The Kashmiri Elegist Who Left Too Soon

In a Budgam village, a young poet gave grief its rhythm and remembrance its language. Years since his passing, Syed Hussain Mosvi's Marsiyas still echo with devotion, longing, and the light of divine sorrow.

- Dr. Syed Eesar Mehdi

When someone you love dies, you don't lose them all at once. They disappear slowly, in pieces. A shirt left in the wardrobe. A silence where their voice used to rise. A prayer they once whispered, now lingering in the curtains, in the dusk, in the dust.

That's how I lost my grandfather. And that’s how I have held onto him. Through the echo of his verses. Through the trembling of his voice when he spoke of Karbala. Through the hush that falls when his Marsiya is recited even now, in the Imam Bargah in Budgam, where time seems to bow down before grief.

Syed Hussain Mosvi wasn't just a poet. That word, though true, feels too small. He was something else. Something closer to a lantern. He was a bright light carried carefully through storms.

He came from Pallar, a village where the air smells of snow and books and the incense of old prayers. He lived only thirty-five years, but he spoke with the weight of centuries.

When he wrote, it was as if history passed through him like wind through chinar leaves. His words didn’t perform. They remembered. And remembrance, in his hands, was sacred.

I still hear his lines each year on the 25th of Rajab, when thousands gather to mourn Imam Musa Kazim (AS). That night in Budgam is unlike any other. The sky is heavy. The crowd sways like a sea in sorrow. And then comes his voice, his Nouha, spoken now by others, but still his in soul.

Azż sappűn barpā dôyum Aashūrā Zahar dètth mõrukh imam-e-mubeenā Hýý wàwailā bànoûv tüfaanā Zahar dètth mõrukh imam-e-mubeenā (Again, Ashura bleeds through time, The Manifest Imam—slain without a crime. O wail, O storm! Let heavens cry, They gave him poison—let truth ask why.)