Rehman Rahi, 97, eminent Kashmiri poet who restored a language, dies

NEW DELHI – Rehman Rahi, a celebrated Kashmiri poet who devoted his life to promoting and preserving the Kashmiri language and gave its poetry a distinct identity, died on Monday at his home in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city. He was 97.

His son, Dr Dildar Ahmad, confirmed the death.

Throughout his career as a writer and university professor, Rahi was committed to Kashmiri, a language he considered the source of Kashmiri identity and essential for preserving the ancient culture of a divided territory.

He published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose in Kashmiri and is credited with restoring the language spoken by more than 6 million people to the realm of literature, lifting it out of the shadow of Persian and Urdu, which once dominated the literary scene in Kashmir, a disputed territory that straddles India and Pakistan.

“He introduced intellectual richness, modern sensibility and accessibility to Kashmiri language and poetry,” Mr Muhammad Amin Bhat, a Kashmiri television anchor and president of Adbee Markaz Kamraz, the region’s oldest literary organisation, said in an interview this week. “Without a doubt, he was the greatest living poet of modern Kashmiri language.”

Over a career that spanned many decades, Rahi won dozens of awards, including the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour, in 2000, and in 2007 the Jnanpith Award, India’s top literary prize, becoming the first Kashmiri to do so.

In 1961, he won a literary award from India’s National Academy of Letters, for his poetry anthology Nawroz-i-Saba or Advent Of The Spring Breeze” (1958).

Like most Kashmiris, Rahi grew up speaking conversational Kashmiri, but the language was removed from schools – the Indian government viewed it as subversive – and its formal speech fell into disuse.

In the 1950s, he attended a poetry reading in the village of Raithan in central Kashmir, where a Kashmiri poem was greeted with tremendous applause. Rahi then went onstage and read his work in Urdu, then the region’s official language.

“No one understood it,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2022. “That day, I started learning Kashmiri.”

That was the beginning of his long love affair with the language, which he described in his 1966 poem Hymn To A Language.

He also promoted Kashmiri in more concrete ways. He was one of the biggest supporters of a campaign to restore the language to schools, an effort that finally succeeded in 2000. He helped recruit teachers and scholars to teach Kashmiri and created a course to teach it to children.

Rehman Rahi was born Abdul Rehman Mir on May 6, 1925, into a poor Muslim family in the Wazpora area of the city of Srinagar.

His father, Mr Ghulam Muhammad Mir, a day labourer, died when Rehman was 14; his mother, Ms Rahat Begum, was a homemaker. After the death of his father, he was raised by a maternal uncle.

Rehman studied Persian at Sri Pratap College and English at Kashmir University, both in Srinagar, earning a master’s degree in each language. He started writing while in college, adopting the pen name Rehman Rahi.

He worked briefly as a clerk in the public works department, earning just a few cents a month and sometimes travelling dozens of kilometres to northern Kashmir for his job.

He then joined a regional Urdu-language newspaper, Khidmat, as an opinion writer. In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan, leading to widespread violence between Muslims and Hindus and cleaving what had been the princely state of Kashmir.

For years, Rahi wrote about the pain and anguish that the upheaval inflicted on millions of ordinary people and how it shaped their experiences and encounters. He also started writing poetry.

In 1964, he joined the Persian department of Kashmir University as a lecturer, and in 1979 switched to the recently created Kashmiri department.

He retired from the university in 1985.

Rahi was sometimes criticised for having failed to engage with the brutal conditions faced by many Kashmiris, who have been oppressed by both Indian security forces and Kashmiri militants fighting for independence from India.

As Kashmir plunged deeper into turmoil after an insurgency began in 1989, Rahi’s poetry grew more sombre, expressing anguish over the mounting violence, yet he continued to avoid addressing the politics around it. He saw literary modernism as a new framework for examining the human condition.

Dr Abir Bazaz, a professor of Kashmiri literature at Ashoka University, outside New Delhi, said Rahi’s reticence had been a valid response to the conflict.

“Rahi’s political silence, a refusal to take sides in the vicious cycles of insurgency and counterinsurgency in Kashmir, does offer a hope for a path beyond the violent binaries that have shaped the Kashmiri present,” Dr Bazaz said. NYTIMES