Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee
“I want one to hold my heart / To feel the beat, / To touch my pain…” Sunita Raina Pandit writes in her Light and Shade (2013) — translated by Prof. Arvind Gigoo. The literary landscape of Kashmir, already steeped in mysticism, natural beauty, and lyrical voices, has in recent years witnessed a new flowering through the poetic offerings of Sunita Raina Pandit. A poet of sensibility and deep-rooted cultural memory, she has redefined how contemporary Kashmiri voices can merge the haunting legacy of their land with the nuanced cadence of the ghazal. For Sunita, poetry is not merely an artistic indulgence—it is her lived experience, her prayer, her lament, and her celebration. When she writes, her poems breathe as ghazals, echoing the traditional Persian and Urdu forms but retaining an individuality rooted in Kashmiri soil. Sunita Raina Pandit who is ten years younger than me and was born in 1967, in the Anantnag district in the Kashmir Valley . Currently, she resides in Ghaziabad . Her husband Ashok Pandit, is noted to be a wildlife photographer.She belongs to the family of Prof. Rehman Rahi, a renowned Kashmiri poet and recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award . She is primarily described as a “dedicated housewife” who balances familial life with a flourishing poetic career.
To understand her creative world, one must first understand the ethos of the ghazal. To place Sunita Raina Pandit in context, one must acknowledge the long tradition of Kashmiri women poets—from Lal Ded’s mystic vakhs to Habba Khatoon’s lyrical laments. While Lal Ded spoke of union with the divine and Habba Khatoon sang of separation and personal grief, Sunita speaks of communal memory and the exile’s soul. She carries forward the feminine poetic voice of Kashmir but situates it within the modern diasporic reality. In Light and Shade she writes , “I am the desire and the preserver of the otherness of the heart.”This traverse yearning for emotional intimacy, alienation from urban landscapes, and the act of poetic safeguarding of inner identity .
Sunita Raina Pandit who belongs to a generation of Kashmiri Pandits Sunita began writing at the tender age of 14. She started with devotional bhajans (“Leela”) and gradually ventured into ghazals, vakhs, and other poetic forms in both Hindi and Kashmiri .
She inherited not only the aesthetic grandeur of Kashmir but also its tragic displacement. Poetry for her becomes a bridge between memory and identity, between the paradise lost and the home eternally remembered. Like Lal Ded and Habba Khatoon before her, she does not write to decorate but to illuminate. Her verses are not abstract constructions; they carry the warmth of watan (homeland), the grief of dispossession, and the resilience of cultural survival. The form of Ghazal, born in Arabia, refined in Persia, and naturalized in the Indian subcontinent, carries within it a rhythm of longing, of unfulfilled desire, of divine yearning. For centuries, poets like Mir, Ghalib, Faiz, and more recently, Parveen Shakir, have enriched its tradition. Yet, in Sunita’s hands, the ghazal acquires a distinctly Kashmiri timbre. Her words float like shikara boats over Dal Lake, resonating with the pain of exile, the beauty of chinars, the silence of snow, and the fragrance of saffron fields.Her ghazals often begin with a soft invocation of Kashmir’s landscape: the glittering snow on Gulmarg, the shimmering waters of Nigeen Lake, or the saffron blooms of Pampore. Yet the beauty never remains untouched by sorrow. The idyllic imagery is shadowed by memories of violence, migration, and longing. This duality—the tension between beauty and pain—gives her poetry its striking emotional depth.When Sunita writes, the ghazal is not just a formal structure of radif and qafia, but an emotional reservoir. Each sher (couplet) in her ghazal can stand alone as a complete thought, but together they weave a tapestry of remembrance and desire. She often chooses refrains that carry both tenderness and ache—words like watan, pyaar, aas, yaad—which bind her couplets into a rhythm of yearning.In her poetry, love is rarely only romantic; it is love for one’s land, for one’s people, for one’s lost home. Her ghazals are a record of nostalgia, a collective diary of Kashmiri Pandits who were uprooted but continue to dream of return. In this sense, Sunita Raina Pandit extends the scope of the ghazal beyond the personal, making it a vehicle for cultural memory and communal resilience.
One of the remarkable features of Sunita’s work is her articulation of feminine subjectivity within the ghazal tradition. Historically, the ghazal has often been dominated by male voices, with women appearing as symbols or beloved figures rather than as authors of their own longing. Sunita reverses this gaze. In her ghazals, the Kashmiri woman speaks for herself—sometimes as a lover, sometimes as a mother, sometimes as an exile.Through her, we hear the suppressed voices of countless Kashmiri women who bore the silent weight of migration, who carried the fading photographs of ancestral homes, who whispered lullabies of belonging to children born far from their valley. Her poetry thus becomes both personal and political, lyrical and testimonial.
Sunita Raina Pandit writes primarily in Hindi and Urdu, but her idiom carries the fragrance of Kashmiri speech. Certain words and images—chinar, kangri, nishat, shikara—enter her ghazals naturally, making them unique. Unlike many modern poets who experiment with free verse, she remains loyal to rhythm and meter. Her ghazals sing; they are meant to be recited, heard, and felt. This is where she demonstrates her mastery: she knows that a ghazal is not just to be read but to be performed in the heart.Much of her poetic imagination revolves around displacement. The pain of losing home, of living as a migrant, and of carrying memories like heirlooms—these emerge again and again in her ghazals.Chinar leaves, saffron fields, and Dal Lake serve as metaphors for both joy and anguish. Nature becomes both witness and companion to human suffering. In The Call of Silence (released book in Kashmiri) direct translated excerpts are not available, literary commentary gives context: Sunita Raina Pandit describes this collection as “a mirror of experiences of Kashmiri Pandit community with an essence of realistic touch.” She addresses social issues through the ghazal form, presenting collective trauma and cultural survival with lyrical realism .Her love poems are deeply spiritual, blending earthly affection with divine yearning. The beloved in her ghazals is sometimes a person, sometimes the homeland, and sometimes God.
Despite exile, her poetry insists on continuity—of festivals, language, rituals, and memories. She writes as a cultural custodian, ensuring that the story of her people remains alive. In her Chinar Ke Aansoon (1988) in Hindi, she writes,
“Ah my childhood! You remained hidden like a blaze within,
And once you met the wind, away you slipped from me.
He gave me tongue and also these breaths,
Now every day, I remain scared under this heavy debt.”
This couplet resonates with lost innocence and existential longing.
Sunita Raina Pandit’s poetry assures us that Kashmiri voices will not be silenced by political turbulence or displacement. In her ghazals, the Valley continues to breathe, sing, and dream. For young Kashmiri readers, she offers a model of resilience: one can lose a home but not the song of one’s heart. For global readers, she represents the universality of longing and belonging.Her poetry reminds us that literature is not bound by geography. Even far away from Srinagar, her verses recreate the fragrance of almond blossoms, the sparkle of snow, and the echo of Kashmiri folk songs. Through her ghazals, Kashmir travels with her wherever she goes.
Sunita Raina Pandit is more than a poet; she is a bridge between past and present, between homeland and exile, between memory and hope. “I have preserved hope and wished myself well. That is why fragrance always hovers around me…” she writes in her A Walk Through the Mist (2016) — translated by Prof. R. N. Kaul. She received the Keshav Samvad Samman from Vishv Samvad Kendra, Meerut, for her contributions to Kashmiri literature. Other organizations like Nagrad Sangam, Jammu & Kashmir Vichar Manch, KECSS Delhi, and AIKS have also felicitated her .She proves that the ghazal, far from being a relic of Persian and Urdu tradition, remains a living, breathing form capable of carrying the most intimate and collective of human experiences.Indeed, when poem is a ghazal, it becomes eternal—and in the voice of Sunita Raina Pandit, Kashmir speaks again.
The writer of this article is International Tagore Awardee multilingual poet Dr.Ratan Bhattacharjee , a former Affiliate Faculty of English in Virginia Commonwealth University .Email profratanbhattacharjee@gmail.com
