Organizer and Chair: Patrick C. Hogan, University of Connecticut
Discussant: Ainslie T. Embree, Columbia University
The AAS has sponsored some extremely valuable sessions on Kashmir. However, these sessions have virtually ignored Kashmir’s rich cultural heritage. This panel will consider some aspects of that heritage, exploring both its intrinsic value and its relevance to current events. Rosenfield will focus on Vedic religion, examining the roots of Kashmir Hinduism, and addressing the important practical issue of preserving ancient manuscripts in the current political situation. Pandit will take up the theme of despair in the hymns of Sankaracarya and Lallesvari. In addition to presenting a novel, aesthetic re-interpretation of these writers, this paper also suggests that any idealization of the past is no less misguided in Kashmir than elsewhere. Shahid Ali, the foremost Kashmiri poet today, will consider the contemporary relevance of Medieval Muslim and Hindu poet-saints, such as Lallesvari and Nuruddin, writers whose religious attitudes and expressions were profoundly opposed to the communalistic antagonism that has had such tragic consequences recently. Finally, Hogan will consider Salman Rushdie’s characterization of Kashmiri tradition in Midnight’s Children. In Rushdie’s novel, the social polity that grew out of Kashmiri tradition is directly contrasted with, and ultimately destroyed by, the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan.
Our hope is that this panel will suggest some of the wealth of Kashmiri tradition, its intrinsic value as an object of literary and philosophical study, but also its significance for current issues—from concerns about the cultural preservation to the more immediately human and consequential dilemma of communalism.
Rescuing Remnants of the Kashmiri Vedic Tradition
Susan J. Rosenfield, Harvard University
Kashmir was once home to an early branch of the Black Yajur Veda known as the Katha Shakha. This school flourished up until the 14th century after which time gradual conversions to Islam fragmented the school and brought an end to its recitation tradition. What did remain was a manuscript tradition maintained by the Pandit families.
Among these manuscripts there exists a vast corpus of Puja and ritual handbooks known as Richikas. They contain various mantras, Grihya sutras, and ritual procedures both Vedic and Tantric. Also included in these Richikas we find what little is left of the Katha-Brahmana literature. The Katha school has no extant Brahmana per se. All that remains of the Shrauta or high ritual tradition is found in fragments of these few Brahmanas scattered throughout the handbooks.
Brahmana literature includes ritual exegesis on the high ritual performances called Yajnas. This exegesis involves narrations on the mythologies of the Vedic gods as well as the implications of various phraseologies and actions undertaken during the Shrauta or high rituals. Typically, these Brahmanas do not pertain to the Grihya or householder rituals connected to the rites of passage known as Samskaras. However, in the Katha School and in several chapters of the Shatapatha Brahmana, we find Brahmanas explaining the significance of these householder rituals.
This paper will explore these unique Grihya Brahmanas for their style, content and usage. The Katha Brahmanas in particular will be analyzed and reasons for their householder orientation explored.
Tragic Sense in the Poetry of Lallesvari and Sankaracarya
Lalita Pandit, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
I shall focus on the constitution of tragic sensibility in the devotional poetry of Lallesvari, a Kashmiri woman poet (14th century) and Sankaracarya (8th century A.D.), the founder of Vedanta. In the devotional poetry of these poets one finds a kind of despair and world weariness that counters the idyllic myth of a perfect kashmiri and/or Indian past, the myth of the golden age. At the same time, the superb poetic of Lallesvari and Sankaracarya offer evidence of a significant precolonial literary tradition. While the excellence of Lallesvari’s poems has been amply acknowledged by Kashmiris worldwide, Sankara’s superb contributions to Sanskrit poetry have remained unacknowledged. His tragic sense has only been seen as a rhetorical device to inspire the reader with a sort of world weariness that would make him/her a single-minded devotee of a transcendent divinity. My purpose is to move away from the conventional habit of seeing Sankara’s tragic sense as simply a persuasive ploy, but to see it ontologically as Sankara’s secular understanding of the human condition. In Lallesvari’s poems also, the mysticism has been emphasized too much and the stark realism has been neglected. A focus on psychological realism will help to bring out specific aspects of their poetry that have had wide appeal for those who read these poets in their own cultural settings.
The Poet-Saints of Kashmir and the Kashmiri Poet Today
Agha Shahid Ali, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Like so many conflicts of this century, the current crisis in Kashmir has made us painfully aware of the dehumanizing brutality that is often bound up with a politics of identity based on religion. And yet, communalism of this sort is not the heritage of Kashmiri literary and religious thought. The great Sufi saints and the great Saiva mystics revered and learned from one another. They saw Islam and Hinduism, not as antagonistic, but as complementary. Today, a Kashmiri poet cannot help but be concerned with the condition of his native land, and cannot help but respond to this in his or her poetry. The works of Nuruddin, Lallesvari, and others, provide the contemporary Kashmiri poet with a model of anti-communalist writing that is deeply a part of the Kashmiri tradition itself. In this paper, I shall consider the general significance of these poet-saints to Kashmiri literature and philosophy today, drawing on my own recent poetry for examples.
Aadam Exiled from the Gardens of Kashmir: Midnight’s Children and the Death of Kashmiri Tradition
Patrick C. Hogan, University of Connecticut
Midnight’s Children is no doubt the most widely read and influential novel by a writer of Kashmiri heritage. Rushdie begins the story with Aadam—the beloved Grandfather of the protagonist, Saleem—in the vale of Kashmir. Moreover, he makes repeated reference to Kashmir in the course of the novel. This emphasis on Kashmir is, I believe, crucial to the political themes of the novel. Yet it has been almost entirely ignored by critics. Specifically, we may distinguish between two types of identity. One is "practical," our ordinary ways of doing things, the customs and habits that allow us to interact with other members of our community with ease and confidence. The other is "representational." This is not a matter of sharing habits and expectations with other members of our community, but of sharing some supposedly definitive category—most often a religious or national category (e.g., "Muslim" or "Hindu"; "Indian" or "Pakistani"). What is called "identity politics"—perhaps the central thematic concern of Rushdie’s novel—is, in effect, politics based on representational identity. For Rushdie, identity politics pervade the new nation-states of India and Pakistan. But Kashmir is different. Kashmir represents a distinct type of community, a community based, not on representational identity, but on practical identity, on a shared tradition. This paper will consider the way Rushdie develops this image of Kashmir in contrast with the images of India and Pakistan, whose 1947 conflict serves to "kill" Kashmiri tradition in Rushdie’s allegory.