Radha Kumar’s Paradise at War makes the various approaches to the Kashmir conflict accessible to lay readers. An edited excerpt:
A Kashmiri political scientist once said to me, “You cannot discuss Kashmir, or the Kashmir conflict, without starting with history”. I was puzzled: What did the region’s ancient or medieval history have to do with a conflict that began after the Partition of India in 1947? It was only when I started researching this book that I found that many contemporary threads of the conflict — and, more importantly, its solution — lead back in time.
Internally, the valley’s particular form of religious syncretism, which is so different from the demographic pluralism of Jammu or the “living together separately” model of Ladakh, is rooted in the opening centuries of the 1st Millennium CE. Kashmir was amongst the earliest regions of the Indian subcontinent to record its history, and through the ages, Kashmiri historians and mythologists preserved much of the culture as it developed. The traditions that were anchored through retelling were not unbroken: Kashmir too fell under a series of empires as well as a rapid succession of dynasties, each of which left its imprint. But the philosophical underpinnings of Kashmiri tradition were relatively undisturbed, perhaps because it was at the periphery of empire and few ancient empire-builders treated peripheries as bulwarks. The beliefs that Kashmir and Kashmiris are exceptional, that they are guardians of the religious sites of all faiths, that the pursuit of knowledge requires engagement with every view, that the military is an inferior occupation — a view shared by India’s nineteenth-century social reformer Swami Vivekananda — remain strong even today, though they are increasingly under threat.
Externally too, the region’s horizons have not altered in any major way despite the changing geopolitics of the region. Neighbours continue to play make-or-break roles in the state. Afghanistan’s leaders, who once ruled Kashmir, no longer seek control or influence there. Yet, events in Afghanistan continue to fall out on Kashmir, largely because of Pakistani activism in both regions. Attacks from modern Pakistan, which includes the ancient territories once called Dardistan, have increased, but only to the extent that there are shorter lulls between attacks than there were centuries ago. While Iran is less prominent than ancient Parthia, it continues to sway Shias in the state politically and Kashmiri elites culturally. China is no longer a potential ally for Kashmir, since it occupied a large part of the state’s territory after the 1962 India-China War and became a stakeholder in the Kashmir conflict. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, once of some significance for both trade and cultural exchange, may regain those ties if plans for connectivity take off. Kashmiri leaders lobby for inclusion in emerging regional road and rail networks that will revive the relations they built during the ancient Silk Route period, in a more peaceable neighbourhood than there was then.
No wonder any discussion on Kashmir has to begin with history, however mythologised some of it may be. For ancient Hindus, Kashmir was a sacred geography to which humans were introduced by divine intervention. The Nilamata Purana, also known as Kasmira Mahatmya, was regarded as one of the texts in the Vedanta, a body of scriptural literature that combines myth and legend with what may have been real-life events and often interprets one through the other. It describes the Kashmir valley as originally one vast lake, home to the gods Shiva and his wife, Parvati, but it also refers to the valley itself as Uma, another name for Parvati, turning it into a place to worship as well as a place of worship.
This vast lake, says the Nilamata, was drained at the order of the sage Kashyapa, grandson of the god Brahma, by cutting a rock gorge at Varahmula, which is Baramulla today. It gradually separated into large and small lakes when the divine clan of Nagas, who were protagonists in the epic Mahabharata, and other fortunate mortals settled there. “Because water called Ka was taken out by Balarama the plough-wielder from this country, so it shall be called Kas’mira in this world.” A paradise to live in, with soaring mountains and flowering orchards, the goddesses Sati, Saci, Ganga, Aditi, Yamuna, Diti and Karisini all took the form of rivers flowing through it. “The water of Vitasta [today’s Jhelum] mixed with that of Sindhu [Indus] is like milk mixed with nectar, beauty combined with elegance, and knowledge combined with good nature.”
Descendants of the sage Kashyapa, whose wife Kadru gave birth to the Naga clan, the Nilamata’s writers saw Kashmiris as guardians of the sacred “who perform sacrifices and are engaged in self-study and contemplation, virtuous ascetics well-versed in the Vedas.” Their life sounds idyllic, if unreal; protected by the formidable mountains that surround it, Kas’mira had never been conquered and its people were free from fear. The valley echoed with the sounds of lutes and drums, religious chants, dance and theatre in an unending round. “One should feast in the company of friends and should play to one’s content.”
Yet, if they failed to follow the edicts of their founder-king Nila, retribution would descend on them in the form of “floods, excess of rain, drought, famine, deaths, untimely death of the king, and dreadful punishments.” Just such an eventuality was described in the Mahabharata, written a thousand years earlier, with Kashyapa’s two wives falling out and turning their children, the Nagas, and the great bird Garuda, into sworn enemies. To trump his foes, Garuda brought the Nagas the nectar of immortality but prevented them from swallowing it, and a series of disasters followed. The Naga chiefs fell out, their people were massacred, their king, Gonanda I, besieged the god Krishna in Mathura and was killed by Krishna’s brother, while Krishna himself killed Gonanda’s son, Damodara I, in Gandhara, which comprised present-day Kandahar and Kabul in Afghanistan together with Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Swat. A repentant Krishna anointed the dead king’s wife, Yasovati, the new ruler of Kashmir, because “the goddess Uma (was) the same as Kas’mira.”
Whether these myths constituted imaginative interpretations of actual alliances and conflicts between rulers of the time is debatable, though it would be aetiologically unsurprising given Kashmir was a Hindu kingdom during the Mahabharata period. It became a part of the Buddhist Mauryan empire between the 3rd and 1st Centuries BCE. The Emperor Ashoka founded the beautiful city of Srinagari in the 3rd Century BCE, some twenty kilometres from today’s capital Srinagar, abutting its suburb Soura. Modern Srinagar dates back to the 7th Century and is in fact built on the site of the 6th Century royal capital Pravarapura, mentioned in the Chinese annals of the Tang dynasty. The modern city took the older Ashokan name.
Buddhism flowered in Kashmir under Ashoka, who dispatched hundreds of monks from Gandhara to spread the faith, at the same time building a Shiva temple at Vijeshwari to support what was then the religion of the majority. Vijeshwari is now Bijbehara in Anantnag district, the constituency of former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed from 2002-15. Buddhism continued to blossom in close proximity to Hinduism under Ashoka’s son and grandson, as well as under the Kushana kings who captured Kashmir from the Mauryan empire in its decline. The Kushanas are believed to be of Turkic origin and possibly belonged to the Xinjiang and Gansu regions of modern China. Folklore has it that the Kushana king Kanishka hosted the Fourth Buddhist Council in the first century at Harwan, today’s Shalimar Garden in Srinagar. The council drew 500 Buddhist and Hindu scholars from all over the region, including China, to codify Sarvastivada, the precursor to Mahayana Buddhism.
First under the Mauryas and then the Kushanas, Kashmir’s horizons stretched across the Indian subcontinent, from Magadha in the southeast, comprising modern Odisha and parts of Bengal, to Malwa or modern Rajasthan in the southwest. In modern-day Pakistan, they covered Gandhara to the north and the lands of the Dards in the northwest, comprising Chitral, Gilgit and Kohistan in Swat, Gurez in Baltistan and parts of northern Punjab, and Mehrgarh or today’s Balochistan in the west. Beyond the subcontinent, they reached further west to Palmyra in Syria and Parthia or Persia, which is present-day Iran; north to Bactria, lands in the Amu Darya or Oxus basin including parts of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, through Sindh and northeast to China.
