From the banks of the Jhelum in Srinagar to displaced Kashmiri Pandit homes in Jammu, traditional Kashmiri folk songs continue to preserve cultural memory, grief and resilience in a region shaped by conflict, exile and loss.
The Jhelum River does not merely divide the ancient brick-and-wood neighbourhoods of Srinagar; it functions as a fluid, dark mirror for everything the valley has buried. On a June afternoon heavy with grey, low-hanging clouds that threaten a sudden summer downpour, the water moves with a deceptive slowness. Near the wooden pylons of the Zainakadal bridge, a structure whose timber has absorbed decades of boots, protests and cartwheels, a middle-aged man sits on the low deck of a tethered doonga boat. His pheran is made of coarse, unrefined wool, its grey colour matching the stones of the embankment, and its sleeves are long enough to completely hide his hands.
He clears his throat, the sound sharp against the heavy humidity of the riverbank. Then he begins to sing, his voice carrying the rough, unpolished edge of a person who sings only to keep from choking on his own thoughts. His fingers tap a slow, uneven heartbeat against the wooden gunwale:
“Maayi chaani ravem mea raat doh
Hoo hoo be kariyo youer waloo…”
(In your love I have lost my days and nights / I want to embrace you with my love, come closer to me.)
To a passing tourist, the tune might register as nothing more than a fragment of old radio nostalgia, a standard folk romance hummed by an ageing boatman. But in the topography of Kashmiri memory, romance and tragedy use the exact same alphabet. The word maayi (love) is never simple here; it is an attachment so fierce that it invites ruin. As his voice catches on the final word, the song takes on a different resonance, evoking themes of longing, absence and waiting.
For nearly four decades, as the region cycled through conflict, military crackdowns, political violence and mass displacement, the domestic sphere became the ultimate archive. When public spaces were policed, searched or silenced, memories survived inside homes and family gatherings. More specifically, songs became a way through which difficult experiences could be expressed. A melody leaves no physical trace for an authority to dismantle. It exists entirely in the brief vibration of the air, passed from one woman’s throat to another, preserved inside homes, courtyards and collective huddles during the snow-bound months of Chillai Kalan.
To understand these songs is to understand that in Kashmir, music is not merely an aesthetic escape; it is an alternative method of writing history. Alongside official histories and political narratives, songs preserve personal experiences that often go undocumented. Across the Kashmir Valley, traditional folk music continues to carry stories of conflict, enforced disappearances, exile, migration and survival that often remain absent from official archives.
When Songs Become Oral Histories
To reach the home of 68-year-old Fatima Begum (name changed), one must navigate a series of narrowing brick alleys in downtown Srinagar, where electric wires hang like tangled vines between three-storey houses built of traditional maharaji bricks. Inside her home, the air smells permanently of damp plaster, woodsmoke and the sharp, salted tang of noon chai. There is very little furniture; the room is defined by a worn, dark-red crewelwork carpet.
Fatima’s eldest son, Javaid, left this house on a Tuesday morning in the autumn of 1996. He was nineteen years old, an amateur calligrapher who had gone to the local market to buy a specific ink. He never returned. He was never found.
He joined the ranks of Kashmir’s “enforced disappearances”, one of the most painful and enduring legacies of the Kashmir conflict. Human rights groups such as the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) estimate that between 8,000 and 10,000 people have disappeared in the region since the late 1980s, leaving families searching for answers decades later.
For nearly thirty years, Fatima has lived as a “half-mother”, a term born from the valley’s specific lexicon of grief to describe women who cannot officially mourn because they cannot officially confirm a death.
When I ask her about the music that drifts from the riverbanks, Fatima does not cry. Instead, she leans back against the wooden wainscoting, closes her eyes and lets her chin sink toward her chest. Her voice, when she begins to sing, is shockingly thin, yet it fills the small room with an immediate, heavy gravity.
She bypasses the introductory verses of the folk song and lands directly on the stanza:
“Malale travith tse sala yikh na
Bae pyale mase ki baray ha lalo…”
(Do not abandon me to this sorrow, my beloved. Let me drink once more from the cup of your love, my beloved.)
She repeats the phrase “Malale travith” three times, her voice cracking slightly on the final syllable of lalo. The word malal implies more than sadness; it is a deep, unresolved grievance, a sorrow mixed with the bitterness of being abandoned without explanation.
“When our daughters sing this at weddings during the wanwun, the guests clap their hands,” Fatima says, opening her eyes and staring down at her thumbs, which constantly trace the frayed edges of her cotton headscarf.
“But when I am alone in this kitchen, and the night is long, I sing it to the walls. I am not singing to a lover in a book. I am screaming at my son through the floorboards. I am telling him: Do not leave me drowning in this house alone. Just come back once, even if it is only to let me pour you a cup of tea.”
For women like Fatima, these songs are not pieces of folklore to be catalogued by academics. They are living vessels of grief, memory and longing, carrying emotions that remain unresolved decades after the events that gave rise to them.
Grief Without Closure
In Jammu, in a modest third-floor flat within a densely packed residential colony built for families displaced from the Kashmir Valley, the summer heat is a physical blow. The air does not smell of pine or woodsmoke; it smells of hot dust and communal tap water. A plastic fan slices through the heavy air without cooling it.
Inside this room sits 72-year-old Kashmiri Pandit Sunita Kaul (name changed), who was displaced from Anantnag during the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in 1990.
Sunita was thirty-six — the exact age her daughter is now — when her family fled their ancestral home in the southern district of Anantnag during the terrifying winter weeks of 1990. Following the targeted killings of community members and the rising tide of slogans that filled the night air, they packed their lives into the back of a rented truck under the cover of darkness.
They left behind a three-storey house with a wooden attic, an orchard of cherry trees and a small library of Sanskrit manuscripts collected by her grandfather.
On Sunita’s lap is a silver-framed photograph that has begun to tarnish around the edges. It shows her standing next to a rosebush in her old garden, her face young and unlined. When I ask her if she still speaks the language of the valley, she scoffs gently.
“We don’t just speak it; we sing it to keep from forgetting who we are,” she says.
She clears her throat, her posture straightening with an old-world dignity that the cramped room cannot diminish. Her singing voice is entirely different from Fatima’s. Where Fatima’s voice is a low, interior groan, Sunita’s is high, piercing and sharp — a style cultivated by generations of Pandit women whose songs had to travel across open mountain fields to reach the next house.
She sings a verse that addresses the internal, burning nature of exile:
“Chi jal te kastoor soze myani
Firaake chyanuk yi saaz wayan…
Yi zeere bam tche kus boznawyi
Baeb baal yodway maray ha lalo”
(Your fiery love burns like musk in my soul. / The melody of our separation plays endlessly. / Who can truly understand this pain buried within? / I shall perish waiting for your return, my beloved.)
The word firaak is an Arabic-Persian loanword that has nested deep within the Kashmiri language. It signifies the absolute agony of separation from one’s homeland or true source of life.
As Sunita sings “Yi saaz wayan” (“this melody plays endlessly”), her hand trembles slightly against the frame of the photograph.
“Our separation is not a story that happened in 1990 and ended,” Sunita explains, her eyes turning toward the window where the glaring Jammu sun beats down on the concrete courtyard below.
“It is an active machine that runs every single morning when I wake up and realise I am still here, in this heat, buying vegetables from people who do not understand our dialect. The song asks, ‘Who can understand this pain buried within?’ The politicians use our tragedy for votes on television, but they don’t understand the small pains. They don’t know what it means to die in exile without ever tasting the water of your own well again.”
Author Bio
Parsa Tariq is a Kashmir-based writer and reporter covering society, culture and human-interest stories. Her work explores memory, identity and everyday life in Jammu and Kashmir.
