In the course of his Kashmir tours, Aurel Stein was impressed by the clear utterances in the speech of villagers which showed far less flawed phonetical features of Kashmiri than were present in the mouth of the residents of Srinagar city. Also his interest in the language aroused from rich store of popular lore which Kashmir preserves in its folk-tales, songs idioms and proverbs. While Stein was devoting his labours to the Rajatarangini, and camped on his favourite mountain site at Mohand Marg on the spur of Haramukh peaks, in 1896, he made use of the opportunity to collect Kashmiri folk-tales and songs from the fount of a professional story teller of the nearby Sindh Valley named Hatim Tilawon. Recitations of Hatim were recorded simultaneously by Stein and Pandit Govind Kaul. His repertoire of stories and songs was large though he was illiterate. His order of words and phrases never varied even when he was called to repeat some of the songs or stories after a long interval According to Stein, “the indication of two or three initial words repeated from written record would be quite sufficient to set the disk moving in this living phonographic machine.”

Hatim 's narratives in Kashmiri as recorded by Stein in Devanagari character