“The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)
Drawing on Multilingualism in the British Azad Kashmiri Community (Nazir, 2024), this talk explores how colonial language ideologies and naming practices shape both perceptions of the language spoken by British Azad Kashmiris and the individuals who speak it. Despite a large speaking population, the language remains structurally invisible and understudied. These hierarchies extend across borders, shaped by monolingualising ideologies and reinforced through institutions, censuses, and education systems in both Pakistan, Jammu, and Azad Kashmir and the British South Asian diaspora. Urdu and English hold elevated status due to their official status rather than speaker numbers, while languages such as Punjabi, Pahari, Pothwari, Balochi, Pashto, Saraiki, and Hindko, though spoken by more people, are often perceived as having a subordinate status. These dynamics influence how language is recognised, named, and marginalised, and how they shape the individual. The talk also reflects on how, in the British Azad Kashmiri community, writing can become an act of resistance, and what it means to write from the margins without being written into them.
The talk will end with a short recital of poems and an informal space for audience members to share their own reflections on language and culture, inspired by the People of the Garáṇ exhibition.
Access
For information re physical access of MIAH Foundation / Moseley Community Hub, please see ourAccessibility Guide here. BSL live interpretation is available on request. This programme will be running on Crip Time. As a result, we endeavour to reschedule events should any of our contributors not feel well / experience a change in capacity in the lead up to and / or on the day of the event itself.
Tickets
In order to ensure this programme is accessible to all, we have implemented a three tiered ticketing system: Pay As You Feel, Standard tickets priced at £5.00 (plus eventbrite fee) as well as Solidarity Tickets priced at £10 (plus eventbrite fee).
If you would like to attend this event but cannot afford to purchase a paid ticket please get in touch with us directly at info@ortgallery.co.uk
About People of the Garáṇ
A solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by artist Haseebah Ali, showcasing historic Kashmiri objects from the MIAH Foundation collection.
This exhibition is curated and conceived by Aaisha Akhtar and Dr Farah Nazir and is produced in collaboration between Ort Gallery and MIAH Foundation.
People of the Garáṇ is an exploration of Azad Kashmiri stories, memories, and cultural practices that have existed beyond public records and archives. This exhibition invites us to reflect on both real and imagined space between the village and the city; from an agrarian past to a post-industrial present; and the ways in which rural village life textures diasporic geographies and peoples in urban Britain.
Inspired by the artefacts from MIAH’s collection, as well as everyday images, art practices, and traditions from her upbringing, Hassebah employs print, photography, textiles, illumination, sculpture and mixed media to trace connections between labour, care, migration, craft, and the remaking of home. Through these forms, Haseebah’s work draws attention to the internal and external worlds of men and women in her family across generations: their bodily labour, emotional endurance, and inherited practices. The artworks offer a way of understanding and connecting the Azad Kashmiri community to their own memories and traditions.
This exhibition is a contemplation on space, not just as a physical entity, but as something lived, remembered, and remade - a notion that is intrinsic to the cultural legacy of a community whose traditions and practices are often understood in form but not in meaning.
Ultimately, People of the Garáṇ is a visual account imbued with tenderness and a desire to celebrate, interrogate and document the cultural legacy and textures of Azad Kashmiri diasporic life.
About the Speaker
Dr Farah Nazir's research interests are in the grammar of South Asian languages, multilingualism, language identity and attitudes, and language creativity. Farah did her PhD on the grammar of the Pahari-Pothwari-Mirpuri language and continues to work on the grammar, as well as promoting the language and identity of Azad Kashmiris via her writing, and literature and language festivals. She was the co-director of the first JAAG (2023) Panjabi and Pahari-Pothwari Language and Literature Festival. She has written several articles exploring her personal journey as a community member and an academic linguist, and linguistic creativity within the British South Asian diaspora community. She casually writes poetry in her language, which is a place of freedom for her to connect to the words and worlds of her elders, her memories, and to the shared collective history of the British Azad Kashmiri community.
She is currently a researcher at University of York where she is supporting a large research project entitled ‘Lost for Words: Cognitive Ageing And Language Control in Bilingual Older Adults with and without Cognitive Impairment'. The project explores how bilinguals navigate language use as they age within multilingual communities in the North of England, focusing on Pahari/Pothwari/Mirpuri speakers as well as other Pakistani/Kashmiri heritage languages.
She continues to navigate and challenge the hierarchical structures within and outside of academia with care, forgiveness, and hope.