My Mother Tongue Is on Her Deathbed

I have a confession to make: I took Latin in high school.

Revealing this part of my past is always a gamble within Harvard’s gates — some are captivated by my choice, others frankly baffled — but I hold tight to it. Latin and I go back; admittedly, only a fraction of the language’s nearly 3,000-year-old existence, but we’ve had each other since the dramatically-humbling experience of seventh grade, which, by all accounts, gave the actual Dark Ages a run for their money.

And of course, I must affirm that Latin is, indeed, dead. I hardly equivocate about befriending (or, perhaps, being haunted by) the ghost of a language. But Latin’s very death was precisely what mesmerized me about it: The language was inextricable from its history, and I was fascinated by what the ancient nooks and crannies of Latin literature could reveal to me about the collapse of its almighty civilization. I dedicated five years of my life to that history, to the firm prose of Cicero and the lush poetry of Vergil that, in all of their antiquity, seemed to resurrect an entire people from their grave.

But while I had been so diligently dusting the tombstone of one dead language, I hadn’t realized that, at the very same time, I had been sealing the grave of my own people’s mother tongue right behind me — that breathing life into Latin meant that I had been suffocating Kashmiri, the language of my ancestors.

Unlike with Latin, I cannot defend my proficiency in Kashmiri: I do not know Kashmiri, and I never have. My parents are both fluent speakers of the language, which is guttural yet melodic, nurtured by its Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and Dardic ancestors but hardened by Kashmir’s own distinct history of colonialism; still, my sister and I failed to absorb even a crumb of our linguistic heritage.

This failure torments my family. My parents, my sister, and I collectively bear the guilt of complicity in Kashmiri’s impending extinction within our own family tree. And for a language attributed to only seven million native speakers, what does the vanishing of one lineage of Kashmiri mean? As settler-colonial politics continue to dictate the pulse of Kashmir, the most militarized area on Earth, in whose hands does the future of Kashmiri rest if not those of Kashmiri families like my own?

That my neglect of Kashmiri for Latin proved so fatal is endemic to an academic landscape — from primary to professional education — where lack of representation is malignant. And when this lack presents in an institution as commanding as Harvard, it metastasizes, reproducing feelings of invisibility and insignificance that have characterized the experience of students from marginalized groups for generations.

Indeed, before course enrollment each semester, my eyes glitter in shameless hope for what I might find about my motherland; yet, time after time, my Crimson Cart consistently locates little to no returns on the search terms, “Kashmir,” “Kashmiri,” or any permutation of my identity for which I would beg to see made visible in this institution.

Remarkably, this year, introductory, intermediate, and advanced instruction in Kashmiri are supervised (but not taught) through Harvard’s South Asian Studies Department, albeit for the first time in years and “according to the academic needs of students,” rather than pure intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, of the four courses I’ve managed to excavate from years of course offerings that, even for one unit, center Kashmiri culture, only one is offered this entire academic year. Even so, its narrow focus on Kashmiri Brahmins largely obscures the contributions and traditions of lower-caste and Muslim Kashmiris, satisfying the very same impulse for invisibility that is so often embedded into the structures of courses at Harvard.

I’d like to think, though, that universities, especially Harvard, share the responsibility to keep my people’s history alive. In many ways, Harvard is an arbiter of belonging; it sculpts national priorities and, in the process, shapes what and who matters (or doesn’t) as the world watches. To forget is political, but for Harvard to consciously remember Kashmir — to engrave my people into the memory of this institution — would be an even more profoundly political move, an act of resistance against an international architecture bent on forgetting and disenfranchising Kashmiri experiences.

Ultimately, for the people of Kashmir and other communities whose lives exist largely on fault lines, a helping hand from Harvard would be intensely symbolic. It would ensure that, as scholars, we can approach the diversity this world has to offer not as archaeologists disentombing a long-gone past, but as individuals committed to protecting and cherishing the still-beating heart of our world today.

Harvard will, of course, not save Kashmir — I never expected it to do so. But its support could very well immortalize Kashmir as a place, a history, and a people worth saving.

Here, then, lies the future of Kashmir within Harvard’s walls: an opportunity not just for mere representation of Kashmir at this University, but for an intentional, proud celebration of Kashmiri history and language. And I pray to see the same kind of belonging for the traditions of other underrepresented communities on campus — otherwise, I fear too many other students may not be able to save their cultures from their deathbeds before it’s too late.

Sameer M. Khan ’24, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History of Science and Social Anthropology concentrator in Adams House.