The Silencing of Kashmiri Cultural Identity

The Silencing of Kashmiri Cultural Identity: Language, Music and Memory Under Occupation


Muhammad Waleed Akhtar

On 5 August 2025, the sixth anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370, police officers in Indian-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir raided bookshops across the Valley and seized 25 books. Among the forfeited titles were works by Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani and Anuradha Bhasin, scholars and journalists whose writing had documented Kashmir's history from perspectives the state finds inconvenient. The J&K Home Department declared the books a threat to public order for promoting false narratives and grievance culture. What the order actually revealed was something more precise: that a government confident in its version of Kashmir's story would not need to confiscate the competing ones.


The book raids were not an isolated act of administrative overreach. They were the most visible moment in a systematic effort to sever the people of Indian-Occupied Kashmir from the language, literature, music and memory that constitute their identity as a distinct people. That effort has been underway since 2019. It is accelerating.


Kashmiri, known to its speakers as Koshur, is the mother tongue of the majority in the Kashmir Valley. It carries within it centuries of Sufi poetry, folk narrative, oral history and cultural memory that exist in no other form. It is also a language being allowed to disappear through deliberate policy choices dressed as administrative oversight.


In 2025, government schools across the Kashmir Valley conducted Kashmiri language examinations for students up to Class 8 without providing them Kashmiri language textbooks. Teachers and activists described the situation to Kashmir Times as deeply troubling, an assault on cultural roots disguised as a procurement failure. The National Education Policy 2020 explicitly emphasises mother-tongue instruction. The School Education Department and JKBOSE apparently found this principle inapplicable in the one territory where it matters most.


The 2020 Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Act added Hindi, Dogri and Kashmiri alongside Urdu and English. The celebrated inclusion of Kashmiri as an official language has not translated into its presence in classrooms. What the act accomplished instead was the promotion of Hindi, a language with no historical roots in the Valley, whose Devanagari script now dominates signboards across Srinagar in place of Urdu. Poet and linguist Zareef Ahmad Zareef described the language policy publicly as a conspiracy to erase cultural identity. Indian authorities maintain it promotes multilingualism. The textbook shortage suggests which description is more accurate.


Indian authorities maintain that security measures in Indian-Occupied Kashmir target separatism rather than culture. The distinction collapses when applied to people whose only political act is making art.


Madhosh Balhami, a Kashmiri poet whose verses drew on the Sufi tradition of resistance and longing, faced repeated summons and interrogations for what authorities described as revolutionary poetry. Syed Areej Safvi, a female Ladishah performer in a tradition of satirical folk singing that has existed in Kashmir for centuries, shifted her material away from political themes after coming under pressure. Kashmiri rappers and YouTubers who documented human rights conditions or drew on resistance traditions in their work were routinely called in for questioning. The New York Times documented in 2021 that poets across the Valley were being forced into silence. The pattern has not reversed.


The UAPA and PSA extend their reach into the cultural sphere through the same mechanism applied to journalists. When Fahad Shah, Aasif Sultan and Irfan Mehraj are imprisoned for journalism that simultaneously preserved Kashmiri memory and historical consciousness, the chilling effect does not stop at the press. It reaches every poet, musician and writer who understands that documentation and artistic expression, in Indian-Occupied Kashmir, carry identical legal risk.


This is not without precedent in the history of contested territories. China's bilingual education policy in Tibet has produced a situation in which, according to the University of Cincinnati Law Review and reporting by The Diplomat in 2025, approximately 95 percent of school textbooks are now in Mandarin, with Tibetan children increasingly placed in boarding schools that sever the cultural transmission the home provides. Turkey banned Kurdish language education and public expression for decades following the 1980 coup, restricting Kurdish cultural performances and media under security pretexts documented extensively by Human Rights Watch and PEN International.


In each case, the strategy followed the same logic: present linguistic and cultural suppression as national integration, use administrative mechanisms rather than explicit prohibition where possible, and target the transmission systems through which identity passes between generations. What is happening in Indian-Occupied Kashmir fits this pattern with uncomfortable precision.


Under Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, India is obligated to respect the right of every person to participate in cultural life and to benefit from the protection of their literary and artistic production. That obligation does not permit the forfeiture of books, the removal of language textbooks, the surveillance of folk performers or the imprisonment of poets whose crime is memory.


The demographic engineering this series has documented, the new domicile laws, the land transfers, the settlement of non-locals, operates most effectively when the indigenous population has been separated from the cultural infrastructure through which identity is transmitted and defended. Language is that infrastructure. Music is that infrastructure. Literature is that infrastructure. A generation of Kashmiris growing up without Kashmiri textbooks, without access to the books that document their history, without poets willing to speak and musicians willing to perform, is a generation whose capacity to articulate what is being done to them has been pre-emptively reduced.

That is not an accident of policy. It is its purpose. The dispossession of a people is complete not when their land is taken but when they can no longer remember, in their own language, that it was ever theirs.

 

The author is a researcher at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad. 

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