Project Aalov | 2025 - 2026
Poetry of Kashmiri Women
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The project, Aalov: Poetry of Kashmiri women, aimed to collect, document, and share the writings of aspiring Kashmiri women poets whose work delves into spoken and unspoken truths of Kashmiri womanhood and resistance. Through Aalov, we turned Maaje Zevwe into a creative, compassionate home for Kashmiri women’s poetry that embodies resistance, solidarity, and freedom in different ways. We strived to inhabit writings that disrupt, destabilise, and flip the world of stereotypes, fantasies, and gazes on its head.
Aalov’s journey began with these themes—
girlhood/womanhood/love and pleasure/bodies and fluids/gazes and touches/wires and veins/convoys and cages/whispers and hushes/cries and screams/starvation and gluttony/spring and our mothers' gardens/Chilai kalaan and warmth of a kaangir/love affair with our local kandur/on dear politics/thieves, goons, and their praised names/boring lectures on faith/sexist vomits and raging males/sex police and our porn addict, drug addict veins/predators and our chest thumping, praying hands/listening to our Faiz obsessed friends/days and nights of imagining otherwise...
—inspiring poems that our current issue holds.
Project Yaarbal | 2023 - 2024
Letters from Kashmir
The project, Yaarbal: Letters from Kashmir, aimed at gathering diverse and dissenting voices of Kashmiri women in the form of letters—addressed to a friend, a parent, a lover, a ghost, a place, or to no one in particular.
By using letter writing as an anchor, we aimed to go beyond the nuances of ‘research’, where it is challenging for women to talk and write about their experiences, thereby making them feel seen and heard through these letters.
In these letters, we wanted Kashmiri women to be themselves by candidly sharing their emotions and experiences to revive the spirit and power of Yaarbal. The final seventeen pieces attempt to add a unique dimension to the existing discourse in Kashmir by fueling the informal documentation of Kashmiri women’s lived realities and memories.
Project Yaarbal was funded by Maypole Fund.
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