Books - Short Introduction: On Chitralekha Zutshi advocating for a shared tradition and history of Kashmir

Raziuddin Aquil 

Chitralekha Zutshi, Kashmir's Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies and the Historical Imagination, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Professor Chitralekha Zutshi has produced an excellent piece of work, rising above the usual communal divide on the history of a region known for its shared cultural traditions and contested political claims. In the language of Kalhana, Kashmir's foremost medieval historian, Professor Zutshi's book offers shantrasa, calm reflection and realisation, in times of political abuses, cacophony and violence.

Professor Zutshi looks at Sanskrit Rajatarangini, Persian tarikh corpus and Kashmiri vernacular narratives as connected and shared historical traditions of Kashmir, beginning in the middle of the twelfth century and continuing all the way to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The colonial period witnessed faultlines being created to see these intertwined traditions separated on religious and communal lines. Recent political difficulties have further deepened communal boundaries to completely fracture the "narrative public", splitting it into "multiple, mutually oppositional publics that are advocating particular versions of Kashmir's history, and ultimately, definitions of Kashmir itself" - presenting Kashmir's past in either purely Hindu or purely Islamic terms.

By contrast, of particular significance is the continuation of the tradition of Sanskrit historical writing, Rajatarangini, all the way to the sixteenth century when Persian tarikh texts were also beginning to be written (drawing from Rajatarangini and celebrating Kashmir's unique geography as a heaven on earth). One of the fifteenth-century texts, Zaintarangini of Srivara, also sings praise of Sultan Zainul Abidin in glorious terms, styling him as an avatar of Ram. Taking cognisance of such connections, the simple binary of Kashmiri Muslims pitted against Kashmiri Pandits will not hold.

Professor Zutshi writes as a conscientious historian and scholar pleading for "a more nuanced approach to history-writing in Kashmir, that draws on and learns from the richness of Kashmir's long and adaptable historical tradition". Her own work attempts to see the interesting continuations, critical connections, mutual appropriations and intelligent intertextual cross-referencing in Kashmir's historical traditions, studied in six chapters, besides Introduction, Conclusion, Glossary and Bibliography (in xvi + 361 pages).