Talk:Kashmiris

Architects' Nagas

This is from Fergusson, James (1868), Tree and serpent Worship, or illustrations of mythology and art in India, Allen, pp. 46–47

It is not, however, only in the valley that our Chinese traveller (Xuanzang) repeats the Hindu legends about serpents and their power, but at every stage of his journey from Cabul to Cashmere, he everywhere finds some spot where a dragon king or Naga Raja resided, and played an important part in the legendary history of the land. These legends, as might be expected, were found in the seventh century very much altered from their more primitive forms, but they are interesting, in the first place, as showing how essentially the north-west corner of India was at one time the seat of Serpent Worship, and also, in what manner it was eventually—except perhaps in Cashmere—amalgamated with Buddhism. (p.46)

These accounts by native authorities are fully confirmed by such scanty notices as we glean from classical authorities; Onesicritus tells us that two ambassadors sent to the king of Cashmere by Alexander, brought back news that the king of the country cherished two large serpents of fabulous dimensions. Maximinius of Tyre tells us, that when Alexander entered India, Taxilus (King of Taxila) showed him a serpent of enormous size which he nourished with great care and revered as the image of the god whom the Greek writers, from the similitude of his attributes, called Dionysus or Bacchus. (p.47)

The latest authority we have, is that of Abulfazl, who tells us that in the reign Of Akbar (1556—1605) there were in Cashmere 45 places dedicated to the worship of Siva, 64 to Vishou, 3 to Brahma, and 22 to Durga, but there were 700 places in the valley where there were carved images of snakes which the inhabitants worshipped. (p.47)

All this is fully confirmed by the architecture of the valley; with very few exceptions, all the ancient temples of Cashmere seem to have been devoted to Serpent Worship. They stand in square courts which were capable of being flooded and were crossed by light bridges of stone, some of which still remain. Even at the present day some of these temples are unapproachable without wading, in consequence of the water which surrounds them, and all might be rendered so by a slight repair to their waterworks. There are, of course, no images in the sanctuaries which long prevented antiquaries from perceiving the form of faith to which they were dedicated. But where the deity is a living god and mortal, when he and his worshippers pay the debt of nature, they leave no material trace to recall the memory of their past existence. (p.47)

-- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:14, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Recent Reverts

Hi User:Joshua Jonathan, thanks for your desire to improve the article on Kashmiris. I noticed that you restored a source published by "Cambridge Scholars Publishing", whose reliability was questioned at WP:RSN. I replaced information cited to that reference with a more reliable one. Would you mind explaining why you wish to retain the former? I look forward to hearing from you. With regards, Anupam^Talk 06:12, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

@Anupam: apologies for the messy editing. This issue has been discussesd before extensively; see Talk:Kashmiris/Archive 2. I wrote a propsal, which also treated the Nagas and Pisachas, placing them in context. The sentence you added,

Archaeological findings postulate that the earliest inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley were the Nagas and Pisachas.

References

seems to be too simple in that respect. Your source also says that the accpounts about Nagas and Pischachas are largely legendary; if you quote Shali, you'll have to quote that part too. I'd still prefer my extended proposal, but alas, any serious change to the Origins-sections seems to be impossible... Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:22, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I actually agree with your edit attributing the statement with respect to Nagas and Pisachas. My main contention was your restoration of content sourced to a single book by "Cambridge Scholars Publishing". What are your thoughts on that? I hope this helps. With regards, Anupam^Talk 07:41, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

I have no particular thoughts on CSP. Most sources on this tpic are questionable, so the best approach seems to be to balance all of them, with attribution and proper quotes. Otherwise, they'll be merely used for pov-pushing. But the status-quo on this section makes it impossible to do this... Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:57, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

In my edit, you will have noted that I removed the content sourced to "Cambridge Scholars Publishing" per this discussion. The original revision that I supplanted it with is buttressed by ABC-CLIO, an academic press; there are scholarly sources on this topic available and we should use them, I think. I hope this helps. Respectfully, Anupam^Talk 08:10, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

@Kautilya3: what do you think? Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 09:20, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Talk page archives also show that there has been no agreed version for the section since it has been always disputed. I also agree that everything is disputed here and some of the mentioned hypothesis (Jewish and Middle Eastern origins) are completely rejected by every single scholar. You had removed the entire section for this very same reason.[1]  I would support blanking that section entirely as alternative. Shashank5988 (talk) 10:36, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

I think it is fine to get rid of the #Origins section. It is all mythology, either old mythology or new mythology.

Personally, I find Parpola's strong two-wave model of Indo-Aryan migrations as the most satisfying model in explaining all the observed facts. According to it, a first group of Indo-Aryans migrated to the subcontinent as early as 2000 BCE, probably coming through the Hindu Kush mountains, and a second wave of Rigvedic Indo-Aryans came around 1500 BCE via Arachosia. The second wave people probably called the first wave people by names such as "Nagas" and "Pishachas" due to their distinctive customs. But over time, these distinctions disappeared. I don't think the history of Kashmir would have been much different from that of the neighbouring Gandhara. The Buddhist sources club the two together as Gandhara–Kashmira. No special "Origins" need to be proposed for the Kashmiris. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:29, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Who were those first Indo-Aryans? - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 15:04, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

I have no objections to removing the section as the current version is largely sourced to a reference that fails WP:RS. Thanks, Anupam^Talk 06:29, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Dogra regime

Dilpa kaur, I am not sure why you needed to move Ian Talbot to the opening, as you say here. The Talbot and Singh book that you cite is on the Partition of India, and neither author is a specialist in Kashmir history. Moreover, Chitralekha Zutshi, who does specialise in Kashmir history, has much to say about these matters in her Chapter 2. For instance, note:

In the case of the Kashmir Valley, the office holders were drawn from the ranks of the Hindu clerical caste of Kashmiri Pandits, and a few prominent Kashmiri Muslim Sayyid and Pir families.

It is important to differentiate between the ranks of the bureaucracy, and the Pandit community in general, since the greatest beneficiaries of the system were the wazir-wazarats and the tehsildars. The lower ranks of the bureaucracy, including the patwaris, kardars and shakdars, most likely did not benefit as much from the system as British representations would have one believe. It is important to differentiate between the ranks of the bureaucracy, and the Pandit community in general, since the greatest beneficiaries of the system were the wazir-wazarats and the tehsildars. The lower ranks of the bureaucracy, including the patwaris, kardars and shakdars, most likely did not benefit as much from the system as British representations would have one believe.

The simplistic picture of Muslim masses being oppressed by Hindu elites drawn by the British commentators is a mirror image of the Hindu masses oppressed by Muslim elites that they drew in the rest of India. These were "familiar colonial tropes" as Barbara Metcalf has pointed out elsewhere. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 08:38, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

References

The history of that text on this article goes back to NadirAli's referral[2] to Fowler&fowler's explanation to you.[3] Perhaps if @Fowler&fowler: has more time he can join us to re-explain to you the importance of this point, and all the other stuff about scholarly surveys etc. The Hindu elite's treatment of Kashmiri Muslims and that treatment's centrality to the Dogra Hindu state is not even a matter of scholarly dispute. As Fowler&fowler has pointed, there is a consensus on it. I am not allowed to debate this as if on a forum. Dilpa kaur (talk) 09:23, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

@Dilpa kaur: I am afraid you haven't addressed any of the points I have raised. So let me repeat them:

• The Talbot and Singh book that you cite is on the Partition of India, and neither author is a specialist in Kashmir history.
• Chitralekha Zutshi, who does specialise in Kashmir history, has much to say about these matters in her Chapter 2.
• These were "familiar colonial tropes" as Barbara Metcalf has pointed out elsewhere.

How do you respond to these points? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:42, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

• That is incorrect. Read the blurb: "this book explores...the ongoing conflict over contested sites such as Jammu and Kashmir." Refer also to the introduction, pp. 5-6. Our Kashmir expert Fowler&fowler has used Talbot & Singh's survey to write the plain fact of the Hindu elite exploiting Kashmiri Muslim peasants.[4] These scholarly surveys show the scholarly consensus. This page will follow that consensus and the Kashmir article.
• Let us see what Mridu Rai author of the award winning Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects has to say.

In fact such incontestable control over the Hindu religious domain allowed the Dogras to ride roughshod over the interests and rights of the vast majority of their Muslim majority subjects

What Zutshi does is add a bit more nuance to the accepted narrative (i.e. "not all Hindus"). Her work is a continuum, this is not a case of contradiction or dichotomy.

• The "colonial tropes" Metcalf refers to is a quote from Sir Henry Elliott about the construction of narratives that Muslims oppressed Hindus. We can't, per WP:SYNTHESIS, extrapolate this, to include the accepted and factual vice-versa instances of Hindu monarchies exploiting Muslims, in the same category as the colonial tropes. Dilpa kaur (talk) 11:19, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

I am afraid you are not making any sense.

• The "ongoing conflict" in the book blurb is referring to the conflict at the time of its publication, not the 100 years of Dogra regime.
• Mridu Rai's POV is clearly advertised in the title of her book itself.
• Zutshi is not adding a "nuance". She has pointed out clearly that there was an "important Muslim element" in the ruling regime. It wasn't just "Hindu elite". What she has refrained from doing, but you are bent on doing, is to communalise what is evidently a feudal exploitation.

The text that was there before your edit wasn't any complimentary to the Dogra regime. But your edit is aimed at hanging the "Hindu elite" to the exclusion of everything else. The text of the article itself shows that the Sikh regime and the Afghan regime that preceded it were also brutal to the Kashmiri peasants. "From the frying pan to the fire", is the title of a book by a Kashmiri, to describe the transition from the Afghan rule to the Sikh rule. And as for the Dogra rule, Ravinderjit Kaur frankly admits:

Gulab Singh did not interfere with the traditional social and economic organization of the State, and almost perfected the political institution of personal rule he had inherited from his predecessors, the Sikhs. In the Kashmir province, Gulab Singh faced many problems of pacification and administration. There was no effective administrative organization in the province which had been ravaged by hundreds of years of misrule and oppression.

• As for the colonial tropes, let me give you the statistics provided by Ian Copland. In Kashmir he says, Muslims were 70% of the population, they held only 22% of the gazetted appointments and 25% places in the army. In comparison, in Bhopal, he says the Muslims comprised a "small fraction" of the population (let us say 15%), but they had 90% of the gazetted appointments, all the top jobs in the police force, and all but one cabinet post. So, things were equally bad you might think. But for the colonial government, Bhopal was a well-managed [state] in which there was no preferential treatment 'of one community at the expense of the other'. Kashmir, on the other hand, was hell on earth.

So your edit is not exhibiting any more scholarly consensus that the version that was there earlier. But it is distorting it. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 00:52, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

• It remains a scholarly survey; with pre-partition context.
• Compare the cites received by Ravinderjit Kaur[5] with Rai[6] or Zutshi.[7] Clearly, Kaur's a nobody in Kashmir studies. Rai, however, is the standard now in Kashmiri historiography.[8]
• Copland's "statistics" can't be extrapolated to support one's personal opinions, especially those with no basis in accepted scholarship. It would contravene WP:SYNTH to do so. The same Ian Copland says about Dogra rule

As one probes deeper, however, it becomes clear that Muslims were the prime sufferers.

When a former Foreign Minister of Kashmir, Sir Albion Banerjea, declared that Kashmiri Muslims were treated like "dumb driven cattle," he was not exaggerating.

We must stick to what the scholars explicitly say and not derive our own conclusions with personal "between the lines" research.

And as far as the scholarly consensus goes, the Talbot & Singh source is it. Dilpa kaur (talk) 10:42, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Again, you are deflecting from the point of this discussion. I never denied that the Kashmiri Muslims were the prime sufferers, and that fact was already adequately represented in the previous content. The "Hindu elite" was mentioned at an appropriate place, along with Zutshi's explanation of the subtleties. So, you are talking about non-issues. You modified that content in order to promote the "Hindu elite" to the lead sentence, and you claimed that you were doing it as per Ian Talbot. But the Talbot book (which was coauthored, by the way) does not fit the bill, because your supporting sentence is mentioned in passing in the midst of a discussion about the partition, with no elaboration and no citations. WP:CONTEXTMATTERS. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 19:42, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

References

I see a change in argument. Regardless, the Talbot sentence is not taken from the midst of discussion on partition. Its taken from the midst of a paragraph about...well...Kashmir (princely). Of course it is the second sentence. However, we can look into expanding by adding before it Talbot's first sentence that the state started out in 1846 as a Hindu monarchy. That is an apt description. In this way we also do not depart far from the precedent set out in Kashmir which will happen if we avoid a categorical identification of the Hindu elite.

Given the subscription I see to Zutshi in your previous statements, well we can also cite her (and Mridu Rai, there's no doing away with the standard historical account) on the oppressive Hindu state. Her entire chapter 3 is on the Hindu state. People who are better equipped than us to understand Zutshi explain the meaning of her narrative.

She argues that Sikh rule in Kashmir, under which the Muslim peasantry suffered considerable hardship, naturally led to a growing stress on the Muslim aspect of the identity of the Kashmiri Muslim majority, which, in turn, functioned as a means to articulate dissent and protest. This was carried further under the Dogra regime, which increasingly relied on orthodox Brahminical Hinduism to claim sanction for itself. As Zutshi aptly puts it, the growing salience of the specifically ‘Muslim’ aspect of the identity of the Kashmiri Muslims was ‘a direct result of the overtly Hindu nature of the Dogras’ apparatus of legitimacy’ (p.13). Under the Dogras, the Kashmiri Muslims, as a whole, suffered heavy privations. Top government posts and large estates were almost entirely monopolized by Dogras, Punjabis and Kashmiri Pundits. As a consequence, Islam and Islamic consciousness served as a crucial vehicle for the Kashmiri Muslims to express protest against their marginalisation and oppression. In this sense, as Zutshi says, the emerging Kashmiri Muslim identity cannot be said to have been ‘communal’ in the narrow sense of the term.

Dilpa kaur (talk) 11:11, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Ok, I see that you are moving on from Talbot & Singh. So I won't belabour it a lot further. But you have to keep in mind that the book is about the partition, and it naturally explains the social context in which the partition occurred. That context obviously had various frictions between Muslims and non-Muslims, which it highlights. It is not a book about the entire history of any part of the subcontinent. But this page is about the entire history of the Kashmir valley. So you cannot draw statements made in the book out of context and insert them here.

As for the "Hindu monarchy", a phrase I have used somewhere (citing Mridu Rai) is that it was an "overwhelmingly Hindu state". That seems like an apt description. It did not specifically exclude Muslims, but it continued whatever class distinctions were previously present in the Kashmiri society. In addition, it brought in the Dogra Rajput nobility from the Jammu areas, which were its home. This is not unique to Kashmir. Similar situation existed throughout all the princely states of India. The Nizam of Hyderabad, for instance, patronised Muslims coming from various parts of India and even from outside India. (His army chief at the time of partition was an Egyptian!) Coming back to Kashmir proper, the Sayyids and Pirzadas have already been mentioned. I have also worked in the last few months on various biography pages like that of Brigadier Aslam Khan and Agha Shaukat Ali, who came from Muslim nobility families patronised by the "Hindu state". Another biography page I have been trying to work on is that of Brigadier Khuda Baksh, who came from a local Gujjar Muslim family of Jammu and rose to be the army chief of the "Hindu state". But I have not run into any native Kashmiri Muslims that rose to high positions. Whether this was a result of specific policies of the "Hindu state" or a result of the "centuries of misrule and oppression" in Kashmir, I can't say. As Ayesha Jalal points out, what Kashmir needed was a "massive facelift", which the Dogra rulers were incapable of producing. One might wonder whether the British Raj was capable of producing such facelifts either. Your own favourite Talbot & Singh points out that, in Bengal, the bhadralok, who comprised 5 percent of the population, monopolised all the official positions. In Punjab, the 'writer castes' made up of Khatri, Agarwal and Arora communities monopolised them. Social history has to be understood in the context of the local class divisions that may have been prevalent for centuries, not in terms of an artificial Hindu–Muslim divide brought in from the outside for political reasons. Talbot & Singh are not doing that for Kashmir, whereas Zutshi is.

As encyclopedia writers, our job is not to cherry-pick whatever statements we like from various sources and insert them, but to develop a broad understanding of the whole subject and use our best judgement to represent the matters as they stand. As far as this page is concerned, the content that was there before your edit is superior to whatever you might wish to do. So, you should simply reset it. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 12:59, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

References

Everyone's judgement and understanding of a subject will be different. But we don't concern ourselves with that. We represent the scholarly consensus, not summarise what ‘‘we’’ think of the subject. The broader understanding and our “best judgement” you speak of is original research. The best thing to do, Fowler&Fowler explains, is to use scholarly surveys and pick out well worn textbooks and summarise them. This way we stick to the consensus.

The top scholars of Kashmir all talk of the Hindu state Rai, Zutshi, Bose, Schofield and et al. I could draw quotations from all of them. We have scholarly surveys such as Talbot & Singh, which while about partition, also pinpoints through its categorical statements the scholarly consensus in academia about broader South Asia topics related to Partition such as Kashmir. And we also have textbook histories which speak of the Hindu elite introduced by the Hindu state in Kashmir. For example David Ludden in “India and South Asia: A Short history.”

The polarisation of the state along Hindu-Muslim lines originated in the Dogra dynasty's nineteenth century installation of a Brahman and Kashmiri Pandit ruling elite of landlords, bureaucrats and businessmen, and its institution of Hindu rituals and law codes. Public Muslim activity in the observance of prayers and festivals was imbued with an air of dissent and even outlawed.

I see talk on this discussion of so-called “artificial Hindu-Muslim differences.” But this nationalist narrative we have in India of blaming the British for “divide and rule” is no longer accepted in mainstream scholarship.

As for the solution, if you mean we should reset it to the Oxford encyclopedia entry written by the Kashmir expert Victoria Schofield, I am open to that. Alternatively another compromise could be to copy over here the sentence from Kashmir which Fowler &Fowler added on the Hindu elite. Dilpa kaur (talk) 13:48, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Copy-vios?...

@Diannaa: could you take a look at this? It seems to me that this editor does not understand what a copy-vio is. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 11:36, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

Diannaa (talk · contribs) is well aware that adding lengthy quotes is considered a copyright violation, per WP:COPYQUOTE. This situation[9] is not acceptable for the legal safety of Wikipedia.Dilpa kaur (talk) 11:56, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

Well, I have to admit, I see your point in this particular case. Nevertheless, I suggest you discuss such matters with experienced editors before jumping to conclusions. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 11:59, 29 December 2018 (UTC)