- Lived:
- 1395–1470 · born in the Kashmir valley, son of its sultan; lived, ruled and died in and around Srinagar (Śrīnagar), reigning fifty years from 1420
- Field:
- kingship — the Shah Mir sultanate of Kashmir; patron of crafts, letters, engineering and an experiment in tolerance a century ahead of its time
- The Big Idea:
- He inherited a throne his father had used to break temples and drive out Kashmir's Hindus — and spent fifty years doing the opposite: recalling the exiles, abolishing the tax on unbelievers, and importing the crafts Kashmir still lives on.
- In their words:
- almost nothing survives — he wrote Persian verse under the pen-name "Qutb," now nearly all lost. What survives instead is his people's one word for him, five centuries running: Budshah, the Great King.
- If you remember one thing:
- A Muslim sultan paid Hindu pandits to keep writing Kashmir's Sanskrit chronicle of kings — knowing it would record, forever, what his own father had done — and they wrote him into it as the king who undid it.