Among the great voices of Kashmiri spiritual literature, Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, revered as Sheikh ul Alam, the patron saint of Kashmir, stands apart not only as a mystic of the highest order but as a poet of remarkable reach.
His poetic compositions, known as Shrukhs, have lived for centuries on the tongues of ordinary people. Recited in kitchens, on mountain paths, in fields and marketplaces, his verses remain among the most quoted in the Kashmiri oral tradition.
But Sheikh ul Alam’s poetry is more than spiritual counsel. Read carefully, it is also a linguistic time capsule.
Sheikh ul Alam’s shrukhs, alongside the vakhs of Lal Ded, preserve a layer of Kashmiri vocabulary that has largely faded from everyday speech. Words expressing ideas as fundamental as unity, wisdom, love, and God appear here in their native forms—terms that most speakers today would scarcely recognise without guidance.
Take the word kunair, meaning unity or wahdat. Where modern Kashmiri reaches for the Persian-derived wahdat, Sheikh ul Alam wrote in his own tongue: “Kunair haa bozakh kuni no rozakh” — if you truly understand unity, you will not even find your separate self.
The same is true of trukhu (or truk), meaning wise or intelligent. The word appears in Lal Ded’s poetry as well — “Truk hay chuk panun paan praznaav” (if you are wise, recognise your own self) — and Sheikh ul Alam echoes it: “Truk hay chukk te panay tsēn” (if you are wise, then know yourself).
Both poets used the same native word “truk,” showing it was once common, though today it has almost disappeared from speech.
Khoi, the Kashmiri word for love, survives in Sheikh’s lines on the devotion between the bumblebee and the flower.
“Ashaq chu nisaar tehezi wate,
Yeti bomburus te poshas aasi khoi”
(The lover sacrifices himself on those pathes;
Where the bumblebee and the flowers are filled with love).
Zagg, a native form of the word for world (closely related to jagg), appears in his warnings against worldly attachment.
Sheikh ul Alam says: “Zagg tich ladan serizine zaneh” (Never become too attached to the world.)
There is another word, “Dai,” the Kashmiri name for God. Sheikh says, “Dai mo dev mokh aasi” meaning the Divine is not confined to any image or idol.
In one place, Lal Ded says: Aa’mi pane soud’ras naa’vi chaes la’maan. Kati bo’zei dai myon mae’ti divi taar: (I’m towing my boat pulling at the frail untwisted thread in the ocean of existence, will my God hear me—and carry me across?).
What makes Sheikh ul Alam’s vocabulary particularly striking is not only its philosophical range but also its precision about the material world.
He was a Saint who moved through the landscape of Kashmir with open eyes, and his Shrukhs are filled with the specific names of things.
Hunder, a word for glacier, appears in a verse that compares a heedless person to ice that has built up in this world, only to melt away in the fire of the hereafter.
Wuddur, the otter, surfaces in a verse about ritual purity. Palna was not just any saddle but specifically the kind used for carrying loads. Wand-fall referred to winter fodder prepared for cattle.
In his poetry, we find references to lash, meaning fatwood — the resinous, fire-ready core of a pine used as fuel in winter.
There is heneir, a drain, butul for earth, ann for food, wan for forest, diyar for money: these are not exotic terms but ordinary ones, and their disappearance is precisely the point.
Vegne lar— used by Sheikh ul Alam for tall or towering structures — is a phrase that might today serve as the nearest native equivalent to what we now call a skyscraper.
Sheikh ul Alam drew freely on the animal world to make his ethical arguments, and in doing so he preserved the Kashmiri names for creatures alongside his teachings.
The kāv (crow), Wāndur (Langur), shōga (parrot), ponz (monkey), wŏdor (otter), rūs (Musk deer), Mogal (owl) — these appear not as ornaments but as mirrors held up to human behaviour.
A false ascetic is compared to a snake and scorpion: “kapat reshi, saraf te biche” — the hypocritical saints are like the serpents and the scorpions.
The honeybee, in one of his most affecting images, gathers honey its whole life only to find that the effort resolves into zhari gath — an empty circle, a futile cycle.
The phrase has no precise modern equivalent; the image it carries is complete in itself.
“Somreith macha thawan tulrei, patto gaxhan zhari gath”—A honeybee gathers honey all its life. In the end, it all turns into an empty cycle
Words like yavan-yaar (one’s own youth), kand (body), shōʦh (pure), wandfal (winter fodder) etc point toward a lexical world that formal dictionaries have largely not captured — because much of it was never written down except in verse.
For linguists, the shrukhs of Sheikh ul Alam and the vakhs of Lal Ded are not just spiritual texts but a rare linguistic archive.
They preserve the spoken Kashmiri of their time, kept alive through memory and recitation rather than writing.
Each forgotten word in these verses opens a glimpse into an older Kashmir, revealing its landscape, seasons, creatures, objects, and ways of thinking.
The work of reading these verses as linguistic evidence, rather than only as spiritual guidance, has barely begun.
