Dr Anubhuti Maurya at the Young Scholars @Seagull Space on 2 November

On 2 November, Dr Anubhuthi Maurya will be speaking at the monthly seminar series: 

Young Scholars @ the seagull space ( an initiative by The Seagull Foundation For The Arts)

Remembrance of Loss: History and Memory of the Mughal Conquest of Kashmir 

In 1586, Mughal armies marched into Srinagar. Courtly accounts like Abul Fazl's Akbarnama and Nizamuddin Ahmad's Tabaqat i Akbari, written in a triumphal mode, celebrated the annexation of Kashmir into the imperial fold. Contemporaneous accounts from Kashmir like Tarikh i Haider Malik and Baharistan i Shahi, reflected a dilemma. Written in the aftermath of Mughal conquest, they accepted the victorious authority of the empire. But they recorded the history of the region in this moment of transition in great detail, albeit written in an elegiac mode, mourning the loss of the Kashmiri Sultanate.

 In the history and politics of Kashmir, since the nineteenth century, Mughal conquest is often invoked as the first moment when the region lost its independence. A historian of Mughal rule in Kashmir, describes it as a loss of '. . . control over their destiny'. Yet, this is a historiographic convention that erases the multiple narrations of Kashmir's political engagement with the Mughal imperial state and surrenders the history of the region to the imperial narrative of conquest.

    In this paper, I will examine accounts of the battle for Kashmir in texts from the sixteenth century and trace how later texts re-narrated this foundational moment. I will explore the creation of the idea of a primal defeat that forever gives Kashmir the sense of loss of independence.