The Songs That Walked: How Shina Musicians Hold a Divided Culture Together Across Kashmir's Line of Control

Two generations of Dard musicians — one displaced, one rooted — sustain a minority language through rabab, harmonium, and sheer stubbornness. The music is the archive.

This is a story about cultural infrastructure maintained by individuals because no institution would do it. Yousuf Naseem, displaced from Gurez Valley during the 1999 Kargil conflict, carried Shina songs to Srinagar's Bohri Kadal market on cassette tapes. Fareed Ahmed Kaloo stayed in the valley, walking between villages with a harmonium and a clay drum, performing for food and a place to sleep. Between them, they kept a language audible. The Shina language belongs to the Dard people, scattered across both sides of the Line of Control — Gurez, Gilgit, Kargil, Drass. Partition and subsequent conflicts fractured the community geographically. Kashmiri cultural dominance did the rest. "After Partition, our culture faded," Kaloo says flatly. "Kashmiri music dominated, and our Dardic roots went silent." The Habba Khatoon Dramatic Club, founded in 1976, is the institutional response — but "institutional" overstates it. Some founding members are dead. Others fled cross-border shelling and never came back. What makes this piece worth attention is the specificity of the transmission mechanism. Naseem didn't record an album and wait. He handed a cassette called Dardistan to a shopkeeper in a market where Dard families worked as wazas — chefs — and asked him to play it every morning. The music entered the soundscape of a neighborhood before anyone understood the language. "People would ask what language it was," Naseem says. "For many, it was the first time they had heard it." That's not preservation in an archive. That's guerrilla broadcasting. Kaloo's method is older and more physical — decades of walking to weddings, fairs, and gatherings, teaching folk songs to children who would otherwise never hear them. The economics are blunt: he accepted food, shelter, or a small honorarium. "We didn't do it for money. We did it because someone had to, and no one else would." This is cultural labor that no grant application or UNESCO designation replaces. The quiet tension in the piece is the asymmetry across the Line of Control. Kaloo listens to new Shina tracks from Gilgit on his phone and notes, with admiration rather than resentment, that musicians there have developed their sound further. "They've gone far ahead of us. As they should." The division imposed by geopolitics created two divergent branches of the same tradition — one with more resources and freedom to evolve, one sustained by individual stubbornness in a militarized zone. The article is Al Jazeera feature journalism at its most useful: specific people, specific places, specific instruments, no thesis imposed from above. It trusts the reader to understand that a 67-year-old man walking between villages with a harmonium is doing something that matters without needing to be told why. The Shina language has no state backing it, no dominant media platform, no diaspora lobby. It has Naseem's rabab and Kaloo's harmonium. Whether that's enough is the question the piece leaves open.