A Language Dying in the Living Room

Kashmiri has survived war, displacement, and centuries of political upheaval. In Chenab Valley, it is being quietly surrendered at the dinner table.

There is no government order banning Kashmiri in Chenab Valley. No police at poetry readings. No court order stripping the language of its status. The death happening here is quieter and, in its own way, more final. It happens over dinner. An educated parent turns to a child and says: Beta, Urdu main baat karo, school main kaam aayega. The child obliges. The grandparents, in the next room, understand nothing of what follows. In three generations, a literary language that produced poets of national stature becomes, for those grandchildren, an unintelligible sound from the past.

The Poets They Hang on Walls

Bhaderwah sits in the lap of the Pir Panjal range in Doda district, a town people half-affectionately call ‘mini-Kashmir.’ The deodar forests still stand. The Neeru river still runs. And in school here, a portrait of Abdul Qadoos, who wrote under the pen name Rasa Javidani, hangs on the wall. The children who pass beneath it, by and large, cannot read a single line he wrote.

Born in Bhaderwah in 1901, Rasa Javidani became what the scholar Mohammad Yousuf Taing called the ‘Ghalib of Kashmiri Ghazal’ — a title earned, not bestowed. He was the only Kashmiri poet to write in the qasida form. His collection Nairang-e-Gazal remains a primary text for anyone studying Kashmiri literary history. He earned recognition beyond Kashmir’s borders. He wrote of his homeland with a precision that Urdu, for all its resources, could not have replicated:

Bhaderwah Tchu zameen Jannat; yeth tchu roodan kanth,
Yeth tchhu bageecha gulab, yeth tchhu shaam sukoon.

(Bhaderwah is a paradise on earth, here rivers run through forests,
Here gardens of roses, here evenings of peace.)

The verse lands differently when you know the landscape it names. That specificity — the particular rivers, the particular light — is what a language carries that translation cannot. It is also what dies first.

Bashir Bhaderwahi, born in 1935, carried the tradition forward with a different register. Where Rasa wrote of love and longing, Bashir wrote of the people themselves — their folklore, their land, their specific griefs. He composed his first Kashmiri ghazal in 1953 while working as a teacher, and his collection Goshan Hind Posh, written that same year and eventually published in 1998, represents a crucial bridge between Chenab Valley’s folk forms and its formal literary canon. In 2015, the Sahitya Akademi awarded him its prize for a work of literary criticism on the history of Naats in Jammu and Kashmir — the country’s highest literary honour for a body of work written in a language most of his region’s children no longer speak.

Then there is Janbaaz Kishtwari. Born Ghulam Nabi Doolwal in 1925 in the Kishtwar village of Dool Hasti, he acquired his pen name in high school — playing a character named Janbaaz in a school play, the name stuck, then became his signature, then became him. His major collection Phalwin Sangar drew on the Kishtwari register of the language, a dialect with its own cadences and images, many of which have no equivalent elsewhere in Kashmiri poetry. He was also a vocalist, known for a singing style called Chalant, a form that blended traditional melodies with improvisation, creating something that felt, in the words of those who heard him, simple and haunting at once. He wrote of equality with a plainness that made crowds rise:

Unch neech ma chu rawa,
Ithaaduk yi chu mudda.

(High and low are not acceptable, Unity is the real purpose.)

These three men, along with others whose names are already receding, gave Chenab Valley a literary identity distinct from the Kashmir Valley, a body of work rooted in a specific landscape, a specific dialect, a specific experience of being Muslim and Kashmiri. This world is now raising children who need footnotes to read them.

The Mechanics of Forgetting

The pattern is consistent enough to feel like policy, though no one drafted it. A child is born in Bhaderwah to parents who speak Kashmiri fluently. The grandparents speak nothing else. The parents, educated in Urdu-medium schools and now investing in English-medium tuition, decide that the child should hear Urdu at home. The child grows up understanding Kashmiri passively, from grandparents, but responding always in Urdu. When this child becomes a parent, Kashmiri has receded to a vague comprehension. The grandchildren understand nothing. The lineage is severed not by war or migration but by the word ‘practical.’

There is a social dimension to this that goes beyond economics. In Bhaderwah’s more prosperous neighbourhoods, the switch from Kashmiri to Urdu when a guest arrives has become a kind of social signal. Children register the lesson early: Kashmiri is what the maid speaks, what the vegetable seller speaks, what grandmothers speak when they forget themselves. It is not what winners speak.

The irony is that this calculation is factually wrong. Decades of research on bilingualism have established that children raised with two or more languages outperform monolingual peers on measures of cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, and executive function. A child fluent in Kashmiri and Urdu is not disadvantaged when learning English. The opposite is closer to the truth. But a linguist’s journal article does not weigh much against a year’s worth of English tuition fees and the anxiety that paid for them.

What the Law Says and What the Schools Do

Article 350A of the Constitution of India places an affirmative obligation on states to provide adequate facilities for mother tongue education at the primary stage. Article 29(1) guarantees any section of citizens the right to conserve their distinct language. Section 29(f) of the Right to Education Act, 2009, requires that the medium of instruction be, ‘as far as practicable, in the child’s mother tongue.’ These are not aspirations. They are law.

The National Education Policy 2020, whatever its other controversies, contains one provision that linguists and educators have long called for: an emphasis on mother tongue or home language as the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, preferably Grade 8. Para 4.11 of the NEP acknowledges that children pick up languages ‘extremely quickly between the ages of 2 and 8,’ that multilingualism has ‘great cognitive benefits,’ and that early instruction should prioritise the home language. The NIPUN Bharat Mission reinforces it. Vidya Pravesh reiterates it.

In Chenab Valley, none of it has produced a single Kashmiri-medium school. There are no Kashmiri textbooks for primary classes in Bhaderwah. No teacher training programmes in mother tongue-based multilingual education. No DIKSHA content in the Kishtwari register of the language. The UT administration — which now governs Jammu and Kashmir directly — has shown no sign of urgency on the matter. Officials praise ‘our rich linguistic heritage’ at cultural functions and return to their Urdu and English correspondence. The law has become a museum exhibit: admired, photographed, left behind glass.

The Valley That Remembered

The contrast with the Kashmir Valley is not flattering to Chenab. In Srinagar, Kashmiri has institutional infrastructure: radio programmes, television content, a functioning literary academy, university departments, a publishing culture that, though struggling, still exists. The J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages has published Kashmiri literature for decades. A parent in Srinagar who speaks only Kashmiri to their child is not considered backward. They are considered culturally serious. In Chenab Valley, the same parent is quietly pitied.

This is not to romanticise the Kashmir Valley’s record. Kashmiri there faces its own pressures — urbanisation, the dominance of Urdu and English in media and commerce, the erosion of dialectal diversity. But the difference between the two is one of institutional dignity. Chenab Valley’s Kashmiri speakers have been treated, and have come to treat themselves, as peripheral to the Kashmiri project — too far south, too demographically mixed, too inconvenient to include.

There are exceptions worth naming. Chenab Times News Network has consistently reported on the language crisis in the region, giving space to voices that would otherwise have nowhere to go. The journalist Anzer Ayoub has documented the decline with the urgency of someone who is not observing a dying culture from outside but mourning a preventable death from within — tracing the line from the grandmother who speaks Kashmiri to the grandchild who cannot answer her, and finding, in that gap, a policy failure and a community failure both.

The Unfinished Couplet

Rasa Javidani wrote a couplet that has outlasted the personal grief that produced it. He wrote it after the violence of 1947, after losing his brother-in-law and keeping from his orphaned niece the fact that he was her uncle and not her father — a truth he buried to protect her. The lines were a private lament that became something larger:

Mashraawthas janaan Cze kar yad pemy bu, Tchhukh azh wafa begana che kar yad pemy boh.
(You have forgotten me, my dear — when will you remember me?)

Read now, the lines sound less like a poet’s grief and more like a language calling out to a generation that has turned its back. The mountains of Chenab Valley have held Kashmiri poetry for centuries — love, anger, prayer, satire, in a language that fit the landscape the way water fits stone. It would be, in the end, a quiet kind of desecration if they fell silent. Not because a conqueror imposed silence. Not because a government banned the tongue. But because parents, with the best of intentions and the tuition receipts to prove it, decided that the future had no room for what the past had made.

Rasa Javidani spent his life proving that Kashmiri was not a limitation but a liberation. The least Chenab Valley owes him is to ensure there remain people who can hear it.

Majid Zareem is an Independent Researcher and holds a Master’s degree in History and can be reached at anumaj2023@gmail.com

Touqeer Nazir is a student of Political Science and can be reached at touqeerplssc@gmail.com

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