How Kashmir Needs A Language Beyond 'Conflict', 'Crackdowns' & 'Curfews'

Can the experts reviving archaic words for national vernacular glossary do justice to Kashmir's political history?

Kashmir is no stranger to the unknown, unseen, and unforeseen— each associated with a multitude of religious and political churnings shaping the region’s cultural milieu. It is precisely to capture this rich history and complexity that a team of academic experts came together to compile an initial vernacular glossary of technical terms and took several hours to translate Adam Smith’s economic concept of “Invisible Hands.”

The term first appeared in 1776 in the Scottish Enlightenment thinker’s seminal work The Wealth of Nations as a metaphor for the system of unintended social and economic outcomes arising out of individual actions in a free market.

That year was just another in Kashmir’s long history of political upheaval and bloody transition of power, replacing one tyrant with another. Haji Karimdad Khan—the region’s then Pathan governor imposed a heavy tax on shawls made in Kashmir, thus, crippling the industry and displacing the weavers.

• A team of academic experts came together to compile a vernacular glossary of technical terms to capture Kashmir's history.

• The University of Kashmir's faculty brainstormed to translate 3900 political science keywords into the Kashur language.

• National Education Policy mandates revival of old idioms and integrate them into political vocabulary.

• The glossary will be published by the CSTT, Ministry of Education in the form of a trilingual dictionary across English, Hindi, and Kashur.

A Deep Dive Into Kashmir’s Rich Linguistics

Three centuries later, in a Kashmir mired in new invisible forces and political disquiet, Smith’s concept was among the nearly four thousand Western concepts and technical terms that the central government-run Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) is translating into vernacular Indian languages, most recently in the Kashur language in the University of Kashmir in Srinagar.

A literal translation of 'Invisible Hands' in the Kashur language would be “gaebi ath” but that didn’t cut it with the team of experts. “It would have been an odd translation,” said Javed Dar, faculty of the University of Kashmir’s Political Science Department and coordinator of the five-day workshop.

The concept of gaebi has spiritual connotations in Kashmir also known as 'the land of saints' and for its rich and syncretic religious culture, akin to the Biblical adage of the mysterious ways of god while the term at hand was a market force. “We thought about it, six of us discussed it for nearly half an hour,” said Dar. “It is not the hand literally.”

Dar came up with “gair shinakhti” — literally, unidentified but in the back of his mind, he said it bothered him that this is a typically Urdu word. Several hours after the day’s workshop had concluded, “Late at night, I had another thought that we use the term ‘nae-deed’ for what we can’t see with our eyes. So the next day I suggested ‘nae-deed taqat’.”

With an accomplished smile, Dar said: “Now it looked like a Kashmiri word.”

An Effort to Mainstream Valley’s Vocabulary

Over a period of five days in the last week of October, eight experts in political science, including Dar and Aijaz Ashraf Wani, author of the acclaimed book 'What Happened to Governance in Kashmir?' ; two in linguistics, and one each in the Sanskrit and Kashur languages—all faculty of the University of Kashmir brainstormed to translate 3900 keywords of the political science discipline into the Kashur language.

The composition of the team also ensured the representation of all regional dialects of the Kashur language “to maintain that originality, proximity to the spoken language and its historic evolution," that Dar said “is how we are trying to make it sensible as per spoken language, grammatical texture, and the idioms used.”

For instance, the expert committee decided that the Kashur equivalent of the English adage “Might is right” was "Yem tuj naer, tem kheyi lukan’hinz lar" — the one who lifts an arm, usurps someone else’s house. This idiom is in the Central Kashmir region’s dialect and has a variation in the north. “We were sensitive to the usage that varies from one region to another. The conclusion was to go with the central region’s dialect so that it is comprehensible across southern Kashmir,” said Dar.

To cite another instance, the term 'capital' was translated in three different contexts: “sarmayi” in a Marxist sense, “razdani” as the capital of a state, and “shahr” in the local context— rural Kashmir’s universal reference to Srinagar as the city.

Can National Education Policy Revive the Lost Language?

Even as the CSTT observer presiding over the workshop suggested that the committee could invent new terms, Dar said they “decided to revive old idioms” and Kashur words and bring them back into the political vocabulary, as the National Education Policy (NEP) under which the pan-India translation exercise is being carried out, mandates.

“First, you preserve the vernacular language,” said Dar. “The NEP aims at preservation and enriching the local knowledge systems. In doing that, this exercise is immensely important.”

He added that his team revived an archaic Kashur term when translating “cabinet responsibility” into vernacular. The initial suggestion “kabeena’ich zimedaeri”, the latter being an Urdu word, was kept aside for “kabeena’ich maeti’dari”.

“Maeti” or responsibility, said Dar, “is an archaic word that hasn’t been in use for nearly a century. It has been in partial use in colloquial as an adjective and verb but the noun form was no longer in use, replaced with the Urdu word ‘zimmedari’.”

CSTT’s Country-Wide Translation Exercise

Dar said that though there are dictionaries of the Kashur language, there wasn’t any disciplinary glossary of academic terms available in Kashur. “We have never done such an academic exercise ever,” he said, adding that it would go a long way in helping students understand the fundamental academic concepts which otherwise have no vernacular expression.

The CSTT’s Assistant Director and observer at the workshop, Shahzad Ansari said that the final glossaries in various Indian languages, including Kashur, would be made available online. Additionally, the exercise across the country would also help build a database of vernacular words which will eventually be made accessible through online translation platforms.

Dar also added that the glossary to be published by the CSTT, Ministry of Education in the form of a trilingual dictionary across English, Hindi, and Kashur.

“The biggest challenge was that the discipline and its vocabulary is completely dominated by the Western notions and terminologies, so we are trying to understand our own political configurations,” said Dar. “There is a certain similarity in the institutions operating in West and India —assembly, parliament, constitution—terms that are universal and with which we have no difficulties.”

Despite centuries of political tumult and instability, even today Kashmir as a border state remains one of India’s most volatile political and security flashpoints, its political vocabulary informed by the language of its several oppressive alien rulers until the fall of the Dogra monarchy and the region’s accession to an Independent India.

Since then, regional politics rooted in the faultlines of never-ending hostilities between India, which Kashmir acceded to, and Pakistan, which continues to claim the territory as its own, and the subsequent emergence of the separatist insurgency and the Union’s response gave way to a new vocabulary of English words— “Crackdowns”, “One-tons”, and “Curfews” to name just a few, crept into the spoken language, almost as if they existed all along.

(Rayan Naqash is an independent journalist based in Kashmir. He tweets @rayan_naqash. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own.The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)