A wonderful article has just been posted on scroll.in - it's by Nirupama Rao, a scholar and onetime foreign secretary of India, and is about exotic imaginings of Kashmir in the west. She looks particularly at Thomas Moore's epic poem 'Lalla Rookh' - about a Mughal princess's journey for marriage through the Himalayan foothills and to (and beyond) Kashmir.
The poem was published 200 years ago; the author had never been to, or near, Kashmir; in an age where there was a great taste for Byronic epic poetry, 'Lalla Rookh' was a huge commercial success. Nirupama Rao discusses how the poem was recreated in later decades on the stage and in song, how it has shaped a western image of Kashmir, and how it plays into other somewhat orientalist takes on the valley, right down to Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir' (at the time that number was written in the early 1970s, none of the band members had ever been to Kashmir, and it was based on a journey into the Sahara!)
And with the permission of both the author and scroll.in, the article is now reposted elsewhere on the KashmirConnected site.
The poem was published 200 years ago; the author had never been to, or near, Kashmir; in an age where there was a great taste for Byronic epic poetry, 'Lalla Rookh' was a huge commercial success. Nirupama Rao discusses how the poem was recreated in later decades on the stage and in song, how it has shaped a western image of Kashmir, and how it plays into other somewhat orientalist takes on the valley, right down to Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir' (at the time that number was written in the early 1970s, none of the band members had ever been to Kashmir, and it was based on a journey into the Sahara!)
And with the permission of both the author and scroll.in, the article is now reposted elsewhere on the KashmirConnected site.
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