By: SHABEER AHMAD
Recently—not very long ago, though one might argue that in the age of disappearing tongues, every moment stretches into eternity and every silence is a small death—I found myself in a classroom with my students, discussing, of all things, Africa and the language of its literature and the languages of people of that great continent. The people of the bruised and battered land where men of letters like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Frantz Fanon wielded their words like machetes, hacking away at the colonial vines, creepers and climbers, strangling their mother tongues. There, in their pages, they wept and raged over the fate of languages like Gikuyu and Kiswahili being swallowed whole by the insatiable jaws of empire, and as I spoke, my students nodded—not just in sympathy, but in recognition. Because, you see, our own Kashmiri was in the very same jaws, being chewed and forgotten, its echoes growing fainter with each passing day.
It is happening before our eyes, this slow and irresistible suffocation. Each day, fewer voices rise in the old tongue. The children, the ones they call Gen Z, Gen Alpha (as if language were some alphabetic apocalypse we were marching through), they have their tongues twisted by the twin serpents of Urdu and English, hissing sweet promises of modernity, of progress, of a future paved with opportunities that Kashmiri, poor, destitute, and orphaned Kashmiri, cannot seem to offer. And so, our language, our ancient storyteller, is dying—not with a grand explosion, not with a final, defiant wail, but with a whisper, slipping away like snow melting under an unseasonable sun.
But who, we must ask, is the executioner? Is it the government, whose bureaucratic machinery has never quite found the time or inclination to nurture Kashmiri within its cold steel gears? After all, what need does the grand institution have for a language that offers no official status, no grand revenue, no sleek corporate sheen? Our colleges do not teach it, our professors (where they exist) are ghosts in their own departments, and the result is predictable: a generation that cannot read, cannot write, and soon, will not speak. And such disharmony among these three aspects of language—reading, writing and speaking—is not a concussion but a big blow that can cause death on the spot.
And yet, blame cannot be placed at a single doorstep, for this is a grand conspiracy of erasure. Urdu and English have conspired, not through malice, but through might. They are the languages of power, of currency, of commerce. They are the tongues that open doors, that fill pockets, that make men nod approvingly in boardrooms and parliament halls. Kashmiri, poor stammering Kashmiri, has no such magic. And so, in the great digital agora, where screens flicker and scroll ceaselessly, where memes and reels and tweets carve the shape of thought, Kashmiri is a ghost. No presence in the newsprint, no headlines in bold letters, no space on the neon billboards of the information age. The young do not learn what they do not see, and what they do not see, they forget.
Of course, the tragedy deepens. For even in the land of its birth, Kashmiri is treated like an unwashed cousin at the feast of languages. It was dragged into schools late, and when it arrived, it was given neither a seat of honour nor a proper meal. The syllabus, a patchwork of disinterest, the examinations, a farce, the teachers, few and untrained, the script, a beautiful but unwieldy thing, scaring away even those who might have embraced it.
Then there are the wanderers. Migration, that old thief, has carried Kashmiri speakers far and wide, scattering them across the earth. Their children, born and raised in foreign lands—or in cities that might as well be foreign—grow up with Kashmiri as a distant echo, a thing spoken in hushed tones by nostalgic elders, a relic of another time. What use do they have for a language that does not pave the road to success?
And, if all this were not enough, if fate had not been cruel enough already, there is the matter of shame. Yes, shame! For in the high offices and the grand institutions, Kashmiri is whispered rather than declared. It is the language of villagers, of rustics, of those who have not learned to smooth their tongues upon the whetstone of sophistication. And so, we train ourselves to forget.
But language is more than words. It is breath, it is blood, it is memory. It is Lal Ded, who spoke her verses before Chaucer even dreamt of his Canterbury pilgrims. It is the unwritten histories of a people who have sung and wept in Kashmiri for centuries. And yet, where are the new poets? Where are the novelists who will give Kashmiri its rightful place in the world of letters? They are there, perhaps, but unheard, unseen, uncelebrated. And where are the great works of world literature in Kashmiri? Other languages have thrived on translation, but Kashmiri remains stranded, untranslated, isolated.
But all is not yet lost. There is still time—if only we act. Let the parents speak Kashmiri to their children, let the government wake from its slumber and offer Kashmiri the place it deserves. Let us write, let us read, let us refuse to be silent. A language is a living thing, but only if we keep it alive. Let it not be said, when history writes its final chapter on Kashmiri, that we were the generation who stood by and watched as it faded into nothingness.
Because if Kashmiri dies, it is not just a language that will be lost, it is us.
The writer teaches English literature in higher education and has a PhD from AMU.
