The curricular omissions discussed in the previous column, (Curriculum of Omission, Greater Kashmir August 6, 2026) has had consequences that extend far beyond the classroom. Generations grew up with a fragmented sense of inheritance. Even though the society had intense emotional resources, we were not equipped with the intellectual wherewithal required to make coherent sense of Kashmir’s own cultural specificity. A publicly validated framework through which to understand our own past, language, political experiments, and constitutional arrangements was never imparted at school.

The omission was not accidental. It reflected a broader post-colonial assumption that regional histories and cultural specificities were potential sources of division and were therefore best kept at the margins of formal education. In Kashmir, the stakes were considerably higher. The region possessed a heightened sense of distinct ethnicity, a special constitutional status, and a sensitive geostrategic location. When its past was treated as either irrelevant or too politically sensitive to teach, public debate about Kashmir lacked the depth that shared historical literacy normally provides. The resulting disconnect was not merely academic; it was existential.

Even when major events such as the accession or the rupture of 1953 remained outside textbooks, they continued to exist as living arguments within families. Similarly, figures such as Lal Ded and Sheikh ul Alam remained active presences in the moral imagination transmitted at home. The formal educational system, however, offered almost no institutional space for these resources to be engaged with systematically.

When formal institutions of public knowledge provided almost no local intellectual or political resources -- whether in history, language, or political economy -- the work of identity formation fell entirely upon the informal sphere. Knowledge of Kashmir’s specific political markers and historical experiences survived primarily through family conversations and neighbourhood memory. Over time, even this informal mechanism began to weaken. By the mid-1980s, Urdu had increasingly displaced Kashmiri as the language of aspiration and mobility among the urban middle classes.

What survived in the private........

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