Kashmiri Literature

The research attempts to unearth the enunciation of meaning in
the  coalescence  of  form  and  content,  and  moreover,  it
investigates  how  the  chaos  has  aptly  been  depicted  in  the
amalgamation  of  different  forms  of  poetry:  villanelle,  canzone
and  sestina.  This  infusion  of  form  and  content  entails  literary
stylistics  as  its  theoretical  framework.  Literary  stylistics
primarily deals with, on the one hand, surface level meaning and
on the other hand, it deals with the underlying meaning of the
literary text.  Following the model suggested by Carter (1979), the
selected  poems  are  examined  on  four  major  levels  as i)
grammatical ii) Lexico-semantic, iii) form and iv) context. This
study  finds  that  the  poetic  forms,  having  been  inextricably
interwoven  with  the  content,  display  traumatized  characters
reeling  while  grappling  with  the  unceasing  calamities.  This
amalgamation of different forms has aptly served the purpose of
embodying  the  message  of  ominous  happenings  that  have
brought  about  the  transformation  of  a  paradise  into a  living
picture of hell.

This essay argues for moving beyond the binary of ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘vernacular’ in our understanding of language and expressions of space in early medieval South Asia. Drawing attention to a classic literary representation of regional space which is in the cosmopolitan Sanskrit and not in the vernacular, the paper examines Kalhan.a’s twelfth century Rājataraṅgiṇī for its depiction of Kashmir. It looks at some of the constituent elements of the spatial imaginary constructed in the text, and at the literary and discursive strategies employed in its construction, including the reworking of intertextual traditions from within Sanskrit literary culture. This essay suggests that more than an objectivist historical narrative which modern historians like to believe it is, the Rājataraṅgiṇī should be viewed as a whole as the traditional kāvya that it is, representing a specific language practice articulative of the poet’s vision.

In this paper, the  author offers an insight into the making of the making of the Kashmir conflict and the emerging independence movement that has consumed many thousands of lives in the Kashmir region. The filing of cases dating back 3 decades against a leading figure of the independence movement in Kashmir has multidimensional implications and repercussions and points to an ominous agenda with fait-accompli. Many Indian and Kashmir politicians and law watchers have expressed fears that the Indian state lead by right-wing nationalist BJP is hell-bent on taking Mr. Malik out of the picture. It is widely believed that in the likelihood of an adverse outcome, where Mr. Malik is sentenced to death or life imprisonment, the smoldering fire in the Kashmiri mountains may well be reignited.

The Paper is an attempt to locate the exact cultural locus of English poetry in Kashmiri society considering that the local newspapers and online magazines have mushroomed in the last few years since Bekaar Jamaat (Idle Company) emerged as a major hit on Facebook during the curfew of 2009. The paper argues that Kashmiri English Poetry needs a dismantling of old sensibilities and embrace fresh motifs and intertextual metaphors and images such that an authentic Kashmiri poetic discourse is formulated that is independent of the nostalgic diaspora tinted poetry of Agha Shahid Ali which is no longer suitable to Kashmiri sensibility. The paper attempts to illustrate the various fault lines in contemporary Kashmiri English poetry and thereof posits what I perceive as the positionality to be adopted for better expression of the Subaltern voice.

An extensive comparative study between the two
seers, Emerson and Iqbal brings forth many
similarities. This paper adds to the corpus of
comparative study between Iqbal and western
philosophy and an unexplored dimension is also
studied in this paper. Drawing on their similarities,
this paper traces the concept of self-reliance as
proposed by the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and the dimensions of the self or
‘Khudi’ as developed by the poet philosopher, Allama
Mohammad Iqbal. The critique in this paper
strengthens upon the processes of Emerson’s
spiritual insight coming from the readings in eastern
religions, and building his vision upon the
reconstruction of reliance on oneself with the
convictions of selfhood, self-actualization, and selfrealization;
which, when considered together, are
perceived as the concept of ‘Khudi’, by Iqbal. While
elaborating on the theory of ‘Khudi’, the paper also
studies the possible limitations of these terms about
the self, in constituting a comprehensive meaning of
‘Khudi’ as visualized by Iqbal. Self-reliance of
Emerson and Khudi of Iqbal, are two philosophies
whose relevance in today’s age is growing. If
Emerson’s Self-Reliance with a preexisting harmony
with nature, and with absolutely trustworthy seated at
our heart has worked for the betterment and
advancement of the people he propounded his
philosophy for, then it goes without saying that
Iqbal’s concept of Khudi goes further and makes the
beholder of this principled stance a personality who
becomes immortal. It is only a matter of
implementing, integrating, and becoming the living
embodiment of Khudi.

There are some questions and issues that have been hotly debated by critics of Kashmiri Sufi poetry. Reviewing the contemporary scenario of criticism of Kashmiri Sufi poetry one acutely feels the problem of hermeneutical despair. We have sharply divergent views equally guilty of meaning closure or epistemic chauvinism. We have critics admitting their failure to identify the signified of the term Kashmiri Sufi poetry as a separate genre. We have other critics disputing number of genuine Sufi poets and questions regarding Sufi poetic credentials of even major Sufi poets like Shams Faqeer and Wahab Khar. One reading reduces their number to seven. We have extremely conflicting estimates of more recent Sufi poets – mostly they are written off as copyists or not warranting serious critical attentions. We have  from modern We have critics deploying psychological or psychoanalytic reductionism that reduces both loal and Sufi understanding of ishq to sex. We have no proper treatment of symbolism deployed by Sufi poets. We have neither metaphysical nor philosophical commentaries on it. We don’t see systematic application of any of major critical perspectives on representative selections of it. We have no systematic study that clarifies relation between Sufi and “non-Sufi romantic” or modernist poets. Sufi poetry has been subject of some doctoral theses from such stalwarts as Rashid Nazki and later scholars but a cursory perusal of all these studies shows their limited canvas in treating the deeper hermeneutical questions that we shall be exploring. Even such elementary questions as appropriation of traditional religious, philosophical and literary heritage in illiterate Sufi poets don’t seem to have been properly dealt with and we find senior scholars like G. N. Khayyal expressing  inability to get proper answer to this issue from any contemporary work on criticism. Given this scenario, the paper calls for better attention to three things to properly study Kashmiri Sufi poetry: Metaphysics, symbolism and sacred centric criticism. All these things need to be properly clarified and salvaged from current misappropriations of them in academia. None of them are duly taken care of or taught in any of the departments devoted to literature due to various reasons. Kashmiri Sufi poetry awaits its proper appreciation and critical introduction  to international audience let alone quality criticism. But our critics have written on certain aspects that is valuable but far from enough and that often evades or distorts certain issues in connection with it.

The paper is about the various events that happened when the Kashmiri Pandits were thrown out of their homes after the brutal killings of prominent KPs. They are still living the life of exile in their own country. This paper has the memories of some KPs in the form of the personal narrative that happened with them at that time. It also has my personal memories related to the event and aftermath.

Recent literary representations of Kashmir conflict have been ideologically bifurcated along national/religious/regional lines. Most literary narratives cater to socio-political constituencies which their authors represent, symbolizing the polarization of Kashmiri society since the 1990's. Literary narratives have either consciously or unconsciously, emerged as propaganda tools for validating communally motivated perspectives on Kashmir conflict. Apart from theoretically engaging with the concept of 'Post-Truth', this paper addresses the problems of representing an ongoing conflict, establishing "Post-Truth" as the aesthetic-political condition which facilitated literary renderings of Kashmir conflict in the last decade. This paper also engages with the utility/relevance of literature in the contemporary world and challenges the commonsensical notion that literature or the humanities somehow challenges or acts as an antidote to "Post-Truth".

This study analyses an illustrated Shahnama of Ferdowsi from Kashmir, datable to the middle of the 1240s A. H. / ca. 1830 A. D, coinciding with Sikh rule over the country. It will be seen that the manuscript forms a group together with several similar volumes, all profusely illustrated, which indicates that at this particular time the Shahnama enjoyed a remarkable popularity in the region. Apart from contextualizing the group, the presumed circumstances of its creation will also be investigated in the present article.

This paper primarily engages with Kashmir Pandit narratives that have transpired after the community was evicted from the Kashmir Valley in the 1990's. The outbreak of armed struggle for Azadi in Kashmir in the 1990's led to the complete breakdown of the social fabric of Kashmir. Indiscriminate attacks on prominent Kashmiri Pandits and creation of a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation finally forced the Pandits to leave the valley. Based on select narratives exploring the themes of identity, belonging and exile of the Kashmiri Pandits, this paper proposes to examine the politics of these narratives in the context of the Hindu fundamentalist discourses among the Kashmiri Pandits.

In twelfth-century Kashmir, the Sanskrit poet Kalhaṇa composed a chronicle of kings. This text has recently become the site of renewed debates about the relationship between history and literature in pre-modern South Asia. From these discussions, new ideas have emerged about temporality, narrative style, and regional identity. Before there can be a regional identity, however, there must be a conception of “region.” For this, I turn to the work of Maṅkha, Kalhaṇa’s contemporary. In the third sarga of Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita, Maṅkha provides a geographical account of the maṇḍala of Kashmir and its capital city Pravarapura where his family had established itself several generations before.

In the first section of this thesis, I explore tensions between the local and translocal in Maṅkha’s description of region. I consider the way in which Kashmiri winters intrude upon the translocal conventions of Sanskrit aesthetics. In section two, I turn to the question of a regional identity. I argue that the particularities in Maṅkha’s description of landscape and social practice point to the construction of Kashmir as more than an idealized cosmological space. The final section considers the relationship between mythology, the divine, and artistic practice, emphasizing the visual quality of Maṅkha’s regional sketch. By thinking about localization as an emergent undercurrent in Kashmiri Sanskrit literature of the second millennium, I depart from the dominant paradigm of sacrality as a model for thinking about landscapes. I turn instead to the materiality of landscapes and consider this as the force around which and through which multiple worldviews come to be expressed in Maṅkha’s regional sketch.

Hybridity is an outcome of consistent movement and interaction of two different aspects of human existence. The forces of nature when confluence each other cause hybrid existence bringing the traces of both into it. It may by and large cohabit the space and time, race and culture, philosophy and religion etc. It encompasses the divergent modes of existence, thinking patterns, behavioral norms, socio-cultural ethos, political and administrative ambience. Diasporic Hybridity is pertinent discourse. It is cause of anxiety in the early stage of migrant experience whereas settling base of later stage of existence of diasporic community. Present paper is an attempt to trace the threads of looming diasporic inbetweenness as reflected in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali.

A Bacchanal in Heaven and Additional Specimens from Maṅkha-
The volume contains five Sargas (2-3, 14-15, 25) of Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita (c. AD 1144), re-edited in Sanskrit and accompanied by an annotated German translation on facing pages. Four of the five chapters have been translated here for the first time.
Sarga 2 (“Connoisseurs, Ignoramuses, Enviers”) contains Maṅkha’s criticism of literature and of litera-ti with revealing remarks on plagiarism as it seems to have been rampant in his days.
Sarga 3 (“About myself”) starts with a description of pre-Islamic Kashmir and Śrīnagar as the poet’s home town. An autobiographical sketch follows, pertaining to the careers and religious affiliations of his father and his three brothers (Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Buddhist). In this chapter, Maṅkha also discloses the authorial intention for his composition.
Sarga 14 (“A Bacchanal in Heaven”) depicts a drinking session of the Immortals with a view to tuning the participants in on lovemaking. The divine performance of the latter is masterfully portrayed in Sarga 15. Both chapters abound in minute, sometimes frivolous, but never tasteless details. They bear potential relevance for our knowledge of the material and social culture of wine drinking in me-dieval Kashmir.
Sarga 25 („Author Reading“), translated for the second time after Kreyenborg’s first attempt (1930), contains, in the poet’s own words, a description of his public reading of the Śrīkaṇṭhacarita to a circle of handpicked connoisseurs and critics, present among them also Maṅkha’s teacher Ruyyaka and his junior contemporary Kalhaṇa.

Diasporic Writings: Narratives across Space and Time explores the area of Diasporic Studies which is still  being theorized and shaped. Not only is this writing creating a new genre, it is also rewriting standard history as it gives personalized accounts of the impact of political manoeuvring. The sheer volume of major works by diasporic authors testifies to the unbounded possibilities and variation in these experiences. V.S. Naipaul, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and M.G. Vassanji are well-known diasporic authors from India, yet some aspects of their work have not heretofore been written about. There are some emerging diasporic voices such as Siddhartha Gigoo who has been forced into exile from Kashmir and Tenzin Tsundue, a rising voice among the Tibetan diaspora. They provide fresh insight into the diasporic condition of Kahmiris and Tibetans, respectively. The diasporic experiences of women are projected through papers on Taslima Nasreen, Meera Syal and Shauna Singh Baldwin. The essays in this collection will help the reader understand, in human terms, the impact of global movement of populations because the subject is contemporary and relevant. Diasporic writing is concerned with approximately 30 million Indian diaspora residing outside India to whom India is the homeland, which also includes people who may be displaced internally. It is also a politically sensitive area of study
as some of the diaspora are migrants who lost their homes due to colonization, violence, wars or natural calamities. The political aspect affects both homeland and host-land in terms of citizenship and the system of duties and rights affect policies of governments as some papers in this book are able to insinuate.
This book seeks to understand the diasporic  experiences of these people. Displacement is a traumatic experience and creates either a myth of return to homeland or the determination to make the host country one’s own. The essays in this collection show the pain of the diaspora who are in a permanent state of exile; the changing fabric of relationships due to technology; or the diasporic author using memory to retain his or her past. People are carriers of culture and language and this research on specific diasporic authors may help to understand the soft power generated by the  Indian diaspora.

This article argues that expressions of postmemory-a form of relationship that a generation has with its antecedants, as proposed by Marianne Hirsch-are writ large in the descendants of the Kashmiri Pandits who fled from the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s and before then. Through a close reading of two novels by Kashmiri writers, Siddhartha Gigoo's The Garden of Solitude and Rajat Mitra's The Infidel Next Door, this article analyses the prevalence of guilt, curiosity and the yearning to (re)connect with a lost home that is evident amongst subsequent generations in relation to their parents' and grandparents' forced migration from Kashmir. We demonstrate that the idea of postmemory provides a useful framework for understanding the feelings of simultaneous attachment to and generational distance from the past.

The East Asian region is the most economically dynamic in the world. China, a major nuclear power and possessing the largest army in the region, is experiencing explosive economic growth coupled with an increase in military modernization; this situation has created concern among her neighbours. There is the complex pattern of rising tensions between china and Taiwan; increasing militarism in the South China Sea; ongoing hostilities between North and South Korea and anxiety over North Korea’s stability and its nuclear capability.
Thus the nations in this region face many obstacles over disputed territories that could hinder their co-operation in regional economic and security problems; these disputes remain sources of tension, suspicion, and misunderstandings. China’s rapid economic development is accompanied by an increasingly active foreign policy and growing military might. Because of the defence modernization, the increase of the defence budget and disputes in the region, for some China is a military threat.
In this paper I will look at whether the rise of china will increase the risk of conflict or whether it would improve stability in the region. I will look briefly at the disputes in this region, the arms build-up and better relationship institutions.

This volume studies the representation of religion in South Asian Anglophone literature of the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. It traces the contours of South Asian writing through the consequences of the complex contesting forces of blasphemy and secularization. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach, it discusses various key issues such as religious fundamentalism, Islamophobia, religious majoritarianism, nationalism, and secularism. It also provides an account of the reception of this writing within the changing conceptions of racial "Others" and cultural difference, particularly with respect to minority writers, in terms of ethnic background and lack of access to social mobility. The volume features chapters on key texts, including The Hungry Tide, The Enchantress of Florence, In Times of Siege, One Part Woman, Anil's Ghost, The Book of Gold Leaves, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, The Black Coat, and Swarnalata, among others. An important contribution to the study of South Asian literature, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of literary studies, religious studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, and South Asian studies.

This chapter contrasts forms of storytelling within Mirza Waheed’s fictional novel The Collaborator and conventional human rights reports published by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International People’s Tribunal of Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir. This chapter identifies the emergence of ‘pleasurecentric advocacy’ in Waheed’s literary fiction and the Kashmiri Bicycle Movement and examines two feminist South Asian rights movements, in Pakistan and India, to further adumbrate the features of this mode of activism. The Collaborator’s deployment of a ‘pleasurecentric temporality,’ which functions by organizing temporal flow through a focalization on recurring lived experiences of pleasure, rather than only depictions of physical pain, torture, and victimization, is expanded upon to reveal innovative strategies for writing rights and representing atrocity. This chapter posits that human rights workers can appropriate the rhetorical strategies of literary fiction and expand the repertoire of stories and testimonies that are told and published in the context of human rights reports, many of which concern themselves with constructing a fictionalized narrative of the human rights crime by using corpora deliciti.

Hybridity is an outcome of consistent movement and interaction of two different aspects of human existence. The forces of nature when confluence each other cause hybrid existence bringing the traces of both into it. It may by and large cohabit the space and time, race and culture, philosophy and religion etc. It encompasses the divergent modes of existence, thinking patterns, behavioral norms, socio-cultural ethos, political and administrative ambience. Diasporic Hybridity is pertinent discourse. It is cause of anxiety in the early stage of migrant experience whereas settling base of later stage of existence of diasporic community. Present paper is an attempt to trace the threads of looming diasporic in-betweenness as reflected in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali.

This project aims to study the complex situation regarding the unstable and quite questionable state of 'identity' of Kashmir, especially in recent years. The socio-political condition of Kashmir resides in a state of liminality and uncertainty, which is showcased in this project. The paper delves deeper into this aspect by taking the novel The Half

For many scholars of South Asia, the first half of the second millennium has been understood as a period of major change and transition. Whether understood as the consequence of violent conquest, vernacularization, patronage shifts to new or different religious and courtly groups, new understandings of history and identity, or complete restructurings of sovereignty and state, many view this period as radically breaking from the past and religion playing a significant role in those changes. However, this article explores the possibility that these images of a rift between the medieval and early modern in South Asia may be premised upon certain binaries, e.g., Sanskrit-vernacular, Hindu-Muslim, and Indic-Persianate, and that such binaries may occlude deeper continuities. Close examination of Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri texts from 8th- to 17th-centuries Kashmir reveals consistently conscious efforts to connect new textual productions, religious and political authority, and understandings of place and local identity to the past throughout the many social, cultural, and political changes occurring during this period. Working past artificial linguistic and methodological constraints of Orientalist and communalist scholarship, this article utilizes multilingual sources and reaches across genres, institutions, religious traditions, and fields of cultural production often assumed to be wholly distinct and mutually exclusive in order to attune scholars to sites of continuity that mitigate prevailing historical narratives of unmitigated rupture from medieval to early modern South Asia.

Abstract
In the context of the Indian subcontinent, politically and economically "Kashmir" is a significant region. Kashmir has been involved with the politics of the subcontinent since ancient times as a Vital Organ. Foreign powers have been influencing Kashmir politics in almost all ages. During the Muslim rule in the middle ages, Kashmir was known as a politically stable and economically prosperous region. However, during the rule of the Sikhs (1819-1846) and the Dogra kings (1846-1947), the general population of Kashmir was absorbed. At that time, 70 percent of the total population of Kashmir, despite being Muslim, has been deprived of their rights by a small number of rulers. India and Pakistan were created on the basis of religion in the Indian subcontinent. According to the British government's decision, Kashmir was deprived of its right to join India or Pakistan on the basis of the majority of the subcontinent's domestic states. The dream of independence for Kashmiris turned into a nightmare in the role of the last British representative, Lord Mount Batten, then Congress leader Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Kashmir's local representative Sheikh Abdullah, Pakistani leaders and King Maharaja Hari Singh in Kashmir. After World War II, when different regions of the world began to be liberated from the chain of imperialism, the occupation and oppression of Kashmir began again. Despite the postmodern era, the Kashmir crisis continues. This article seeks to find out where the main source of the Kashmir crisis that has been going on for decades, and what has worked behind it.
Key words: Kashmir, Muslims, India, Pakistan, British policy.

Kashmiri is an Indo-Aryan language spoken predominantly in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India and in some parts of Pakistan. Some phonological and morphological features of this language make it peculiar among Indo-Aryan languages. This write-up provides a phonological sketch of Kashmiri. The description o f Vowels and Consonants is given in order to build a general idea of the phonological system of the language. The process of nasalization is phonemic in Kashmiri. The aim of this write-up is to describe and show all the phonological features of the language, particularly those that are uniquely found in this language. In addition, an attempt has been made to describe and explain the various phonological processes such as Palatalization, Epenthesis and Elision, which occur in Kashmiri. All such processes are described with appropriate examples and the data comprising of lexemes and sounds for examples is primary data used by the author who is a native speaker of the language. Given to the peculiar features of this language, the process of homonymy, which is homographic in nature, is described with appropriate examples.