Kashmir

Kashmir is a high enclosed valley whose religious history is out of all proportion to its size. Buddhism was established there early and strongly, and Kashmiri scholars carried Sanskrit Buddhist texts north into Central Asia and Tibet; tradition places a major Buddhist council in the region under the Kushan king Kanishka.

Its most distinctive contribution is a school of Shaiva philosophy developed between the ninth and eleventh centuries, usually called Kashmir Shaivism, whose leading figures are Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. Against a Vedanta that treats the world as illusory, this tradition holds that reality is a single conscious power which manifests the universe as an act of free self-expression, and that recognition of one's identity with that consciousness is liberation. Abhinavagupta's writing covers ritual, philosophy, and aesthetics, and his theory of aesthetic experience as a form of the same recognition remains influential in Indian literary theory independently of its theology.

Islam arrived from the fourteenth century and took a local form. The Rishi order, associated with Nuruddin Nurani, drew on the ascetic patterns already present in the valley, and shrine veneration became central to Kashmiri Muslim practice in a way that later reformist currents have contested. The shrine of Hazratbal in Srinagar, which holds a relic attributed to the Prophet, is the most prominent of them.

Kashmir has been contested between India and Pakistan since 1947, and the religious life of the valley cannot be described apart from that, because access to the sites is itself administered as a security question.

The Amarnath cave, high in the mountains southeast of Srinagar, holds an ice formation that grows and shrinks with the season and is venerated as a linga. The pilgrimage to it lasts several weeks each summer, draws hundreds of thousands of people, and is run by a statutory board created by legislation in 2000. The route passes through militarised country and the yatra travels under heavy protection, in convoys, with the road closed to other traffic. Pilgrims have been attacked more than once.

A dispute in 2008 over transferring forest land to the shrine board for pilgrim facilities produced mass protests in the valley and counter-protests in Jammu, and the order was withdrawn and then partly reinstated. The episode showed how a question about a few dozen hectares becomes a question about demography and control.

The Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu is governed by a similar board created in 1988 and receives even larger numbers. Both cases show a pattern the atlas records elsewhere too: where a shrine sits inside a political dispute, the state ends up managing the pilgrimage, and the management becomes part of the dispute.