Every year, as Muharram arrives, something shifts quietly across the Kashmir Valley. Black attire appears on the streets. Imambargahs fill with the sound of lamentation. Processions move through lanes that have seen, in living memory, far worse kinds of grief. The 8th of Muharram is not simply a date on a religious calendar. For Kashmiris who observe it, it is a reckoning with history, with loss, and with what it means to stand firm when standing firm costs everything.
The events being remembered took place in 680 CE, on the scorched plains of Karbala in present-day Iraq. Imam Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, had refused to endorse a ruler he considered unjust. For that refusal, he was surrounded, his camp cut off from the Euphrates, his family left thirsty under the desert sun. On the 8th, he sought a meeting with the opposing commander, one last attempt at reason, at dialogue, at averting slaughter. He was turned away. Two days later, on Ashura, came the massacre that history has never forgotten.
What has kept this story alive across fourteen centuries is not its tragedy alone. It is the choice at its centre. Husayn knew what awaited him. He chose anyway. That kind of moral clarity, the refusal to bend to power simply because power demands it, is rare in any age. It is why Karbala has spoken to people far beyond its time and place, including to generations of Kashmiris who found in it a mirror for their own experience of suffering and survival.
Azadari, the tradition of mourning Karbala, has been part of Kashmir’s life for centuries. The Imambargahs of Zadibal and Hassanabad in Srinagar have stood as its centres. The Alams carried in procession, the Nowhehs sung in Kashmiri and Urdu, the Sabeelgahs where volunteers press water and sharbat into the hands of mourners and strangers alike, all of it has been woven into the Valley’s fabric for generations.
And then, for thirty-four years, the main procession stopped.
From 1990 onward, the traditional 8th Muharram route through Srinagar remained closed. Militancy had made the streets dangerous. The observances continued in smaller gatherings, within walls, behind restricted routes, but the full procession, moving openly through the city as it always had, was suspended. Thirty-four years is not an abstraction. It is the entirety of a young person’s life. It is parents who grew old without ever showing their children what the procession once looked like.
When it resumed in 2023, people who lined the route understood what they were watching. Not just a religious procession. A return.
The processions of 2025 and 2026 have continued peacefully. That peace is not to be taken lightly. It has been built slowly, through enormous cost, cost borne by ordinary Kashmiris who wanted nothing more complicated than to live, to grieve their traditions openly, and to raise their children without fear. That it is now possible to do so is worth saying plainly, without political decoration.
There is something else worth noting. Along these procession routes, in a Valley often described through the lens of its divisions, Sunni neighbours have stood in respect. Gestures of solidarity have come from Hindu, Sikh, and Kashmiri Pandit residents. This is not new, as Kashmir’s communities have shared streets and festivals and grief for centuries, but it is a reminder of what the Valley looks like when it is not being torn apart. The message of Karbala has always crossed the boundaries people draw around it. Husayn’s stand was for justice, and justice has no sect.
For Kashmir’s younger generation, the one inheriting this changed but still fragile present, Muharram carries a particular lesson. Husayn did not fight because he thought he would win. He stood because he thought it was right. That distinction between calculating odds and holding to principle is one that every generation in every difficult place eventually has to face. Kashmir has faced it at tremendous cost. The question now is what is built on the other side of that cost.
The Valley today is not without its troubles. Wounds from three decades of conflict do not close on a schedule. But something has shifted. The procession walks its old route again. The Sabeelgahs offer their water. The Nowhehs rise into the air above streets that, not long ago, would not have been safe to walk.
Karbala teaches that bearing witness matters. That to mourn honestly, to remember without flinching, to refuse to let injustice be forgotten, these are not passive acts. They are how people hold onto themselves across long years of darkness.
Kashmir is holding on. The black flags say so.
