In the village of Karkitchoo, about 13 kilometres from Kargil town in Ladakh, lives a man who has never sat in a classroom, and yet holds an honorary doctorate. 

Akhone Asgar Ali Basharat, now in his seventies, is a writer and poet of Balti, a language spoken in Ladakh and the Baltistan region of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. 

What began as a love for verse in his father's home has grown into a five-decade mission to document, preserve, and breathe life into a language that the census data show is steadily losing speakers.

His early education came from a madrassa (educational institution) his father established at their home in 1972, where students were taught Balti, Persian, and Arabic.

That beginning gave Basharat fluency across scripts and traditions, making him uniquely suited to compile and author literary works in a language with no known dominant institutional backing. 

He became interested in writing poetry around 1980, with his early works being Naat — poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad — and Manqabat, a Sufi devotional form.

From those beginnings, his writing expanded into the full cultural landscape of Balti life: its geography, oral histories, and the community divided by the Line of Control.

Five books and a shrinking language

Over more than........

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