Kashmiri schools were locked down long before COVID-19 hit. One podcast filled the gap.
“I was in 8th grade when I first saw a computer in my school, and I was fascinated by them,” says Insha Kanue, a computer engineer and tech entrepreneur living in India-administered Kashmir.
She is talking about her career on a podcast called Zanaan Wanaan, a Kashmiri phrase that translates to “the women are speaking.” The podcast was started by a women’s collective by the same name, based in the valley of Kashmir. The nine-episode podcast devotes each episode to Kashmiri women in a particular field of study, like psychology, engineering, media, and liberal arts.
“We envision Zanaan Wanaan to be a platform for young students, and one of the fundamental things that we do is knowledge production,” explains Mariya Mushtaq, one of the founders of the collective.
When the pandemic shut down schools all over the world, Kashmiri students had already spent around seven months out of school. In the last decade, popular uprisings and clashes with the Indian armed forces in the region have led to months-long lockdowns and repeated communication blockades. These have paralysed normal life, affecting education and students.
For the last couple of years, an average Kashmiri student has attended around four months of school a year. Days in school are spent rushing through the curriculum and taking exams without attending classes. Many student cohorts have been mass promoted without any assessment or grading. Students barely get to spend quality time with their teachers and peers, to hone their skills or to explore which subject interests them.
The Zanaan Wanaan collective was formed in 2019 to fill in these crucial academic gaps. The collective supports Kashmiri women who want to pursue academics or opt for higher studies by helping them search for colleges, navigate the admissions processes, and identify scholarships. The podcast became an extension of this mission.
“We wanted to bring speakers based in Kashmir, Indian universities, and foreign countries. That [approach] helped bring out the difference between studying in these three realities and the similarities and differences,” explains Ifshah Zehra, the creative director at the collective.
The speakers featured in the podcast are young professionals who share their professional journeys, cultural experiences, and social pressures that came with pursuing their field of study, how they navigated these issues and followed their dreams and passions. Mushtaq says that they want their audience to be able to relate to the speakers: “When the speakers share their apprehensions or confusion, it gives a semblance of accessibility.”
Zanaan Wanaan launched their podcast in April 2020, a time when the podcast industry in India saw a considerable rise. A report by Spotify noted that 76% of Indian millennials and Gen Z used audio to cope with stress and anxiety, compared to a global proportion of 68%. While Zanaan Wanaan has listeners in 30 countries, 82% of its audience is based in India. In an uncertain environment like Kashmir, podcasts like Zanaan Wanaan have become an important resource.
“Our target audience was young students. We did not care so much about going viral. We want the podcast to be like an archive that people can come back to again and again,” says Zehra.
The podcast has also been an effort by the collective to showcase Kashmiri women’s work, which is often hard to find. “So many Kashmiri women are doing incredible work, but when we think about pioneers, Kashmiri women are not imagined to be the ones, and we wanted to change that,” says Zehra.
The show found its target audience — 72% of its listeners are 18–27 years old— and listeners found the information valuable. “The podcast gave me insight into what can be worked on. It also helped me find work done by Kashmiris, which is often tough to find,” shares Aneeqa Khalid, 24, one of the listeners of the podcast. Khalid is planning to pursue her Master’s degree in psychology.
Episodes are recorded on Zoom, with multiple speakers engaged in one conversation. With that many remote guests who have different schedules and who live in different time zones, coordinating became a challenge. “We wanted to have organic conversation and the speakers to be able to build on what the other person is saying. So we had to compromise with the audio quality a bit,” says Zehra.
“But all of our speakers shared the concern of helping other students, so all of them made themselves available and even offered informal mentorship,” added Mushtaq.
Living in a conflict zone, the makers of the podcast aim to create a vibrant academic society that can contribute to the region’s development. “We might not have the power to make large-scale structural changes all at once, but this seemed to be a good start,” says Mushtaq.
Currently, the podcast has been played around 2,000 times, but Zanaan Wanaan hopes for it to create a bigger impact in the future, as the content remains relevant in archiving Kashmiri women’s journeys into academia.
“As a young researcher myself, it was really helpful for me to understand and diversify my own understanding of how we can work with other disciplines, to create impactful work,” concludes Mushtaq.
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