Half a decade ago, when I was in school, I faced a penalty of five rupees every time I spoke in my mother tongue—Kashmiri. The principal reprimanded us if her ears detected a syllable of the Kashmiri language.
I never paid the fine. Neither did any of my classmates. In spite of this regular admonishment, we believed that speaking our own language was neither a mistake worthy of punishment, nor a mark of humiliation. The school must still be following the same policies, but today, I see hope and resistance. Kashmiri, the only Dardic language—a branch of Indo-Aryan languages spoken across Pakistan and Afghanistan—that has a literature, is fighting its extermination.
“The story of the resistance of the Kashmiri language is not a recent one,” Zareef Ahmad Zareef, a Kashmiri poet renowned for his satire and humour, told me on the telephone. “It’s been resisting right from the day Mughals invaded the valley. They implemented Persian here, and it was used for official and trade purposes. After the Mughals came the Afghans, after them the Sikhs, later on the Dogras, and now India is ruling over it. Yet the Kashmiri language never succumbed to this foreign duress. All the outside rulers forced their own language upon the people, but the values, traditions, its literature, and the richness of its history became its pillars of support, and it has strived to maintain its existence for more than four hundred years since then. In its struggle for survival, the language has seen tough times, but it never gave up.”
It is a universally acknowledged fact that the occupation of a country by a powerful nation begins with control over peoples’ culture and language—the core elements of their identity. In Kashmir, India has left the people bereft of their own language, but natives of the occupied land are indifferent and a cultural uprising seems far away. When I asked Zareef where he sees the language today, he said, “In recent years, we have seen our youth abandoning the Kashmiri language. Kashmiri was properly taught in schools until 1953, the year Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, who worked in favour of the Indian government in Delhi, became prime minister of the state.” The reason behind the language’s disappearance, he added, “was that Master Tara Singh was demanding a separate state based on the Punjabi-speaking population, and the Congress government was scared that if the language blooms in a state stitched to India against the will of its people, a similar demand for freedom rooted in cultural sentiments and a common language would take birth there.”
In schools, Kashmiri was made compulsory up to the eighth standard, in 2008, after much struggle. At the university level, it was only in 1979 that, with the efforts of writers and intellectuals, a postgraduate course in Kashmiri language was started at Kashmir University, despite the recommendations of the Kothari commission fifteen years before. The custodians of the language have been demanding classical-language status for Kashmiri, as its history dates back to over a thousand years. However, in a recent development, India’s ministry of human-resource development has removed Kashmiri from its Bhasha Sangam portal, after Kashmiri Pandits—who use a slightly different form of Kashmiri—objected to the version of the language used.
The Kashmiri language has produced some exceptional literature and writers. Rasul Mir, one of the leading Kashmiri poets of the nineteenth century, is popularly called the John Keats of Kashmir. Mahmud Gami’s Yusuf Zulaikha was translated into German in the nineteenth century. The rich corpus of Kashmiri literature deals with every aspect of life—from romantic poetry to existential prose. But this literature is not easily accessible, or read by many.
Last year, I met Azhar Hilal, the son of the prolific Kashmiri novelist and short-story writer Akhtar Mohiuddin, who died in 2001. Akhtar wrote the first ever novel in Kashmiri, Dod Dag—Disease and Pain. In 1968, he was awarded the Padma Shri—India’s fourth-highest civilian honour—which he returned in protest against the hanging of the separatist leader Maqbool Bhat, inside Delhi’s Tihar jail in 1984. “Some of the most important works by my father are still unpublished,” Hilal told me. “They are locked in the safe.”
In recent years, a number of local musicians have tried to immortalise the Kashmiri language through their music. From the old Sufi harmonium of Rashid Hafiz to the modern sound of Ali Saffudin, Kashmiri music has received widespread attention through video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. Mohammad Muneem, a popular musician who is part of the band Alif, told me, “When I was a kid, I was not spoken to in the Kashmiri language. It was more of Urdu and now English, and understandably, it’s peer pressure that caused this. I personally believe that we have to make Kashmiri look appealing to get hold of the youth.”
One afternoon last December, actors, directors and producers affiliated to Doordarshan took to the streets to protest the deliberate negligence of Kashmiri-language programmes on the DD Kashir channel. Launched in 2000, DD Kashir was meant to provide a platform for Kashmiri television programs. However, besides sidelining Kashmiri, the channel is now used by the Indian government to broadcast propaganda programmes that, a senior home-ministry official told the journalist Azaan Javaid, “show security forces in a positive light and highlight the development work undertaken by the government in Jammu and Kashmir.”
In March this year, the Kashmiri Language Union, a group of young civil-society members and graduates in Kashmiri, staged a protest at Pratap Park in Srinagar. Formed in 2017, the KLU works to not just promote Kashmiri, but also other regional languages of Jammu and Kashmir. Sofi Hilal Fayaz, the general secretary of the KLU, told me that the authorities were deliberately undermining the language. “No educated person likes to get out in the streets like we do. But when the question is about one’s identity, one has to. One must.” Fayaz said that despite the state government issuing an order, on 19 June 2017, for Kashmiri to be taught in the ninth and tenth standards, “no one has talked about the order ever since.”
“It is not a feasible option to go from door to door, telling parents to speak in Kashmiri with their children,” Abid Zulfiqar, another member of the KLU, told me. “The language must be brought into the school curriculum and given an official status. Only then can it thrive and bloom.” Kashmir University produces over seventy postgraduate students in the Kashmiri language every year. However, due to a lack of employment opportunities, their future prospects remain uncertain.
The KLU has prepared a four-point programme, which they think is the first step towards saving the language from extinction. First, it demands a rehbar-e-zubaan—a recruitment drive for language guides, along the lines of state-government schemes such as the rehbar-e-taleem, for teachers, and the rehbar-e-zirat, for agriculture graduates. Second, it wants the Jammu and Kashmir Service Selection Board to reserve 15 percent of jobs for Kashmiri-language teachers, along the lines of existing reservations for teachers of Urdu and other disciplines. Third, it wants Kashmiri to be included in the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, the central-government scheme for universalising secondary education. It also wants Kashmiri to be taught up to the twelfth standard in the Kashmir and Chenab valleys.
Over the years, many luminaries of Kashmiri literature and language have championed the cause of preserving and teaching Kashmiri in schools. However, many of their own children can hardly utter three consecutive words in Kashmiri. Nevertheless, I took heart in Zareef’s final words during our conversation: “Wande tsale, sheen gale, bae yee bahaar”—The winter will go; the snow will melt away; spring will come again.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the KLU wanted reservations along the lines of existing reservations for "teachers of Dogri and Urdu." In fact, the KLU wants reservations "along the lines of existing reservations for teachers of Urdu and other disciplines." The Caravan regrets the error.