Stereotypes in My Own Backyard

Coming home to Kashmir taught me how easily district pride turns into contempt, and how faith, ethics, and history offer a way back to each other.

- Muskan Shafi Malik

I arrived in Srinagar with the feeling of coming home, where lanes, liveliness, and language offered a familiarity that settled around me with ease.

Living here for several months brought me into close contact with Kashmiris from many districts, from the north, the south, and the centre, each carrying distinct stories and accents shaped by place and experience.

It was during these everyday encounters that I began to notice something unfamiliar to me from my years outside the valley, a pattern revealed slowly through lived moments rather than theory or textbooks, a phenomenon I eventually recognised as regionalism.

My early years shaped a different understanding of belonging.

At university, meeting another Kashmiri meant asking a single question: Are you Kashmiri?

Conversations followed in our mother tongue, help came easily, and an unspoken bond formed without reference to district or background.

A decade later, returning home placed me inside a social atmosphere where labels moved fast and cut deep. Stereotypes travelled freely. Casual insults passed as humour. Prejudices appeared inherited, rehearsed, and delivered with ease.

What troubled me most was not disagreement. What disturbed me was contempt becoming ordinary.

North versus south turned into a language of judgement, used to question intelligence, character, faith, and even lineage.

Hearing this from people expected to uphold ethical responsibility, including those working within institutions meant to safeguard public discourse, forced me into months of reflection.

The conclusion arrived with clarity.

Laughter at regional insult signals something deeply wrong in how people treat one another. Before speaking of injustice or enlightenment, a harder question waits: How do we treat our own?