editorial

The musicians who kept it alive

In Kangan, in central Kashmir, 53-year-old singer Yousuf Naseem has spent three decades preserving Shina through music.

Sitting on his veranda, he plays a six-stringed rabab. His songs carry memories of migration, loss and the home he left behind.

Born in Dangithal, near the Line of Control in Gurez Valley, Naseem remembers long winters, family storytelling and songs passed along by older relatives.

“The elders in our house were our library,” he says. “Whatever they hummed, we sang.”

During the 1999 Kargil conflict, his family was among those forced to leave Gurez. They resettled in Kangan.

“We lost everything,” he says. “But the songs travelled with us.”

Naseem began taking Shina music to new listeners in Srinagar. In Bohri Kadal, a historic market in the old city where many Dard families work as wazas, or chefs, he gave a shopkeeper a copy of his first cassette, Dardistan, and asked him to play it every morning.

His voice began travelling through the market.

“People would ask what language it was,” Naseem says. “It was Shina. For many, it was the first time they had heard it.”

While Naseem carried Shina music beyond Gurez, Fareed Ahmed Kaloo worked to preserve it within the valley.

At the Shina Cultural Centre near Dawar, young musicians gather as Kaloo, 67, adjusts his harmonium and begins to sing. He wears a traditional shoka and white pakol cap.

“Gilgit, Kargil, Gurez, Drass – our pride, our own,
This is our Golden Garden: Dardistan, our home.”

Kaloo leads the Habba Khatoon Dramatic Club, a cultural group founded in 1976 to preserve Shina folklore in Gurez.

“After Partition, our culture faded,” he says. “Kashmiri music dominated, and our Dardic roots went silent.”

For years, he travelled between villages on foot, carrying a harmonium and a tumbak naari, a clay percussion instrument. He performed at weddings, fairs and local gatherings, accepting food, a place to sleep or a small honorarium as payment.

“We didn’t do it for money,” he says. “We did it because someone had to, and no one else would.”

Some of the club’s earliest members have died. Others left amid cross-border shelling and never returned. Kaloo stayed, teaching folk songs to younger generations.

He now listens to new tracks on his phone and admires how musicians in Gilgit have developed their sound while retaining elements of traditional Shina music.

“They’ve gone far ahead of us,” he says with a smile. “As they should. Our songs must evolve, but never lose their roots.”

Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British actor who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek” and Professor Charles Xavier in the “X-Men” films, has died. He was 86.

Stewart died on Wednesday in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said in a statement on Thursday.

Although best known for his film and television roles, Stewart spent much of his career onstage, performing Shakespeare and other classics.

His career included performances as Claudius and Macbeth, a one-man adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”, and West End and Broadway productions of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” alongside longtime friend Ian McKellen.

Stewart earned some of the best reviews of his career for his 2007 portrayal of Macbeth, including his only Tony Award nomination. The Times of London described his Macbeth performance as “an enthralling creation of frailty, appetite, egotism and grim humour”.

“Nearly 50 years I’ve waited,” Stewart told the Associated Press news agency in 2008. “I learned it when I was 14. I memorized all the soliloquies just because I thought they were great. And they stuck, so I didn’t have to learn those bits of the play, which is a blessing, because learning lines has now become the one curse of this job.”

From working-class Yorkshire to Shakespeare

Raised in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, a working-class corner of northern England, the future 24th-century commander of a starship grew up without a bathroom in his house.

He joined an amateur drama group at 12 and, as a teenager, memorised Shakespeare for fun. A scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School helped launch his acting career.

Stewart, who developed alopecia at a young age, had been bald since he was 19.

His childhood was also marked by domestic violence. His father, a former regimental sergeant major in the British Army, was prone to outbursts of “repeated violence against my mother,” as Stewart wrote in a newspaper piece. “Violence is always a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.”

Stewart later became a patron of Refuge, a charity supporting survivors of domestic abuse.

From Shakespeare to Captain Picard

Stewart spent 14 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing everyone from Mark Antony and Henry IV to Shylock and Oberon.

“People who were not in the company would say to me, ‘Give it a break. Why don’t you go somewhere else?’ And I would say, ‘To do what?’” he told the AP. “Telly?”

He eventually left and appeared in the 1981 film “Excalibur”. In 1987, shortly after performing in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, he was offered a role in a science fiction series.

“I found myself in Hollywood shooting a syndicated science fiction series, which I was assured would fail,” he said.

But “Star Trek: The Next Generation” ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes. Stewart became known worldwide as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whose command, “Make it so”, became one of the show’s best-known lines.

Stewart also played Professor Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, beginning with the 2000 film “X-Men”. He returned to the role in several sequels, including 2017’s “Logan”, alongside Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Stewart died just days after Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original “Star Trek” series, which aired from 1966 to 1969.

Queen Elizabeth II knighted Stewart in June 2010. He also served as an ambassador for the International Rescue Committee.