2. CHINESE

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Rajatarangini Means 'River Of Kings'. The Stories Were Written In Verse By Kalhana, A Famous Eleventh-Century Historian-Poet. These Stories Cover Kashmir'S Rich Culture, Traditions And Beliefs.

What is history? How does a land become a homeland? How are cultural identities formed? The Making of Early Kashmir explores these questions in relation to the birth of Kashmir and the discursive and material practices that shaped it up to the 12th century CE. Reinterpreting the first work of Kashmiri history, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, this book argues that the text was history not despite being traditional Sanskrit poetry but because of it. It elaborated a poetics of place, implicating Kashmir’s sacred geography, a stringent critique of local politics, and a regional selfhood that transcended the limits of vernacularism.Combined with longue durée testimonies from art, material culture, script, and linguistics, this book jettisons the image of an isolated and insular Kashmir. It proposes a cultural formation that straddled the Western Himalayas and the Indic plains with Kashmir as the pivot. This is the story of the connected histories of the region and the rest of India.

Jonaraja s Rajatarangini is the second in the series of Kashmir chronicles, next to the work of Kalhana. The Kashmirian tradition of writing chronicles was not discontinued at the death of Kalhana but was carried further by his diciples. The Rajatrangini of Jonaraja covers the period from 1150 A. D. to 1459 A. D. of the Kashmir History. This period witnessed the advent of the Muslims in Kashmir and conversion of the majority of the Hindus into Islam. Jonaraja who was a historian to the true sense of the term and a Sanskrit poet of very high order has vividly described the decline of Hindu civilization of Kashmir. He describes without any prejudice, the Muslim regimes, mentions the contributions of the good among them and fearlessly criticizes the oppressors and persecutors. He does not even try to conceal the degeneration among the contemporary Hindus. His work is a valuable source book of the history of medieval Kashmir. The present publication is the only complete English translation of Jonaraja s work, made available after a long time.