Daak Weekly: Seena ba Seena - Mother Tongue Tales
Last week, as the world marked International Mother Language Day, Prachi and I found ourselves reminiscing about the languages we grew up around. As someone who works on the folklore of my home, Kashmir, I have been fascinated with meanings that lie encoded within oral traditions. Years after retelling Kashmiri folktales, I now find myself tracing the hidden moral, ethical, and historical threads that have been passed down from one generation to the next.
Kashmiri — a primarily spoken tongue — holds much of its beauty in everyday speech. The ingenuity with which Kashmiris, a once isolated population from up North, string their words and weave their tales, is exceptional. Kashmiri has kept alive its repertoire of proverbs across centuries and with that the thought encoded within, each proverb telling a tale of a period in history or wisdom to hold on to. Read more about Kashmiri proverbs here.
Writer and folklorist, Ghulam Nabi Atash says in his work on folklore that the passing of history and ethics happened “seena ba seena” (from chest to chest/heart to heart/through word of mouth) from one generation to another. He points out instances of how stories from folklore helped construct history for historians in Kashmir. As each regime replaced the other, what persisted was remnants in the vernacular — a local language of the unlettered where transmission happened seena ba seena, and the folk, the people, were the source material for anyone looking to investigate. In more recent times, poetry has been the vessel of choice for resistance and remembrance in Kashmir’s politically fraught landscape.
Mahjoor’s poetry is a prime example. Beyond idyllic depictions of nature, his verses spoke of patriotism, freedom, and unity across religious divides in the face of oppression. His work remains an essential entry point into the socio-political fabric of 20th century Kashmir.
Traces of Kashmir’s Buddhist past also persist in its everyday language. Philosopher M.H. Zafar points out how Buddhist ideas like the concept of suffering and nothingness have quietly endured in Kashmiri aphorisms. They also find their way into fables like Akanandun, a popular folktale many a Kashmiri kid hears growing up. A royal couple wants a child. A yogi grants them a wish that he will give them a child but they will have to return it after twelve years. They readily agree to the yogi’s demands, raising the child with love and affection and slowly fading away the memory of the conditions. When the boy turns twelve, the yogi knocks on their door to have the child back. Paying no heed to their protests and wails, he orders them to cut the boy into pieces, cook his meat and serve it. The family, distraught and destroyed, complies. Eventually, Akanandun comes back to life but the story is Abrahamic in the parallels one can draw and has been rendered into poetry by many Sufi poets. This is a story of detachment and selflessness, for a people from the land of Hindu asceticism and Buddhist renunciation but also an illustration of the Islamic concept of tawakkul or submission before God’s wish, a tale replete with spiritual messages from across traditions.
Mysticism is another thread that runs deep through Kashmiri literary tradition. Nund Reshi or Sheikh Noor ud-Din Wali, also popularly known as Sheikh ul-Alam, was a Kashmiri mystic and often regarded as the patron saint of Kashmiris. In line with the poetic device of his time, he composed shruiks — philosophical and spiritual poetic couplets, either with four or eight verses. Shrukh translates into “knot” in Kashmiri and just like a tight knot, his verses need to be untangled to get their full essence. His prophetic verses on environmental consciousness in particular are much quoted.
In her book on the Rajatarangini (a legendary and historical chronicle of the north-western part of Indian sub-continent, particularly the kings of Kashmir), Shonaleeka Kaul writes of a “certain civilizational centrality of storytelling in Kashmir.” For long we have used stories and myth to explain nature and breed a sense of social cohesion. Stories right from the 12th century Rajtarangini have had a didactic quality to them. So, it isn’t a surprise that we find similarities in more recent literature too.
Before I end these musings, I must not forget — you can now sort pieces on the Daak website using language — so, here is the selection of Kashmiri literature we have covered so far.
Until next time!
With love,
Onaiza
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