A homecoming, wherever you live.

Kashmiri Pandits are believed to be aboriginal to the Kashmir Valley — the original inhabitants. We belong to the Saraswat Brahmin community, named either for the river Saraswati on whose banks the lineage settled in the Vedic age, or for the goddess Saraswati, patron of learning. Pandit Anand Koul, writing in 1924, was emphatic that "there are no chronicled records of Pandits having come to Kashmir from somewhere else" — we have always been here.

The word Pandita, in Sanskrit, means "a cultured personage." In Prakrit we are called Bhatta or Batta — "wonderful researchers." Both names tell you the same thing: this is a community that has, for two thousand years, been organised around learning.

Tradition holds that our community originally descended from six gotras — Dattatreya, Bhardwaja, Paledeva, Mudgalya, Dhaumyayana, and Aupamanyava — six original sages whose spiritual lineage we still trace today. Through intermarriage across the centuries, those six grew into 199 gotras. The names we still carry — Bhat, Kaul, Raina, Dhar, Tikku, Mattoo, Bamzai, Warikoo, Zutshi — are the leaves of that one tree.

And within the community, three working roles emerged across the centuries: the gor (Sanskrit guru) — the priestly class, devoted to ritual and the sacred texts; the joytishi — the astrologers and scholars, keepers of Sharada-script horoscopes and the philosophical traditions; and the karkun — the worldly practitioners who served as administrators, scribes, and professionals. Three hands of one community.