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Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a long history of the historical imagination in Kashmir. It explores the articulation, within Kashmir's multilingual historical tradition, of the idea of Kashmir and the idea of history in conversation with each other. Contrary to the notion that the Indian Subcontinent did not produce histories, the book uncovers the production, circulation, and consumption of a vibrant regional tradition of historical composition in its textual, oral,
and performance forms from the late sixteenth century to the present. It reveals the deep linkages amongst Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives as they drew on and informed each other to define
Kashmir as a sacred landscape and polity. It argues that within this interconnected narrative tradition, Kashmir was, and continues to be, imagined as far more than simply an embattled territory or a tourist paradise. History and history writing too, the book further illustrates, were defined in multiple ways-as tradition, facts, memories, stories, common sense, and spiritual practice. The book thus offers a historically grounded reflection on the historical memories, narrative practices,
and institutional contexts that have informed imaginings of Kashmir and its past, and explores the challenges posed to these ideas in Kashmiri political culture today.
Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a long history of the historical imagination in Kashmir. It explores the articulation, within Kashmir's multilingual historical tradition, of the idea of Kashmir and the idea of history in conversation with each other. Contrary to the notion that the Indian Subcontinent did not produce histories, the book uncovers the production, circulation, and consumption of a vibrant regional tradition of historical composition in its textual, oral,
and performance forms from the late sixteenth century to the present. It reveals the deep linkages amongst Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives as they drew on and informed each other to define
Kashmir as a sacred landscape and polity. It argues that within this interconnected narrative tradition, Kashmir was, and continues to be, imagined as far more than simply an embattled territory or a tourist paradise. History and history writing too, the book further illustrates, were defined in multiple ways-as tradition, facts, memories, stories, common sense, and spiritual practice. The book thus offers a historically grounded reflection on the historical memories, narrative practices,
and institutional contexts that have informed imaginings of Kashmir and its past, and explores the challenges posed to these ideas in Kashmiri political culture today.
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
Chitralekha Zutshi is Professor of History at the College of
William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. She specializes in
Modern South Asia, with particular interests in Islam in the Indian
Subcontinent; interactions between religious identities, regional
movements and nationalism in princely and colonial India; commodity
and consumer cultures in Britain and colonial India; ideas of
history and historiography in pre-colonial and colonial India.
Kashmir's
Contested Pasts is her second book.
Chitralekha Zutshi's Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a magisterial
survey of Kashmiri historiography over the last several centuries,
a history of the writing of histories in Kashmir...The book ends
with excellent chapters on the Kashmiri narrative public and its
engagement with performative modes of history and collective
memory, followed by a look at contemporary battles over history in
Kashmir, a legacy of the growing communalization of Kashmiri
identity
characteristic of the last two centuries (Review by Umair A.
Muhajir
https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/reviews/183268/muhajir-zutshi-kashmirs-contested-pasts-narratives-sacred-geographies)
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