Indelible Imprint

Utpal Kaul, who heads Utpal Publications, with some of the books that arrived from his family’s abandoned bookshop in Kashmir ten years after his family migrated to Delhi. Established in 1938 by his grandfather Samsar Chand Kaul, the first ornithologist of Asia, Utpal was once known for its free publication of books on Kashmir. When Islamist radicals razed their ancestral house in 1995, over 5,000 books were lost, but their bookshop, located in a narrow bylane of Rainawari neighbourhood of Srinagar, was left untouched. Many believe the bookshop survived because it had copies of the Qur’an on its shelves. Kaul, who is popular among Kashmiris and academics as the ‘walking history of Kashmir’, continues the family’s mission of publishing books on Kashmir and its people