Refuting notions that South Asia lacked histories in the precolonial period, Chitralekha Zutshi's Kashmir's Contested Pasts uncovers the ideas of history and historical production reflected in narrative traditions of Kashmir ranging from the sixteenth century to the contemporary period. Instead of dismissing premodern narratives as fanciful and imaginative, Zutshi draws attention to how history and historical composition were defined in multiple ways—stories, facts, and spiritual practice—and sets out to resurrect the historical life of Persian tazkiras (texts focusing ostensibly on the lives of saints) and tarikhs (texts largely focusing on kings). Tazkiras, tarikhs, and oral traditions are approached here as dialogic responses to the political situation and interventions in contemporary discourses. Crucially, Zutshi suggests that the tarikhs produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should not be subsumed under the broad “Indo-Persian” tarikh tradition embodied by Mughal histories. The tarikhs produced in Kashmir continued to focus on local concerns and drew from pre-Mughal sources. In other words, the imagining of Kashmir as a distinct space made this tradition uniquely Kashmiri, and the organization of space (not just time) was an important facet of historical practice.
The link between narrative traditions and place making is particularly well explored in this book. Zutshi's magisterial survey of Kashmir's multilingual historical traditions clearly demonstrates that a central aim of these traditions was to establish Kashmir as a sacred landscape and a unique polity. Haider Malik's Waqiat-i Kashmir, for instance, attempted to define Kashmir as a distinct mulk through emphasizing the unique nature of Kashmir's landscape, detailing specific events that shaped its physical landscape (for example, earthquakes) and mapping spiritual networks. The analysis of representations of Kashmir in Persian traditions demonstrates the continuities and shared idioms between Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives. For instance, the definitions of Kashmir as a sacred landscape in Sanskrit texts were appropriated in Persian historical traditions. Even Persian narrative traditions that set out to present Kashmir as an Islamic space shaped by Sufi networks drew from earlier Sanskrit narratives—especially the Rajatarangini—to relocate myths of origin and settlement into a more universal Islamic imagination. The emphasis on the multilingual traditions of Kashmir challenges both colonial attempts to define linguistic communities and the alignment of Kashmir's Sanskrit tradition with “Hinduism” and “Hindus.”
While highlighting continuities in narrative traditions over the longue durée, Zutshi firmly locates these sources within the context of their production. Indeed, she stresses that the narrative traditions are deeply political in the sense that they allowed for a variety of ideological, religious, and political agendas to be expressed. The first chapter of the book explores how tazkiras and tarikhs from the late sixteenth century served to naturalize Islam in Kashmir. Chapter 2 demonstrates how tarikhs composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew from earlier Sufi narratives and Sanskrit tradition to assert the unique position of Kashmir within the Mughal Empire and the period of Afghan rule. Chapter 3 explores traditions of historical composition in the nineteenth century, which were produced within the context of Sikh and Dogra rule, and were responding to colonial efforts to chart the history of Kashmir. Here Zutshi highlights how these tarikhs moved beyond defining the place towards categorizing the inhabitants. Thus, by the late nineteenth century, the people of Kashmir come to be conceived of in political and religious terms, eventually resulting in the narrative tradition itself being categorized as Hindu/Sanskrit and Muslim/Persian. Given that pre-nineteenth-century traditions themselves described engagements between “true Islam,” apostates, and infidels, as well as rivalries between Sufi orders, more could have been said in these chapters about how groups and sectarian identities were imagined and presented in the earlier Persian narratives.
The last three chapters of the book focus on the shifts in the world of Kashmiri historiography and the nature of the narrative public in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Chapter 4 explores the impact of colonial scholarship and historical methods on Kashmir's narrative tradition. In particular, it demonstrates how the Orientalist preoccupation with originary texts, singular notions of authorship, and the search for India's ancient past (defined as a Hindu past) resulted in the decontextualization of Sanskrit texts and the separation of Sanskrit and Persian traditions. The fifth chapter focuses on performers, minstrels, and storytellers like the ladhishah and bhaggats who shaped the historical consciousness. Here Zutshi's argument that the Kashmiri-language narrative public was deeply political yet autonomous of the state makes a valuable intervention in the broader historiography on public spheres and oral traditions. These chapters could have benefited from an analysis of the patronage networks and social distinctions that differentiated the performers, the nature of their tales, and their audiences. The final chapter reflects on the increasingly fractured nature of the contemporary narrative public. Zutshi shows that the narrative public has been split into mutually oppositional publics advocating distinct versions of Kashmir's past and differing definitions of Kashmir itself.
The analysis of debates over the past in contemporary Kashmir serves to reassert how history and notions of space are intertwined with political imagination and contestations. More broadly, it emphasizes the political nature of memory, narrative practices, and the discipline of history itself. Both of these are themes that are central to this book. Apart from stressing the importance of the context, attention is drawn throughout the book towards the use of texts and narrative traditions to legitimize a variety of ideological, religious, and political agendas. It is important to note here that while highlighting continuities between Sanskrit narratives and Persian tarikhs, Zutshi does not approach the tarikhs as mere translations but as texts that developed through dialogue with the Sanskrit narratives. Furthermore, in examining Sanskrit texts, tazkiras, tarikhs, and contemporary debates over Kashmir's past, Zutshi also questions the seemingly unproblematic division between “myth” and “history.” The rejection of specific aspects of narrative traditions or entire genres themselves as “mythical,” be it by colonial scholars, contemporary Kashmiri figures and sociocultural movements, or state institutions, is itself a political act. Thus, Zutshi's Kashmir's Contested Pasts is as much about memory as it is about forgetting aspects of the past.
