Like many conquerors before him, Timur bypassed the Kashmir valley during his invasion of India, fixing his sights on the Tughluq capital of Delhi. In the autumn of 1398 his army had already marched across Afghanistan and was moving through the passes leading to the upper Indus valley. Yet his reputation for wholesale massacres of great cities had preceded his arrival in India, which is why Kashmir’s Sultan Sikandar (r. 1389-1413), on hearing that the Central Asian warlord was nearing his neighbourhood, rushed envoys to Timur’s camp bearing gifts and fervent pledges of loyalty. Although Timur only wanted Sikandar’s formal appearance, and no cash, his unscrupulous envoys caused the Kashmiri court to understand that it would have to furnish horses and a large sum of money. Puritanical and influential Muslims in Srinagar seized this moment to advance their religious agenda. One of these was Saiyid Muhammad Hamadani, a revered shaikh who, like his father ‘Ali Hamadani, had migrated from Iran. Also influential was a group of Muslim clerics, the Baihaqi saiyids. In order to meet Timur’s alleged financial demands, the latter urged the sultan to demolish Hindu temples and convert their images to bullion. The sultan’s chief minister, Suha Bhatta, himself a zealous convert to Islam, persuaded Sikandar to destroy at least four major temple complexes in the valley – Parihaspura, Bijbehara, Tripureśvara and Martand – which earned the sultan the title butshikan, ‘temple-destroyer’.11 Sikandar also undermined the influence of the valley’s powerful class of Brahmins by revoking their tax-free holdings and destroying their Sanskrit books.12 Owing to such coercive measures, plus his imposition of the discriminatory jizya tax on non-Muslims, the charge of anti-Hindu bigotry has ever since clung to Sikandar’s memory.13 But not to that of his son.
There is a proverb that an apple never falls far from the tree; that is, a son tends to inherit his father’s character. But in the case of Sikandar’s son Zain al-‘Abidin (r. 1420–70), the apple fell nowhere near the tree. After a brief period when his weak-willed elder brother ruled the valley, Zain al-‘Abidin deposed his sibling and in 1420, with military help from allies in the Punjab, rose to power in Srinagar. His fifty-year reign, unlike Sikandar’s fractious, intolerant rule, has been remembered as a golden age in Kashmir. The sultan’s love of the valley’s land, its literary heritage and its religious traditions comes through very clearly in contemporary literary works. One of his court poets, the Sanskrit scholar Śrivara, recorded an instance in which he and the sultan climbed high in the Pir Panjal Mountains to visit a lake sacred to the god Vishnu. After being rowed to the centre of the lake, the sultan asked the poet to relate the legends associated with it. As snow began to fall, the sultan reclined in the boat and listened as the poet recited verses from a famous Vaishnava Sanskrit work. ‘Hearing the songs from the Gitagovinda from me,’ recalled the poet:
a wondrous sentiment raining down the devotion of Visnu Govinda arose for the king. The melodious tune struck up by both our voices echoed from the thickets [on the bank] as if repeated in refrain by the gandharvas [heavenly beings] staying there out of veneration to the king. Suddenly, gods showered forth flowers in the form of snowfall upon the king as he moved about on the lake, as if pleased at his devotion.14
As in Bengal, Kashmir’s sultans showed a clear affinity for Vaishnava Hinduism. In both sultanates Muslim rulers patronized Vaishnava literature, admired Vaishnava poetry and consorted with Vaishnava personalities.
There are other reasons why Zain al-‘Abidin’s reign has been treasured in subsequent memory. The sultan recovered neighbouring territories that, though annexed by his grandfather Shihab al-Din, had asserted de facto independence in the intervening years. These included Baltistan and Ladakh to the north and east of the valley, and the upper Indus region to the west. He exchanged embassies or gifts with potentates beyond Kashmir, both in India and the Middle East. He improved the state’s infrastructure by building bridges and digging irrigation canals. He encouraged villagers to settle in urban centres and take up a range of handicraft industries – for example, glasswork, woodwork, carpets and shawls – that have made Kashmir world-famous ever since. He gave encouragement to foreign architects such as Sadr al-Din Khurasani, who developed the design of wooden buildings that thereafter defined Kashmir’s built landscape.15 He regulated commodity prices, and was the valley’s first sultan to inscribe his name on coins certain to have been minted in Kashmir. He was also the first local sultan to mint silver coins, suggesting his regime’s economic stability and administrative centralization.16 Finally, he eased taxes on the rural classes and, by abolishing the poll tax on non-Muslims, reversed one of his father’s most contentious policies.
Zain al-‘Abidin’s most interesting initiatives, however, lay in his court’s patronage of literature. It was in Kashmir, especially during this king’s reign, that the Sanskrit and Persian literary worlds engaged with one another with an intensity not seen in India before. The sultan patronized not only literary production in both languages, but also bi-directional translation projects between them. Modern scholars have marvelled at how a small and isolated valley in the Himalaya range so far from India’s main political centres had become such an important cultural hub for the entire subcontinent. For more than four centuries Sanskrit scholars there dominated the discourse on poetics while making unique contributions in the disciplines of Sanskrit grammar and logic.17 Sanskrit also served as the language used both for everyday government administration and for literary expression. Zain al-‘Abidin continued the Kashmir court’s tradition of patronizing Sanskrit literature by commissioning the poets Jonaraja (d. 1459) and his student Śrivara (fl. 1459–86) to write supplements to the Rajatarangini, the renowned Sanskrit text chronicling Kashmir’s history composed in the mid twelfth century by the poet Kalhana. In his reign, too, a manuscript of one of the earliest works of India’s sacred literature, the Atharvaveda, was brought from Karnataka to Kashmir and recited by Brahmin priests.18
Sultan Zain al-‘Abidin’s court also patronized the translation of numerous Sanskrit classics into Persian, as well as Persian classics into Sanskrit. The Mahabharata, the Kathasaritsagara by Somadeva, the Daśavatara by Ksemendra, the Rajatarangini (possibly only Kalhana’s), the Hatakeśvara Samhita and the Prthviraj-vijaya by Jayanaka were all translated from Sanskrit to Persian.19 In the opposite direction, the Sanskrit scholar Bhattavarta used Firdausi’s great epic poem the Shah-nama as a model for his Sanskrit Jainavilasa, which also contains the sayings of Sultan Zain al-‘Abidin.20 And the court poet Śrivara translated from Persian into Sanskrit the immensely popular Yusuf va Zuleikha, composed by the Persian mystical poet ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami in 1483.21 Śrivara’s Sanskrit version of this Persian classic, his Katha-kautuka, appeared in the Kashmir court in 1505, just a few decades after Jami had composed the Persian original in Herat, some 1,100 kilometres to the west. This indicates, notes the literary historian David Shulman, ‘both the astonishing rapidity of cultural transmission in fifteenth-century Kashmir and the intricate interpenetration there of parallel linguistic cultures’.22 Nor was this sort of Sanskrit–Persian bilingualism confined to the Kashmir court. Both languages were used in manuscripts found in regional Sufi shrines and in inscriptions inscribed on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muslim gravestones.23
Zain al-‘Abidin’s reign thus witnessed a singular moment in the braided history of the Sanskrit and Persian worlds. While cultivating both literary traditions, this sultan’s long reign also bridged the transition from an era of Sanskrit literary dominance to one of sustained production of original Persian literature, promoted both at the state level and in the hinterland. Much of it pertained to the life and career of Saiyid ‘Ali Hamadani, the renowned shaikh whose memory became more hallowed with each passing decade. By the time of Zain al-‘Abidin’s reign there had emerged an integrated network of Sufi shrines in the valley’s countryside, most of them focused on Sufi migrants from Iran or Central Asia who considered Shaikh Hamadani their spiritual head. From this time on, Sufi shaikhs or minor members of Kashmir’s rural gentry authored many saintly biographies and local histories in Persian.24
Finally, Zain al-‘Abidin was the first Kashmiri ruler to establish Persian as the state’s official language, which it would remain until the end of the nineteenth century. Brahmins, long accustomed to serving both Hindu and Muslim rulers in the medium of Sanskrit, quickly switched to using India’s other transregional language, which they avidly cultivated for the next five centuries. Many of them formed the main body of Kashmir’s karkuns, later known as the Kashmir Pandits, who formed the class of secretaries, clerks and accountants and retained their prominent position in government and letters up to the mid twentieth century.25 Meanwhile, generations of Kashmiri-speakers memorized and passed on orally the Kashmiri poetry of revered religious figures such as the mystics Lalla or Shaikh Nur al-Din (d. 1440). But except for a short period during Zain al-‘Abidin’s reign, ordinary Kashmiri was never patronized by the court, either in pre-sultanate or in sultanate times.26 Instead, Persian acquired a certain double persona. Like Sanskrit, it possessed high status as a transregional and prestigious language. Brahmins read the classics of Persian literature – the works of Rumi, Firdausi, Nizami, etc. – in local schools or maktabs, which they often ran.27 At the same time, from Zain al-‘Abidin’s day Persian, not Kashmiri, attained the status of the valley’s regional written language.28 In discussing the literary productions of his fifteenth-century contemporaries, the poet Śrivara referenced a type of locally written literature that he characterized as deśa, or ‘regional’. He was not referring to works composed in Kashmiri, far less in Sanskrit, but to those in Persian.29 Elsewhere in India it was the local vernacular tongue that emerged as a region’s written medium, whether for documentary or for literary purposes. Only in Kashmir did Persian function both as a prestigious, transregional medium and as the valley’s written medium.