Category: Kashmir History

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. 

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. 

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…

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…

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.

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.…

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…

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.

“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.”

Kanger remains beloved to the Kashmiri, historian Hassan Kuihami writes: “What Laila was to Majnun’s bosom, so is the Kanger to a Kashmiri”

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…

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

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.

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.

Iqbal has possibly the largest number of mis-ascribed or falsely ascribed couplets to. Kindly stop sharing them in his name.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.