Kashmir’s Contested Pasts (OIP)

Description

A pioneering and comprehensive study of the historical imagination in Kashmir, this book explores the conversations between the ideas of Kashmir and the ideas of history taking place within Kashmir’s multilingual historical tradition. Analysing the deep linkages among Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts contends that these traditions drew on and influenced each other to imagine Kashmir as far more than simply an unsettled territory or a tourist paradise. By offering a historically grounded reflection on the memories, narrative practices, and institutional contexts that have informed, and continue to inform, imaginings of Kashmir and its past, the book suggests new ways of understanding the debates over history, territory, identity, and sovereignty that shape contemporary South Asia.

About the Author

Chitralekha Zutshi is James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, USA.

Reviews

‘[A] groundbreaking book’
—Nile Green, Los Angeles Review of Books
‘A magisterial survey of Kashmiri historiography …’
—Umair A. Muhajir, H-Asia

Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Paradise on Earth: The Past and Present of History-Writing in Kashmir
1. Garden of Solomon: Landscape and Sacred Pasts in Kashmir’s Sixteenth-Century Persian Narratives
2. A Literary Paradise: The Tarikh Tradition in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Kashmir
3. Vernacular Histories: Narration and Practice in Kashmir’s Nineteenth-Century Historiographical Tradition
4. The Multiple Lives of Rajatarangini: Orientalist and Nationalist Knowledge Production in Kashmir and Colonial India
5. The Kashmiri Narrative Public: Textuality, Orality, and Performance
6. The Divided Public: Battles over History and Territory in Contemporary Kashmir
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Author