Orientalism and the Invention of Kashmiri Religion(s)

The sordid research process behind the Lallā-Vākyāni, the first major English translation of poetry attributed to the fourteenth-century saint Lal Ded, reveals strategies employed by George Grierson, Lionel Barnett, and Mukund Ram Shastri to recast Lal Ded and the cultural heritage of Kashmir as exclusively Hindu. Contradicting the earliest depictions of Lal Ded in sixteenth-century Persian hagiographies, the Lallā-Vākyāni was instrumental to the modern invention of Kashmiri ?aiva Hinduism as the true religion and culture of Kashmir completely devoid of any connection—religious, historical, or social—with Islam, simultaneously serving Orientalist agendas and politics of the ?ogrā court.