Where Does Kashmiri Literature Live?

When I read Onaiza Drabu’s recent anthology on Kashmiri literature, The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature, I found myself gaining momentum with questions for which I wanted to find answers. The anthology is a wide collection of Kashmir’s centuries-old literature, along with the contemporary artistic flavour of poems, songs, plays and stories. It brings together literary figures from the Valley, some known and some anonymous. It serves as a single window into different themes and subjects, with the common objective of presenting the richness of Kashmiri Literature to readers. Mahmood Gani and Lal Ded’s translated poems engaged my thoughts as I moved through the book. However, the quest to discover the sources of these poems and older works remained genuine and persistent. I was still left with the same questions: Where does Kashmiri literature live?

We usually imagine literature as books written by the prominent writers or preserved by the publishers or institutions. But the Kashmiri literary tradition has lived through differently: through oral poetry, songs, radio programmes, personal notebooks, shrines and informal spaces.

“Poetry is central, it accompanies all rites from birth to death, marking all moments in between. Although literature is everywhere; it is omnipresent,” was Onaiza Drabu’s first response to my question.

The important point is how literature serves everyday cultural life. In an ecosystem where publishing is gatekept, a woman writing down a song in her notebook makes that a site of literature. It does not merely merely preserve ink on paper, but also the emotions, lullabies, love and memory across generations.

“I think collecting Literature was the easier part but the labour involved in anthologising and these last few years was wider” Drabu said.

But recognising literature outside the publications creates another problem: how do these scattered forms survive? It becomes challenging to obtain the archived version of literature without any systematic preservation, particularly when oral tradition and folklore have formed such significant parts of the culture. If a work is not printed, catalogued or kept in an institutional archive, its survival can depend on individuals who happen to preserve it. Something that is neither formally published or archived may struggle to travel across generations. The process of anthologising the work into a collection remains revealing. What appears in the finished book is the result of searching libraries, private collections, old anthologies and digital archives.

Oral tradition, radio, and poetry have also remained mediums of transmission in Kashmir’s literary culture, without significant scripts. Radio Kashmir’s cultural programmes, for instance, allowed expressions and conversation to travel across generations. This shows that literature does not survive only on paper, but through sound. It was significant to my own query that literature is not merely a trace of written text, but exists in scattered forms and through different mediums.

Similarly, the oral tradition of Wanvun remains embedded in Kashmiri culture. In The Big Book of Kashmir Literature, a translated poem of an anonymous poet captures the feelings associated with the ‘Meanzraath’–the henna night. The poem begins in Muslim culture, and continues with wishes of “bright on you!” Similarly, such poems show a diverse cultural attachment and expressions. These written literary works show that a tradition flows within the literature–whether in oral forms or written, and anonymously or written with by a prominent writer.

“My utmost gratitude to zealous Kashmiri digital archivists who have over the years uploaded and digitalised many out of print books,” Drabu said, unfolding another layer of my inquiry.

Preservation is not merely the work of major literary institutions but demands for a collaborative individual and informal network to formally digitalise the archives. M.K. Raina, for instance, has spent decades working on Kashmiri language, producing learning material in different scripts. His work illustrates how preservation can happen through personal initiatives as much as through formal archives.

The search for literature also takes one through unexpected and almost magical coincidences. Drabu's anecdote about locating an original story illustrates this. She had been searching for the story for two years through family and state libraries, with the help of the writer’s grandson, but could not find it for the anthology. Then, one day, at the University of Kashmir’s library, she picked up an old anthology and the first story in it was the very one she had been searching for.

Such instances allow a reader to encounter more and more unfamiliar work: literature that sometimes tunes the harmonium of a singer, and sometimes loses its tune when it cannot be found in written form.

While reading a soulful poem on the harsh treatment of a daughter-in-law, I realised how poetry can function as a central medium of conversion and expression in everyday life. It carried grief, cries of cruelty, and warmth for the mother:

“You used to wake me gently at seven-thirty,

Mother-in-law stirs me with her feet, son dirty."

Selection, therefore, is not simply about declining which poems or stories are good enough to be included. It can begin much earlier, with what is available to be found, translated and preserved. A poem that has survived only through oral transmission may be harder to recover than a work preserved in several editions. A writer whose work has remained within the family narrations have less accessibility than a work preserved in a public library. Similarly, a work may remain outside an anthology due to its harder accessibility. What reaches the reader is therefore shaped not only by literary value, but also by the circumstances of preservation and accessibility.

This also means that the literary edition we encounter is never entirely the tradition that once existed. The gaps matter: they remind us of literary work and voices that remain outside the archive not because they lacked literature, but because the circumstances of their preservation are different.

Thus, Kashmiri literature does not live only in books and libraries. It also lives in songs, poems, memories, notebooks, radio recordings, family collections and the people who continue to preserve them. My search for where Kashmiri literature lives therefore led me away from a single shelf and towards a larger archive.