Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word is thought to derive from Sanskrit. One popular local explanation reads it as land desiccated from water, suggesting the valley was once a lake. Another tradition links it to the Vedic sage Kashyapa, giving meanings such as Kashyapa's Lake or Kashyapa's Mountain. The earliest direct textual mention is in Panini's Ashtadhyayi, written in the 5th century BC.
It was created in 1846 after the British defeated the Sikh Empire in the First Anglo-Sikh War. Under the Treaty of Amritsar, the British transferred mountainous territory east of the Indus and west of the Ravi rivers to Gulab Singh for 75 lakhs. The state combined ethnically and religiously diverse regions including Buddhist Ladakh, mixed Jammu, and the overwhelmingly Muslim Kashmir Valley.
The United Nations brokered a ceasefire at the end of 1948 and demanded a plebiscite to determine Kashmiris' wishes. India insisted no referendum could be held while Pakistani-backed irregulars remained on the territory. The plebiscite was never conducted, and the unresolved dispute hardened into multiple wars.
India controls roughly half the former princely state, administered as the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh since 2019. Pakistan controls about a third, divided into Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. China controls the northeastern Aksai Chin area and the Trans-Karakoram Tract, having entered the region in the 1950s and consolidated control following the Sino-Indian War of 1962.
The British census of 1941 recorded the princely state as approximately 77 percent Muslim, 20 percent Hindu, and 3 percent Buddhist and Sikh combined. In the Kashmir Valley itself the Muslim share was higher. The Kashmiri Pandit community, the Hindu minority of the Valley, underwent a near-complete exodus in the 1990s during the Kashmir insurgency; estimates range from around 100,000 to as many as 300,000 people who left.
Kashmir is almost entirely mountainous, traversed by the Himalayas, the Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush. The Karakoram is the most heavily glaciated region outside the polar areas, containing the world's second and third longest non-polar glaciers. Three major rivers, the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab, drain the territory. Elevations range from subtropical plains in Jammu below 1,000 feet to near-rainless high-altitude desert in Aksai Chin above 17,000 feet.