It was however left to Aurel Stein one of those high minded Western scholars, who keenly appreciated Kashmir’s cultural greatness and literary traditions at a time when few were aware of it. His incessant labours on Kalhana’s Rajatarangini and for the promotion of study of Kashmiri language and literature have immortalized him before the civilized world. The relation of such a soul will compensate for some unhappy relations between Europe and India in political and commercial spheres. These will be forgotten by the future while the services of men like Aurel Stein to unearth the cultural and literary legacy of Kashmir will ever be remembered by posterity.

He was the first among the Europeans to understand the ethos of Kashmiri culture and recognize the value of its contribution to the history of world culture. He showed that in the higher reaches of human spirit, there is neither East nor West, that humanity is one, beneath the trappings of custom and skin, that in a sense, in quest of learning and knowledge, man is classless, nation-less king over himself. This great European savant who dedicated his life to the task of exploring the inner essence and beauty of Sanskrit literature in Kashmir will ever be remembered with gratitude by generations of scholars all over the world and particularly by Kashmiris for ensuring their motherland, a glorious and permanent place in the estimation of the world. It was on account of his first hand knowledge of Kashmiri scholarship that even after when he himself moved to another field of oriental study i.e. the Central Asian explorations he became the lone European scholar to whom almost all other western Indologists and Indophiles referred the matter of their inquiries for seeking local help of Kashmiri scholars. Such names included George Grierson, Maurice Winternitz, J. Ph. Vogel, K. Vreese and Franklin Edgerton amongst others.