The urge for identity as a basic human urge has received specific academic recognition in post-modern political thought. People have sought a sense of belonging and security in groups throughout human history, starting from the primitive tribal life. The forms and basis of groups have changed from time to time and people were not always free, until democratic systems emerged, to belong to a group of their choice.
In the case of Kashmir Valley, Kashmiri identity has been the most persistent and dominating urge of people. It is the most homogeneous and in some respects the most crucial part of what is officially called the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu and Ladakh are its two other regions. The Kashmiris have always perceived their identity as distinct and separate within the subcontinent. This identity was uniquely Kashmiri, which encompassed Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain the distinctiveness of the Kashmiri identity.
Kashmir was the largest state of the British Indian empire ruled by a prince or Maharaja. At the time of its independence and partition into the dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Maharaja aspired to an independent status for his state. But the attempt by Pakistan to annex the state through a tribal raid sponsored by it, forced him to seek the help of the Indian army after exercising his constitutional right to accede to the Indian Union on 26 October 1947. The way people of the valley acclaimed, through large rallies, the decision of the popular National Conference party led by its charismatic leader, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, to support the state’s accession to India, and the way they cooperated with the Indian army in expelling the raiders from the valley, added political and moral legitimacy to the decision of the ruler to accede to the Indian Union.
The armed clash between India and Pakistan (the latter had reinforced the tribal raid with regulars of its army) in the state terminated in a ceasefire on 1 January 1949. The ceasefire line, later rationalised and renamed the Line of Control after the Indo-Pak war of 1971, divided the state into two parts; 84,112 square kilometres of territory remained under the control of Pakistan, including Gilgit and the northern dependencies of the state, Skardu in the former Ladakh district, the Pothoari-speaking western tract of the district of Muzaftarabad in the former Kashmir province, and Poonch Jagir and Mirpur district in Jammu province. None of these areas were originally inhabited by Kashmiris. The Azad Kashmir or POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir), as the Pak-held part of the state is called in Pakistan and India respectively, is, therefore, a misnomer. The entire Kashmiri-speaking area, i.e. the valley of Kashmir, is within the Indian part of the state and comprises just over 11% of its area. About 47% of the people in the state speak Kashmiri as their mother tongue, including a small percentage in the Jammu region.
If the Pakistan-held part is also included, the percentage of area and population of the valley will shrink further. But the importance of Kashmir is due to the fact that it is the real bone of contention between India and Pakistan. The rest of the state could have been easily parcelled out between the two neighbouring countries. India is, for instance, almost reconciled to the present division of the state except for occasionally laying a formal legal claim to the Pak-held part as a bargaining counter. Pakistan, on the other hand, has often indicated its willingness to concede Jammu and Ladakh, at any rate their non-Muslim parts, to India. What created the Kashmir problem was the accession of a Muslim majority state in 1947 and the apparent fluctuations in the mind of Kashmiri Muslims thereafter.
Why did Kashmiris remain aloof from the mainstream pre-independent Muslim politics in the subcontinent? Why did they, instead, overwhelmingly opt for India in 1947? Why were they alienated from the Indian mainstream from 1953 to 1975? Yet why did they not respond to Pak-sponsored liberation attempts during the period? Why were they again reconciled to remaining a part of India from 1975, following the Indira–Abdullah Accord, to, say, 1987? Why did a sudden insurgency overtake the valley a little later? Why have non-Kashmiri Muslims of the Indian part of the state not joined the ongoing insurgency? Why, despite the dependence on arms supply from, as also the political, moral and diplomatic support of Pakistan, is the rallying slogan of insurgent Kashmir ‘azadi’—freedom—and not ‘Pakistan’?
The only way this zig-zagging of Kashmir politics can be explained is in terms of the assertion of the Kashmiri identity. The Kashmiri Muslims have reacted against the threat perceived by them to their identity from diverse directions. They do react like any other Muslim community when their religious interests are endangered. But they are unlikely to submerge their Kashmiri identity in the name of Islam.
The beginning of the modern political movement in Kashmir is traced to a religious issue—as a protest by the Muslims of the state against the desecration of the holy Quran by a police officer in 1931. It acquired an organised form with the formation of the Muslim Conference a year later, fully supported by the Indian Muslim League. But as the movement culminated in the demand for the transfer of power from a non-Kashmiri ruler (who belonged to the Dogra community of Jammu) to the people, and the transfer of land from landlords, mostly non-Kashmiri or non-Muslim to the tillers, a contradiction emerged between the interests of Kashmiris and those of the Muslim League, because the latter was patronised by Muslim princes and landlords. The support lent by Indian nationalist leaders of the Congress party to Kashmiri interests and aspirations led to the conversion of the Muslim Conference into the National Conference in 1939.
Alliance of Kashmiri nationalists with Indian nationalism
The assertion of Kashmiri identity led to the split in the Muslim leadership of the state along regional lines. The anti-Maharaja and anti-feudal plank of the National Conference did not get the same emotional response from the Muslims of Jammu as the Maharaja and most of the landlords belonged to Jammu and the latter also included Muslims. The National Conference thus essentially represented a movement of Kashmiri nationalism which became an ally of the Indian nationalist movement.
By 1947, the Muslim League had established its sway throughout the subcontinent. Almost all dissenting Muslim stalwarts collapsed one after the other. Confident in the belief that as the J&K state was a Muslim majority state, its Muslims would not behave differently from Muslims elsewhere, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the supreme leader of the League and founder of Pakistan, declared that the state was in his pocket. He conceded the right of the ruler to take a decision about the future affiliation of the state with either of the two newly independent dominions of India and Pakistan and started negotiations with him. But he also sent tribal raiders to take Kashmir by force, believing that the Muslims of the valley would not resist the opportunity of joining a Muslim country.
Indian leaders, in contrast, had put their bet on the sentiment of Kashmiri patriotism. They proclaimed that sovereignty belonged to the people and not to the ruler. Gandhi’s personal visit to the valley to convey this assurance acted as a magnetic pull on the Kashmiri mind which was outraged by the policy of the Pakistan government to recognise the Maharaja’s sovereignty on one hand, and on the other to decide the issue of accession of the state by force. Leaders of Kashmir thus would claim, after the state’s accession to India, that Indian forces had come to Kashmir to defend their azadi (freedom) which Pakistan had threatened. The insurgency which started around 1990 also proclaimed azadi as its objective, except that the roles were now reversed. Now India is projected as the enemy of azadi while support is sought from Pakistan to defend it.
The alliance between Kashmiri and Indian nationality developed strains as the government of India started pressurising the Kashmiri leadership to cede more subjects to the Centre than those, i.e. Defence, Foreign Affairs and Communications which were stipulated in the instrument of accession. This was what other princely states had to do, under the pressure of their people.
However, while the Kashmiri leaders tried to resist these encroachments by the Centre on the autonomy of the state, they did not concede the demand for regional autonomy within the state of Jammu and Ladakh. These regions, therefore, had no interest in supporting the autonomy of the state. Tensions in inter-regional relations and in Centre-state relations eventually led to the crisis of August 1953 when Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed as Prime Minister and put under detention, even though all the 75 members of the state assembly were members of his National Conference. This treatment of the hero of Kashmiri nationalism and the architect of the state’s accession to India was a big blow to the self-respect and identity of Kashmir. Further blows were struck by the measures taken to force the constitutional integration of the state with the Indian Union. This was accomplished with the connivance of pliable governments imposed upon the state through rigged elections.
However, Pakistan’s military regime and centralised polity did not satisfy Kashmir’s urge for autonomy and identity either. Moreover, as an ally of Indian nationalism, Kashmir’s political movement had come to share a common political ideology broadly expressed in slogans like secularism, democracy and socialism. Despite the emotional break with the Centre in 1953, these ideological links were not completely snapped. In addition, Sheikh Abdullah and his colleagues had intimate personal associations with many government and non-government national leaders.
It was thus possible for the present writer to play a mediational role and assist the two sides to evolve a formula for the preservation of Kashmiri identity within India and of the regions within the state. The split of Pakistan and emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 improved the prospects of a settlement. For it not only weakened the bargaining capacity of Pakistan, and hence of the Kashmiri leaders as well, but it also reiterated the validity of ethnic identities. The assertion of Bangla identity against Pak–Muslim identity strengthened the case for Kashmiri identity against Pakistani claims. Thus when Sheikh Abdullah returned to power in 1975 after an accord with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he received a tumultuous welcome in the valley. For the government of India conceded, inter alia, that Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which accorded the J&K state special status within India, would continue, and that the state could review the central laws extended to the state after 1953 and request the Centre to amend or repeal them. That the hero of Kashmiri nationalism was again at the helm was considered by many Kashmiris as an added guarantee for the defence of Kashmiri identity.
The dismissal of Farooq Abdullah, son and successor of Sheikh Abdullah, from chief ministership in 1984 and his reinstatement, after humiliating parleys for over two years, with his agreement to share power with the Congress, offended the self-respect and dignity of the people of Kashmir. The offence was compounded by the manipulation of the elections in 1987 in a number of constituencies and by denying popular discontent any constitutional expression. Kashmiris were thus forced to seek non-constitutional militant and secessionist outlets. Pakistan provided the wherewithal in the form of arms and training facilities to the militants. Significantly, this time Pakistan used the Kashmiri card instead of the Islamic card it had been using so far. The initiative for the militant movement in Kashmir around 1989 was entrusted to the JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) which swore by Kashmiriat. Later, similar strains developed between Pakistan’s interests and the claims of Kashmiriat as had developed between the latter and Indian nationalism after 1947.
Uniqueness of Kashmiri Identity
Events in Kashmir from 1931 to the early 1990s thus eloquently demonstrate the vitality of the Kashmiri identity. It acquired this vitality due among others to geographical, historical and ethnic factors. Enclosed by mountain ranges from 10,000 feet to 18,000 feet high, “Kashmir is the largest valley in the lap of the largest mountains in the world.” They enclose a plain of around 1900 square miles almost uniformly at a height of 5,000 feet; some 84 miles long and 20 to 25 miles wide. Though geographically isolated, the valley is internally well connected. Every place in it is within a few hours ride by car. The fabled beauty of Kashmir, which poets, writers and travellers from all over the world have described as incomparable, further inspires a deep love for the land in its closely knit society.
Kashmir has a homogeneous culture as 94% of its population are Muslims, while over 89% speak Kashmiri as their mother tongue. Kashur—as the language is called by the Kashmiris—is one of the oldest spoken and literary languages of modern India. It has a more than 600-year-old recorded literary heritage if Lai Ded is considered the earliest Kashmiri poetess. According to Sir George Grierson, the pioneering authority on Indian languages, it is not of Sanskrit, but of Dardic origin. If this view is correct, Kashmiri does not belong to the Indo-Aryan family of languages spoken from Dhaka (Bangladesh) to Peshawar (Pakistan). However, G.M.D. Sufi, author of a monumental work, Kashir, concedes that although the Kashmiri language has a Dardic base, it has been influenced by the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in its southern parts. He observes: “The original Dardic language has supplied the skeleton, Sanskrit has given it flesh, but Islam has given it life” (G.M.D. Sufi, Kashir). He also adds that it is the only Dardic language that has a written literature.
Again, Kashmir is a unique civilisational experiment which can claim, as observed by Sir Aurel Stein, the translator of the celebrated history of Kashmir, Rajatarangani, “the distinction of being the only region of India which posseses an uninterrupted series of written records of its history” (Aurel Stein, Introduction to River of Kings). The archaeological excavations at Bourzahama, 15 kilometres from Srinagar, establish its antiquity to before 3000 BC. Though it was contemporaneous to the Mohenjodaro civilisation, perhaps it has some independent features also. The widespread prevalence of Naga-worship before and even after the Buddhist period indicate that the Naga and indigenous tribes lived in Kashmir before the advent of the Aryans in the subcontinent. According to James Ferguson, the Nagas were serpent worshippers, an aboriginal race of Turanian stock inhabiting North India, who were conquered by the Aryans (James Ferguson, Tree and Serpent Worship, 1873). Durbbavardhna, who ruled Kashmir from AD 627 to 663, is stated to have been the son of a Naga (G.M.D. Sufi, Kashir). Abhinava Gupta (AD 915–1009), the eminent Kashmiri philosopher, claims the primacy of agamas—religious texts of ancient Kashmir dating between the first to the fifth-sixth century AD—over the Vedas both in point of time and performance of rituals (Abhinava Gupta, Tantraloka).
The interaction between Vedic and Kashmiri traditions did develop in the course of time. But in Kashmir’s religious literature, the supremacy of Shiva over the Vedic god Indra, has often been asserted. Margendre Tantra, for instance, refers to a legend in which Shiva is regarded as the supreme deity from whom Indra brings the sacred knowledge of Tantra to the world, thereby reducing him to a mere communicator of Shiva’s knowledge (V.N. Drabu, Saivagamas, p 50). According to V.N. Drabu, the pre-Vedic people of Kashmir were admitted to Vedic society “with distinctive characteristics of their own life at different periods” (ibid., p. 31).
The transition from Naga cults to Buddhism, too, was smooth. According to legend, some Nagas attended the religious seminars of Nagarjuna at Nalanda and, impressed by the way he contradicted the Vedic doctrines, invited him to Kashmir. According to Sufi, “on account of his connections with the Nagas, he received the name of Nagarjuna.” (Some scholars claim that he was a Kashmiri.) He was elevated to the status of Bodhisatava. It was under his leadership that the fourth council of Buddhism was held at Haryvan, near Srinagar in Kashmir in AD 100, where the Mahayan school of Buddhism was founded. Influenced by the Shaivite–Tantric thought of Kashmir, Buddhism got transformed into its Kashmiri version. Eventually indigenous religious beliefs, Vedic thought and Buddhism were synthesised by the great Kashmiri philosopher Vasugupta (ninth century AD) and Abhinava Gupta (tenth century AD) into Kashmiri version of Shaivism called Trikka philosophy.
According to G.M.D. Sufi, the monastic theism of “Kashmir Shaivism is very near to Islam”. He particularly compares it with the celebrated Muslim mystic Mansur al Hallaj (858–922 AD) who proclaimed “An’l Haq” (I am creative truth). Kashmir thus accepted Islam not as a negation but as a culmination of a proud spiritual heritage. It did not surrender to Islam as a spiritually exhausted personality but greeted it in a friendly embrace. Islam did not come to Kashmir as a faith of the conquerors and therefore did not humiliate or hurt its pride. Muslim rule was not an outside import but followed the conversion of a local ruler. The mass conversion of the people of Kashmir to Islam owes to the unique character that emerged from the soil in the person of Alamdar-i-Kashmir, Shaikh Nooruddin Noorani, popularly called Nund Rishi (14th century) who became the patron-saint of Kashmir. He translated Islam into Kashmir’s spiritual and cultural idiom and converted it into a massive emotional upsurge. Farooq Nazki calls him a Muslim Shaivite. According to Dr B.N. Pandit, his poetry is a mixture of Shaivism and Sufism.
Proclaiming himself to be the spiritual son of Lai Ded, who represented the acme of the pre-Islamic spiritual heritage of Kashmir, Nund Rishi carried the heritage forward as a part of its Rishi order. Thus, in Kashmir, Islamic beliefs and practices enjoyed as much autonomy within wider Islamic traditions as pre-Islamic belief during Vedic and post-Vedic times. It “neither affected the independence of Kashmir nor, at first, did it materially changed its cultural and political conditions” (G.M.D. Sufi, Kashir).
Many scholars have noted pre-Islamic influences in Kashmiri Islam. Abdullah Yusuf Ali traces the practice of relic worship—as in the Hazaratbal Shrine where the prophet’s hair is preserved—to Buddhist influence [O’Molley (ed), Modern India and the West, 1941, p. 391). Dr Arthur Neve observes that, “The Kashmiri Muslim has transferred reverence from Hindu stones to Muslim relics” (The Tourist Guide to Kashmir, Ladakh, Skardo, etc., 1938, p. 103). Similarly, “Muslim saints are worshipped like Hindu gods and godlings” (O’Molley, op. cit.).
Islam in Sufi form thus came to Kashmir not as a destroyer of tradition, as was the case in many other lands, but as its preserver, consolidator and perpetuator. The fact that Islam is rooted in Kashmiri tradition and that tradition is permeated with the Islamic spirit has enabled Kashmiris to reconcile cosmopolitan affiliations with territorial nationalism. The Kashmiri Muslim has remained a Kashmiri as well as a Muslim and rarely suffers from the schizophrenic pangs which Islamic links and local patriotism often generate among Muslims elsewhere in India.
Kashmir has been a melting pot of ideas and races. It received every new creed with discrimination and enriched it with its own contribution, without throwing away its earlier acquisitions. As Sufi observes, “The cult of Buddha, the teaching of Vedanta, the mysticism of Islam have one after another found a congenial home in Kashmir.” He adds, “It has imbibed the best of Buddhism, the best of Hinduism and the best of Islam.” Similarly, on account of its cultural homogeneity and geographical compactness, all admixtures of races who emigrated to Kashmir from ancient times merged their identities into one whole. According to the renowned Kashmiri scholar and historian Mohammad Din Fauq, even the people who came from Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkastan as late as 600 or 700 years ago were so mixed with Kashmiri Muslims in culture, civilisation and matrimonial relations that “all non-Kashmiri traces are completely absent from their life” (cited in Sufi, op. cit.).
Monumental achievements
Kashmir was, at one period, “the clearing house of several civilisations and the influences of these found into this natural retreat” [Elphistone, History of India (London: 1866), p 515]. It had also made a monumental contribution to Indian culture. Its position within India was similar to that of ancient Greece in European civilisation. It has been one of the biggest seats of Indian culture and learning which, in the words of Jawharlal Nehru, “dominated the intellectual scene of the country for almost 2000 years”. There is no branch of human knowledge to which ancient Kashmir did not make a pioneering and a substantial contribution. G.T. Vigne had hoped, “Kashmir will (again) become the focus of Asiatic civilisation—a miniature England in the heart of Asia” (G. T. Vigne, Travel Vol II, p. 68).
Among the political achievements of Kashmir, mention may be made of Lalitaditya-Muktapida (AD 725–753) whom the great Kashmiri historian Kalhana describes as the universal monarch moving round the earth like the sun. According to Sufi, “He is the most conspicuous figure in Kashmir history. He raised his country to a pitch of glory it had never reached before.” He, writes Mohibbul Hasan, defeated forces led by Junaid, Mohammed Bin Qasim’s successor in Sindh, and overran his territory (Kashmir Under Sultans, p. 35). He collected a galaxy of scholars from all over India in his Durbar.
Kashmiris similarly recall another golden period of their history during the reign of the Muslim king Zain-ul-Abdin, popularly called Bud Shah (the great king) from 1420 to 1470. It “constituted a climax never attained by any other independent king in Kashmir” (Sufi, op. cit.). He invited artisans, craftsmen, scholars and men of letters from far off foreign countries as a result of which Kashmir flourished materially and culturally. He laid the lasting basis of a truly secular polity.
The watershed in the history of Kashmir is not Islam, as generally thought in the rest of the subcontinent, but the changeover from a Kashmiri to non-Kashmiri rule. Indigenous Muslim rule lasted for just 250 years after which Kashmir was annexed by the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1586. For the next 250 years, Kashmir was ruled by Muslim kings (Mughal followed by Afghan). But since they were non-Kashmiris, their rule, along with 111 years of rule by a Punjabi Sikh and a Dogra Hindu, is regarded by most Kashmiris as a period of slavery. When the organised movement against autocracy started in 1931, its leaders linked it with the four-centuries-old urge for freedom of the people of Kashmir. It culminated in the Quit Kashmir movement in 1946 which, though addressed to the last ruler (a Dogra Hindu), Maharaja Hari Singh, promised to undo Akbar’s act of enslaving Kashmir in 1586.
The identity of Kashmir, that was confronted with the option of joining one of the two dominions into which the Indian subcontinent was divided in 1949, had acquired a unique character and vitality on account of 5000 years of its continuous history, its genius in reconciling claims of continuity and change, its leading role in the intellectual and spiritual life of the country, its ability to assimilate ideas and races, its splendid isolation and distinctness guarded by physical barriers, monumental achievements in every field of human activity and sense of pride in the rich heritage shared by Hindu and Muslims alike.
This identity was obviously a misfit in the monolithic structure of Pakistan which did not recognise any identity other than based on religion. The federal, democratic and secular framework of India, on the other hand, promised a better guarantee for the defence and growth of the Kashmiri identity. The accession of the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir to India, in which Kashmiri leaders had played a key role, revitalised and revalidated Indian secularism which had been seriously undermined by partition. It enhanced India’s moral and political prestige in the world, including the Muslim part of it.
Alas, neither did Kashmir explore the potentialities of what it could achieve as a constituent part of the republic of India nor did the republic explore the potentialities of what it could achieve with such a region being a willing and contented part of it. If these potentialities had been realised, the whole subcontinent would have been more at peace with itself and might have played a greater role, befitting its size and cultural and intellectual endowments, in the affairs of the world.
Kashmiri identity in the early 1990s was badly wounded and fractured. It split on religious lines with the exodus of the bulk of its small but vital minority of Kashmiri Pandits (all Kashmiri Hindus are Pandits). The physical distance between the two communities unfortunately also reflects the mental distance between them. Kashmir not only underwent colossal physical suffering; its soul also suffocated.
Why a wonderful experiment came to such a tragic end and what the prospects are of retrieving the situation, are beyond the purview of the present study.
[Balraj Puri (1928–2014) was an Indian political commentator and human rights activist.]
