The book is being read when one more Kashmiri family has lost their daughter to domestic abuse. Itโs being talked about when lawyers have their hands full of divorce cases. Itโs being discussed when love marriages are ending on a sour note in the valley. The telling treatise may lack Kashmir context, setting, background or…
In the land of Alim, Adab and Aab, Sonawari has emerged as a stronghold of Kashmiri literature. Outside his window, as Jhelum meanders through the Chinar-dotted landscape, Aadil Mohidin breaks into a thoughtful remark: โYe wyeth roze pakaan (Jhelum will keep flowing).โย This typical Koshur watchword might be a regularโyet resilientโreply from Kashmiris caught in…
In the land of โAdabโ, a venerable versifier is speaking hearts and minds of masses with her mystical verses. In her meditatively-calm room, sheโs murmuring the song of storms. The song is a rendition of her verses woven with mystic musings. Thereโs an apparent throbbing heart in the melody transcending sensory perceptions. It talks about…
Hunt has done an enormous service to Kashmir by preserving the representations, which often swing like a pendulum between a heavenly abode and a place ravaged by strife. By the time the seething summer of 2010 thawed, 118 people had lost their lives across the valley. Years later, the telling number would become an index…
In Kashmirโs literary circles, some people are asserting that a poet from Sonawari might be the worldโs only poet to write and read poetry in circles.ย The poetic vision burnished in Zareefa Jan, 55, when she was out to fetch water from her village brook.ย Carrying a pitcher on her head, she soon drifted in…
As gateways to knowledge and culture, libraries play a fundamental role in society. But barring a few token book houses devoid of reading culture, Kashmir has nothing substantial to offer to readers. When Salik Pervaiz, a Ph.D scholar from Central University, visited the SPS Library last year, he found himself in a cold and confused…
As people often wake up to the news of a new teenโs โdebut novelโ release in town, the valleyโs literary scene only becomes poorer with the addition of the hastily-written, poorly-edited and badly-treated manuscripts. Self-publishing words in the name of aspiring authorship is only creating a rat race among young boys and girls in the…
The ghazal evolved as a highly formalized poetic form with rhyming couplets, and a refrain. The origins of Urdu have been well documented as first emerging as a pidgin โ a negotiation between Hindi, Persian and Arabic, and evolving to establish itself as one of the most spoken languages in the world. Historians broadly agree…
As a literary maverick, Agha Shahid Ali is quite legendary for voicing his homeland blues through poetry, but his prose on TS Eliot makes a different case for the poet, perhaps for the first time after his demise, 19 years ago, on December 8, 2001. Years before he would pen down Rizwanโa poetic Kashmiri boy…