Engaging with the Local Narrative of Hagiography in Kashmir

Abstract

Local narratives when they contradict dominant episteme of the age may not be academically respectable. They may be discussed as something curious or interesting or for purely historical reasons or as a species of antique collections dumped into the wastebasket of history. And when these are about local beliefs and mythopoetic experiences they are more incredible to the scholarly. And historians today are trained not to take note of local narratives at face value and somehow appropriate their queerness. Often people’s gullibility or hagiographer’s zeal or faith is invoked to explain what appears to be scandalous to reason or received understanding of science. Once upon a time the world of angels, fairies and djinns were part of experience or explanatory framework to which people naturally subscribed. But in the secular age it is no longer a case. All these things appear relics of a bygone age of faith. Today hagiographers too have mostly succumbed to the fashions of the age and write as if ordinary stories of ordinary men. Engaging with traditional hagiographic accounts in the face of all these epistemic shifts resulting in either skewed reading in light of what appears as distorting mirror of rationalist framework and casting doubts on the claims of hagiographers may well be questioned on account of greater sensitivity shown, in the postmodern era, to other forms of rationality that better accommodate local narrative not fitting in the Grand Narratives of Enlightenment and Secular Humanism. Taking the test case of local narrative of belief in saints and their miraculous performances in Kashmir we argue that modernist historiography as practized in Kashmir seems to be guilty of epistemic violence while applying modernist tools to a traditional culture.