A Meeting Ground

By Prof. Muhammad Ishaq Khan, "The question of identity" - Greater Kashmir - Srinagar, Kashmir, India
Monday, October 20, 2008

Prof. Muhammad Ishaq Khan on Silk Route and Kashmiri Identity Consciousness

Sufism, through the Silk route, allowed ready discourse with other cultures at the intellectual and social levels.

This trend that particularly developed in Central Asia had a far-reaching impact on the gradual but orderly evolution of Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit societies.

Sufis who particularly settled in the traditional part of Srinagar, the nerve centre of the Brahmans, were intrinsically peaceful missionaries. But for this fact intimate neighbourly relations would not have existed between the Brahmans and the Saiyid families tracing their ancestry to various territories of Central Asia and Persia.

Persian became the official language during the reign of the sultans. Kashmiri Brahmans learnt Persian with avidity so much so that they did not feel any inhibition in composing verses in it in praise of their deities. Until the middle of the last century, there was no dearth of Kashmiri Brahmans who could freely quote verses from Shaikh Sa‘di’s Gulistan and Bostan or the Masnavi of Maulana Rumi in their everyday conversation. One significant consequence of intermingling of cultures was certainly the gradual assimilation of the pious Brahman families in Islam over longer periods of time. This explains why such families proudly retained their Brahman titles such as Kaul, Pandit, Raina and so on. It was thus at the intellectual and personal level that the Brahmans were reduced to a minority during a period of nearly five centuries of Islamic acculturation. Considering this fact together with the assimilation of the agriculturalists, artisans and the working people in Islam through either khanqahs of the immigrant Sufis from Central Asia and Persia as well as ziarats of the Rishis, it would be incorrect to say that the entire Brahman community of Kashmir resisted Islam.

As a matter of fact, the Brahmans who stuck to their religion with dogged tenacity were men of integrity and conviction in their own right. Considering themselves to be the purest lot of the whole human species, they sought to retain their ancient links with the Brahmans of the rest of India. Undergoing acute crisis of identity under the reeling impact of Central Asia and Persia, they kept alive the memory of being a branch of the Saraswat Brahmans. Although they continued to invoke their Vedic past, they could not resist the impact of fairly cosmopolitan or broad-based, sophisticated and multi-ethnic environment of Central Asia on their social life. Their cuisine bore striking resemblance to those of Muslims in respect of cooking fish or choosing lamb for the meat course. Unlike the most Brahmans of the rest of India who regarded Shiva as the Destroyer, in Kashmir Saivism, he is projected as the enduring revelation of cosmos and of all life, both visible and invisible.

Kashmiri Brahmans were not antagonistic to Sufism. This explains the conversion of both Brahmans and other sections of Kashmir society to Islam at various levels: discussion and debate, group conversion of the tribes and assimilation of the commoners. It goes to the credit of the Brahmans that so long as members of their community embraced Islam out of conviction or suasion of a Sufi or so long as the khanqahs of the Sufis proved to be catalysts of social conversion, they did not bother about such developments. Thus, for example, the first Brahman convert to Islam in Kashmir in recorded history was Srikanth. He belonged to a respectable Brahman family of Srinagar. It is not known at whose hands he embraced Islam long before Mir Saiyid ‘Ali Hamadani landed in Kashmir. But it is certain that his conversion was voluntary. His son also embraced Islam and was named Shaikh Ahmad. Srikanth first visited Samarqand and, after obtaining education there, travelled to Kolab where he entered the discipleship of Saiyid ‘Ali Hamadani. The lesser known and the hitherto least stressed historical fact is that it was the Kashmiri Brahman who first looked to Central Asia for spiritual inspiration. It is most likely that the earnest disciple must have furnished first-hand information about the religious situation in Kashmir to his pir.

What, however, prompted Kashmiri Brahmans to assert their identity in ethnocentric terms in a historical context and antagonistic terms in contemporary context was not Sufism but radicalization of Islam. The first attempt at radicalization of Islam was not made by the Sufis but by converts themselves. This was resented by the Brahmans in strongest terms so much so that their chroniclers concocted myths about the persecution of their community and their mass exodus to the plains. There is strong reason to believe that several Saiyids who accompanied Saiyid Ali Hamadani to Kashmir played an important part in imparting true Islamic education to such members of Kashmiri elite as were wedded to syncretistic practices even while assuming Muslim names. The dignified presence of such Saiyids in the nerve centre of the Brahmans in Srinagar or for that matter in Avantipur was not looked with disfavour by the Brahmans. However, the problem arose during the reign of Sultan Sikandar whose reign was marked by the advent of Mir Saiyid Muhammad Hamadani, the son of illustrious Saiyid Ali Hamadani, along with a group of Saiyids from Central Asian and Persia. What caused ferment in Kashmiri society was not so much the conversion of a prominent Brahman minister of the sultan at the hands of the Saiyid as the religious zeal of the convert. Suha Bhat assumed the name of Saifu’d-Din, the Sword of Religion. Notwithstanding Sultan Sikandar’s initial disapproval of his minister’s hostility to Brahmanism, Saifu’d-Din, in an attempt at securing the forcible conversion of Brahmans, relegated the essential egalitarian and peaceful spirit charactering the missionary work of the Central Asian and Persian Sufis to the background, though temporarily.

Sultan Sikandar’s successor, Zainu’l-‘Abidin, however, made amends for the wrongs committed by his father’s fanatic minister. He allowed the migrant Brahmans to return to their homeland, encouraged reconversion of those who had been forcibly converted to Islam, made endowments to the temples and hostels of the Brahmans, sought to promote a better understanding of Islam and Hinduism through translation of classic Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit works, encouraged closer interaction at the literary and cultural level with Central Asia and Persia by purchasing Persian and Arabic manuscripts, sponsored the visit of two Kashmiris to Samarqand in order to enable them learn the art of manufacturing paper and the art of book-binding, encouraged craftsmen from Iraq and Central Asia to impart their skills to Kashmiris, patronised a musician from Khurasan and, above all, maintained intimate contact with the Sufis of both Central Asian and indigenous order, the Silsilah-i Rishiyyan.

Despite the divide between Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits, caused unfortunately by the onset of militancy in 1990, Sufism still continues to be a meeting ground for them. Can they weld themselves into dynamic and creative self-consciousness as Kashmiris? Doesn’t the Central Asian experience stress the importance of preserving the identity of nationalities on the basis of ethnicity, geography and history?

(Summary of the paper presented at the international conference on the Silk Route organised under the auspices of Central Asian Studies, Kashmir University, October 14-17).

Links to News reports about the conference:
http://www.risingkashmir.com/?option=com_content&task=view&id=7620
http://etalaat.com/english/News/news-scan/3214.html]

[A geopolitical perspective about nowadays's Silk Road: "Kashmir's Silk Fantasy" by Arjimand Hussain Talib http://www.greaterkashmir.com/full_story.asp?Date=19_10_2008&ItemID=11&cat=17]

[Picture from: US Central Asia Travel Agency
http://www.east-site.com/].