THE INTELLECTUAL DECLINE OF CONTEMPORARY KASHMIRI LITERATURE: A STRUCTURAL READING WITH A NOTE ON SCRIPT
Kashmiri literature possesses one of the most distinguished genealogies in South Asia. From the Vaakhs of Lal Ded and the Shruks of Sheikh ul Alam to the Persian Masnavis of the medieval court, from the modernist poetry of Dina Nath Nadim to the critical essays of Rehman Rahi and the fiction of Akhtar Mohiuddin and Amin Kamil, it was a literature that combined deep locality with a capacity to speak beyond the Valley. The present moment shows a widely felt erosion of intellectual rigour. This erosion is not caused by lack of talent. It is structural. It results from the collapse of readership, the Award games, the disowning of the mother tongue, the script divide, the unedited abundance of the internet, the reduction of all experience to a singular concept created by prolonged violence, the consequent loss of universal content, and the disappearance of satire and humour .
THE SINGULAR CONCEPT: HOW VIOLENCE NARROWS IMAGINATION
The most decisive factor in the decline is what can be called the singular concept. For more than three decades, terrorism and the politics around it, the deep-rooted psychological effects of its violence and the sufferings it unleashed, have become the sole legitimate subject of serious writing from Kashmir. Everything else has been rendered marginal or even suspect. In practice this means that every poem must be about loss, every story must be about suffering, every novel must be about identity, exile or pain. A writer who wishes to write about a farmer and his land, about a love affair in old Srinagar, about ageing, about childhood play, about the comic life of a bazaar, about bureaucracy, about the philosophical problems of time or mortality, is told that such subjects are escapist or that they betray the larger cause.
The result is a literature that is monothematic. Monothematic literature inevitably becomes formally thin. When the theme is decided in advance, character becomes illustration, language becomes slogan, and complexity becomes disloyalty. The great Kashmiri writers of the past wrote about the human condition through Kashmir. Much contemporary writing writes only about Kashmir as a political condition, and therefore fails to achieve a human condition at all.
Terrorism in this sense has not only affected life. It has affected the imagination itself. It has taught writers to see only one story. A single story, however urgent, cannot sustain a literature. Literature needs multiplicity. When violence becomes the only lens, all other lenses are discarded and the eye itself loses depth perception.
THE LOSS OF UNIVERSAL CONTENT AND THE FAILURE OF TRANSLATION
This monothematic pressure explains why most contemporary writing from Kashmir fails to acquire readers even when translated into English or any other language.
Great regional literature becomes universal not by abandoning locality but by deepening it. The Kashmiri village in Nadim, the Srinagar mohalla in Akhtar Mohiuddin, the peasant in Amin Kamil is so precisely observed that it becomes recognisable to a reader in Bengal or Brazil. The local is rendered with such psychological and philosophical depth that it transcends locality.
Much of the literature now being produced does the opposite. It treats Kashmir as a theme rather than as a lived world. The narrative is driven by identity, grievance, exile, or assertion. These are important realities, but when they are presented as slogans rather than as human dilemmas, the work loses its capacity to travel.
A story that depends entirely on the reader already sharing a political position cannot survive translation, because the translated reader does not share that immediate context. The universal elements, the rendering of love, ageing, childhood, work, guilt, fear, tenderness, which allow a Tamil or Polish reader to enter the text, are absent. Translation therefore exposes the thinness. What was moving in the original because of shared context becomes inert in English because there is no underlying human architecture to hold it.
This is not an argument against political writing. It is an argument for political writing that achieves universality through craft. The Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, the Irish writer Seamus Heaney, the Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon are deeply political and yet universally read, because their politics is embodied in character and language, not declared in authorial commentary. Contemporary Kashmiri writing in many cases declares rather than embodies.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BITING SATIRE AND ROBUST HUMOUR
The most visible symptom of this narrowing is the disappearance of satire and humour, the very traditions that once gave Kashmiri literature its intellectual edge.
Hari Krishen Kaul remains the exemplary figure of biting satire. Kaul did not write political slogans. He wrote about the small, corrupt, self-important man. His characters, the clerk who becomes a philosopher in office, the social worker who converts charity into business, the intellectual who changes ideology with the season, the officer who speaks of values while practising vice, are rendered with merciless precision. Kaul understood that satire is not abuse. Satire is the exact observation of power when it pretends to be moral. His plays and stories work because the satire is not directed at an external enemy alone but at ourselves, at the Kashmiri middle class, its vanities, its double-speak, its willingness to accommodate any master. That inward gaze is the mark of an intellectually confident culture. Without that gaze, a literature cannot correct itself.
Pushkar Bhan represents the other essential tradition, that of affectionate but deeply intelligent humour. Bhan was not a comedian in the trivial sense. His genius lay in capturing spoken Kashmiri idiom, its proverbs, its exaggerations, its capacity to laugh at misfortune. Through characters like Machama, he showed that humour is a form of knowledge. A community that can laugh at itself is a community that can think about itself. Bhan preserved the oral archive of Kashmiri, its wit, its timing, its vocabulary of the daydreamers and illiterate simpletons. His humour was never cruel. It was rooted in love for the common Kashmiri.
Both traditions have almost vanished. There are three reasons. First, the singular concept does not permit laughter. In a discourse where everything must be tragic, to laugh is seen as betrayal. Satire requires the freedom to say that our own side is also ridiculous. That freedom has been withdrawn by social pressure and by self-censorship. Second, satire and humour require linguistic mastery. Kaul and Bhan could be funny because they commanded Kashmiri at the level of idiom. They knew the difference between two words for the same object that belong to different districts and generations. A generation that has been encouraged to see Kashmiri as backward cannot command that idiom. It can be angry in English, but it cannot be funny in Kashmiri. Third, the platforms have changed. Satire needs a stage, a live audience and the risk of immediate response. Bhand Pather had that. Radio Kashmir had that. The internet does not. Online, satire is instantly misread as literal statement, humour is reported as offence, and the safest course is solemnity. The result is a literature that is earnest, humourless and therefore less intelligent than its predecessors.
THE VANISHING READER: WRITERS WRITING ONLY FOR WRITERS
A second structural factor is the disappearance of the general reader. Literature survives only when its readers greatly outnumber its writers. In contemporary Kashmir that equation has inverted.
A field survey of bookstalls from Lal Chowk to Sopore, Anantnag, Baramulla, Kulgam and Pulwama reveals a stark fact. Not a single literary work in Kashmiri is regularly sold on the stands as a matter of normal trade. The stands stock competitive examination guides, religious tracts and English-language self-help material. A Kashmiri novel typically has a print run of three to four hundred copies, most of which are distributed among friends, academy libraries and prize committees.
Writers have become the only readers of other writers. Seminars, Mushairas, book launches, award functions and social media groups consist of the same fifty to sixty individuals who review and praise each other. When the writer, the critic, the jury and the audience are the same person, the corrective pressure that creates standards disappears. Literature becomes an exercise in mutual courtesy rather than intellectual challenge.
The lack of readers also means the lack of a market. Without a market, there is no professional publisher who can pay an editor, a proof-reader and a designer. Without that investment, books are produced poorly, which further discourages readers. A vicious circle is established.
THE AWARD GAMES AND THE DISINCENTIVE TO RIGOUR
The proliferation of literary awards has unintentionally accelerated the decline. The Sahitya Akademi Award for Kashmiri, awards given by the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, and numerous private awards instituted by trusts and cultural organisations have created an 'Award Economy' that rewards the wrong behaviour. It rewards conformity. A jury with limited time will tend to choose the book that aligns with prevailing sentiment and is formally familiar. A formally difficult or morally ambiguous work is less likely to be awarded. It rewards haste. To remain visible in the annual cycle, a writer is incentivised to produce a book every year. A novel that requires four years of research and revision becomes a career risk. Premature publication is encouraged and editorial standards collapse.
It replaces criticism. Once a book is awarded, it is treated as canonised . It is not subjected to rigorous review outside. The prize becomes a substitute for slow critical acceptance rather than its outcome. This has led to an inflation of titles and a deflation of intellectual value. Many young writers now write with the Award in mind, not the reader. That shift from reader to jury is fatal for intellectual standards.
THE MOTHER TONGUE IS DISOWNED
No literary tradition can survive when its own speech community regards its language as a marker of backwardness. In contemporary middle-class Kashmir, this is precisely what has occurred.
Parents actively steer young children towards English from the age of three. Kashmiri is tolerated as the language of home and humour but not as the language of knowledge, argument or ambition. In many households, fluent Kashmiri is seen as rural or unsophisticated. The result is a generation that is emotionally Kashmiri but intellectually ill-equipped in Kashmiri. Its English is functional, adequate for examinations and employment, but rarely literary. The young writer therefore lacks access to the proverbial, musical and philosophical reserves of Kashmiri, and also lacks the literary depth in English to compensate. The language in which he writes is thinner than the life he wishes to describe.
This parental choice, understandable as an economic strategy, has catastrophic cultural consequences. A child who does not hear complex Kashmiri at home cannot write complex Kashmiri as an adult. He can only write simple Kashmiri about complex feelings, which inevitably reads as thin.
THE SCRIPT DIVIDE: ONE LANGUAGE, TWO INACCESSIBLE ARCHIVES
Kashmiri is now written in two scripts, and this division has split its archive.
Kashmiri Muslims in the Valley use the Nastaliq script, which connects them to the Persian and Urdu traditions. The Kashmiri Hindus, especially those who grew up outside the Valley after nineteen-ninety, have learnt Kashmiri in Devanagari, which was promoted as an alternative standard for pedagogical reasons.
In practice, Muslim youth rarely learn Devanagari and young Hindu youth have almost no knowledge of Nastaliq. The consequence is stark. A book published in Srinagar in Nastaliq cannot be read by a young Hindu reader in Jammu, and a book published in Devanagari in Jammu cannot be read by a young Muslim reader in Srinagar. One language now has two mutually inaccessible bodies of work.
The composite public that once allowed Dina Nath Nadim and Rahman Rahi to be read together has been formally divided. No other major Indian literature is split at the level of basic literacy. Comparative criticism becomes impossible when you cannot read the other half of your own tradition. The script divide also means that the already tiny readership is further divided into two even tinier readerships, neither of which is viable.
The internet has played havoc with literary discipline in two ways.
First, it has abolished the interval between writing and publishing. In the era of Radio Kashmir and the Academy journals, a writer submitted work to an editor who returned it with queries and suggestions. That interval allowed for revision, doubt and self-criticism. Social media allows instant publication. The first draft becomes the final draft. The discipline of rewriting, which is the core of intellectual labour, disappears.
Second, it has altered form to suit the medium. The platform rewards brevity, explicit emotion and rapid political signalling. The Ghazal, which requires years of training in metre, rhyme and classical reference, is replaced by free verse that is free not by aesthetic choice but by lack of craft. The short story, which requires architecture and withholding, is replaced by personal anecdote and direct statement. Allusion, irony and layered reference, which require a slow reader, do not perform well online. Slogans do. Over time, writers internalise the logic of the platform and begin to write for it rather than against it.
The internet has also created the illusion of audience. A poem that receives five hundred likes is thought to be successful, even though none of those who liked it has read a second poem or bought a book. The metric of likes replaces the metric of rereading, which is the true test of literature.
CONCLUSION
The decline of intellectual standards in contemporary Kashmiri literature is therefore not accidental. It is the logical outcome of an ecosystem where terrorism has created a singular concept that forbids humour, where there are no independent readers, where no literary book in Kashmiri is sold on the stands, where prizes reward quantity over quality, where the mother tongue is seen as backward and parents steer children towards English, where one language is split into two scripts and Nastaliq and Devanagari readers cannot read each other, where literature lacks universal human content and therefore cannot survive translation, where satire and humour have been lost, and where instant digital publication has replaced editorial rigour.
Recovery will require deliberate action that runs counter to present fashion.
First,we must encourage literature in Nastaliq and also in Devanagari as equal scripts for Kashmiri. The aim is not to replace one script with the other, but to restore a single readership that can read both. Without such parity, Kashmiri readers will remain divided into two archives. Second, our universities and private publishers must revive editorial infrastructure. A peer-reviewed critical journal must be established that is willing to reject ninety percent of submissions.
Third, and this is the new question, could Roman be made a third script for Kashmiri. The argument in favour is sociological. Young Kashmiris already write Kashmiri in Roman on phones, on social media, in messages. For a generation that finds Nastaliq calligraphy difficult and Devanagari unfamiliar, Roman is the script of ease. It is also the script of the internet. If the aim is to bring young readers back to Kashmiri, Roman offers a low-barrier entry. It could act as a bridge script. Many languages have done this. Malay went from Jawi to Roman, Turkish went from Ottoman to Roman, and gained mass literacy. A Roman edition of Kashmiri books, alongside Nastaliq and Devanagari, could vastly increase circulation among youth in the Valley and the diaspora.
The argument against Roman is cultural and literary. Nastaliq carries centuries of aesthetic memory, its ligatures and its visual poetry are inseparable from the way Kashmiri sounds in the mind. Devanagari carries a precise phonetic logic and connects Kashmiri to the larger Sanskrit and Hindi archive. Roman, while easy, flattens sound, loses nuance and severs the visual link to the Persianate and Indic past. If Roman replaces the other two, rather than supplementing them, it will create a generation that can text in Kashmiri but cannot read its own classics in original. A balanced policy therefore would be threefold. Protect Nastaliq as the primary literary script . Promote Devanagari as a fully equal second script to reunite the Hindu and Muslim readerships. And allow Roman as an auxiliary and pedagogical script for digital communication, for early learning, and for transliterated editions aimed at young readers, with clear standardisation of spelling so that Roman does not become chaotic.
Such a policy would acknowledge reality without surrendering heritage. Government encouragement must mean not choosing one script against another, but funding all three with different roles. Nastaliq for depth, Devanagari for unity, Roman for reach.
Above all, writers must be get the freedom to break the singular concept, to write about the fullness of Kashmiri life beyond the immediate political moment, and to recover the lost traditions .of satire and humour . A literature that cannot laugh at itself, that cannot satirise its own vanities, that cannot find humour in sorrow, cannot think clearly about itself. It was precisely because Kashmiri satire and humour could make people laugh that Kashmiri literature once commanded respect beyond the Valley. Restoring that laughter, restoring readers, restoring both scripts and judiciously using Roman as a bridge, is not frivolity. It is the restoration of intellect itself.
The sporadic illuminations offered by a handful of contemporary poets and writers prove insufficient to dispel the pervasive gloom that has enveloped the literary landscape of Kashmiri literature. While individual creative endeavours exhibit aesthetic resilience and cultural fidelity, they remain fragmented, lacking the institutional cohesion necessary to engender a literary renaissance. It would be erroneous to contend that the situation is irredeemable; rather, the predicament stems from the absence of a collective, critical consciousness and a coherent intellectual discourse. Without a concerted engagement from academia, critics, and cultural institutions, the revival of Kashmiri literary tradition shall remain an elusive aspiration.
( Avtar Mota )
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