Brahma's Curse: Facets of Political and Social Violence in Premodern Kashmir.

• Author: Nemec, John
• Position: Book review

Brahma's Curse: Facets of Political and Social Violence in Premodern Kashmir. By WALTER SLAJE. Studia Indologica Universitatis Halensis, vol. 13. Halle an der Saale: UNIVERSITATSVERLAG HALLE-WlTTENBERG, 2019. Pp. viii + 53. [euro]48.

The present volume--in fact a mere pamphlet, published however in an elegant hardback--is comprised of two short chapters, each of twenty-two pages. The first is entitled "A Glimpse into the Happy Valley's Unhappy Past: Violence and Brahmin Warfare in Pre-Mughal Kashmir," the second "What Does it Mean to Smash an Idol? Iconoclasm in Medieval Kashmir as Reflected in Contemporaneous Sanskrit Sources." The former prints a lecture delivered at Harvard University in March of 2018, the latter one at the University of Tokyo in March of 2019. Both examine social and political life in Kashmir's pre-Muslim antiquity, with the explicit goal of putting "the picture of premodern realities of life in Kashmir a bit into perspective" (p. viii).

The perspective Slaje offers is one of the Kashmir Valley not as a "happy" place, but as a society and polity beset by "social misery, disasters, violence and war" (p. vii). Thus the title of this item, which refers to a popular myth that Brahma cursed the people of the Valley, a curse, as Slaje notes, of perennial mention in Kashmir. The myth of the malediction is related as told by Sahib Ram (d. 1872), who in turn drew from (unpublished) mahatmyas, among them the Amaresvaratirthamahatmya and the Kapatamunimahatmya, as well as, perhaps, the much-discussed Nllamatapurana (see pp. 8-9 n. 48). A king, the story goes, inadvertently served the human flesh of a secretly murdered Brahmin to others, when in fact a demon deceived that king so as to effect the same. The curse that the Valley's Brahmins cast on the king was consequently turned by Brahma back onto them, with interminable consequences. Indeed, as Slaje notes, from Sahib Ram's perspective it was Brahma's curse that "as a sort of maximum damage to the valley... also caused the Islamization" (p. 9).

The particular value of Brahma's Curse lies in its point of view. Slaje is right that some corrective is needed to balance the picture of Kashmir that is intimated (though in my view inadvertently) by the primary foci of the relevant extant scholarship, which often, though by no means exclusively, privileges intellectual history and examines the contents of Kashmiri philosophical and literary works at the expense of any robust...