Landscapes of the Past: Rajatarangini and Historical Knowledge Production in Late-Nineteenth-Century Kashmir

Abstract

The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir rarely figures as a site for the study of colonial knowledge production, particularly as it related to the construction of India’s historical past. I would argue that this is a major lacuna, given that it was in the context of nineteenth-century Kashmir that some of the most widely accepted ideas about India’s historical traditions and the narrative of its past were articulated. As scholars have recently argued, even as colonial Indologists and Orientalists denied India both a history and a tradition of historical writing, they set about establishing a new historical method that designated most precolonial Indian texts as “sources” from which a legitimate history of India could be constructed.¹ This colonial project, although operating on the same principles, took a somewhat different turn in Kashmir. There the “discovery” of Rajatarangini— the twelfth-century Sanskrit narrative by Kalhana—in the late eighteenth century (followed by its partial translation by H. H. Wilson in 1829) led to its possible designation as the only Sanskrit text from the precolonial period that could legitimately be accorded the status of “history.” By the start of the twentieth century, this idea was entrenched, not just among colonial historians but also in the Indian nationalist imagination, as several Indians undertook translations of this iconic “Indian” text.