Ashaq Hussain Parray

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA, documents, analyses, and translates the Kashmiri Marsi tradition by combining audio-visual recordings of live performance with translations and critical reflection. Over 18 months, the researcher will record public Marsi performances, produce an audio-visual archive with English subtitles, translate the Marsi verses into English, and write a reflective essay that situates Marsi in Kashmir’s literary and performative histories. The work aims to make this largely undocumented performative tradition visible to wider audiences while preserving its sonic and embodied registers. Ashaq Hussain Parray is the Coordinator for this project

Ashaq Hussain Parray holds a PhD in South Asian poetry in translation from Aligarh Muslim University. He is a translator, Marsi performer, and researcher based in Kashmir and teaches as an Assistant Professor of English in the Higher Education Department of Jammu and Kashmir. His translations have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Asymptote and Ezra, and a translation collection is due from Afterword India in 2026. Given his combined roles as a translator, practitioner, and scholar, he is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Kashmiri Marsi is a Shi‘i elegiac performance tradition that has been transmitted orally for centuries but remains largely absent from mainstream literary histories and academic syllabuses. The project situates Marsi as a living practice that shapes identity and community in Kashmir, not only as literature but as an embodied ritual led by a Zakir and enacted collectively in Majlis. By focusing on the period 1836–1940 and on contemporary practice, the research traces the genre’s public performance history, its ritual grammar of wazan (rhythm and tone), and the social role Marsi plays in producing collective grief, language maintenance, and spiritual life. The coordinator’s position as a village-level Zakir and Kashmiri Shi‘i practitioner is central to the project. He acknowledges the challenges of insider research and adopts a reflexive stance to ensure both critical distance and deep, embodied insight.

The research uses a multimodal, practice-sensitive methodology. Core methods include participant observation and autoethnographic reflection on the coordinator’s own practice as Zakir; audio-visual documentation of five full Marsi performances with professional recording and English subtitles; close literary and performance analysis of a larger corpus; and translation of thirty representative Marsi into English. Fieldwork will take place in relevant Kashmiri villages and Majlis spaces, and archival work will focus on locating and recording vernacular texts and performance sites. The project will combine camera-based visual ethnography with interviews, photographic documentation, and detailed notes on kinesics, vocalics, chronemics, and the coordinated gestures of Zakir and participants. Translation work will foreground performative features so that the English versions preserve rhythmic, tonal, and affective cues as far as possible.

The outcome of this project includes a public audio-visual archive of five professional recordings of Marsi performances with English subtitles; an anthology of thirty Marsi poems in English translation; and a long, illustrated personal essay reflecting on Marsi as memory, performance, and language, accompanied by audio-visual documentation. In addition, a small community launch and dissemination plan for the anthology and recordings is planned. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will be an audio-visual subtitled archive of five Marsi performances in Kashmiri, an essay reflecting on Marsi as memory and performance, and an anthology of 30 Marsi in English translation. 

This project strongly aligns with the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme by focusing on a marginalised performance tradition through a unique blend of scholarship, performance, and translation. As one of the first translation-led proposals supported under the rearticulated programme, it stands out for the way the researcher draws on his experience as a performer, poet, and translator to offer a deeply grounded, multilayered approach. The project not only documents and interprets a rich cultural form, but also promises to create lasting, accessible resources that honour both literary and lived knowledge.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

The Project is part-supported by BNP Paribas India.