There was a time in Kashmir when spirituality did not announce itself. It did not need microphones, entourages, or a cheering gallery. It arrived quietly – often barefoot, often hungry, often alone.
The recent social-media upheaval around the Sandeep Mawa–Ghulam Rasool Hami controversy may look like a fleeting digital quarrel, but it is, in fact, a symptom of a deeper civilizational illness: the evaporation of Kashmir’s spiritual spine under the weight of ugly noise.
A society anchored in spirituality does not rush to verdicts. It pauses. It doubts. It allows silence to do the heavy lifting that shouting cannot. Kashmir once knew this instinct well. That is the time when saints needed no stage.
The Rishi–Sufi tradition of Kashmir was not ornamental. It was experiential. Saints were not performers; they were disruptors of ego.
Lal Ded wandered unclothed – not to shock society, but to declare freedom from it. Her verses were not motivational slogans; they were existential grenades, unsettling both priest and ruler alike. She did not seek endorsement. Her authority came from renunciation so complete that it terrified power.
Nund Rishi did not heal by theatrics. He healed by withdrawing – from excess, from cruelty, from noise. His miracles were not staged interventions but moral awakenings. He confronted kings without raising his voice and corrected communities without humiliating them.
Their spirituality had three defining features: silence before speech, solitude before authority, and inner transformation before public display
Miracles, when they occurred, were not advertised. They were whispered about long after the saint had moved on.
Kashmir’s Rishi–Sufi tradition did not produce performers. It produced gravity. Today’s faith healers or peers or whatever you call them are theatre artists who know when to put their decibels on high or low pitch. They also know when to pause and restart as the electricity goes off and microphones have no gensets as a backup.
Saints of our past spoke little because their lives spoke loudly enough.
Here is an anecdote about Nund Rishi worth remembering.
When local chieftains, alarmed by his growing influence, approached him with gifts and demands for public endorsement of their authority, Nund Rishi reportedly responded not with a sermon, but with silence. He did not curse them. He did not bless them. He simply refused to be used.
That silence proved more destabilising than rebellion. The chieftains left unsettled – not because they were opposed, but because they were denied validation. That, in Kashmiri spiritual history, was considered a miracle: the power to unseat ego without confrontation.
No crowd. No chanting. No raised hands. Just refusal.
Now fast-forward today. You have a peer only if he has an Instagram/Twitter account. Things have eroded in Kashmir. Very badly. But the arrogance of a common Kashmiri is so high that he claims to be feeling cozy-cozy even when he is standing on wet poop.
And on top of that today’s Kashmiris are happy when their godmen arrive with amplified sound systems, rhythmic slogans repeated until thinking collapses, and hands constantly in motion, as if motion itself were proof of power.
Their throats are loud, but their presence is light. Their miracles are instant, but their impact is zero. They can neither calm a crowd nor quiet a mind. Remove the microphone, and the authority evaporates. This is not spirituality. This is acoustics.
The Rishi tradition demanded ego annihilation. Today’s godmen demand visibility. Saints once fled recognition; today’s figures survive on it. Earlier miracles followed discipline; today discipline is absent, but miracles are promised in advance.
The inversion is complete. The spiritual spine is broken.
This is where the Hami controversy fits – not as a scandal, but as a symptom. When people possess inner conviction, they do not rush to declare allegiance. They can afford neutrality. They can avoid glare. They can afford delay. They can afford doubt.
But when spiritual discipline collapses, morality becomes noisy. It needs reassurance. It needs numbers. This is precisely why counter videos are emerging from Hami’s side influenced by people who claim to be his followers and/ or who claim to be ‘too close’ to him. It needs a chorus to drown out its own hollowness.
And you can’t be too close to a spiritual man. The energies will burn you. Neither will any spiritual man let you come close to him. If you both are closer to each other; you both are ordinary.
In short, a society that once produced saints capable of shaking power through withdrawal now demands constant verbal alignment from ordinary citizens. That is not progress. That is regression dressed up as moral urgency.
The saints of this land did not need followers to validate them. Today, godmen cannot function without crowds. The saints transformed people by shrinking their own presence. Today’s healers expand themselves and shrink nothing else.
Kashmir has not lost faith. It has lost spiritual weight. We are hollow people now. The most dangerous loss is not political or social. It is civilizational.
