Asif Tariq, author: ‘Teaching Kashmiri made me optimistic about its future’

Many experiences have shaped the literary sensibility of the 25-year-old Kashmiri writer and language teacher Asif Tariq, but two stand out for their passive and overt violence. As a standard 7 student at a school in his native Ganderbal area, he submitted a poem in Kashmiri for the school magazine. The editor tore the poem up and, with derision, told him to think of singing as a career. Folk singers are perched at the bottom of the social ladder in Kashmir.

A year later, another of his teachers was incensed after hearing Tariq chatting with a fellow student in Kashmiri. Asif said he was told to remove his shirt and stand in the corridor for the second half of the day. Hurt at the incident, Tariq’s father transferred him to another school.

Various reasons have led to a peculiar linguistic crisis in Kashmir. Most literate Kashmiris can’t read or write their mother tongue. Most parents prefer to converse with their children in Urdu or English. Schools, where Kashmiri has been taught as a subject for the past few years now, follow the trend. This indifference to one’s own language was, however, taken a step too far by Asif’s teachers.

“I have often dreamt of that corridor and woken up sweating, flustered and disturbed,” said Asif, who is pursuing a master’s degree in Kashmiri at the University of Kashmir. The school experiences were traumatic, no doubt, but they also made him fall in love with his mother tongue.

As a college student, he contributed poems and short stories to a Kashmiri language newspaper and then attempted something very ambitious: a novel in Kashmiri. Not more than two dozen have been written in the language.

The novel, Khaban Khayalan Manz (In Dreams and Thoughts), took a long time to mature and was published in 2021 by a reputed local publishing house. The first print of 350 copies was sold out. This is remarkable in a state where the sale of even 100 copies of a Kashmiri book makes it a best seller. A second print of 400 copies is now ready to roll out. The novel is an allegory of a man’s journey to a land that turns out to be an endless landscape of ruins. Asif counts Alexander Solzhenitsyn and legendary Kashmiri short-story writer Akhtar Mohiuddin as his influences.

Classes at university, literary meets, reading, writing and staying in touch with some of the best Kashmiri writers nourish Asif’s creative urges. For the past two years, however, he has been teaching the Kashmiri language online mostly to young non-Kashmiri learners.

“Learning and teaching Kashmiri made me more optimistic about the future of this language, which doomsayers predict will die. I believe it is alive as long as our milkmen and bakers speak it,” he said.

The first batch of mostly Kashmiri students taught him that the natives had a relatively casual relationship with the language. “Some of them wanted to hear my ghazals in Kashmiri rather than learn about syntax,” he said. His ongoing all-female class has only one Kashmiri, whose seriousness goes well beyond the language. She told me that she was driven to learn Kashmiri from a budding writer, even though she hears and speaks it every day at home, by an urge to embrace Kashmiri culture rather more tightly in these fraught times.

Another of his students, whose mother tongue is Urdu, is learning Kashmiri so that she can converse with her Kashmiri in-laws in their own language. “There is always a smile on their faces when I greet them in Kashmiri. It’s a beautiful language. I didn’t find it difficult,” she said. A family of four from the Jammu region was part of an earlier batch. Between them, they speak 22 languages but felt something was sorely missing in their linguistic repertoire: the knowledge of a language spoken by their Kashmiri-speaking neighbours.

A student from the National Institute of Technology got interested because he was so touched by the hospitality at a Kashmiri friend’s home that he wanted to express his gratitude in the family’s native tongue. A girl from Himachal Pradesh found that many words spoken in Kashmiri and Himachali were similar.

“The non-Kashmiri students are especially demanding about learning the proper pronunciation of words. They want their Kashmiri to be as natural as possible,” Asif said.

Tariq said the biggest takeaway in dealing with both the casual native speakers and the enthusiastic non-natives is that the “theory heavy” curriculum of the Kashmiri language taught in educational institutions needs to change.

“Modern elements are lacking. Contemporary literature should be part of our syllabi. Poetry of medieval Kashmiri mystics is canonical but most of my fellow students are interested in the present,” he said.

Asif’s eight-month course in Kashmiri is largely standardized but can be tailored to suit the needs of students. He is now working on a guide to widen the reach of spoken Kashmiri for non-native speakers. How To Speak Kashmiri will have instructions in Roman and Kashmiri.

While the extremism of his school teachers is a thing of the past, Asif still encounters milder forms of prejudice. Some teachers begrudge his “premature” leap into novel writing. “The encounters in school taught me not to dwell on the unimportant. What’s important is a focus on a language many are abandoning,” he said.

Hilal Mir is an independent writer. He lives in Kashmir

The views expressed are personal

Many experiences have shaped the literary sensibility of the 25-year-old Kashmiri writer and language teacher Asif Tariq, but two stand out for their passive and overt violence. As a standard 7 student at a school in his native Ganderbal area, he submitted a poem in Kashmiri for the school magazine. The editor tore the poem up and, with derision, told him to think of singing as a career. Folk singers are perched at the bottom of the social ladder in Kashmir.

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A year later, another of his teachers was incensed after hearing Tariq chatting with a fellow student in Kashmiri. Asif said he was told to remove his shirt and stand in the corridor for the second half of the day. Hurt at the incident, Tariq’s father transferred him to another school.

Various reasons have led to a peculiar linguistic crisis in Kashmir. Most literate Kashmiris can’t read or write their mother tongue. Most parents prefer to converse with their children in Urdu or English. Schools, where Kashmiri has been taught as a subject for the past few years now, follow the trend. This indifference to one’s own language was, however, taken a step too far by Asif’s teachers.

“I have often dreamt of that corridor and woken up sweating, flustered and disturbed,” said Asif, who is pursuing a master’s degree in Kashmiri at the University of Kashmir. The school experiences were traumatic, no doubt, but they also made him fall in love with his mother tongue.

As a college student, he contributed poems and short stories to a Kashmiri language newspaper and then attempted something very ambitious: a novel in Kashmiri. Not more than two dozen have been written in the language.

The novel, Khaban Khayalan Manz (In Dreams and Thoughts), took a long time to mature and was published in 2021 by a reputed local publishing house. The first print of 350 copies was sold out. This is remarkable in a state where the sale of even 100 copies of a Kashmiri book makes it a best seller. A second print of 400 copies is now ready to roll out. The novel is an allegory of a man’s journey to a land that turns out to be an endless landscape of ruins. Asif counts Alexander Solzhenitsyn and legendary Kashmiri short-story writer Akhtar Mohiuddin as his influences.

Classes at university, literary meets, reading, writing and staying in touch with some of the best Kashmiri writers nourish Asif’s creative urges. For the past two years, however, he has been teaching the Kashmiri language online mostly to young non-Kashmiri learners.

“Learning and teaching Kashmiri made me more optimistic about the future of this language, which doomsayers predict will die. I believe it is alive as long as our milkmen and bakers speak it,” he said.

The first batch of mostly Kashmiri students taught him that the natives had a relatively casual relationship with the language. “Some of them wanted to hear my ghazals in Kashmiri rather than learn about syntax,” he said. His ongoing all-female class has only one Kashmiri, whose seriousness goes well beyond the language. She told me that she was driven to learn Kashmiri from a budding writer, even though she hears and speaks it every day at home, by an urge to embrace Kashmiri culture rather more tightly in these fraught times.

Another of his students, whose mother tongue is Urdu, is learning Kashmiri so that she can converse with her Kashmiri in-laws in their own language. “There is always a smile on their faces when I greet them in Kashmiri. It’s a beautiful language. I didn’t find it difficult,” she said. A family of four from the Jammu region was part of an earlier batch. Between them, they speak 22 languages but felt something was sorely missing in their linguistic repertoire: the knowledge of a language spoken by their Kashmiri-speaking neighbours.

A student from the National Institute of Technology got interested because he was so touched by the hospitality at a Kashmiri friend’s home that he wanted to express his gratitude in the family’s native tongue. A girl from Himachal Pradesh found that many words spoken in Kashmiri and Himachali were similar.

“The non-Kashmiri students are especially demanding about learning the proper pronunciation of words. They want their Kashmiri to be as natural as possible,” Asif said.

Tariq said the biggest takeaway in dealing with both the casual native speakers and the enthusiastic non-natives is that the “theory heavy” curriculum of the Kashmiri language taught in educational institutions needs to change.

“Modern elements are lacking. Contemporary literature should be part of our syllabi. Poetry of medieval Kashmiri mystics is canonical but most of my fellow students are interested in the present,” he said.

Asif’s eight-month course in Kashmiri is largely standardized but can be tailored to suit the needs of students. He is now working on a guide to widen the reach of spoken Kashmiri for non-native speakers. How To Speak Kashmiri will have instructions in Roman and Kashmiri.

While the extremism of his school teachers is a thing of the past, Asif still encounters milder forms of prejudice. Some teachers begrudge his “premature” leap into novel writing. “The encounters in school taught me not to dwell on the unimportant. What’s important is a focus on a language many are abandoning,” he said.

Hilal Mir is an independent writer. He lives in Kashmir

The views expressed are personal