Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Kashmir - History

Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range.Contemporarily, Kashmir denotes a larger area that includes the Indian administered state of Jammu and Kashmir (Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh), the Pakistani administered Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, and the Chinese-administered regions of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract. The United Nations, and other local entities, use the designation Jammu and Kashmir to geographically denote said area.

 
According to the Mahabharata,the Kambojas ruled Kashmir during the epic period with a Republican system of government. Kashmir was an important center of Hinduism and Buddhism. In 1349, Shah Mir became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir and inaugurated the Salatin-i-Kashmir or Swati dynasty. For the next five centuries, Muslim monarchs ruled Kashmir, including the Mughals, who ruled from 1526 until 1751, then the Afghan Durrani Empire that ruled from 1747 until 1820.That year, the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh, annexed Kashmir. In 1846, upon the purchase of the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar, the Dogras under Gulab Singh became the new rulers. Dogra Rule, under the paramountcy (or tutelage) of the British Crown, lasted until 1947.
Adi Shankara visited the pre-existing Sarvajñapeetha (Sharada Peeth) in Kashmir in late 8th century CE or early 9th Century CE. The Madhaviya Shankaravijayam states this temple had four doors for scholars from the four cardinal directions. The southern door (representing South India) had never been opened, indicating that no scholar from South India had entered the Sarvajna Pitha. Adi Shankara opened the southern door by defeating in debate all the scholars there in all the various scholastic disciplines such as Mimamsa, Vedanta and other branches of Hindu philosophy; he ascended the throne of Transcendent wisdom of that temple.
Abhinavagupta (approx. 950 - 1020 AD) was born in the valley of Kashmir. He was one of India's greatest philosophers, mystics and aestheticians. He was also considered an important musician, poet, dramatist, exeget, theologian, and logician - a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture. In his long life he completed over 35 works, the largest and most famous of which is Tantraloka, an encyclopedic treatise on all the philosophical and practical aspects of Trika and Kaula (known today as Kashmir Shaivism). Another one of his very important contributions was in the field of philosophy of aesthetics with his famous Abhinavabharati commentary of Natyasastra of Bharata Muni.

 
Muslim invaders, including Mughals and the Afghans, ruled the Kashmir for four centuries till early 19th Century.

After the death of Ranjit Deo, the Raja of Jammu, in 1780, the kingdom of Jammu was captured by the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh of Lahore. In 1819, Ranjit Deo's grandnephew, Gulab Singh took control of the Kashmir valley for the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh. In 1920, Gulab Singh became the governor of the Jammu. Soon, with the help of his officer, Zorawar Singh, Gulab Singh captured Ladakh and Baltistan, regions to the east and north-east of Jammu. Until 1846, these regions were part of the Sikh power.
The Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu (as it was then called) was constituted between 1820 and 1858. It combined regions: to the east, Ladakh was ethnically and culturally Tibetan and its inhabitants practised Buddhism; to the south, Jammu had a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; in the heavily populated central Kashmir valley, the population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, however, there was also a small but influential Hindu minority, the Kashmiri brahmins or pandits; to the northeast, sparsely populated Baltistan had a population ethnically related to Ladakh, but which practised Shi'a Islam; to the north, also sparsely populated, Gilgit Agency, was an area of diverse, mostly Shi'a groups; and, to the west, Punch was Muslim, but of different ethnicity than the Kashmir valley.

Ranbir Singh's grandson Hari Singh, who had ascended the throne of Kashmir in 1925, was the reigning monarch in 1947 at the conclusion of British rule of the subcontinent and the subsequent partition of the British Indian Empire into the newly independent Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. He was one of the rulers of princely states.

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