Chitralekha Zutshi, Kashmir's Contested Pasts: Narratives, Geographies and the Historical Imagination
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp 378.
Keywords:
Memory, Historical imagination, Kashmir, Public memory, Persian literatureAbstract
The review of Kashmir's Contested Pasts by Chitralekha Zutshi engages with Zutshi's ambitious endeavour to challenge the colonial and nationalist privileging of Kalhana's Rajatarangini by shedding light on Persian tarikhs, Sufi tazkiras, vernacular traditions, and performative memory practices that shaped Kashmir's historical imagination from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. While the book successfully recovers an underexplored archive of Kashmir's multilingual intellectual traditions, the review questions the theoretical coherence of Zutshi's longue durée framework and her claims regarding Persian histories as definitive markers of regional Kashmiri identity.
References
Aquil, Raziuddin. Lovers of God: Sufism and the Politics of Islam in Medieval India. New Delhi: Manohar, 2017.
Kachru, Braj B. Kashmiri Literature. Vol. VIII, Fasc. 4 of A History of Indian Literature, ed. by Jan Gonda. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981.
Orsini, Francesca, ed. Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010.
White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003.
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