What a French Story Has to Say to Kashmir

From 19th-century France to 21st-century Kashmir, the lesson remains the same: a lost language is a lost identity.

- Tabassum Haroon

While teaching a class thousands of kilometres from Kashmir, I often find myself speaking with emotion about Alphonse Daudet's short story The Last Lesson.

It tells of a small French village, Alsace and Lorraine, where people wake up one morning to learn that they can no longer study their language.

The occupying power has banned French, replacing it with German. That final day, their teacher, M. Hamel, gives his last lesson in French. The children, who once skipped his class, now listen with tears in their eyes. The villagers, too, crowd into the room, wishing they had valued their language more when they had the chance.

Each time I discuss this story, I look at my students and ask, "How would you feel if one morning you were told that you could no longer speak your mother tongue?" The room goes still. After a long pause, one student whispers, "Detached." Another says, "Uprooted."

Those two words always stay with me. They describe not only the grief of Daudet's villagers but also something I feel about Kashmir today.

In many ways, we are living our own version of The Last Lesson: slowly, silently, forgetting our mother tongue.

Over the years, I've watched Kashmiri slip away from daily life. English and Urdu are celebrated, while Kashmiri is dismissed as old-fashioned, even embarrassing.

I still remember speaking to a shopkeeper in Kashmiri and hearing him respond in Urdu, as if my words carried some social shame. That small moment said everything about the shift we're living through, a silent (and dangerous) loss of linguistic confidence.