The tragedy is this: we are not being robbed. We are giving it away freely, willingly, and often proudly. A language is never merely a communication tool. It is the nervous system of a civilisation. When a language begins to fade, what disappears is not simply vocabulary but an entire way of seeing the world.
Khalid Quyoom
There is a particular kind of grief that arrives not with a bang but with applause. It does not announce itself in the language of tragedy. It arrives dressed as progress, filmed in portrait mode and uploaded with cheerful hashtags. Kashmir is living through precisely this kind of grief, and we are too busy celebrating it to notice the funeral taking place before our eyes.
Consider, for a moment, a familiar species of entertainment that now populates our social media timelines: the influencer presenting a native Kashmiri child with a challenge. The challenge is simple. “Speak in a Kashmiri accent.” Try it. Go on. As though the language the child was born into is now an exotic performance, a cultural curiosity to be excavated from the ruins of memory rather than inherited naturally. The child obliges. The audience applauds. The reels gather thousands of views. Nobody appears to find anything unusual about the spectacle.
Let us be honest about what we are watching. These are children raised on a linguistic cocktail so thoroughly mixed that no single ingredient remains distinguishable. Their Kashmiri is not quite Kashmiri. Their Urdu is not quite Urdu. What they speak, with alarming confidence and zero self-consciousness, is a creature of pure improvisation, Kashmiri sentences faithfully translated into Urdu, but carrying all the grammatical furniture of their mother tongue along for the journey. The sentence structure, the verb placement, the rhythm of a language built on entirely different bones, all of it dragged wholesale into another language that has its own skeleton entirely. The result is, by any linguistic measure, a blunder.
Yet what is perhaps more alarming is that nobody notices. Or worse, nobody minds.
The judges, after all, are Kashmiris too. They understand the distortion instinctively because they themselves inhabit the same confusion. What ought to become a moment of gentle correction turns instead into a moment of celebration. The child who barely touches the surface of a language that should have settled into their consciousness like marrow in the bones is applauded simply for attempting it. We have lowered the standard so dramatically that even the faintest approximation now passes for fluency, and this, we are told, is progress.
Now consider the other side of the paradox. The Kashmiri who speaks the language with clarity, rhythm and fidelity to its natural form, unhurried and uninterrupted by obligatory English insertions deployed as proof of sophistication, is often regarded with quiet suspicion. Too traditional. Too rural. Not modern enough. In contemporary Kashmir, fluency in one’s own language has gradually transformed from a mark of cultural richness into an unintended social liability. The more polished your Kashmiri, the less “educated” you are presumed to be.
Meanwhile, the person who constantly shifts between broken Urdu, fragmented English, and diluted Kashmiri is considered refined, cultured, and socially elevated. Doors open more easily for such speech. Heads nod with approval. Without consciously intending to, we have created a hierarchy of language in which our mother tongue occupies the lowest rung. We ourselves have become embarrassed custodians of the very thing that belongs to us most intimately.
There was a time, not so distant that it requires archaeology, when Kashmiri was not merely a medium of communication but a vessel of wisdom. Proverbs travelled between generations like heirlooms. Riddles sharpened young minds. Every day speech carried philosophy within it. The language possessed a compressed intelligence capable of expressing in a single phrase what entire paragraphs often fail to communicate. These were not decorative relics of folklore. They were evidence of a civilisation thinking deeply about itself and about life.
Today, much of that inheritance is quietly disappearing. Not because the modern world has become too complicated, but because we have become impatient with depth itself. A proverb requires a listener who understands the language well enough to feel the emotional and cultural weight hidden inside it. Each generation now produces fewer such listeners. The old expressions survive briefly in the mouths of grandparents before falling silently into oblivion.
One need only look at many other regions of India to notice a striking contrast. Across several states, the mother tongue is worn almost defiantly as a badge of belonging and honour. Sometimes the attachment becomes excessive, even exclusionary, but the underlying conviction remains unmistakable: this language is ours, it matters, and we refuse to apologise for it.
Kashmir, however, has arrived at the opposite condition through a far more tragic route. Nobody forcibly confiscated our language. No imperial decree banned Kashmiri from our homes. No cultural coloniser arrived with orders to erase it from public life. We surrendered it voluntarily, slowly, almost politely. Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that speaking Kashmiri fluently made us appear smaller, less modern, less cosmopolitan. Prestige became attached to every language except our own.
This is the great paradox of our time. While other communities struggle fiercely to preserve their linguistic identities, we participate enthusiastically in dismantling ours, mistaking surrender for sophistication.
Somewhere along this journey, fluency in Kashmiri became optional, while struggling through it became oddly charming. The person who stumbles through basic Kashmiri is met with affection and amusement. The person who speaks it naturally and beautifully is treated as though they belong to another century entirely.
At some point, we must ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: who exactly is supposed to preserve this language if not us? Are we outsourcing even this responsibility? Do we genuinely expect outsiders to value Kashmiri more deeply than Kashmiris themselves? At the rate we are proceeding, we may soon require subtitles to comprehend our elders’ conversations, a possibility that sounds absurd only because it is already beginning to feel plausible.
The irony did not die quietly in Kashmir. It was celebrated, recorded, uploaded, and shared with hashtags.
A language is never merely a communication tool. It is the nervous system of a civilisation. Through language, people remember their dead, raise their children, express love, preserve memory, transmit humour, and make sense of suffering. When a language begins to fade, what disappears is not simply vocabulary but an entire way of seeing the world. Certain emotions exist properly only within certain tongues. Certain silences, jokes, prayers, and griefs lose their texture when translated.
Kashmiri, as a language, contains ways of understanding life that cannot be replicated elsewhere. It carries the memory of our ancestors, the emotional cadence of our homes, the wisdom embedded in ordinary speech, the metaphors born from our landscapes, winters, rivers and histories. To lose such a language is not merely to lose words. It is to lose an irreplaceable part of ourselves.
And the tragedy is this: we are not being robbed. We are giving it away freely, willingly and often proudly. The least we could do is notice.
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