Habba Khatoon

Come to the karewa plateaus above Pampore in late October, some year in the 1570s. The flat tableland south of Srinagar is doing the thing it does for two weeks a year and nowhere else on earth quite does: flowering purple. Saffron crocuses, millions of them, low to the ground, and the whole village out among them at first light, because the flowers must be picked the morning they open. It is stooping, freezing, finger-numbing work — and each flower surrenders three red threads, which is why saffron has always been worth more than its weight in silver, and why these villages have been famous since Kashmiri antiquity; even the great ones of this book knew Pampore's crocuses.

Among the pickers is a young woman with a story the village never tires of chewing over. Married off young, as every girl is; sent to a husband's house; and then — this is the scandalous part — not destroyed by it. The marriage was miserable, the mother-in-law a torment, and the girl did the almost unheard-of thing: the marriage ended, and she came home alive to her father's house. Damaged goods, says the village. She does not seem to agree. As she works she sings — everyone sings here; the work is unbearable otherwise — but her songs are her own, in plain village Kashmiri, about her own life: the taunts, the waste of her youth, the jasmine she never got to wear. The other pickers have started singing them too. That is the strange power nobody has named yet: her complaints come out shaped, and a shaped complaint belongs to everyone who ever suffered the same.

Tradition says a royal hunting party came through those fields one afternoon — and that under a chinar, the vast broad-leafed plane tree that is Kashmir's national shade, the young Chak prince who would shortly be sultan heard a voice and stopped his horse. Perhaps it happened. It is, as we will see, the kind of scene a people invents when it needs its greatest poet and its last king to have found each other. But hold the picture, because the whole chapter is in it: a divorced peasant woman, singing to nobody, overheard.

Her parents had looked at their baby and named her Zoon — "the Moon." The palace would rename her Habba Khatoon. Kashmir has never stopped singing her. Here is what one voice can carry when everything else is taken away.

The Life

Honesty first, as always in this book, and here the honesty must be doubled. For the king in this story, the record is excellent: Yūsuf Shāh Chak's reign, his war and his ruin are documented year by year in the Mughal chronicles — the Akbarnāma, Badāūnī — and in Kashmir's own histories. For the poet, there is almost nothing contemporary. No chronicle of her lifetime names her; the earliest written collections of her songs are centuries later; her biography has been reconstructed backwards, by Kashmiri tradition, largely out of the songs themselves — which sing of a cruel mother-in-law, a lost beloved, a woman named Habba Khatoon waiting. Some historians go so far as to doubt that she was ever a queen at all, reading the royal love story as legend crystallized around a real village singer. This chapter will tell the traditional life fully, because it is one of the most beloved stories Kashmir owns — but everything biographical in it should be read with "tradition says" hovering over the sentence. What is beyond doubt is the thing that matters: the songs exist, Kashmir has sung them for four hundred years, and they are the finest lyric poetry in the language.

The world she was born into, around 1554, was a kingdom running out of time. The old sultanate — the dynasty of Budshah, whose golden reign the reader knows (chapter 119) — had rotted into puppetry, and real power had passed to the Chaks, a tough soldier clan of Dard descent from the Gurez side of the mountains, Shia in a mostly Sunni valley; in 1561 they took the throne outright. Beyond the passes, Akbar's empire was swallowing kingdom after kingdom. At court, the language was Persian — the reader has watched Persian become the subcontinent's language of power (the 1582 order, chapter 138). Kashmiri, the valley's own tongue — the language of Lal Ded's fierce verses (chapter 115) — was what people actually spoke, in the fields and kitchens. Almost nobody important wrote it down.

Tradition gives Zoon a solid peasant family — her father a well-off farmer of Chandhur, a hamlet in the saffron country near Pampore — and one precious anomaly: the village moulvi, the local Muslim cleric-teacher, taught her to read. Do not slide past that. A literate peasant girl in the sixteenth century was a rarity in Kashmir, in India, in Europe, anywhere; whatever else legend added later, Kashmiri memory insisted on this detail, a girl bent over letters, and it is why her songs, though they lived orally, have the compression of someone who knew what a made poem was. A rival tradition — argued with fresh energy now that tourism has reached that remote valley — says she was born not in the saffron villages at all but in Gurez, up on the old Gilgit road, the Chak homeland itself. The Pampore tradition is older and stronger; the Gurez claim has a mountain (wait for it); you have both.

At the usual age — young; remember what normal meant — she was married to a peasant named Aziz Lone. You know this story already, because Kashmir's other great woman poet lived it first: Lal Ded, married at about twelve into a household at Pampore — the very same saffron town — starved and tormented by her mother-in-law until she walked out into sainthood. Two centuries apart, the valley's two supreme poets open with the identical scene, the daughter-in-law ground down in a stranger's kitchen; and in both cases the record of the cruelty is the poetry it provoked. Lalla answered with metaphysics. Zoon answered with the sharpest domestic lyrics in Kashmiri — the pounding, the fetching, the counted mouthfuls, the mother-in-law's tongue — and then did something Lalla never did: she went home. Tradition says the marriage was formally dissolved. A peasant woman's divorce, in her world, was rare, scandalous — and real; Islamic law provided for it, and she or her family invoked it. She returned to her father's house with nothing but a ruined reputation and her songs.

Then the chinar. Tradition's founding scene — told above, and told here again as tradition, not fact — has Yūsuf Shāh Chak, hunting near Pampore, hear her singing and lose his heart. He brought her to the palace; her village name gave way to Habba Khatoon — "Habba the Lady." What exactly she became there is the second genuine contest of this chapter. The beloved story, and most of Kashmiri tradition, says queen: his companion, his consort, the love of his life. Sober historians note that no contemporary source records the marriage, and some suggest she may have entered the royal household in a humbler place — a singer of the court, a member of the harem without a crown. The songs, for what they are worth, speak simply as a woman to her beloved. Both readings stand; nobody alive can settle it.

What is certain is that her king's reign was brief and precarious. Yūsuf Shāh took the throne in 1579, was toppled by his own nobles within months, went begging to Akbar for help, and then — recovering his throne in 1580 by his own sword before Mughal help could arrive and claim the credit — spent the rest of his reign under the emperor's darkening displeasure, dodging summons after summons to attend the imperial court, knowing what attendance meant. The six years he had, tradition remembers as a small golden age and a long flinch: poetry and music in the gardens, boating on the lakes, the summer visits to Gurez, a king besotted with his singer-queen while everyone waited for the hammer. In late December 1585 it fell: a Mughal army under Rāja Bhagwant Das came over the passes.

Now the debit this book flagged two chapters ago, paid here from the Kashmiri side. The winter defence actually held — snow, hunger and the passes fought for Kashmir, and the stalled Mughal commander negotiated. In February 1586 Yūsuf Shāh came to terms and surrendered on them: he would keep his kingdom, striking coins and having the Friday sermon read in Akbar's name, under a safe-conduct sworn by Bhagwant Das. Akbar refused the treaty. The king who had come out trusting a general's word was detained, held prisoner, handed to Todar Mal's custody; the chronicles of Akbar's own court record the breach, and recorded it with discomfort even then. The emperor whom the last three chapters gave you every reason to admire — the abolisher of the jizya, the philosopher of sulh-i-kul — took the last independent king of Kashmir by breaking a promise of safety, then sent a second army to take the valley by force. Kashmir's nobles crowned Yūsuf's son Yakub Shah Chak, who fought on until 1589; but from the autumn of 1586 Kashmir was a Mughal province, and it would not again have an independent dynasty of its own; Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs and Dogras followed in turn. Yūsuf Shāh was eventually released into imperial service, a minor officer under Rāja Mān Singh in distant Bihar: a king converted into a pensioner. He died in September 1592, still in the empire's eastern harness. His grave is at Biswak, a village in Bihar's Nalanda district — about as far from the chinars, in soil and soul, as India gets.

And Habba Khatoon? Tradition says she refused the palace that no longer held him and walked out of history's official record entirely — twenty years, village to village, a wandering singer in the valley her husband had lost, composing the grief-songs that are her monument, and dying around 1609. A modest tomb by the roadside at Athwajan, on the highway out of Srinagar towards Jammu, is honoured as hers. Far away at Biswak, villagers point to a small grave beside Yūsuf Shāh's and say she followed him into exile and lies there — a claim historians find no evidence for, and which is really a wish: that the two of them, whom an empire separated, be together somewhere. Read the twin tombs as the tradition's last poem. His exile was a place; hers was a condition. He was buried far from Kashmir. She was buried in Kashmir, far from him.

The Great Work

The lol — a form the size of a sigh. What Habba Khatoon actually made, and what Kashmir kept, is a body of short songs in the form scholars call the lol — a Kashmiri word with no exact English equivalent; "love-longing made lyric" is close. A lol is brief: a handful of lines, built for singing, with a refrain that returns like an ache. It speaks in the first person, and the person is a woman — that is the form's signature. Its material is her own life: love, loss, taunts, jasmine, saffron, waiting. Where the songs of courts praised patrons and the songs of saints praised God, the lol praises nothing; it misses. Many of her songs carry her name woven into a closing line — "Habba Khatoon is pining" — the singer's signature that oral tradition uses in place of a title page, exactly as Mīrā's songs seal themselves with her name (chapter 135). One caveat, stated once and meant throughout: a corpus carried for centuries in living voices has soft edges. Songs have drifted in and out of her name, verses have been polished by every generation of singers, and no scholar can draw a firm line around "the authentic Habba Khatoon." What is firm is the voice — so distinct that Kashmiris recognize it the way you recognize a relative on the phone.

Two women, two registers — the language's whole range. Put her beside Lal Ded (chapter 115), as every Kashmiri does, and you can see an entire literature standing on two women. Lalla's vākh is vertical: four taut lines boring inward and upward — the self, the Self, the burning away of the world. Habba's lol is horizontal: it reaches across — to the absent beloved, the cruel household, the village, the fields. One is scripture; the other is song. One asks who am I?; the other asks where are you? Between them they gave Kashmiri its two permanent registers, the metaphysical and the intimate — and the astonishing fact is that a language received both from women: a wandering ascetic and a divorced peasant singer. Ask where else in the sixteenth-century world that happened, and you will be searching a long time.

The songs of the bad marriage. The earliest layer of her tradition sings the daughter-in-law's life from inside, and it is the least romantic poetry imaginable: the grinding and husking, the water fetched, the food begrudged, the mother-in-law's mouth, the young husband who never once looks up, the girl who was the moon of her father's house discovering what she is worth in someone else's. Kashmiri folk memory holds whole songs in this register under her name. Their value is double. They are, first, a social document almost without parallel: the interior testimony of a sixteenth-century peasant bride, a person whom every archive in the world ignores. And they are, second, the reason the rest of the story rings true: when the later songs mourn a lost king, the voice is one the listeners already knew — a village voice that had earned its griefs one taunt at a time. Kashmir's women did not sing Habba Khatoon out of loyalty to a dynasty. They sang her because she had been one of them first, and said so.

"Come back, my flower-love" — the grief made everyone's. The heart of the corpus is the cycle of longing songs tradition reads as her calling after Yūsuf — reproach and tenderness braided so tightly you cannot pull them apart. The most famous begins Tsolhama roshay roshay — "You left me in anger, in anger" — and runs, in our loose rendering of its much-varied verses:

You left me in anger, in anger —

which rival of mine has beguiled you?

I swear I have kept my door open.

My youth is going by in the waiting.

Come back, my flower-love, come.

Listen to the refrain in Kashmiri — walo myaani poshay madano — because one word of it holds the whole civilization of this book. "Come, my flower-Madan": Madan is Kāmadeva, the Hindu god of love, and here is a Muslim poet, in a Muslim court's shadow, reaching for him as the natural name for her beloved — the syncretic reflex of a valley where Lalla is claimed by both faiths and nobody found the line strange for four hundred years. The songs dress their grief in the valley itself: jasmine to be gathered for a man who does not come, vineyards and roses, the saffron fields of her girlhood, dawn departures over mountain passes. Another song beloved across Kashmir — Harmukh bartal, "at the gateway of Harmukh," the great snow-peak that Hindu Kashmir holds sacred — has its singer keeping watch at the mountain's threshold for her love's return; tradition usually gives it to Habba Khatoon, some scholars to Arnimal, and the honest answer is that no one knows. (Arnimal deserves her one line here: an eighteenth-century Kashmiri Pandit poet, abandoned by a husband gone to serve the Afghan court, whose grief-songs are so close in key to Habba's that the two corpora have bled into each other — the valley's sorrow apparently writes in one hand.) And this is precisely why the songs survived. A court elegy for a deposed sultan would have died with the court. But a woman singing you left me, come back belongs to every wife whose husband crossed the passes for work, every mother whose son did not return — and to every generation of the valley that has known loss. The queen's grief was written in the universal second person; Kashmir put its own losses into her refrains, and a private wound became a public archive.

The singer's craft — and the language's life-raft. Tradition credits her with more than words: she is remembered as a musician who reshaped how Kashmiri is sung, credited with the melodic mode called rāst-i-Kashmiri in the valley's Sufiana art music — a claim impossible to verify at this distance and repeated here as what it is, the tradition's way of saying the songs and their tunes were born together. However the melodies began, what carried them is the true final achievement, and it is bigger than her. Persian owned everything official in her Kashmir — throne, chancery, serious literature — and after 1586 the Mughal province doubled the weight; the reader has seen what a language-of-record decision does across generations (chapter 138). Kashmiri had no court behind it, no printing press (none would print it for centuries), no academy, no paying patron. By every rule of linguistic history it should have withered into a kitchen dialect with no literature. It did not, and the mechanism deserves to be stated exactly: the language lived because women sang her. The lol went where Persian never reached — into the wanwun rows of wedding singers, the work-songs at the spinning wheel, the saffron fields, the lullabies — an oral, female, unpaid, institution-free transmission system, mother to daughter for four hundred years. You have watched this force before: the women of Maharashtra keeping Janābāī at the grindstone (chapter 109), Bihar's wedding courtyards keeping Vidyāpati (chapter 117), the satsangs keeping Mīrā (chapter 135). Habba Khatoon is this book's starkest case, because in Kashmir there was no alternative carrier at all: between Lal Ded and the modern era, the thin thread of Kashmiri literature runs overwhelmingly through song, and the strongest strand of it is hers. When Kashmiri finally re-emerged in print and radio as a literary language in the twentieth century, the poets reached back across the gap and found her holding the far end. A language survived as literature inside the memory of women who could not, most of them, read. That is the great work.

Before & After

Backward, this chapter closes a five-hundred-year Kashmiri arc that this book has been building since chapter 86. Abhinavagupta made Kashmir the subcontinent's capital of thought; Kalhaṇa (chapter 95) gave it India's one true history book; Lal Ded (chapter 115) cracked the language open and is Habba's direct ancestor — the same valley, the same cruel-kitchen opening, the same escape into voice, transposed from God to love. Zain-ul-Ābidīn (chapter 119) broke the ground her songs grew in: his court first patronized written Kashmiri, and his chronicle-keeping is why her husband's fall is so well documented. And Akbar: that chapter promised that the 1586 annexation would be paid from the Kashmiri side, and it now has been — the safe-conduct broken, the king in chains, the empire's most admirable emperor seen, for one chapter, from below, through the eyes of the woman he widowed without killing anyone. Both chapters are true at once; that is this book's way. Along the women's line, she joins Akka Mahādevi (chapter 99), Janābāī (chapter 109), Molla (chapter 124) and Mīrā (chapter 135) — the roster of women who made language do what the institutions around them would not — as its station of pure lyric grief. Forward, the thread thins painfully: she is this era's only Kashmiri, and the valley's later poets — Arnimal, the romantics Mahmud Gami and Rasul Mir, the modern master Mahjoor, who was called her heir — lie beyond this roster, so the survival she made possible must be carried by her chapter alone. The global rhyme is Sappho: a woman singing love in a local tongue while grander languages ruled the world, her life dissolving into legend, her songs outliving empires — except that Sappho survives in fragments quoted by grammarians, and Habba Khatoon survives in full voice, because her manuscript was people. And the book's very next station shows the same empire from a third angle: the Guru it would martyr (chapter 144).

Why It Still Matters

Start with the singing, because it has not stopped. Her songs are the bedrock of Kashmiri repertoire: Radio Kashmir built its songbook on her after 1947, the great women singers of the twentieth century — Raj Begum above all — made her lyrics their signatures, and Tsolhama roshay and Harmukh bartal are performed, streamed and wept over today, in a language whose survival as sung literature is her doing. Cinema tried repeatedly to film her — Mehboob Khan died planning it; Muzaffar Ali shot Zooni with Dimple Kapadia in the late 1980s, and the film, unfinished when the valley's insurgency erupted, remains one of Indian cinema's famous ghosts; a 1978 Kashmiri telefilm and later TV serials did reach the screen. The map remembers her more reliably than the movies: in Gurez, the valley that claims her birth, a startling pyramid of rock above the Kishanganga river is named Habba Khatoon Peak — a mountain named for a peasant woman poet, which is not a common category — with a spring beside it bearing her name; Srinagar has her name on institutions; the Indian Coast Guard has sailed a ship called Habba Khatoon. Most striking is who remembers her: in a place where nearly everything has become contested ground, she is claimed by essentially everyone — Kashmir's Muslims as their queen and voice, Pandit tradition as the twin of Lalla and Arnimal, the Indian state as national heritage, Kashmiri cultural memory as the singer of loss itself. Held lightly, as it should be, the point is simply this: a divorced village girl's songs turned out to be the one Kashmiri possession nobody wants to give up.

And underneath sits the lesson this book keeps finding in its women. Every other survival story you have read here had machinery: empires, monasteries, courts, manuscripts, mints. Habba Khatoon's archive had no institution whatsoever — no building, no budget, no scribe on salary — and it outlasted the empire that destroyed her life; the Mughals kept Kashmir for 167 years, and she has kept it for 440. What she had was compression — songs short enough to carry; emotional exactness — grief rendered so truly that strangers adopted it as their own; and a transmission network of unpaid women whom no historian counted. If you want a definition of culture, the thing this whole book exists to give you pride in, you could do worse: culture is what survives without an army. Akbar took the king; nobody could take the song.

Over to You

The love story — chinar, king, queen — is unverifiable, and some historians suspect the "queen" was a court singer around whom legend crystallized. Does it matter? What exactly is lost, and what gained, if Kashmir's best-loved royal romance turns out to be the people's invention rather than the archive's fact?

Akbar's chapter earned your admiration; this one shows him breaking a sworn safe-conduct to take a kingdom. Can both chapters be fully true at once — and is a reader's duty to average the two verdicts, hold them separately, or decide that one reveals the "real" man?

Kashmiri survived in women's songs precisely because it was shut out of power — Persian took the offices, so the vernacular kept the kitchens, weddings and griefs. Is exclusion from officialdom sometimes what keeps a language (or an art) alive and honest? What does that imply for languages we now try to save by making them official?

Lal Ded turned a cruel marriage into metaphysics; Habba Khatoon turned hers into lyric, and then turned a political catastrophe into personal song. Is converting public injustice into private grief-poetry an evasion of politics, or the longest-lasting politics there is?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: The Mystic and the Lyric: Four Women Poets from Kashmir by Neerja Mattoo (Zubaan, 2019) — a Kashmiri scholar's translations of Lal Ded, Habba Khatoon, Rupa Bhawani and Arnimal, with the lives and the doubts honestly laid out; the Habba Khatoon section reads in an evening and pairs each song with its world. Then hear her — recordings of Tsolhama roshay and Harmukh bartal by Kashmiri singers such as Raj Begum are easy to find online, and the songs were made for the ear, not the page.

A modern way in: S. L. Sadhu's short monograph Haba Khatoon (Sahitya Akademi, Makers of Indian Literature series) — a compact life-and-works by a Kashmiri man of letters, ideal for a reader who wants the tradition and the scholarship in fifty-odd pages; and for atmosphere, the story of Muzaffar Ali's unfinished film Zooni is a haunting rabbit hole in itself.

The thread forward: While Habba's king sat out his Bihar exile, a young Guru in Punjab was raising a temple with a door on each of its four sides; in 1604 he would compile a book that put the hymns of Hindu and Muslim saints — a weaver, a barber, a cobbler — beside the Gurus' own, in one scripture, and in 1606 the empire would kill him for the size of what he was building. Chapter 144: Guru Arjan, and the moment the Mughal peace began to crack.