On Oct. 24, 1947, the lights went out on the last Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, whose Himalayan domain extended from China to Afghanistan. A patch of darkness has remained on the Indian subcontinent ever since. That evening, Maharajah Hari Singh was presiding over a Hindu rite to the goddess of war. The chubby monarch was seated under a gilded, lotus-shaped umbrella when, suddenly, all the bulbs in the palace chandeliers flickered and died. Marauding tribesmen had blown up Kashmir's power station and were advancing toward the maharajah's lakeside palace in Srinagar. The ritual offering to the war goddess was hastily completed, and the maharajah had no doubts about what to do next. He fled.

As Hari Singh's caravan of cars, stuffed with his treasures, family, servants and his favorite pair of shotguns, sped down the mountains from Srinagar to the safety of Jammu in the plains, the raiders closed in on Kashmir's largest city. Only 120 km of undefended road separated them from their prize. With the maharajah in flight, nothing could have stopped the Pathan tribesmen from capturing this vast kingdom and claiming it for Pakistan. The invasion had the secret backing of Pakistan's military leaders, who were worried that Kashmir's Hindu ruler might merge with India even though most of his 4 million subjects were Muslims.

The Pathan warriors were told by their Pakistani recruiters that they had been chosen to fight a holy war, one that would free Kashmir's Muslim vassals from their Hindu master. The Pathans, as it turned out, also went along hoping for loot. While they should have been triumphantly raising the Pakistani flag over Srinagar, the Pathans instead stopped to pillage nearly every village along the way. By the time they reached the city's outskirts, burdened by their plunder, the balance had shifted against them.

Cornered, the maharajah had signed the papers ceding Jammu and Kashmir to India. This enabled Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a Kashmiri Hindu, to rush troops up to Srinagar and repulse the advancing tribesmen. Pakistani regular troops were then sent to the Himalayas to prop up the fading Pathan advance. Just nine weeks after India and Pakistan had gained freedom from the British Crown, they were waging an undeclared war. Another war, in 1965, would also be fought over Kashmir and two others narrowly averted, one as recently as 1990. But the disputed boundary--or Line of Actual Control, as it's called--remains as it was when the United Nations brokered a 1948 cease-fire between the two countries. Today, despite the continuing presence of U.N. monitors, the Pakistani and Indian armies routinely shoot at each other up and down the mountains. Most of the casualties, invariably, are not soldiers but civilians. Human rights activists, in the past have accused Indian security troops of terrible atrocities.

If Kashmir were simply a question of land, Pakistan and India might have resolved this feud decades ago. All that is needed is a Solomon to draw an invisible line through glaciers, lakes and orchards. But Kashmiris never liked their maharajah much; they had another leader, Sheik Abdullah, a former science teacher who founded the National Conference party. While the maharajah scooted off, Abdullah stayed on in Srinagar to help fight the invaders. Even though Abdullah was a Muslim, he knew that Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Sikhs had coexisted peacefully in Kashmir for centuries, and he did not believe in Pakistan leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah's vision of a Muslim-only state.

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