even Stafford Cripps in London raised it with Jawaharlal Nehru. Sheikh Abdullah's administration maintained that they had evidence that Kak was hobnobbing with the Pakistani raiders and agents. In his autobiography, Sheikh Abdullah held that Kak believed Kashmir, being a Muslim majority state, was bound to accede to Pakistan and prepared to be in its service; nonetheless, he praised Kak for maintaining good relations with the ruling circles in Pakistan. Kak was tied to hay-ropes and paraded through the streets, as NC aligned Kashmiris heckled him. In April 1948, he was tried for three criminal offenses — he was acquitted on two counts but convicted of the third, and jailed. He was pardoned (and released), arguably under pressure from Delhi, but on the condition that he may never enter Kashmir without permission of the state. Kak retired from public life, and migrated to Kasauli. On 3 December 1959, the Chief Justice of Jammu and Kashmir High Court —Syed Murtaza Fazl Ali— voided the externment order upon an appeal from Kak but rejected his petition to be paid due pension (with arrears) since termination, amounting to Rs. 91466. The court held that the Government had exercised reasonable discretion in withholding pensions from someone, convicted of an offense involving moral turpitude. Kak returned back to Kashmir, but alternated between Srinagar and Kasauli. Personal life Ram Chandra Kak married Janaki Devi (b. 1894) in 1901. They had five sons —Shailendra, Narendra, Brijendra, Surendra, and Khemendra— and a daughter, who died in infancy. They had also adopted Kak's grand-niece Lila. Devi died in 1928, from tuberculosis. In 1935, Kak married Margaret Mary. Khemendra, a pilot for the Royal Indian Air Force, died in 1945 of a air-crash near Risalpur; this affected Kak considerably. Academics Ram Chandra Kak was in possession of the two complete Sharada script copies of the Nilamata Purana, when a critical edition was being prepared by K. de Vreese. Kak wrote a treatise on Kashmiri archaeology titled Ancient monuments of Kashmir in 1933; Francis Younghusband wrote the foreword to the book. The book focused on the destruction of temples by Muslim rulers to such an extent, that he was compelled by the publisher to expunge certain "irrelevant" passages lest communal harmony was affected; a chapter on political history of Kashmir portrayed the centuries of Islamic rule as "one of unmitigated plunder, barbarism, and iconoclasm." Historian Mridu Rai notes his work to