THE KASHMIRI BRAHMINS (PANDITS) UP TO 1930: CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE CITIES OF NORTH INDI

This study focuses upon those Kashmiri Pandits who left Kashmir at varying times and settled in the cities of North India. The Kashmiri Pandits were a small community. The Census of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh enumerated only 791 in 1891; forty-five years later, an internal community survey of all the Pandits outside Kashmir itself identified approximately 2,000. The Pandits were a highly literate community and dependent upon that literacy for their livelihood.;The introductory chapters of this study examine the conditions under which the Kashmiri Pandits departed from Kashmir and the extent to which community accounts of departure accord with a more detached historical perspective. The second part of this work follows the Pandits as they dispersed from Delhi in the twilight of Mughal imperial rule to more prosperous regional centers such as Lucknow and Lahore.;The later years of the nineteenth century were difficult years for the Pandits. Previously they had defined themselves by and assimilated themselves to the Mughal court culture, a culture which contained many Islamicate and Persianate elements. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the ideals of this culture no longer exercised commanding influence over Indian society. Simultaneously, the traditional literate elite, a composite group of both Muslim and non-Muslim Urdu speakers found their monopoly on government service challenged.;The journals of the community reflected the degree to which the Kashmiri Pandits felt vulnerable as "outsiders." They also reflected the degree to which the Pandits felt pressured by communalist Hindus as a result of those elements in their cultural heritage which came to be labeled "Islamic." As a result of changes in the environment, the Pandits inaugurated what one termed a "program of Islamicization." Even as Tej Bahadur Sapru was eulogizing the Pandits as a community which embodied the best of both Muslim and non-Muslim culture, others were joining Hindu chauvinist organizations and taking up Sanscrit. By 1930, the point at which this study ends, the cultural attributes of the Pandits were very different from what they were a century earlier.