Communicating Islam in Kashmir Intersection of Religion and Media

Orality and Manuscript Tradition

Scholars such as Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Jack Goody have divided the history of communication largely as a play of three acts: orality, literacy and electronic consciousness (Sterne 2011: 208). ¹

Much of the literature on conversions (Khan 1994; Wani 2004) to Islam in the Kashmir Valley has identified two trends for communicating Islam to masses. One trend of communicating Islam to masses in the Kashmir Valley has been attributed by the historians to the role of highly literate Kubravi Sufi missionaries from Central Asia and Persia. The second trend which explains mass conversions to Islam has been attributed to the role of local Rishis in communicating the local variant of Islam in Kashmir Valley. This article is of the view that both these trends intersected, shared the same space, however, at the same time, participated in quite different cultural worlds (Dewey and Malbon 1995: 2). These two modes of religious thought were distinctive yet flowing into and out of the each other. These settings prepared a ground for the interplay of oral and written scribal culture in Kashmir Valley, thereby starting a communication process which contributed in influencing the religious landscape of Muslim society in Kashmir Valley.

The spread of Islam to the Valley of Kashmir is often attributed to the role of Kubravi Sufi missionaries from Central Asia and Persia. These missionaries from Central Asia and Persia succeeded in winning the admiration and political patronage of the Muslim rulers. Kubravi Sufis in Kashmir Valley largely were not satisfied merely ritualistic conversion of locals to Islam. They mostly insisted on preaching a code of Islam in Kashmir Valley which could discern Muslim practices from non-Muslim practices. Kubravi Sufis not only tried to distinguish Islamic practices from non-Islamic practices, but the latter also were sometimes firmly repudiated (Khan 1994). Richard M. Eaton in the context of conversions to Islam in South Asia has said that this trend was accompanied by ‘greater attention given to the all-encompassing power of one Islamic agency in particular, the supreme god of Allah, who assumes the function and powers of all the agencies in the former pantheon’ (Eaton 2005: 111).

In medieval times, Kashmir was valued for its art in papermaking. Historian, Ishaq Khan, writes that Kashmir paper was distinguished for its fine gloss, its evenness, its wax-like colour and its appearance and was considered by those who used it as a means to ‘impart dignity to their correspondence’ (Khan 2007: 72). One Kubravi Sufi missionary, whose power wielded the most extraordinary influence in the spread of Islam in Kashmir Valley, is said to be Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani. He is considered to have authored more than 100 religious manuscripts (Rafiqi 2003: 50). This article correlates the role of manuscript tradition in granting power to those who had the power to access, interpret and understand the written word. Those who controlled the written word wielded great authority in interpreting religious texts. Their monopoly over this literate form of knowledge tended to polarise the society into a mass of the ignorant and the knowledge elite. In this context, it was the Kubravi Sufi missionaries, whose knowledge of the written word allowed them to become the part of religious aristocracy and the administration.

The written word in Kashmir Valley up until the recent transition of society in Kashmir to mass literacy has always been the sphere of social elites. During the rule by Muslims in Kashmir, the understanding of written word guarded the religious orthodoxy of the priestly aristocracy. Written word was a tool of government and the empire. Harold Innis (1964) in the other contexts has linked this control over key communication technologies with the concept of monopolies of knowledge. For Michel Foucault, those who control the word have the ‘power to subjugate the other forms of knowledge by disqualifying them as inadequate to their task and insufficiently elaborated, located down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’ (Foucault and Gordon 1980: 82).

On the other side, the masses which depended on oral mode of thought formed a distinctive religious Islamic tradition. This religious tradition was exposed to the thought of literate religious tradition represented by Kubravi Sufis but did not completely internalise it. This article argues that it is the local Rishi tradition within the fold of Islam, which performed a decisive role in accommodating Islam as literate religion to the transcendental aspirations of unlettered masses. This aspect of religiosity thereby fulfilled the social, psychological and survival needs of the traditional society of Kashmir Valley. The masses in Kashmir Valley were different from the literate few as in their dependence on oral mode of thought and knowledge. Oral tradition has been the major source of the preserving culture and tradition in Kashmir Valley for unlettered masses. Oral tradition has remained the method in Kashmir Valley in which stories, folktales, history and religious beliefs are passed on from one generation to another.

The poetry of Nuruddin Nurani (regarded as the patron saint of Kashmir) has been accorded the status of Kashmiri Quran (Koshur Quran) by the Kashmiri-speaking Muslim population. Yoginder Sikand (2004) has written that the verses of Nuruddin Nurani are still on the lips of Kashmiris and are treasured by both Muslims and Pundits. On such characteristics of oral cultures, Eric Havelock (1963) has observed that ‘poetry, proverbs, metaphors serve as mnemonic devices to help storing traditions to be passed on for future generations. Poetry is first and last a didactic instrument for transmitting the tradition’ (p. 43). According to Havelock, a collective social memory, tenacious and reliable, is an absolute social prerequisite for maintaining the apparatus of any civilisation (p. 42). The role of Nuruddin as a seer, a prophet bears a resemblance to the role of minstrels in Homeric Greece captured by Havelock in his work. The prevalence of oral tradition in the Kashmir Valley suited the prerequisite nature of social and cultural requirements of the Muslim masses in the Valley of Kashmir. This observation falls in line with what Clifford Geertz has called ‘cultural dimension of religious analysis’ or ‘religion as a cultural system’, that is, a system of symbols which synthesises a people’s ethos and explains their worlds (Geertz 1973: 89).

Throughout the history of Islam in Kashmir Valley, the legitimacy to define Islam has been the monopoly of those having the understanding of the written word. Those who had the monopoly over written word were also in a position to define what legitimate knowledge is (Innis 1964). Muslims masses with no control over the production of written religious scriptures in Kashmir Valley on the other hand have always been criticised for their polytheistic practices by the literate ulemas. The literates were unwilling to associate with someone they considered to be an illiterate man (nadan marad) practising austerities in the manner of the Hindus (Khan 1994: 163).

How religious education was perceived by literates as a means to wield power and control over masses can be established through this observation by Walter Roper Lawrence in his book titled The Valley of Kashmir.

There are four Kazis in Srinagar who decide the more intricate cases relating to inheritance and divorce. They jealously keep their knowledge to themselves and their sons; the outside world is not allowed to learn the secrets of shara. (Lawrence 1895: 296)

The interplay of orality and literacy in Kashmir played a key role in contributing to the circulation of religious thought up until the transition of Kashmir from medieval to modern period. The balance between the interplay of oral and written religious thought in Kashmir as explicated previously began to alter only when for the first time British intervened into the political and sociocultural affairs of the state during the Dogra rule in Kashmir. The development of transportation facilities and establishing of first modern schools in the nineteenth century contributed to the transition of old medieval institutions of Kashmir valley into modern ones (Khan 1994). These institutions though modern were determined, at least partially, by the existing nature of medieval institutions in Kashmir.

Printing Technology and Religious Reform in Modern Kashmir

The rule by successive Muslim dynasties in Kashmir extended from 1339 to 1819. The modern institutional configuration in the Kashmir Valley began to emerge only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Up until the last decade of the nineteenth century, the essence of the social, religious and political order in Kashmir Valley was under the influence of medieval institutions (Khan 2007). In 1846, the modern state of Jammu and Kashmir was founded through the sale of Jammu and Kashmir by the British to the Gulab Singh Dogra for ₹7.5 million in local currency. The state of Jammu and Kashmir under the Dogra rule became one of the 556 princely states ruled indirectly under the aegis of British imperialism. The flourishing of modern institutions in Kashmir has often been attributed to the changes brought by the colonial interventions of British during the Dogra rule in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Before the establishment of British Residency (1885) and the foundation of Christian missionary schools in the Kashmir Valley, it was largely the traditional maktabs and pathshalas, which dominated the transmission of education in the Kashmir Valley (Bazaz 1983). The education transmitted through these traditional means was largely confined to the domains of religious instruction at a very limited scale. The traditional education imparted through maktabs and pathshalas was also directed towards the creation of a small percentage of influential section of literate class in Kashmir Valley. The literate abilities of this class prepared them to be an indispensable component for the government administration.

The introduction of modern education in Kashmir Valley is credited to the schools established by the British Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although the influence of Christian missionary schools remained restricted to small percentage of urban population in Srinagar, the impact of these initiatives, however, left a conspicuous mark on the religiously conscious literate urban Muslim classes of Kashmir Valley. For example, in an attempt to face up to the educational initiatives by the Christian missionaries, Mirwaiz Rasool Shah laid the foundation of first noted modern Muslim school (or socioreligious or reform organisation) named Anjuman-i-Nusratul-Islam in Srinagar. Established in 1899 first as a Madrasa, Anjuman-i-Nusratul-Islam later on developed into an Islamia High School in 1905 (Rai 2004: 236). The rationale of founding Anjuman-i-Nusratul-Islam was twofold, one to deter the ‘designs of the Christian missionaries’ in making inroads into the Kashmir Valley and second to provide an alternative to Muslims for having an education which could integrate religion and sciences.

The early consequences of modern education in Kashmir at the turn of the twentieth century contributed to an intense focus on Islam and definitions within the literate sections of the society (Zutshi 2004). In the state of Jammu and Kashmir, there was neither any independent privately owned printing press nor any newspaper before 1924. The politics of Kashmir Valley, however, always retained the important space in newspapers outside Kashmir Valley. The mention of the attitude of Dogra rulers towards Muslim subjects is abundantly found in newspapers of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British India. Muslim newspapers in British India particularly looked at the plight of Kashmir Valley Muslims as an issue which required attention and sympathy of Muslims across British India.

This example establishes the notion of imagined community before the emergence of nationalist movement in Kashmir Valley. Here, the ‘horizontal comradeship’ was not formed on the basis of national boundaries, but on the basis of religious identities. These newspapers, however, were not allowed to enter in the dominion of the ruling Dogra regime. The use of printing press to report on the situation of Muslims in Kashmir constructed an imagined Muslim community which contributed in altering the equations in the territorial and extraterritorial affiliations (Jalal 2012).

The mere idea of bringing out a newspaper in the extremely autocratic atmosphere during the Dogra rule had been near to impossible as there was stiff opposition during the prevalent days to any efforts towards establishing a credible and independent newspaper. Muslims from Kashmir Valley, who had migrated to Punjab, always maintained emotional links with their homeland. The writings in Punjab press about the pitiable conditions of people in Kashmir Valley had mobilised some Muslims of Kashmir Valley origin in Punjab to form organisations to bemoan the merciless treatment meted out to their ‘horizontal comrades’ in their native land (Anderson 1991). The influence of these papers on the tiny section of educated community of Kashmir Valley was strong. The newspapers of Punjab, as a matter of fact, were organs of local Kashmir Valley opinion. If the Hindu rulers in Kashmir Valley constructed a specifically Hindu sovereignty, Muslims resorted to Islamic idiom in articulating their resistance by forging connections with politics of their co-religionists in other parts of India notably Punjab (Jalal 2012). This horizontal comradeship in the case of Punjab–Kashmir Valley nexus also was located outside the binaries of state and nation.

The arrival of publication market in Kashmir Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century coincided with the articulation of new religious ideas. The history of printing in Kashmir is deeply rooted in religious publishing. The Muslim religious reformers in the Kashmir Valley were among the very first to use the printing press within Kashmir Valley.In Kashmir Valley, the newly formed religious societies used pamphlets, booklets, magazines and other printed materials to propagate their ideas. It was Mirwaiz Muhammad Yusuf Shah, one among Mirwaiz Rasool Shah’s successors, who set up first printing press in order to broadcast the views of Deobandis. Two weeklies named Al-Islam and Rahnumna were launched to combat what were seen as the un-Islamic practices of the Muslims from the Kashmir Valley (Sikand 2002: 713).

Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah is credited for being the first individual to translate and publish the Kashmiri translation and commentary on the Quran. The aim here was to lessen the dependency of Muslims in Kashmir Valley on the custodians of shrines for their religious instruction (Sikand 2002). The arrival of printing press and its use by religious reformists coincided with the emergence of two significant reformist religious movements. These movements since their birth in Kashmir Valley have played a significant role in shaping the religious landscape of Kashmir Valley. The use of printing press by these organisations has been closely intertwined with Muslim religious reform in Kashmir Valley.

One of these religious organisations/movements making its presence felt in Kashmir Valley in the first half of the twentieth century is Jamiat-i-Ahl-i-Hadith. Founded by Sayyid Hussain Shah Batku, the Ahl-i-Hadith movement emphasised strict adherence to teachings Quran and the Hadith (Prophetic Traditions). One of the major objectives of Ahl-i-Hadith movement has been purging Islam of its accretions, customs, practices, superstitions and ceremonies with a view to restoring its pristine purity. It also stood for a strong affirmation of the unity of God (Tawhid), the rejection of bidah’s (innovations) and polytheism (shirk). Ahl-i-Hadith was the first reformist movement of its kind in Kashmir Valley since the arrival of Islam in Kashmir Valley (Khan 2007).

In 1923, Anjuman-i-Ahl-i-Hadith was founded in Kashmir Valley. To spread its views, Ahl-i-Hadith brought out the Tawhid (oneness of God), in 1936, its first official publication (Khan 2000: 147). The publication of Tawhid stopped after four years and it was in 1940 that Anjuman-i-Ahl-i-Hadith started out another publication named The Muslim. The Muslim mostly dealt with socio-religious issues facing Muslims and continues to focus on issues such as tomb worship, saint worship and lavish spending on the occasion of the birth and death of Muslims (Khan 2000: 147). The emergence of Ahl-i-Hadith movement in Kashmir Valley created fissures in the traditional religious leadership. The age-old monopoly over religion by traditional elites was challenged by the new emerging educated middle class. This resulted into a battle which was largely fought on the pamphlets and booklets. The literature of this time produced by both the Hanafis (religious school of thought followed by majority of Muslims in Kashmir Valley) and the Ahl-i-Hadith reflects this war (Zutshi 2004: 223–33).

After the emergence of Ahl-i-Hadith movement in Kashmir Valley, another cadre-based religio-political movement that emerged and used print extensively to propagate its ideas in Kashmir Valley was Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). The JI is a major Islamic organisation formed in undivided India by Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi. Maududi saw Islam as a complete ideology and code of life (nizam-i-hayat), covering all aspects of a Muslim’s personal as well as collective existence. Maududi’s Islamic understanding of the world is entirely a product of print culture (Robinson 1996). Vali Nasr, in his work on Maududi, has observed that that this process of circulating the religious tracts written by Maududi led to the ‘systematic propagation and dissemination of textual material’, thereby helping to institutionalise Maududi’s view of Muslim identity in the Indian subcontinent. After Partition, the JI was trifurcated into Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan (JIP), Jamaat-i-Islami Hind (JIH) and Jamaat-i-Islami Jammu and Kashmir (JIJK). In 1974, a unit in the Pakistan administered Kashmir was also established (Malik 2008). The JI units in both the sides of Kashmir Valley are politically closer and more aligned to the ideology of Maududi. The JI in Jammu and Kashmir took roots in middle of the 1940s. The members of JI saw their hope against their grievances in Islam, in the way it was being presented in the writings of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (Grare 2001).

One of the earliest activists of JI from Kashmir Valley was Saaduddin Tarabali. His association with the JI began in his youth, when he came across Maududi’s journal, the Tarjuman al-Quran. So impressed was he with Maududi’s analysis of the Muslim situation in India in his Musalman Aur Maujooda Siyasi Kashmakash (Muslims and the Present Political Turmoil) that he wrote a letter to Maududi. Maududi wrote back, and this was the beginning of a long and close relationship between the two (Sikand 2002: 717). The formal unit of JI in Jammu and Kashmir Valley, JIJK was formed in 1953 and Saaduddin was elected its first president. It was through him and others that the writings of Maududi were been copiously circulated in the Kashmir Valley. In an effort to propagate its agenda in Jammu and Kashmir, JI started its magazine titled Azan (Islamic call to worship). In Jammu and Kashmir, Azan was the official mouthpiece of JI from 1948 till 1975.

Other than Jamiat-i-Ahl-i-Hadith and JI, many other religious groups also used the printing technology as a means to propagate their ideology in Kashmir Valley. Even though newspapers and other printed material indirectly impacted those who could not read and write, the printing technology did not offer the direct privilege to the majority who still depended on oral means of communication for their religious knowledge. Given the power associated with the literacy, the print technology did create a public opinion that shifted the nature of religious discourse in the Valley in favour of reformist Islam. For those who indirectly attained the understanding of this religious change, print media did not affect the ratio of their senses.

Majority in Kashmir continued to depend on oral modes of communicating religious traditions in Kashmir. Therefore, printing technology in Kashmir valley never came to become a mass medium in Kashmir. It was eventually the appearance of radio as a mass medium which echoed cultural and religious needs of unlettered in the Kashmir Valley. If printing press in Kashmir can be said to have extended the scribal cultural in Kashmir, the radio in Kashmir can be said to have multiplied the cultural and religious aspects of oral communication in Kashmir. However, the orality informed through radio in Kashmir in the words of Walter Ong was both like and unlike the orality of medieval Kashmir. This is a kind of orality which according to Ong is more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print (Ong 1986: 133). Ong has referred this form of orality as secondary orality.

Radio and Religion in Kashmir

The first radio station in Kashmir known as Radio Kashmir was launched in Srinagar on 1 July 1948 with an aim to counter the propaganda of Azad Kashmir Radio which operated under Pakistan (Luthra 1986: Chapter 20). Keeping in view the strategic importance of Kashmir Valley, Kashmir has been one of the first places to have radio station just after the Indian independence. The main aim of Radio Kashmir Srinagar was to carry out the propaganda against Azad Kashmir Radio operating under Pakistan. For example, Jawabi Hamla (counterattack) on Radio Kashmir was presented by Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki to reply the programme Zarb-e-Kaleem (The Rod of Moses) from Azad Kashmir (Hyderi 2001: 48).

At the time when radio was introduced in Kashmir, the literacy rate among Kashmiri Muslims continued to abysmally poor (less than 2%). It was therefore radio which provided a platform that could meet the cultural requirements of those not acquainted with the written word. Unlike print media, the inherent power of radio is located in its orality and its ability to reach people without any skill in literacy. Such qualifications of radio as a medium made it the first mass media of Kashmir valley in the real sense. The radio in Kashmir reinforced the folk/oral story culture of Kashmir as it ideally suited the context of the society in Kashmir. Radio in Kashmir gave the people a sense of identification and cultural affinity. From the very beginning, radio became a very popular mass medium in Kashmir.

By broadcasting traditional stories of Kashmir such as Yusuf Zulekha, Wamiq Azra, Saiful Malook-Gulrez and Aknandun, tuning to Radio Kashmir became people’s daily activity. The religious requirements of Muslim population in Kashmir played a significant role in shaping the radio programming of Radio Kashmir. The inauguration of Radio Kashmir in Srinagar itself started with the readings from religious scriptures, particularly with the recitation from Quran by Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah in 1948 (Luthra 1986). Radio Kashmir continues to broadcast religious programmes on all important festivals, commemorated and celebrated by Muslims. Special programmes on the occasion of Muharram, Eid Milad, Eid ul Fitr, Eid uz Zuha, Shab e Qadar and Urs Shah-i-Hamdan, Sheikhul Alam and Ghousul Dastageer are broadcasted from Radio Kashmir. Radio Kashmir holds the distinction of being a radio station that broadcasts special mourning programmes for three consecutive days during Muharram, the first month of Islamic Calendar (Hyderi 2001). For many in Kashmir, especially the older generation who could not read and write, radio became a source of religious knowledge. Radio Kashmir aided the propagation of cultural ingredients of Kashmiri folk culture by encouraging broadcasting of programmes in the form of folk formats of storytelling (called Dastaan Goee), drama, devotional music and so on.

Other than Radio Kashmir, the role of Azad Kashmir Radio and Radio Tehran in appealing to the religious needs of the Muslim population in Kashmir cannot be neglected. Both Radio Tehran and Azad Kashmir Radio broadcasted religious programmes especially on the occasion of Muslim festivals. Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah, who at the time of partition fled to Azad Kashmir, would recite Quran with translation and commentary from Azad Kashmir Radio. His programme which would run probably for half an hour could manage to draw many people in Kashmir tuning to Radio Azad Kashmir. For many Muslims in Kashmir, listening to Azad Kashmir Radio was also a political act.

Globalisation, Television and Religion in Kashmir

Television redefined the nature of intersection between media and religion in Kashmir. It must be cited here that religion and media as a distinct academic inquiry owe its origins to the thorough reflection on religious broadcasting by televangelists in the USA. Few of the scholars who studied television in relation to religion in the USA saw television as a medium which was able to provide an alternate worldview to the old reality, and to the old religious view based on that reality, for millions of viewers. Stewart Hoover has noted that where prime-time television once carried few programmes with religious or spiritual themes, religion has become a staple of commercial television in the USA since the 1990s (Hoover 2006: 3). To compete with Christianity, people from other religions of the world also began to unveil their own religious television channels so as to disseminate their respective worldviews. The curious case in this competition has been the astounding response from the Muslim televangelists in articulating their faith through television.

Television in India much like several countries in Europe was built of the model of public broadcasting systems. Before the introduction of television in India, it was radio which had a mass appeal in the Indian socio-economic context. The print media mostly catered to the literate abilities of the educated section within India. In the existing socio-economic and cultural settings of India, it was the broadcasting media such as radio and television, which catered to the demands of mass audiences in India. The broadcast media in India, which were under state monopoly for a longer period, formed a tentative bridge between different sections of the society (Rajagopal 2001: 7). Since the introduction of television in India in the year 1959, the television viewers in India could only watch one television channel called Doordarshan until 1991 (Mehta 2008). Srinagar was one of the first few places to have a television broadcasting station in India. In fact, Doordarshan Srinagar was the third television station of India set up on 26 January 1973.

To realise the success of Doordarshan in Kashmir, the programme content was developed to satisfy the local cultural attributes of the society in Kashmir. In an attempt to popularise Doordarshan in Kashmir, a regional language channel named Doordarshan Kashir was launched in the year 2003. Doordarshan Kashir broadcasts many programmes in the form of serials, music, touching upon the aspects of religion in Kashmir. The peculiarity of the content with religious connotations telecasted through Doordarshan in Srinagar has usually meant to highlight the culture and heritage of the society in Kashmir. The monopoly of state over the airwaves in India ended only when in 1995 the Supreme Court of India came up with a judgement that the airwaves and frequencies were a public property. The economic reforms and policies initiated in 1991 by the Congress government in India facilitated the entry of many private television broadcasters. The number satellite networks in India rose to more than 30 from 1995 to 2007 (Mehta 2008). In the terms of revenue, India is at present one of the top 15 global media and entertainment markets (Mehta 2015: 50).

The availability of privately produced satellite television according to Robin Jeffrey meant that people discovered new ways to think about themselves and to participate in politics that would have been unthinkable a generation before. The proliferation of private television broadcasters for the first time catapulted the entry of channels by Muslim individuals or organisations devoted entirely for the religious purposes. The privatisation of media in India afforded Muslims in Kashmir for the first time came to use television as a space to witness variety of ideological views, positions and projects concerned with their religion. It was in this backdrop that the well-known tele-Islamicist, Zakir Naik, made inroads into the religious settings of Muslim society in Kashmir. Any understanding of the current flow of religious discourses in Kashmir cannot be completed without making reference to Zakir Naik. To study relationship between religion and television in contemporary Kashmir cannot therefore be completed without understanding Zakir Naik, his television channel (Peace TV) and his audiences.

The content viewed through television by the Muslims in Kashmir facilitated the evolution of Kashmir from place to Kashmir as a space. The intensification of cultural transactions through television contributed to shape local happenings in Kashmir by events occurring many miles way. Some of the television channels devoted entirely to Islamic content and watched in Kashmir are Peace TV, QTV and ARY. Most of these channels operate outside the Kashmir valley. The popularity of such channels has also influenced the burgeoning of local cable TV channels telecasting religious content. Many local preachers from Kashmir have started to appear on these different channels and mediate the values of Islam to the larger audiences.

Cassette Culture and Religion in Kashmir

When satellite television was appearing on the scene in Kashmir, there was at the same time a parallel evolution of the cassette recording industry market in Kashmir. The beginning of the 1990s saw the proliferation of cassette recording industry in Kashmir. Cassettes in Kashmir became the platforms through which culture, politics and religion of Kashmir were mediated. The growth of cassette recording industry in Kashmir, however, was spasmodic and therefore it becomes difficult in drawing a coherent narrative which could explain the systematic development of cassette recording industry in Kashmir. The content circulated through cassettes in different parts of Kashmir differed on the basis of the local patterns of sociocultural contexts. It can be, however, argued that content largely comprised of Hindi songs, Kashmiri folk songs and the performances, and speeches related to religion in Kashmir. One of the significant suppliers of the religious content remained the tapes of Kashmiri separatist songs mixed with calls for armed resistance against India from religious clerics (Manuel 2001: 250).

In addition to the political message combined with religion, the cassette recording industry in Kashmir also helped to recreate an aural environment where people could consume the content which was part and parcel of the religious aspects of folk culture in Kashmir. For example, the cassette about story of Prophet Yunus sung in Kashmiri language by a local singer named Ghulam Nabi Bhat needs to be highlighted here. The cassette titled Yunus Nama (story of Prophet Yunus/Jonah) became the popular cassette containing religious content. Yunus Nama is the story of miraculous endurance of Prophet Yunus (Jonah) after being swallowed by whale. Soon after the success of Yunus Nama, the largest cassette distributor of Kashmir Ravimech Studios run by R.K. Bhan realised the potential of cassettes addressing religious sensibilities in Kashmir. Ravimech Studios was the first studio in Kashmir equipped with multitrack, digital recording facilities and video post-production facilities. Realising the business prospects of recording and selling religious filled content, R. K. Bhan, a Kashmiri Pandit, recorded Khawab Nama of Hazrat Khadija, the wife of Prophet Muhammad. Khawab Nama of Hazrat Khadija is a story about her dream in which sun descended from the heavens into her courtyard and radiating her home. Khawab Nama was sung also by Ghulam Nabi Bhat.

According to Peter Manuels, although Kashmir may not host a particularly dynamic regional cassette industry, tapes of separatist songs circulate widely, mixing calls for Islamic jihad with appeals to Kashmiri nationalism (Manuel 2001: 250). One of the most famous preachers whose voices reverberated across the valley in the 1990s was Qari Hanif, from Pakistan. The Qari Hanif phenomenon contributed to the transformation of art of preaching in Kashmir. For the Muslim population of Kashmir, listening to the speeches of Qari Hanif became a practice of ethical self-disciple (Hirschkind 2001). It can be said that what Zakir Naik meant for local religious trends in Kashmir in relation to television, Qari Hanif carried similar influence while concerning preaching religion in Kashmir through cassettes. Post-1990s, Kashmir witnessed the circulation of cassettes of local sermon preachers (e.g., Qazi Nisar in Anantnag) who came to be regarded as important sources of Islamic knowledge. While the content of the sermons of Qari Hanif was limited majorly to the aspects of Muslim eschatology (issues concerning death, Day of Judgment in Islam), the local Muslim preachers amalgamated their religious sermons with the changing political scenario of Kashmir in the 1990s.

The sermon preachers from Kashmir with their homiletic techniques came to be regarded as exemplary practitioners of communicating Islamic ideals in the valley. The tonality (voice quality in terms of emotion, smoothness) of the preachers became a wide subject of discussion for many in Kashmir. The cassette technology in Kashmir allowed the freezing of religious performances by the preachers into a reproducible object physically separable from those who produce it, thereby removing it from its original context and making its communicative potential universally accessible through playback and broadcasting technology. Other than listening to the cassettes containing the religious sermons, the cassettes of devotional music and Qawalis became the ideal choice of the majority of Muslims in Kashmir.

The religious content of the cassettes accompanied passengers in taxis, minibuses and most forms of public transportation. Cassette markets particular during Fridays and in the month of Ramadhan in Kashmir were crowded with people looking for the latest sermons from the renowned preachers (Hirschkind 2001). In this way, the popularity of cassettes in Kashmir created an alternate public constituted by circulation of its own discourse. Owing to the fact that the cassette recording industry in Kashmir remained the first medium of mass communication outside the control of the state apparatus, the cassettes facilitating in creating a discourse around politics and religion which led to new ways of articulating faith and various forms of religiosity in Kashmir.

Religion and Digital Technology in Kashmir

Manuel Castells has noted that the diffusion of Internet, mobile communication, digital media and a variety of tools of social software in the last two decades has prompted the development of horizontal networks of interactive communication that connect local and global in chosen time (Castells 2006: 249). Before the explosion of mobile phone technology, computer-mediated communications and increasing Internet access, the information about religion circulated through mass media was largely in the control of state apparatuses. With the increasing use of digital technologies coupled with access to Internet, a new sense of public shaped by increasingly open contests over the authoritative use of symbolic language of religion has emerged. Situated outside the formal state control, this distinctively Muslim public sphere in Kashmir exists at the intersections of religious, political and social life (Eickelman and Anderson 2003).

The facilitation of unlimited interactivity through digital technology is allowing the Muslims in Kashmir to share, communicate and produce content on religion in way never witnessed before. Gary R. Bunt, one of the very first researchers who started to systematically analyse the impact of the Internet and information and communication technology (ICT) on Islam and diverse Muslim communities, has observed that the digital technologies have a profound contemporary impact on how Muslims perceive Islam and how Islamic societies and networks are evolving and shifting in the twenty-first century (Bunt 2009: 1).

The digital technologies have become a source of meaning for articulating sectarian identities by these religious groups. The access to contemporary forms of communication has allowed the existing religious groups in Kashmir to have more rapid and flexible ways of building and sustaining contact with the people. These new ways of communicating religion through digital platforms, however, cannot be in isolation from the past and are therefore a reflection of how traditional ways of communicating religion can be integrated with the demands of digital technology. At the same time, it becomes important to acknowledge the extraordinary social change represented by new information technologies. Eickelman and Anderson (2003) have argued that the publicly shared ideas of community, identity and leadership take significantly new shapes in such engagements, even as the users of the new technologies claim an unchanged continuity with the past (p. 2).

Through the digital technology, meanings produced around religion in Kashmir collide and circulate and therefore make these new technologies as a resource or a forum to locate and understand new religious patterns in Kashmir. There is often a distinction made while understanding the penetration of digital technology in rural and urban spaces. The digital divide that is sometimes attributed to the rural–urban divide does not hold true while understanding digital technology in Kashmir. According to the annual report released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in 2015–16, unlike in the rest of India where large percentage of subscribers to Internet concentrate in urban areas, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir there are more Internet subscribers in rural areas. This can attribute to the fact that Kashmir is largely a rural territory. The teledensity in the state of Jammu and Kashmir as per the same report was near to 80 per cent (Mirani, December 2015, Greater Kashmir).

With the increasing use of digital technologies, there are significant changes taking place in the ways in which these technologies are influencing the Muslims in Kashmir to practise and mediate religion. By appropriating new forms of communication tools such as mobile phones, social media and file sharing methods, there has been a rise of new form of socialised communication, termed as mass self-communication by Manuel Castells. Mass self-communication according to Castells is

[M]ultimodal, as the digitization of content and advanced social software, often based on open source that can be downloaded free, allows the reformatting of almost any content in almost any form, increasingly distributed via wireless networks. And it is self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by many that communicate with many. (Castells 2006: 248)

Through the mass self-communication facilitated by the user-generated content function of digital technologies, more and more number of Muslims in Kashmir are participating in religious and various other forms of discourses. The new digital technologies allow Muslim individuals in Kashmir a choice to choose, reflect and interpret the religious content from the multiple claims made available through digital spaces.

One of the significant changes brought by the increasing access to digital means in communicating religion in Kashmir has been penetration of religious discourses about religion from religious actors distantly located from Kashmir. It is a common site nowadays in Kashmir to see the digital CDs, memory cards filled with the religious content sourced from outside Kashmir. The speeches of the sermons of major international Muslim preachers such as Zakir Naik, Tareeq Jameel, Nouman Ali Khan, Yusuf Estes and Abdur Raheem Green are to be found abundantly available in Kashmir. The relentless flow of religious content originating from local context and non-local contexts has led to what Anthony Giddens has referred as disembedding of social systems. According to Giddens, disembedding refers to ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time space (Giddens 1990: 21). Therefore, Kashmir as a place in the age of digital technologies has increasingly transformed into phantasmagoric, which according to Giddens as a condition of modernity implies when ‘locales are locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them. What structures the locale is not simply that which is present on the scene’ (p. 19).

Prior to the usage of smartphones and access to Internet, it was only few local religious organisations which would dominate the Muslim religious public sphere in Kashmir. The pervasive nature of digital technology has meant new opportunities for those religious groups whose voices were marginalised. Most of the existing religious groups in Kashmir have their own websites and social media pages that allow the user to interact frequently with the ideas propagated by these groups. Although the ways in which Internet allows to access information on religion are new and innovative, much of its content has a basis in classical Islamic concepts. In addition to the websites maintained by the local religious groups, there are countless websites on Islam available for searching desired Islamic information. Mostly, this customised presentation of Islam allows audiences to feed themselves with the information that satisfies their cognitive consonances. However, these new opportunities are readily embraced by some, but met with scepticism by others.

The access to digital means of communication has contributed to the creation of realm where many new actors participate in creation and distribution of the religious content. Digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube mirror the differences and diversity in the religious patterns among Muslims in Kashmir. The religious cyber-practices of Muslims in Kashmir are an extension of the offline Muslim practices. In the past, the spread of religious knowledge was limited by a lack of communication tools in Kashmir. The ability to convert any information about religion into the digital forms generally has allowed the Muslims to store the information about religion in their mobile phones, flash drives and computers. In the process, many individuals while accessing the information about religion become co-creators of the religious content.

Conclusion

Historically, the religious practices of Muslims in Kashmir to a large extent have been influenced by their dominant means of communication. This is particularly evident in the context of digital technologies, which are contributing in intensifying the social, religious and cultural changes taking place in contemporary Kashmir. Until recently, majority of Muslims in Kashmir were not sufficiently skilled to read, comprehend and interpret religious texts. With the transition of society in Kashmir to mass literacy, a large section of the population is in a position to have direct access to the religious scriptures. This access to the religious content is largely facilitated through the proliferation of new media technologies. The article therefore sees media as source to locate ideas and symbols linked with the functioning of religion in Kashmir. In this way, this article places itself within the framework of studies on media and religion which have argued that media should be regarded as an integral part of the definition of religion.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.