Khawar
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‘The first thing that we ask of a writer is that he shan’t tell lies’
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The mushaira and the novel end with the the word of God just as they had started, remembering the bygone era in all its lost glory. Drawing upon the living memories the book blends fact and fiction seamlessly keeping alive the high culture of old Dilli. Conscious of the decline and defeat of the cultural…
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I looked outside the window at the patches of snow that had hardly managed to cover a few twigs on a nearby walnut tree. Depth, nuance and reflection were like these few patches- rare, fragile and fleeting against the flouroscent tyrrany of performative chaos. I turned off the app to let the feed roar on…
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With continuously changing and reforming social and political circumstances in Kashmir, new subjectivities and sensitivities keep emerging. These find expression in unique forms of poetic articulation. The canon of Kashmiri poetry is as living as Kashmir itself and keels constantly reshaping, revising, and renewing its contours.
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In the heart of the historical Amira Kadal lies a ‘flea Market’ which is less about fleas and more about the colours: of toys, fabrics and sometimes of life.
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Love is the greatest mystery of life that defies all analysis and shames all questions. Like life, it is indescribable and an attempt to define it is as baffling as defining life itself . Questions demand boundaries love refuses them, queries seek limit and love finds its way where limits dissolve, mind draws circles and…
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The homeless man writes with a coherence of genuine disorientation, not the incoherent orientation of a poet. He scribbles with the authentic confusion of someone who looked too deeply into the mirror and can no longer distinguish between the image and void behind it.
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What makes Harwan truly exceptional is not merely the presence of these diverse motifs but their harmonious integration on a single site. Kashmir’s status as a cross-section of civilisations is reflected in this extraordinary cultural convergence.
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The year 2025 in Kashmir left like any other year in Kashmir: full of rumours, expectations and disappointments. What kept Kashmiris going was their knack for good humour, their love for wazwan and their witty capability to dismiss. But 2025 was also a year of quiet literary resilience. Bookstores opened and closed like the shutters…
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Abdul Ahad Azad’s book ‘Kashmiri Zubaan aur Shayiri’ is one of the greatest works that analyses the literary traditions of Kashmiri language. It helps to preserve the language and give it literary legitimacy in an era when it is dying. Someone has rightly compared the book to Edward Granville Browne’s monumental five-volume work, A Literary…
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The re-interpretation of a traditional Kashmiri legend through a communist lens illuminated universal themes of resilience, hope, and survival, marking it as one of the most remarkable contributions to twentieth-century literature.
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Iqbal’s critique of nationalism remains strikingly relevant in our contemporary world. His warning about nationalism’s tendency toward “competitive nationalism and its resultant militarism, imperialism and consumerism” anticipated many of the conflicts that have plagued the modern world, like the ongoing Gaza genocide, where territorial allegiances have weighed heavily over the supra-territorial ethical and moral responsibilities…
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The true speech is the one that is not institutionalised. The true self is the one which is not subjectified. The true language is that of breaking free. Language as freedom:The essence of human ego is its ‘will to choose’ and ‘will to express’ and hence the beginning and end of all philosophy is freedom.…
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I placed an order for Roy’s latest book at a local online bookstore. As excited as I always am before receiving my new book, this time the anticipation was intertwined with a myriad of other questions and expectations; can literature take for its province, a whole society and for its purpose, its sentient reflections? What…
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These form an intimate and lasting part of oral tradition and serve as the vessels of cultural wisdom. The convey values, traditions and even subtler forms of resistance across generations. Through them the child absorbs something essential: the perception of who they are, serving as the foremost anchors of identity.
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Darwish refers to multitudes of identity that made up Said. He did not belong to a single place; his personality was sometimes a rich tapestry and other times a ragged canvas, woven with elements of Palestine, the US, and Cairo; shaped by his identity as a Palestinian Christian, an Arab, and an American academia, all…
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“More powerful than all poetry, more pervasive than all science, more profound than all philosophy are the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six pillars of strength upon which our culture rests.”
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Kanger remains beloved to the Kashmiri, historian Hassan Kuihami writes: “What Laila was to Majnun’s bosom, so is the Kanger to a Kashmiri”
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Founded in year 1587 C.E during by the Mughal emperor Akbar, the cemetery of poets, also called Mazar-e-Shoara is situated along the banks of Dal Lake. The burial ground for the once eminent poets seems to have been selected carefully to give the dead souls a serene eternal sleep. The historical records show that there…
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What is often assumed is that medieval Kashmir was a land cutoff from the rest of the world owing to its topography. However, the historical analysis proves that it was one of the centres of civilisation shaping the history and politics of the whole world from time to time, the Abbasid revolution being one of…
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Language is deeply imbricated in the flesh of civilisation. Chomsky beautiful explains relation between language and freedom and how “language, in its essential properties and in a manner of its use provides a basic criterion for determining that an organism is a being with a human mind”. Therefore, the will to express is the basis of…
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With Persian becoming the court language, a new breed of functionaries was brought to fore who chose Persian over Kashmiri and Sanskrit to stay in the echelons of power. Even though there were mass conversions in Kashmir, and contrary to the popular belief, it were the Kashmiri Brahmans and a few elite Muslims who became…
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It may be pointed out that Lalla was disowned, not only in her own times but for a greater part of Kashmir history, by the elite on account of her hostility to the Caste superiority.
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Orwell (1953) explained, “Because of nationalism we tend to divide the world into an “us” and “them”; terms like “freedom fighter” and “terrorist” become secondary to our own national sympathies; and a form of moral relativism prevails”
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The word “exodus” has become almost rhetorical in the Kashmiri political discourse, however, the political connotations underpinning it have largely ignored the many mass migrations and displacements of poor Muslim peasants and artisans under Sikh and Dogra regimes
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On both sides, small art samples were beautifying the stairs and the walls were covered with works of famous painters. I knocked on the door gently. The door opened. Faiz stood in front of me. For a moment I was spellbound, blank and had no idea what to say.
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According to Robert Thorpe, during Ranbir Singh’s time the license granting permission for purchase of girls for this purpose cost about a 100 chilkee rupees. Robert Thorpe wrote further that the Kashmiri girls were being forced into prostitution by the authorities with the idea of earning more and more revenue from licensing the flesh trade.…
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Purposive activity is of the very essence of God—God is indeed moved by purposes, but purposes that are His own—and God has been creating for wise purposes from eternity. At the level of creation itself, nothing created is eternal, but there have always been created things of one sort or another
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Ibn Taymiyya crafts a vision of God as active, personal and much more intimately involved in temporal and human affairs than the God of Kalām theology and Avicennan philosophy in order to prompt more ready obedience to God’s law.
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The Jesus Resistance remains lost in a misrepresented history which favoured the system back then and which continues to favour the Western capitalist and material narratives right now.
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It is said that military of Maharaja installed a cannon on the roof of Pathar Masjid to blown up Shahi Hamdan shrine, which is situated across the Jhelum. However, an influential Pandit, Birbal Dhar, intervened into the matter and saved the shrine.
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Iqbal has possibly the largest number of mis-ascribed or falsely ascribed couplets to. Kindly stop sharing them in his name.
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Galwan had a lot to say and had a fervent desire to write all of it in English for the world to know. Encouraged by one of his American employers, Mrs. Katherine Barret and her husband Robert Barret, Ghulam Rassul started writing an autobiography called ‘Servant of the Sahibs- To be read aloud’.
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Proverbs were used by Kashmiris, often accompanied with dark humour, to denounce injustices and tyrannies caused to them from time to time, regime after regime. Some of these historic political proverbs coined by unknown Kashmiris, in reaction to the political situations they encountered are compiled below.
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In this article, the author tries to go beyond the traditionally accepted etymologies behind the origin of the word Kashmir
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The histories are marked by people who became epicentres of contention for generations to come. Kashmir history in particular, being an intersection of multitude faiths and cultures, has given rise to legends, allegories and realities which have set dais for discussions from time immemorial.
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Different rulers, at different times, banned eating beef and slaughter of cow. The slaughter of a cow was called ‘hatya‘ (murder), and the accusation of the practice (hatya haanz) often ended in the most brutal of punishments. One such punishment was mesle waalun (skinning alive) and then being hung on the road-side.
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From his love for the land, his marriage in Srinagar and his association with Kashmiri leadership, Faiz’s Kashmir connection ran deep and rather close to his heart.
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While Jhelum has always been a symbol of the local populace, the bridges of Kashmir very conveniently become representatives of a larger political dynamics that has kept the Kashmiri socio-political discourse abuzz over centuries.
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School does not exist to foster ethics and upheaval. It exists to stabilize the status quo. It exists to train a population which is subject to the power of such instruments of mass persuasion as the social order has at hand. It exists to get its citizens prepared for moral compromise.
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It is the second biggest mosque in Kashmir after Jamia Masjid. It is a hypostyle mosque, the style which first emerged in Iraq and dominated the world after 715 CE.
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The images of Syrian or Palestinian children with blood oozing out of their ears or eyes popping out might disturb the aesthetic sensitivities of Western intellectuals but their moral and humanistic sensitivities remain largely unfazed.
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A doctor meets with a drug addict at his hospital in Srinagar. In the conversation between the two reproduced below some chilling details emerged about the easy accessibility of drugs in our towns and village and the life altering consequences its use has on our youth.
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