Mission Kashmir to discover Sanskrit

The Human Resource Development Ministry too has a Mission Kashmir. The ministry’s Rs 1-crore, five-volume project will reconstruct Kash...

The Human Resource Development Ministry too has a Mission Kashmir. The ministry’s Rs 1-crore, five-volume project will reconstruct Kashmir’s literary and cultural history and its Sanskrit past.

The project is being jointly done by the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL), Department of Higher Education, HRD Ministry and the Kashmir University. The focus of the mission, however, seems to be Kashmiri’s link with Sanskrit, a language HRD Minster Murli Manohar Joshi is obsessed with.

In fact, a note prepared by the NCPUL says as much: ‘‘A majority of Sanskrit scholars of India to whom legitimately can be attributed a new thinking on theory of literature, interpretation and aesthetics belonged to Kashmir’’.

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So, efforts of the reconstruction project, the NCPUL’s note adds, will be ‘‘to link the present Kashmiri (language) to its glorious Sanskrit past and evolution of the language through the magnificent persian-arabic (spelt in lower case) period up to modern Kashmir will be the main focus of the project.’’

The NCPUL Director M. Hamidullah Bhat says: ‘‘Our mandate is to emphasis the continuity and to analyse why the glorious flow of Kashmiri literary history got interrupted in the post-Independence era. The fact that Kashmir was neither made integrate fully with the new Indian state nor allowed to assert its distinctive regional identity, could have resulted in the downslide.’’

The NCPUL claims that the project has received backing from Kashmir-watchers and scholars both in Srinagar and Delhi. ‘‘They apprehend that in case the continuity in the history of literature is not reconstructed, there could be a huge heritage loss not only to Kashmir, but to the Indian composite culture as a whole.’’

The Kashmir University is in the process of identifying scholars and historians who will be involved in writing the five-volumes on history of Kashmiri literature, Sanskrit literature, Urdu literature, Persian literature and Arabic literature in Kashmir. A workshop for the project will begin in Kashmir University from Monday.