The Skin and the Soul: Mother Tongue and Communal Identity in the Verse of Imtiyaz Lone

Credit By: MUSHTAQUE B BARQ

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• 12 Apr 2026

Imtiyaz Lone , a resident of Bumbrath, Kugam, Kashmir, is a serious modern Kashmiri voice, a poet who always peeps down the chronicles to fetch his images and themes

It is a well-said statement: the sharpest memories get a warm glow with time. The human mind is itself a chronicle that retains the impressions of yore. Roy Baumeister, a famous psychologist, reveals in his research: "Bad is stronger than good." The toughest experiences stick more than expected for the reason that the human mind stores agonies and worries for longer times and frequently evokes a sense that takes one back to the past; a sigh that slips from the nostrils stands witness to our own agonies. For poets, memories are a saffron field from which they pluck the finest blooms to serve their readers in the most thoughtful way, as Rilke suggests that memories must “turn to blood” within us before they become poetry.

Nostalgia

To rekindle the face of that black Takhti
with silt-ink, if the memory still holds
slate, chalk, the tables, and bag,
the shared lick of a single sugar-crystal
where Wali and Akbar once looked from the page,
a foreign language has claimed the space;
but that innocent youthfulness,
I think, is something hard to ever truly forget.

An Iridescent peacock-fan before the dusk,
fed with sugar to seed a thousand more,
the Hopscotch of those days seems orphaned now,
and the divers have vanished beyond the ghats.

The card-players have lost their measure and  score,
 and I have forgotten the truth and falsehood of those years.

Now that a timeless moment calls you toward us,
you should come to fulfill that lingering dream.
In that book still lies the bunch of peacock feathers you gifted,
tasting of old sugar, as in a house still full of life.

This poem is a profound meditation on the erosion of cultural identity and the sanctity of childhood memory. It serves as a bridge between the physical world of a Kashmiri upbringing and the metaphysical void left by modernity and linguistic displacement. Talking about the sensory imagery of the poem, a few strong vibes touch our senses. (Naabad Phol) and "silt-ink," "tasting of old sugar," not only serve the reader with olfactory and gustatory imagery but also take us back to the sweetest past, the moment we lost in the mighty wheel of time that knows no backward movement.

The Takhti once again takes us back to the past, where fragments of memories represent the foundation of indigenous cognition, but now, in the rat race of progression, we are thrown into the desert where sand particles serve none. Wali and Akbar, a powerful memory of old school days, recall the symbols of native intellect which have been replaced in the modern curriculum, leaving Wali and Akbar as a stamp on our tattered pages of innocence.

One of the remarkable childhood symbols of the progeny of imagination was the peacock feathers, a complex symbol of beauty and protection. A tinge of sugar and the imagination of progeny was one of the strongest images we carried down the generations, which, to Gen Z, is yet another echo of falsifying innocence.

Imtiyaz Lone, a resident of Bumbrath, Kugam, Kashmir is a serious modern Kashmiri voice, a poet who always peeps down the chronicles to fetch his images and themes. The translated version of his poem, "Nostalgia," is one of the most powerful poems present in his anthology, Khanah Band Vaeth. His voice is fresh and whirls like a fragrance to hold our senses to reflect upon the sweet and bitter memories of the past.

Once again, like his nostalgic renderings, he has brought forth one of the most common pastime games, Hopscotch, not to unfurl the pages of yore but to reveal the agony of his unrest. He is conscious of the changes around him, and the influence of these changes has appeared in the poem itself, as his hopscotch is deprived and looks like an orphan, suggesting the loss of childhood days.

Imtiyaz Lone equally laments the loss of his mother tongue, and his sorrow of displacement is genuine. He is aware of the fact that linguistic and cultural erasure has highlighted how the colonisation of the mind has deprived us of our own mother tongue. For a poet, his mother tongue is the skin and the soul of his creative zeal. The trauma of a heritage that has been overwritten is the grief the poet carries beneath his disturbed pulse.

One of the major symbols of communal identity shared in the poem is the "shared lick," an image that only a sensitive and suffering poet like Imtiyaz can bring to the fore. The reasons can be many, but he seems to witness the fragmented communal harmony himself, and thereby his loss is colossal, which he easily translates into feelings to find a place in likewise hearts.

Talking about the context of the poem, Imtiyaz Lone has maintained a delicate balance between (Markazi Khayal), the central theme, and a progression like that of a well-composed Nazm. The entire composition is interconnected. From Takhti to the loss of childhood, the poem holds a thread that inturn keeps the reader connected to the nostalgic narrative of the poet. The way Imtiyaz Lone has brought a contrast of consonants like Chalk, Takhti, Silt, Peacock feathers, and dreams draws out the fading nature of our collective memories.

Let us analyze the poem keeping two specific theories of nostalgia into consideration: Svetlana Boym’s Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia. The first rebuilds the past exactly as it was and treats memory as truth, but the second reveals the gap between the past and present. Its objective is focused on the longing and the fragments of memory that remain as a tool to reconstruct a perfect history. Imtiyaz Lone’s speaker in the poem has admitted that truth has been forgotten, and orphaned hopscotch are images of reflective nostalgia. The focus is on the lament of loss and not on the records of yore.

Another interesting feature, as designed by Gaston Bachelard in Poetics of Space, argues that childhood objects, likewise in the poem, Takhti, a house still full of life, are not mere expressions but everlasting impressions pulsating with our pulse; they, in turn, keep a poet alive to use the images of the past from his toolbox shelved by memories.

The poet has drawn a mind-boggling comparison between the microcosm, in the light of peacock feathers, where progeny is subjective to imagination, and the macrocosm that admits death as a decree. This delicate comparison has lifted the landscape of the poem to the level of dynamism. Our young Kashmiri poets have lifted up the voice of the land, the people, and social unrest; they are equally aware of their history and boldly narrate their nostalgic content.

(The Author is a distinguished Kashmiri novelist, poet, translator, columnist, reviewer, and script writer with over two decades of contributions to literature and education, and guiding aspiring writers through creative writing workshops and pedagogy training)