Keep it, don’t use it |
In October 2025, the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly was in session. A senior National Conference leader, Mubarak Gul — a former Speaker of the same House — rose to address the Assembly in Kashmiri, his mother tongue. Kashmiri is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. It has been an official language of Jammu and Kashmir since 2020.
There were no translation facilities. Members from Jammu would not understand. Gul switched to Urdu without protest.
The moment passed without uproar. But it should not have. A man silenced in his own legislature, in his own language — not by law, not by hostility, but by administrative absence — is not a trivial event. It is a symbol. This is what cultural erasure looks like when it wears the face of policy.
The Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Act, 2020 lists Kashmiri, Dogri, Urdu, Hindi and English as official languages of the Union Territory. On paper, this appears generous. In practice, it has left Kashmiri official in name but marginal in function.
A language older than our politics
Koshur — Kashmiri — is among the oldest living languages of the subcontinent. Linguists classify it within the Indo-Aryan family with strong Dardic affinities, retaining grammatical features traceable to early Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian strata. It is spoken by roughly seven million people, primarily in the Valley.
Yet until 2020, Kashmiri was never an official language of the state whose name it shares.
From 1889, when Maharaja Pratap Singh replaced Persian with Urdu as the court language, until the passage of the 2020 Act, Kashmiri had no official standing in its own homeland. For 131 years, administration, courts and official correspondence functioned in Urdu — the mother tongue of a minuscule percentage of the population.
Urdu became the language of governance. Kashmiri remained the language of hearth and field.
The 2020 Act formally corrected that imbalance. But recognition without infrastructure is........