‘A focus on literature that is part of everyday life’: Onaiza Drabu on editing a Kashmiri anthology

The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature is an anthology edited by Onaiza Drabu. It presents Kashmiri literature alongside the land and people that shape it. Its purpose is to show that Kashmiri literary expression is rich, varied, and widespread.

The book gathers works by historical saints, scholars, unlettered poets, and contemporary voices. It includes poetry and other genres, while keeping the language’s poetry and rhyme at the centre. Drabu also included writers inside and outside the traditional publishing system.

The anthology is equally concerned with translation. It brings together different translators and translation styles, including people for whom translation is not their main profession. This makes the book more than a collection of texts. It is an assembled record of Kashmiri expression across centuries, forms, writers, and literary practices.

The anthology’s scope is unusually broad. It moves from the fourteenth century to the contemporary era, connecting historical Kashmiri voices with present-day writing. This long timeline lets readers see a literary tradition across major periods rather than through a single generation.

Drabu wanted all genres represented. She also centred the poetry and rhyme inherent in Kashmiri, while including expressions from saints, scholars, unlettered poets, and other voices. The book reaches beyond established literary institutions by including writers who publish outside the traditional publishing ecosystem.

Its range also appears in how texts are translated. Drabu assembled translators with different backgrounds and styles, including people who translate beyond their daily work. The result is a layered anthology of genres, writers, periods, forms of expression, and translation practices rather than one uniform literary collection.

Drabu’s central idea was that literature is everywhere. She wanted to make Kashmiri literature visible as a living part of the region’s language, land, and people. The anthology therefore treats literature as a broad cultural presence, not simply as books produced by recognised authors.

Her choices reflect that aim. She included historical saints, scholars, unlettered poets, and contemporary voices. She also valued poetry, rhyme, and orality, and sought writers from both traditional publishing and spaces beyond it. These choices widen the meaning of who creates literature and where it exists.

This matters because a diverse anthology can show Kashmir through many forms of expression. Drabu’s project also makes that richness available in English translation. Her work suggests that Kashmiri literary life includes remembered, spoken, translated, and published forms, all brought together across time.

Drabu began by reading literary histories in Kashmiri, English, and Urdu. She then mapped literature already available in translation and contacted translators whose work interested her. Libraries and private holdings expanded that starting point, especially for older material.

She accessed the Cultural Academy, the University of Kashmir, public libraries in Srinagar, Sahitya Akademi, and personal collections. Kashmiri digital archivists were especially important because they uploaded and digitised many out-of-print books. MK Raina also rewrote older texts from Nastaliq into Devanagari, creating another route into the material.

The main difficulty was not simply finding individual works. It was coordinating writers and translators across geographies, time zones, and historical periods. The provided excerpt does not identify a particular text that was hardest to trace. It does show that access depended on scattered collections, digitisation, conversations, and guidance from experienced translators.

Libraries, personal collections, and digital archives formed a practical network for building the anthology. Drabu used institutional holdings to locate literary histories and older works, then drew on private collections when public access was limited. These sources helped her move beyond material already available in translation.

She specifically accessed the Cultural Academy, the University of Kashmir, public libraries in Srinagar, Sahitya Akademi, and personal collections. Digital archivists added another crucial layer by uploading and digitising many out-of-print books. MK Raina’s rewriting of old Nastaliq texts into Devanagari also helped preserve and circulate older material.

The excerpt does not mention radio or shrine pamphlets, so their role cannot be established from the supplied text. It does show that conversations were important. People directed Drabu toward sources, while translators served as guides and helped decide which works could enter the anthology.

Translating Kashmiri into English matters because it opens the tradition to readers who cannot read Kashmiri. Drabu herself began by reading Kashmiri literature in translation before learning the script. Translation therefore became a practical route into a literary world that was not initially accessible to her.

The challenge is not only changing words between languages. Drabu wrote about the powers that decide what gets translated, how it gets translated, and who gets published. She also placed Kashmiri orality at the centre, seeking to retain the language’s poetry and rhyme rather than flattening its spoken qualities.

The anthology responds by using many translators and translation styles. Some translators work beyond their daily professions, and each brings a different relationship to the texts. This approach can make oral-rooted literature available in English while keeping its variety visible, though the excerpt does not claim that translation reproduces every feature perfectly.

When translations make a regional tradition accessible, readers who cannot read the original language can encounter its stories, poems, ideas, and cultural perspectives. In this case, the anthology creates an English-language entry point into Kashmiri literature, land, and people across a long historical span.

Drabu’s method broadens that access through selection. She includes saints, scholars, unlettered poets, contemporary voices, multiple genres, and writers from inside and outside traditional publishing. Different translators and translation styles also prevent the tradition from appearing to have only one voice or literary form.

The likely forward effect is greater visibility for Kashmiri writing among English readers and renewed attention to works that were scattered, old, or out of print. The supplied text describes the anthology’s aims and process, but does not report measurable reader response or a later publishing impact.