Dynamics of people’s interaction with their regions has always been a complex phenomenon. Arranged in several layers and operated through subtle modalities of diverse functional nuances, its historicity is embedded in socio-economic practices and livelihood options. But quite importantly, it is also rooted in the cultural practices of people that happen to construct distinct regional identities building up shared consciousness across socio-economic categories. They evolve as collective expressions of the majority and stand out as essential components of socio-spatial dialectics of regions. In the face of multiple dominations taking place across the globe, such practices often strike a common chord with those across countries depending on prevailing disharmonies and diversities of struggles. A material framework of social relations and discursive methodology gets embodied in these practices with key elements rooted in interactions, contradictions and conflicts – surfaced or unsurfaced and generated historically. Taking diverse forms of popular culture like music, poetry, films, theatre, performing arts, cartoon or folk art, they become manifestations of people’s power in challenging the supremacy of organised power. Through them is highlighted the contradiction between the imagination of power that aims to control space and that of the located communities as its living users.

Sharing rich legacies of regional cultures and drawing analogous experiences from regions at large, these cultural practices are found to generate alternate means to build up resistance and solidarity across masses. Like many other regions across the world, a form of poetry since long has evolved in Kashmir with an aim to contest domination and spread socio-political awareness. The following four poems of Abdul Ahad Azad, translated from Kashmiri, belong to the above genre.

Born in a village having little interaction with city intellectual environment, Azad was much ahead of his time, writes Shamim Ahmed Shamim. It is a unique experience to read Azad. Limited formal education could not obstruct his exposure to critical, diverse viewpoints that largely influenced his thoughts on nationalism and longing for a new world without hierarchy. Even while respecting tradition, he did not walk on the beaten track, preferred the rebel than the refined, material than the mystic and valued collective consciousness to a great extent. His poems having all elements of world resistance literature introduced a new genre in Kashmiri poetry that was less delicate and more direct. Azad’s search as a poet went beyond Kashmir to an expansive space of liberty and inspired many who subsequently followed his way of writing.

He even started writing a history of Kashmiri literature, but could not complete the work. Azad died very young in 1948. His poetry became popular posthumously.