The forgotten custodians of our syncretic culture

There are truths that arrive quietly, like snowflakes touching the ground before sunrise. You don’t hear them falling. You only see the world changed when dawn finally comes. The truth about the absence of elders in our children’s lives is like that—silent, but enormous. It settles on our homes, our society, our future.

Sometimes, I think Kashmir itself is an elder, a wise old woman wrapped in her faded pheran, watching us from the corner of the room as we rush on with our modern errands. She keeps waiting for us to sit beside her, to hold her weathered hands, to listen. But we rarely do.

Once, our childhoods were raised by a whole tribe—grandparents, neighbours, storytellers, farmers, carpet-weavers, shepherds returning from highland pastures with pockets full of tales. A Kashmiri child grew like the walnut tree: slowly, under the patient gaze of elders who knew how to wait for things to ripen. Today the walnut trees are still there, but the guardians are missing. Their stories remain unheard, like abandoned manuscripts collecting dust in forgotten attics.

The new world has invented a strange loneliness. It builds houses but empties homes. Everywhere in Kashmir, you can see it—old parents with children scattered across cities, continents, time zones. In some villages, the only sound outside at dusk is the creaking of iron gates opened by elders returning from the masjid, walking slowly, not because of age but because there is no one waiting for them inside.

And then, there are our children—hungry for gentleness in a world that feeds them noise. They need someone who knows the old calendar of seasons, someone who remembers what the world looked like before phones became mirrors and mirrors became prisons. A grandmother who knows when the first snow on Harmukh foretells an early winter. A grandfather who knows the name of every bird that visits the paddy fields. Elders who can sit with them and tell stories not found on the digital ocean, but etched in memory like a prayer.

Here, somewhere in the middle of this fading landscape, lies the syncretic heart of Kashmir—that old interweaving of traditions, where a Muslim and Pandith grandmothers humming a wanwun, a neighbour quoting a couplet of Lalla Ded, and a Pandith hakeem reciting Tyndale’s herbal lore all belonged to the same moral universe. Where wisdom did not come from one lineage but from many rivers merging into one lake. Our elders were the custodians of that syncretism. With their silence, a whole way of knowing disappears.

Kashmir has been rearranged too by this quiet migration of elders out of relevance. Their retreat is not loud. It is the retreat of lamps dimming one by one in a long corridor. We do not realise how dark the hallway becomes until the last lamp goes out. The tragedy is not only that elders are alone. The deeper tragedy is that our children are growing without them, without that emotional architecture that once held a society together.

Elders were the first schools we attended before we ever put on a uniform. They taught us how to greet guests, how to sit with humility, how to respect silence, how to hold grief without collapsing, how to wait for spring even when winter felt endless. They taught us—without lecture or punishment—that life must be carried with both hands.

When elders disappear from childhoods, children grow up lopsided—brilliant perhaps, technologically gifted perhaps, but spiritually hollow. They may know how to swipe screens faster than adults, but they do not know how to sit beside an aging person and listen to the slow music of their breathing. And that, too, is a kind of literacy: the ability to understand the trembling of hands that once held them, the pauses between stories, the memories that soften the voice of an elder when they speak of the past.

Kashmir is full of such memories. Every village has an old woman who once sang wanwun the night before her children’s weddings. Every mohalla has an old man who carried his toddler grandchild on his shoulders through apple orchards. These elders still live among us, but as shadows—rarely invited into the fast-paced parenting models that have entered our homes like unannounced guests.

Parenting today is obsessed with perfection: perfect grades, perfect English, perfect school bags, perfect futures. But in this pursuit, we have forgotten the simplest truth: a child who grows up without elders grows up without emotional rivers—rivers that once carried fragments of story, sorrow, truth, and hope.

If one follows that river to Kashmir, one finds a landscape where the presence of elders is not only cultural but sacred. Their absence, therefore, is not merely a social issue—it is a wound. We need to return, gently, deliberately, to that old rhythm where elders were not inconveniences but anchors. Their arthritic hands still know how to cradle the confusion of a child. Their fading eyesight still recognises the contours of innocence better than ours do. Their stories still breathe.

What they need is not much—just a place in the living room, a cup of nun chai shared without hurry, a conversation that drifts from the present into the past, weaving continuity. The well-being of our children depends on these continuities.

Let us restore the rightful place of elders in our homes, our routines, our children’s imaginations. Let them be the caretakers again—keepers of memory, guardians of tenderness, living libraries of experience. And perhaps, when a child finally sits beside an elder again, the old woman Kashmir will smile from her corner, shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, whispering, “At last, you have remembered.”

 Khursheed Dar writes about Kashmiri sufism,

culture and society.