Kashmir’s Bonesetters: A Living Tradition

By Eswar Kumar · 9 August 2026

Kashmir’s bonesetters are traditional practitioners who assess and bind fractures, dislocations and sprains by hand, working from their own homes and from the precincts of Sufi shrines rather than from licensed clinics. Reporters who have visited them — Reuters, Anadolu Agency, FairPlanet — describe a craft usually carried within families over several generations, closely bound up with Muslim devotional life, and busy enough that some practitioners see scores of patients a day. The same reporting carries the other half: orthopaedic surgeons in Srinagar who see the cases that go wrong, and who say patients should consult professionals.

This article summarises what published journalism and peer-reviewed research actually record. It is not medical advice, not an endorsement, and it makes no claim that bonesetting treats, heals or cures anything. Where a source is one reporter’s account of one household rather than a survey, this page says so.

Who Kashmir’s bonesetters are

The local term is watangor. Anadolu Agency’s 2023 report introduces the practitioners as “watangor in a local language”; FairPlanet’s 2024 feature glosses it explicitly as “Watangor in Kashmiri”; a 2022 Inverse feature uses the same word. Capitalisation varies between outlets, but the word is consistent across three independent reports, which is the reason it appears here at all.

The practitioners named in that coverage give a sense of the range:

  • Noor Mohammad, of Srinagar, is described by Reuters in October 2025 as “a third-generation bonesetter who has been practising for 35 years” who “sees scores of patients daily” at his house.
  • Mohammad Ramzan Bangi, 58, works at the Naqshband Sahab shrine in central Srinagar. He told Anadolu he was about seventeen when he took up the work, learning it from his father, Ghulam Mohammad Bangi, a bonesetter for nearly fifty years who came from a family of them.
  • Ghulam Muhammad, 65, works from a house a few kilometres from the Charar-e-Sharief shrine in Budgam district. FairPlanet reports that he is an exception to the hereditary pattern — most Kashmiri bonesetters learn from their families, but he taught himself — and that he has treated people without charge for more than thirty years. His locality is known as Watangor Mohalla.

There is no register, no examination and no protected title behind any of this. As with the lineages described in India’s other bonesetting traditions, standing comes from reputation and descent, not certification. No source consulted for this page offers a count of how many watangor work in the valley.

How the practice works there

The reported method is consistent across outlets. Reuters describes a “centuries-old practice that typically involves massaging the affected area, wrapping it with cloth or medical tape, and reciting holy verses.” Anadolu adds the assessment step: practitioners “place their thumb on the broken bones and press, assessing the intensity of the fracture or injury solely through touch.” Bangi’s working kit, as Anadolu describes it, is a bag of bandages, plasters, medical tape rolls, cotton and a small knife.

Two practical factors recur as reasons people come. Noor Mohammad told Reuters the treatment “is cheaper and takes less time” than hospital care. FairPlanet supplies the texture: Bilal Shafi, a daily-wage brick-kiln worker, said he first took his brother to a primary healthcare facility that could not help “due to a lack of orthopaedic facilities there,” and that hospital would have meant more money and lost work.

Note what is absent from every description: no standard protocol, no shared training, no formal record of what was done. Two watangor in neighbouring districts may work quite differently, and no source establishes otherwise.

Faith and healing touch

Kashmir is Muslim-majority, and the devotional dimension is not decoration around the practice; the reporting places it at the centre. Reuters writes that “many patients believe bonesetters possess a spiritual, healing touch and are more effective than modern medicine,” and describes the recitation of holy verses as part of the treatment itself. Two of the practitioners named above work at or beside a shrine.

Practitioners frame the skill the same way. Noor Mohammad told Reuters: “It is a God-given ability.” A practitioner in the Inverse feature says the most crucial part of the profession is spirituality. FairPlanet quotes a patient, Mumtaza, 46, who called the ability “God-gifted” — though her stated reason for avoiding hospital was medical: more medicine, she said, was something her kidneys could not handle.

Recording a belief is not evaluating it. What the belief explains is behaviour — why a person with a painful limb walks to a shrine rather than an outpatient department. Whether the touch does anything to the bone is a question the journalism does not answer and does not attempt to.

The X-ray shift: tradition adapting

The most newsworthy thing in the Reuters piece is not the tradition’s persistence but its adaptation. Noor Mohammad told the agency: “It is a God-given ability. Now we use modern technology like X-rays to assess the gravity of the injury.” He also described a referral boundary: “We handle minor fractures and muscle sprains here and refer others to an orthopaedist for treatment.”

The generational detail is sharper still. His niece, Nargis, is pursuing a medical degree to become an orthopaedist, in Reuters’ words “aiming to merge modern techniques with the family’s legacy.” Her own stated aim: “My focus would be the treatment of women and to carry forward the legacy.” A family line that has run three generations outside the medical system is now sending a member into it.

Two cautions matter more than the headline. The evidence is narrow: one family in one wire report. No survey establishes how many Kashmiri bonesetters use imaging, and the Anadolu and FairPlanet features of 2023 and 2024 do not mention X-rays at all. And obtaining a radiograph is not interpreting one — no source says who reads the films, or against what training.

The contrast with Puttur is still instructive. The 2011 study of Puttur kattu in Andhra Pradesh recorded the opposite posture: “They have no X-ray unit in their campus. Patients bring their X-rays, but X-rays are given less importance.” If the Kashmiri practice is genuinely moving towards imaging and referral, that is a real divergence within Indian bonesetting.

What doctors in the valley say

Both wire reports that sought medical comment got the same answer. Dr Altaf Kawoosa, head of the orthopaedics department at the Bone and Joints Hospital in Srinagar, told Reuters: “We have seen instances where the damage was so severe that amputation was necessary. In these situations, people should at least seek help from those with basic knowledge… patients must consult professionals.”

Dr Naseer Ahmad Mir, a senior orthopaedic surgeon, told Anadolu he had received many patients who were in a worse state after treatment by bonesetters: “In some cases, we had to cut down limbs and operate on patients for dislocated bones and joints because bonesetters don’t understand anatomy.” He described bandages and tape as blocking blood vessels, resulting in the death of body tissue, and as a route to bacterial infections and blisters. Bangi disagreed, arguing that if their methods harmed patients they would not keep receiving them.

Both sides of that exchange are partial. A surgeon sees a selected population — the cases that failed badly enough to reach a hospital, never the ones that did not — and patient volume is evidence of demand, not of outcome. But the surgeons’ accounts do establish that limb-threatening harm happens.

The wider literature is consistent with them. A 2023 systematic review in Tropical Doctor included twelve observational studies covering 833 participants and 691 documented complications of traditional bonesetter treatment across low- and middle-income countries — commonest were malunion, non-union, gangrene, amputation and stiff joints — and concluded: “We identify a significant number of limb and life-threatening complications including mortality associated with the treatment by TBS.” That review is international rather than Kashmir-specific, and no complication study confined to Kashmir was found while researching this page. The broader picture is in Is bonesetting safe?

One structural fact sits underneath the argument: FairPlanet reports that Srinagar’s Bone & Joint Hospital is overburdened after a 2022 fire cut its bed strength from 200 to 150, while its outpatient department receives around 1,000 patients daily. That is context for why people go elsewhere, not a defence of what happens when they do.

How it compares with South Indian traditions

Set the Kashmiri practice beside Puttur kattu, documented in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine in 2011, and the family resemblance is obvious — so are the differences.

What they share. Both are hereditary crafts held in named families rather than institutions. Both assess by hand, both are fast and cheap relative to hospital care — the Puttur paper records practitioners taking “only 5–10 minutes” for routine cases, the clinics 200–300 patients a day — and both sit in unresolved tension with orthopaedic medicine.

What differs. Puttur practitioners use gauze dipped in a paste of the herb kasamarda (Cassia occidentalis) and immobilise with short pieces of bamboo; the Kashmiri accounts describe massage, cloth or medical tape and no herbal preparation. The religious framing differs too — Quranic recitation is reported as integral in Kashmir, whereas the academic account of Puttur describes a herbal and manual procedure with no devotional component. So does the direction of travel: Puttur was documented in 2011 as giving X-rays “less importance,” while the Kashmiri practitioner Reuters interviewed in 2025 describes using them.

What differs most is documentation. Puttur has a peer-reviewed observational study; Kashmir has good journalism and no comparable published study of its own. That asymmetry should shape how confidently anyone states anything about Kashmiri bonesetting. For the national picture, see what Indian bonesetting is.

When to see a doctor

Cultural significance is not a clinical recommendation. A practice being centuries old and locally trusted says nothing about whether it is right for a particular injury.

Seek qualified medical care immediately for:

  • Suspected fractures or breaks — visible deformity, inability to bear weight, a crack or snap heard at the time of injury, severe pain over a bone.
  • Suspected or visible dislocations — a joint that is locked, misshapen or cannot be moved.
  • Any acute trauma — road accidents, falls from height, crush injuries, blows to the head, neck or spine.
  • Numbness, tingling, weakness or loss of function in a limb, hand or foot.
  • A limb that is cold, pale, blue or pulseless, or pain that keeps escalating — possible compartment syndrome or compromised blood supply; both are surgical emergencies.
  • Any binding or dressing that becomes tight, or a limb that swells beneath it — the specific mechanism Kashmiri surgeons describe as leading to tissue death.
  • Open wounds, bone visible through skin, fever or spreading redness — infection risk.
  • Loss of bladder or bowel control, or severe progressive back pain — a spinal emergency.
  • Uncertainty. Not knowing what you have is itself a reason to be examined.

Fractures and dislocations need imaging and a clinician who can act on it. Assessment by thumb, however experienced, cannot tell you whether a fracture is displaced, whether it involves a joint surface, or whether the blood supply is compromised.

Frequently asked questions

What is a bonesetter called in Kashmiri?

The word reported in the coverage is watangor. FairPlanet glosses it as “Watangor in Kashmiri,” Anadolu Agency introduces the practitioners as “watangor in a local language,” and Inverse uses the same term. Capitalisation varies between publications; the word is consistent across all three.

Do Kashmiri bonesetters use X-rays?

At least one does. Noor Mohammad, a third-generation bonesetter in Srinagar, told Reuters in October 2025: “Now we use modern technology like X-rays to assess the gravity of the injury.” That is one practitioner in one report, not a survey — features from 2023 and 2024 do not mention imaging at all, and no source states who interprets the films.

Is bonesetting in Kashmir safe?

No source establishes that it is, and orthopaedic surgeons in the valley say it can cause serious harm. Dr Altaf Kawoosa of the Bone and Joints Hospital in Srinagar told Reuters that his department has seen damage so severe that amputation was necessary, and that patients must consult professionals. A 2023 systematic review of traditional bonesetting across low- and middle-income countries found limb- and life-threatening complications, including mortality.

Why do so many people in Kashmir go to bonesetters instead of hospitals?

The reporting gives three reasons: cost and time, access, and belief. Reuters reports practitioners saying the treatment is cheaper and quicker than hospital care; FairPlanet reports Srinagar’s Bone & Joint Hospital overburdened since a 2022 fire cut its beds from 200 to 150, with around 1,000 outpatients a day; and both record a widespread belief that bonesetters have a spiritual healing touch.

Is Kashmiri bonesetting the same as Puttur kattu?

No. Both are hereditary Indian traditions that assess by hand, but they use different materials and sit in different religious contexts. Puttur practitioners in Andhra Pradesh apply a paste of the herb kasamarda and immobilise with bamboo; Kashmiri accounts describe massage, cloth or medical tape and the recitation of holy verses. Puttur has a peer-reviewed study behind it; Kashmir’s tradition is documented mainly through journalism.

Sources

This article is educational and is not medical advice. It describes a documented practice and reports what named journalists, practitioners and clinicians have said about it. Bonesetting techniques should only be practised after supervised, in-person training and in line with the laws where you live.