THE RAJATARANGINI: KASHMIR’S POETIC TALE OF TIME
Shonaleeka Kaul’s book looks at the cultural history of early Kashmir through Kalhana’s 11th century masterpiece. An excerpt
This book is a cultural history/anthropology/geography of early Kashmir… an attempt to identify and interpret the values and meanings associated with the region called Kashmir from its origins until the 12th century CE. It does so chiefly through the medium of an iconic textual representation composed by a Kashmiri in 1148 CE, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini. The Making of Early Kashmir is in a primary sense, therefore, a work of textual criticism…
The Rajatarangini , an epic Sanskrit poem running into nearly 8,000 verses and narrating the story of Kashmir’s royal dynasties over more than a millennium, deserves to be the subject and medium of such an investigation for it is one of Kashmir’s earliest articulations of, and engagements with, a regional self-awareness… Kalhana’s magnum opus, when translated by European Orientalists in the 19th century, was believed to be the first and only work of true history to be found in all of Sanskrit literature and early India. Given that such an interpretation implied that early Indians otherwise were singularly bereft of a sense of history, this celebration of the text was in fact deprecation of an entire civilization. It was nonetheless embraced by Indian historians and philologists throughout the 20th century...
That the Rajatarangini did not call itself history but rather quite unequivocally traditional Sanskrit poetry, mahakavya or prabandha, and behaved like the latter, complete with its heavy use of rhetoric, myth, and didacticism, was seen as something of an inconvenience and aberration… Today a part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Valley of the river Vitasta (Jhelum) was, for at least 1,500 years before Kalhana, the kingdom or mandala of Kashmir. This book attempts to understand the discursive and material processes by which it emerged as a historical culture region… A region does not express or possess intrinsic meaning. Meaning is given or constructed through discursive practices, chief among which is textualization performed by social actors such as Kalhana. A land coming into meaning is the birth of a region, in particular a culture region. So regions are produced not just by material practices on the ground such as the drawing of boundaries or erection of gateways but, perhaps more powerfully, by cultural practices of representation... The fact that Kalhana’s Rajatarangini gave rise to at least three sequels by other Kashmiris over the next four, tumultuous centuries of Kashmiri history and was still regarded as the foremost representation of the land by Abul Fazl when the Mughals descended on the Valley in the late 16th century decidedly attests to the persistence of the power and deemed authenticity of Kalhana’s discourse... it is only when a discourse is embedded in a semantic–conceptual universe that is shared by the community that it can attain currency. For Kalhana and his representation of Kashmir, that shared cultural universe or framework by which people made sense of the world around them drew from the pan-Indic Sanskrit episteme. In particular, Sanskrit’s master texts and genres, such as itihasa, purana, kavya, and sastra, and their ethico-philosophical traditions relating to niti (principles), dharma (righteousness/duty), and karma (action), were the intertexts that furnished for early Kashmir the criteria for evaluating knowledge as relevant and true…
Kalhana’s elite background, evident not least of all in his choice of a highly learned Sanskrit genre, has been indicted by some scholars as shaping his historical assessments. On a close reading of the text, it appears that Kalhana’s ethical sensibility far outweighed his social ideology... though certainly... a conservative traditionalist and a monarchist, he at times is seen reworking social distinctions in order to foreground ethical ones. Thus he lampoons... figures of ritual or political authority for being pompous, debauched, or treacherous even as he... valorizes... the socially insignificant, such as a prostitute or a cook, for their loyalty or bravery. Everywhere, Kalhana’s ... chief tirade is against persecution of the people (prajapidanam)... Kalhana spares no one except the pure minded (suddhadhi, sat, manasvi) .... While works on medieval, modern/colonial, and contemporary Kashmir may abound, serious discursive scholarship on the ancient past of this troubled land has been inadequate... Indeed, while historically thin notions of a peculiarly pluralist identity (‘Kashmiriyat’) have been devised for medieval Kashmir down to Independence, and claims of a regional identity based on a single religion for contemporary Kashmir are proferred, there is little understanding in mainstream scholarship of the emergence of early Kashmir as a culture region... The Making of Early Kashmir does not claim... to be a comprehensive analysis of all of early Kashmiri culture. Its chief ambitions are: first, putting out a critical reinterpretation of a literary classic... And second, bringing clarity to our understanding of the genesis... of a region long subject to scholarly and political assumptions and clichés, if not neglect.