Introduction:
This essay is going to be divided into three parts. In this series of essays, I am going to tell you how the ancient history of Kashmir is not what you think it is and how the main sources of Kashmir's history namely Rajatarangini by Kalhana and Nilamata Purana are more or less fictional. In the final essay, I will tell you a little about the Kashmir history through reliable sources.
Table of contents:
About Rajatarangini
About Nilamata Purana
What archaeological sources say.
Before we begin:
There aren't many sources of Kashmir history/politics/sociology about the ancient history of Kashmir. For now, there is very little known about the ancient history of Kashmir. The two main sources of Kashmir's ancient history are:
Rajtarangini by Kalhana
Nilamata Purana: According to Writer and scholar Professor Shafi Shauq, Nilamata Purana is an ancient folk tale that was given the form of a literary text in the 8th or 9th century AD.
About Rajtarangini:
Rajtarangini literally means, “Flow of Kings”. It has the status of longest narrative in the Indian subcontinent. Based on which rests the claim that Kashmir has a recorded history of 5000 years. If you believe the same thing, I am here to change that.
Why Rajtarangini and Kalhana are unreliable sources:
First things first, the credibility of a work is based on the author. If we read a hadees book or a particular hadees, we categorise it on the basis of how reliable the scholar is. But we don't know anything about Kalhana, except a few things:
He looked down on women.
He wrote 4000 thousand years of history in a year. 1148-1149AD.
He was a kattar Shaivite Hindu and a master of sanskrit language.
He considered Sanskrit as divine language and hated Kashmiri and Kashmiri language calling it “Vulgar speech fit for drunkards”. At the same time, he draws full inspiration from the cultural milieu he lived in and uses words, idioms, expressions, phrases and proverbs from Kashmiri language.
Now, I should have said it at last for the dramatic value but me chu ni tab'i so, I will tell you in the beginning that the only reason everyone accepted this piece of literature as history is only because in the 19th and early 20th centuries M.A. Stein and Ranjit Pandit translated it into english and according to Chitralekha Zutshi Ranjit Pandit performed a “double act of appropriating this history of a region into the nation's collective literary heritage, thereby incorporation the region into the nation”. He deliberately used the narrative to showcase Kashmir as a part of India rather than a separate geographical entity and Rajtarangini being in Sanskrit gave him another advantage. And if you need any more context about it, just know that Jawahar Lal Nehru (source: his foreword to Ranjit Pandit's translation) was reluctant to believe that it was history and only accepted it because it proved Kashmir's ties with India.
Now the question is don't you know me, my qualifications or if what I am saying is true. So how will you know if I am reliable?
In these cases, when you know nothing about the author, you compare the texts. Compare whatever I am saying to other credible sources. Kalhana himself says that he consulted as many as 11 earlier works on religious and historical literature excluding the Nilamata Purana.
Nilamata Purana, as I will tell you later, is fully mythological and Kalhana has built Rajtarangini's foundation on it. Also Nilamata suffers from textual corruption. It also suffers from changes and additions.
So, I was saying that none of his works have come down to us and are not available for comparison. And they were his only source of looking at the past. However he is himself not sure about their credibility.
This leads to questions:
Wherefrom did he collect his information about 3,000 years of Kashmir’s past?
Did he rely on the same ‘fragmentary, dexterity-lacking, troublesome reading, misplaced and fiill-of-mistakes’ sources or did he reconstruct prehistoric Kashmir purely with his poetic imagination?
Another way, we cannot say it's reliable is because there is:
According to Auriel Stein, up to the 7th century AD, Kalhana's timeline is made up. Kalhana tried to cover a large gap in Kashmir's past by inventing exact sounding dates and figures. And Walter Lawrence the writer of “The Valley of Kashmir” says that it is a “a trust-worthy record from the middle of the ninth century onwards”
So in short, out of 4,000 years of Kashmir’s history that Kalhana reconstructs for us, the narration of 3,000 years has no source to back it and it appears that it is a product of Kalhana's imagination.
Mistakes. Many of them. Such as Ranaditya's rule spread over a period of 300 years and Mihirakula’s rule is recorded 700 years ahead of his father, Toromana. And Al Biruni says that Hindu chroniclers don't pay a lot of attention to the historical order of their kings. And when they are pressed for more info and are at loss, not knowing what to say, they start creating fiction. (Source; Kitab ul Hind) Which leads us to another point
A hell lot of tale-telling. In short, lies. LIES. A lot of Hindu mythology (which makes it sacred to Hindus and makes them angry if someone questions it). So in this book, characters have super-natural powers. I will give you one example to make it all clear.
He gives an account of an ancient capital city of Srinagri, identified by Stein and Cunningham as present day Pandrethan, built by Ashoka. He writes:
“That illustrious king built the town of Srinagari, which was most important on account of its ninety-six lakhs of houses resplendent with wealth.”
Pandrethen, I shall tell you, is a locality 7 kilometres to the southeast of today’s Srinagar city. It is a narrow and small strip of land sandwiched between mount Beswan and River Jhelum. The area is barely enough to accommodate a thousand odd houses. And even today, with such a population, there are only around 2 lakh houses in Srinagar.
And it is not only this. He has made these blundering statements more often than you may think. And the numbers he quotes are simply out of this world. Look at this story:
“Mihirakula was diverting the course of River Candrakulya when a rock in the middle, which could not be moved, impeded the work. The king performed a penance and was informed in the dream that a powerful yaksa who observed the vow of chastity lived in the rock and if a chaste woman was to touch it, the obstruction would be removed. The attempts of every woman of good birth failed, and ultimately a potter’s wife achieved the feat. This infuriated the king, and in anger he “slaughtered three crore women of respectable birth, together with their husbands, brothers and sons.
So this story has a lot of nonsense.
First how did you get 3 crore women to physically come to you to do that job?
And in a time where there were no phones or any other communication as today, how did all of them even have lovers?
And if you think there was some form of communication, it is weird to think that all women, 3 crore noble women weren't chaste.
And if he killed 3 crore women, their husbands, sons and brothers, then how are we here? That's 3 crore women+3 crore husbands+(if we only take one son and one brother) 3 crore sons+3 crore brothers which is 120 million.
And after this, I don't think there would be any civilization left. So, we came from heaven itself because looking at this story, our birth was impossible.
And he has taken full liberty in reducing a considerable portion of this book into fantasy tales and bed time stories. Hindu Gods take trips to Kashmir, even the origin of Kashmir is a fantastic story.
I will give you last few examples and we will close this:
We are told that Kashmir was a vast lake in whose waters lived the Nagas, the serpent deities of the lake, who, from the depths of the lake, once heard cries of a newborn baby floating on a lotus leaf. They adopted the child and gave him the name jalodbhava (water-born). When he grew up he started devouring people living on the periphery of the lake and soon the place became desolate. The serpent deities invoked gods who ultimately killed Jalodbhuva, and one of them, Ananta, broke the mountain with his plough draining the water of the lake upon which Kasmira came into being. King Jayendra’s adviser, Samdhimati, was resurrected and ascended the throne after having been executed by the king for allegedly eyeing his throne. King Lalitaditya, when led into an ocean of sand by a deceitful minister of another ruler and faced with an unsure situation with his exhausted and thirsty soldiers, struck the sand with his lance and a stream gushed forth in the desert to quench his and his soldiers' thirst. King Meghavahana in his expedition of Lanka plunged into the foaming ocean and the waters parted, and he, smiling at his troops' astonishment, beckoned them to follow him. In this wondrous manner, Meghavahana reached Lanka and won over its king, Vibhishana.
He has used this sea parting various times.
This one will ring a few bells:
Lalitaditya had collected a number of wise men around him. Of these, Cankuna once used a charm on the turbulent waters of a river of the Punjab, causing the waters to separate and leave a clear path in the middle for the army to cross.
Does it ring a bell? It is the exact replica of the story of Musa (as) told in the Quran and Bible.
And the last thing is that he took only one year to write it and even today with all the resources, it will take you years, if not decades to recreate 5 thousand years of history. It took me a week to draft, write, fact check it and I used five to six sources, and wrote four pages. How did he even complete that in 1 year?
Now why is it taken as a source of history if it is not?
Mainly it is said that it is not his fault. He perhaps wrote a kavya with the theme that time is the all-conquering power, and that man is governed by destiny. It was the translators who turned it into history.
Now another question is if it is fictional, why did he use real kings and said that he had consulted books?
I will let Akhtar Mohiuddin answer it for you:
Any creative writer of whatever caliber knows that the choice of characters in a creative piece is always determined by the theme. In the present case, the theme that time was the all-conquering power would in no way be presented but through the kings, who were on the mundane plane, the only conquerors during the feudal age and in whose hands lay this worldly destiny of multitudes and countries. And since Kalhana was a great writer, he knew how to achieve credibility and how to make the narrative realistic ‘by alluding to sources’, and by using the names of some of the real kings and queens.
In the end, why it was taken as a source of history, Akhtar Mohiuddin says:
“In the absence of any positive evidence to the contrary, these Sanskrit works [Nilamata Purana and Rajatarangini] began to be taken as the source material for our history, if not the actual history…”
And in the end, it wasn't his fault, but the translator's fault that this creative work was interpreted as history.
This was it for today. I will try to finish the next part about Nilamata Purana in this week or next. Do tell me how useful did you find it. I tried my best to make it as simple and easy to understand.
والسلام