Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, Jan 15: The spring named after the celebrated mystic poetess, Habba Khatoon, is in shambles at Chandhara, her native village, in South Kashmir’s Pulwama district and presents a grim picture of neglect by successive regimes.
Owing to its miraculous generation the spring is revered by the locals. “The spring came into existence when a revered saint visited Chandhara and his horse felt thirsty, it scratched the earth with its hooves and water spurted out. He, the saint, later gifted the spring to Habba Khatoon and said that people would remember it by her name,” say the locals.
A resident of the Chandhara said that no one is paying any attention to this spring. “It is in dilapidated condition. People have blocked its outflow and grabbed the land. It’s slowly turning into a cesspool,” he said.
In 2013, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) attempted to restore the spring but locals did not allow it. “With an estimated proposal of more than Rs 1 crore, we had decided to repair and clean the whole spring but locals created hurdles and forced us to stop the work,” said Bilal Ahmad, the Coordinator of the NGO, adding, “they told us to hand over money to them so that they can spend it themselves”.
However, a local resident Abdul Rashid said they won’t allow anyone to fiddle with the spring. “The spring is spiritually very important to us and we don’t want anyone to fiddle with its aesthetics. We want to maintain ourselves and don’t want to change its years old look,” he added.
Castigating the Government for neglecting the spring, a research scholar said: “The successive Governments might boast about reviving the Kashmiri language but their claim fell like pack of cards when one finds the real spring of this literary legend in ruins,” said Shaista, research scholar at Kashmir University.
Head of the Department (HOD) Kashmiri language at Kashmir varsity, Shaad Ramazan said the Habba Khatoon was the greatest poet of Kashmir after Lal Ded and Sheikh-ul-Alam. “She filled the lacunae left in the Kashmiri literature after these two poets. She represented a whole era of Kashmir,” he said, adding, “she was a literary and social rebel who challenged the traditional order of mystic and devotional poetry and is considered as the Kashmir’s only feminist poet.”
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