In the remote Tulail Valley near the Line of Control in Indian-administered Kashmir, 25-year-old Shina singer Aasim Yaseen says a chance encounter in his village of Buglinder renewed his commitment to music. A college student from a nearby hamlet, Tanveer, played Yaseen’s recent Shina-language song Sangh Mukh Shamah on his phone, a moment the singer describes as proof that local audiences value his work even when music is not widely treated as a profession. The feature, part of a series on how artificial borders reshape daily life, examines how young Shina musicians across Gurez, Drass and Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan use social media to keep their language alive and reconnect a divided community.
Key Takeaways: The report focuses on Shina-speaking artists in Gurez, Drass and Gilgit-Baltistan who share songs online despite unreliable internet, financial pressure and restrictions on movement. It says online music has become a safer way for divided families and communities to communicate without direct cross-border contact. It also cites the April 2025 attack near Pahalgam, which it says killed 26 people, as part of the security environment affecting the region.
The Shina-speaking community’s separation is rooted in Partition and the establishment of the Line of Control, which divides Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. Yaseen’s grandfather has recounted how a great-great uncle lived in Gilgit-Baltistan before Partition and remained there as the region came under Pakistani control; contact later became extremely difficult and, according to Yaseen, security concerns eventually broke family ties. Gurez lies on historic routes linking the Kashmir Valley with Central Asia, including the Burzil Pass route to Astore, but residents have no local crossing to visit relatives in Gilgit. Buses once connected Srinagar with Muzaffarabad and Poonch with Rawalakot, but neither route passed through Gurez.
Artists began sharing Shina songs on Facebook and YouTube in the late 2010s, and by 2020 residents were using online music to reconnect across the mountains. A 35-year-old teacher from Purana Tulail, who asked not to be named because of security concerns, said songs had become an emotional medium: ‘Through music, we could convey a message without having to send it. When a singer from this side sings, our community across the border listens to it.’ Yaseen said people in his area often do not consider music to be work: ‘Sometimes I think about going into another profession, but then someone plays my song on their phone, and I keep going.’ In Buglinder, his family life is centered on farming; outside their wooden home a zomo, a yak-cattle hybrid, stands under a tree while chickens roam the yard. His mother prepares namkeen chai, Kashmir’s pink salted tea, on a clay stove.
The report portrays the musicians’ efforts as both cultural preservation and a quiet form of cross-border connection, but it also notes persistent obstacles: financial pressure, patchy internet and political restrictions on movement. In Yaseen’s valley, bunkers sit on hills, fences run across mountains, cameras monitor ridgelines and checkpoints line roads; winter snow can close routes for months, limiting access to schools, markets and medical care. For now, the songs continue to travel where people often cannot, offering the divided Shina community a shared space online while the wider political dispute over Kashmir remains unresolved.
Source: www.aljazeera.com