Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir

by Rahul Pandita

The eleventh century Pandit poet Bilhana had a secret affair with a king’s daughter. When it was discovered, he was thrown into prison and ordered to be executed by beheading. Even while facing the prospect of execution, he wrote poetry. It was in the darkness of prison that he wrote his Chaurapanchasika (The Collection of Fifty Verses by a Love Thief). Many centuries earlier, Kashmiri scholars made immense contributions to Buddhism, which came to Kashmir with the emperor Asoka who extended his rule over Kashmir around 250 BC. It was in Kashmir that Buddhist scriptures were written in Sanskrit for the first time. The revered monk Gunavarman, who belonged to a royal family of Kashmir from the fifth century AD, refused the throne when it was offered to him upon the king’s death as he had no interest in wordly matters, wishing only to spread the teachings of the Buddha. He travelled to Ceylon, Java and China as well, propagating Buddhism. It was Kumarajiva, a Buddhist monk, whose father was a Kashmiri Pandit, who translated the Buddhist Lotus Sutra into Chinese in 406 AD. Guru Padmasambhava, or Rinpoche, who is also referred to as the Second Buddha, spent time in Kashmir, drinking from its knowledge reservoir. A Pandit scholar, Ratnavaja, was assigned the task of rebuilding the circular terrace of the Bsam-yas monastery in central Tibet, which was burnt down in the later part of the tenth century. In the early eleventh century, a female Pandit scholar called Lakshmi travelled...

monotheistic religion. There is nothing that reflects this melding more than a vaakh by Lal Ded, Kashmir’s revered poetess-saint: Shiv chhuy thali’e thali’e rozaan Mo zaan Hyon’d tey Musalmaan God pervades every particle, every being Don’t distinguish between a Hindu and a Muslim

From 1752 onwards, the Valley slipped into the terrible misfortune of being ruled by Afghans for almost seven decades. In his book The Valley of Kashmir, Walter R. Lawrence writes of one of the Afghan governors, Assad Khan: It was his practice to tie up the Pandits, two and two, in grass sacks and sink them in the Dal lake. As an amusement, a pitcher filled with ordure would be placed on a Pandit’s head and Musalmans would pelt the pitcher with stones till it broke, the unfortunate Hindu being blinded with filth. During the rule of another governor, Atta Muhammad Khan, Lawrence writes: Any Musalman who met a Pandit would jump on his back, and take a ride.

In 1948, the Kashmiri political leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who had been a strong opponent of Dogra rule in Kashmir, made his pact with India by standing next to Jawaharlal Nehru and reciting a Persian couplet: ‘Mann tu shudi, tu mann shudi, Ta kas na goyed, Man degram tu degri.’ (I became you and you became me, so nobody can think of us as separate.)