Book Launch | ‘The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature’ by Onaiza Drabu

What is it like to revisit one’s mother tongue and find a way to inhabit it with radical confidence? How does one carry the nuance of lived experience from one language to another?  

This discussion brings together anthropologist Onaiza Drabu, editor of The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature and poet Sohini Basak, for a conversation about how literature, and translation in particular, can be a doorway to access the distinct world of Kashmir. 

Join us for an engaging conversation moderated by poet Sohini Basak. This will be followed by an interactive Q&A with the audience.

Here are the details:

Date: 12th September 2026, Saturday

Time: 6:00 PM (seating begins at 5:45 PM)

Venue: Champaca Bookstore, Vasanth Nagar

RSVP here to register.

About the book: 

This anthology of literature translated from the Kashmiri language is the first of its kind. It is as much an introduction to the literary landscape of Kashmir as a journey through its history. From pre-modern verse to radio plays, folk chants to metaphysical ghazals, flash fiction to excerpts from a novel, The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature is a compilation of memory and an anthology of voices. The reader will encounter scholars, saints, experimental dramatists and unlettered poets starting from the fourteenth century to today.

Kashmir has a thriving oral tradition, a literary culture that borrowed from the East and a print culture that engaged with the West, and it all comes together in this volume with a promise of immersion into the emotional topography of the land, the language and the people.

Meet the editor:

Onaiza Drabu is an anthropologist, writer and translator. Rooted in Kashmir, she tries to make sense of the world around her through language and literature. Her first book, a retelling of Kashmiri folklore, was published in 2019.

About the moderator: 

Sohini Basak’s first book of poems, We Live in the Newness of Small Differences, won the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and was published in 2018. She writes fiction these days and currently serves as the poetry editor for the literary translation magazine, Words Without Borders. 

RSVP to reserve your spot.