Young influencers tell their lives and their online culture

In a calm summer afternoon in 2020, a calendar in a cashmere mosque administered by the Indians drew the attention of Muneer Ahmad Dar. He presented a poem written in cashmere, the language spoken in the region.

To his surprise, he had a hard time reading it.

This made him wonder how his generation had slowly moved away from their mother tongue, because other languages ​​like English, Ourdou and Hindi have spread.

With this achievement, he launched a social media page – called Muneer Speaks – to preserve and promote cashmere culture.

Five years later, his profile collected more than 500 million impressions on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

“I want to tell stories on our places and our stories, our proverbs, our folklore and our poetry,” he said. “It’s about capturing our way of living, laughing, cooking and remembering.”

Mr. Dar is part of an emerging group of young content creators using digital platforms to preserve the fragments of the heritage of cashmere.

The region, divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both, was marked by decades of conflict and lost thousands of lives because of the insurrection.

In recent years, many young people have left cashmere – some to escape violence, others looking for better opportunities.

But now, a new generation changes the story – highlighting art, tradition and daily life, beyond troubles and violence.

When Mr. Dar started his social media page, the accent was put on the cashmere language. But in the past five years, his work has extended to a mixture of content, with photographs of the old architecture, cultural tradition and stories behind local delights.

In one of his popular videos, Mr. Dar shares surprising facts on the architecture of the region – such as the way people have used eggs to help maintain buildings together.

Meanwhile, the Instagram page, a cashmere museum, adopts a broader approach to archiving.

The page is managed by the 33 -year -old journalist Muhammad Fayal, who, with a team of conservatives and oral historians, documents artifacts and neglected traditions of cashmere.

Videos of dynamic mosque ceilings and poetry recitals have legends that offer a rapid and perceptive context.

Subscribers say that the page helps them see the history of cashmere in a new light.

“Heritage is not only a question of great monuments,” said a disciple, “but about the things that people have transported when they left their houses, books, shawls and family recipes”.

Experts say that content creators must remain accurate, especially with oral stories that can lose details over time.

The increase in the narration of cashmere offers a “vital counteract”, but the precipitated documentation can blur the nuances, according to the author and researcher Khalid Bashir Ahmad.

To ensure authenticity, the creators say that they rely on researchers who overlap their content from published sources, while preserving the original context.

On Instagram, the 31 -year -old filmmaker, Sheikh Adnan, directs `Shawlwala ”, a page dedicated to the emblematic pashmina scarves of cashmere (called shawls) – woven by the fine wool of the Himalayan goats and celebrated both as heritage and luxury.

“Our shawls are not only fabric,” he said, stressing that most of his subjects are elderly craftsmen who turn, dye and weave each wire.

Its objective is to move the story by “taking the scarves beyond fashion and tourism” and to present them as “examples of the history and resilience of cashmere”.

“These are contact, skills and generations cards. Each wire has a story.”

A widely shared video shows a woman who turns the thread on a traditional handbrick while a cashmere folk song plays in the background. “I want people to see the story of an unknown cashmere woman who turns thread with love,” explains Mr. Adnan.

Not all preservation work is serious. Some young artists create content with a hint of sarcasm.

For Seerat Hafiz, 22, known online under the name of Yikvot or Nun Chai with Jiya, satire and humor are his tools of choice. His videos are a mixture of puns and cultural comments and cover a range of local literature subjects with cashmiri translations of English classics.

In an article, she uses viral memes to show “why reading native literature helps save the language”. In another, an illustration of a man and a woman appears with a cashmere translation of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte playing in the background.

“In a way, I document the thoughts and emotions of young cashmiris,” said Ms. Hafiz.

“We are constantly changing languages, identities, platforms, but we always carry the grief of our history, even in our humor.”

But preserving an online language is only part of the battle – Mr. Dar says that platforms still do not recognize cashmere as a regional language, affecting visibility and scope.

“I have to choose the” other language “option because cashmere is not listed on meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram”, explains Mr. Dar. “He treats it as a language that has been forgotten.” The BBC contacted Meta to comment.

Since 2023, the literary group Adbi Markaz Kamraz campaigned to add the cashmere to Google Translate.

They sent official requests and thousands of emails, said its president Mohammed Amin Bhat, who remains full of hope.

The BBC contacted Google for comments and will update the story when they are reply.

Despite the challenges, this young group is determined to maintain their work.

From Mr. Dar to Mrs. Hafiz, they insist on the fact that their work proves that the Kashmir culture has not been but fighting to remember his own terms.

“Perhaps one day people will forget my name,” explains Mr. Dar, “but if they remember a single cashmere story, I helped stay alive, then my work will have a meaning”.

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