ABSTRACT
There is a Gilgit dimension to the Kashmir issue, a dimension that brings to mind a hundred-year-long unending debate which highlights the strategic importance of the Himalayan ramparts, in the Pamirs-Karakoram-Hindu Kush trijunction, where the huge land masses of the five nations meet. This huge land area is of great historical import and is known by yet another name – the Northern Areas, a place where many pathways of culture and civilization have criss-crossed, an entrepot of many cultures with rare complexities and sophistication. It is here that Gilgit manuscripts, unravelling among other things mass killings of Buddhists, were also found. In a way, it symbolized the end of a long search for the scientific origins of the British Indian empire along the Indus in the north; the triumph of colonialism over orientalism – a marriage of British colonialism and feudal despotism. It is an area with a variety of ethnic characteristics, such as ‘Kafirs’ of ‘Kafirstan’, a tribal sect with weird ritual dances and animal sacrifices. Kafirstan, in addition to other tribal entities living in these Himalayan ramparts, poses a challenge not only to Islamic nomenclatures, which are sought to be imposed under the new Islamic dispensation, but also symbolizes an anguished cry against suppression of tribal autonomy in the name of radical Islam groaning under military rule.
