Place · ruined temple & university · India

Shāradā Peeth

Also known as Sharada Peeth, Sharda Peeth, Shardi, Neelum, Sharada script

Periods

Regional Flourishing, Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Kashmiri Shakta and Sharada traditions

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.793, 74.190

Worth knowing

Al-Biruni names it among the most visited Hindu shrines of his day, and Kashmiri scholars signed themselves as having studied there. It has been across the Line of Control since 1947 and was effectively unreachable for seventy years; a crossing point was opened in 2023. The building is a plinth and four walls of dressed stone with no roof.

Connections (6)

• Pitha network withKāmākhyā

  Sharada Peeth in the Neelum valley is a ruined Saraswati temple and library that gave Kashmir the name Sharada Desh and the Sharada script its name, and it now lies across the line of control. Kashmiri Pandits have campaigned for decades for access. The pitha network was mapped as a single body across a single land, and the twentieth century cut it in several places — this is the cut that is felt most.

• Teaching lineageNālandā mahāvihāra

  Sharada Peeth in Kashmir and Nalanda in Magadha were the northern and eastern poles of the medieval learning network, and scholars moved between them: Kashmir sent Buddhist and Shaiva texts east and south, and the Sharada script carried Sanskrit manuscripts across the north for centuries. Both were libraries as much as institutions, and both are ruins — one destroyed in the thirteenth century, the other abandoned by degrees and now on the wrong side of a line of control.

• Contemporary capital withMārtānd Sun Temple

  Martand and Sharada are two of the three great Kashmiri Pandit sites, with Amarnath, and both belong to the Karkota period when Kashmir was an independent power with its own script, its own Sanskrit scholarship and a king, Lalitaditya, who campaigned across north India. The sun temple on its plateau and the learning centre in the Neelum valley are what survives of that state — one a ruin in Indian Kashmir, the other a ruin in Pakistani Kashmir.

• Teaching lineageShrīperumbudūr

  Śāradā Pīṭh drew scholars from across the subcontinent — Rāmānuja is said to have gone there for a manuscript and the Tibetan translator Vairotsana to have studied there — and it gave its name to the Sharada script in which Kashmiri Sanskrit was written for a thousand years. It now stands on the Line of Control, inaccessible from the Indian side since 1947, and nobody knows what was in its library.

• Teaching lineageSrinagar

  Kashmir's Sanskrit scholarship — Abhinavagupta's aesthetics and Shaiva philosophy, Kalhana's Rajatarangini, the Sharada script — made the valley the north's intellectual centre for several centuries, and Sharada Peeth in the Neelum valley was its library and its shrine. The script is named for the goddess of that temple. Kashmiri manuscripts, monks and painters went out over these passes to Tibet, Central Asia and the plains.

• Route adjacencyRed Fort, Muzaffarabad

  Both stand on the Neelum, the river the Kishanganga becomes when it crosses the line of control, and both are now on the Pakistani side of a border that cut their world in half. Sharada Peeth, the Shakta seat and school that Kashmiri learning took its name for its script from, lies upstream near Kupwara's opposite bank; Muzaffarabad's fort commands the confluence with the Jhelum downstream. The valley route between them was the ordinary road from Kashmir to the Punjab until 1947.

On these journeys

• Shakti Pitha system
• Manuscript libraries & schools
• Kashmir

Sources

Wikipedia, “Sharada Peeth”. Kalhana, Rājataraṅgiṇī, trans. Stein; al-Bīrūnī, Tārīkh al-Hind, on the shrine's standing.

• Wikipedia — Sharada Peeth