IN T E R V I E W which she penned in 2010, turned
heads. More people are warming up
‘Kashmir and its endemic
spirituality are timeless’
Interview with Shonaleeka Kaul, academic and author. B Y Z I Y A U S S A L A M
IT is difficult to slot Shonaleeka
Kaul. Indeed, she defies easy descrip-
tion. At one level, she is a serious
academic grooming the next genera-
tion of historians at the much-in-
the-news Jawaharlal Nehru Univer-
sity in New Delhi. At another, she is a
lover of Urdu and takes justifiable
pride in her language skills. Al-
though not formally trained under
an aalim (scholar), she can certainly
more than distinguish between
qamar (moon) and kamar (waist),
which is not something one can say
about even some professional singers
these days. She often responds to a
query with ashaar (Urdu couplets),
breaking all stereotypes of academics
being just serious scholars of their
chosen field of study.
Yet all this pales into the back-
ground when she speaks of Sanskrit,
not just Sanskrit as a language of
scriptures but Sanskrit as a language
of administration, culture, even
technology; all this at a time when a
section of India is seeking to use the
ancient language for saffronisation,
reducing it to a mere tool of ideology.
The insightful Imagining the Urban:
Sanskrit and the City in Early India,
“The first thing ‘The Making of Early Kashmir’ tries to
do is rehabilitate ‘Rajatarangini’ to its literary culture—
kavya—and thereby access the wealth of meanings about
Kashmir that it produced and preserved via its authentic
representational strategies.”
FRONTLINE . MARCH 16, 2018
is also a form of literature which
would make no sense but for the co- ters past (bhutartha), and to do so
to her latest book, The Making of
Early Kashmir: Landscape and
Identity in the Rajatarangini, pub-
lished by Oxford University Press.
The book obviously delves into
Kalhana’s landmark work of the 12th
century. Rajatarangini was a trail-
blazer: it inspired at least three other
works in subsequent centuries. It is
still viewed critically for giving an
identity, voice and expression to the
transcendent “local culture”.
Not having quite finished with
demolishing stereotypes with her
Urdu, Shonaleeka Kaul goes on to do
more than that with her writing, ar-
guing forcefully that Sanskrit has
been misunderstood in the past few
centuries. Languages, she believes,
are not mere instruments of power
and politics.
Excerpts from the interview she
gave Frontline between myriad other
challenges waiting for her attention.
You argue in your latest book that
Kalhana’s “Rajatarangini” is a piece
of history because it is traditional
Sanskrit poetry (“kavya”). Is it not
hard to reconcile poetry with
history? We have had the worst
experience with Malik Muhammad
Jayasi’s “Padmawat” recently.
The divide between history and po-
etry may, in fact, be a fallacious one
and perhaps stems from a misunder-
standing of both. It is also rather re-
cent, inspired from
post-Enlightenment objectivist no-
tions in the West rather than from
any ancient approaches to treating of
the past. It is to a great extent the
positivist legacy of Leopold von
Ranke [1795-1886], who introduced
this stress on facticity, objectivity
and scientific method in history as if
it were a physical science rather than
a humanistic discipline.
It is interesting to note, however,
that Ranke’s own contemporaries,
other philosophers such as Hegel,
Droysen, Nietzsche and Croce, all
understood history writing as a liter-
ary art grounded in poetic intuition.
More recently, after the postmodern
turn, scholars such as Hayden White
have convincingly shown that history
94
true nature of reality, including mat-
herence of the narrative form—“the
plot structure”—which is the inven-
tion, no less, of the historian and on
which he endows the past.
On the other side, literature is
not necessarily fiction, although even
fiction, I would argue, contains an
intuitive grasp of symbolic truths.
A.K. Ramanujan’s profound read-
ings of ancient Sanskrit and Tamil
texts have demonstrated this par ex-
cellence. So poetry is but another
mode or form of representation of
past realities, only more aesthetic
than usual. As for history, there is
happily now a growing awareness
among scholars working on premod-
ern, non-Western societies that what
is history is not a universal given—in
content or form—but a highly cul-
ture-specific understanding of time
and what constitutes true knowledge
of it. Of course, it is for the historian
to devise sensitive and rigorous
methods to read “poetry” for history.
What then was the idea of history in
early India?
Honestly, we are only beginning to
ask that question in earnest! It would
be fair to say there was not one but
multiple modes and practices of his-
tory in early India—itihasa, purana,
charita, katha, kavya, vamshavali,
and so on—which were, however, in
conversation with one another.
Among these, Sanskrit poetics
(alamkarashastra) invested in the
epistemic authority of the poet
(kavi) as the historian by virtue of his
seer-like qualities and intuition that
enabled him to “see” (pashya) the
95
without attachment or aversion
(ragadveshabahishkrita), as Ra-
jatarangini states. The kavi had the
qualities of both varnana [descrip-
tion] and darshana [insight]. An-
other feature of this historical vision,
well illustrated by Rajatarangini,
was its deeply ethical character.
A certain critical idealism and
call to action [dharma, karma] im-
bued history in this form with a tran-
scendental value over and above the
more limited task of recording facts,
and gave kavya-as-history a discurs-
ive and commentarial effect.
You claim that “Rajatarangini” is not
a simple text but a composite type.
Is it not at the end of the day simply
kavya?
Ironically, most of 200 years of
scholarship on Rajatarangini that
celebrated it as objectivist history re-
garded it as anything but kavya!
This displayed that anxiety over the
history/poetry divide. They dis-
missed all aspects of figuration that
were proper to it as traditional po-
etry, like rhetoric, myth, memory
and didacticism, and the rich se-
mantic possibilities in these, and ex-
tolled instead chronology and
causality in the text—positivist qual-
ities that were hardly central to the
concerns of the genre itself. So the
first thing The Making of Early
Kashmir tries to do is rehabilitate
Rajatarangini to its literary cul-
ture—kavya—and thereby access
the wealth of meanings about Kash-
mir that it produced and preserved
via its authentic representational
strategies.
Now, the reason I call Rajatar-
angini a composite text rather than
a simple kavya is the substantial
intertextuality on display in it. Cru-
cial postures and propositions of
Rajatarangini are informed by
other, pan-Indian Sanskrit literary
and philosophical traditions such as
shastra [prescriptive treatises on
statecraft and law], niti [political
and moral parables], itihasa [nar-
ratives on the past: the Ma-
habharata and the Ramayana, to be
precise] and vamshavali [genea-
FRONTLINE . MARCH 16, 2018
logy]. Rajatarangini may be seen to
migrate among these genres and
kavya—an act of literary virtuosity
that also attests the felicity with
which Kashmiri poets could wield
the master texts and genres of the
Sanskrit episteme.
There are inherent flaws in almost
all historical accounts. They are
written with the top-down approach,
a kind of euphemism for praising
the king. Do such blemishes make
an appearance in “Rajatarangini”,
too? You call it a political
commentary.
Our understanding of ancient poets
is rather supercilious. We believe
them to be passive “house birds of
patricians” prostrating before their
almighty patrons and parroting what
the elites would want to hear. We
also assume that they were socially
conservative. I have always
wondered at this teleological double
standard where modern intellectuals
and litterateurs image themselves as
critical, radical and speaking truth to
power but are loath to extend the
same possibilities to their ancient
and medieval counterparts! In fact,
as I have shown in my first book,
Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and
the City in Early India, and as the
work of Yigal Bronner and others has
also brought out, there are any num-
ber of examples from Sanskrit liter-
ature where poets expose and
stridently critique different forms of
power in early India—that of the
king, of priests, of patriarchy and of
wealth.
Rajatarangini itself is a splendid
example as Kalhana devotes far less
space to eulogising virtuous kings
than he does to critiquing wrongdo-
ing ones, as well as lampooning the
pompous among Brahmanas, and
castigating degenerate or syco-
phantic courtiers and feudal chiefs.
“The absence of Kashmir from school and college syllabi is
shocking and is one of the reasons why there is so much
ignorance about its history and legacy.”
FRONTLINE . MARCH 16, 2018
Moreover, his attack is in scathing
terms, sometimes even using ob-
scene and scatalogical language for
the object of his contempt, which is
highly unusual in Sanskrit poetry.
While some regard this as a trade-
mark cynicism, I believe it shows
that for Kalhana ethics far out-
weighed aesthetics and social status.
PLURALISM OF KASHMIR
Kalhana hails the pluralism of
Kashmir, the coexistence of Saivas,
Vaishnavas, Buddhists, etc. Why
have our historians fallen short of
highlighting this multilayered
pluralism? I ask because long
before we got the much-hailed
Akbar, Kashmir gave us Zainul
Abedin.
You’re right! And much before a
Zainul Abedin, there was a
Meghavahana, a Lalitaditya, an Av-
antivarman and a Jayasimha in
Kashmir, all of those so eclectic in
extending their support to multiple
faiths. Moving still further back,
there is epigraphic evidence from
across India of not just kings but
common people cross-subscribing to
what we today think were discrete,
watertight belief systems. There
were also shared sacred spaces, such
as seen at Ellora and Aihole. Indeed,
simultaneous multiple religious af-
filiations in early India is pluralism
at its fascinating best, yet it has not
received its due in scholarship.
Historians tend to see culture ex-
cessively through the prism of power
and, therefore, as a perennial site of
conflict and competition. Such an
approach perhaps forecloses the ex-
ploration of early Indian religions, as
much as languages and literatures,
on their own terms and through their
own complex dynamics.
Why is it that in the annals of India,
96
Kashmir is often treated as an
outpost? I mean we hear more
about Kushanas and Taxila,
Kamarupa, Cheras and Ikshvakus
than of the Kashmir of ancient or
medieval India.
Exactly! The absence of Kashmir
from school and college syllabi is
shocking and is one of the reasons
why there is so much ignorance
about its history and legacy. Of
course, it is not the only region of
India to receive inadequate cur-
ricular coverage, and a contributory
factor is certainly the lack of any re-
cent, comprehensive history that
would synthesise the entire gamut of
historical evidence and present a
genuine and complex narrative. But
even so, here was a land that spear-
headed virtually all intellectual and
cultural movements of the Indian
subcontinent for at least 1,500 years,
if you count from just the 1st century
C.E. onwards, and was acknow-
ledged for it, both by other regions of
India as far south as Tamilakam, as
the work of Whitney Cox and others
shows, and by lands beyond South
Asia, like Tibet, Sogdia, Kucha,
Yarkand, Turfan where it was Kash-
miris that spread Indic knowledge
and learning, especially Sarvastivada
and Madhyamika Buddhism and
Tantric Saivism, not to mention lan-
guages like Sanskrit and Prakrit,
scripts like Brahmi, and Indic styles
of art and architecture.
However, some historians have
assumed the reverse. They have, as
you correctly say, attributed the
status of an outpost or periphery to
Kashmir, as also an isolation and in-
sularity vis-a-vis mainland India. In
fact, however, a range of cultural
markers from early Kashmir—ar-
chaeology, art, script, linguistics, for-
eign accounts, etc.,—question these
assumptions and attest to her deep
and extensive connections and mu-
tual involvement not just with neigh-
bouring areas like Punjab and
Himachal but with centres of Indic
civilisation in the deep interiors of
India like Patna, Nalanda, Gaya,
Banaras, Allahabad, Mathura,
Malwa, Gauda (Bengal), till
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
This was cultural transmission
and communication of incredible
reach! Kashmiris looked to these
places for politics, trade, education,
asylum, employment, art, religion,
philosophy, fashion and pilgrimage,
while people from different parts of
India travelled to and settled in
Kashmir for the same reasons. So
massive and crucial was Kashmir’s
presence in Indic affairs, and vice
versa, that I argue for moving away
from the paradigm of “unique his-
tory” or “centre and periphery” to
that of “connected histories” to cor-
rectly understand Kashmir’s civilisa-
tional centrality.
You describe Kashmir’s “regional
selfhood” as something that
transcended the limits of
vernacularism. Is that not just
another form of parochialism?
Not quite. The vernacular finds a pe-
culiar expression and form in early
Kashmir that makes it quite different
from other regions. That form is cos-
mopolitan and universal, not paro-
chial. Sheldon Pollock argued for the
binary of cosmopolitan and vernacu-
lar languages and for the latter—like
Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, and so
on—displacing the cosmopolitan
language par excellence, Sanskrit,
when regional kingdoms crystallised
in different parts of India between
1000 and 1500 C.E. But Kashmir
offers a stunning exception to this:
she emerges on the discursive hori-
zons of history with self-awareness
as a region and a people—entirely in
Sanskrit! Namely, Rajatarangini,
which is the earliest extant articula-
tion of Kashmiri selfhood. So much
so that till today the Kashmiri names
of places in the Valley are clearly de-
rivatives of their Sanskrit names
mentioned in Rajatarangini 900
years ago, displaying a remarkable
persistence of culture despite the
odds. And Rajatarangini is not even
“Sanskrit has
been rather
misunderstood
for a couple of
centuries now....”
the first form this took; in what is
often glossed over, the text itself
names a long and like tradition of
texts, also evidently in Sanskrit, that
narrated the history of Kashmir long
before Kalhana.
When you add to this fact all the
other geo-cultural synchonicities
with the rest of the subcontinent, it
suggests that early Kashmir presents
an understanding of regions as per-
forated entities: “nodes gathering
spatial flows and connectivities that
stretched far in time and space”.
Hardly perceived as threatening, this
constitutive exteriority seems to have
been inherently enabling, and Kash-
miris like Kalhana wore their local
and universal affiliations with no ap-
parent discomfort or sense of disson-
ance. Indeed, one observes that the
highly intertextual Rajatarangini
was in this sense a metaphor for
Kashmir, since just as texts made
themselves from other texts, regions
could also make themselves from
other regions. The local and the uni-
versal, the vernacular and the pan-
Indic, appear as but different re-
gisters of expression for Kashmir.
In what may be described then as
a diglossic identity, the regional is
hardly expropriated by the trans-re-
gional. Rajatarangini does not see
these as mutually exclusive identities
to sport. Instead, there is a need to
appreciate that societies have always
been constituted by their involve-
ments in more extensive networks.
And ancient regions could be just as
embedded in and defined by these
spatial matrices outside of them-
selves and be just as cosmopolitan
and dynamic as modern cities and
nations even without the benefit of
the latter’s advanced communica-
tion technologies.
97
You have brought the focus back on
“Rajatarangini” at a time when
Sanskrit is in danger of being
reduced to an instrument of
saffronisation, a time when caste
identities are being reinforced. Is
there not a danger of the language
itself being misconstrued?
That danger is not recent. I would
argue that Sanskrit has been rather
misunderstood for a couple of cen-
turies now but especially since the
20th century when scholarship came
to increasingly believe that it was his-
torically a language exclusively of
scripture, ritual and repression. But
this is drastically reductive of the vast
and variegated repertoire of Sanskrit
literature, which entails everything
from metaphysics to erotics, logic to
poetics, statecraft to medicine, in-
cluding veterinary science, from
maths and astronomy to painting
and architecture, law, ethics, food,
and so on.
I can’t emphasise enough that
languages are not merely instru-
ments of power and politics. They are
also an entire system of symbolic ex-
pression, means through which soci-
eties made sense and meaning of the
world around them and articulated
their humanity and genius. So let us
not throw the baby out with the
bathwater. If there was ever a time to
reimagine Sanskrit and other early
Indian languages and recover and
interrogate the extraordinary intel-
lectual histories entailed by them, it
is now.
Finally, with all the political turmoil
and criss-crossing religious
identities, is culture not a timeless
constant in Kashmir?
I believe the land of Kashmir and its
endemic spirituality, which Rajatar-
angini refers to repeatedly, are time-
less. Righteous conduct and qualities
that Kalhana idolises—justice,
bravery, loyalty, discriminating right
from wrong, high-mindedness—are
eternal and universal ideals too. But
between then and now, Kashmir has
gone through a great deal of violence,
not only the colossal loss of lives but
the loss of an open and plural culture,
and the loss of history and heritage,
which is ultimately a loss of self. m
FRONTLINE . MARCH 16, 2018