Young musicians connect a community across the Line of Control

ملخص مفصل

Sharing Shina songs online, musicians in Kashmir, Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan renew ties across the divide.

This feature is part of a series examining how artificial borders reshape daily life, divide families and force loved ones to navigate the human cost of political geography.

In the remote Tulail Valley close to the Line of Control in Indian-administered Kashmir, 25-year-old singer Aasim Yaseen was walking through his village, Buglinder, when a college student from a neighbouring hamlet stopped him.

The young man, Tanveer, took out his phone and played Sangh Mukh Shamah, a song Yaseen had recently released in Shina, their shared language.

“Sometimes I think about going into another profession, but then someone plays my song on their phone, and I keep going.”

Across Gurez in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, Drass in Indian-administered Ladakh, and Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan, young musicians like Yaseen are sharing Shina songs on social media. They are helping keep their language alive and renewing ties within a community that has been divided for generations.

The songs cross the Line of Control, which divides Indian- and Pakistani-administered parts of Kashmir. But the musicians face financial pressures, unreliable internet connections and political restrictions on their movement.

His grandfather has told him stories about Yaseen’s great-great uncle, who lived in Gilgit-Baltistan before Partition and stayed there as the region fell under Pakistani control. Yaseen says movement became extremely difficult after the Line of Control was established, and security concerns eventually led the relatives to lose contact.

“We were one family,” Yaseen says. “But we were divided into two countries.”

Gurez, the homeland of Indigenous Shina-speaking people, lies on historic routes linking the Kashmir Valley with Central Asia, including the Burzil Pass route to Astore in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan.

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