South Asian Studies
ISSN: 0266-6030 (Print) 2153-2699 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsas20
Literature, History, and the Making of Kashmir
Jahnabi Barooah Chanchani
To cite this article: Jahnabi Barooah Chanchani (2018): Literature, History, and the Making of
Kashmir, South Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2018.1529910
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2018.1529910
Published online: 07 Nov 2018.
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South Asian Studies, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2018.1529910
Literature, History, and the Making of Kashmir
Malhan, Tara Sheemar, Plunging the Ocean: Courts, originally part of a considerably grander composition,
Castes, and Courtesans in the Kathāsaritsāgara, 2017, one purportedly first narrated by Śiva to entertain
Primus Books, Delhi, 333 pp. (hardback), $59.95. ISBN Pārvātī. This grand narrative has not come down to
978-93-84082-86-4 us. Although the Kathāsaritsāgara was composed in
Kashmir, its stories are mostly set in Kausambi, a city
in the mid-Gangetic plains. They refer to Kashmir only
Kaul, Shonaleeka, The Making of Early Kashmir: occasionally. Written in eight parts, the Rājataraṅgiṇī
Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini, 2018, presents itself as a chronicle of Kashmiri polity from
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 189 pp. (hard- the period when the heroes of the Mahābhārata epic
back), $40.00. ISBN 0-19-948292-6 are thought to have lived until the author’s lifetime in
the twelfth century. Its author, Kalhana, consulted older
In recent decades, scholars have begun to recognize chronicles and inscriptions. Yet, it is not a straightfor-
that an array of discursive genres popular in early ward litany of rulers and dynasties. Its literary register
medieval north India may be describable as historical. is usually classified as Sanskrit courtly poetry (kāvya).
As one prominent example, Romila Thapar has eluci- That said, scholars have often commented on the
dated how works written in genres such purāṇa, Rājataraṅgiṇī’s heterogeneity. It comprises of diverse
itihāsa, and kāvya contain historical consciousness: episodes ranging from romantic escapades to moral
they demonstrate an interest in weighing the relative fables to genealogies. Its voice is occasionally didactic
merits of diverse sources, studying cause and effect, (śāstric), and at other times, kindles a sense of equi-
and offering insights into how their compilers imagined poise. Here, it is important to note that whatever its
and negotiated pasts to meet present contingencies. beginnings, by the twelfth century, the kāvya genre had
Two ambitious new monographs, Tara Sheemar become capacious. It was able to encompass within its
Malhan’s Plunging the Ocean and Shonaleeka Kaul’s fold styles usually associated with genres such as
The Making of Early Kashmir participate in this wave itihāsa, śāstra, and nīti. These are in fact the
of scholarship1 Rājataraṅgīṇī’s primary intertexts.
Malhan and Kaul use celebrated early medieval The Kathāsaritsāgara has long been known and
Sanskrit narratives composed in Kashmir to understand translated into English. However, it has not yet
how space, society, and time were shaped and reflected received the scholarly attention that it deserves.
in this mountainous region. These are the Perhaps, the only other recent work that has examined
Kathāsaritsāgara (Ocean of River of Stories) and the the Kathāsaritsāgara to write a social history is Aparna
Rājataraṅgiṇī (Waves of Kings), respectively. Malhan’s Chattopadhyay’s Studies in the Kathāsaritsāgara
thesis is that the experience of space was gendered. (1993). However, Chattopadhyay’s book treats the med-
Further, it upheld and on occasion subverted normative ieval masterpiece as if it were a modern governmental
behavioural codes. Kaul’s overarching thesis is more organization with discrete departments: caste affairs,
difficult to identity, but her two primary aims are clearly education, marriage, and others. Malhan’s work seeks
stated: first, to rethink the relationship between history to rectify these lacunae. She also wishes to broaden the
and textuality, and second, to recentre Kashmir’s posi- scope of the study of medieval Kashmir which has thus
tion in Indian history. far mostly focused its gaze on the valley’s aesthetic,
Before discussing the two monographs, some back- philosophical, and religious innovations. By examining
ground on Kathāsaritsāgara and Rājataraṅgiṇī is in how the Kathāsaritsāgara describes a spectrum of land-
order. Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgara is datable to the scapes – including forests, villages, cities, homes, tem-
eleventh century. It is thrice as long as the ples, monasteries, and courts – and how it places
Rājataraṅgiṇī and contains 350 tales of adventures women and men within each of them, she argues that
and intrigues. These tales are spread across eighteen a new social history of early medieval Kashmir (and
sections and are penned in relatively unadorned verse. perhaps elsewhere in northern India) may be recover-
Somadeva informs his readers that these tales were able. In her view, this history can tell us how spaces
2 Book Review
were gendered, how sexual identities were constructed other portions as fanciful. At the same time, she criti-
and contested, authority exercised and renounced, and cizes literary scholars who have emphasized the work’s
labour relations negotiated. formal qualities and have not recognized its historical
In the Anglophone academy, the Rājataraṅgiṇī has dimensions. She is also critical of scholars who have
often borne the weight of being one of early India’s sole found its aesthetic objectives to dominate over its his-
historically aware texts. This perception arose in the torical imperatives, and vice versa. For Kaul, the
nineteenth century when positivism dominated history Rājataraṅgiṇī’s narrative is the medium of history and
writing. In the last twenty years, scholars have begun to not an ‘inert receptacle’ of history.
rethink the Rājataraṅgiṇīi’s place. Some Indologists Kaul sees the Rājataraṅgiṇī as a unified text. As she
such as Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay exhorts her readers to take the Rājataraṅgiṇī’s claim of
Subrahmanyam have noted its hyper-realist texture being a kāvya seriously, she demonstrates how
and they have questioned whether it is a work of his- Kalhaṇa’s writing of this kāvya was an ethical under-
tory at all. Meanwhile, Sanskritists such as Yigal taking. Indeed, in her view, ‘the tendency to moralize’
Bronner, Whitney Cox, and Lawrence McCrea have is the text’s primary objective. She also shows how the
situated the text squarely within Kashmir’s literary text is concerned with both ‘transcendent and contin-
and intellectual currents. Kaul’s nuanced proposition is gent truths’, and thus in creating a landscape. As the
that the Rājataraṅgiṇī is history because it is kāvya. In reader continues to work through her monograph, she
defining kāvya, however, she goes beyond the usual or he learns that Kaul is not fully satisfied with desig-
matters of taste, standards of beauty, and figures of nating the Rājataraṅgiṇī solely as kāvya, and Kalhaṇa
speech and emphasizes its didactic function. That is, as a poet. For, after stating that some nineteenth-
kāvya’s purpose of giving instruction on dharma, artha, century Western philosophers considered history to be
and kāma. Indeed, she views the Rājataraṅgiṇī’s didac- a literary art, she concludes her book with the state-
tic and aesthetic functions to be inseparable. In this ment: ‘In every way, then, Kalhaṇa and his ethical
regard, she stands in opposition to Sheldon Pollock discourse on and for Kashmir stake a claim as legit-
who found the text’s didactic layer to be subservient imate as any to the title of history.’
to its aesthetics. A limitation: despite striving to maintain her argu-
In the remainder of the review, I discuss Malhan ment that narrative is not an inert receptacle of history,
and Kaul’s monographs with respect to two areas of Kaul eventually contradicts her own argument. This
intersection: first, their interpretation of the relation- contradiction occurs in Chapter 4. For instance, to
ship between literature and history, and second, their make the argument that early Kashmir was deeply
analysis of the representation of space. connected to the rest of India, she unhesitatingly pre-
Malhan explicitly eschews hermeneutics, an inter- sents and uses the Rājataraṅgiṇī’s claim of medieval
prise at the heart of literary criticism and history writ- Kashmiri kings leading cosmopolitan courts, marrying
ing. Yet, upon inspection, a reader finds Malhan their sons to princesses from regions across India, and
repeatedly engaging in interpretative acts as she seeks of ordinary citizens travelling to places as far away as
to glean historical information from a monumental text Gaya, as historical facts. Here is another example.
that straddles folk and courtly worlds and consists, in Concluding an analysis of ancient material culture
her view, of a ‘mixture of myth, legend, history, and that seems to point to interactions and exchanges
story’. Her conclusions are also interpretive: she sees between Kashmir and other parts of the subcontinent,
representations of characters in the Kathāsaritsāgara as she writes that such ‘comings and goings are described
providing insights into how individuals subverted nor- by Kalhaṇa’. More instances can easily be cited, but
mative injunctions, and its stories as modulating the these two examples should illustrate a drawback: Kaul
behaviours of medieval audiences. To buttress her con- engages in the very hermeneutical practices for which
tentions about the state of affairs in early medieval she reproaches historians and archaeologists.
Kashmir as sieved from the Kathāsaritsāgara’s stories, This said, for a historian who works primarily with
she draws on the late first millennium Nīlamata Purāṇa Sanskrit texts, the desire to engage with material cul-
and the Rājataraṅgiṇī. It is important to note that in ture is commendable. Kaul notices many similarities
using the Rājataraṅgiṇī in this manner, Malhan rein- between Kashmiri sculptural art and the sculptural
forces modern understandings of the text as a straight- traditions of the adjacent Gāndhāra and of the more
forward history book in most respects. distant Sarnath and Nālandā towns in the Gangetic
Situating herself in a lineage inaugurated by plains. In doing so, she provokes art historians to con-
Hayden White, Kaul is opposed to historians such as sider: ‘how Himalayan was Himalayan Art when its
Malhan who have engaged with parts of the cultural roots were sourced from the surrounding
Rājataraṅgiṇī as if it were a history book and discarded plains as well as the interiors of India?’
South Asian Studies 3
Malhan does not study material culture. Yet, given authors are primarly concerned. Malhan notes that
the insights that Kaul is able to offer based upon her the tales embedded in the Kathāsaritsāgara were nar-
reading of material culture, I wonder what narratives of rated numerous times before their inclusion in this
gender and power might emerge from an analysis of masterpiece. Therefore, they ‘betray a consciousness
material culture found in Kashmir and adjoining areas, about the timelessness of the tales … irrelevance
and how those might further enrich Sheemar’s about their origin, place or time’. Still, she unhesitat-
reconstructions. ingly situates the immediate context of the
In Plunging the Ocean and The Making of Early Kathāsaritsāgara in the eleventh-century court of
Kashmir, we also see two ways of studying the represen- King Ananta. As for Kaul, she consistently describes
tation of space. Following Henri Lefebvre and Sheldon the temporal frame of her study as ‘early’. Yet, she
Pollock, both approaches view the literary imagination as does not define what that term encompasses. I won-
reflecting and reinforcing a certain sense of space. Yet, der if this is a deliberate attempt to avoid troubled
their methodology in examining space is quite different. terms such as ‘ancient,’ ‘medieval’, and ‘early
Whereas Malhan reads the text with attention to the kinds modern’?
of places represented, and how individuals behaved, In the final analysis, however, Plunging the Ocean
Kaul’s analysis focuses on the language that the poet and The Making of Early Kashmir are commendable as
uses to create a sense of place. they raise important questions: might the analysis of
Malhan divides the Kathāsaritsāgara’s represented gender and space in the Kathāsaritsāgara be applic-
space into three broad categories: urban, rural, and able to early medieval Kashmir alone simply because
wild. Within these, she situates cities, courts, palatial it was composed there, or can it speak equally to other
inner apartments, houses, gardens, cremation grounds, regions because the work was written in a transregio-
festivals, monasteries, temples, villages, forests, and nal language and enjoyed wide circulation? If the
hermitages. Through a close reading of the text’s Rājataraṅgiṇī is a history because it is a kāvya, how
numerous stories, she shows that particular spaces can we extend this insight to other kāvyas? And finally,
acquire their character through the normative and sub- how might textual and material culture historians
versive actions of the individuals who inhabit them, equally benefit from studying the others’ archives
those who are barred from them, and those who have and melding insights? For opening up the possibility
the power to stealthily transgress their boundaries. In of asking and interrogating such questions, I recom-
her analysis, spaces are ultimately not equal as impor- mend Plunging the Ocean and The Making of Early
tant characters, irrespective of gender, are inevitably Kashmir to students of South Asian literature and
urbane, whereas villagers are shown to be foolish and history.
unrefined.
In contrast to Malhan for whom space is defined
with respect to people, Kaul’s analysis largely focuses NOTE
on the natural landscape the poet conjures. She shows 1. The Making of Early Kashmir is Kaul’s second
convincingly and elegantly the myriad ways in which monograph and has grown out of a number of
Kalhana creates a sense of place by weaving myth and articles that she has published in recent years.
folklore with a poetic geographical knowledge. His Plunging the Ocean is Malhan’s first book and is
narrative register is a localized Sanskrit, one in which a careful revision of her dissertation.
innovative descriptions, similes, and metaphors are
used to evoke the geocultural landscape of Kashmir. Jahnabi Barooah Chanchani
This comes to the fore in Kalhana’s portrayal of lakes, Visiting Scholar, Department of Asian Languages and
rivers, peaks, sacred centres, floods, famines, snowfalls, Cultures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
hailstorms, torrential rain, and local fruits and [email protected]
vegetables. © 2018 Jahnabi Barooah Chanchani
One shared inadequacy of Plunging the Ocean https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2018.1529910
and The Making of Early Kashmir, however, is a
lack of clarity of the time period with which the
