Iqwat Foundation

Kashmir — A History Timeline

Five thousand years
of a homeland.

Kashmir is older than most countries. Older than most religions. Older than the word ‘history’ itself in most languages that try to describe it.

Scroll to walk the timeline

The story in one minute

Five moments that shaped the valley.

Before 3000 BCE – 600 BCE

The Valley Begins

The lake of Satisar drains. The sage Kashyapa consecrates the land. Neolithic people at Burzahom, near today's Srinagar, build circular pit-homes and farm wheat and barley — 3000 BCE.

Read the chapter 625 CE – 855 CE

The Empire of Martand

Emperor Lalitaditya Muktapida rules a kingdom stretching from Punjab to Central Asia. He commissions the Martand Sun Temple — still a wonder in ruin — and makes Kashmir a magnet for scholars from across Asia.

Read the chapter 850 CE – 1200 CE

Abhinavagupta, Kalhana, and the Mind of Kashmir

Abhinavagupta writes the Tantraloka. Kashmir Shaivism — a non-dual philosophy of consciousness — becomes one of India's great intellectual traditions. Kalhana completes the Rajatarangini, India's first true historical chronicle.

Read the chapter 1200 CE – 1500 CE

Lal Ded, Nund Rishi, and Budshah

Lal Ded, the barefoot mystic, composes her vakhs in Kashmiri — the first great poetry in the language. The 14th century brings difficult chapters. Under Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, the 'Budshah', a golden age of tolerance.

Read the chapter 1990 – Today

And the Journey Since

From one-room transit camps in Jammu to homes in Dubai, London, Toronto, and San Francisco — the community re-rooted itself. Today, a new generation asks where it came from. Iqwat was born in that moment.

Read the chapter

The full timeline

Take your time. Each era opens into its own chapter.

Nothing here is required reading. Dip in where your curiosity pulls you.

I

Before 3000 BCE – 600 BCE

Origins — The Lake, the Sage, the First Hearths

Kashmir begins, in its own self-telling, as a lake — Satisar, 'the lake of Sati'. In the Nilamata Purana, the demon Jalodbhava terrorises the people, and the sage Kashyapa, grandson of Brahma, drains the waters near present-day Baramulla so that a habitable valley appears. The name 'Kashmir' is glossed by the Sanskritist Christopher Snedden as a contraction of 'Kashyapa Mira' — Kashyapa's lake — and by older grammarians as 'ka' (water) plus 'shimeera' (to desiccate), 'land dried from water'.

Geology agrees on the broad outline: the Kashmir Valley sits on the bed of a Pleistocene lake whose sediments, the karewas, still shape the soil today. When the waters receded, people came.

The earliest confirmed inhabitants lived at Burzahom, 16 km north-east of today's Srinagar, between roughly 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE. Archaeologists from the Archaeological Survey of India, excavating between 1960 and 1971, uncovered something unusual: circular and oval pit-dwellings dug into the compact karewa soil, reached by wooden ladders, with hearths at the base. The Burzahom people grew wheat, barley, and lentils; hunted and gathered; and left behind tools of bone and antler and the earliest engraved stones of the region. The site was nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status in 2014.

II

600 BCE – 600 CE

The Ancient Age — Kingdoms, Shrines, Scholars

By the time the Buddha walked in Bihar, Kashmir was already woven into the civilisational fabric of the subcontinent. The emperor Ashoka, in the 3rd century BCE, is credited in Kalhana's Rajatarangini with founding Srinagari — the first city on the site of modern Srinagar — and with bringing Buddhism to the valley.

III

625 CE – 855 CE

The Golden Age — Lalitaditya and the Karkotas

Between roughly 625 and 855 CE, the Karkota dynasty built Kashmir into an empire. The apex came under Lalitaditya Muktapida (r. c. 724–760 CE), whom Kalhana would later call a 'world conqueror'. Lalitaditya's armies reached the Punjab plains, the Deccan frontier, and pushed back Arab incursions from the west; his court invited scholars, architects, and craftsmen from across Asia.

IV

850 CE – 1200 CE

The Age of Ideas — Shaivism, Poetics, and Rajatarangini

If the Karkotas gave Kashmir an empire, the centuries that followed gave it a mind. Between the 9th and 12th centuries, Kashmir became one of the two or three most important centres of Sanskrit scholarship in the world.

V

1200 CE – 1500 CE

Saints, Sultans, and a Renaissance

The 14th century was a century of saints and sultans. In 1320, in Pandrethan near Srinagar, a Kashmiri Pandit girl was born who would change the soul of the valley. Her given name was Padmavati. History knows her as Lal Ded — Lalla the grandmother — or Lalleshwari. At twelve, she was married into a difficult household. At twenty-six, she walked out, renouncing the world.

VI

1500 CE – 1947 CE

The Later Centuries — Mughal, Afghan, Sikh, Dogra

From the 16th century, Kashmir passed through a sequence of outside rulers. The Mughals took the valley in 1586 under Akbar; Jahangir, enchanted by its gardens, began the Shalimar and Nishat Bagh — paradises of terraced water that remain the visual signature of Srinagar today. Under Aurangzeb's reign, Kashmiri Pandits who sought refuge at the Mughal court influenced Delhi's scholarship and administration for a century.

VII

1947 CE – 1989 CE

Modern Kashmir and the Community

In October 1947, Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Union of India. Across the next four decades, the community continued to live the life it had built — doctors in Srinagar's hospitals, teachers in its schools, pandits at its weddings, shopkeepers in Habba Kadal and Rainawari, hundreds of small mohallas carrying the rhythm of Kashmiri Pandit domestic and religious life. Wazwaan was still eaten cross-legged. Shivaratri — 'Herath' — was still celebrated the Kashmiri Pandit way, with walnuts, fish, and the soft chant of Shiva Sutras. The Sharada script was kept alive in horoscopes and hand-copied prayer books.

VIII

1989 – 1990

January 1990 — The Exodus

In the final months of 1989, as a violent insurgency took hold in the Kashmir Valley, the Kashmiri Pandit community — roughly 120,000 to 140,000 people — found itself the focus of targeted violence. Prominent community members were killed through the autumn and winter. On the night of 19 January 1990, public loudspeakers across Srinagar and other towns broadcast calls directed at the community. By the morning, departure had begun.

IX

1990 – Today

The Diaspora Era and the Revival

The three decades after 1990 were, for most of the community, a long rebuilding. First in Jammu's one-room transit camps. Then in Delhi and Bombay and Pune. Then Dubai and London and Toronto and Melbourne and San Francisco. Kashmiri Pandit doctors, engineers, academics, civil servants, entrepreneurs, and artists re-rooted themselves across the world, carrying the same language, the same recipes, the same names for their children.

You are part of this timeline.

Every Kashmiri Pandit family carries a piece of this story in its own language, its own kitchen, its own memory. Iqwat is the place where those pieces come together.

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Together Wherever Forever.

Sources & further reading

Every date and name above is sourced.

We favour scholarly encyclopedias, government-stewarded sites, and literary foundation pages. If you spot a missing source or a more authoritative one, please write to us.

Origins, Satisar, and Burzahom

Karkota Dynasty and Lalitaditya

Sharada Script

Kashmir Shaivism and Abhinavagupta

Rajatarangini and Kalhana

Lal Ded / Lalleshwari

Sultanate Period — Sikandar and Zain-ul-Abidin

Kashmiri Pandits and the 1990 Exodus