[Reader-list] Rajatarangini and the Making of India's Past

[SJabbar]

Wits and dimwits notwit(h)standing I think the question one ought to ask,
like many have done before, what IS India: one nation or a composite of many
nations? A geographical entity upon which maps of various dimensions have
been inscribed? From the Gandharan, Ashokan, Kushan, Turkic, Mughal and
British Empires what glue made it stick and what forces broke it up?

The Rajatarangini throws light on some of these questions, written as it was
centuries before the idea of nations became so contested.  It also reveals
that Kashmir was not as isolated as it became in later centuries, that it
was connected by religion, language, history to regions that we designate as
part of India today-- The great hero king Lalitaditya's mother was a Bania
woman from Rohtak, for instance...

As interesting as this is I should like to argue that membership into a
modern democratic nation cannot depend on perceptions of shared history
alone but ought to be a voluntary act based on political needs. One need
not get fixated on Kashmir. Take a look at Dravidian nationalism and the
separatist movement in the 1950s and '60s. How did it go from seeing itself
as distinct and separate from the rest of India to, in 40-50 years being an
'integral' part of India?



On 15/11/10 10:51 AM, "Sanjay Kak" <kaksanjay at gmail.com> wrote:

> Forgive me for asking, dear reader-list....
But having read this Announcement
> several times over, and attempted to
unpack it with my admittedly dim wits,
> I'm still not able to
understand how this text proves that 'kashmir was a part
> of india', or
disproves the assertion that 'kashmir was never a part of
> India'.
best
Sanjay Kak

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Aalok Aima
> <aalok.aima at yahoo.com> wrote:
> when some dimwits are insistent that 'kashmir
> was never a part of india', one can only be amused by their ignorance and
> wonder at how little they know about the 'kashmir' that they are so passionate
> about
>
> .......... aalok aima
>
>
>
> http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4351
>
> TITLE:
> Translating "History": Rajatarangini and the Making of India's Past
>
>
> SPEAKER: Chitralekha Zutshi
> EVENT DATE: 07/10/2008
> RUNNING TIME: 65
> minutes
>
> DESCRIPTION:
> Nineteenth-century European orientalists and
> philologists considered the Rajatarangini--a 12-century Sanskrit historical
> narrative from Kashmir--as the only Indian text to which the status of
> "history" could be accorded. Chitralekha Zutshi analyzes several late-19th and
> early 20th-century translations of this text by both Europeans and Indians to
> illustrate the mediated nature of the process of colonial and nationalist
> production of knowledge about India's past--indeed of the idea of history
> itsef--in British India.
>
> Speaker Biography: Kluge Fellow Chitralekha
> Zutshi is associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary.
> She is the author of "Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity and the
> Making of Kashmir."
>
>
>
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