Just a few days ago, militants in J&K’s Reasi ambushed a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims. In response, right-wing influencers have called for an “Israel-like solution”, despite being fully aware of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
The 20th and 21st centuries have seen horror after horror in J&K, with extremists constantly calling for violence as a solution—and using “historical evidence” to support it.
For many decades, Kashmir’s religious history has served as a clarion call for India’s far right. The standard narrative paints a picture of constant, merciless “Islamic” persecution, based on a selective reading of a handful of medieval loudmouths with their own agendas, rather than critical, multidisciplinary study.
Until we truly understand Kashmir’s deep history, there might be no end to the bloodshed.
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Conversions & temple destruction
One of our main sources on Kashmir’s historical conversions is Tarikh-i-Kashmir, a 16th-century work by Sayyid Ali, who collected documents and legends about various Sufi saints and rishis from the 1350s onward. To the modern reader, living in polarised times, the Tarikh contains much that is inflammatory.
Kashmiri historian Rattan Lal Hangloo studied the text in The State in Medieval Kashmir to understand the reality of conversions. In one of its stories, a Sufi saint, an Iranian immigrant, defeats a Hindu guru in debate. He then orders his disciples to break 120 idols. The last one “miraculously” contains a paper with the Islamic declaration of faith, and the Hindu guru immediately converts. In the vicinity of Srinagar and Awantipora, writes Sayyid Ali, temple idols were destroyed by Sufis; idols made of precious metals were melted down. In other cases, temples were converted directly to mosques by removing idols.
But Ali was writing 200 years after these events. Well before him, Kashmiri Brahmin chroniclers also wrote about these Sufis, who claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad.
One of them, Jonaraja, claims that they “descended like locusts”, accumulated property, and insisted that Sultan Sikandar, who ruled from 1389–1413, attack temples (JC Dutt’s translation of Jonaraja’s Rajatarangini, page 53). The same book describes how Sultan’s councillor Suhabhatta, a Brahmin convert to Islam, persecuted Brahmins for four years, apparently by withholding allowances and imposing fines against the Sultan’s orders. There aren’t a lot of examples of outright violence against Brahmins in Rajatarangini. While they are described as committing suicide in tragic ways or succumbing to danger as they fled, it’s not clear how much of this was literary device, and how much actual fact?
There are many exaggerations in Jonaraja’s account. He says: “There was no city, no village, no town, no wood where… the Turushka left the temples of gods unbroken.” Yet in the 16th century, a touring Kashmiri Sultan, Mirza Haider Dughlat, noted over 150 temples active in the valley. In only one case does Jonaraja claim that Suhabhatta “tried to destroy the caste of the people”. Elsewhere he is much more concerned with how, on Suhabhatta’s orders, “the low-born man tormented the twice-born”, especially Brahmins.
Finally, as I’ve written earlier, Jonaraja himself was a great admirer of his own Muslim patron, Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, which would hardly have been the case if Brahmins had been so mercilessly and completely prosecuted.
How did society convert?
There was certainly something going on with Sultans, Sufis, and Brahmins in the 14th century. Let’s zoom out to understand it.
Across Eurasia, from the 1200s onwards, nomads from Central Asia had violently conquered older kingdoms. China and Iran were ruled by Mongols, the descendants of Genghis Khan. These conquering nomads had little local support, and depended on immigrants to conduct administration. In Mongol-ruled China, the senior-most bureaucrats were Central Asian and Iranian Muslims, while religious leaders were Tibetan Buddhists. In Kashmir, local Brahmins were stripped of their privileged positions, and replaced by Iranian Sufis. In the process, the Sufis seized a lot of property for themselves, and they later became a major problem for Kashmir’s Sultans—just as Brahmins had once been for Hindu kings, as I wrote about here.
Greed and bigotry were certainly motivators for idol-destroying Sufis. But, as Professor Hangloo (Medieval Kashmir) points out, it’s important to also see how Sufis presented their activities. The Brahmin writer Jonaraja claimed that when idols were destroyed, the world trembled, and evils came upon the Sultan. But the Sufi writer Sayyid Ali claimed that when Sufi saints destroyed idols, it became clear that they had no magical powers, and people converted to Islam. What we are seeing is an elite squabble for power in an emerging state, both convinced they were morally superior. Sufis believed they were “rescuing” people, while Brahmins believed their temples were responsible for the kingdom’s prosperity.
There are hints that not all Kashmiri aristocrats thought this way. Many non-Brahmins, according to Jonaraja, were “ambitious to obtain the favour of the king” and converted when it became clear how the winds were blowing.
Damaras and Lavanyas, mountain-chiefs whose “Hindu” credentials were never the strongest, intermarried with the Sultans. (Jonaraja quite rudely claims that the Sultan’s daughters were “life-destroying serpents”, but the Lavanyas must have thought otherwise.)
So much for the ruling class. What about the people they ruled, the majority of Kashmiris?
Jonaraja, an elite writer, has little to say about them, except for complaining about how the low-born were oppressing Brahmins. Were these “low-born” people hurt and horrified by idol destruction, as Brahmins were? Hindu rishis, such as the popular Lal Ded, criticised temples as “nothing but stone”, so there were certainly religious Kashmiris who would not have minded temple destruction too much. Sufi sources present destructions as celebratory events that immediately led to mass conversions, but this must be an exaggeration. In the medieval period, it was simply not possible to force rapid religious change: people had brains and states had limited capacity. Conversions didn’t happen instantly, but gradually over the centuries.
This is strongly suggested by Kashmir’s once-eclectic Muslim culture. Professor Mushtaq Kaw of the University of Kashmir writes that Sufis adopted Hindu religious terms, like avatar and deva; Kashmiri Muslims worshipped snake-deities for centuries after, and continued Buddhist-inspired practices, like worshipping the relics of Muhammad. And Kashmiri Muslim practices percolated into their neighbouring regions. In Xinjiang, for example, ascetics were worshipped, much like Kashmir’s rishis. Finally, the conversion of temples to mosques might not always have been intended to prove the superiority of Islam, but to maintain continuity with their sacred pasts. For example, the Sufi Shah-i-Hamdan shrine in Srinagar, until the 20th century, was also sacred to Hindus, who considered it a temple to Kali.
As a tangent, it should also be noted that the brief persecution of Brahmins in the 14th century did not become a lasting state policy.
From the 16th to the 17th century, Brahmins became highly literate in Persian and worked as landed bureaucrats for Mughal governors and Afghan rulers. Prof Hangloo provides a number of examples: Pandit Tota Ram, deputy of Mirza Yusuf Khan (1587–93); Pandit Mahadev Kaul, deputy of Ali Mardan Khan (1638–40, 1650–57); Sudarshan Kaul, deputy of Inayatullah Khan (1711–12). Kashmiri Pandits also migrated into the Mughal empire at large. By the 19th century, under the Hindu Dogra dynasty of Kashmir, they were by far the region’s most powerful and influential group, as documented by historian Mridu Rai in Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir.
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Medieval rhetoric, modern policy
From the far right, both Hindu and Muslim, the story is that the horrors inflicted on Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s had medieval roots. That the persecution of Kashmir’s 14th-century Brahmin elite culminated in events over six hundred years later. The reality is far, far messier.
There is no denying that persecutions happened, but they had a context. Medieval states violently pitted their elites against each other, and these elites complained about it loudly. But medieval states did not have the capacity for large-scale persecutions, occupations, and narrative building, as modern nation-states do. Four years of a Sultan imposing fines and attacking temples—with mixed responses—do not make a genocide. Medieval persecutions, pre-gunpowder and telegram, could not approach the horrors of modern genocides, such as the very real exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s.
The solutions to Kashmir’s woes do not lie in the distant past, but in the contested politics of the 21st century. The far right claims that medieval rhetoric justifies modern persecution and occupation. But violence has only ever led to more violence. Claiming that communalism and extremism are an eternal feature of such-and-such religion ignores a much more inconvenient fact. These are modern problems stemming from modern political failures. It’s time we stop using the past as a fig leaf for our own hatreds.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)