In the family courts of Srinagar, one Kashmiri sentence — Waen kari court faasleh — has become the sound of a marriage ending. A psychologist, a journalist, a surgeon and a matrimonial lawyer on what is actually breaking Kashmiri marriages, what feminism is being blamed for, and what it would take to hold a household together.
1. THE EXHAUSTED NERVOUS SYSTEM
A society kept on alert for four decades did not lose its patience by accident. Marriage in Kashmir, argues a psychologist, is now being asked to survive on a nervous system that has nothing left over — and inside an economy built to keep it that way.
Umair Ashraf
To understand the fracturing of marriage in Kashmir, we have to look further than arguments about modern attitudes or moral decline. What we are watching is the meeting point of three things: inherited stress, biological exhaustion, and a commercial environment designed to exploit both.
Begin with the ground beneath the household. The Kashmir Mental Health Survey, carried out in 2015 by Médecins Sans Frontières with the University of Kashmir and the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, found that roughly 1.8 million adults in the Valley — 45 per cent — showed symptoms of significant mental distress. Forty-one per cent screened positive for probable depression, 26 per cent for anxiety, 19 per cent for post-traumatic stress. The average adult reported witnessing or experiencing close to eight traumatic events in a lifetime. Distress was highest among women, the widowed and the separated.
That is not a footnote to the marriage debate. It is the floor on which every marriage in Kashmir is built.
Physiologists have a word for the cost of staying alert too long: allostatic load, a term introduced by the neuroscientist Bruce McEwen to describe the wear that accumulates when the stress response never fully switches off. A body braced for threat spends its reserves on vigilance. What it economises on is the slow, expensive work — patience, perspective, the ability to hear a complaint without treating it as an attack. Those are the exact capacities a marriage runs on.
For a long time, Kashmir absorbed this cost socially. The household functioned as a shelter from the street. Our mothers and grandmothers did not experience compromise as defeat; it was understood as a contribution to something that would outlive them. Faith supplied the reason. The Qur’an describes marriage as a relationship in which God “placed between you affection and mercy” (Ar-Rum, 30:21) — a framing that gave patience a purpose larger than a single lifetime. Even when women were educated and earning, their income entered the household as a shared resource rather than a bargaining chip.
That arrangement is now carrying a second load it was never designed for.
Consider a young couple in Srinagar today. Their wedding may have cost their families several years of combined income — the wazwan, the gold, the tent, the photography — before the two of them have had a single honest conversation about money. Neither has been asked how they intend to divide the housework or handle a disagreement. Both spend two or three hours a day on platforms that show them, continuously, other people’s best afternoons. Within months, ordinary domestic friction is being measured against an imported standard of what a marriage is supposed to feel like.
Attention economies are engineered for immediate return. Long-term bonding is not. It requires tolerating discomfort now for something that pays later, and an exhausted nervous system is very poor at that trade. When the reserves are gone, the mind stops negotiating and starts defending. A spouse ceases to be a partner in a shared difficulty and becomes an obstacle to personal peace.
This is where the language of the current debate goes wrong in both directions. A consumer caricature of independence does circulate under the name of feminism, one that reads every compromise as surrender and mistakes hostility for strength. But an equally false caricature circulates under the name of tradition — one that reads a woman’s self-respect as rebellion. Neither is the real thing. Both are cheap scripts that an overloaded mind reaches for because thinking is expensive.
And we should not escape the present by romanticising the past. Earlier generations also endured domestic violence, financial dependence and silent agony in marriages they had no power to leave. A woman who leaves a destructive marriage is not destroying society; she is claiming her dignity. The crisis is not that divorce exists. The crisis is a household in which rights belong to one partner and obligations to the other.
The way out is unglamorous and practical. Premarital counselling before the wedding date is fixed, not after the first crisis. Honest conversations about money and labour while the engagement is still an engagement. Sleep, and less of the phone at night. Willingness to use the services that exist — IMHANS, the district mental health programmes, Kashmir Lifeline — before a marriage reaches a lawyer’s office rather than after.
We are asking two exhausted people to build something durable. The least we can do is stop pretending that willpower alone will be enough.
2. RESPONSIBLE EQUALITY
One much-discussed case has been circulating as proof of what “women today” have become. A journalist argues that a single story cannot be evidence about half a population — and that the honest question is not why women want divorce, but why so many households still distribute rights and duties so unevenly.
Peerzada Masarat Shah
A case shared with me recently — a newly married woman who is said to have left within weeks and sought a substantial settlement — has been travelling through drawing rooms and WhatsApp groups as a verdict on an entire generation. I have not been able to verify its particulars, and neither, I suspect, have most of the people repeating it. That is precisely the problem. One story, however striking, is not evidence about half a population.
My mother’s generation held a different understanding of family duty. Many of those women were educated and professionally accomplished — teachers who left home before eight and returned to a full house at four, health workers, government employees. They earned, and they ran households, and they raised children. What is striking in hindsight is what they did not do: they did not convert their salary into leverage. Their earnings entered the family as a contribution, not a scorecard.
That restraint deserves respect. It should not, however, be mistaken for a golden age. Those same decades contained silent agony — domestic violence, emotional cruelty, unequal treatment, financial dependence so total that leaving was not a decision a woman could make. Many stayed not because their marriages were good but because society had arranged for them to have nowhere to go. Every family in Kashmir knows at least one such marriage and calls it, in retrospect, patience.
So when a woman leaves an abusive marriage today, that is not the failure of feminism. It is courage, and it should be named as such.
What true equality means is worth stating plainly, because the word is now used to mean almost anything. It means equal dignity, freedom of choice, protection from harm — and equal responsibility. The Qur’an’s image of spouses as “garments for one another” (Al-Baqarah, 2:187) is a description of mutual covering and mutual protection, not of one person carrying and the other being carried. Any version of empowerment that treats domestic responsibility as beneath a woman is not equality; it is simply a transfer of the same old unfairness in the opposite direction. And any version of tradition that treats a woman’s income as her husband’s entitlement is the original unfairness, unreformed.
It is also worth being accurate about scale. In the 2011 Census, Jammu and Kashmir recorded one of the lowest proportions of divorced and separated persons in the country — around 0.34 per cent — well below Haryana and several neighbouring states. What has changed is not that Kashmir has overtaken anyone. It is the direction of travel: family courts in Srinagar now hear several matrimonial petitions on an ordinary working day, where two decades ago some district courts recorded fewer than sixty in a year. Thousands of matrimonial and maintenance matters are pending across the Union Territory. The absolute number remains modest. The slope is steep, and slopes are what deserve attention.
Why do marriages end? For the same reasons they end everywhere: incompatibility, abuse, betrayal, money, interference from extended families, expectations no marriage could meet, and sometimes the simple discovery that two decent people cannot live together. Divorce is not by itself evidence of moral decline. Sometimes it is evidence that a woman finally had an alternative.
The gap that deserves our attention is the one between rights and responsibilities. Women must have education, employment, financial independence and firm protection from violence. Men must have dignity, fairness, and protection from false or malicious accusation — a protection that matters more, not less, as litigation becomes routine. No marriage survives an arrangement in which one partner holds the rights and the other carries the duties, whichever way round it is arranged.
In Kashmir, where families remain closely woven, the practical fix is education of a kind we currently do not provide. Young men and women should learn not only their legal entitlements but the ordinary mechanics of a shared life: how two incomes become one budget, who does what when both come home tired, how to disagree without escalation, what to do when the mother-in-law has an opinion.
Our mothers and aunts can teach us commitment. This generation can teach us dignity and equality. There is no reason to choose. What Kashmir needs is not a hostile feminism and not a nostalgic obedience, but responsible equality — two adults sharing the work, respecting each other’s choices, and building something together.
3. THE QUESTION OF HAYA
A surgeon returns to a question he first raised at the Nigeen Club: are Kashmir’s unwritten boundaries weakening, or are isolated incidents being amplified into a story of collapse? His answer is a warning about our own conduct online.
Dr. Faiz Fazili
In continuation of my earlier reflections on Kashmir’s changing moral landscape, and in response to Peerzada Masarat Shah’s observations at the Nigeen Club, I want to raise an uncomfortable question — not to moralise, but because I do not think we have an honest answer.
Kashmir has long thought of itself as a modest, God-fearing society in which the young were expected to honour certain boundaries: haya, dignity, restraint, respect for elders. Are those unwritten boundaries weakening? Or has our capacity to notice and circulate exceptions simply multiplied?
I raise it because I do not know. What I have are impressions, and impressions are exactly what we should be most careful with. Walking to the mosque for Asr recently, I saw two young people in a public street behave in a way my generation would not have. They saw me, and they hurried away. I do not know who they were, what their relationship was, or what I actually witnessed. That is the whole point of the anecdote. It made me wonder — and wondering is a very different act from concluding.
Consider what happens next in Kashmir today. An incident is seen. It becomes a story. The story becomes a photograph or a fifteen-second clip. The clip becomes a judgement on an entire generation, delivered by people who were not present. Along the way, a real family’s private grief is converted into public entertainment. When a young person dies in an accident, the question we ask should be about road safety at that hour on that stretch, not about character. When claims circulate about the private lives of hostel residents, the honest response is that shared accommodation and friendship are evidence of nothing at all, and that unverified claims about identifiable people should not be repeated by anyone who fears God.
My observations at recent melas and fairs raise the same doubt from another angle. The pushing, the crowding, the display — at times these gatherings seem less like exhibitions than occasions for spectacle. Perhaps that is the real issue. Not that Kashmir has suddenly become immoral, but that the vocabulary of haya is losing its place in ordinary life, and we have not replaced it with anything.
The answer cannot be policing, and it cannot be nostalgia. Families, schools, religious leaders and communities have to engage young people with empathy and reason rather than surveillance and shame. Haya is not repression. It is dignity, restraint, and consciousness of how one’s conduct lands on others.
A humble appeal. Before uploading, sharing, forwarding, liking or commenting on any video, photograph or post, pause. Our Prophet ﷺ said: “Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, let him speak good or remain silent.”
A single disturbing clip does not represent a community, a profession or a generation. Wrongdoing exists and should be addressed — but addressing it does not require convicting everybody. Thoughtless posts also discourage the disciplined, decent young people who are quietly doing the right thing and who see, every day, that their society is more interested in the exceptions. Verify before sharing. Think before commenting. Be fair before judging. Our social media should serve truth, dignity and reform — not humiliation.
Mouj Kashir is in the dark. We have the power to turn on the light.
A personal note. I write this not as someone with the answers but as someone who cares about Kashmir’s future. I have seen broken families, and young people lost between tradition and modernity, and the silence of those who feel they have no one to turn to. I have also seen the resilience and decency of Kashmiri youth. They are not the enemy. They are the future, and they deserve better than our verdicts. They deserve our guidance, our patience and our love. Let us rise to that.
4. WHAT THE CASE FILES SAY
Ten years of matrimonial practice at the District Court, Srinagar, produce a less philosophical account of why marriages fail. Three causes recur. All three are preventable — and by the time they reach a courtroom, ego has usually finished the job.
Advocate Muneer Najar
My view of this subject is not shaped by theory or by social media. It comes from case files, and from what happens in a corridor outside a courtroom while two families refuse to look at each other.
Some numbers first, since this debate is conducted almost entirely without them. Jammu and Kashmir’s recorded divorce figures remain low by national standards — the 2011 Census put the divorced and separated population at roughly a third of one per cent. But the trend in the courts is unmistakable. Family courts in Srinagar and other districts now take up several matrimonial petitions on a working day, where such filings were once counted in dozens per year. Legislative data indicates thousands of matrimonial matters pending across the Union Territory, alongside a still larger number of maintenance cases. A low base and a steep climb are not a contradiction. They are a warning.
In my practice, the causes fall into three recurring categories.
First, financial exploitation — specifically of mahr and a wife’s wedding gifts. In law and in religion this wealth belongs to the wife alone. The common pattern is this: within the first year, a husband asks her to hand over her mahr or her gold to invest in a business, a shop, a vehicle. She gives it, because refusing your husband in year one feels impossible. Years pass. In his mind the obligation dissolves like soap foam. Then, at the first serious quarrel, she asks for what is hers — and it is at that moment, not before, that many of these households turn violent, and she is put out of the door. I have handled cases in which a woman’s entire mahr was converted into a business registered solely in her husband’s name, with no document bearing her signature anywhere. My advice to every family is unromantic and I give it anyway: put it in writing at the time of the nikah, and keep the receipts for the gold.
Second, infidelity. A significant share of my files involve extramarital affairs that continue openly after marriage and after children — conducted now with a phone, which is both what makes them easier and what makes them discoverable. Trust, once broken this way, is rarely repaired by litigation.
Third, interference by in-laws. In the majority of my practical cases, the mother-in-law is the primary source of the dispute. A painful pattern emerges: the men of the household genuinely want peace, and peace remains impossible, because harmony in that house is being actively withheld. A son who will not say a firm and respectful word to his mother in defence of his wife is not keeping the peace. He is choosing a side and pretending he has not.
Once the marriage reaches the legal system, ego takes over and the courtroom becomes a battlefield. If one party files in haste, the other seizes it as permanent justification to end all communication, digging in with the words I hear every week: “Waen kari court faasleh” — now the court will decide. Litigation turns into revenge. It gets worse when a husband simply refuses to pay court-ordered interim maintenance, a remedy available under Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005. Starving a wife financially during proceedings adds salt to the wound and pushes the bitterness past recovery. The High Court has repeatedly stressed that these matters call for sensitivity and the possibility of reconciliation rather than pure adversarial contest. Too few litigants hear it.
There is, despite all this, a clear path back. My professional observation, after hundreds of bitter disputes, is simple: where both parties manage to maintain basic human respect through the proceedings, the chance of reconciliation is remarkably high. Not certain — but high. I see that maturity in perhaps one or two cases out of ten.
If Kashmir wants to reverse this trend, the work does not begin in my chamber. It begins with mahr honoured rather than borrowed, with parents who let their married children run their own house, and with the understanding that dignity, patience and honesty are not weaknesses in a dispute. They are the only things that have ever ended one.
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Umair Ashraf is a psychologist with a research interest in neuroscience. He writes on trauma, attention and the psychological consequences of prolonged uncertainty in the Valley.
Peerzada Masarat Shah is a journalist and analyst, and a sub-editor with this newspaper. She writes on gender, society and public life in Kashmir.
Dr. Faiz Fazili is an onco-surgeon who served at the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences and works in documentation and research. He writes frequently on Kashmir’s social and moral life.
Advocate Muneer Najar has practised matrimonial law for a decade at the District Court, Srinagar. He appears regularly in maintenance, custody and dissolution matters.
The views expressed are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the position of this newspaper. Case details have been generalised to protect the privacy of the families involved.
