Kashmiri Literature, With Poetry As Its Chief Mode Of Expression, Can Be Said To Have Begun With Lal Ded,ýThat Most Manly Of Women Seekers After Godý And The Other Outstanding Mystic, Sheikh-Ul-Alam.One Unique Thing About Kashmiri Letters Is The Total Absence Of Prose Till 1940 (Apart From The Language Of Speech). During The Last Six Decades It Has, However, Branched Out Into Various Genres Like Essay, Criticism, History, Drama And Fiction-And Kashmiri Literature Now Has A Pride Of Place In Indian Letters.
It Provides A Valuable Source Material On The Past History Of Kashmir With Particular Referens To The Kashmiri Pandits. Also Provides Background To The Current Turmoil And Giving Accent Of The Struggle Of This Community In The Course Of History.
"Charmed by the generous people and exquisite beauty of Kashmir, celebrated photographer John Isaac set out to honor this enchanting land that is unknown to so many. The 160 photographs in The Vale of Kashmir present the people and landscape of this remote and exotic region and the unique way of life that has developed on Dal Lake." "Nestled in the lush area where India, China, and Pakistan meet, the Vale of Kashmir is a vast garden dotted with lakes, marshes, orchards, and terraced fields, surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. Isaac's spectacular photographs show us canals crowded with houseboats, floating gardens on Dal Lake, and the ancient city of Srinagar. The varied details of daily life-the harvesting of saffron, Hindu pilgrimages through the mountains, shepherds on the Himalayan slopes, and prayers at the mosque-come alive in these pages." "In addition to capturing the breathtaking natural beauty of the Vale, Isaac also honors the private realm of family life in Kashmir, with images of the merchants, farmers, weavers, and fishermen who live on the lake. Though renowned for its abundance of superb handicrafts, including carpets, shawls, silks, woodwork, and papier-mache boxes, Kashmir and its people are largely uncelebrated; Isaac's tender portraits honor these hard-working families. This arresting view of the land and Kashmiri people is put into a historical and geographical context by author Art Davidson's insightful and sensitive introduction."--BOOK JACKET.
Since 1947-48, when India and Pakistan fought their first war over Kashmir, it has been reduced to an endlessly disputed territory. As a result, the people of this region and its rich history are often forgotten. This short introduction untangles the complex issue of Kashmir to help readers understand not just its past, present, and future, but also the sources of the existing misconceptions about it. In lucidly written prose, the author presents a range of ways in which Kashmir has been imagined by its inhabitants and outsiders over the centuries—a sacred space, homeland, nation, secular symbol, and a zone of conflict. Kashmir thus emerges in this account as a geographic entity as well as a composite of multiple ideas and shifting boundaries that were produced in specific historical and political contexts.
A cross-disciplinary anthology on contemporary Kashmir by academics from Jammu and Kashmir, the first such volume to appear. The book offers a panorama of key cultural concerns of Jammu and Kashmir today, incorporating analysis of military, cultural, religious, and social aspects of the society and polity.
What is history? How does a land become a homeland? How are cultural identities formed? The Making of Early Kashmir explores these questions in relation to the birth of Kashmir and the discursive and material practices that shaped it up to the 12th century CE. Reinterpreting the first work of Kashmiri history, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, this book argues that the text was history not despite being traditional Sanskrit poetry but because of it. It elaborated a poetics of place, implicating Kashmir’s sacred geography, a stringent critique of local politics, and a regional selfhood that transcended the limits of vernacularism.Combined with longue durée testimonies from art, material culture, script, and linguistics, this book jettisons the image of an isolated and insular Kashmir. It proposes a cultural formation that straddled the Western Himalayas and the Indic plains with Kashmir as the pivot. This is the story of the connected histories of the region and the rest of India.
Resisting Occupation in Kashmir considers the social and legal dimensions of India's occupation of Kashmir and the ways in which Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region's history of armed rebellion to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century.
Kashmir remains one of the world's most militarized areas of dispute, having been in the grips of an armed insurgency against India since the late 1980s. In existing scholarship, ideas of territoriality, state sovereignty, and national security have dominated the discourses on the Kashmir conflict. This book, in contrast, places Kashmir and Kashmiris at the center of historical debate and investigates a broad range of sources to illuminate a century of political players and social structures on both sides of divided Kashmir and in the wider Kashmiri diaspora. In the process, it broadens the contours of Kashmir's postcolonial and resistance history, complicates the meaning of Kashmiri identity, and reveals Kashmiris' myriad imaginings of freedom. It asserts that 'Kashmir' has emerged as a political imaginary in postcolonial era, a vision that grounds Kashmiris in their negotiations for rights not only in India and Pakistan, but also in global political spaces.
Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world—and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human- rights abuses and atrocities are routinely visited on its Muslim-majority population. In the last two decades alone, over seventy thousand people have died. Ignored by its own corrupt politicians, abandoned by Pakistan and the West, which refuses to bring pressure to bear on its regional ally, India, the Kashmiri people’s ongoing quest for justice and self- determination continues to be brutally suppressed. Exploring the causes and consequences of the occupation, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is a passionate call for the end of occupation, and for the right of self- determination for the Kashmiri people.
