I was born and raised in Malikpora, a small village in Bandipora in Kashmir, amidst mountains, waterways, shrines, orchards, and the difficult textures of working-class life. Much of who I am as a scholar, teacher, translator, and writer emerges from this landscape and from the worlds of memory, language, and precarity that shaped my childhood. Growing up in rural Kashmir, I came to English not as a language of privilege but as a difficult bridge between margins and institutions, between inherited worlds and imagined futures. That tension continues to inform both my academic work and my writing.
I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English from the University of Kashmir before pursuing a PhD in Translation Studies at Aligarh Muslim University, where my research focused on South Asian poetry in translation, particularly Urdu and Kashmiri poetic traditions. Translation, for me, has never been a purely linguistic activity. It is an ethical and emotional act — a way of carrying voices, histories, silences, griefs, and cultural worlds across languages without erasing their complexity.
Since December 2021, I have been serving as Assistant Professor of English in the Higher Education Department of Jammu and Kashmir, teaching undergraduate courses in English literature, especially poetry. Before this, I taught at the Islamic University of Science and Technology, where I introduced students to Indian English poetry, literature in translation, and postcolonial literary traditions while supervising dissertations on postmodernism, slavery narratives, identity, and contemporary fiction. Teaching, for me, is deeply tied to questions of access, dignity, and intellectual selfhood, particularly for students from socially and economically marginalized backgrounds who often encounter English through fear, aspiration, and alienation simultaneously.
My work as a translator has appeared in journals and publications in India and internationally. I was part of the translation team for The Vyeth is Not Asleep: Poems of Rahman Rahi, dedicated to the celebrated Kashmiri poet Rahman Rahi. My translations have also appeared in Asymptote, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Nether Quarterly, and English Studies in India. I have translated poets such as Jayant Parmar, Shahnaz Rashid, and Nighat Sahiba, moving between Kashmiri, Urdu, and English. I have also translated the renowned Odia writer Fakir Mohan Senapati into Kashmiri, an experience that deepened my engagement with multilingual literary cultures in South Asia.
Alongside translation, I write essays and reflective prose on Kashmir, English education, caste, sectarianism, memory, and marginality. My essay The English Education of a Kashmiri emerged from my own lived experience of class mobility, linguistic anxiety, and the contradictions of inhabiting English as someone from the rural margins. Much of my writing attempts to bring together the personal and the political, the literary and the lived, the academic and the intimate.
Over the years, I have presented papers at conferences and seminars in India and abroad, including at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I spoke on translation ethics and ideology. I have also delivered invited lectures and participated in discussions on caste in Kashmir, devotional poetry, subaltern identities, and Kashmiri marsiya traditions in academic and cultural forums, including engagements associated with the Central University of Kashmir and international South Asian literary networks.
I was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship by the University Grants Commission and was selected for the South Asia Speaks Fellowship in 2023 under the mentorship of Marc Herman. As part of the fellowship, I began working on Walking with Ghosts, a memoir that reflects on memory, class, grief, teaching, and becoming in Kashmir. I am also currently working on an anthology of Kashmiri marsiya supported by the India Foundation for the Arts, as well as a forthcoming afterword project titled Piles of Yellow Leaves.
I work across Kashmiri, Urdu, and English, with a basic familiarity with Persian. My intellectual and creative interests lie at the intersections of poetry, translation, pedagogy, decolonial thought, memory studies, and the literary cultures of Kashmir. Whether through teaching, translation, scholarship, or reflective prose, I remain committed to writing from and toward the margins — toward those fragile worlds, forgotten histories, devotional traditions, and ordinary lives that continue to survive through language.
Government Degree College Ajas Bandipora