Kashmir, Kashmir: Sanctum, Kingdom, Conundrum

For two thousand years, Kashmir has been coveted, conquered, celebrated and contested. Emperors have wept at leaving it. Poets have dreamed of it from afar. Armies have died for it. And the world has never stopped watching.

In this landmark history, John Keay – acclaimed author of India: A History and China: A History – traces Kashmir's extraordinary story from its mythic origins as a sacred Himalayan lake to its violent transformation into one of the twenty-first century's most dangerous flashpoints. Drawing on sources ranging from the ancient Sanskrit chronicle known as the Rajatarangini – the twelfth-century 'River of Kings' that stands as the only surviving pre-Islamic chronicle of substance in the entire Indian subcontinent – to the memoirs of Mughal emperors, the dispatches of Central Asian adventurers, the accounts of British travellers and the testimony of modern Kashmiri writers, Keay reveals a civilisation of astonishing depth and resilience.

Here are the great conquerors: Lalitaditya, the eighth-century Kashmiri king whose 'world conquest' may have stretched from Sri Lanka to the Silk Road; Akbar the Great, who spent three summers in the Valley and never forgot them; the Emperor Jahangir, who asked for nothing on his deathbed but Kashmir: 'If there is a paradise on Earth, this is it, this is it, this is it.' Here too are the forgotten figures whose stories illuminate the present: Ram Chandra Kak, the brilliant archaeologist who became Kashmir's last Pandit prime minister and paid for his principles with imprisonment and exile; Sheikh Abdullah, the 'Lion of Kashmir', who spent more years in detention than in power, yet whose shadow still falls across every political calculation in Srinagar and Delhi. And here, woven through the whole, is the Valley itself – its saffron fields and Mughal gardens, its lotus-choked lakes and ancient temples, its houseboats and martyrs' graveyards – by turns paradise and nightmare.

What is it about this place that makes it so sought after, and so fought over? Is it the accident of geography that gives it such strategic importance, poised between India, Pakistan, China and Central Asia? The intoxicating beauty that reduced emperors to poets? The sheer weight of history, which has made Kashmir the site of every imaginable conflict between faith and power, sovereignty and self-determination?

As the twelfth-century poet-historian Kalhana observed, sovereignty rests only for a while, like a bird on the tree. In Kashmir, Kashmir, John Keay shows how that bird has never stopped moving – and why the world has never stopped watching.