“Kashmiri youth have become wayward.” This may be a statement of the obvious. But the question is: what accounts for this?

Broadly, does this mean or imply cultural disintegration, a fragmentation of the self and its eventual dissolution? Is Kashmir losing its cultural soul?

And, more provocatively, did Kashmir ever have one?

These questions, as salient and important as they are, beg a further set of questions: what makes me, as an observer and student of culture in both broad and specific terms, raise them? What is their premise and predicate? Are there larger economic and global forces at work whose scope is so expansive that they throw cultures across the world under the proverbial bus?

An explication warrants and calls for a definition of culture first. 

In her brilliant oeuvre, Patterns of Culture, the great anthropologist Ruth Benedict postulated culture as “being a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action […] where every society selects a few dominant personality traits from the great arc of human potentialities and weaves them into a unified, coherent whole.” 

While there are other brilliant and cogent definitions of culture that must be omitted because of the paucity of space, I shall employ Benedict’s definition as a starting point to tease out an answer to the questions posed in this essay.

With respect to Kashmir, what “dominant personality traits” from “the great arc of human potentialities” were culled and woven into a “coherent whole”? 

This is a difficult question to answer. But it would appear that, barring the poetic and literary genius of Kashmir, now dead and buried, Kashmiri people never had a dominant personality trait except during some tumultuous historical periods. 

But a distinction needs to be made here. Kashmiris had a “lived experience” and a “habitus,” the traits and characteristics of which included the waane pyend, or corner store evening socialization and gossip among the youth, rof te chakker among women, a........

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