Krishen Smailpuri was six years old when he lost his mother, and it was his maternal uncle, Pt Agya Ram, a superintendent in the Dogra durbar's protocol office, who took him in at Smailpur, a village some 16 kilometres from Jammu city. Born to Pt Sunder Dass, a deeply religious man of modest means, the boy left school after middle standard, chasing drama, music and singing instead of a certificate. Out of that unglamorous start came a body of roughly 200 Dogri lyrics that, decades later, would win India's Sahitya Akademi Award and carry the ghazal — a form built for Persian and Urdu — into Dogri for the first time.
September 8 this year marks 126 years since Smailpuri was born in 1900; he died on January 27, 1981, and literary and social organisations across Jammu still mark the date every year. Daily Excelsior first brought this year's remembrance to notice, in a piece by O P Sharma tracing his life and work — the starting point for what follows, filled out here with a closer look at his radio years, his place among Dogri's early Sahitya Akademi honourees, and how the tradition he helped start is still visibly alive in Jammu.
Money forced Smailpuri out of the state for a time — he took work with a private concern before coming home to a job that suited him better, as a preacher with the Dharamarth Trust, the trust that has administered Jammu's major temples since Dogra rule. His first book, Vaishno Katha, had its first copy laid at the holy Durbar of Vaishno Devi. He also wrote in Urdu — Firdouse Wattan is among his published work — and in 1927 tried running his own Urdu weekly, Jannat, out of Sialkot; it folded within the year for lack of funds. His reading in Urdu ran deep: Daag, Mirza Ghalib, Amir Minai and Josh Malihabadi all shaped how he thought a line of verse should move, and he spent a career arguing, through his own Dogri ghazals, that his mother tongue could carry that same weight and precision.
After Radio Kashmir Jammu began broadcasting in December 1947 — its first address delivered by Maharaja Hari Singh — Smailpuri joined the new station as a copyist, years before it moved into the haveli at Panjtirthi that still houses All India Radio Jammu today. It put him inside the institution that would carry Dogri song to a mass audience for the first time, and it was there that his best-known composition, Palla Sipahiya Dogre Aa, found the audience that made it his signature: sung by Lata Mangeshkar, and adopted almost as an anthem by the security forces who heard in it a plain-spoken pride in the Dogra homeland. One of his lines, as rendered in translation, captures the same instinct — “Oh companion, don't talk about any paradise; you just sing praises about our own motherland.”
Smailpuri's poems found their way into Jaggo Duggar, the first-ever anthology of Dogri poetry, published in 1949 by the newly formed Dogri Sanstha — the organisation, founded in 1944, that has spent eight decades building Jammu's Dogri literary infrastructure, right down to the Dogri Bhawan on Karan Nagar that now hosts the readings and seminars later writers built on. The J&K State Academy of Art, Culture and Languages recognised his work in 1963-64. The larger honour came in 1975, when the Sahitya Akademi named his collection Mere Dogri Geet a winner — just six years after the Akademi had recognised Dogri as a major Indian language at all, in 1969. That places Smailpuri among the first generation of writers the Akademi ever honoured in Dogri, a list that would go on to include Narendra Khajuria, its first-ever Dogri awardee for short fiction, novelist Srivats Vikal and the poet Padma Sachdev, later called Dogri's poet laureate.
He wore his identity as plainly as he wrote it, in a Dogri churidar-pyjama and kurta by most accounts, until his death in 1981. The September 8 remembrances — this year marking his 126th birth anniversary and the 45th year since his passing — are less nostalgia than upkeep on a tradition still visibly active in Jammu today: the mushairas held most winters at Abhinav Theatre, or the national seminar on Dogri drama the Sahitya Akademi and JKAACL ran at the Writers Club just last month, both draw on ground that Smailpuri and his contemporaries were among the first to clear. A pioneer only matters if someone is still walking the path he opened — in Duggar's case, plenty of people still are.
This article draws on and expands the original reporting in “Remembering Dogri Poet Krishen Smailpuri” by O P Sharma, published in Daily Excelsior on September 8, 2026, with additional research into Smailpuri's radio career, his place among the earliest Sahitya Akademi Dogri honourees, and Dogri Sanstha's founding-era publications.
