commemorates the adoption, on October 27, 1980, of UNESCO’s Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images, an international instrument that recognised film and other moving images as part of humanity’s cultural heritage. The day is not simply a celebration of cinema, radio or television. It is a reminder that the very materials created to preserve human experience are themselves vulnerable
Every family in Kashmir has a recording it cannot quite replace, a cassette of a wedding Wanvun, a video of a grandparent speaking in a village dialect, a radio song remembered more clearly than the year it was broadcast. These objects rarely look important. They sit in cupboards, shoe boxes, old almirahs and forgotten hard drives. Yet they carry something that official records often do not, the sound of a place, the cadence of a language, the texture of everyday life. As the world marks World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on October 27, Kashmir has reason to pay attention. The region’s past is preserved not only in manuscripts, monuments and written histories, but in voices, songs, performances, family films and broadcast archives. Much of this material is ageing quickly. Some of it has already disappeared. What remains needs to be identified, protected and made accessible before it becomes impossible to recover. Audiovisual records matter because they preserve what paper cannot. A transcript of a Kashmiri folk song may retain its words, but not its melody, rhythm, pronunciation or the collective energy of women singing together at a wedding. A written account of a traditional performance cannot capture a performer’s gestures, an audience’s laughter, or the interaction between singer and listener. A photograph may show a Srinagar street, but a film recording can show how people moved through it, spoke in it and inhabited it. In Kashmir, where oral transmission has long been central to cultural life, this distinction is especially important. Traditions such as Wanvun, Rouf, Chakri, Ladishah and Sufiana music have been carried through performance, memory and community participation rather than formal notation. Wanvun, traditionally associated with women’s singing at weddings and other celebrations, has been transmitted orally across generations, scholars and cultural practitioners have repeatedly warned that the passing of older singers makes systematic documentation increasingly urgent. A recording does not replace living practice. A tradition survives only when people continue to perform, teach and reinterpret it. But a recording can preserve a version of that practice for future generations, its language, its regional variation, its emotional register and its social context. Without such documentation, a tradition may continue in fragmentary form, or vanish without leaving a full record of what it once was. World Day for Audiovisual Heritage was proclaimed by UNESCO’s General Conference in 2005. It commemorates the adoption, on October 27, 1980, of UNESCO’s Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images, an international instrument that recognised film and other moving images as part of humanity’s cultural heritage. The day is not simply a celebration of cinema, radio or television. It is a reminder that the very materials created to preserve human experience are themselves vulnerable. Films decay, tapes deteriorate, playback machines become obsolete and digital files can be corrupted, misplaced or rendered inaccessible by changing technology. The idea of audiovisual heritage as a “Window to the world” is particularly apt for Kashmir. Recordings can connect younger Kashmiris with ways of life that may no longer be familiar. They can help researchers understand social change. They can also allow people outside the region to encounter Kashmir through its own voices rather than through distant stereotypes or simplified headlines. But a window remains open only if someone maintains it.
Kashmir’s broadcasting history illustrates both the value and the fragility of audiovisual memory. For decades, Radio Kashmir Srinagar, now All India Radio Srinagar, was a major repository of Kashmiri music, drama, poetry, public discussion and folk performance. Its archives held recordings of artists such as Raj Begum, Mohan Lal Aima, Ghulam Qadir Langoo, Ghulam Nabi Dolwaal, Pandit Shambhu Nath Sopori, Ghulam Hasan Sofi, Ustad Mohammad Abdullah Tibet Bakal and others whose work shaped the soundscape of generations. Yet the archive has not been immune to loss. Reporting on the station’s digitisation efforts has noted that a substantial portion of its older archival stock was already lost, while surviving recordings required careful transfer to digital formats. The case of Pushkar Bhan, one of Kashmir’s best-known broadcasting personalities, has also drawn attention to the precarious condition of early radio material. Accounts of efforts to trace his work describe missing recordings associated with programmes such as Zoon Dab and Machama, with some surviving material reportedly held privately and in deteriorating condition. These examples should not be read as a verdict on any single institution. Archives everywhere face shortages of funding, equipment, trained staff and storage space. But they do show a broader truth, cultural memory is not automatically preserved simply because it was once recorded. It survives through deliberate care. The technical risks are real. Early cellulose nitrate film is chemically unstable and can pose a serious fire hazard. Acetate film can suffer from vinegar syndrome, a progressive chemical decay that damages the material and eventually makes it unplayable. Magnetic audio and video tapes can lose signal quality, shed oxide or become difficult to play as equipment disappears. UNESCO and archival bodies have long identified inadequate storage, obsolescence and physical degradation as central threats to audio-visual collections. Digitisation offers a lifeline, but it is not a cure. A recording transferred to a computer can still be lost if the file is not backed up, described properly and migrated as formats change. Preservation is not a one-time act of copying. It is a continuing process of storage, documentation, checking and renewal. It is tempting to think of audio-visual heritage as belonging chiefly to famous singers, filmmakers and broadcasters. Kashmir’s cultural history certainly includes such figures. But it also includes people whose names may never appear in formal histories: farmers, boatmen, artisans, teachers, women who led household rituals, village elders, folk performers and ordinary residents who witnessed the transformation of their neighbourhoods.
Their recordings matter because they broaden the historical record. A conversation with an elderly resident may reveal how a locality changed, how occupations disappeared or adapted, how languages were spoken in daily life, or how communities marked festivals and hardships. A video of a craftsperson at work may preserve techniques that written descriptions can only approximate. A recording of a local performance may document a regional variation that exists nowhere else. Kashmir’s musical traditions show why this breadth matters. Chakri, with its responsive choruses and narrative verses. Rouf, associated with spring and communal singing and ladishah, a satirical performance form, are not merely aesthetic categories. They are records of social life, humour, belief, language and collective memory. If only polished studio recordings are preserved, future generations may lose the rougher, local and community-based versions that reveal how culture was actually lived. Some documentation efforts are already under way. These efforts are valuable precisely because they combine recording with context. A recording without information can become an unidentified file. Who is speaking ? Where was it recorded ? When ? What occasion does it document ? Who holds rights over it ? Such details, metadata, in archival language, determine whether a recording remains usable for research, education and public memory. The digital age has changed the nature of the problem. Kashmir is now documented more extensively than ever before. Weddings, festivals, shrines, public gatherings, musical performances, family celebrations and everyday street life are recorded on smartphones. Much of this material may one day be invaluable to historians. But it is also scattered across personal phones, social-media accounts, private computers, memory cards and cloud storage. A phone can be lost. A hard drive can fail. An account can be deleted or become inaccessible. A platform can remove content. And even when a file survives, it may be useless if no one knows where it was recorded, who appears in it or what it shows. The challenge, therefore, is twofold - rescue vulnerable analogue recordings and create sustainable systems for preserving today’s digital material. This cannot be left to individuals alone. Cultural institutions, universities, broadcasters, libraries, museums and community organisations need to work together to identify significant collections, assess their condition and establish priorities for preservation. Families can begin immediately. Old cassettes, video tapes, photographs and digital files should be labelled with names, dates, places and occasions where possible. Important recordings should be copied and stored in more than one secure location. A simple note, a name, a village, a year, a relationship, can transform an anonymous file into a historical document. Schools and colleges can encourage students to document family histories and local traditions, provided they do so with consent and sensitivity. Cultural organisations can record performances, dialects, craft practices and community memories while ensuring that the people being recorded understand how the material will be used. Preservation has limited public value if recordings remain locked away. Archives must also create ways for people to discover and engage with what they hold. Curated exhibitions, documentary screenings, digital collections, educational programmes and oral-history projects can bring archival material to students, researchers and the wider public. For Kashmir, such access could be especially meaningful. Historical footage of Srinagar, recordings of Kashmiri music, documented craft practices and interviews with older residents could help younger generations understand the social worlds that shaped their communities. They could also give visitors and scholars a more layered understanding of the region than landscapes and headlines alone can provide. But access must be responsible. Some recordings contain private family matters, culturally restricted knowledge, images of suffering or material whose context has been lost. Making something available online is not the same as preserving it responsibly. Institutions must consider consent, privacy, copyright, cultural ownership and accurate interpretation. This matters especially in an era when short clips can be stripped of context and circulated widely. A recording is evidence, but it is not self-explanatory evidence. Its meaning depends on when it was made, by whom, for what purpose and how it relates to other sources. Careful documentation protects both historical accuracy and the dignity of the people captured in the frame.
Kashmir’s heritage does not reside only in its monuments, manuscripts and landscapes. It lives in the voice of an elder describing a vanished way of life, in the refrain of a wedding song, in the grainy footage of a neighbourhood that has changed beyond recognition and in the recordings that future generations may one day depend upon to understand their past. A fading cassette, an unlabelled film reel or a forgotten digital file may contain something that cannot be recreated once lost. Unlike a building, a voice does not leave ruins. It disappears quietly. October 27 should therefore be more than a symbolic observance. It should prompt a sustained effort to identify, preserve, describe and responsibly share Kashmir’s audiovisual heritage. Governments and cultural institutions can fund preservation and train archivists. Universities can support oral-history and documentation projects. Broadcasters can prioritise the digitisation and cataloguing of vulnerable collections. Families can label, back up and protect their own recordings. None of this requires a grand beginning. A recorded conversation with a grandparent, a properly stored video of a traditional performance, or a labelled cassette from a family wedding can become part of Kashmir’s collective memory. Every preserved recording is an investment in the future’s ability to understand the past. For Kashmir, keeping its window to the world open means ensuring that its voices, songs and images continue to speak, not only to those who remember them, but to those who have yet to discover them.
Email:----------------------mauzambakshi@gmail.com
commemorates the adoption, on October 27, 1980, of UNESCO’s Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images, an international instrument that recognised film and other moving images as part of humanity’s cultural heritage. The day is not simply a celebration of cinema, radio or television. It is a reminder that the very materials created to preserve human experience are themselves vulnerable
Every family in Kashmir has a recording it cannot quite replace, a cassette of a wedding Wanvun, a video of a grandparent speaking in a village dialect, a radio song remembered more clearly than the year it was broadcast. These objects rarely look important. They sit in cupboards, shoe boxes, old almirahs and forgotten hard drives. Yet they carry something that official records often do not, the sound of a place, the cadence of a language, the texture of everyday life. As the world marks World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on October 27, Kashmir has reason to pay attention. The region’s past is preserved not only in manuscripts, monuments and written histories, but in voices, songs, performances, family films and broadcast archives. Much of this material is ageing quickly. Some of it has already disappeared. What remains needs to be identified, protected and made accessible before it becomes impossible to recover. Audiovisual records matter because they preserve what paper cannot. A transcript of a Kashmiri folk song may retain its words, but not its melody, rhythm, pronunciation or the collective energy of women singing together at a wedding. A written account of a traditional performance cannot capture a performer’s gestures, an audience’s laughter, or the interaction between singer and listener. A photograph may show a Srinagar street, but a film recording can show how people moved through it, spoke in it and inhabited it. In Kashmir, where oral transmission has long been central to cultural life, this distinction is especially important. Traditions such as Wanvun, Rouf, Chakri, Ladishah and Sufiana music have been carried through performance, memory and community participation rather than formal notation. Wanvun, traditionally associated with women’s singing at weddings and other celebrations, has been transmitted orally across generations, scholars and cultural practitioners have repeatedly warned that the passing of older singers makes systematic documentation increasingly urgent. A recording does not replace living practice. A tradition survives only when people continue to perform, teach and reinterpret it. But a recording can preserve a version of that practice for future generations, its language, its regional variation, its emotional register and its social context. Without such documentation, a tradition may continue in fragmentary form, or vanish without leaving a full record of what it once was. World Day for Audiovisual Heritage was proclaimed by UNESCO’s General Conference in 2005. It commemorates the adoption, on October 27, 1980, of UNESCO’s Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images, an international instrument that recognised film and other moving images as part of humanity’s cultural heritage. The day is not simply a celebration of cinema, radio or television. It is a reminder that the very materials created to preserve human experience are themselves vulnerable. Films decay, tapes deteriorate, playback machines become obsolete and digital files can be corrupted, misplaced or rendered inaccessible by changing technology. The idea of audiovisual heritage as a “Window to the world” is particularly apt for Kashmir. Recordings can connect younger Kashmiris with ways of life that may no longer be familiar. They can help researchers understand social change. They can also allow people outside the region to encounter Kashmir through its own voices rather than through distant stereotypes or simplified headlines. But a window remains open only if someone maintains it.
Kashmir’s broadcasting history illustrates both the value and the fragility of audiovisual memory. For decades, Radio Kashmir Srinagar, now All India Radio Srinagar, was a major repository of Kashmiri music, drama, poetry, public discussion and folk performance. Its archives held recordings of artists such as Raj Begum, Mohan Lal Aima, Ghulam Qadir Langoo, Ghulam Nabi Dolwaal, Pandit Shambhu Nath Sopori, Ghulam Hasan Sofi, Ustad Mohammad Abdullah Tibet Bakal and others whose work shaped the soundscape of generations. Yet the archive has not been immune to loss. Reporting on the station’s digitisation efforts has noted that a substantial portion of its older archival stock was already lost, while surviving recordings required careful transfer to digital formats. The case of Pushkar Bhan, one of Kashmir’s best-known broadcasting personalities, has also drawn attention to the precarious condition of early radio material. Accounts of efforts to trace his work describe missing recordings associated with programmes such as Zoon Dab and Machama, with some surviving material reportedly held privately and in deteriorating condition. These examples should not be read as a verdict on any single institution. Archives everywhere face shortages of funding, equipment, trained staff and storage space. But they do show a broader truth, cultural memory is not automatically preserved simply because it was once recorded. It survives through deliberate care. The technical risks are real. Early cellulose nitrate film is chemically unstable and can pose a serious fire hazard. Acetate film can suffer from vinegar syndrome, a progressive chemical decay that damages the material and eventually makes it unplayable. Magnetic audio and video tapes can lose signal quality, shed oxide or become difficult to play as equipment disappears. UNESCO and archival bodies have long identified inadequate storage, obsolescence and physical degradation as central threats to audio-visual collections. Digitisation offers a lifeline, but it is not a cure. A recording transferred to a computer can still be lost if the file is not backed up, described properly and migrated as formats change. Preservation is not a one-time act of copying. It is a continuing process of storage, documentation, checking and renewal. It is tempting to think of audio-visual heritage as belonging chiefly to famous singers, filmmakers and broadcasters. Kashmir’s cultural history certainly includes such figures. But it also includes people whose names may never appear in formal histories: farmers, boatmen, artisans, teachers, women who led household rituals, village elders, folk performers and ordinary residents who witnessed the transformation of their neighbourhoods.
Their recordings matter because they broaden the historical record. A conversation with an elderly resident may reveal how a locality changed, how occupations disappeared or adapted, how languages were spoken in daily life, or how communities marked festivals and hardships. A video of a craftsperson at work may preserve techniques that written descriptions can only approximate. A recording of a local performance may document a regional variation that exists nowhere else. Kashmir’s musical traditions show why this breadth matters. Chakri, with its responsive choruses and narrative verses. Rouf, associated with spring and communal singing and ladishah, a satirical performance form, are not merely aesthetic categories. They are records of social life, humour, belief, language and collective memory. If only polished studio recordings are preserved, future generations may lose the rougher, local and community-based versions that reveal how culture was actually lived. Some documentation efforts are already under way. These efforts are valuable precisely because they combine recording with context. A recording without information can become an unidentified file. Who is speaking ? Where was it recorded ? When ? What occasion does it document ? Who holds rights over it ? Such details, metadata, in archival language, determine whether a recording remains usable for research, education and public memory. The digital age has changed the nature of the problem. Kashmir is now documented more extensively than ever before. Weddings, festivals, shrines, public gatherings, musical performances, family celebrations and everyday street life are recorded on smartphones. Much of this material may one day be invaluable to historians. But it is also scattered across personal phones, social-media accounts, private computers, memory cards and cloud storage. A phone can be lost. A hard drive can fail. An account can be deleted or become inaccessible. A platform can remove content. And even when a file survives, it may be useless if no one knows where it was recorded, who appears in it or what it shows. The challenge, therefore, is twofold - rescue vulnerable analogue recordings and create sustainable systems for preserving today’s digital material. This cannot be left to individuals alone. Cultural institutions, universities, broadcasters, libraries, museums and community organisations need to work together to identify significant collections, assess their condition and establish priorities for preservation. Families can begin immediately. Old cassettes, video tapes, photographs and digital files should be labelled with names, dates, places and occasions where possible. Important recordings should be copied and stored in more than one secure location. A simple note, a name, a village, a year, a relationship, can transform an anonymous file into a historical document. Schools and colleges can encourage students to document family histories and local traditions, provided they do so with consent and sensitivity. Cultural organisations can record performances, dialects, craft practices and community memories while ensuring that the people being recorded understand how the material will be used. Preservation has limited public value if recordings remain locked away. Archives must also create ways for people to discover and engage with what they hold. Curated exhibitions, documentary screenings, digital collections, educational programmes and oral-history projects can bring archival material to students, researchers and the wider public. For Kashmir, such access could be especially meaningful. Historical footage of Srinagar, recordings of Kashmiri music, documented craft practices and interviews with older residents could help younger generations understand the social worlds that shaped their communities. They could also give visitors and scholars a more layered understanding of the region than landscapes and headlines alone can provide. But access must be responsible. Some recordings contain private family matters, culturally restricted knowledge, images of suffering or material whose context has been lost. Making something available online is not the same as preserving it responsibly. Institutions must consider consent, privacy, copyright, cultural ownership and accurate interpretation. This matters especially in an era when short clips can be stripped of context and circulated widely. A recording is evidence, but it is not self-explanatory evidence. Its meaning depends on when it was made, by whom, for what purpose and how it relates to other sources. Careful documentation protects both historical accuracy and the dignity of the people captured in the frame.
Kashmir’s heritage does not reside only in its monuments, manuscripts and landscapes. It lives in the voice of an elder describing a vanished way of life, in the refrain of a wedding song, in the grainy footage of a neighbourhood that has changed beyond recognition and in the recordings that future generations may one day depend upon to understand their past. A fading cassette, an unlabelled film reel or a forgotten digital file may contain something that cannot be recreated once lost. Unlike a building, a voice does not leave ruins. It disappears quietly. October 27 should therefore be more than a symbolic observance. It should prompt a sustained effort to identify, preserve, describe and responsibly share Kashmir’s audiovisual heritage. Governments and cultural institutions can fund preservation and train archivists. Universities can support oral-history and documentation projects. Broadcasters can prioritise the digitisation and cataloguing of vulnerable collections. Families can label, back up and protect their own recordings. None of this requires a grand beginning. A recorded conversation with a grandparent, a properly stored video of a traditional performance, or a labelled cassette from a family wedding can become part of Kashmir’s collective memory. Every preserved recording is an investment in the future’s ability to understand the past. For Kashmir, keeping its window to the world open means ensuring that its voices, songs and images continue to speak, not only to those who remember them, but to those who have yet to discover them.
Email:----------------------mauzambakshi@gmail.com
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