ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, the celebrated 12th-century Sanskrit classic, and presents its representation of a regional space, Kashmir. It explores the understanding that the interplay between the universal and the particular frames the literary composition of Kashmir as a space in the Rajatarangini. While the connection between myths and regional identity-formation is not new and has been documented for various parts of the Indian subcontinent, it is not so in the case of the representation of Kashmir in the Rajatarangini. The movement from physical qualities of space to spiritual ones is effected as a continuum in the Rajatarangini. The ‘imagined landscape’ of Kashmir – pristine, holy, spiritual – is thus set off against the unholy and troubled contretemps occurring therein. The contrast is a striking one and could not have been lost on its author; it essays the mixed feelings with which he seems to have undertaken to represent his country, feelings of ‘love woven with shame and sorrow’.
