‘Kashmir had an overwhelmingly Indic and Sanskritic

identity and character’

Shonaleeka Kaul, Associate Professor at JNU's Centre for Historical Studies and
a cultural historian of early South Asia, talks about understanding Kashmir's
historical lineage and current cultural moorings.

Dr Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia specialising in

working with Sanskrit texts. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for
Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has also been
the Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University,
USA, and the Jan Gonda Fellowship in Indology at Leiden University, The
Netherlands. She is the author of The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and
Identity in the Rajatarangini (Oxford University Press, 2018), Cultural History of
Early South Asia: A Reader (Orient BlackSwan, 2013), and Imagining the Urban:
Sanskrit and the City in Early India (Permanent Black and Seagull Books, 2010).

Timesnownews.com caught up with her to understand Kashmir’s historical

lineage and the current cultural moorings.

Excerpts from the interview.

Akrita Reyar: Tell us something about your book The Making of Early
Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini.

Shonaleeka Kaul: My book is a new cultural history/anthropology of Kashmir

that challenges a number of assumptions, clichés and misconceptions about the
Valley which have taken root in academic, popular and political circles without
basis in reality. It raises a set of three interrelated questions as necessary to
understanding any South Asian region: What is history and in which modes may
we receive it? How does land become a homeland? And how are cultural
identities formed? It explores these interrelated questions in relation to the birth
of Kashmir by tracing the ideational and material practices that shaped her
emergence right up to the 12th century CE. Reinterpreting the first work of
Kashmiri history written in that century, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, I depart from
200 years of scholarship to argue that the iconic text was history not despite
being traditional Sanskrit poetry but because of it. It organised Kashmir’s past
around a deeply ethical understanding of time and human action and employed
popular memory, myth, rhetoric and the didactic as crucial strategies of its
historical vision -- aspects that modern scholars of the text had bracketed out
and dismissed.

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Moreover, the Rajatarangini elaborated a poetics of place, overlaying the
geography of the land with narrative -- myriad tales of gods, demigods, kings
and commoners tied to the physical features of Kashmir’s landscape -- inducing
a rootedness in the land and a sense of belonging. This drew deeply on the
sacred geography of Kashmir, as well as a stringent and detailed critique of local
politics, and, spectacularly, regional selfhood that aspired to transcend the
narrow cultural limits of localism.

Further, exploring the question of identity, The Making of Early Kashmir

combines text with longue durée testimonies from art, archaeology, script, and
linguistics, to jettison the image of an isolated and insular Kashmir. It proposes
a cultural formation that straddled the Western Himalayas and the Indic plains
with Kashmir as the pivot. This is the story of Kashmir’s connected histories
with the rest of India.

Akrita Reyar: Of the discussion we had, it seems you feel that the history
of Kashmir has suffered from misrepresentation. Where have been the gaps
according to you?

Shonaleeka Kaul: Perhaps one of the most glaring misrepresentations of

Kashmir is the theory that it was historically isolated from the rest of India and
therefore developed a cultural insularity and uniqueness. It has also been
assumed retrospectively that Kashmiri culture, including the tradition of
history-writing, was influenced by West Asia and Central Asia. However,
research shows that all cultural markers in early Kashmir from at least the 5th
century BCE onwards for another two thousand years -- material culture,
textual representations, foreign accounts, inscriptions, coins, language, art,
religion, philosophy -- attest overwhelmingly to Kashmir’s Indic and Sanskritic
identity and character.

They also attest to its deep and extensive connections and mutual involvement
not just with neighbouring areas like Punjab and Himachal but with centres of
Indic civilisation in the deep interiors of India like Patna, Nalanda, Gaya,
Banaras, Allahabad, Mathura, Malwa, Saurashtra, Gauda (Bengal), till
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the far south. Here was cultural transmission and
communication of astonishing reach!

Kashmiris looked to these places for politics, trade, education, asylum,

employment, art, religion, philosophy, fashion (!), and pilgrimage, while people
from different parts of India travelled to and settled in Kashmir for the same
reasons. So massive and crucial was Kashmir’s participation and presence in
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Indic affairs that by the second half of the first millennium CE, it had come to
spearhead virtually all intellectual and cultural movements in the Indian
subcontinent with trademark erudition and brilliance. How did this happen if
Kashmir was cut off from the rest of India?! This is why in my book I have argued
for moving away from the paradigm of ‘unique history’ or ‘centre and periphery’
to that of ‘connected histories’ if the genesis and character of Kashmiri culture
are to be correctly understood.

Akrita Reyar: Can you throw light on Kashmir’s contribution to Indic

affairs and culture?

Shonaleeka Kaul: Not just contribution, to borrow the term from connected
histories it is Kashmir’s shaping entanglement, material and ideological, with
the rest of India that is truly incredible. Sample just a few formative facts of
Kashmiri history of which most people are unaware: Civilisation comes to
Kashmir at the same time as in the rest of India circa 6th century BCE and in
the same form, designated as the Northern Black Polished Ware culture that is
typically associated with the Gangetic Valley. Kashmir was a part of pan-Indian
political formations from the very beginning too, i.e. from 3rd century BCE as a
part of the Mauryan Empire that stretched across the subcontinent and whose
emperor Ashoka founded the capital city of Srinagari. It was also a part of the
Indian kingdoms of the Kushanas 2nd-3rd century CE and Hunas 6th century
CE which extended till Banaras in the east and Malwa in central India,
respectively.

Kings, queens and ministers of Kashmir were drawn from different parts of India
across the centuries. Would you believe it that Kashmir and Gandhara
(Peshawar) were known to be the political allies of Magadha or Bihar! Kashmir
also had close marital and political histories with Pragjyotisha or Assam, Gauda
or Bengal, Cholas or Tamilakam, while rulers from Madhya Pradesh were invited
by Kashmiris to be their king! The 8th century Kashmiri king Lalitaditya, in
turn, undertook expeditions in parts of north India including in Kanauj and his
coins have been found in massive hordes from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,
affirming the political and commercial presence of Kashmiris deep in the Ganga
valley.

That’s not all. People from Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bengal, Malwa, Karnataka and
Tamil Nadu are seen migrating and settling in Kashmir over the centuries in the
Rajatarangini. The earliest historical languages we have in Kashmir are Prakrit
and Sanskrit, just like the rest of India. The vernacular tongue Kashmiri is itself
an Indo-Aryan language with close affinities to archaic Sanskrit. The earliest
script in Kashmir was, for the most, the quintessential Indic script Brahmi, from
as early as 2nd century CE, and its descendant Sharada at least up till 16th
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century. A long line of virtuoso Kashmiri poets and philosophers, like Vamana,
Udbhata, Mammata, Ksemendra, Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta
revolutionised Sanskrit aesthetics and literature, monopolising the hugely
significant intellectual scene across the country right into the second
millennium CE. Their works circulated widely and were studied as learned
models even in the deep South, something that a scholar of Tamil has recently
colourfully described as saffron in the rasam!

Kashmiri art and sculpture, in particular, has been traced in every one of its
stages at Bijabehara, then Baramulla and Pandrethan, to the influence of the
Gupta, post-Gupta and Pala art styles from Sarnath, Udayagiri and Nalanda.
Did you know this repertoire includes iconic pan-Indic Buddhist and Hindu
images such as bodhisattva, Trimurti, Vaikuntha Vishnu, Maheshvara as
Bhuteshvara, many-armed Durgamahishasuramardini, Harihara, Ganesa,
Kartikeya and so on?

Kashmiris worshipped the same Gods as the rest of India. Shaivism, Shaktism
and Buddhism in Kashmir are as old as Kashmir itself, and it is Kashmiris who
took Buddhism from India to China and Central Asia. The Sharada temple,
today lying derelict across the LoC in Neelam village, PoK, was visited by pilgrims
from as far as Bengal in the 8th century and is listed by Al beruini as among the
top three shrines of Al Hind (India) in the 11th century. Great Indian
philosophers like Nagarjuna and Shankaracharya taught in Kashmir while
Kashmiris frequented Gaya and Kashi so much that a 9th-century minister
sought tax exemption for Kashmiris at these centres of faith!

On left is the Sharada Temple 130-year back and on right is the same temple in a
dilapidated state | Pic Credit: Wikimedia Commons

So thoroughly Indic thus is Kashmiri origin and so crucial was Kashmiri

participation in Indic affairs in the longue durée. How did this happen if Kashmir
was never a part of India? And yet thousands of lives have been lost over this
question! I believe the attempt to erase this founding history from living memory
is the root of disinformation and conflict in the Valley. But history cannot be
wished away simply because it does not suit politics.

Akrita Reyar: You say Kashmiriyat is an incorrect term – is it the coinage

of the term or the message that it represents?

Shonaleeka Kaul: Despite its appeal and the net of mystique that it casts over
the Valley of Kashmir, ‘Kashmiriyat’ may be a historically thin term. And no
wonder, since it is largely of political coinage with a certain symbolic burden
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that the Valley has been expected to carry as a paragon of sectarian syncretism
in a secular India – a ‘paragon’ which has, of course, come to blow up in secular
India’s face via the reign of theocratic terror in the Valley today. Thus the concept
of Kashmiriyat, some feel, has elided over the very real fractures and tensions
in Kashmiri society that developed precisely over the question of religion since
at least the 14th century.

Kashmiriyat suggests that different religions co-existed peacefully and uniquely

in Kashmir. While this may be true of how certain individual Sufi saints, like
Sheikh Nooruddin aka Nand Rishi, and their Hindu followers operated; the
contours and implications of six centuries of massive and, by several accounts,
forced conversion of a Hindu and Buddhist people have not been historically
worked out and cannot be explained away by ‘syncretism’. Pakistan’s diabolism
notwithstanding, syncretism would also not explain the separatist movement in
the Valley that burst to the surface thirty years ago targeting and cleansing first
of all what remained of the minority Hindu community from the Valley.

Akrita Reyar: Which are the areas of Kashmiri tradition that have come
under threat due to violence in the Valley and the migration of Kashmiri
Pandits?

Shonaleeka Kaul: Research shows that early Kashmiri society and culture were
open, pluralist and dynamic, with a great investment in learning and the arts,
prioritising the cultivation of the highest pursuits known to man at which
Kashmiris excelled. This is a far cry from the fundamentalist, closed and
exclusionist visage of the Valley today. It is precisely the vibrant, cosmopolitan
histories of Kashmir that have been dismantled and its pluralism erased by the
violent separatist movement, leading to the deracination of the Kashmiris as a
whole. For, an identity divorced from history descends into delusion. Even the
age-old traditional names of towns and sacred places have been attempted to be
changed to ones that have no association with Kashmiri history and the
Kashmiri people at all. As for the Kashmiri Pandits, it is believed that they have
been, against all odds, the flag bearers of a great deal of the scholarship and
spiritual values that originated in Kashmir, and their cleansing, therefore, is
symbolic of the great loss of history and heritage that is ongoing in the Valley.

Akrita Reyar: Thank You.