Kashmir
Kashmir (Kashmiri: کٔشِیر / कॅशीर; Hindi: कश्मीर; Urdu: کشمیر), archaically spelled Cashmere, is in the northwestern region of South Asia. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range. As of 2021, the wider region of Kashmir is disputed among Pakistan, India and China.
Quotes
[edit]- Mr Abdullah, you want that India should defend Kashmir. You wish India should protect your borders, she should build roads in your area, she should supply you food grains, and Kashmir should get equal status as India, but you don’t want India and any citizen of India to have any rights in Kashmir and Government of India should have only limited powers. To give consent to this proposal would be a treacherous thing against the interests of India, and I, as the Law Minister of India, will never do so. I cannot betray the interests of my country.
- Attributed to B. R. Ambedkar by Venkaiah Naidu in an op-ed published in The Hindu (17 August 2019), quoted by Noel Maryam George, "Viewing Article 370 abrogation through the lens of Ambedkar — and Ambedkarites", firstpost.com (19 November 2019)
- Whenever a VIP visit to Kashmir was planned, like that of the prime minister, a hundred messages would fly around saying, ‘Usko ura dena, uski baja dena, safed ghar khatam ho jana chahiye.’ ['finish this fellow', 'beat that guy', 'demolish that house', etc.]
- A. S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (India: HarperCollins, 2015) ch. 2
- The Yunkang caves in China, the wall paintings from several sites in Inner Asia, especially Qizil and Tun-huang, the paintings from the cache at Tun-huang, and some iconographic manuscripts from Japan, for example, should be evaluated with Kaśmīr in mind as a possible source.
- Susan Huntington, The Art of Ancient India (New York: Weatherhill, 1985), pp. 360-85, quoted in S. Kak, The Vedic Gods of Japan (2004)
- The good country of Kashmira is adorned by the vedas with their six angas, and the vedantas, and the well arranged siddhantas, by logic and grammar, by the puranas, by the mantras, and by the six schools of philosophy ; by the followers of Shiva and of Vishnu, by the worshippers of the sun, by the Buddhists with their paintings and viharas and mathas ; by the vine, and the saffron, the grains, and the shali rice, and by fragrant flowers; by the puranas, and the shrutis and the tarkashastras; by the Brahmana worahippers of fire, and by the Brahmanas devoted to contemplation, austerities, prayers, and anxious for ablution and worship ; by kotis of nagas, by Hari and Hara ; and by the Gandharvvas and the Vidyadharas. Here the water is cool like the amrita of heaven.
- Rajataranginī of Jonaraja, translated from Sanskrit by Jogesh Chunder Dutt (1898, 1986 reprint), Gian Publishing House, page 430.
- In Kashmir, rights relating to life, liberty, dignity of the people, and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, embodied in the fundamental covenants and enforceable by courts of law, have been gravely violated.
- Nyla Ali Khan, "The Hidden Tragedy of Kashmir", Interview with Souad Sharabani, counterpunch.org (15 September 2016)
- If woman can make the worst wilderness dear,
Think, think what a Heaven she must make of Cashmere!- Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), "The Light of the Haram"
- I’ve never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it’s just spectacular. And it’s true, the people are very beautiful too. Kashmir is quite prosperous. The soil is very rich, so the crops are plentiful. It’s lush, not like much of India, in which there’s great scarcity. But of course all that’s gone now, and there is great hardship.The main industry of Kashmir was tourism. Not foreign tourism, Indian tourism. If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India’s fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow. You’d see people at the airport where there’s dirty, slushy snow piled up by the sides of the roads, standing there as if they’d found a diamond mine. It had that feeling of an enchanted space. That’s all gone now, and even if there’s a peace treaty tomorrow it’s not coming back, because the thing that was smashed, which is what I tried to write about, is the tolerant, mingled culture of Kashmir. After the way the Hindus were driven out, and the way the Muslims have been radicalized and tormented, you can’t put it back together again. I wanted to say: It’s not just a story about mountain people five or six thousand miles away. It’s our story, too.
- Salman Rushdie, interviewed by Jack Livings, The Paris Review (Summer 2005) [1]
- Oh, pilot of the storm who leaves no trace
Like thoughts inside a dream.
Heed the path that led me to that place,
Yellow desert stream.
My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon
Will return again.
Sure as the dust that floats b'hind you
When movin' through Kashmir.- Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir", from Physical Graffiti (1975)
