By: Ravinder Gurtoo
Jammu and Kashmir has a wonderful culture which has played an important role in earning accolades for it from across the world, be it literature, lifestyle, language, religion, arts, crafts, music and traditional festivals.
Today i want to speak heart out to those people of my community who have decided to give up their ancestral language. I have been noticing since long that the people of Kashmir especially in Kashmiri Pandits and more especially from South and North kashmir have started disliking the accent of their mother languages. These people prefer hiding their accent behind an adapted language called Hindi. Telling you very honestly they misuse this language too. I personally belong to Srinagar and the Kashmiri speaking people of Srinagar had a different accent than the people of South and North Kashmir. I personally loved all the three accents of Kashmiri language and I suppose there are not only three.
Forget about the children who after migration had to do their schooling outside Kashmir among Non-Kashmiri students. Their choice of speaking Hindi can be understood though I believe that we as parents should keep them well versed with our mother tongue where so ever possible. Astonishing is that the parents almost of my age have also switched over to Hindi. I know a friend of mine for last 30 years. He belongs to Sopore. Suddenly for last 5-6 years he gave up speaking Kashmiri. I always speak in Kashmiri at least to him but he still replies in Hindi. I hope he is reading this. I wanted to ask him number of times the reason behind his choice but couldn’t gather guts.
How can we choose to avoid a language which our parents, grandparents and ancestors used to speak. Only reason I find in it is to hide your accent. We can’t be that cruel to our roots.
Surprisingly such people don’t know how bad they speak in Hindi or Urdu. I don’t want to mention any examples in this regard as we all know about it. Learning other languages isn’t bad but hiding behind other languages to conceal your originality and identity is very very unfortunate. Same disorder has entered Kashmiri Muslims. They have derived a completely different language which is a blend of Kashmiri, Urdu and Hindi. Very ugly accent it has. When we speak to a Non-Kashmiri we have to find a way out to reach such people but when we speak amongst us why to use a artificially made sub-standard language.
The important culture of our state was Kashmiri language (Koshur), which is dying both in Jammu as well as in the valley ; our school grown kids hardly speak Kashmiri,; it has become the language of aliens for students and elites in the state. Language was in fact most important part of the cultural identity of the Kashmiri people. Culture is always in a flux and ferment. It is a non-stop mental journey with no mile-posts to cool its heels upon. Marcus Garvey is quite right when he puts his immortal words about the culture to quote him, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”.
Jammu and Kashmir has a wonderful culture which has played an important role in earning accolades for it from across the world, be it literature, lifestyle, language, religion, arts, crafts, music and traditional festivals.
Elie Wiesel once remarked quite apt that, “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, and no future”. The more social media we have, the more we think we are connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other and losing our great ethos of culture and tradition. We need to introspect and think deeply over the fading of our culture!
