Kashmir's Lost Pages

With rising costs and shifting habits, print newspapers are slowly disappearing from Kashmir, leaving a gap in how the region remembers itself.

- Madhat Bin Hashmat

Mornings in Kashmir once had a familiar start. A soft knock at the door, and the newspaper would arrive, sometimes damp from the morning mist. The ink smelled fresh, the pages crisp, and every edition carried the day's stories.

In many homes, reading the newspaper was a ritual, a spark for conversation, and a way to make sense of the world.

Now, that ritual is fading.

Print newspapers are disappearing from the doorsteps of Kashmir. It's not happening in a sudden, dramatic moment. There are no headlines screaming “The End of Print.” Instead, it's a slow eclipse, almost invisible to most.

The disappearance is gradual, silent, and it carries consequences far deeper than missing news.

This is not just a matter of technology replacing tradition. Across the world, digital platforms have changed the way we consume news. But in Kashmir, where political uncertainty, difficult terrain, and unreliable internet connectivity are part of daily life, the retreat of print carries a unique cost.

For decades, newspapers were more than just news sources here. They were a record of life's small details: the opening of a school in a remote village, the progress of a local development project, the celebrations of a regional festival, or the poetry of a young writer struggling to be heard. These were stories about us.