The first Balti song Zahra Banoo from Kargil heard as a child still stayed with her. It eventually shaped her music. Today, the 23-year-old musician is using music and social media to keep both her language and cultural memory alive. She performs at local cultural programmes and shares her songs online. “I see other languages being promoted everywhere,” she says. “I thought we should also promote our language through music because this is a good way to connect with people.” She hopes to make Balti music relevant to younger audiences without losing its essence. Her Balti rendition of Laila Majnu, for instance, has taken her music beyond Kargil. Listeners from Baltistan have also begun responding to her work online. “Many people from Baltistan comment on my songs,” she says. “It feels like we are still connected.”
Spoken across parts of Ladakh and Pakistan-administered Baltistan, Balti’s history is shaped by Partition. The songs tell stories of love, weddings, landscapes, and separation. “The songs are about families who were divided after Partition,” Banoo says. In Kargil, where Balti remains an integral part of the region’s cultural fabric, a small group of young musicians is finding new ways to carry this legacy forward. They are recording traditional songs, which are shared online.
Another musician, Kaleem Hassan Balti, who also lives in the Kargil region, believes technology has expanded the reach of Balti music. The internet has allowed him to connect with Balti speakers across the border. “We cannot go to Baltistan, and they cannot come here. But this music is connecting us,” he says.
Likewise, his peer, Gulzar Hussain finds preservation begins with songs surviving only in memory. He works with older artists to collect traditional lyrics and transform them into recorded compositions. “I started learning Balti folk songs in my childhood,” he says. “Now I collect lyrics from older artists and compose them into albums.” Hussain has also witnessed a positive shift in local attitudes towards the music. “Earlier Balti songs were not sung in traditional weddings,” he says. “Now you can hear them in many cultural events.” While such festivals have provided institutional support, he believes more needs to be done to keep the language alive.
Banoo believes that connection is the point. Like the other musicians working to keep Balti traditions alive, she hopes to take the music to larger platforms, ensuring that a language at risk of fading from everyday life continues to be heard—and sung—by the next generation.
