Devotees fill the courtyard of Khanqah-e-Moula before dawn breaks over Srinagar’s old city. Wooden lattices, carved by hands trained in techniques brought from Iran six centuries ago, frame the shrine’s entrance. 

Vendors along the narrow lane sell papier-mâché boxes painted with Persian floral motifs, a craft passed down since a Sufi saint named Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani first came here in the fourteenth century. 

The scene looks, and in many ways feels, Persian. And it raises a question that circulates endlessly among Kashmiris, in university seminars, family dinners and heated posts online: are the people of this valley descendants of Iran?

Geneticists, historians and linguists who have studied the question give an answer more textured than the debate usually allows. 

Kashmiris form an indigenous Northwest South Asian population, deeply rooted in the mountains they inhabit, with meaningful genetic threads connecting them to West Eurasia and a cultural inheritance so bound up with Persian civilization that for centuries scholars called this valley Irān-e Ṣaḡir, Little Iran.

A 2025 study published in Scientific Reports supplied the first ancient DNA evidence from Kashmir, sequencing maternal genomes recovered from burials at Burzahom, a Neolithic site on Srinagar’s edge. 

The findings sketch a population both settled and connected. 

A Neolithic woman buried nearly 4,000 years ago held the M65 maternal lineage, a marker still concentrated among modern Kashmiris and Tajiks living on the Pamir Plateau, pointing to a maternal line that stretches back roughly 7,000 years. 

A Megalithic individual from around 550 CE held the U2b2 lineage, also documented in the Swat Valley and parts of Central Asia. 

Two medieval-era samples reveal wider connections still:........

© Kashmir Observer