The story of Habba Khatoon, also called ‘Zoon’ (moon), hovers between the mist of legend and the light of history. She is celebrated as the beloved of Yusuf Shah Chak, the last independent ruler of Kashmir, and as the poet-queen whose songs still echo across the Valley’s orchards and lakes.
Even as her songs continue to reverberate in the Valley centuries after she lived, there is no or little record of her in chronicles.
In the Persian histories of sixteenth-century Kashmir—Baharistan-i-Shahi, Haidar Malik Chadura’s Tarikh-i-Kashmir, and Mirza Haidar Dughlat’s Tarikh-i-Rashidi—her name is nowhere to be found. No decree, no royal register, no court chronicle records her presence. The paradox: While to her people she remains unforgettable, to the official historians of her time, she was invisible.
The chroniclers may have omitted her, but the folk singers of Kashmir preserved her in melody, giving her a permanence no royal chronicler could confer. Refused existence in manuscripts, her songs became her biography.
The Silences of History
The absence of Habba Khatoon from Persian sources is striking but not unique. Medieval historiography, bound by the politics of courts and conquest, seldom granted women a place unless they wielded power in their own right.
Baharistan-i-Shahi speaks of Yusuf Shah Chak’s rivalries, the intrigues of the Chak court, and his downfall at the hands of Akbar, but it says nothing of the woman who, in legend, gave his melancholy a voice. Haidar Malik’s Tarikh-i-Kashmir, written under Mughal influence, continues the omission, describing the Chak fall and Mughal annexation in precise detail yet remaining silent about the poet whose verses became the Valley’s lament.
Equally significant is what these chronicles reveal by omission, exposing the limits of official remembrance. They record Yusuf Shah’s sons, Yaqub, Ibrahim, and Haidar, but never name their mothers. No other queen of Yusuf Shah Chak is identified in any surviving chronicle. The only woman associated with his name in Kashmiri memory is Habba Khatoon.
While her chronicles were never written in ink, the Kashmiri tongues sing her songs unceasingly.
Oral traditions, passed down through generations, tell of Zoon, born in Chandhara, a village in Pampore, who was first married to a peasant named Aziz Lone. Her beauty, intelligence, and mellifluous voice soon became the talk of the countryside. One afternoon, as she sang beside a stream, Yusuf Shah Chak, then ruler of Kashmir, wandering incognito among his people, heard her and was entranced.
Some say he arranged her divorce and married her; others that he brought her to his court as his cherished companion. Whether wedded formally or not, she became his muse, the embodiment of his kingdom’s grace.
Born in the mid-sixteenth century, Habba Khatoon’s life coincided with the waning independence of the Chak dynasty. When Akbar’s diplomacy lured Yusuf Shah into captivity and exile in Bihar in 1586 CE, Habba Khatoon’s songs turned elegiac.
Left behind in the Valley, she poured her grief into verse: “Tche ha yus chu yaar myon, tche kyah chu baago wanai?” (“You who are my beloved, why are you gone from the garden?”) Her laments transcended personal sorrow; they became dirges for dispossession itself, love and sovereignty exiled together.
Habba Khatoon’s genius lies in her fusion of simplicity and depth. Her loal baet (love songs) draw upon familiar images - flowers, rivers, clouds - to articulate longing and loss.
In one of her couplets, she even identifies herself as a daughter of the Sayyid lineage:
Males naw chum Sayyid-ul-Kamal,
Maje naw chum Bud-lul-Jamal,
Sayyid kore chus pur kamalo, woth lalo neddray.
(My father’s name is Sayyid-ul-Kamal, my mother’s name is Bud-lul-Jamal; I am a daughter of the Sayyid dynasty—awake, my beloved, and drink the wine from my hands.)
In another, she hints at her beloved residing in Jamalata, Srinagar, expressing both yearning and devotion:
Yar muon choe Jamalatay, tus kem kor Jamal nawo,
Soe cho tatay be kas matay, ake latay ye na ya.
(My beloved dwells in Jamalata; he who has turned all beauty into his name. There he stays, untouched by others — would that he came or sent for me once again!)
(Prof. A. J.Gokhami, Ganai Koi Zat Nahi (Urdu), pp. 32–34).
Through these verses, Habba Khatoon not only narrates the intimate story of love and separation but also inscribes herself into the historical and cultural fabric of Kashmir.
Her claim of Sayyid lineage cannot be lightly dismissed, for the refinement, literary learning, and poetic sophistication evident in her loal verses were social attributes typically nurtured within Sayyid households of the time.
These poems bear witness to her identity not just as a woman of feeling, but as a literary figure whose erudition and artistry would have been possible only in a cultured Sayyid milieu. Her words carry the voice of a woman claiming lineage, love and agency, while simultaneously reflecting the collective sorrow of a land in transition.
After the Mughal conquest, Habba Khatoon’s figure faded from formal record but not from imagination. In the centuries that followed, as Kashmiri and Urdu developed, her story resurfaced, enriched by romance and loss.
European travellers, in their Oriental reveries, called her the “Nightingale of Kashmir.” Later Kashmiri historians, including Hassan Shah, acknowledged that while documentary evidence of her life was scarce, her legend embodied a deeper emotional truth. Zoon’s metamorphosis into Habba Khatoon mirrored Kashmir’s own journey, from pastoral serenity to political grief. In her, poetry became memory, and memory became endurance.
Even in death, Habba Khatoon remains ungraspable. Several places claim her resting place. One tradition locates her grave near Chandhara, her native village. Another points to Bijbehara, where she is said to have spent her final years in solitude. A third legend claims Athawajan as her burial place. A fourth one says she lies beside Yusuf Shah Chak in Biswak, Bihar, the site of his exile and death. Local lore at Biswak identifies one of the graves beside Yusuf’s as hers, yet the Persian chronicles remain silent.
The question of her very existence has surfaced in modern debates, with some scholars questioning whether she was a historical figure or a composite of poetic imagination. Yet, the persistent attribution of the loals to Zoon across centuries, along with the historical consonance of her life with Yusuf Shah Chak’s exile, affirms her reality in both cultural and historical memory.
History’s Unwritten Chapter
Habba Khatoon’s absence from the chronicles challenges the craft of history itself. What is the historian’s duty? To record the acts of rulers or to preserve the soul of a people? The Persian annalists captured the treaties and defeats that ended Yusuf Shah Chak’s reign. The Kashmiri people, through their songs, captured what those events felt like.
This gendered silence is not peculiar to Kashmir. Women’s voices, especially those of poets and singers, were long dismissed as marginal. Yet these voices often outlive dynasties. Habba Khatoon may not figure in Baharistan-i-Shahi, and other contemporary chronicles but she breathes in the collective conscience of her land. Her songs have become its unwritten chronicle, an emotional history carved in melody.
Proof of ‘Memory’?
Can a figure be believed into existence solely through the persistence of song? The answer lies in distinguishing between historical and cultural truth. While historians depend on written testimony, folk traditions carry the truth of feeling. In a society where literacy was confined to the few, the song became the people’s archive.
If Habba Khatoon did not exist, then who composed the poignant loal verses that speak so vividly of separation and exile? Could an anonymous bard have written: “Me chu yaar gayo pardes, wuchhun chhu myani dilbaro,” (“My beloved has gone to a foreign land; how shall I live, my love?”) Had they been composed by another, surely some voice would have contested their attribution. None did.
The unbroken tradition of crediting them to Zoon suggests a living origin, an individual consciousness whose sorrow became song. Memory may forget faces but not voices.
The Afterlife of a Voice
Today, Habba Khatoon’s name adorns a mountain in Gurez. Her verses are taught in schools, sung by artists, and revisited by filmmakers and scholars alike. She has become both poet and metaphor, the woman who voiced a land’s dispossession.
Whether or not she was a crowned queen is inconsequential. What endures is what she represents: the triumph of poetry over power, of feeling over fact. The mountain that bears her name stands solitary yet steadfast, much like the woman herself - a figure of grace amid ruin, of melody amid mourning.
Habba Khatoon’s life defies the categories of history. She may never have worn a crown, but she reigns over the emotional kingdom of her people. Her story reminds us that truth is not always documentary. Sometimes it is experiential, passed down through rhythm and song. While chroniclers preserved the king for perpetuity, Habba Khatoon is immortalised in the hearts and minds of people. It is between the ink and her voice that lies the truest history of Kashmir, with love and loss forever intertwining.
Zoon, the moon of Kashmir, thus remains eternal.
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