The Man Who Made Tolstoy Speak Kashmiri

Muzaffar Aazim’s life was an act of literary revolution, carried out in poems, translations, and invisible code.

- Fiza Masoodi

War and Peace rests on a shelf in a Srinagar study. The cover is plain, the title in flowing Nastalik script, almost too shy to call attention to itself.

But what lies inside is something rare. It is Tolstoy, speaking Kashmiri.

This is no ordinary translation. It's a bridge across continents, centuries, and alphabets.

And behind it was a man who believed his mother tongue was worthy of the world’s grandest stories.

Muzaffar Aazim translated Tolstoy alone, in his thirties, with the faith that Kashmiri deserved its place on the global literary shelf.

Born in 1934 in Tangmarg, Aazim grew up surrounded by snow, silence, and story. Oral traditions were part of the air.

As a boy, he listened more than he spoke. And later, when he wrote, his words carried that attention.

He studied at Sri Pratap College, taught briefly at Amar Singh College, and went on to become Director of Sericulture in the Jammu and Kashmir government.

Literary icon Rehman Rahi once called him “a dexterous craftsman,” whose poems would “outlast the moment”.

That same love of structure, of doing things properly and beautifully, guided Aazim into an unlikely second act: technology.