A cross-disciplinary anthology on contemporary Kashmir by academics from Jammu and Kashmir, the first such volume to appear. The book offers a panorama of key cultural concerns of Jammu and Kashmir today, incorporating analysis of military, cultural, religious, and social aspects of the society and polity.

Kashmir is renowned throughout the world for its beauty- for the girdle of snowy mountains which surrounded the lovely valley, for its rivers and lakes and its primeval forests, and for its moderate temperature. Kashmir was a centre of knowledge and education since the time of its habitation by humans. With the advent of the Aryans, ancient Kashmir produced scholars of the Vedas, and once Sanskrit emerged as the literary language, Kashmir’s took its study and learning to great heights, producing mature and renowned scholars of Sanskrit. Kashmir has a tradition of recorded history dating back to the times when history as an organized study was unknown in most of the civilized nations of today. There has been no serious attempt to delineate the economic life of people of Kashmir in the early period. The overemphasis by earlier scholars on political history had led the neglect of social history in general and economic life in particular. The aim of the present study is to give a comprehensive picture of economic life of Kashmir prior to medieval times. The information for this work has been derived from, literary works, epigraphical evidence, sculptural and archaeological data, and accounts of foreign travellers and historians.

In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers. Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, the author deals with the socioeconomic strategies of the communities whose livelihoods are embedded here and analyses the ecological condition of the Dal, and the reasons for its progressive degradation.