Between Myth, Memory and History: Persian Texts and the Making of the ‘Tomb of Jesus’ in Kashmir

Abstract

The site of Rozabal in Srinagar, Kashmir, locally called the burial place of a nabīʼ (prophet), is famously known as the Tomb of Jesus. This paper analyses portrayals of the site in two well-known Persian texts from Kashmir, Azam Dedmari’s mid eighteenth century Wāqiʻāt-i Kashmir (Events of Kashmir) and Hassan Khuihami’s late nineteenth century Asrār-ul Aḵẖyār (Secrets of the Pious). We seek to demonstrate how the bringing together of the oral and textual narratives into a genre of historical chronicles by the two authors played a critical role in mapping the site of Rozabal onto the larger canvas of what Nile Green has termed as a ‘sacred geography’ of the region. We argue that the making of Rozabal as an Islamic shrine presents a perfect case of the Persian texts creating sacred geographies at the intersection of myth, memory and history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s claims about Jesus’s burial in the shrine and the subsequent undying debates between his proponents and opponents revolved around reinterpretations of Wāqiʻāt and Asrār’s textual descriptions of the site, demonstrating the renewed lives of these texts in modern contexts.