Has Kashmir Lost Its Poetic Soul?

While past poets thrived amid struggle and scarcity, today's generation faces an attention economy that often values visibility over depth, leaving poetry and the art of thinking behind.

- Wajahat Qazi

It may not be far-fetched to describe historical Kashmir as the "land of poets.

The nature of poetry in Kashmir is suffused with mysticism, existentialism, a yearning for the visaal (union) with the Divine, and a mournful elegy over firaaq (the pain of separation) from the beloved.

This descriptive typology of the nature of poetry in Kashmir may be a tad reductive. But in the main, barring the romantic poetry interlude of Rasool Mir Sahib, the politics-inflected poems of Mehjoor, and the eclectic genre of Rehman Rahi, in the modern periods this may be said to constitute the gravamen of our poetic genius.

But the travesty (or even tragedy) is that Kashmir may not produce poetic greats anymore.

We may actually have to rest on the proverbial laurels of the past. Even worse, Kashmir may have lost its indelible historical link with poetry.

Consider the evidence. Apart from Rehman Rahi, in the recent past Kashmir has not produced a poet of reckoning or worth.

Rahi, if memory serves me right, filled an interregnum after Mehjoor's death.

But, sadly, that's that. Why have we lost our connection and link with poetry?

The answer is, by necessity, anecdotal.

While the loss of our poetic eminence is almost an empirical fact, the reasons are not easy to locate and tease out.

One prong of the answer may be economic, the other sociological, followed by more prosaic ones. Re economics, there is a paradox in operation.