The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini by Shonaleeka Kaul

Author:Shonaleeka Kaul [Kaul, Shonaleeka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2018-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

chapter four

(Re)locating Early Kashmir

Geoculture of a Region and Beyond

The shared commons that we choose to call a regional way of life is only ever relationally and discursively constituted.

—Ash Amin

Apart from questions of history and landscape, the third main interest behind the textual reinterpretation of the Rājataraṅgiṇī that this book represents is the question of early Kashmir’s cultural location and identity. In other words, we look to understand the regional identity claimed for and by this land, as well as the traditions that shaped this identity, until the early medieval period. A historical region—a unit of a geographical, political, or cultural character—is, by definition, a relational term. It can be spoken of in explicit or implicit association or contrast with other regions and, most often, a supra-region. In Kashmir’s case, there is a special need to pose this question of the relational location of the region. That need derives from the main impression that the Valley seems to have left on popular and scholarly imagination, namely that of its isolation,1 a view suggested more by its surrounding high mountain topography perhaps, than by its historical reality attested multiply by all manner of sources, as this chapter will show.

From ‘isolation’ to ‘insularity’ and a consequential ‘uniqueness’ has been but a short step in the assumptive characterization of ancient Kashmir. Sample this representative statement: ‘The Himalayan Valley of Kashmir … [has been] geographically secluded from the rest of South Asia. Its geographic situation, bounded on all sides by high mountains, has led to an insularity that contributed to the development of its unique cultural characteristics’ (emphasis added).2 This conviction about Kashmir’s splendid, if imaginary, isolation has in turn tied in neatly with ideas of ‘peripherality’—a notion thought to apply to any region that lay on the outliers of the historical formation that flourished along the Gangetic Valley from the 6th century BCE onwards, which is construed as the ‘Centre’.

Peripherality is used to imply a great distance, literal and figurative, from the Centre. That this is itself a view from the Centre, privileging it in historical processes, is not noticed by those looking to ascribe acculturative and hegemonizing tendencies to the relationship between the Indic heartland and everywhere else. This evolutionist position suggests a passivity to outlying regions in their historical emergence and development as also an understanding of cultural processes, mechanisms, and choices as top-down (also hand-me-down), expropriative, static, and unilinear.

A recent study of the Nīlamata Purāṇa applies this approach to early Kashmir.3 It essentially replays the influential materialist scholarship on the Purāṇas, according to the most cogent theoretical statement of which by Vijay Nath, these texts were little more than an acculturative instrument for the imposition of ‘mainstream civilization’ and ‘brahmanization’ on ‘tribal societies’ to facilitate the spread of agriculture.4 As Christopher Minkowski has put it, this is ‘as if brahmins were a species of beneficial, exotic plant or insect’!5 Such a position is also highly reductive of a genre that was essentially an amorphous and heterogeneous compilation of free-floating oral narratives and encyclopaedic materials over centuries.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.