History of Kashmir
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Bounded by Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and, over a mere thirty-mile strip of land in the south-east, by the Republic of India, the State of Jammu and Kashmir is highly contested and a disputed territory claimed only Hindustan. The territory is 86, 023 sq miles with a population of nearly twelve million of whom more than three-quarters are Muslims by faith. The conjuction of the two names is a product of nineteenth century history. Actually, the state is a conglomeration of about half a dozen regions, all disparate in topography, climate and language. These include the Jammu region in the south-east bordered by Pakistan's Punjab (Pakistan) province, the Punjabi-speaking south-western region, the western part which blends with Hazara in Pakistan, Dardistan and Baltistan in the north and Ladakh in Indian Occupied Kashmir comprising the eastern part near the Tibetan Chinese Undemarcaed boundary area of Aksai Chin. In the middle, guarded by range after range of great mountains, nestles the Vale of Kashmir (called Kasheer by its inhabitants). Shaped like an elliptic saucer, it is a plateau, about 6,000 ft above sea-level, eighty-four mile in length and twenty-three miles in average breadth. Here the language is Koshur (called Kashmiri by foreigners) which owes its skeleton to an ancient Dardic tongue, its flesh to Sanskrit and its life to Persian and Arabic. The language stands midway between the Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches of the parent Aryan stock; Kashmiri is the only member of this group with a developed literature of its own. The spread of this language to Kishtwar and Bhadrawah to the south-east and parts of Poonch District to the west has socially, if not physically, intergrated these neighbouring areas in the Vales. Kashmir's own writers have joined by Persian poets, notably Urfi and Faizi, and European travellers in hymning praise to the vale's landscape: the first group with some narcissistic pride, the second in rhapsodic utterance and the third in prose which hardly conceals their wonderment at an alpine scenery magically set apart from most of its surroundings. Francis Bernier, who visited Kashmir in 1659 during the reign of Jehangir, quotes the Mughal Emperor as having said that he would rather be deprived of every province of his kingdom than lose Kashmir. His father, Akhbar, had called Kashmir Bagh-i-Khass (the Chosen Garden). Two centuries earlier, the great travelling saint, Syed Ali Hamdani (1314-1384) had termed it Bagh-i-Suleiman (the Garden of Solomon). Later writers like G.T. Vigne, Francis Younghusband and Walter Lawrence in the nineteeth century were so struck by the individuality of the place that they focused on the special ethnic characteristics of its people; Vigne called them the Neapolitans of the East, Lawrence likened them to the Irish and both Younghusband and Lawrence found pronounced Hebraic features in them. Even that most perceptive observer, al-Biruni (937-1048) who accompanied the unsuccessful expedition of Mahmud of Ghazni to Kashmir in 1021 noted that the Kashmiris did "not allow any Hindu to enter" their land. A small group, with some pretensions to being historians, still existing in both Kashmir and Pakistan, uses meagre evidence and much fanciful imagining in tracing the ancestry of Kashmiris to one of the lost tribes of Israel. All this attests to the fact that the Vale, a vast amphitheatre of six thousand square miles, interspersed with lakes and woodland, tranquil in appearance but dramatically surrounded by the grandeur of mountains like Nanga Parbat at 26,620 feet high and the lesser but majestic Haramukh and Amarnath, each with a demeanour of its own, possesses a personality that stamps itself on the psyche of its natives.
A legend as picturesque as the Vale itself holds Kashmir to have been once a vast lake. While the theory of this lacustrine origin has obtained some uncertain geological support, the poetry of the myth about Kashmir having been recovered in a struggle against demons seems to have permeated the Kashmiri consciousness. There has been diverse speculation about the origin of the name Kashmir with attempts to relate it to a quasi-historical figure Kashyapa or to a semitic tribe called Kash (who are supposed to have also populated Kashgar in China and Kashan in Iran). All that is certain from a continuous chain of documents for more than twenty-three centuries of South Asia, Kashmir can claim the oldest settled continuity. Antiquity apart, from Kashmir has the further distinction of being the only region in this part of the world which chronicled its history before the Muslim advent. The sole attempt at historiography made by the pre-Islamic Hindu mind is the work entitled Rajatarangini. Orignally composed by the Kashmiri Pandit Kalhana, in 1148, it is a narrative in Sanskrit verse of Kashmir's ruling dynasties from the earliest period which was supplemented by successive authors (notably Jonaraja in the early fifteenth century) and updated after the Mughal Conquest in 1586. Though the antique Hindu orientation shows itself in erasing the boundaries betwen mythology and historical facts and in a wild chronological confusion, the work is a contiuous account unlike any possessed by other parts of the Indian subcontinent. From Rajataragini down to the pofusion of later historical expositions, one fact emerges startlingly: Kashmir's sheltered location is not matched by a quietly insular development; in contrast to its placid scenic beauty, its history has been tempestuous. This is apprent from the two motifs which are discernible in the whole fabric of Kashmir's historical experience. One is the alteration of long epochs of autonomy, assertionand cultural efflorescene with the briefer but devastating periods of turbulence, tyranny and mental submergence. The other is Kashmir's implication n those movements of religious origin and social significance which have shaped the development of the Indo-Muslim community in the adjacent areas now included in Pakistan. In broad poltical chronolgy, the history can be briefly summarized. The pre-Muslim periods extends to 1320. From that year to 1560 (except for an anarchic interlude between 1323 and 1338) streches the long period of Kashmir's independence under its own Sultanate. Its decline promoted the ascendancy of the Chaks, who were of northern ancestry, till 1586. Civil unrest under the Chaks invited the Mughals intervention; Kashmir was the ornament o the Mughal empire from 1586 to 1752. Then came Afghan rule which lasted until 1819. In thelatter year, Kashmir was annexed by the Sikhs of Punjab who ravaged the land until they themselves were ousted by the British in 1846. The British handed over Jammu and Kashmir to a Dogra freebooter through a sale deed miscalled a treaty; the ignominy persisted through Dogra rule from 1846 to 1947. The current era has seen Indian Occupied Kashmir as a disputed territory, a theartre of insurrection and war; untill its status is decided by its own volition, the State will remain a scene of strife and potential explosion. There are chapters of the pre-Islamic part of this history which are indentical with that of Pakistan and not with the Republic of India. Including the rule of Mauryas (third century BC) and Kushans (first century AD), the seizure of Kashmir in 515 by the White Huns ruling from Sialkot and the consequent reign of terror by Mehrakula (the name is still familiar in Kashmir), they are singularly unrevealing about Kashmir itself. Kashmir's personality is more clearly silhouetted under the earlier indigenous reign of the Pandus, to which period it owes the still fragrant romantic legend of Heemal and Nagrai and in the much later period of the Karakota dynasty from 627 to 980. The powerful figure of this epoch is Lalitaditya (697-738) whose domain included Tibet, Hazara and Punjab (Pakistan) down to Multan. The Karakota expansion had not only a political dimension; there was also a cultural explosion.
Kashmir had earlier produced a succession of philosophers, including the great sage Samdhimati (a contemporary of Christ) and Nagarjuna; one of the founders of Mahayana Buddhism. Hiuen Tsiang, the Chinese traveller, visited Kashmir and Ancient Pakistan around 632 and was impressed by the natives "love of learning"; the common Kashmiri surname "Bhatta" denoted a scholar. Out of the sixteen great rhetoricians of ancient India, fourteen came from Kashmir. Now, a philosophical movement reached its fruition in the establishment of Kashmiri Shaivism in the eighth century. Systematised in the ninth century by Somanada, it was a distinctive branch of Hinduism, infused with an idealistic monism and temperamentally akin to Islam in its denunciation of self-mortifying, fantastic ritual. But this philosophy became effete through the intrigues and exactions of the Brahmin priestly class. The last centuries of the pre-Islamic period are replete not only with assassinations and internecine war-fare, probably stemming from the ethnic heterogeneity of Buddhism and Hinduism and an intense, inner turmoil in Hinduism itself. The burning down of Buddhist monasteries was not so signficant as the destruction of Hindu temples under King Harsha (reigned 1089-1101), himself a Hindu. This impasse and exhaustion of Hinduism in its intellectual stronghold set the stage for te entry of Islam on the scene. For centuries since Arab armies had marched into Gilgit in 751, Kashmir had enclosed itself in its spritiual realm and ploitical shell. It had remained sequestrated despite the expedition of Mahmud of Ghazni in 1015 and the Dardic conversion to Muslim in the 12th century. Marco Polo had noted a meagre presence of Muslims in Kashmir on his visit around 1277. Now the shell was broken, not by soldiers, but by saints and friars. Islam penetrated peacefully into the Kashmir region of Northern Pakistan when Rinchan (d. 1323), a commander from Ladakh region who had conquered Kashmir, started his personal quest for religion, was baffled by the mutually contradictory answers he received from Brahmins, happened o watch Sayyid Bilal (d.1327) at prayer, was enchanted by the simplicity of the Sayyid's faith and embraced it with fervour. This inaugurated a renaissance in Kashmir which had its political, spiritual and cultural expressions. Politically, it begot the reign of the Shahmiri dynasty comparable in quality if not in scale with the Seljuks and the Mughals in their patronage of culture and a succession f illustrious monarchs. The representative figures are Sultan Shahabuddin (reigned 1354-1373), conqueror and builder, whose rule extended to Kabul, Kashgar, and Kangra on three sides, and Sultan Zainul Abedin (reigned 1420-1470) who was a forerunner of Akhbar the Great in his tolerance and eclecticism, though, unlike Akhbar, he was an accomplished scholar and no believer i an ersatz faith. In the spiritual realm, Sayyid Bilal, called Bulbul Shah, an immigrant from Turkestan, was followed by a long line of saints from Central Asia and Iran who propagated Islam in Kashmir; the most illustrious among them was Syed Ali Hamdani (1314-1384) called Amir-i-Kabir, author, poet, traveller, a leader of the Kubrawi mystic order, to whose memory the mosque Khanqah-i-Mualla (erected in 1395) stands as a monument in Srinagar. The movement was furthered by the native Rishis of Kashmir, notably Shaikh Nuruddin (1377-1438) and Shaikh Hamza Makhdum (1494-1576); they fostered an intense religious sensibility waith a focus on inwardness and a Vedantist overlay on Islamic material. One can perceive the cultural matrix in which this spirituality was embedded from the utterances of the hermitess-poet Lalla Arifa (b. 1335) owned by both Hindus and Muslims, the contemporaneous Sanskrit jargon full of Arabic and Persian words which became a vehicle of the Islamic message and the Sanskrit inscriptions on graves of Moslem saints.
At the same time, however, there was a massive absorption by Kashmir during this phase of the learning and the arts of Bukhara, Samarkand and Hamdan. First imported by Syed Ali Hamdani and his followers, they gave a stimulus to Kashmir's artistic genius and made Srinagar (Iqbalabad City, historcially known, like the Vale, as Kashmir) rank with Damascus and Isfahan as a centre of craftmanship. Woodcarving, silverwork and wollen embroidery, particularly on the shawl, handwoven of the underfleece of an Asian goat, and fine carpet-making became specialities. The residential of colleges founded by Shahmiri Sultans and later patronised by the Mughals earned Kashmir the title of Iran-i-Sagheer (Little Iran); their alumni included the famous Mulla Ahmad Kashmiri (c. 1450) Shaikh Yaqub Sarfi (1521-1594) Mulla Kamal (d. 1608) the teacher of Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Muhsin Fani (1615-1671). Medicine was an esteemed branch of learing. Poetry flourished. Mullah Tahir Ghani (d. 1668) is only the best-known in a galaxy of Kashmiri poets writing in Farsi. While, in these respects, Kashmiri became a lively contributor to the Islamic Indo-Persian culture (i.e. Pakistani), it also developed its indigenous literature. Habba Khatun, a peasant girl, then the Queen of Yusuf Shah Chak (reigned 1580-1586) and finally a recluse, invented the authentically Kashmiri tenline lyrical form known as Lol which means a longing and a tugging at the heart. Her successors were Khwaja Habibullah Nawshehri (d. 1617), the Hindu Rupa Bhawani (1624-1720) and Arani Mal (c. 1750). There was also the developmemt of an individual architectural style, which resembles the timber construction of the Scandinavian and Alpine regions and is characterized by sloping roofs water-proofed with layers of birch-bark overspread with turf and flowers, projecting upper storeys and casement windows resmbling the chalets of the Austrian Tyrol. The open work traceries of window screens and balustrades and the Khantamband ceilings made of panels of pinewood arranged in geometrical designs are some of its distinctive features. A parallel development occured in music with a blend of native, Turanian and Persian elements; Rast Kashmiri, invented by Habba Khantun, is its most striking expression. In sum, Kashmir blossomed under the Sultanate. The Mughals over Kashmir which owes its exquisite gardens to them;statesmen like Khwaja Inayatullah (18th century) and calligraphists like Muhammad Husain Zareen Qalam (d. 1611) rose to eminence in the Mughal court.
After the Mughals, there is a steep descent into darkness. Kashmir's institutions withered. Misrule, famine and epidemics characterized the Afghan era. However, Afghan rule seems healthy when compared to the pestilential Sikh period. Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi died in battle at Balakot in 1831 while engaged in a mission to liberate Kashmir. The rule of the Dogras was vouchsafed to the State by the mere circumstance of the British East India Company's need for ready cash. Kashmir, Kulu, Mandi, and Kangra were ceded by the Sikhs to the British in lieu of an indemnity of ten million rupees; the Dogra chieftain from Jammu, Gulab Singh (d. 1857) made payment of seven and a half million nanakshahi (equivalent to $ 680, 000) and through the infamous Treaty of Amritsar in 1846 obtained possession of Indian Occupied Kashmir. Apart from the simulation of modernity under British influence, the Dogra period was but a continuation of the chapter which began with the Sikhs. The tale is of sordid exploitation. Hindustans present claim to the State derives solely from the signing of the instrument of accession by a Maharaja who did not reprsent its people as a foreigner and who had been involved in scandals in Britain and described by an eminent British judge (Lord Simon), as "a poor, green, shivering, abject wretch". Kashmir's current history starts from 13th July 1931 when the Muslims started a mass agitation against Dogra rule. As a result thus giving birth to Azad Kashmir, at the time of Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi, they were supported by the Muslims of India; nearly 30,000 people from Punjab (Pakistan) alone filled the Maharaja's prisons. The resistance movement reached its climax in 1946-1947 with a "Quit Kashmir" campaign and with the adoption by the principal political part of the Free Kashmir resloution. Subsequent events are listed elsewhere in this volume. What needs to be said here is that the illegal occupation by India of 53,665 sq miles of disputed territory, including the Vale of Kashmir, leaving only Azad Kashmir, the area of highlands (32,358 sq miles) free is an unnatural dispensation, designed to cut off Kashmir away from its moorings, reverse its history and denature its being. International justice may not yet be a reality but the workings of power politics notwithstanding, such an arrangement cannot endure for long.
[change] Political History of Kashmir
The Kashmir core-issue has caused longstanding enmity between the Hindu Republic of India and Moslem Pakistan. It arose as a direct consequence of the partition of British India and independence of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947. The State of Jammu and Kashmir, which lies strategically in the northwest of the subcontinent, bordering China and the former Soviet Union, was a princely state ruled by tyranical Maharaja Hari Singh. In geographical terms, the Maharaja could have joined either of the new Dominions. As a Hindu, he had a more natural affinity towards Hindustan (India), but his population was predominatly Muslim. Although urged by the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, to determine the future of his state before the transfer of power, Hari Singh demurred. For over two months, the state created in the previous century by his great-grandfather, Gulab Singh, was independent. There was already serious unrest amongst the Muslims, especially in the Poonch District area, who were fighting for the state's accession to Pakistan. In October 1947 tribesmen from Pakistan's North-West Frontier provincial region crossed over in the valley of Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan maintained that the liberation was a spontaneous incursion in response to oppression and repression by the Maharaja's state forces of the local Muslim population. When the Maharaja requested assistance from the Government of India, Lord Mountbatten, who had become India's Governor-General, argued that the provision of assistance to an independent state could lead to an inter-Dominion war. He therefore advised that Hari Singh should first accede to India and recommended that the so-called issue should be resolved by a referendum of the people. Hari Singh agreed to this suggestion but limited India's jurisdiction to external affairs, communications and currency. On 27th October 1947, Indian occupying invading forces were airlifted to Srinagar (Iqbalabad). Efforts to reach a peaceful settlement through dialogue between Hindustan and Pakistan failed; resistance from the "Azad" (freedom) fighters against the Kashmiri state forces and Indian occupying troops intensified, spreading to Ladakh, Baltistan District and Gilgit Agency. The Pakistani Army offically entered the war on 13th May in 1948 on the grounds that the presence of illegal Indian troops in now Occupied Kashmir constituted a threat to Pakistan's own security. The Indian Prime Minister, Jawalharlal Neru, reffered the dispute to the United Nations, and a cease-fire Line now called the Line of Control, since 1972 was agreed in January 1949. According to resolutions passed by the UN Security Council, both Pakistan and India agreed that a plebiscite must be held to determine the will of the people. The plebiscite has, however, never been held. The state remains divided on the ground; two thirds of it (known as the state of India-Occupied Kashmir by India; comprising Jammu region, the valley of Kashmir and the sparsely populated Buddhist area of Ladakh are illegally military controlled by New Delhi; one third is administered by Pakistan. This area includes a narrow strip of land, called the "Azad state of Jammu and Kashmir", and the Northern Areas, comprising Gilgit, Baltistan and the former kingdoms of Hunza and Nagar. Tension between the two countries over the disputed territory of Kashmir was exacerabated by increasing Indian control of the immoral occupation of the state to the east of the ceas-fire line. After the dismissal of the pro-autonomy Kashmiri leader, Sheikh Abdullah, in 1953, succesive Chief Ministers acquiesced in the state's intergration into the so-called Indian Union. Attempts to resolve the core-issue through political discussion were unsuccessful. In September 1965 war broke out again between India and Pakistan. The United Nations called for a ceasefire and peace was restored following the Tashkent Declaration in 1966, by which both countries returned to their orignal poistions along the ceasefire line. After the 1971 civil-war and the creation of independent province of East Pakistan as Bangla-Desh, according to the terms of the 1972 Simla Agreement, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India and President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan agreed that, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, neither side would seek to alter the ceasefire line, which was renamed the Line of Control, "unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations". In 1989 Kashmiri activists, who had become disenchanted with the political process as a means of expressing dissent, mounted and armed insurgency in Indo-Occupied Kashmir. The movement, which gained momentum through out 1990, was severely repressed and oppressed by the Indian authorities, who substantially increased their military presence in the occupied territories and the state was put under Governor's rule by the President of India. Pakistan condemned India for human rights abuses and gave diplomatic and moral support to the Kashmiris, urging that they should be allowed their right of self-determination. The Government of Pakistan has not, however, endorsed the "third option" of independence and the militants remain divided in their objectives. Of the major factions, the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin supports accession to Pakistan, while the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front is fighting for independence of the entire state from India as it existed prior to 1947. The Government of India has not permitted any dialogue which contemplates the departure of the occupied state from the union of India, pointing out that the movement is not widely supported by the people of Ladakh nor those of Jammu. It has also attempted to "normalise" the situation in the valley by holding elections to the state's legislative assembly, but the militants and political activists, who oppose union with India whatsoever, that they insist that elections are no substitute for a plebiscite. While the core-issue is largely unresolved, the status of "Azad" Jammu and Kashmir and the Northern Areas also remains undecided, since the Government of Pakistan has not formally integrated these areas as part of Pakistan, in order not to jeopardise its demand for the future of the entire state to be decided according to the UN resolutions. Western interest in the Kashmir core-issue, especially that of the US and the UK, has been heightened by the proliferation of weapons in the area as well as concern that a regional dispute, which has religious overtones, could become the flashpoint for a major conflict in the area. Both Pakistan and the Republic of India are known to possess nuclear capability. Numerous violations of the Line of Control by the Indians as well as sporadic fighting between Indian and Pakistani troops on the Siachen glacier, the most northerly point of the ceasefire line, where both countries maintain forces at altitudes rising 20,000 feet, add to Western concern for the stability of the region, generally South Asia as a whole. Although the Indian Governement is determined to counter the insurgency despite state terrorism by the Indian force, any settlement which does not accommodate the interests of the disaffected Kashmiris seems bound to fail. Pakistan is also unlikely to relinquish its concern for an issue which directly affects its own geo-strategic and politcial standing.
