The People’s Voice
Half a decade ago, when I was in school, I faced a penalty of five rupees every time I spoke in my mother tongue—Kashmiri. The principal reprimanded us if her ears detected a syllable of the Kashmiri language.
I never paid the fine. Neither did any of my classmates. In spite of this regular admonishment, we believed that speaking our own language was neither a mistake worthy of punishment, nor a mark of humiliation. The school must still be following the same policies, but today, I see hope and resistance. Kashmiri, the only Dardic language—a branch of Indo-Aryan languages spoken across Pakistan and Afghaistanthat has a literature, is fighting its extermination.
“The story of the resistance of the Kashmiri language is not a recent one,” Zareef Ahmad Zareef, a
