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Kashmir’s Contested Pasts
She writes: ‘Just as Kashmir itself was a place defined by the imprint of successive waves of migrants, so too history-writing was defined by the impress of external and internal influences that combined to produce a stable, yet mutable, tradition of narrating the past.’ Persian texts were adopted from Sanskrit texts to cast them in the ‘universal idiom of Islam’. In that sense, Islamic universalism combined seamlessly with ‘Sanskrit cosmopolitanism and Kashmir localism to produce a clearly defined sense of Kashmir as place’. Gradually, the narrative split into Hindu and Muslim viewpoints. Waqiat-I Kashmir and Bahg-i Sulaiman talk of the history of Kashmir and its people following the breakdown of the Mughal system. Chadurah mentions a prophecy beneath the temple walls of Parahaspura that talks about how Sultan Sikandar from Iraq will come to Kashmir and destroy the temple, and how Kashmir will pass from the Sultans to Mughal rulers. In the texts, Hindus have been identified as a ‘distinct community’ since they had attained high positions in the administration by the late Mughal period. The undoing of rulers and dynasties were policies that created ‘religious dissensions among Shias and Sunnis.’
Battles over Kashmir, which for all its beauty seems like a cursed land, go back far into time. Muntakhab describes the bloody wars among armies of Kashmiri nobles, and between Kashmiri armies and the Mughals — ‘Kashmir appears as a region constantly under siege, as against its neighbouring Mughal provinces’, such as the peaceful and prosperous Lahore. Bagh-i Sulaiman blames Kashmiri Shias and Hindus, who were advisers to Afghan governors, for helping Afghans loot Kashmir and oppress Muslims. At the same time, it notes that the land was settled and populated in the beginning by Hindus. The more recent account — PNK Bamzai’s A History of Kashmir: Political, Social, and Cultural (published in 1962) champions the Valley’s ‘non-communal culture’. In the foreword, Jawaharlal Nehru writes the refusal of the people of Kashmir to accept the so-called two nation theory was not a mere political development but had its roots in their long past and the culture they had developed. The book’s context was the discussions in the Security Council regarding the Indo-Pak war over Kashmir. An extremely well-researched and exhaustive book, and for that, it may be a heavy read for non-academicians. But determined researchers and curious minds would lap it up, as should those fighting about and over Kashmir.
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What
is Kashmir; who makes it what it is — the Pandits’ influence over
centuries or Islamic-Sufi traditions, or both, and still many others?
Objectively, through enormous repertoire of historical views and 16th
century Persian narratives and Sanskrit texts, Chitralekha delves into
the idea of Kashmir; the dynamics between Kashmir and imperial
entities — the Mughals, Afghans and Dogras; the Tarikh tradition;
vernacular histories and historiographical tradition; orientalist and
nationalist knowledge production in Kashmir and colonial India; and
conflicts over history and the embattled territory of this ‘distinct
mulk.’
