The apocalyptic is at the core of the vernacular vision of Islam disclosed in the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi. There is nothing unusual about this as the apocalyptic genre is fundamental to all Abrahamic religions. Even more significantly, it is Nund Rishi's shruks on the apocalyptic that endure the most in Kashmiri cultural memory and have passed on into the Kashmiri language as proverb and prophecy. The apocalyptic mode in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry, it is useful to recall, emerges at a distinct historical moment in medieval Kashmir: a time of transitions from the rule of independent Hindu kings to the establishment of a Muslim sultanate and the beginning of religious conversions to Islam in the region. A close reading of the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic material reveals a translated, and vernacular, apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry that mediates relations between pre-Islamic and Islamic eschatology.

A traditional Muslim apocalyptic is deployed by Nund Rishi and hurled against the political structure of his time (the new Muslim sultanate ruled by the Shahmīrī dynasty). But the elements of a traditional Muslim apocalyptic are also displaced on to metaphors of a sudden inner transformation. The catastrophe of end times intimates hope of a new life. There is a tension in the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic between a traditional Muslim apocalypse and a Sufi apocalypse. This is true of much Islamic mystical poetry, but what is unique in Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is that the coming hour of reckoning (the Islamic qiyāmah, or qayāmat in Urdu and Kashmiri) is seen not as the end of history (individual or eschatological) but as the end to an unjust political order in history. Even though the currency of Nund Rishi's apocalyptic shruks in popular memory owes much to enduring cycles of violence in Kashmir's recent history, Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is best approached as the translation of classic Islamic eschatology (traditional Muslim apocalyptic) into the Kashmiri vernacular. The preponderance of the theme of the apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry is also conspicuous because other key Islamic eschatological themes such as the Prophet's mystical ascension to heaven, mi’rāj, do not appear so significantly in the Nund Rishi corpus.