Kalhana’s Rajatarangini was not merely a record of kings — it was a manifesto for how history ought to be written and why it matters
Dr Showket Ahmad Mandloo
When Kalhana began composing the Rajatarangini, he was not merely weaving political currents and narrating dynastic succession. He was articulating a theory of history. Written in the mid-12th century, the chronicle is described as the subcontinent’s first sustained historical chronicle. It inaugurated a tradition of historical writing in Kashmir that is continuous and shaped by shifts in language, sovereignty and epistemology.
However, to approach Rajatarangini merely as a repository of dynastic detail is to miss its significance and relevance. It is not only a narrative of kings; it is rather an early meditation on the ethical responsibilities of the historian and the fragile architecture of memory. Kalhana wrote at a moment of political turbulence. Courtly intrigues, factional violence, and dynastic decline were the order of the day and shaped the milieu in which Kalhana composed his chronicle. Yet, unlike bardic panegyrists celebrating their patrons uncritically, Kalhana appears to be very objective and positions himself as a reflective observer. In his prologue, he outlines a historian’s duty to avoid both malice and flattery, insisting on detachment from contemporary political passions. He maintains that the historian must be devoid of ‘raga’ [attachment] and ‘dvesha’ [hatred]— an ethical formulation that anticipates modern discussions of historical objectivity. This insistence on impartiality, though inevitably constrained by his social and ideological world, signals a striking self-consciousness about the craft of history writing. Rajatarangini draws upon earlier chronicles, inscriptions, oral traditions, and genealogical records.
Kalhana does not reproduce these sources credulously; he evaluates them and offers a contextualization of the events to fit in the historical perspective. Kalhana’s work exhibits a striking concern for chronology, corroboration, and moral evaluation. He consulted earlier chronicles, inscriptions, land grants, and oral traditions, openly acknowledging their inconsistencies. He differentiates between hearsay and credible testimony, between poetic exaggeration and plausible reconstruction and between hyperbole and historical probability. This ethical dimension distinguishes the Rajatarangini from many contemporary court chronicles across regions, where royal legitimacy often superseded critical scrutiny.
Kalhana’s willingness to critique rulers, including those proximate to his own time, destabilises the conventional assumption that premodern historiography was merely encomiastic. While he remains embedded within Brahmanical legitimation and elite perspectives, his text resists simplistic classification as propaganda. His method, as reflected in his work, reveals a nascent historical criticism and invites reflection on the historian’s ethical burden: to balance fidelity to sources with awareness of interpretive limits.
This measured realism perse does not ensure the development of history writing in the positivist sense, for Rajatarangini has a blend of quasi-history as well. Its early portions weave myth, memory, and morality into narratives of kingship. What, therefore, comes to the fore is a ‘moralised historiography.’ The Kings are judged as much by their adherence to dharma as by their administrative efficiency. For Kalhana, kingship is measured not merely by military success or territorial expansion, but by adherence to dharma.
While myth and legend find place in his account— particularly in the early books, where kings emerge from quasi-mythical antiquity—Kalhana increasingly rests his narrative on what he presents as verifiable events as he approaches his own time. As the narrative progresses toward more recent centuries, the density of detail increases. Political intrigues are rendered with psychological nuance; administrative failures are dissected; famine, corruption and factionalism receive attention. The chronicler’s gaze becomes sharper. The ethical imperative intensifies: misrule is not merely lamented but anatomised. Through this progression, Kalhana constructs a continuum from mythic origins to lived political reality, binding collective identity to documented experience; this underscores its enduring authority. The later chroniclers extended the legacy into subsequent centuries and effectively institutionalised Kalhana’s model of regional historiography. His chronicle became both a source and testament to a deep-rooted historical consciousness carried forward by Jonaraja, Srivara, Prajyabhatta, and Suka to the late medieval period. These continuations preserved the formal structure of the Rajatarangini even though the political world they narrated transformed dramatically. The medium remained Sanskrit; the world they documented was Persianate.
The historical consciousness did not collapse with regime change, but recalibrated. The recalibration is perhaps Kalhana’s most enduring lesson. History, in his conception, is not an instrument of triumphalism nor a weapon of resentment. It is an ethical discipline. In an age when historical memory is increasingly mobilised to harden identities and sanctify power, Kalhana’s insistence on detachment from raga and dvesha appears less medieval and stands as a reminder that history writing is an ethical act. He reminds us that the historian’s task, and preservation of memory, carries responsibility. To narrate is to judge; to record is to render the past with sobriety, moral seriousness, and awareness of limitation. If the twelfth-century historian could imagine such restraint amidst political instability, the question for the twenty-first century is whether we can afford to abandon it.
The writer is an Assistant Professor of History at Chandigarh University
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