Alien Natives...

However, there is one thing. I saw that two of the authors in the previous comment have suggested that, what they like to call, the aboriginals of Kashmir are the Kashmiri Pundits and the Kashmiri Muslims, “ the non-state subjects”, “all of them”, are the invaders or settlers who came from outside. Certainly, due to the forgetful nature of time, there exists no empirical evidence, which these authors can produce, to support this surmise. But we can, however, try to theorize taking into account certain known facts and experiences of other cultures. As far as “mythology” goes, I remember reading somewhere that it was Kashyp Rishi (the word Kashmir apparently derived from his name) a scholar from India who traveled north in search of greater truth or some such thing and finally reached the valley. After killing all the “demons” (Jalad Bhava, the leader of demons translates into “Water-Demon”), who might as well have been the local populace, decided to settle there along with his followers. This might give us a picture of who might be the “aboriginals” and who the foreigners in the Kashmir. It usually happens that whenever invaders come and settle in a place, the local population does all it can to distance itself from such invaders. This might explain the overnight conversion of the entire Kashmiri population to Islam. It is always the higher class, the ruling class that rejects change and tries to maintain status quo and in turn retain the power they have over the lower strata of the society. Maybe this is the reason why the decedents of Kashyp Rishi didn’t convert to Islam and preferred to carry on with the religion passed on to them by their forefathers. Kashmiri Pundits have always been the more influential, more educated class in Kashmir, a fact that they should be proud of. But one has to wonder why this distinction cuts across two criterions. Why one set of people were, both more powerful and at the same time of a particular faith? The only “logical” (we are famous for that, aren’t we?) conclusion can be drawn is that it is Kashmiri Pundits who are the decedents of foreign settlers and maybe that’s the reason why they find it so easy to dismiss every, political, historical and cultural, peculiarity of Kashmir and identify themselves with the Indian Dominion.