‘A focus on literature that is part of everyday life’: Onaiza Drabu on editing a Kashmiri anthology
· Scroll
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“I wanted to make the case for the fact that literature is everywhere; it is omnipresent.”
That is what Onaiza Drabu aimed to do with The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature, the anthology she has edited that illustrates the richness of Kashmiri literature, land, and people through a diverse canon of expressions.
The anthology brings together the works of several historical saints, scholars, unlettered poets, and voices of Kashmir, ranging from the fourteenth century to the contemporary era.
In a conversation with Scroll, Drabu spoke about the making of The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature, the inspiration for the project, the process of collecting literary works from earlier centuries and selecting texts for an anthology of this scale.
Excerpts from the interview:
How did you get the idea to compile The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature?
I started my journey into exploring Kashmiri language and literature way back in 2013. That is when I started drawing the earliest illustrations of proverbs for something called Lipton Chai Blog. In fact, Scroll was the first platform to feature some of these. Those were the early days of memes and they got very popular. It was then that I started reading Kashmiri literature in translation and a few years later, started working on my first book on Kashmiri folklore. Starting then,...