Ghulam Mohammad Khan
WHEN seismic events rupture the fabric of politics, culture, or collective memory, they do not merely alter circumstances—they fracture language itself. Words, apparently stable vessels of meaning, are wrenched from their semantic moorings, forced to bear the weight of new horrors. As Nietzsche observed, “All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history can be defined.” The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated this vividly: terms like lockdown, quarantine, and even normal were hollowed out and refilled with dread, their former innocence irretrievable.
In Kashmir, such transformations are not anomalies but inevitabilities. Here, place names are not just geography—they are palimpsests of pain, their syllables overwritten with the ink of trauma. Kunan Poshpora no longer denotes a village; it evokes a world of systemic shame, a wound that refuses to scar. Machil has shed its literal meaning to become shorthand for orchestrated deceit, a spectre of injustice. Pulwama has transcended cartography, now a temporal marker—”When Pulwama happened”—a linguistic pivot between before and after. And now, Pahalgam. A synonym for Edenic beauty—lush meadows, laughing brooks, the joyous chaos of pony rides—it is being remade in the media’s alchemical furnace, its essence corroded by the bullets of April 2025.
April’s Cruelty
“April is the cruellest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot, and Kashmir knows this truth too well. Just as spring’s thaw promised renewal—the earth stirring, the blossoms gathering courage—Pahalgam was unmade. Tourism’s hopeful hum was silenced; the brooks, once shimmering with light, ran red. The woods, whispering with myth, roared with the echoes of gunfire. The meadows, those gentle slopes where children tumbled like wildflowers, became graves.
Language, like land, can be colonised by violence. Pahalgam’s semantic corruption has spread like a virus, its former poetry supplanted by a grotesque new lexicon. Walter Benjamin warned that “there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” So too with place names: their beauty is now haunted, their syllables weighted with the unspeakable.
The Inescapable Aftermath
The essay writing assignments of our childhood, those innocent paeans to Pahalgam picnics and pony rides, now read like elegies. The question is no longer what Pahalgam means, but what it will be forced to mean next. In Kashmir, meaning is a battleground. And as the world watches, the victors will not be those who control the land, but those who control the story.
Truly, April has been the cruellest month for Kashmir—not just this year, but in the long, unrelenting calendar of its sorrows. The skies had just emptied their fury—thunder and lightning and rain—stirring the dull roots of winter, coaxing the valley toward the fragile promise of spring. The blossoms trembled on the brink of full bloom; the air hummed with the expectation of tourists, of laughter echoing through the meadows. And then, Pahalgam collapsed.
It had never happened there before. Not like this. Bullets, those blunt instruments of hatred, tore through the fragile membrane of meaning. Beauty was not merely stolen—it was defiled. Ugliness descended like a shroud. Pahalgam lost its meaning. Or rather, its meaning was stolen, hijacked, rewritten in the jagged script of violence. Like a sacred text desecrated, it subverted its own essence, its syllables now heavy with a grief too vast for language. This was no mere semantic shift—it was a corruption, a viral mutation of meaning, spreading like a sickness through the veins of collective memory.
Who Would Do This?
Who would want Pahalgam to lose its meaning? No Kashmiri. No Indian. No human who still recognises beauty, who still believes in peace, in happiness, in the fragile miracle of coexistence. Only those who thrive in the absence of light, who plant their flags in the ruins of joy, who measure their power in the currency of suffering.
The blood of the innocent has stained Pahalgam’s name forever. But names, like wounds, can heal—or at least scar over. The question is not whether Pahalgam will ever mean what it once did, but whether we will allow its new meaning to be dictated by those who deal in death. Or whether, against all odds, we will reclaim it—not as a symbol of horror, but as a testament to resilience, to the stubborn refusal of beauty to be erased.
For now, the brooks still run. The woods still stand. The meadows, though scarred, have not forgotten how to bloom. And somewhere beneath the weight of this April’s cruelty, the roots are still stirring.
A Nation’s Anguish
The massacre at Pahalgam ignited a firestorm of condemnation—not the hollow, performative kind, but the raw, trembling fury of a people who have endured too much. Kashmiri people, their hearts heavy with shared grief, took to the streets in candlelit vigils. Markets shuttered in protest and government employees bowed their heads in two minutes of silence. The media, for once, did not just report—it mirrored back the anguish of shattered families, their wails echoing across a place already too familiar with loss.
The dead were mostly Hindu pilgrims, seekers of solace in Kashmir’s embrace, their journey ending in a horror they could never have imagined. Among them, a Muslim pony rider—whose name should be etched in memory—lunged at a terrorist in a moment of transcendent courage, disarming one before falling to another’s bullet. His bravery was a reminder that terror has no religion—only victims. Some called this attack worse than Pulwama, for it did not target soldiers but innocents: families and dreamers who would never return home.
The Unending Cycle of Suffering
And yet, what has changed? The river of Kashmir’s sorrow has swallowed countless tragedies, yet the architects of violence remain unmoved. The attack was not just an assault on lives but on the very idea of Kashmir—its beauty, its fragile peace, its possibility of healing. The killings should never have happened. This is not a political statement; it is the simplest, most human truth. But what follows is a double agony: the unbearable loss of those slain, and the older, deeper wound of a land condemned to relive its trauma.
In the aftermath, madness has taken hold. Opportunists, draped in the garb of concern, twist narratives to fit their agendas. They demand the right words, the correct terminology, as if linguistic compliance could mask their indifference to real suffering. The nation is rightly disturbed—but beneath the outrage, a dangerous noise rises, one that threatens to drown out the victims’ voices in a cacophony of vengeance and misinformation.
Futility of Retribution
No amount of retaliatory violence can return the dead to their families. No torture, no harassment of the innocent—under the banner of “justice”—can stitch closed the wounds of Pahalgam. True vengeance does not mean mirroring the killers’ savagery; it means dismantling the very machinery of terror, severing the sinews that empower it. It means refusing to be manipulated into chaos by those who profit from division.
Kashmir has bled enough. The answer is not to make others bleed in turn, but to break the cycle with relentless precision, targeting not scapegoats, but the true operators of this horror. Anything less is not justice, but another chapter in the same old story of ruin. And Kashmir, above all, deserves a new story.
Crushed Dreams of a Season
This was supposed to be the season of revival. After years of lockdowns, political unrest, and the slow suffocation of hope, Kashmir stood on the brink of a tourism boom—its mountains, meadows, and rivers ready to welcome back the world. For the poor Kashmiris who had staked everything on this fragile promise, the stakes were existential. Some had taken crushing loans to buy tourist vehicles, others had poured their life savings into new hotels and restaurants. Shopkeepers had stocked their shelves, pony-wallahs had groomed their horses, and houseboat owners had repainted their floating homes—all banking on the belief that this summer, finally, would be different. Then came Pahalgam.
In a single, savage stroke, the massacre didn’t just kill innocent lives—it slaughtered livelihoods. The streets filled not just with mourners, but with broken men and women grieving the death of their future. Kashmiris weep for the victims, yes—but they also weep for themselves, for the cruel familiarity of a dream deferred, again, by forces beyond their control.
The Double Wound
And yet, even as they mourn, Kashmiris find themselves punished anew—this time by suspicion and reprisal. Students from the valley, already adrift in hostile cities, now face threats and harassment. The collective Indian psyche has been conditioned to see every Kashmiri as complicit—a grotesque distortion of justice that only deepens the rift. The resentment of the nation is understandable, but misdirected rage solves nothing. When innocent Kashmiris, who have lost as much as anyone, are made to bear the brunt of this tragedy, the cycle of alienation only tightens its grip.
This is not just a failure of empathy; it is a failure of strategy. Terror thrives in the soil of collective punishment. Every Kashmiri student forced to flee their college, every trader threatened, every worker denied dignity, becomes another brick in the wall of resentment that the enemies of peace have spent decades building.
The Void of Oblivion
What is most devastating is the predictability of it all. Kashmir has lived this story before—hope flickers, then is extinguished. The world moves on, but the valley remains, trapped in a void where progress goes to die. Pahalgam was not just an attack on a place; it was an attack on possibility. With it, every tourist destination in Kashmir has been tainted, their names now whispered with hesitation.
The back of Kashmir is broken. Not just by bullets, but by the weight of history, by the certainty that no matter how hard its people strive, forces beyond their reach will drag them back into the abyss. No one—no Kashmiri, no Indian, no human with a shred of conscience—wants this. But wanting is not enough.
The Way Forward
The solution does not lie in mob retribution or the demonisation of an entire people. It lies in the cold, precise dismantling of terror networks—not through hatred, but through intelligence, diplomacy, and an unwavering commitment to justice that does not blur the line between perpetrator and bystander. It lies in protecting Kashmiris from becoming collateral damage in a situation they did not choose.
Most of all, it lies in refusing to let Pahalgam become just another name in Kashmir’s litany of loss. The meadows will bloom again. The brooks will run clear. But only if we choose—all of us—to break the cycle. Not with more blood, but with the quiet, stubborn courage of those who still believe in a Kashmir that is not defined by its wounds, but by its resilience.
Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.
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