For centuries, Kashmiri Pandits were forced to celebrate their most sacred festivals in whispers, or not at all. The historical record bears witness to a cultural erasure that demands remembrance.
In 1895, British Settlement Officer Walter R. Lawrence published his exhaustive 478-page survey, The Valley of Kashmir. He documented everything: agricultural cycles, marriage customs, temple architecture, tax records, seasonal fairs. Yet when it came to Diwali, the festival that lights up nearly every corner of India, Lawrence recorded just one stark line: “Diwali, when the city people are fed at the expense of the State.”
Not celebrated. Not observed with lamps or prayers. Simply fed, a state-administered obligation, perhaps at a designated temple or public square. This was not a festival; it was bureaucratic charity.
Dussehra fared worse. The ten-day celebration marked across India with Ram Leela performances and the burning of Ravana effigies earned no mention whatsoever in Lawrence’s exhaustive chronicle. It simply did not exist in Kashmir’s public life.
C.E. Tyndale-Biscoe’s 1922 ethnography and the Imperial Gazetteer of India maintain the same conspicuous silence. These were not oversights. British administrators were documenting an absence so profound it had become normalized, festivals erased so completely that even meticulous colonial record-keepers found nothing to describe.
Fear became memory. Memory became silence. Silence became culture.
The answer to this silence lies in centuries of systematic persecution that began long before the British arrived.
In 1320, Tartar chief Dulucha’s invasion enslaved 50,000 Brahmins, many dying at Devsar Pass. Sultan Shahmir established Muslim rule in 1339; Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani codified harsh restrictions in “Zakhirat’ul Maluk.”
Under Sikandar Butshikan (1389-1413), led by convert Suha Bhatt, temples like Martand were destroyed, sacred threads publicly burned, Hindu texts drowned in Dal Lake. Chronicler Jonaraja records: no town was spared. Temple stones-built mosques.
Lawrence himself, in his historical analysis of Kashmir’s Hindu community, documented this brutal reality with stark clarity. Writing about the persecution under Sikandar and subsequent rulers, he noted that Kashmiri Brahmins were forced into three impossible choices: death, conversion, or exile. His research reveals how this systematic oppression fundamentally altered the community’s relationship with public religious expression.
Though Mughal emperor Akbar later abolished the jizya tax and supported Pandit rehabilitation, intolerance returned under Aurangzeb and subsequent rulers. In 1720, Mullah Abdul Nabi imposed devastating restrictions that triggered the fifth major exodus of Kashmir’s Pandits. His edicts forbade Hindus from riding horses or wearing shoes, from visiting gardens or wearing ornate clothes, from applying tilak marks or receiving education. Most crucially: no festivals, no celebrations, no public rituals. Even mourning the dead was forbidden.
Public Hindu worship became a death sentence.
The Culture of Invisibility
Faced with this sustained assault, Kashmiri Pandits made an impossible choice: invisibility over extinction. They took festivals that elsewhere define Hindu communal life, joyous, loud, public celebrations, and buried them deep within domestic walls.
Diwali’s diyas, which blaze from rooftops across India, were lit in secret or not at all. Dussehra’s towering effigies disappeared entirely. Only Herath (Shivratri) survived, because it could be practiced in the intimate sanctuary of home shrines. It became both a festival and a code of survival.
This explains the void in British records. By the time Lawrence arrived in the 1890s, two centuries of terror had erased these festivals from public memory. Even during the Dogra period (1846-1947), when Pandits regained some security, Diwali and Dussehra remained muted shadows. A rare photograph from 1920s Mirpur showing a Dussehra effigy burning stands as miraculous evidence, a single documented instance across decades of archival silence.
Brief Revival, Brutal Ending
The 1960s brought cautious revival. In Srinagar’s old quarters, lamps reappeared. Small processions formed. By the 1980s, Anantnag and Baramulla witnessed similar stirrings. After two centuries of darkness, the festival flame was rekindling.
Then came 1990. The violence and mass exodus that year extinguished those fragile lights as swiftly as they’d been lit. Once again, festivals became memories, celebration pushed into exile, to refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi.
What We Owe the Silence
The absence of Diwali and Dussehra in British records is not a historical footnote. It is evidence of cultural genocide, not the swift, spectacular kind, but the slow, suffocating erasure that occurs when a community must choose between identity and survival.
Elsewhere in India, Hindu festivals affirm solidarity and fill public space with unapologetic joy. In Kashmir, for Pandits, they nurtured resilience forged in restraint, identity practiced in code, faith sustained in shadows.
The unlit lamps along the Jhelum are archaeology of trauma. They mark the price of survival when survival itself becomes defiance.
Today, when a displaced Kashmiri Pandit lights a Diya thousands of miles from their ancestral home, that small flame carries unbearable history. It burns for Lakshmi, yes, but also for generations who couldn’t light it at all. For Ram Leela performances that never happened. For Dussehra, effigies never built. For children who learned to celebrate in whispers. For festival songs trapped in throats, unsung.
That flame says: We are still here. You tried to make us invisible, but we refused to disappear.
The silence in the historical record speaks louder than any testimony. It tells of a people forced to hide their joy, suppress their celebrations, and practice faith in shadows, not for decades, but for centuries. The absence of Diwali and Dussehra in Kashmir isn’t a documentation gap. It’s evidence of cultural violence so systematic it erased festivals from public memory.
That erasure deserves to be named, remembered, and mourned. The lamps of Kashmir may be scattered across refugee colonies and distant cities now. But they burn—with the fury of every forbidden Diwali, every uncelebrated Dussehra, every generation that chose silence over extermination. And that light, fragile and fierce, refuses to go out.
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