In October 2025, the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly was in session. A senior National Conference leader, Mubarak Gul — a former Speaker of the same House — rose to address the Assembly in Kashmiri, his mother tongue. Kashmiri is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. It has been an official language of Jammu and Kashmir since 2020.

There were no translation facilities. Members from Jammu would not understand. Gul switched to Urdu without protest.

The moment passed without uproar. But it should not have. A man silenced in his own legislature, in his own language — not by law, not by hostility, but by administrative absence — is not a trivial event. It is a symbol. This is what cultural erasure looks like when it wears the face of policy.

The Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Act, 2020 lists Kashmiri, Dogri, Urdu, Hindi and English as official languages of the Union Territory. On paper, this appears generous. In practice, it has left Kashmiri official in name but marginal in function.

A language older than our politics

Koshur — Kashmiri — is among the oldest living languages of the subcontinent. Linguists classify it within the Indo-Aryan family with strong Dardic affinities, retaining grammatical features traceable to early Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian strata. It is spoken by roughly seven million people, primarily in the Valley.

Yet until 2020, Kashmiri was never an official language of the state whose name it shares.

From 1889, when Maharaja Pratap Singh replaced Persian with Urdu as the court language, until the passage of the 2020 Act, Kashmiri had no official standing in its own homeland. For 131 years, administration, courts and official correspondence functioned in Urdu — the mother tongue of a minuscule percentage of the population.

Urdu became the language of governance. Kashmiri remained the language of hearth and field.

The 2020 Act formally corrected that imbalance. But recognition without infrastructure is symbolism. There is no systematic provision for Kashmiri in legislative proceedings. Courts do not function in it. Administrative correspondence defaults to English or Hindi. Even in schools, it rarely serves as a serious medium of instruction.

An official language that cannot be used officially is not empowered; it is displayed.

Sharada: when a civilisation forgets its handwriting

The story of Kashmiri’s marginalisation is deeper than 1889. It goes back to the disappearance of Sharada — the script once associated with Kashmir’s intellectual prestige.

Named after the goddess Saraswati (Sharada) and linked to the ancient Sharda Peeth, this script was used for centuries to write Sanskrit and Kashmiri texts. The Bakhshali manuscript — among the earliest known mathematical texts and an early documented use of zero — was written in a Sharada-type script.

Kashmir was not merely a landscape of beauty; it was a centre of civilisational production.

By the late nineteenth century, Persian and then Urdu displaced Sharada. By the mid-twentieth century, Perso-Arabic script became dominant for Kashmiri among the Muslim majority. By the end of the century, only a handful of fluent Sharada readers reportedly remained. The script is now formally classified as endangered.

Today, it survives primarily in ritual contexts among Kashmiri Pandits. The vast corpus of manuscripts written in Sharada remains inaccessible to most Kashmiris because we can no longer read our own ancestors’ handwriting.

Digital encoding proposals and scholarly initiatives offer hope. But preservation of script without restoration of literacy is preservation of form without restoration of memory.

Dogri’s elevation — and the anxiety of context

The 2020 Act also elevated Dogri. On its own merits, that recognition is justified. Dogri has a substantial speaker base in Jammu, a rich literary tradition, and constitutional recognition since 2003.

The discomfort in the Valley was not about Dogri’s legitimacy. It was about context.

The Act was passed by Parliament at a time when Jammu and Kashmir had no elected legislature. The state had been reorganised into a Union Territory. The abrogation of Article 370 was fresh. Consultation was absent.

When change arrives without dialogue, even corrective measures feel imposed.

Simultaneously, Hindi’s growing use in Assembly proceedings — including by non-BJP members — has been widely noted. Hindi’s presence in J&K is not illegitimate. But when Hindi advances institutionally while Kashmiri lacks even basic translation facilities, perceptions of dilution inevitably arise.

Language politics is never only about grammar. It is about power.

Urdu: inheritance and paradox

Urdu occupies a complex space in this debate.

It is not the mother tongue of most Kashmiris. Yet it is the language of Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz — the poetic tradition through which generations of Kashmiri Muslims articulated longing, faith and loss. The Quran is often understood through Urdu commentary. Weddings, elegies, and sermons draw heavily from its cadence.

Urdu’s century-long administrative dominance was historically an imposition. Yet over time, it became internalised as cultural inheritance.

Today, some fear that Urdu’s relative downgrading represents not mere bureaucratic adjustment but identity erosion. Whether one agrees fully with that interpretation or not, the emotional register cannot be dismissed.

But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging another fact: Kashmiri itself was neglected for decades by successive governments. Making Kashmiri official in 2020 was not radical generosity. It was delayed recognition.

The tragedy is that even this recognition has not translated into usable authority.

What real protection would require

A language policy that lists Kashmiri as official but provides no institutional ecosystem for its operation is cosmetic. Genuine protection requires structural commitment.

First, Kashmiri must become the medium of instruction in early primary education in the Valley. Article 350A of the Constitution recognises the importance of mother-tongue education. Global pedagogy affirms that children learn concepts most effectively in their first language. This is not sentimentality; it is cognitive science.

Second, Sharada must receive institutional support — through digitisation, manuscript preservation, academic chairs and teaching programmes. Revival need not be communal or nostalgic. It can be civilisational.

Third, the J&K legislature must establish full translation infrastructure for Kashmiri. The October 2025 episode should not repeat. A former Speaker should not have to abandon his language because the system never prepared for its use.

Finally, administrative correspondence in the Valley should gradually integrate Kashmiri alongside English and Hindi, at least in citizen-facing communication.

Official status without operational capacity is ceremonial.

I grew up speaking Kashmiri at home. I recited Urdu poetry in uniform mess halls across India. I read enough Persian to sense the intellectual river that once flowed through this Valley.

Yim czan rozikh, yim chyan rozikh — what remains of you will remain in what you leave behind.

Many young Kashmiris today struggle to read that proverb in any script. Some are more comfortable in Hindi or English than in the language their grandparents dreamed in.

This is not a call for linguistic exclusivity. Kashmir has always absorbed influences. But absorption is not the same as displacement.

A civilisation is not preserved by inscribing its language in statute and then denying it institutional air. If Kashmiri is to be official, it must be usable. If Sharada is to survive, it must be readable. If multilingualism is to be meaningful, it must be balanced.

Otherwise, we will continue to keep the language ceremonially — and lose it functionally.

© Greater Kashmir