After 36 years of exile, Kashmiri Pandits return home

There are journeys that are measured in miles, and there are journeys that are measured in memory.

For the Kashmiri Pandit community, the Global Kashmiri Pandit Heritage Tour and Conclave 2026 in Srinagar is both. It is a physical journey back to Kashmir, but it is also a journey across thirty-six years of exile, longing, resilience and quiet preservation. It is a return to the land that shaped our civilizational imagination, nourished our saints and scholars, held our temples and springs, and gave us the language, rituals and rhythms by which we knew ourselves.

We call this gathering Praagaash — The First Light. The name is deliberate. It does not claim that all darkness has ended. It does not pretend that the pain of our cleansing has vanished. We are filled with agony as to why the world turned against us, violently? Why every arm of our world failed to save us? Why after thirty-six years our world remains a chimera? Pragaash does not relinquish any historical rights. It says something more modest, and perhaps more powerful: that after a long night of separation, a first light has to become visible.

For many elders, this tour will reopen the map of memory. A temple visited in childhood. A school once walked to in winter. A shrine where a mother prayed. A spring whose water was once considered sacred. A much-delayed shraad for a departed ancestor. A street whose name still lives in family conversation. For the younger generation, many of whom were born outside Kashmir, this will be the first time that inherited memory becomes visible historiography. They have heard Kashmir in stories; now they will walk it. 

Even more, they will experience it and understand what the touch of Shakti, energy, can mean. They will recommit that the community will never, never abandon the abodes of its gods and goddesses. They will visit the camps where the minuscule Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley live and connect with the message that you are not forgotten, you are not alone. That you will be made the litmus test of Kashmiri Pandit integration and rehabilitation. There will be joy, but there will also be sorrow. What was saved and what was lost will surface vividly, bringing some trauma but also some healing. 

This is why the tour and conclave cannot be understood merely as an event. It is an act of cultural reconnection, a civilizational sambandh. The Kashmiri Pandit community was not only displaced from houses. Its umbilical cord with a civilizational ecology: sacred sites, festivals, language, foodways, neighbourhoods, schools, manuscripts, oral traditions and the living presence of ancestral land was severed. For thirty-six years, those who left carried Kashmir with them — in prayer rooms, kitchens, stories, names, family albums, songs, almanacs and rituals. The return now gives memory a landscape again. Kashmir is not merely a Kshetra for the Pandits; it is a mandala.

The conclave’s theme, “From Exile to Excellence: Kashmiri Pandit Journey of Resilience, Renaissance and Return,” captures an extraordinary arc. Exile did not extinguish the community. In cities across India and across the world, Kashmiri Pandits rebuilt lives with dignity. They became teachers, scientists, civil servants, doctors, entrepreneurs, writers, artists, scholars and community workers. They preserved identity under conditions of dispersal. They taught children rituals in apartments far from the Valley. They kept alive festivals in unfamiliar climates. They remembered their deities even when separated from their shrines.

Yet excellence without rootedness is incomplete. A community cannot live forever only through nostalgia. It must give its children a living relationship with the land from which it came. That is the purpose of this tour. It is not an exercise in bitterness. It is not a return to accusation. It is a return to continuity, to the highest cause which is beyond time, sanatan, which exceeds the duty to self.

Kashmir has always been more than scenery. It has been a seat of learning, spiritual inquiry, Sanskritic scholarship, Shaiva philosophy, poetry, aesthetics, temples, sacred geography and cultural refinement. The Kashmiri Pandit contribution to this inheritance is not marginal; it is foundational. Restoring awareness of this heritage does not exclude anyone. It is to complete the story of Kashmir.

The conclave in Srinagar will bring together community organizations, scholars, entrepreneurs, artists, civil society voices, political representatives and public leaders. Its purpose is reflection, and also renewal. It asks: How can memory become institution? How can heritage become education? How can return become engagement? How can the community’s global achievements contribute to Kashmir’s future? There are many histories but there is only one future and it is here where all right-minded Kashmiris should join hands to redress, to restitute, to restore, to return but ultimately to renew and re-ignite. And that future should flow out of the fullness and power and glory of the Constitution of India.

At the heart of Praagaash is a simple human truth: every community needs a place where its children can stand and say, “This is where we come from.” For Kashmiri Pandits, that place is Kashmir. For thirty-six years, that sentence has often been spoken with ache. It is now being spoken with trembling hope.

The first light is not the full sunrise. But dawn light is enough to begin walking. A collective journey led by resolve and imagination.

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