Directly north of Delhi, protected by massive walls of snowcapped mountains, lies the fertile and densely populated valley of Kashmir, an oval-shaped plain approximately 145 kilometres long and forty wide. For centuries, the valley’s physical properties have enchanted its visitors: ‘A garden of perpetual spring’ is how the Mughal administrator Abu’l-fazl characterized it. Surrounded on all sides by towering mountains attaining 5,500 metres in height, the valley – 1,800 metres above sea level – is watered by the Jhelum River, which springs from the valley floor and flows gently westwards until it plunges through a narrow gorge in the Pir Panjal Mountains, which form the valley’s western edge. After cutting through this range, the river turns abruptly south, eventually forming the westernmost of the five rivers that flow over the Punjab; in all, it drops over 1,000 metres from its headwaters in the Kashmir valley to the plains of the Punjab.
These topographical features helped shape the course of Kashmiri culture and history. For centuries, Hindu rulers in the secluded valley had enjoyed freedom from outside invaders; formidable mountains to the south, east or north could block incursions from those sides. Incursions were rare and logistically difficult even from the valley’s western side, where the Jhelum cuts through a narrow defile at Baramulla, the so-called ‘gateway to the Kashmir valley’. In the eighth century Arabs tried to invade the valley at least once, possibly twice, but failed. Mahmud of Ghazni attacked Kashmir twice – in 1015 and 1021 – but turned back both times owing to severe snowstorms. Muhammad Ghuri and his slave commanders made no attempt to conquer Kashmir when they swept over the Indo-Gangetic plain in the late twelfth century. After the Delhi sultanate was established at the beginning of the thirteenth century, sultans never attacked the valley, focusing instead on the flat, physically accessible Indo-Gangetic plain.
The same isolation that protected Kashmir from repeated invasions also made it a secure haven for refugees fleeing other regions. Among these was a Tibetan Buddhist prince, Rinchana, who reached the valley in 1320 after fleeing nearby Ladakh, where he had led a failed rebellion against his royal uncle. This was shortly after a Mongol chieftain, Zulju, had successfully invaded and devastated Kashmir – a notable exception to the string of failed attempts to penetrate the valley. In the chaos following the Mongol invasion and the flight of the Hindu raja Suhadeva (r. 1301–20), Rinchana seized power and declared himself king (r. 1320–23). Soon thereafter the latter appointed as his chief minister another outsider to the valley, Shah Mir; probably of Iranian origin, Shah Mir had migrated to Kashmir in 1313 and risen to high office in Suhadeva’s government. In 1339 he attained sovereign power after winning a palace struggle, thereby launching Kashmir’s first dynasty of Muslim sultans. With his reign, a more definitive Iranian influence took hold in the valley, as seen, for example, in the sultan’s replacing the Hindu Śaka calendar with a Zoroastrian one that had been launched in Iran by the last Sasanian emperor in AD 632.41 Shah Mir also fixed the state’s land revenue demand at just one-sixth of the annual harvest, while abolishing various other taxes. Since Rinchana and Shah Mir had broken the influence of powerful feudatories, the valley’s Brahmins acquiesced in such measures. Nor did Brahmins view the sultans as threatening their own status, especially when Kashmir’s new rulers married into the families of neighbouring rajas and – more importantly – made Brahmins their partners in governance.42
The mid fourteenth century saw a burst of the dynasty’s territorial expansion, as Shah Mir’s grandson, Shihab al-Din (r. 1355–73), became the first Kashmiri ruler since the eighth century to launch military campaigns beyond the valley, annexing Baltistan to the north, Ladakh to the east and Jammu to the south. But these campaigns came at great cost to the state’s treasury. The sultan’s Hindu finance minister even suggested increasing the state’s coinage by melting down a brass image of the Buddha – a measure that Shihab al-Din, shocked at the proposal, refused.43 Meanwhile, Persian culture continued to flow into the valley, as seen in the state’s increasing patronage of Persian literature relative to Sanskrit works, whether produced at the court or beyond. Through it all, the actual management of the sultanate’s governance remained firmly in the hands of Brahmin ministers and administrators.
Sultan Shihab al-Din was succeeded by his brother Qutb al-Din (r. 1373–89), in whose reign another prominent migrant reached Kashmir, Saiyid ‘Ali Hamadani (d. 1384). Though brief, this Sufi’s stay in the valley would have far-reaching consequences. Like Shah Mir, ‘Ali Hamadani had come from Iran, and, like Rinchana, he arrived as a refugee – in his case, as a consequence of the rise of Timur, the great Central Asian warlord who between 1360 and 1405 would conquer most of the eastern Muslim world. Fearing sectarian persecution from Timur’s army, which campaigned across the Iranian plateau between 1380 and 1386, ‘Ali Hamadani left western Iran accompanied by a host of saiyids, men claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad. In 1381 he found refuge in Kashmir, where Sultan Qutb al-Din warmly greeted him and his companions, allegedly numbering some 700. These men then set up a network of intercommunicating khanaqahs throughout the valley. ‘Ali Hamadani also maintained close ties with the sultan, giving him his own headgear (kulah-i mubarak) to wear underneath his crown.44 Although the shaikh left the valley only several years after his arrival, he had established Kashmir as a place of refuge for other Sufis coming from Central Asia or Iran. As Timur’s assaults across western Asia continued during the reign of Qutb al-Din’s successor Sultan Sikandar (r. 1389–1413), still more waves of immigrants reached the valley, including ‘Ali Hamadani’s son, Muhammad Hamadani. Towards the end of the fourteenth century Sultan Sikandar patronized the construction of a shrine for Saiyid ‘Ali Hamadani, known as the Khanaqah-i Mu‘alla, which stands on the banks of the Jhelum in Srinagar’s old city. Although rebuilt several times over the centuries, this elegant structure, with its sloping pyramidal roofs made of cedar and its delicately carved eaves, is a superb example of traditional Kashmiri architecture.
In Kashmir’s volatile fourteenth century, the valley kingdom thus saw the end of the indigenous Lohara dynasty (1003–1320), Mongol invasion, and the fitful beginnings of the Kashmir sultanate. The latter part of that century also saw a remarkable female poet, Lalla (also called Laleshwari, or Lal Ded, d. 1392), who further unsettled Kashmir’s existing socio-religious order. Following a pattern of Indian religious reformers going back at least to the time of the Buddha, Lalla severed social ties with her marital family and wandered for extended periods of time in a quest for truth. An ardent devotee of Śiva, she described achieving liberation from the endless cycle of reincarnation that underlies much of Indian thought:
I, Lalla, entered by the garden-gate of mine own mind,
And there (O joy!) saw Siva with Shakti sealed in one;
And there itself I merged in the Lake of Immortal Bliss.
Now while alive I am unchained from the wheel of birth and death,
What can the world do unto me?45
She also boldly challenged the norms of conventional religion. Declaring that images and temples are only stone, Lalla – though herself born into a Brahmin household – threw down the challenge: ‘Whom will you worship, O stubborn Pandit?’46 For centuries, Lalla’s poems were cherished, committed to memory and handed down orally among the masses of Kashmir’s rural society.47 Indeed, her verses comprise the earliest specimens of vernacular Kashmiri language and literature.48 Moreover, like other devotional poets who began to appear throughout South Asia from the fourteenth century on, Lalla sought, found and preached a social reality lying beyond conventionally understood religious communities.49
Several points stand out regarding the growth of sultanate institutions in fourteenth-century Kashmir. First, such institutions did not derive from any political connection with the Delhi sultanate, as was the case in regions such as Bengal, Gujarat or the Deccan. Consequently, the Kashmir sultanate did not inherit a tradition of military slavery or of slave rulers, as did some other Indian sultanates. Nor did it mint the kind of coinage that appeared in the Delhi sultanate from its earliest days. Brahmins continued to run government affairs after the valley’s transition to a sultanate form of rulership, and Sanskrit – not Persian – remained the official language. Although Kashmir’s fourteenth century had opened with a Hindu dynasty and closed with a Muslim one, the valley experienced no serious rupture in its governing institutions during this transition. It would pioneer its own style of Indian sultanate.