The Nilamata Purana’s Kashmir flood and lake-formation traditions

Record summary

The Nilamata Purana describes Kashmir’s sacred landscape through traditions involving water, drainage, serpents, and the transformation of a lake into habitable country. Nineteenth-century Orientalist editions and studies made the text a significant source for comparing regional flood, inundation, and landscape-formation narratives. The material is not a simple analogue of the Manu deluge: it concerns the ordering of Kashmir’s geography and ritual communities. Its historical value depends on distinguishing textual mythmaking from geological reconstruction and from later Kashmiri oral explanations.