Pandits want official status for Kashmiri written in Devanagari script
The demand to use Devanagari is being opposed by Kashmiris settled in the valley, as they have been using the Nastaliq script, used for Arabic and Urdu , to write the Kashmiri language.
Kashmiri scholars and writers from the Hindu community have demanded the official recognition of Devanagari script for writing the Kashmiri language, arguing that this would make the language more accessible to Kashmiri Pandit youths. This is being opposed by Kashmiris settled in the valley, as they have been using the Nastaliq script—a calligraphic script used to write Arabic, Persian and Urdu languages—to write Kashmiri for centuries. Cur- rently, Nastaliq is the only official script for Kashmiri language.
The KP community, which was driven out of the valley since the onset of militancy in 1990, has been trying to keep its culture and identity intact. The language struggle has cropped up as a major issue facing them, with KP scholars alleging that the community is at the receiving end of a cultural assault by elements in the valley who want to replace the original Kashmiri identity with one imported from outside.
A group of Pandits met the former HRD minister Smriti Irani last year with the proposal to allow the use of Devanagari to write Kashmiri officially. Talking to The Sunday Guardian, Sunita Raina Pandita, a prominent Kashmiri Pandit author, said, “While the minister seemed sympathetic, many organisations in Kashmir immediately organised emergency meetings to oppose this proposal with full force.” Pandita said that the Jammu and Kashmir Vichar Manch will now meet the new HRD Minister, Prakash Javadekar to apprise him of their demand.
Dr Shashi Shekhar Toshkhani, a leading linguist who has tried to prove with his pioneering work that Kashmiri language has descended from Sanskrit like most other Indian languages, and not from the Central Asian Dardic fam- ily, as was thought earlier, added: “They (Kashmiris in the valley) say that allowing Kashmiri to be written in Devanagari would be an assault on their culture. Even when I suggested writing it in Roman script, one prominent writer said that there would be ‘rivers of blood’ in Kashmir if that happens.” Toshkhani is of the view that Devanagari is similar to Sharada, which was the original script for the Kashmiri language. He said that Nastaliq was not compatible with Kashmiri and had to be modified for it to be suitable to the language.
But scholars in the valley feel that doing away with Nastaliq will not be reasonable. Abid Ahmed, editor at the J&K Cultural Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, feels that Nastaliq is important for historical reasons: “Nastaliq has been in use for centuries. Having Devanagari as script would lead to difficulty in studying the literature produced over a large period of time.”
But the quarrel over the script forms only one part of the divisions between Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri