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What is history? How does a land become a homeland? How are cultural identities formed? Offering cogent new answers to these fundamental questions, The Making of Early Kashmir is a cultural history of the birth of Kashmir and the discursive and material practices that constituted it into a historical region up to the 12th century CE. It critically reinterprets Kalhana's Rajatarangini, explores its understanding of regional selfhood, and traces Kashmir's connectedhistories with the rest of India.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
Preface
Note on Edition, Translation, and Diacritics
1. Introduction
2. Poetics and the Past: Questions of History in Kalhana's Rajatarangini
The History Hypothesis or The History That Wasn't
The Literary Hypothesis
Is the Rajatarangini a Kavya?
Metapoetry and Epistemic Insight
'The River of Kings' as a Flow of Exemplars
Critique of Power---and Time
3. Imagined Landscape: Myth, Memory, and Place-Making
Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in Kashmir
Layers of Landscape
Mapping the Land
Nature and Ritual
Storytelling and the Moral Agency of Nagas
Local Imageries
Kingdom of Piety or This Troubled Land
4. (Re)locating Early Kashmir: Geoculture of a Region and Beyond
From Unique History to Connected Histories
Text
Material Culture
Script
Language
Art
5. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
About the author
Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia, specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is associate
professor in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
