Jammu & Kashmir
Ancient Kashmir is steeped in legend. It is said that the Kashmir Valley was
once the great lake Satisar (the Lake of the goddess Sati, also known as Durga),
home to ferocious demons. Responding to the penances of the great sage Kashyapa,
the grandson of Brahma himself, the gods destroyed the demon of the lake, with
a pebble divinely caste, which today stands as the hill upon which towers the
fortress built by the Mughal Emperor Akbar, and known today as Hari Parbat.
The water of Satisar was drained through a breach in the mountains at what is
now the mouth of the Valley, beyond the northern town of Baramulla (or the Sanskrit
name of Varaha Mukh, the visage of the boar). From then on the Valley has carried
the name of its founder. Like that of the rest of India, the ancient history
of the State lacks detailed documentation although stuff and legend have been
indistinguishably mired in the work of Rajatarangini by Kalhan whose identity
remains a source of conjecture.
In the 3rd Century BC, the state was incorporated into the Maurya Empire under
Asoka, founder of the city of Srinagar. Buddhism became the principal religion
which continued into the times of the Kushanas (1st and 2nd centuries AD), the
names of many of whose rulers several towns in the Valley were named and continue
to be borne by several towns in the Valley, such as Kanispora after Kanishka,
and Hushkora after Huvishka. It was in Kanishka's time that the 3rd Great Buddhist
Council was held in Srinagar, enter izat the split between the schools of Hinayana
and Mahayana Buddhism.
Thereafter Buddhism declined in the Valley though it retained its vibrancy and
continues to thrive in Ladakh. In the 8th century, Kashmir rose to become the
enter of a great kingdom , spanning much of North India and parts of Central
Asia under Lalitaditya Muktapida, who was builder of the Martand (sun) Temple,
and founder of the Valley's irrigation canal irrigation system which has survived
for centuries, helping water rich harvests of the finest rice, a variety of
temperate fruit and exotic crops such as saffron.
Islam came to India through traders, warriors and missionaries from the eighth
to the twelfth centuries. The faith came to Kashmir through the Sufi saint Bulbul
Shah in the early fourteenth century, finding wide acceptance. The ruling monarch
Rinchen Shah converted to Islam and assumed the name of Sadruddin in 1327 AD.
Thereafter, beginning with his former general Shahmir, a series of Muslim dynasties
ruled the State with brief interludes of annexation into neighbouring States,
to become a part of the Mughal Empire in the late 16th century, under its greatest
ruler Akbar.
The State was fully incorporated into the systems of administration and land
settlement which long remained a legacy of that Empire in India, well after
its own disintegration. All through this period the religious activity of the
Shaivites and Sufis continued to flourish, and fed the vibrant stream of Kashmiri
culture. Lal Ded, Kashmir's great poetesses was also among her foremost Shaivite
ascetics and mentor to one of Kashmir's greatest Sufi saints, Sheikh Nooruddin,
whose school of Sufism is called 'Rishi' and who is revered by Hindus as Nand
Rishi.
The songs of Habba Khatoon, queen to the last Sultan of Kashmir before it fell
to the Mughals, who retired to the life of a hermit in the hills of Gurez after
her husband's deportation, still resonate with the peasant women harvesting
rice in Kashmir's fields. The rule of the Mughals has been coloured by romance,
the modern remnants of which are to be found in the masterful architecture and
layout of their world famous gardens in Kashmir: Shalimar, Nishat, Chashme Shahi,
Chinar Bagh.
A graphic account of the pomp and panoply of the Emperor's cavalcade to Kashmir
has been left to us by the French physician Francois Bernier who was in the
court of the Emperor Aurangzeb. The Imperial Court called on the Kashmiri Pandits,
famed for their scholarship, to man courtly positions in Delhi. Thus it was
that the ancestor of the Nehrus was recruited by the Emperor Farrukhsiyar in
the early 18th century to serve as imperial scribe.
The defeat of the Empire at the hands of the Afghan brigand Ahmed Shah Abdali
forced the ceding of Kashmir to the Afghans in 1753 AD, leading to a period
of unmitigated brutality and widespread distress, which remained cruelly etched
on the public memory, reinforced by the happenings of 1947. The greatest of
the Sikh rulers Maharaja Ranjit Singh won Kashmir in 1815. On the defeat of
the Sikhs by the British, the latter annexed and then sold Kashmir to the local
feudatory Gulab Singh, who then assumed the title of Maharaja. His dynasty continued
to rule the State under British paramountcy till the events described hereafter.
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