Ghulam Hassan Khuihami

Hassan Shah Khoyihami (c. 1832 – c. 1898), born Pir Ghulam Hassan Shah and commonly known as Pir Ghulam Hassan Shah, was a nineteenth-century Kashmiri historian, scholar, and poet from Gamroo village near Bandipora. He is best remembered for the Tarikh-i-Hassan, a four-volume Persian-language work encompassing the geography, history, Sufi biography, and literary heritage of the Kashmir Valley.

His life spanned the Dogra era, from the reign of Maharaja Gulab Singh to that of Maharaja Pratap Singh, and his writings remain an important reference for the study of Kashmiri history and of Kashmiri culture. He notably engaged with the Rajatarangini manuscripts, adapting ancient historical narratives into a chronological Persian format. The Government Degree College, Bandipora was officially named the 'Hassan Khoyihami Memorial Degree College Bandipora' in his honour.

Biography Hassan Shah's seventh paternal ancestor, Ganesh Kaul, belonged to the Dattatreya Kaul gotra and served in the Mughal judiciary. He was converted to Islam by the saint Sultan ul-Arifin Sheikh Hamza Makhdoom, upon which he was renamed Sheikh Ghaziuddin; the entire family converted with him. Hassan's ancestral spiritual allegiance thus traced back to Sheikh Hamza Makhdoom, whom he venerated as his hereditary pir. He was himself later initiated into the Naqshbandi order by Khawaja Muhammad Tashkandi.

Hassan Shah died on 28 Jamadi-us-Sani 1316 A.H. (13 November 1898) at the age of sixty-eight, at Gamroo. He was buried there in the precincts of the mazar of Mir Bibi Khatun, a pious woman of his village. Volume III, initiated in 1305 A.H., documents the lives of great Sayyid, Rishis, seers, scholars, and saints of Kashmir and reflects the author's allegiance to the Suhrawardiyya order. Volume IV, is devoted to the Persian poets of Kashmir, preserving the literary heritage of a tradition that flourished under the Mughals (1586–1752) and continued through the reign of Maharaja Pratap Singh (1885–1925).

One of the most significant contributions of Volume II is its preservation of the accounts of kings absent from Kalhana's Rajatarangi. Hassan had carefully studied Waqia-i-Kashmir, a Persian translation of the Sanskrit Ratnakar Purana compiled by Mulla Ahmad, court poet of Sultan Zayn al-Abidin the Great (r. 1420–1470). He obtained a manuscript copy from Mulla Mahmud, an Afghan resident of the village of Pindore (now in Pakistan). While travelling by boat in Srinagar, Hassan's vessel capsized; he was rescued, but the manuscript was lost to the river. He nonetheless incorporated what he had learned from it into Tarikh-i-Hassan. Writing in the Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Pandit Ananda Koul noted that after Hassan's death, no further copy of Mulla Ahmad's translation could be traced, leaving Tarikh-i-Hassan as the sole surviving source for these lost kings. In his birthplace, Bandipora, the Government Degree College, Bandipora was named the 'Hassan Khoyihami Memorial Degree College Bandipora in his honour.