Photo Essay: Zaroo Gun Factory, Srinagar

Photo Essay: Zaroo Gun Factory, Srinagar

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Zaroo Gun Factory is one of only two family-run workshops in Srinagar. Violence in the region and crackdowns on gun licenses have decimated the business, but the Zaroos are determined to keep the craft alive.

Zaroo gun factory was established in 1958 by Ghulam Mohammad Zaroo in Nowhatta, Srinagar. The small dark workshop packed with lathes and milling machines adjacent to the Zaroo family home is the center of a gun manufacturing business that has been supplying the Kashmir region with rifles since 1953. For Farooq Ahmad Zaroo, who inherited the business from his father, Ghulam, each day brings a new challenge to keep the business alive. According to Farooq, things have never been the same since Indian authorities imposed a two-year ban on gun-making in 1989…this business has never recovered fully since.

Kashmir has its own history and identity of gun making that dates back to the Mughal Empire in the 1500s, and continued right through the British Raj until the present day. In the early and middle decades of the 20th-century, Kashmir supplied thousands of intricately fashioned guns to the princes and elites of India, and in the years leading up to the Partition of India in 1947, local gun factories were buzzing with activity.

Noted for their stocks made of walnut, many with the leaves of Kashmir’s famed Chinar trees carved on them, Kashmir-made rifles were highly prized before 1947, when Kashmir was an independent princely state, a golden era for local gun makers.

Ghulam Mohammad Zaroo came to Srinagar from what is now Pakistan at the invitation of Maharaja Sir Hari Singh, for whom he made muzzle-loader guns. Burhan Ahmad Zaroo, the grandson joined the business after watching the number of workers dwindle from 50 to just two, today. In the past 10 years, declining demand for locally made rifles has reached a point where the market has completely collapsed. It takes them a year or two to make and sell a single gun. All new rifles must then be subjected to rigorous testing before they can be sold. All the barrels, for instance, are sent to ordnance factories in other regions of India, like Lucknow and Kanpur, for inspection. After which they await government clearance, which takes its own time. It is a far cry from the 1940s, when more than 50 gun factories competed for business in the region. Today, Kashmir has only two surviving gun factories, the Zaroo Gun Factory and Shubhana and Sons, whose owners are now looking to shut down and move on to another line of business. Meanwhile, in Jammu, the gun-making business appears to be thriving, with around 30 gun factories and more than a hundred arms dealers benefiting from the decline of the factories in Kashmir.