Kashmir's Contested Pasts

Chitralekha Zutshi is the James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. She specializes in Modern South Asia, with particular interests in Islam in the Indian Subcontinent; interactions between religious identities, regional movements and nationalism in princely and colonial India; commodity and consumer cultures in Britain and colonial India; ideas of history and historiography in pre-colonial and colonial India. Kashmir's Contested Pasts is her second book.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction - Paradise on Earth: The Past and Present of History Writing in Kashmir1. Garden of Solomon: Landscape and Sacred Pasts in Kashmir's Sixteenth-Century Persian Narratives2. A Literary Paradise: The Tarikh Tradition in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Kashmir3. Vernacular Histories: Narration and Practice in Kashmir's Nineteenth-Century Historiographical Tradition4. The Multiple Lives of Rajatarangini: Orientalist and Nationalist Knowledge Production in Kashmir and Colonial India5. The Kashmiri Narrative Public: Textuality, Orality, and Performance6. The Divided Public: Battles over History and Territory in Contemporary KashmirConclusionGlossaryBibliographyIndexAbout the Author

Chitralekha Zutshi's Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a magisterial survey of Kashmiri historiography over the last several centuries, a history of the writing of histories in Kashmir ... The book ends with excellent chapters on the Kashmiri narrative public and its engagement with performative modes of history and collective memory, followed by a look at contemporary battles over history in Kashmir, a legacy of the growing communalization of Kashmiri identity characteristic of the last two centuries