Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a long history of the historical imagination in Kashmir. It explores the articulation, within Kashmir's multilingual historical tradition, of the idea of Kashmir and the idea of history in conversation with each other. Contrary to the notion that the Indian Subcontinent did not produce histories, the book uncovers the production, circulation, and consumption of a vibrant regional tradition of historical composition in its textual, oral, and performance forms from the late sixteenth century to the present. It reveals the deep linkages amongst Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives as they drew on and informed each other to define Kashmir as a sacred landscape and polity. It argues that within this interconnected narrative tradition, Kashmir was, and continues to be, imagined as far more than simply an embattled territory or a tourist paradise. History and history writing too, the book further illustrates, were defined in multiple ways-as tradition, facts, memories, stories, common sense, and spiritual practice. The book thus offers a historically grounded reflection on the historical memories, narrative practices, and institutional contexts that have informed imaginings of Kashmir and its past, and explores the challenges posed to these ideas in Kashmiri political culture today.

About the Author
Chitralekha Zutshi is the James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. She specializes in Modern South Asia, with particular interests in Islam in the Indian Subcontinent; interactions between religious identities, regional movements and nationalism in princely and colonial India; commodity and consumer cultures in Britain and colonial India; ideas of history and historiography in pre-colonial and colonial India. Kashmir's Contested Pasts is her second book.

Reviews
Chitralekha Zutshi's Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a magisterial survey of Kashmiri historiography over the last several centuries, a history of the writing of histories in Kashmir ... The book ends with excellent chapters on the Kashmiri narrative public and its engagement with performative modes of history and collective memory, followed by a look at contemporary battles over history in Kashmir, a legacy of the growing communalization of Kashmiri identity characteristic of the last two centuries * Umair A. Muhajir, H-Net *


Awards
Winner of Honorable mention: Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies.



Book Information
ISBN 9780199481347
Author Chitralekha Zutshi
Format Paperback
Page Count 380
Imprint OUP India
Publisher OUP India
Weight(grams) 328g
Dimensions(mm) 217mm * 143mm * 25mm