SRINAGAR: Ancient Kashmir may have been a land of elephants, horses, cattle, tigers, lions, bears and a remarkable variety of birds and reptiles, but in the Nīlamata Purāṇa it was conspicuously a land without cats. A new study argues that this apparent absence tells us less about the animals that actually lived in Kashmir than about the animals humans considered important enough to record.
The study, No Cat’s Land”: The Animal World of Kashmir as Seen in the Nīlamata Purāṇa, has been authored by Huaiyu Chen of Arizona State University, USA, and published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies in 2026.
Chen’s argument turns the conventional reading of an ancient text on its head. The Nīlamata Purāṇa, generally dated by contemporary philologists to between the early seventh and mid-ninth centuries CE, was principally concerned with religious beliefs, rituals and the sacred calendar of Kashmir. Animals consequently appear in it not because the compiler was attempting to produce a catalogue of local fauna, but because animals had functions within the religious and social world being described.
That distinction is crucial. The animals remembered by the text were, in large measure, animals that mattered to humans. Cows, horses and goats were particularly prominent in ritual offerings, while elephants and horses had an additional significance as instruments of political and military power. The study finds that animals therefore occupied several worlds simultaneously: they connected humans with gods through sacrifice, supported agriculture and production, and helped establish social and economic status.
The Nīlamata Purāṇa presents Kashmir as a richly populated ecological landscape. Its Kashmir mandala contained valleys, hills and snow-covered mountains, with rice and wheat cultivation in the lowlands and numerous animal habitats across the varied terrain. The text speaks of milk cows, horses and elephants, as well as venomous snakes, tigers, water buffaloes, bears and other wild animals.
Its list of animals associated with divine mounts is particularly revealing. Bulls, buffaloes, horses, elephants, lions, tigers, deer, goats, sheep, wild boars and hares appear alongside crocodiles, tortoises and snakes, while peacocks, swans, cranes, partridges and roosters represent the birds. Chen argues that although these associations belong to the realm of religious imagination, they were not necessarily detached from the real ecology known to people in ancient Kashmir.
The prominence of cattle is even more striking. The paper finds that cows were a major material resource and that the religious language of the Nīlamata Purāṇa repeatedly used cattle as a measure of merit. Various pilgrimages, sacred baths and religious acts were assigned the equivalent merit of tens, hundreds or even thousands of cows. Cattle also supported agriculture, while sheep and goats point to the importance of pastoral and wool-producing activities.
Horses and elephants occupied a different but equally important position. The text prescribes rituals for caring for and protecting horses and elephants, suggesting that they were not merely sacrificial objects. Horses and elephants were essential resources in political and economic life, particularly because horses were associated with armed power and elephants with royal warfare and transportation.
The study also points to an important limitation in reading ancient texts as ecological records. The Nīlamata Purāṇa was fundamentally anthropocentric: animals became visible in history when they entered human activities. Animals that had no obvious religious, economic or political significance could simply disappear from the written record.
This explains the curious case of the cat.
The Nīlamata Purāṇa does not mention either domestic or wild cats, leading Chen to describe its Kashmir as a “No Cat’s Land”. But the author cautions that textual silence cannot be treated as proof of zoological absence. Archaeological evidence indicates that domestic cats existed elsewhere in South Asia, while later sources unmistakably place cats within the cultural landscape of Kashmir.
One of the most intriguing examples comes from the nineteenth-century Kashmiri folklore collected by British scholar J Hinton Knowles. His Folk-Tales of Kashmir, published in 1888, contains a story called The Cat Who Became Queen, in which a palace cat becomes entangled in a royal succession story and is ultimately transformed into a woman through divine intervention. For Chen, the tale is significant not merely for its fantasy but because the cat, absent from the Nīlamata Purāṇa, has now entered the recorded cultural world of Kashmir.
The transition from silence to visibility becomes still clearer in the accounts of European travellers and naturalists. British explorer Godfrey Thomas Vigne, whose Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo, the Countries adjoining the Mountain-Course of the Indus, and the Himalaya, North of the Panjab was published in 1842 by Henry Colburn in London, recorded a much wider animal world. His observations included Kashmir stag, bears, leopards, wildcats, jackals, foxes, otters, flying squirrels and numerous birds.
Vigne’s Kashmir was therefore considerably more zoologically crowded than the Kashmir that can be reconstructed from the Nīlamata Purāṇa. He described wildcats as widespread and also mentioned the so-called tiger cat. The study notes that European scientific knowledge of the Indian wildcat developed during the nineteenth century, with specimens from Kashmir eventually entering scientific collections.
By the late nineteenth century, the process had become much more systematic. WL Abbott collected mammal skins and skulls in Kashmir between 1891 and 1893. Frederick W True subsequently catalogued the material in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum in 1894. The collection included the Indian wildcat, jackal, mountain fox, bears, urial, ibex, flying squirrels, marmots, voles, hares, pikas, shrews and several species of bats. The Indian wildcat specimen came from Lolab Valley.
This progression, from religious reference, to traveller’s observation, to scientific specimen collection, is at the heart of Chen’s study. The animal world itself did not necessarily appear suddenly. Rather, human ways of seeing animals changed.
The earliest surviving manuscript tradition of the Nīlamata Purāṇa itself is relatively complicated. The paper credits Georg Bühler and Aurel Stein with the discovery of surviving manuscripts. Bühler acquired birch-bark manuscripts in the nineteenth century, while Stein collected numerous manuscripts during his travels in Kashmir and sent them to institutions in Europe, including the Bodleian Library at Oxford. KDe Vreese published a preliminary Sanskrit edition in 1936, followed by Ved Kumari’s expanded critical edition between 1968 and 1973.
Chen’s study also makes a larger argument about how history is constructed. Animals become part of history when humans observe, name, describe, classify, collect or imagine them. In medieval Kashmir, represented by the Nīlamata Purāṇa, religious activity was the principal mechanism through which animals entered the record. In the modern period, scientific observation and classification increasingly determined which animals became visible in knowledge.
The paper ultimately suggests that asking whether Kashmir really was a “Cat’s Land” or a “No Cat’s Land” depends on which evidence is being used. Textually, it was a “No Cat’s Land”; ecologically, that conclusion cannot be sustained. Large animals such as lions, tigers and leopards carried greater symbolic weight in the ancient text, while cattle, horses and other animals became prominent because of their ritual and material value.
The conclusion carries the argument beyond cats. Chen says the history of Kashmir’s animals is also a history of changing human priorities. Politics, economics, religion and culture determined which creatures were noticed in earlier periods, while the rise of scientific exploration in the modern era expanded the inventory. Colonial commerce, warfare and conquest further complicated both human knowledge of animals and their fate.
In that sense, the missing cat may be the most revealing animal in the entire Nīlamata Purāṇa. Its absence is not necessarily evidence that there was no cat in Kashmir. It is evidence that the cat had not yet become important enough to the humans writing Kashmir’s history to be written into it.
