Chandhara is a village in the saffron country around Pampore, in what is now the Pulwama district of Kashmir. Around 1554 a girl named Zoon, the Kashmiri word for moon, was born there to a peasant family. She would become Habba Khatun, the poet whose songs of longing are still sung in Kashmiri homes and on Kashmiri radio more than four centuries later, and whose name is attached to a mountain peak, a naval vessel and an entire tradition of lyric verse.

Zoon of Chandhara

The details of her early life come to us through a mixture of chronicle and long-transmitted oral tradition, and the two do not always agree. What is consistently reported is that she was born into an ordinary cultivating family, that her father was named Abdi Rather, and that she was taught to read by the village moulvi, an unusual thing for a girl of her background in sixteenth-century Kashmir. She was said to be strikingly beautiful and, more importantly for what followed, already composing verse as a young woman.

She was married into a peasant household, to a man named Aziz Lone, and the marriage was unhappy. Tradition holds that her in-laws resented her singing and her habit of composing in the fields, and that the marriage ended. This period, whether or not every detail of it is historically recoverable, is the source of a body of her verse about a woman's isolation inside a household that has no use for her.

Yusuf Shah Chak

The turning point of her life was her meeting with Yusuf Shah Chak, of the Chak dynasty that then ruled Kashmir. He heard her singing, according to the tradition, while out hunting near Pampore. She entered his household and, by most accounts, became his queen. Some scholars have questioned the precise status she held, and the sources are not decisive, but her association with him is not in doubt.

Yusuf Shah came to the throne in 1579 and immediately faced instability. He was displaced within roughly a year, recovered his kingdom in 1581, and ruled uneasily thereafter. The couple are remembered in Kashmiri tradition for their patronage of the valley's landscape, and several of the meadows and resorts now central to Kashmir's identity, including Gulmarg, Sonamarg, Achabal and Aharbal, are associated with their time.

In 1586 the Mughals under Akbar completed their annexation of Kashmir. Yusuf Shah was induced to travel to the imperial court to negotiate, and was detained. He never returned. He was eventually sent to Bihar, where he died in exile, and Kashmir's independence ended with him.

The Poetry of Separation

Everything Habba Khatun is remembered for flows from that loss. She spent the remainder of her life, by tradition wandering the valley in the dress of an ascetic, composing and singing songs of separation. Kashmiri calls these laments by their own name, and the form she worked in, the lol, is a short, intensely personal lyric built for singing rather than for the page.

Her contribution to the language is structural, not merely emotional. She is credited with shaping the Kashmiri lyric into its recognisable form, bringing to it a musical sophistication drawn partly from Persian practice, and above all with writing in the first person about her own desire and her own grief at a moment when the literary languages of the region were Persian and Sanskrit. She wrote in the speech of Chandhara. That decision is why she is read as the founder of a vernacular tradition rather than as an ornament within an imperial one.

Songs attributed to her, among them the lines beginning walo myaeni poshey madano and the songs invoking the Harmukh mountain, remain in active performance. They are sung at weddings, on the radio, by Sufi singers and by ordinary people who could not name their author. Very little else in South Asian literature has stayed continuously in the popular repertoire for four hundred years.

Afterlife

Because so much of her biography comes through oral transmission, scholars differ on how much of the received life story can be treated as history. There is disagreement about her exact status in Yusuf Shah's household, about whether the Gurez or the Pampore tradition of her origin is the older one, and about which of the songs attributed to her she actually composed, since four centuries of singers have added to the corpus. What is not disputed is that a woman poet of that name existed in sixteenth-century Kashmir, that she wrote in Kashmiri, and that the tradition begins with her.

She is believed to have died around 1609, and a grave at Athwajan, on the outskirts of Srinagar, is traditionally identified as hers. A peak in the Gurez valley, in the north of Kashmir, is named Habba Khatoon for its resemblance to a veiled woman, and Gurez has its own competing tradition about her origins. The Indian Coast Guard named a ship after her.

Her position in Kashmiri culture is unique. For Kashmiris she is simultaneously the great love poet, the last figure of independent Kashmir, and a woman who spoke publicly about her own feeling in a society that did not encourage it. Every subsequent Kashmiri poet works in a tradition she largely made, and the fact that she began as a farmer's daughter in Chandhara is not incidental to how she is remembered.