Two Halves of a Grain of Mung They Are

By William Dalrymple, "The Valley Where Worlds Met And Fused" - Tehelka Magazine - New Delhi, India
Vol 5, Issue 16, Dated April 26, 2008

The syncreticism on display at a recent exhibition of Kashmiri art in New York shows the way to peace

In November 1989, as a young journalist newly arrived in India, I was sent to Kashmir to cover a spate of violent protests in Srinagar.

The protests turned out to be the beginning of the ill-fated uprising against Indian rule that is still smouldering 18 years later and which has now left thousands dead, radicalised an entire region, and brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.

So long has the conflict dragged on that many people now associate Kashmir with violence, strife and terrorism rather than the traditions of high culture, artistic brilliance, and religious syncretism with which the region was traditionally connected.

It is therefore timely and imaginative of the Asia Society in New York to mount an exhibition and to publish a superb catalogue of scholarly essays edited by Pratapaditya Pal, which reminds one of the larger currents at work in Kashmiri history.

The Arts of Kashmir was a superb piece of museum craft — a beautifully realised display of the intellectual and artistic brilliance that long distinguished the valley.

The greatest revelation for me was the quality of the astonishing art works from Kashmir’s early Hindu and Buddhist past. In the early centuries AD, the western Himalayas were not the culturally remote region they are today. Despite their physical isolation, these mountains and valleys were a major intellectual crossroads where the Hellenistic, Persian, Central Asian, Tibetan, Indian and Chinese worlds met and fused.

The earliest sculptures in Kashmir were heavily influenced by Gandhara’s languid, meditating Indo-Hellenistic Buddhas, even using the same dark grey schist. In time, Kashmir ceased to be a provincial adjunct to Gandhara and became a centre of Buddhist art and scholarship in its own right. Around 100 AD, one of the Buddhist councils was held here and from at least 400 AD, Chinese monks were coming to the valley to consult Kashmiri scholars, among them the young Kumarajiva who later translated the Lotus Sutra into Chinese. In the seventh century, it was to Kashmir that Tibetan rulers sent emissaries to study Buddhism and adapt a script for their own use and some of the highlights of the show date from the ancient period: astonishingly tall, thin and sensual bronzes of the Boddhisattvas Maitreya and Avalokitesvara standing cloaked and majestic, their elongated torsos tapering down to a narrow waist, their hands raised in blessing
and reassurance.

Yet, Kashmir was also a centre of Hindu art and philosophy. Its early rulers were Hindu and it was they who commissioned the images of Hindu deities, such as the goddess Indrani — restless, vivacious, curving her body and swinging her hips to the sounds of some unseen musicians.

Whether Hindu or Buddhist, these early Kashmiri sculptures all hint at a vibrant court life, where the kings patronised music, dance and poetry, and where the gods are depicted as courtly creatures. Thus Lord Shiv is shown crowned and kingly, playfully throwing a dice as Parvati, here a carefully coiffeured, sari-clad Kashmiri queen, looks on.

Hinduism and Buddhism coexisted and intermingled in Kashmir for 800 years. Both faiths were patronised by thesame kings, ministers and merchants, many of whom indulged in the same Tantric heterodoxies. Indeed, it seems to have been in Kashmir that Tantrism passed from Hinduism to Buddhism, giving birth to the Mahayana school that would later flourish in Tibet and Nepal; certainly some of the earliest Mahayana texts found date from Kashmir during the first century BC.

Some of the most beguiling exhibits in the show are of Tantric Buddhist deities, such as the eighth century brass figurine of the four-headed, ten-armed Chakrasamvara — naked but for a lungi and dancing on his prostrate demonic enemies. Roaring with rage yet strangely poised and balletic, he is crowned and garlanded with skulls, brandishes thunderbolts and skull-headed sceptres and over his head, he holds the stretched skin of a dead elephant.

This is exactly the sort of angry protector figure that became common in later Tibetan art as a way of warding off demons and other creatures of darkness. It is a world away from the aniconic images of early Indian Buddhist art. Kashmir, the exhibition makes clear, was the missing link between the art of early Buddhist Gandhara and later Buddhist iconography of Nepal and Tibet. The arrival of Islam at first sight marks a dramatic break in the exhibition.


In the Islamic rooms of the show, there are no more Gods or Goddesses; they’re filled with intricate but almost entirely non-figurative calligraphy, carpets, textiles and ceramics.

But initial impressions of a clear break are false. The first Muslim ruler of Kashmir was not a conqueror but a Ladhaki Buddhist King named Rinchana (r1320-3) who converted to Islam, starting the slow process of the Islamisation of the valley.

When the Mughals conquered the valley in 1589, there began a flow of Kashmiri intellectuals from the valley to the imperial court.

Several Kashmiri artists such as the calligrapher Muhammad Husayn Kashmiri, known as Golden Pen, became celebrities in the entourage of Akbar. An image of the calligrapher, seated on a carpet and wearing a shawl as he teaches his young pupil, is among the most beautiful miniatures on display.

It was under Akbar’s greatgrandson Dara Shikoh that Kashmiri traditions of syncretism came to have the greatest influence on the court. Dara had imbibed the heterodoxy of the Kashmiri Sufis from Mullah Shah Badakshani who had retired to the Pari Mahal, not far from Srinagar.

In 1638 he instructed the young prince in the essential unity of the Islamic and Hindu mystical paths and it was at Pari Mahal that Dara wrote his great treatise on Sufism, The Compass of Truth:

“Though art in the Ka’ba at Mecca
as well as in the temple of Somnath

Though art in the monastery
as well as in the tavern

Thou art at the same time the light and the moth
The wine and the cup
The sage and the fool
The rose and the nightingale.”

It was partly as a result of time spent with the sages of Kashmir that Dara had the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads translated into Persian as The Mysteries of Mysteries, and wrote a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam, The Mingling of Two Oceans, which emphasised the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations.

He also wrote of the visions he received from Hindu deities, and how Vasistha had appeared to him: “He was very kind to me and patted me on the back. He told Lord Ram that I was his brother because we were both seekers after truth.

He asked Lord Ram to embrace me which he did in an exuberance of love. He then gave some food [prasad] to Lord Ram, which I also took, and ate.”

In the end, Dara Shikoh’s Kashmir-influenced speculations proved too radical for even the Muslim élite of Mughal Delhi. By the mid-twentieth century, the last traces of the old pluralism had been replaced by a savage polarisation.

During the resulting conflict, Kashmir’s architectural and archaeological heritage has been neglected and, in some cases, severely damaged. The ASI personnel that were supposed to look after antiquities fled the valley and Pari Mahal is, like several other monuments, in a state of collapse.

But the most tragic effect of the conflict has been the flight from the valley of most of the learned Kashmiri Pundits who, in 1947, made up around 15 percent of the valley’s population. The valley is now almost entirely mono-religious for the first time in its history.

Today the conflict may appear as insolvable as ever. Yet in the plural currents of tolerance and syncretism so clearly exemplified in this exhibition lies a route map for the only possible solution.

In the words of Deen Darvish, a 19th century Kashmiri Sufi:

“The Hindu says, ‘I am superior’
The Musalman says ‘I’

Two halves of a grain of mung they are
Which, then, is greater than the other?

Don’t quarrel over who is superior
And who is not

The one is a devotee of Ram, the other of Rahman

Deen Darvish says, the two unite in one ocean
There is only one Lord of all
The Hindu and the Musalman are one.”

[Picture: Colophon page of Gulistan of Sadi 1581
Copied by Muhammad Husayn Kashmiri
Portraits of the calligrapher and self by Manohar (flourished late 16th–early 17th century)
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
H. 12.8 x W. 8.5 in. Royal Asiatic Society
Photo from the exhibition The Arts Of Kashmir - Asia Society, New York, NY
Photo: Asia Society http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/kashmir/islam03.htm].