Jammu and Kashmir’s cultural heritage is not a museum piece; it is living evidence that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists once breathed the same air of tolerance long before modern politics tore it apart. Kashmiri Sufism, with its poets Lal Ded and Nund Rishi, spoke a language that needed no translation across mandirs and khanqahs. Shikaras still glide on Dal Lake, pashmina shawls are still knotted by fingers that remember centuries-old motifs, and the martand sun temple, the Shankaracharya hill, the medieval mosques of Srinagar and the wooden minarets of Bomai stand as silent witnesses to a composite civilisation.
Yet decades of violence, forced migrations and ideological battles have left deep scars on this shared memory. The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 severed one vital thread of the syncretic fabric; the subsequent dominance of a narrower narrative further frayed the rest. Today, when a young Kashmiri Muslim may never have heard Lal Ded’s vaakhs recited in the same breath as Habba Khatoon’s love songs, we are losing more than folklore—we are losing the idea that Kashmir belongs to all its children.
Cultural revival, therefore, is not nostalgia; it is political healing in its purest form. When the government restored the 19th-century Pathar Masjid or when artisans from both sides of the Pir Panjal jointly exhibited papier-mâché and basohli paintings in Delhi, something shifted. People saw that crewel embroidery and walnut-wood carving do not carry religion in their stitches and grains. Joint festivals celebrating Rishi peer’s urs alongside Shivratri, inter-community craft melas, and school curricula that teach the verses of both Sheikh Nooruddin and Lalleshwari side by side are small but powerful acts of reclamation.
These initiatives work because they bypass the language of grievance and speak instead in the mother tongue of beauty. A shared song, a common craft, a restored haveli—these create moments of mutual recognition stronger than any political sermon. When a young Pandit visitor lights a diya at Kheer Bhawani while his Muslim neighbour from the next village helps clean the spring, identity ceases to be a border; it becomes a bridge.
The state, civil society and, most importantly, local youth must own this mission. Digital archives of Sufi music, travelling exhibitions of miniature paintings, apprenticeship programmes that pair displaced Pandit craftsmen with Valley artisans—every such step rebuilds trust, one story, one motif, one melody at a time. In preserving Kashmir’s composite culture we are not merely saving the past; we are writing the only future in which all its communities can again call the same valley home.
