Who is a Kashmiri? Rethinking identity in a fractured homeland

July 5, 2025 by News Desk

Shah Shahid

Over the years, Kashmir’s intellectual discourse has thinned and faltered, collapsing into a singular question of identity that refuses to go away. In this narrowing, we have failed to even address the basic question of who a Kashmiri is! This question, for all its complexity, has not been handled with care or nuance.

It has instead been flattened, instrumentalised, and rehearsed through a narrow script. Most academic and cultural circles have failed the public, not only by reducing Kashmiri identity to a linguistic lens, but by doing so often in service of personal legitimacy, political positioning, or cultural insecurities.

The result is a sterile, self-referential debate that continues to dominate discussions, at the cost of more urgent, more layered conversations that Kashmir desperately needs.

Much of this intellectual narrowing stems from the post-1990s rupture, when the Kashmiri Pandit community, displaced and fearing cultural extinction, began articulating identity with renewed urgency. For many among them, language became the last surviving thread.

Scholars and writers like Dr. K. L. Chowdhury and Agnishekhar framed Kashmiri identity as inherently and almost exclusively tied to the Kashmiri language; Koshur.

This was not just a sentimental attachment; it was a political act of boundary-making. Chowdhury, in his essays and reflections, repeatedly invoked the cultural continuity of Koshur-speaking people, cautioning that without the language, the very soul of Kashmir would be lost.

Agnishekhar, a poet and activist, went further, mobilising this idea in his advocacy for Panun Kashmir, where language became both a civilizational and ethnic marker.

This view found intellectual reinforcement in the work of Kashi Nath Pandita, who rooted Kashmiri identity in pre-Islamic historical continuity, again mediated through Koshur. Similarly, T. N. Dhar ‘Kundan’ wrote of the need to protect Kashmiri language not merely as heritage but as identity itself.

These voices, while rooted in genuine fear of erasure and cultural loss, ended up constructing a version of Kashmiriness that excluded all those who did not speak the language, from Gujjar Muslims to Shina speakers in Gurez, to urban Kashmiris who have grown up in Urdu-speaking households.

Yet, even as this linguistic purism gained cultural traction, it was not unchallenged. Several Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri scholars have pushed back against this reduction.

Mohamad Junaid, Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, in his ethnographic research on Kashmiri youth and resistance, has repeatedly argued that Kashmiri identity is not defined by language but by shared political experiences. Junaid clearly frames Kashmiriness as a product of political formation, not linguistic inheritance.

For Junaid, what makes someone Kashmiri is not the language they speak but the life they lead. His fieldwork shows how solidarity across linguistic lines is not only possible but lived reality in Kashmir.

Mona Bhan, Anthropologist with extensive fieldwork, through her anthropological work among Gujjar and Bakarwal communities, challenges the idea that only Koshur speakers are authentic Kashmiris.

Her work reveals how linguistic minorities, though often marginalised in dominant discourses, have actively shaped and participated in the Kashmiri political consciousness. She shows that the exclusion of non-Koshur speakers is not only unjust but historically inaccurate.

Professor Hameedah Nayeem, a leading academic and public intellectual in Kashmir, has also cautioned against reducing identity to language. Her writings emphasise that Kashmiri cultural identity—what some call Kashmiriyat—is rooted in values, spiritual traditions, and political solidarities, not just in a mother tongue.

She argues that language is a tool, not a test of belonging.

The late historian Mohammad Ishaq Khan too contributed to this line of thought. His work on Kashmiri mysticism, Islamisation, and cultural transformation avoided linguistic essentialism and instead explored how identity in Kashmir evolved through dynamic interactions between religion, politics, and memory.

These voices offer a necessary counterpoint. They ask us to imagine Kashmiriness not as a linguistic inheritance but as a political, historical, and ethical position.

Their vision includes the Gujjar herder, the Shina-speaking soldier, the Urdu-educated city girl, and the Koshur-speaking poet—not because they share a tongue, but because they share a world.

And yet, despite these important interventions, the public and academic discourse in Kashmir continues to orbit the linguistic question.

The reasons are many: intellectual laziness, lack of reading, personal insecurity, and at times, a hunger for cultural ownership. As more and more people abandon books for tweets, and confuse visibility with insight, the debate over identity has grown louder but not deeper. We have begun to mistake repetition for authority.

It is time for a course correction. Those who first collapsed Kashmiri identity into language must now step back and reconsider.

Language matters, it carries memory, imagination, and feeling. But it cannot, and must not, be the only gate to belonging. To reduce Kashmir to a tongue is to betray its plural past and sabotage its collective future.

A new imagination is needed—one that is inclusive, layered, and informed by both scholarship and lived experience. One that sees Kashmir not as a fortress of speech but as a landscape of struggle, solidarity, and shared becoming.

Only then can we move beyond the tired question of who is a Kashmiri, and begin asking what Kashmir, as a place and a promise, still demands of us.

Shah Shahid is a research scholar at Aligarh Muslim University.