Frozen in turbulence for nearly 15 years, Kashmir seems defined by its recent history. And 1989 is the line that divides the much-loved tourist cliche from the no less familiar epithet ‘paradise lost’. ‘Before Militancy’ from ‘After Militancy’. If you are fortunate enough to visit Srinagar you will certainly feel the tragedy of the present more keenly. The city bears many scars as well as the unnerving (and sometimes reassuring) presence of many, many armed men. And yet, as you walk the streets, paddle through the backwaters of the lake or down the Jhelum, your perspective will change as you sense a more complex continuum. The bowl of the valley is too large for the dismal tale of militancy and military repression alone. It’s brimming, of course, with natural beauty and with faith. But best of all, it’s brimming with history. The beauty is indifferent to human problems and faith is too often at the root of them. But the history, if you read and see enough of it, is full of beauty, faith and intelligence.

If you like complexity, that is. If you are reassured by the knowledge that the powerful are sometimes good, that the pious can be evil, and that often it’s the other way round. If you can delight in the knowledge that in 1320 the Ladakhi Buddhist prince Rinchin would become the first Muslim king of Kashmir. That the relentless iconoclast Sikandar Butshikan would father the secularist Prince Charming, Badshah Zain-ul-abidin (1420-1470). That in 1665, Aurangzeb would come here to unburden his guilt on the shoulder of a flamboyant Brahmin ascetic, Rishi Pir, for having executed the nudist Armenian-Jewish-Sufi Sarmad. Kashmir is full of these stories, and the monuments that make them manifest. The comforts of history.

Aurangzeb was comforted too. Never mind, Rishi Pir told him, Sarmad was too great a man to care about life or death.