Islamic rule in Kashmir

Background: Kashmir before 1339

Before its Muslim dynasties, Kashmir had been ruled successively by the Karkota (c. 625–855 CE), Utpala, and Lohara dynasties, and was a major center of Sanskrit learning, Shaiva philosophy, and, earlier still, under the Kushans, of Buddhism; tradition holds that a great Buddhist council was convened in Kashmir under Kanishka. The Karkota king Lalitaditya Muktapida (r. c. 724–760) is credited with building the Martand Sun Temple, and later Kashmiri Shaiva thinkers, above all Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016), produced philosophical works that influenced Indic thought well beyond the valley. The single most important source for this period, and for the centuries that follow, is Kalhana's Rajatarangini ("River of Kings"), a Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmir's rulers completed around 1148–49 under the Lohara dynasty — one of the earliest sustained works of historical narrative, as opposed to genealogy or legend, produced anywhere in premodern India.

The Shah Mir Dynasty: Sikandar and Zain-ul-Abidin

Kashmir's Lohara dynasty ended amid political instability in the early 14th century, worsened by a devastating raid in 1320 led by the Mongol chief Dulacha. Rinchana, a Buddhist prince from Ladakh, seized the throne around 1320 and converted to Islam soon after, ruling briefly as Sultan Sadr-ud-din before his death around 1323; he is sometimes counted as Kashmir's first Muslim ruler. Shah Mir, a courtier who had served earlier Hindu kings, took the throne in 1339 as Sultan Shams-ud-din, founding the Shah Mir dynasty, which ruled Kashmir for over two centuries.

The dynasty's most consequential ruler for Kashmir's religious history was Sultan Sikandar, who reigned from around 1389 to 1413 and was given the epithet But-Shikan ("breaker of idols") by later chroniclers. According to Jonaraja, a near-contemporary continuator of the Rajatarangini writing under Sikandar's grandson, Sikandar's reign saw the destruction of numerous temples, including the Martand Sun Temple, the burning of Sanskrit manuscripts, restrictions imposed on non-Muslims, and a wave of conversion, flight, or death among the valley's Brahmin population under the influence of his minister Suha Bhatta, himself a convert. Later Persian-language chronicles, including the Baharistan-i-Shahi, repeat and elaborate this account.

Sikandar's son and eventual successor, Zain-ul-Abidin (r. 1420–1470), reversed much of this policy and is remembered, including in Jonaraja's and Srivara's continuations of the Rajatarangini, as one of Kashmir's most tolerant rulers: he abolished the jizya tax on non-Muslims, recalled Brahmin families who had fled or converted under duress, patronized Sanskrit scholarship and translation alongside Persian learning, and is credited with reviving craft industries, including shawl-weaving and papermaking. He is remembered in Kashmiri tradition by the honorific Budshah, "the great king."

Mughal, Afghan, and Sikh Rule (1586–1846)

The Shah Mir dynasty gave way to the Chak dynasty (1555–1586), Kashmir's last independent Muslim rulers, who were Shia and whose reign saw renewed sectarian tension with the valley's Sunni majority. In 1586 the Mughal emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir, ending Kashmiri political independence for more than three centuries. Mughal rule, under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, is chiefly remembered in Kashmir for the Mughal gardens built around Srinagar's lakes, including the Shalimar Bagh, rather than for religious persecution, though Mughal governors continued to levy jizya intermittently. Mughal control weakened in the 18th century, and in 1752 Kashmir passed to the Afghan Durrani empire; Afghan rule (1752–1819) is remembered in both Kashmiri Muslim and Hindu accounts as harsh and extractive, marked by heavy taxation and periodic repression of both the Hindu minority and Shia Muslims.

In 1819 the Sikh Empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh conquered Kashmir, ending Muslim political rule of the valley. Sikh administration banned cow slaughter and, according to several contemporary accounts, closed Srinagar's Jama Masjid to Friday prayers for a period; it also taxed the Muslim peasantry heavily and is generally described by historians as harsh toward the Muslim majority rather than toward Hindus.

Dogra Rule and the Treaty of Amritsar (1846–1947)

Following the First Anglo-Sikh War, the British East India Company sold the territories of Jammu and Kashmir to Gulab Singh, a Dogra Rajput who had served as a Sikh governor, under the Treaty of Amritsar of March 1846, for 7.5 million Nanakshahi rupees. The resulting Dogra dynasty — Gulab Singh, Ranbir Singh, Pratap Singh, and Hari Singh — ruled as a princely state under British paramountcy until 1947. Dogra rule saw a revival of Hindu religious patronage and administrative Sanskritization, while the Muslim majority, still the great bulk of the valley's population, remained largely excluded from land ownership and state office, a grievance that fed into Kashmir's first organized Muslim political movements in the 1930s under Sheikh Abdullah.

Partition, Accession, and the First Kashmir War (1947)

At independence and partition in August 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh, ruling a Muslim-majority state, delayed a decision on accession to either India or Pakistan. An internal revolt against Dogra rule had already broken out in the Poonch region that summer. In late October 1947, Pashtun tribal militias from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province invaded the state, looting and killing as they advanced through Muzaffarabad and Baramulla — where, among other reported atrocities, several nuns and patients were killed at St. Joseph's convent and hospital — before being halted short of Srinagar. Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession to India on 26 October 1947, and Indian troops were airlifted into Srinagar the following day, opening the First Kashmir War (1947–48), which ended with a UN-brokered ceasefire in January 1949 along a line that, after the 1972 Simla Agreement, became the Line of Control.

In the Jammu region during October–November 1947, organized violence by Hindu and Sikh mobs, in which Dogra state forces were also implicated by later inquiries, killed large numbers of Muslims and drove much of the remaining Muslim population out of Jammu city and its hinterland; death-toll estimates in the historical literature vary enormously, from the low thousands to figures approaching 100,000, and the episode has never been the subject of an authoritative official inquiry.

Insurgency and the Kashmiri Pandit Exodus (1989–1990)

Kashmir remained part of India under a special constitutional status (Article 370) after 1947, its politics dominated for decades by Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference. Widespread allegations that the 1987 state assembly election was rigged are generally cited by historians as a catalyst for armed separatism: young Kashmiri Muslims who had contested and lost that election, including members of the Muslim United Front, subsequently crossed into Pakistan-administered Kashmir for training. The secular, pro-independence Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) launched the first wave of militancy from 1988–89, and was progressively overtaken in the early 1990s by Pakistan-backed Islamist groups, chiefly Hizbul Mujahideen, which favored accession to Pakistan.

Kashmiri Hindus — the Kashmiri Pandit community, a small but historically prominent minority concentrated in Srinagar and a handful of valley towns — became targets from the movement's earliest months. Tika Lal Taploo, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader, was shot dead in September 1989; Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo, who had sentenced JKLF founder Maqbool Bhat to death in an earlier case, was killed in November 1989. Through late 1989 and into January 1990, further killings, along with mosque announcements and posted notices demanding that Pandits leave, convert, or face death, precipitated a mass exodus beginning in January 1990. Estimates of the number displaced vary widely in the literature, from roughly 100,000 to several hundred thousand, reflecting disputes over the size of the pre-1990 Pandit population as well as the pace and completeness of departure; most sources agree that the great majority of the valley's Hindu population left within a few months, settling chiefly in refugee camps and resettlement colonies around Jammu and in Delhi.

Violence Through the 1990s and 2000s

Killings of the remaining Hindu, and in some cases Sikh, population continued after the main exodus, chiefly in villages and border districts. Documented incidents include the killing of seven Kashmiri Pandits at Sangrampora, Budgam district, in March 1997; the killing of 23 Kashmiri Pandits at Wandhama, Ganderbal district, in January 1998; the killing of 35 Sikhs at Chittisinghpura, Anantnag district, in March 2000, which occurred during a visit to India by US President Bill Clinton; and the killing of 24 Kashmiri Pandits at Nadimarg, Pulwama district, in March 2003, the last large-scale massacre of Pandits in the valley. Temples were also targeted for destruction or desecration through this period; a widely cited, though not independently audited, estimate holds that several hundred Hindu temples and shrines in the valley were damaged, destroyed, or abandoned between the late 1980s and early 2000s.

Since 2019

In August 2019, the Indian Parliament revoked Jammu and Kashmir's special status under Article 370 and reorganized the former state into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, effective 31 October 2019. Government schemes since 2008 have offered jobs and transit housing in the valley to Kashmiri Pandits willing to return, with limited uptake; Pandit employees under these schemes have themselves been targeted in subsequent militant attacks, including the killing of Rahul Bhat, a government employee, in Chadoora in May 2022. The great majority of the community displaced in 1990 remains settled outside the valley.

Historiography

For the medieval period, the principal narrative sources are Kalhana's Rajatarangini and its two continuations, by Jonaraja, covering events to 1459 and written under the patronage of Zain-ul-Abidin's dynasty, and by Srivara, extending the narrative to 1486, supplemented by later Persian-language chronicles such as the Baharistan-i-Shahi and Mirza Haidar Dughlat's Tarikh-i-Rashidi, which covers 16th-century Kashmir under Chak and early Mughal rule. For the 20th century, the 1947 accession and war are documented in British, Indian, and Pakistani official records and a substantial secondary literature; the events of 1989–90 and after are covered by journalistic accounts, community-authored memoirs such as Rahul Pandita's Our Moon Has Blood Clots, and academic studies, though the scale of several individual episodes, the Jammu violence of 1947 above all, remains a matter of continuing historical dispute rather than settled record.