At the entrance of a modest shrine in Shehar-e-Khaas in Srinagar, the peeling walls carry verses not just from the Qur’an, but from poets whose names have long faded into the dust of collective memory. Written in looping Urdu script, the calligraphy sits quietly, almost unnoticed by the schoolchildren passing by – some able to read it, some unable to. The script, once a marker of officialdom and public life, now blends into the background like an old song only the elders remember.In Kashmir, Urdu is everywhere and nowhere. It lives in gravestones, court archives, marsiyan (elegiac poems) at Muharram, the walls of madrassas and in the metaphors of protest posters. It is the language in which both praise and pain have been composed. And yet, it is increasingly becoming absent from the spaces that should uphold it – school curricula, government offices, and even street signages. Once the state language of Jammu and Kashmir, Urdu now finds itself edged out of the very institutions that once elevated it. But this is not a story of a language lost – it is of what languages remember when a state forgets or chooses to forget it.In Kashmir, Urdu still holds a quiet but powerful space where cultural memory and survival are being written, line by line, verse by verse.Neither native nor foreignUrdu did not arrive in Kashmir as a native tongue, nor was it entirely foreign. Like many things embedded into the region’s administrative fabric, the language came with the empire – first with the Sikhs and then, more decisively, under Dogra rule. In 1889, Maharaja Pratap Singh, under British pressure, formally replaced Persian with Urdu as the official language of the princely state. It was a pragmatic decision, born less of cultural affinity and more of bureaucratic convenience, as Urdu had already emerged as the lingua franca of northern India.Still, what began as a top-down imposition gradually grew into a bottom-up acceptance. Urdu spread through courts, government offices and early education institutions. It was taught in primary schools, in Jammu and in Kashmir, even before regional languages like Dogri or Kashmiri were formally introduced. By the early 20th century, local newspapers, literary journals and political pamphlets were increasingly printed in Urdu. Its script, similar to Persian, was already familiar to both Muslim and Hindu elites. And as political mobilisation gathered pace in the 1930s, leaders like Sheikh Abdullah turned to Urdu poetry and oratory to stir the masses.Though only a few Kashmiris have ever spoken Urdu as a mother tongue, many made it their political and poetic tongue. Over time, it became a language of aspiration, religious expression and collective belonging. In that sense, Urdu occupied a unique space, an elite language that became locally rooted, a colonial medium-turned-cultural memory. Today, however, as institutions reconfigure their linguistic allegiances, the hybrid history of Urdu in Kashmir stands quietly at odds with the state’s new preferences, not erased, but carefully sidelined.In Kashmir, Urdu lives in quiet corners, carved on gravestones, written into prayer slips, recited at shrines and whispered in elegies. It is the language of dua (invocation) and marsiya, of a khatib (orator) quoting Iqbal in Friday sermons, of mourners invoking loss through rhythm and verse. Even where it no longer enjoys institutional prominence, it continues to shape memory, symbolise grief and dignify struggle.In Srinagar’s Khanyar locality, a shrine caretaker recalls how Urdu verses have long adorned the inner walls of shrines, stitched into banners during urs (commemoration of death anniversary of a Sufi saint), and recited during mehfil-e-naat (a gathering for the recitation of naat, or poetry in praise of Prophet Muhammad). “Even those who can’t read Urdu know the words by heart,” he says, pointing to faded calligraphy of a verse from Allama Iqbal that reads:“Watan ki fikr kar nadan, musibat aane wali hai,Teri barbadiyon ke mashware hain asmanon mein.”(Fool, worry for your land, disaster is near;The skies whisper counsel for your ruin.)Memory and faithUrdu, in everyday Kashmir, is not merely functional. It holds the weight of remembrance. In a place where timelines bend and histories are layered, the language offers a sense of continuity, a quiet thread running through generations. It carries the cadence of both prayer and poetry, giving voice to emotions that often find no space in official records. Whether spoken in moments of grief or scribbled in margins of old notebooks, Urdu allows Kashmiris to hold on to memory with dignity and express themselves in metaphors. Urdu, in Kashmir, has long carried what history has dropped. It has recorded grief where official memory has faltered: the silence after Partition, the sorrow of wars, the pauses between uprisings. Through marsiya, elegies and verses passed down in family rooms, it became the medium through which Kashmiris mourned, remembered, and endured. It stayed, despite its colonial background, because it became the language of poetry, of sermons, of the local newspaper, of the handwritten placard. Its endurance wasn’t just literary, it was emotional. Urdu came to inhabit that space between faith and feeling, where a gravestone needs a line of prayer, or where a letter to a loved one must carry weight without raising alarm.From Iqbal’s fire to Faiz’s defiance, and from the rhythmic diction of local poets to the quiet letters of the elderly, Urdu made mourning lyrical and resistance palatable. But in today’s Kashmir, that lyricism struggles to hold space amid shifting priorities. Many young Kashmiris still inherit Urdu’s intimacy, through whispered verses at funerals or religious sermons, but few see it as an asset in their resumes. English dominates the classrooms and Hindi fills the screens. Urdu, meanwhile, waits at the edges: elegant, historical, but no longer urgent. It is this disjuncture between inheritance and utility that defines Urdu’s current moment. Slow disappearanceUrdu is displaced, but surely not dead. It lives in old archives and new WhatsApp forwards, in court records and crumbling diaries, in the metaphors that still feel more real than factual reports. Its decline isn’t sudden; it has been a slow fade, not through censorship, but through substitution. And yet, as long as grief seeks poetry and memory seeks rhythm, Urdu will remain – not because it is protected, but because it still knows how to say what others cannot.Languages rarely disappear in loud protest. They are erased quietly through curriculum changes, shifts in hiring requirements, altered signage and the slow retreat of a script from state paperwork. Urdu, in Kashmir, too, has not been banned or outlawed; it is simply being rewritten out of “need”. Where once it was the primary medium of instruction, law, and public communication, today Urdu survives largely in ceremonial corners: on land records, in occasional formal announcements.The transition has been administrative, layered in policy shifts that appear neutral, even progressive. The choice of “inclusion” of more official languages has subtly rendered Urdu optional. And in bureaucratic logic, what becomes optional often fades into irrelevance. An Urdu lecturer in Srinagar, nearing retirement, recounted how her department was once full of students who saw the language as a ladder to civil service, to journalism, to social mobility. Now, she says, her classes shrink each semester. “The job market speaks English. The government responds in English. Who is going to choose a language that won’t answer back?”Surviving erasureWhen nameplates shift from Nastaliq to Devanagari, when state recruitment no longer requires Urdu proficiency, when textbooks arrive in Hindi and English by default, the loss isn’t aggressive, it’s procedural. It travels through committee rooms, not protest banners. This kind of forgetting doesn’t cause alarm nor does it make the headlines, but its effect is more lasting. Abdul Aziz, a poet in Baramulla, describes this as “a silencing without warning.” He continues to write in Urdu because it’s the only language he feels he can mourn in. “Kashmiri is the fire. Urdu is the smoke,” he says, “It carries what the fire leaves behind.”In Kashmir, the politics of forgetting don’t operate by force. It reshapes what feels necessary. It replaces urgency with redundancy. But Urdu, a language built on loss and longing, knows how to survive erasure. Even if it is left off signboards and stripped from syllabi, it remains in rhythm, prayer, grief and in breath.The shrine in Khanyar still smells faintly of rose water and damp stone. The calligraphy along its inner wall, once sharp, now fading, curls like smoke above the doorway. The verse, written decades ago in a flowing hand, speaks of grace and endurance. No one stops to read it anymore. Children pass by it on their way to school, reading English street signs, holding Hindi textbooks. But the verse remains, etched not just in plaster but in the muscle memory of a place.Urdu remains, though it no longer sits at the desk of a clerk or the table of a civil servant; though it does not make state announcements or speak in policy directives. It lives in the texture of Kashmiri breath, in condolence notes, in the margins of prayer books, in the slow, recited grief of a marsiya during a household death. This is not disappearance – it is migration, from the outer to the inner. Urdu has moved into the quiet. Into the private. Into the deeply felt.Language, after all, is not only preserved by institutions. It is preserved by need. Kashmir, a place where memory is often the only thing that survives, still needs a language soft enough to carry the weight of what it feels, firm enough to hold its rage. Urdu has long served as that vessel, carrying longing without bitterness, history without footnotes.As a calligrapher in Anantnag put it simply: “We stopped writing Urdu for officials, but we still write it for God.” As bureaucracies evolve and syllabi forget, Urdu no longer serves the state, but it serves the soul. In Kashmir, Urdu survives because it is still remembered. Because it knows what power does not record. And perhaps that is its most resilient form yet. Because some languages do not need permission to exist – only memory, breath and time.Huzaiful Reyaz is a Kashmiri researcher and independent writer based in New Delhi.