Kond=Narcissist.
For many Kashmiri parents of millennials, the 2003 Hindi film Baghban, directed by B. R. Chopra, became a moral weapon.
Its message of children owing unquestioned obedience to parents was often wielded less as a reflection than as a discipline.
Wrapped in sentiment and a swelling soundtrack, the film normalised emotional manipulation as parental love.
Like many of my generation, I once accepted that framing. Few of us grow up without wanting to be seen as the “good son” or the “good daughter.”
But Baghban did not introduce a foreign value system into Kashmiri society. It merely amplified something already familiar: a culture of hierarchy is mistaken for virtue, obedience for morality, and emotional manipulation for care.
Kashmir is a society shaped by prolonged political violence. As with many traumatised societies, it clings to tradition as ballast.
Here, the philosopher Frantz Fanon observed that, “when the oppressed cannot end their oppression, they internalise it and reproduce it upon those closest to them.”
Along with several other structures of violence, that reproduction is also visible and carefully hidden within families.
Kashmiri mental health professionals and counsellors have pointed to recurring patterns of narcissism amongst parents, particularly in homes of newly married couples, excessive parental control, emotional manipulation, surveillance, humiliation and the systematic erasure of autonomy.
These behaviours are rarely recognised as abuse because they are framed as normal. “Yi tchu saarni jaai,” people say this happens everywhere as though ubiquity were absolution.
Clinical psychology has long established that narcissistic family systems operate by disguising control as concern, cruelty as duty, and domination as tradition.
Such systems do not require overt violence as they thrive on gaslighting, moral blackmail and the strategic withdrawal of affection.
Over time, these dynamics become invisible even to those who suffer under them.
Kashmiri oral culture has documented this long before.
The 14th-century mystic Lal Ded writes of the cruelty inflicted by her narcissistic in-laws In a verse attributed to her:
دُرِ مے ہاوُن گُل
رَتھ وُہ دن میون عذاب
پَرٕ مے وُچھ دوست اندرٕ
They spat on me and called it flowers.
Night and day were my torment,
Yet I found the Friend within.
A century later, the poet Habba Khatoon gives voice to the same suffocation, in a verse attributed to her:
مَلیُونو ہۆ
مے گَژھ نہٕ بولن ہۆ
سَس نِنٛدَر ژھانٛڈن
I was subdued, oh.
I could not speak, oh.
My mother-in-law kept watch.
These verses seem relevant because the conditions they describe still exist. Many Kashmiri women would today recognise themselves in these centuries-old laments.
The moral tragedy is that this violence is rarely framed as violence. Verbal degradation is treated as a right of the elders.
Surveillance is called protection. Silencing is called discipline.
Eventually, many women arrive at a strange truth, strangers in the homes they were born into, strangers in the homes they married into, with only God imagined as an impartial arbiter of eventual justice.
Islamic ethics, ironically, offer a direct critique of this culture.
The theologian Al-Ghazali described ʿujb (self-admiration) and kibr (arrogance) as spiritual diseases that make people incapable of recognising their own injustice.
When moral authority becomes fused with ego, Ghazali warned, oppression is rationalised as righteousness and cruelty becomes invisible to the perpetrator.
This is precisely how narcissistic family systems survive.
Kashmiri men are often inducted into these systems gradually.
At first, they are passive enablers. Over time, silence becomes approval. Approval becomes participation.
Eventually, abuse is inherited as an obligation.
A husband who resists this inheritance and sides with his spouse against familial cruelty is mocked as weak, “syos,” insufficiently masculine.
A society that loudly campaigns for justice suddenly finds agreement with the degradation of those who seek an end to injustice.
One nikah-khwan once recounted to me how he suggested, during a wedding sermon, that newly married couples be given separate space to build their relationship.
He was publicly rebuked for being “uncultural.” In some ceremonies and YouTube videos, misogyny is openly sanctified, with Qur’anic verses stripped of context and repurposed as weapons.
It is the perfect bullet, abuse framed as divine command.
None of this is universal. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.
But given the widely reported rise in domestic violence in Kashmir, anecdotes provide context.
The question, then, is not whether tradition matters. It is whether the tradition that reproduces harm deserves protection.
Inter-generational abuse does not end organically. Someone must pluck out the narcissistic kond.
Otherwise, we condemn our children to a future where 14th- and 15th-century cries of suffering still feel modern.
