A pakhwada is a fortnight. That is the first useful thing to know about what opened at K.L. Saigal Hall in Jammu on 14 September — because it means the programme is not over, and there is still time to walk into one.
The J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages inaugurated its Hindi Diwas Pakhwada there with a bill that ran from scholarship to classical vocal to undergraduates reading their own work. Here is what was on it.
The argument of the evening
The academic session belonged to Maharaj Krishan Bharat, who presented a paper titled "Hindi: Paramparik Gyan Se Kritrim Budhimata Tak" — Hindi from traditional knowledge systems to artificial intelligence.
That is a more pointed subject than a Hindi Day programme usually gets. Every student in the hall uses AI tools that were trained overwhelmingly in English and that handle Hindi, and Dogri, considerably worse. What happens to a language when the machine everyone drafts in does not really speak it is not an abstract question for a twenty-year-old in Jammu. It is a question about whether the next generation writes in it at all.
Who was honoured
Four writers were felicitated: Prof. Pran Nath Trisal, Prof. Kiran Bakshi, Naresh Kumar Udas and Dr. Aruna Sharma.
Who read
The poets' session drew Sham Bihari Juneja, Manto Dutta, Rakesh Abrol, Amita Mehta, Heena Mahajan, Yogesh Sharma "Yogi", Sanjeev Bhasin, Sunil Sharma and Manju Sharma.
And then five students, which is the detail worth pulling out of the programme. Ridhima Sharma, Suneha Sharma and Vaani Verma of PSPS Government College for Women, Gandhi Nagar, and Raggni Parihar and Aditi Sharma of GCW Parade, read alongside writers several decades their senior. Government-college undergraduates sharing a state academy's stage with the UT's established Hindi poets is not a small thing, and it is the clearest signal in the whole evening that the door is open.
The rest of the bill
The evening opened with a Saraswati Vandana composed by Ravi Sharma and presented by Mamta, Neelakshi Samiksh and Tahriya. The lamp was lit by chief guest Prof. Raj Kumar, with Prof. Chanchal Dogra as guest of honour, alongside JKAACL Secretary Harvinder Kour, Special Secretary Sonali Arun Gupta and Dr. Chanchal Sharma, the academy's Hindi editor. Dr. Jasmeet Kour sang, accompanied by Neeraj Verma on tabla and Kapil on harmonium. Kusum Tickoo conducted proceedings.
Campuses in the belt marked the day too, with programmes at GDC Katra and GDC Vijaypur.
If you want to go to one
Here is the honest limitation. A pakhwada beginning on 14 September would ordinarily run to around the 28th, but JKAACL has not published the rest of the programme anywhere we could find, and the academy's own website was unreachable while we were checking. So we cannot tell you what is on next week or where.
What we can tell you is that these events are free, that they happen mostly at K.L. Saigal Hall and Abhinav Theatre, and that the academy answers its phone. If reading your own poetry to a room that includes people who have been publishing for forty years sounds like something you would do, it is worth asking what is left on the calendar.
If the language question interests you more than the poetry, we went at it directly in Can Dogri Survive If Young Dogras Stop Speaking It?
Sources: Jammu Links News, 14 September 2026; JK Monitor, 14 September 2026. Both reproduce the academy's own announcement of the event.
