Divided They Speak

The Valley is wary of Hindi and non-Kashmiri indigenous languages such as Dogri of Jammu, even as the Bharatiya Janata Party pushes for both, against the official dominance of Urdu

- Ishfaq Naseem

INSIDE a multi-storey tenement block in Srinagar, Kashmir, rice boils in a pot on a gas stove set against a coarse wall that speaks poverty in any language—Hindi, Urdu, Dogri, Kashmiri—while Muzamil Ansari, a 25-year-old from Uttar Pradesh, pushes the foot pedal of a sewing machine in the small room he shares with three other Hindi-speakers, all from his native state.

As low-paid house painters and tailors who need to send money to their families back home, this cramped space is the best they could afford in the Valley where they are easily distinguished from the locals due to the language they speak and their relatively browner skin tone. Since 2019—the year Muzamil came to Kashmir to look for work as a tailor as “there were almost no jobs for us in UP”, and also the year the Narendra Modi government in New Delhi abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution of India that had granted Jammu and Kashmir a nominal and progressively denuded form of autonomy—migrants like him have found themselves in the midst of an altered political landscape where they are often identified as a “demographic threat”, as “outsiders” likely to grab jobs and land from the local residents.

“The fear that people like us would deprive Kashmiris of their jobs has no basis,” says Muzamil as his roommates nod in agreement. “I never went to school, so I am ineligible for any government job and earn only Rs 500-600 a day. I barely save enough to send home, how could I possibly buy land to settle down in Kashmir?” The widespread fear persists nonetheless and extends also to recent rows over the use of official languages, which pit not just locals against non-locals, but also the people of Jammu against the people of Kashmir.