A boy from Kaprin

The village of Kaprin lies in the orchard country of Shopian district, in the southern reach of the Kashmir valley, where apple trees run up to the foot of the Pir Panjal. It was here, on 3 August 1924, that a boy was born and named Muhammad Amin Nengroo. He grew up in a valley whose spoken language carried centuries of poetry in it and almost no institutional respect: Kashmiri was the tongue of the household, the field and the shrine, while Persian and later Urdu held the offices, the courtrooms and the printed page. The boy from Kaprin would spend his adult life narrowing that gap. Under the pen name Amin Kamil he became one of the most consequential Kashmiri writers of the twentieth century, and arguably the single figure who did most to give modern Kashmiri literature its confidence.

His early education took him out of the village and eventually out of the valley. He completed an arts degree at Punjab University and then studied law at Aligarh Muslim University, an institution that drew ambitious students from across northern India. He returned home qualified for a respectable professional life and, in 1947, joined the Bar.

Law, then letters

The legal career lasted only two years. Kamil practised until 1949, when he was appointed a lecturer at Sri Pratap College in Srinagar, and from that point his working life belonged to language rather than litigation. The timing mattered. The late 1940s and 1950s were years in which Kashmir was rethinking almost everything about itself, and a generation of writers began to argue that the valley's own language deserved a modern literature rather than a museum shelf. Kamil placed himself at the centre of that argument, and he did so on three fronts at once: as a poet, as a writer of prose fiction, and as an editor and textual scholar.

Remaking the Kashmiri ghazal

Poetry was where his influence ran deepest. The ghazal had reached Kashmiri through Persian and Urdu, and it had arrived with a full set of borrowed images, borrowed diction and borrowed emotional postures. Kamil's achievement was to take the form apart and rebuild it in genuinely Kashmiri material: the idiom of ordinary speech, the landscape and weather of the valley, the textures of village life he had known at Kaprin. What emerged was recognisably a ghazal and yet no longer an imitation of anyone. Younger poets followed the opening he had made, and his standing as a master of the form was acknowledged across the valley long before any official body recognised it.

His collections appeared steadily across five decades. Lava ta Prava, also transliterated as Laveh Te Praveh, was published in 1965 and brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, India's principal national honour for literary work in its recognised languages. Beyi Suy Paan followed in 1967, Padis Pod Tshay in 1972, and Taay Nama in the mid-1980s. He was still publishing in the new century, with Yim Myani Sokhan appearing in 2001, more than seventy-five years after his birth in Kaprin.

The storyteller and the editor

Kamil was also among the pioneers of the modern Kashmiri short story, a form with very little precedent in the language when he began. His collection Kathi Manz Kath came out in 1966 and contained the story Kokar Jang, or The Cockfight, which became one of the best-known pieces of Kashmiri fiction ever written and is still read as a model of what the language can do in prose. He had earlier published the novel Gati Manz Gaash in 1958. Across this fiction he wrote about ordinary people with an unsentimental eye, refusing both the decorative romanticism that outsiders expected of Kashmir and the flat didacticism that the political mood of the time encouraged.

Alongside his own writing he did the unglamorous work that a literature needs if it is to survive. In 1958, when the State Cultural Academy was established, he joined it as convener for the Kashmiri language, and he later served as its editor for Kashmiri, guiding the journals Sheeraza and Son Adab until he retired in 1979. Those journals were, for a whole generation, the place where Kashmiri writing was published, argued over and taken seriously. He also produced critically edited texts of the valley's inherited poetry, including a three-volume compilation of Sufi verse issued in 1964 and 1965, and edited collections of the verse of Nund Reshi and of Habba Khatoon, the sixteenth-century poet whose songs are still sung in Kashmiri households. Editing work of this kind is invisible to most readers and indispensable to all of them; it fixed reliable texts where previously there had been competing manuscripts and half-remembered recitations.

Recognition and last years

Formal honours accumulated slowly, as they often do for writers in India's smaller literary languages. Beyond the Sahitya Akademi Award, he received a lifetime achievement award from the University of Kashmir, an international literary award, and repeated public felicitation in the valley. In 2005 the Government of India conferred on him the Padma Shri for literature and education, placing a Kashmiri-language writer among the country's civilian honourees at a time when the valley's cultural life had been badly disrupted by years of conflict.

Kamil spent his later years in Jammu, and died there on 30 October 2014, at the age of ninety. He left behind a body of work that changed the expectations attached to his language: after him, it was no longer possible to treat Kashmiri as a dialect suited only to folk song and devotional verse. The clearest measure of what he did is that Kashmiri poets writing today, several literary generations removed from Kaprin, still work inside the space he opened.