The Man Who Made Kashmir Laugh

He turned pain into punchlines, sorrow into satire. Now, with Bashir Kotur gone, Kashmir mourns a voice that made it feel whole.

- Ansar Hussain Dar

Days before he died, Bashir Kotur looked straight into the camera and flashed his signature angry expressions.

False rumours of his death were swirling online. People were already posting tributes. But Bashir, ever the showman, responded the only way he knew how: with a line sharp enough to pierce grief and absurd enough to go viral. "Don't bury me before my time," he said, wrapped in a pheran, his smile worn but intact.

That was his final performance.

On Monday morning, in his modest home in Hanji Gund, Budgam, Bashir Ahmad Bhat, better known across Kashmir as Bashir Kotur, passed away. He was 65.

His death marks the end of an era, not just for Kashmiri comedy, but for a way of telling truth through laughter, a way of resisting despair with disguise.

For nearly two decades, Kotur's face flickered across local cable TV screens. His brand of streetwise comedy became a household ritual, one of the few sources of collective joy in a region fractured by violence and uncertainty.

He was never formally trained in performance, yet he could command a room like few others. His jokes were unscripted, his timing flawless, his satire piercing.

"He made us laugh when nothing else did," said Faheem Dar, a Srinagar-based videographer who grew up watching Kotur's shows. "He wasn't just funny, he made pain easier to live with."

Kotur's sketches, often alongside fellow comedians like Gulzar Fighter and Seth Rafi, were lo-fi productions.

Shot with handheld cameras, staged in living rooms, draped with floral bedsheets as backdrops, they rarely ran for more than 10 minutes. But they ran deep.