Kashmir persists as the centre of one of the most significant and ongoing conflicts in the world that cuts across several national and regional borders. The voluminous writing on the region has been shaped by the intricacies of this conflict and the constantly-battling mainstream nationalist-political narratives that drive it (see, for instance, Lamb, 1991; Jha, 1996). The insurgency in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir against the Indian government, which began in 1989 and continues to rage in a different form today, produced a fresh spate of partisan writings that interpret Kashmir's past and present through the prism of divisive ideological agendas, thus presenting Kashmir's current situation as the outcome of an inevitable teleology (for a longer discussion, see Zutshi, 2014, esp. ch. 6). The deeply contested nature of these claims and counter-claims have ensured that Kashmir's history, society, politics and people remain shrouded in the multiple disputes that have plagued the region in the 70 years since Indian independence, partition and the creation of Pakistan.

Scholarly writing that challenges and transcends these ideologically-driven narratives on Kashmir, however, has come a long way in the past two decades. When I began my own research on the region in the mid-1990s, there were scarcely a handful of scholarly works on its history, economy, or culture. The enormity of the task ahead dawned on me on my first research visit to Srinagar in 1996, when I was advised to read the well-thumbed Kashir by G. M. D. Sufi (1974 [1949]), P. N. Bazaz's History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir (1954 [1945]), P. N. K. Bamzai's A History of Kashmir (1962) and Mohibbul Hasan's Kashmir Under the Sultans (1959). These books, along with Kalhana's Rajatarangini (1979 [1900]) and Walter Lawrence's The Valley of Kashmir (1996 [1895]), were considered the beginning and the end of scholarship on the region.

Since this was the period at the height of the insurgency, scholarly writings on Kashmir's politics had begun to make their appearance; these works sought to explain the reasons behind the ostensibly unexpected emergence of the ferocious upsurge against the Indian state in 1989 (Wirsing, 1994; Schofield, 1996, 2000; Ganguly, 1997; Bose, 1997, 2003). For some scholars, at the same time, the insurgency prompted a measure of reflection on Kashmir's past, especially as the dangers of its falling victim to Kashmir's continuously turbulent politics became increasingly apparent.