Located in Uri area of North Kashmir’s Boniyar Tehsil, Baramulla district, the picturesque village of Dudran is a testament to the preservation of ancient Kashmiri traditions. Dudran, as the name suggests, is a “milk village” rooted in the age-old traditions of cattle rearing and dairy dating back centuries. Each of the 70-odd households, like that of Ghulam Qadir Sheikh, in this hamlet has been engaged in dairy farming for generations.

The main concept of this pastoral legacy is the doud khot, the Kashmiri term for small vault-like structures built with stones and planks of wood along the path of natural springs and function as natural refrigeration systems without electricity. Dudran is not just a village. It’s a repository of culture.  People of Dudran take pride in producing the finest dairy products — milk, cheese, butter or curd — using traditional methods.

Traditional techniques are used not just for milk products, people of Dudran also still use the gratt  – the stone and wood flour mill which is operated by stream of water. In winters they depend entirely on sun-dried vegetables because of heavy snowfall which can be up to 15 feet high.

The doud khots dotting Dudran’s landscape not only help store milk and other dairy products for days without spoiling, these also safeguard the stock against the wildlife. Locals attribute the quality of milk that Dudran produces to the abundance of pastures that keep the cattle naturally healthy. Each household in the village gets a yield of 10-15 litres of milk a day.
Summers are the most productive. Using a wooden churner (de’on), milk stored in aluminium pots inside the doud khots is curdled (ban-e-doud) repeatedly to produce butter (th’ain)in the age-old tradition of gurus mandun  – producing buttermilk, as a by product of traditional butter making. A traditional drink, Gurus is seen as a traditional coolant. Families making Gurus used to gift part of it to the neighbours. Gurus was also advised by Kashmiri hakims as an aid to digestion.

People of Punjab would be familiar with the exact same traditional way of making buttermilk using a madhani (the churner), tied with a rope to a wooden post. The two ends of the rope, which have small wooden pieces attached are used to move the madhani in a back-n-forth motion to churn the butter.