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Sunday Market: A market of Dreams| Photostory from Chilai Kalan of 2018
In the heart of the historical Amira Kadal lies a ‘flea Market’ which is less about fleas and more about the colours: of toys, fabrics and sometimes of life.
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The tongueless clarity in Rumi’s Love
Love is the greatest mystery of life that defies all analysis and shames all questions. Like life, it is indescribable and an attempt to define it is as baffling as defining life itself . Questions demand boundaries love refuses them, queries seek limit and love finds its way where limits dissolve, mind draws circles and…
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Today I turn thirty eight and I choose to remain unfinished!
The homeless man writes with a coherence of genuine disorientation, not the incoherent orientation of a poet. He scribbles with the authentic confusion of someone who looked too deeply into the mirror and can no longer distinguish between the image and void behind it.
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From Harwan to Hellenism: A memory of civilisation in clay
What makes Harwan truly exceptional is not merely the presence of these diverse motifs but their harmonious integration on a single site. Kashmir’s status as a cross-section of civilisations is reflected in this extraordinary cultural convergence.
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What Kashmir read in 2025
The year 2025 in Kashmir left like any other year in Kashmir: full of rumours, expectations and disappointments. What kept Kashmiris going was their knack for good humour, their love for wazwan and their witty capability to dismiss. But 2025 was also a year of quiet literary resilience. Bookstores opened and closed like the shutters…
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Kashmiri Zubaan aur Shayari by Abdul Ahad Azad
Abdul Ahad Azad’s book ‘Kashmiri Zubaan aur Shayiri’ is one of the greatest works that analyses the literary traditions of Kashmiri language. It helps to preserve the language and give it literary legitimacy in an era when it is dying. Someone has rightly compared the book to Edward Granville Browne’s monumental five-volume work, A Literary…
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The Valley in Communist Verse: Rashidov’s The Kashmir Song
The re-interpretation of a traditional Kashmiri legend through a communist lens illuminated universal themes of resilience, hope, and survival, marking it as one of the most remarkable contributions to twentieth-century literature.
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Iqbal and the Making of Muslim Political Modernity
Iqbal’s critique of nationalism remains strikingly relevant in our contemporary world. His warning about nationalism’s tendency toward “competitive nationalism and its resultant militarism, imperialism and consumerism” anticipated many of the conflicts that have plagued the modern world, like the ongoing Gaza genocide, where territorial allegiances have weighed heavily over the supra-territorial ethical and moral responsibilities…
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The Unbound Tongue: Language as the Site of Liberation
The true speech is the one that is not institutionalised. The true self is the one which is not subjectified. The true language is that of breaking free. Language as freedom:The essence of human ego is its ‘will to choose’ and ‘will to express’ and hence the beginning and end of all philosophy is freedom.…
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Arundhati Roy and Literature as Witness
I placed an order for Roy’s latest book at a local online bookstore. As excited as I always am before receiving my new book, this time the anticipation was intertwined with a myriad of other questions and expectations; can literature take for its province, a whole society and for its purpose, its sentient reflections? What…
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Disappearing Kashmiri lullabies: Cultural erosion at the cradle
These form an intimate and lasting part of oral tradition and serve as the vessels of cultural wisdom. The convey values, traditions and even subtler forms of resistance across generations. Through them the child absorbs something essential: the perception of who they are, serving as the foremost anchors of identity.
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Identity and Exile: a non-scholarly understanding of ‘Antithesis to Edward Said’
Darwish refers to multitudes of identity that made up Said. He did not belong to a single place; his personality was sometimes a rich tapestry and other times a ragged canvas, woven with elements of Palestine, the US, and Cairo; shaped by his identity as a Palestinian Christian, an Arab, and an American academia, all…
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Calligraphy in medieval Kashmir
“More powerful than all poetry, more pervasive than all science, more profound than all philosophy are the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six pillars of strength upon which our culture rests.”
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The Kanger tales
Kanger remains beloved to the Kashmiri, historian Hassan Kuihami writes: “What Laila was to Majnun’s bosom, so is the Kanger to a Kashmiri”
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Mazar-e-Shoara: The forgotten dead
Founded in year 1587 C.E during by the Mughal emperor Akbar, the cemetery of poets, also called Mazar-e-Shoara is situated along the banks of Dal Lake. The burial ground for the once eminent poets seems to have been selected carefully to give the dead souls a serene eternal sleep. The historical records show that there…
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Kashmir and the Abbasid revolution
What is often assumed is that medieval Kashmir was a land cutoff from the rest of the world owing to its topography. However, the historical analysis proves that it was one of the centres of civilisation shaping the history and politics of the whole world from time to time, the Abbasid revolution being one of…
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Class consciousness in Kashmiri literature
Language is deeply imbricated in the flesh of civilisation. Chomsky beautiful explains relation between language and freedom and how “language, in its essential properties and in a manner of its use provides a basic criterion for determining that an organism is a being with a human mind”. Therefore, the will to express is the basis of…
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Persian and Kashmir: A story of poetics and power
With Persian becoming the court language, a new breed of functionaries was brought to fore who chose Persian over Kashmiri and Sanskrit to stay in the echelons of power. Even though there were mass conversions in Kashmir, and contrary to the popular belief, it were the Kashmiri Brahmans and a few elite Muslims who became…
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Reconstructing Lal Ded: Beyond magic and mysticism
It may be pointed out that Lalla was disowned, not only in her own times but for a greater part of Kashmir history, by the elite on account of her hostility to the Caste superiority.
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Identity and Nationalism: A vexed question
Orwell (1953) explained, “Because of nationalism we tend to divide the world into an “us” and “them”; terms like “freedom fighter” and “terrorist” become secondary to our own national sympathies; and a form of moral relativism prevails”
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The ignored exoduses of Kashmiri Muslims—Part I: Slavery and subjugation
The word “exodus” has become almost rhetorical in the Kashmiri political discourse, however, the political connotations underpinning it have largely ignored the many mass migrations and displacements of poor Muslim peasants and artisans under Sikh and Dogra regimes
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Faiz’s heart ached for Kashmir: Shameem’s rare interview of Faiz Ahmad Faiz
On both sides, small art samples were beautifying the stairs and the walls were covered with works of famous painters. I knocked on the door gently. The door opened. Faiz stood in front of me. For a moment I was spellbound, blank and had no idea what to say.
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The dark history of prostitution in Kashmir
According to Robert Thorpe, during Ranbir Singh’s time the license granting permission for purchase of girls for this purpose cost about a 100 chilkee rupees. Robert Thorpe wrote further that the Kashmiri girls were being forced into prostitution by the authorities with the idea of earning more and more revenue from licensing the flesh trade.…
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God’s creative purpose according to early Hambalite scholars
Purposive activity is of the very essence of God—God is indeed moved by purposes, but purposes that are His own—and God has been creating for wise purposes from eternity. At the level of creation itself, nothing created is eternal, but there have always been created things of one sort or another
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Of revelation and reason: Ibn Taymiyyah’s literalist rationalism
Ibn Taymiyya crafts a vision of God as active, personal and much more intimately involved in temporal and human affairs than the God of Kalām theology and Avicennan philosophy in order to prompt more ready obedience to God’s law.
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The forgotten Jesus resistance to Roman state and Jewish bureaucracy
The Jesus Resistance remains lost in a misrepresented history which favoured the system back then and which continues to favour the Western capitalist and material narratives right now.
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Pathar Masjid: A brief history
It is said that military of Maharaja installed a cannon on the roof of Pathar Masjid to blown up Shahi Hamdan shrine, which is situated across the Jhelum. However, an influential Pandit, Birbal Dhar, intervened into the matter and saved the shrine.
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Couplets wrongly ascribed to Allama Iqbal
Iqbal has possibly the largest number of mis-ascribed or falsely ascribed couplets to. Kindly stop sharing them in his name.
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Ghulam Rassul Galwan: The Kashmiri explorer Ladakh’s high altitude battlefield is named after
Galwan had a lot to say and had a fervent desire to write all of it in English for the world to know. Encouraged by one of his American employers, Mrs. Katherine Barret and her husband Robert Barret, Ghulam Rassul started writing an autobiography called ‘Servant of the Sahibs- To be read aloud’.
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Oral memory: Kashmiri proverbs as political commentary
Proverbs were used by Kashmiris, often accompanied with dark humour, to denounce injustices and tyrannies caused to them from time to time, regime after regime. Some of these historic political proverbs coined by unknown Kashmiris, in reaction to the political situations they encountered are compiled below.
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Myths and misconceptions: Origin of name Kashmir
In this article, the author tries to go beyond the traditionally accepted etymologies behind the origin of the word Kashmir
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Didda: Between fact and fantasy
The histories are marked by people who became epicentres of contention for generations to come. Kashmir history in particular, being an intersection of multitude faiths and cultures, has given rise to legends, allegories and realities which have set dais for discussions from time immemorial.
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An adage: “Mea kyah hatya kerme?”
Different rulers, at different times, banned eating beef and slaughter of cow. The slaughter of a cow was called ‘hatya‘ (murder), and the accusation of the practice (hatya haanz) often ended in the most brutal of punishments. One such punishment was mesle waalun (skinning alive) and then being hung on the road-side.
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Faiz’s two loves: Allys and Kashmir
From his love for the land, his marriage in Srinagar and his association with Kashmiri leadership, Faiz’s Kashmir connection ran deep and rather close to his heart.
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Kadal Nama: Brief history of historical connectors
While Jhelum has always been a symbol of the local populace, the bridges of Kashmir very conveniently become representatives of a larger political dynamics that has kept the Kashmiri socio-political discourse abuzz over centuries.
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Why we need de-schooling!
School does not exist to foster ethics and upheaval. It exists to stabilize the status quo. It exists to train a population which is subject to the power of such instruments of mass persuasion as the social order has at hand. It exists to get its citizens prepared for moral compromise.
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Aali Masjid: A brief history
It is the second biggest mosque in Kashmir after Jamia Masjid. It is a hypostyle mosque, the style which first emerged in Iraq and dominated the world after 715 CE.
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Unabated banality of Western media
The images of Syrian or Palestinian children with blood oozing out of their ears or eyes popping out might disturb the aesthetic sensitivities of Western intellectuals but their moral and humanistic sensitivities remain largely unfazed.
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What is the one thing you miss most from your previous life: “My father”
A doctor meets with a drug addict at his hospital in Srinagar. In the conversation between the two reproduced below some chilling details emerged about the easy accessibility of drugs in our towns and village and the life altering consequences its use has on our youth.
Literature is not an aesthetic affair..
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