International Journal of History

Author(s): Haroon Rashid

Abstract: The Nāga tradition of early Kashmir has long oscillated across the registers of myth, memory, and history. Conventional scholarship has often reduced this discourse to a simplistic binary of myth versus reality, privileging reality as truth while relegating myth to the realm of fiction or illusion. In contrast, recent historiographical approaches recognize myth as a valid form of truth, with memory functioning as the crucial conduit through which such truths are sustained, reshaped, and transmitted over time. Viewed through this lens, the Nāga tradition emerges not merely as a mythological residue, but as a multilayered cultural memory embedded within Kashmirs historical consciousness. Early textual tradition of Kashmir portrays the Nāgas both as serpentine deities inhabiting springs and as an early tribe. Their very existence has generated persistent scholarly debate: one school grounds their presence in literary works as an early belief system, whereas another dismisses it due to the paucity of archaeological evidence. These tensions reveal how the Nāga discourse has been continually reframed by shifting ideological, social, and political concerns. This paper seeks to revisit the Nāga tradition through the framework of connected history, situating it at the intersection of myth, memory, and history in order to illuminate its enduring place within the cultural imagination of early Kashmir.

DOI: 10.22271/27069109.2025.v7.i12a.586

Pages: 32-36 | Views: 347 | Downloads: 242

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