How Yikvot, a Kashmiri language preservation platform, hopes to help youth take to the language

In 2023, Seerat Hafiz, who studied conflict studies and psychology in college and university, founded Yikvot, which means “together” in Kashmiri, to preserve the Kashmiri language and culture, and to connect and engage with her mother tongue at a time discourses around Kashmiri literature were hard to find for young people like herself.

It began with hosting interactive reading sessions of important works of Kashmiri literature with academics and writers like Shafi Shouq and Neerja Mattoo. The most ambitious effort of the platform was to recover the vast, overlooked corpus of translation both into and out of Kashmiri. For instance, Russian greats like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky have been translated into Kashmiri, and this revelation reframed for Hafiz how far translation has shaped Kashmir’s literary history.

Today, Yikvot is devoted to literature, arts, and culture – it is a space where Kashmir’s artists and writers can publish their own work. The next step is to develop an app, which many users find easier to navigate and more travel-friendly. The app will feature, among other things, “Rasm-e-Khat”, the Kashmiri keyboard, “Alif Bey”, a space to learn to read, write, and speak Kashmiri, and “Kutub Kha’na’e”, a library of Kashmiri literature. It is set to launch...

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