By: Sabahat Fida
We are a null set, an empty shell, easily displaced, easily rewritten. A person stripped off culture is not just exiled from land, but from memory, from meaning, from the heartbeat of being itself.
It is culture , not wealth or power that ties the invisible string to our hearts. Tradition is not just habit; it is love passed down. Language is not just communication; it is the scent of our mothers’ voices, the rhythm of ancestral lullabies, the cry of a people stitched into grammar.
I was recently transferred to a remote and deeper rural community. While the hardships here are many, the silver lining has been unexpected yet profound: I found myself drawn closer to the region’s rich cultural heritage. It was here that I first learned about Pir e khear, a festival I had never known before. This celebration marks the moment when rice crops begin to bloom, the first visible signs of grain emerging. It’s a deeply symbolic and joyous occasion, stretching over eight to ten days, filled with the sounds of reviving folklore music, traditional rituals, and vibrant communal gatherings.
One of the most touching customs is the calling back of daughters to their parental homes, reinforcing family bonds and honouring shared roots, fish dishes are painstakingly prepared, and prayers are offered deep into the night. It made me thing the richness of our culture and heritage, culture which is a living archive, not just a performance, it is memory encoded in language, rhythm, food, and gesture.
This festival is a living expression of a people’s metaphysics and aesthetics: the recognition of the divine in nature’s renewal, the love of daughters, the sanctity of tradition. Songs sung in Kashmiri, the preparation of fish passed down through generations, and the gathering in prayer represent a collective identity that goes beyond mere heritage, it is ontological continuity.
Then it was shared to me that this traditional festival is not celebrated with the earlier richness and fervour and certain sections of the society refrain from it. And it got me thinking that when such rituals are abandoned, not out of evolution but erasure, the people lose more than a celebration-they lose themselves.
There is a growing sense in Kashmir, particularly among the younger generation, that their own language and customs are somehow inadequate. English is seen as the language of intellect and opportunity, while Kashmiri is relegated to the domestic or the rural. The traditional pheran, once a symbol of elegance and resistance to the cold and colonial gaze alike, is increasingly replaced by western attire in the name of civility. Cultural shame is now dressed as modernity.
This sense of inferiority did not arise in a vacuum. It is the result of sustained narratives of colonial mindset that have constructed Kashmiri culture as “uncivilized”, “irrational,” and what was once celebrated as syncretic and soulful is now viewed by some as heretical or backward.
If colonization in the past involved physical occupation and economic plunder, today it operates through the displacement of symbols and meanings. As philosopher Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argued, ‘the most dangerous colonization is not of land but of the mind’. In Kashmir, this manifests in the marginalization of the Kashmiri language, the ridicule of folk traditions and alienation with heritage.
Festivals are phenomenology of being human , take Pir e Khear , a festival once celebrated in the different rural areas not merely as an agricultural event, It is poetry embodied: Muslims and Pandits alike would celebrate, families would cook, gather, and rejoice, songs would rise like prayer from the fields.
This was Kashmir not just a region on the map, but a phenomenology of unity. Here, culture wasn’t a label-it was a shared breath.
But now?
The division so subtle, so refined, it leaves no fingerprints. It does not burn books. It simply makes people forget how to read their own hearts.
To be human is to revere what has shaped us and to romanticize our winters in pherans, our grandmothers’ stories, the music that rose with morning fog. But when a person is made to feel ashamed of these, when Kashmiri becomes a lower language, when pheran becomes backward, this is not just cultural suppression, this is spiritual engineering ,erasing the emotions that make a human feel rooted, beloved, at home.
And what remains? A body that speaks in someone else’s tongue, wears someone else’s norms, and worships without memory. We must ask: Who benefits when we forget who we are?
Colonialism is not just physical domination but the devastation and target of language memory and self-worth. Its cultural hegemony that west exercised where English language is the language of intellect; a suit, pant and a tie is the only refined version of human civilisation.
And then answer with action- by remembering, preserving, and living as if our culture is sacred. Because it is!
I remember when I was little sitting in the soft warmth of the Chalai Kalan, the kangri, listening with wide eyes and open hearts as our elders told us stories of Rantas, Pasikdar, Bramchok, tasrufdar, not just any stories, but mythical folklore about animals that spoke, about spirits that wandered, whose names rolled off their tongues with awe and ease. We sat spell bound and amazed.
The cinematic description was so vivid that it left a deep-rooted impression in our imaginations no ‘Dora the explorer’ could ever do! Not because we understood every detail, but because we felt it. The way they spoke- our grandparents, our parents- it carried something sacred. It wasn’t just storytelling. It was mythology, oral history, and emotion woven into one. Those moments stretched our imaginations like wings. They opened doors in our minds to worlds beyond textbooks and logic. It also did something else it tied us to them.
Despite the generation gap, we didn’t see them as “old” or irrelevant. We saw them as keepers of something mysterious and rich. They were not just our elders; they were living archives, filled with sacred history that wasn’t written, but lived. I am still amazed as I hear my mother‘s so eloquent, sharp and witty use of Kashmiri muhavharat, her words were so precise, so elegant, so rooted in rhythm that they became music.
And these Kashmiri words delicate and perfect whose meanings I still don’t fully grasp, but I can feel their weight, their shape, their beauty. My mind drifts to the way my mother used to tell stories as she fed me evocative tales, soaked in detail and tenderness. When a story ended in a sad tone I’d object, genuinely upset: ‘This can’t be the ending!’ I needed resolution. I needed hope. Those stories weren’t just addictive or entertaining they were my emotional nourishment.
How is that all erased? I don’t understand. How does something so alive so central to our identity vanish in just a few decades?
These words, these stories, are alive in us, but they are not being passed forward with the same fire. And I fear that after just a few generations, they can’t be even museum pieces. The life will be gone. The warmth of Chalai Kalal, the intonation of the tale, the gathering of bodies, the feeling- all gone!
And I just wish… we were better off. I wish we had guarded it more fiercely.
I wish we hadn’t been made to feel ashamed. I wish we had spoken more, listened more, remembered more. Because we were once a people rich in story. And now we are a people forgetting the sound of our own voice.
The writer is a Zoology lecturer. sabahatfidah@yahoo.com>
