SAE NEWS | 06 AUGUST 2026
BY – FIDATO
August 03, 2026
Introduction
Kashmiri Pandits In Kashmir’s Administration: A Historical Overview
An analysis of historical records cited by the author on community participation in governance from the 14th to 20th century.
Editor’s Note / Disclaimer
This article is published as an opinion/analysis piece with permission from the author. The views, interpretations, and conclusions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this publication. The piece relies on historical texts listed in the references. Readers are encouraged to consult the original sources and multiple historical perspectives. We welcome responses and documented counterpoints for publication.
Article:
Kashmiri Pandits never formed more than a slender four percent of the valley’s population but the weight they carried in the affairs of the land far exceeded that tiny fraction. Across centuries they moved with practised ease through the courts of successive conquerors, adapting their tongues and manners to each new master while the Muslim majority bore the full cost of occupation. Their presence proved decisive in 1947 when a Muslim-majority Kashmir found itself yoked to a Hindu-majority India, a political reversal few could have imagined without the steady leverage this community had long exercised. Even after the armed uprising of 1990 drove most of them from the valley the memory of that influence lingered as a central thread in Kashmir’s troubled history.
From birth to death a Pandit household depended on Muslim hands – midwives who delivered the children, kawjis who carried the dead to the cremation ground – but the same households refused to accept food or drink touched by those same hands. Poultry and ordinary eggs were shunned as unclean while wild fowl and the eggs of lake birds were welcomed provided they had been slaughtered according to Muslim rite. Trades regarded as lowly like cobbling pottery, corn-frying, portering boatmanship, carpentry, masonry and fruit-selling were left entirely to Muslims. A foster mother might nurse a Pandit infant, a Muslim servant might keep the household running but neither friend nor servant was permitted across the threshold of the kitchen. The community regarded itself as a superior race and therefore kept clear of occupations it deemed beneath its dignity and instead relied on the labour of the very people it held at arm’s length.
History shows that this small community repeatedly secured positions of power no matter which foreign banner flew over Kashmir. Members of the community themselves have sometimes conceded that where flattery is required, none can surpass the Pandit. Under the rule of Zain-ul-Abidin, the Brahmans already dominated the higher ranks of administration. Shri Bhatta remained in constant attendance upon the king and used that proximity to advance the interests of his community. Village administration, land settlement and agriculture rested almost entirely in their hands. Gopala Koul, Madho Koul and Ganesha Koul as chief and provincial heads of the revenue machinery filled subordinate posts with men of their own caste. Jonaraja and Srivara enjoyed royal patronage as did Sadasheo Bayu Soma Pandit, Sumitra Bhatta, Rupya Bhatta, Karpur Bhatta, Yodha Bhatta, Rupya Bhanda and Jaya Bhatta. Some were entrusted with strictly confidential diplomatic missions. So complete was their sway that the king forbade the killing of fish in certain tanks and the eating of meat on designated days. Under the later Chak rulers, Brahmans continued to serve in the administration thereby receiving land grants and watched mathas rise and villages pass into their endowment. Hussain Shah himself joined in Hindu festivals and summoned Brahmans to his court.
When Akbar’s armies extinguished Kashmir’s independence at the close of the sixteenth century, Muslim resistance to the occupation was fierce and prolonged. The emperor employed every device to win popular affection but failed. He succeeded however in binding the Brahmans to the new order. They chose to identify with the Mughal system and a fresh field of opportunity opened before them. After one of Akbar’s visits, a throng of Pandits followed him southward like flies stick to sweet. Among them was Sada Koul who later received from Jahangir and Shah Jahan the lofty titles like Itmad-ul-Saltanat, Mushir-ul-Mulk and Gam Khaar. Rent-free lands were distributed. The Brahmans were received with marked sympathy and the emperor himself took part in their religious observances.
While the Muslim majority was systematically shut out of every channel of administration and barred from military service so that its martial spirit might be broken, the defence of the frontier was entrusted to Pandits as a mark of imperial confidence. Miru Pandit commanded a section of Nur Jahan’s bodyguard. The once-powerful Muslim houses like Shah Mirs, Chaks, Magres, Rainas, Maliks and Bhats were pulled down and quickly forgotten. Persian, now the language of the court, was mastered by the Brahmans who filled virtually every administrative post and became the eyes and ears of Mughal authority in the valley. Names such as Tota Ram, Miru Pandit, Bulaqi Pandit, Makund Pandit, Pandit Mahadeo, Mahesh Shankar Das and Mukund Ram Khar recur in the records of influence. Sadanand Koul was invited to Agra while as Chander Bhan, Dina Nath Madan and Janardhan Zutshi rose high at the imperial court. The same pattern of patronage continued under Aurangzeb when the local bureaucracy remained largely in Pandit hands. Service linkages even altered family names. Gurtoos became Bahadur, certain Kouls became Bakhshis or Nigari Kouls and a branch of the Dhars adopted the surname Shah after an emperor remarked that one of their number resembled a Shah. Trade and commerce were transferred from Muslim to Hindu control. Through propaganda and persistent intercession the Brahmans secured the repeated appointment of Abu Barkat Khan as subedar. Even after the Mughal power waned the community retained its grip. At the urging of Jai Ram Bhan Mohammad Shah issued a royal decree, formally designating the Kashmiri Brahmans as Kashmiri Pandits thereby distinguishing them from the Brahmans of India. Mahanand Dar later rose to the rank of prime minister under Sukh Jivan’s brief independent interlude.
The shrewdness with which Pandit officials served their Mughal masters is illustrated by an episode in the time of Shah Jahan that gave rise to the Kashmiri saying “Darwayik malakh genzrawin” (to count the waves of the river). Ali Mardan Khan the governor employed two special servants one Muslim and one Hindu. The Muslim laboured the entire day yet received less pay than the Pandit who worked only an hour. When the Muslim petitioned for equal salary, the king replied that the request would be granted if the petitioner first counted the waves of the river and reported their number. The Muslim set out soon discovered the impossibility of the task and returned empty-handed. The Pandit was then ordered to perform the same duty. He asked for 2000 rupees and a 100 soldiers. At every turn of the river he stationed four soldiers and a toll post levying four rupees from each passing boat on the pretext that the boatmen had hindered the counting of the waves. In this manner, he collected one lakh rupees, laid the bags at the king’s feet and declared that “the waves numbered one lakh my Lord!” He was promoted to high office while the Muslim was reduced. Tradition holds that custom-houses entered Kashmir on this Pandit’s advice.
When Afghan rule replaced the Mughals, the new masters governed largely through the same intermediaries. Pandit Nand Ram Tiku became prime minister at Kabul and saw his name struck on the coinage. Families such as the Dhars, Kouls Tikkus and Saprus remained fixtures in public service. The Dhars and Tikkus openly displayed loyalty to Kabul and quarrelled with local governors over remittances of revenue. A branch of Kouls acquired the surname Jalali through Afghan service. Mahanand Pandit Dhar served as one of Governor Nooruddin Khan’s two advisers and controlled revenue collection. Kailash Pandit Dhar held the post of sahibkar. So deeply entrenched were the Pandits in the revenue machinery that Mir Hazar Khan upon becoming governor in 1793 tried to abolish the departments altogether as the only means of removing them and forbade them to study Persian. Kailas Dar and Pandit Dila Ram Quli rose to the highest rank of sahibkar equivalent to PM.
The latter later received the full title of madarulmiham from Azad Khan and gave unstinting support to a governor remembered as a veritable scourge. Zairam Bhan became diwan. When the Afghan Hindu Sukh Jeevan seized power, he appointed Mahanand Dhar as the prime minister. At Dhar’s instigation,Azaan was banned, cow slaughter forbidden, Muslim soldiers disbanded and replaced by Sikhs and Punjabis. Dila Ram Quli now prime minister under Azad Khan backed that governor’s merciless methods and instigated the Shia-Sunni riots of 1786 before meeting his end at Khanyar. When the relatively tolerant Atta Mohammad Khan declared independence and admitted Kashmiri Muslims into the administration, a party of Pandits travelled to Kabul secured his removal by a strong military expedition and later procured the recall and imprisonment of Abdullah Khan through the influence of Nand Ram. A later Pandit chronicler could even brand a local jagirdar who rebelled against the Afghans as a traitor.
As Afghan authority crumbled, Birbal Dhar and a circle of Pandits already looked towards the Sikh court at Lahore. Out of favour with the last Afghan governor l, Azim Khan Dhar and his son Raja Kak made their way clandestinely to Lahore with the assistance of Gulab Singh of Jammu. There Dhar persuaded the reluctant Ranjit Singh to launch a fresh invasion. On 20 June 1819 the Pandit and his companions entered Srinagar in triumph beside the Sikh army. Lal Koul another participant in the conquest later commanded the Rawalpindi Brigade and governed Multan. The 27 years of Sikh rule that followed were marked by open physical economic and religious aggression against the Muslim population. Mosques were locked or converted into stables and granaries, the call to prayer was silenced and Jama Masjid remained closed for twenty-three years. The aggressive general Phoola Singh prepared to train a cannon on the Khanqah-i-Mualla – the most revered Muslim shrine of the old city – and was restrained only at the last moment by Birbal Dhar’s warning of the danger of widespread unrest. Marriages and divorces were taxed and for every such ceremony, the patwari, invariably a Kashmiri Pandit, exacted an additional ‘anna, as rasm-e-patwari.
The defeat of the Sikhs by the British merely exchanged one tyranny for another. In 1846 the entire country, its people and its resources were sold by the British for seven and a half million rupees to Gulab Singh, described by contemporary observers as one of the meanest, most avaricious and unprincipled men ever to occupy a throne. Vigne calculated that the six hundred thousand inhabitants had been valued at twenty-five shillings a head, the most extensive transaction in the modern slave trade. The century of Dogra rule that followed was a continuous record of suffering for the Muslim majority. Gulab Singh declared that since he had purchased the land, he alone was its proprietor and hence cultivators and zamindars became mere tenants-at-will. They were treated as beasts of burden. Through it all, the Kashmiri Pandits remained comfortably placed and continued to serve as instruments of repression. The institution of Begaar (forced labour) that sent countless able-bodied Muslims to perish on mountain tracks and feed the vultures was administered by Pandit officials. Pandits were exempt. Muslim cultivators working on the lands of Pandits, Sikhs or the Dharmarth department were likewise spared. The revenue officers who selected the victims for corvée were callous in the extreme.
Kashmiri speech itself preserves the memory of that experience in a series of bitter proverbs like “Bata kaar gata kaar” (the Pandit’s work is dark work), “Bata yaar berozgar” (a Pandit is your friend only when out of employment), “Kani wasya poas Bata bani doas” (finding a friend in a Pandit is as impossible as skinning a rock) and “Bata chhu grata” (the Pandit is like a grinding mill).
The very title Pandit became synonymous with “Mahrah” – the shortened form of Maharaja by which Muslims addressed members of the community. In the early twentieth century when Hindu officers from the Punjab began to compete for administrative posts, the Pandits resisted fiercely and in 1927 forced the Dogra ruler to enact the State Subject Law that closed government employment to non-State subjects. They also sought and obtained the support of the British Residency against their own Hindu maharaja. British officers encouraged them and enlisted them in large numbers in the departments under their control.
Thus from the Mughal Afghan Sikh and Dogra occupations, the same pattern repeated itself. A small community convinced of its own superiority attached itself to whichever foreign power held the valley, filled the offices of revenue and administration and prospered through siding with the tyrants while the Muslim majority faced dispossession, forced labour and the systematic denial of political voice fir resisting foreign occupationa. It is hardly surprising that the same Pandits now enjoy numerous privileges and are appointed in different central and state agencies to keep and eye and effectively control the majority muslim population.
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References:
Hindu Rulers Muslim Subjects by Mridu Rai
Kashmir: Exposing the Myth Behind the Narrative by Khalid Bashir Ahmad
Khulasaatul Tawareekh by Saiffuddin
The Valley of Kashmir by Walter Lawrence
A History of Kashmir by P.N.K Bamzai
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Source: FIDATO / X @tequieremos
