Tarikh-i-Kashmir explained

The Tarikh-i-Kashmir (History of Kashmir) refers to several history books of Kashmir's Sultanate period, some of them lost and partially used as sources for the others.^[1]

Lost sources

Earlier lost sources include;^[2]

• History of Mullah Ahmad Kashmiri (lost)
• History of Mullah Nadiri (lost)

Use of Mullah Nadiri in Ahmadi texts

The Ahmadi writer Khwaja Nazir Ahmad in his advocacy of evidence for Jesus in India (1952) produced a photograph of a page in a folio he had tried to purchase in 1946 which he identified as being from Mullah Nadri.^[3] The folio is now lost and no identification of the document had been made by academic sources. Nazir Ahmad speculates that the Hindu text mentioned in the text in the 1946 photograph identifying Yuz Asaf with Jesus might have been the Bhavishya Purana. However that part of the text of the Bhavishya Purana dates from the British colonial era and does not mention Yuz Asaf, only Jesus and Mohammed.

Surviving histories

The surviving contemporary histories of the Sultanate are:

• Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Sayyid Ali completed in 1579;
• Tarikh-i-Kashmir by an anonymous writer (Aumer 287) written in 1590;
• Baharistan-i-Shahi, also anonymous, written in the time of Jahangir;
• Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Hasan b. Ali Kashmiri also written in the time of Jahangir;
• Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Haidar Malik Chaduara completed in 1620–21.

Other histories of Kashmir are eighteenth and nineteenth century abridgements of the above works.

Notes and References

1. Encyclopaedic Historiography of the Muslim World - Page 530 NK Singh, Nagendra Kr. Singh, Abida Samiuddin - 2004 "Thus the histories of the Sultanate period are the Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Sayyid Ali completed in 1579; the Tarikh-i-Kashmir by an anonymous writer (Aumer 287) written in 1590; the Baharistan-i-Shahi, also anonymous, written in the time of Jahangir; the Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Hasan b. Ali Kashmiri also written in the time of Jahangir; the Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Haidar Malik completed in 1620-21. The other histories of Kashmir, besides being abridgements of the above works, were written in the eighteenth and nineteenth .."
2. Krishan Lal Kalia -Eminent Personalities Of Kashmir 1997 - Page 49 "The precision of his dates could be critically cross checked had the history of Mullah Ahmed or Mullah Nadri been available as both the documents are lost in the womb of time. The chronology of Persian chronicles is not reliable as they have ..."
3. [Khwaja Nazir Ahmad]