Kashmir & Ladakh

A Himalayan valley and the high desert beyond it, held by three states and claimed in full by two. Kashmir was a centre of Sanskrit learning and Shaivite philosophy for a thousand years, and Buddhism reached Tibet partly through it; Ladakh, over the passes, is culturally Tibetan and was an independent kingdom until 1834. Islam arrived in the valley in the fourteenth century largely through Sufi preaching rather than conquest, producing a syncretic tradition and a Muslim majority alongside a Hindu Pandit minority prominent out of proportion to its size. The Mughals took the valley in 1586 and treated it as a garden retreat. In 1846 the British sold it, literally, to the Dogra ruler Gulab Singh for seventy-five lakh rupees under the Treaty of Amritsar, creating a Hindu dynasty over a Muslim population. That arrangement produced the crisis of 1947, when the maharaja hesitated, Pakistani tribesmen invaded, and he acceded to India in exchange for military help. The war that followed left a ceasefire line that is still the Line of Control. Three further wars, a UN plebiscite promised and never held, an insurgency from 1989, and the flight of most of the Pandit community followed. India revoked the state's special autonomy under Article 370 in 2019. China holds Aksai Chin. The glaciers here feed the Indus. Srinagar and Jammu serve as summer and winter capitals. Leh sits above three thousand metres. The Siachen glacier is the highest battlefield in the world. Kashmiri shawl weaving gave English the word cashmere.

• Existed: 1300 CE – present
• Type: Entity