On the morning of 24 August, in the K. L. Sehgal Hall at the Writers Club in Jammu, a two-day national seminar sat down to do something nobody had quite done in public before: divide the whole of Dogri drama into six periods and hand each one to a scholar.
It was organised by the Sahitya Akademi — India's national academy of letters — in collaboration with the Jammu & Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages (JKAACL). And while a literary seminar is not the sort of thing that trends, this one is worth a young Dogri speaker's attention for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia.
How the two days were carved up
The papers ran chronologically, in two chaired sessions.
Session one, covering everything up to 1990, was chaired by T. R. Mangotra Sagar. Under it: Radha Rani on Dogri drama up to 1960, Mukesh Kumar on 1961–80, and Shalu Sharma on 1981–90.
Session two, on everything after 1990, was chaired by Dr Padam Dev Singh Nandan, with Anu Sharma on 1991–2000, Rakesh Verma on 2001–10 and Shagufta Chaudhary on 2011–20.
Six papers, six decades, one language's dramatic tradition laid end to end. Whatever else it produced, it produced a map — and Dogri has not had many of those.
It is worth pausing on how that division is drawn, because the seam is placed at 1990 and the two halves are weighted very differently. Everything before 1990 gets three papers covering roughly seven decades. Everything after gets three papers covering three. That is not an accident of scheduling; it is a statement that the recent decades of Dogri drama are dense enough to need decade-by-decade attention. For a language routinely discussed in the past tense, that is a quietly assertive piece of structure.
Who was in the room
The welcome address came from Mohan Singh, Padma Shri, who convenes the Sahitya Akademi's Dogri Advisory Board. Shiv Dev Sushil delivered the keynote. Sonali Arun Gupta, Special Secretary, was chief guest; Dr Om Goswami gave the presidential address; and Reeta Khadyal, the Akademi's Dogri Editor, closed with the vote of thanks.
That list is the actually useful part of this story, and here is why.
The bit nobody explains to young Dogri writers
If you grew up speaking Dogri at home in Jammu and have never studied it formally — which describes a great many people reading this — the language can feel like something that exists in your grandparents' generation and in nobody's career. That is not quite true, and the seminar's guest list is the evidence.
Dogri is a scheduled language, which means it has national institutional standing. The Sahitya Akademi runs a Dogri Advisory Board with a convener. It employs a Dogri Editor. It commissions, publishes, translates and awards in the language. JKAACL, on the state side, programmes and produces in it. These are not honorary positions; they are a small but real professional structure, and it is staffed by people who at some point decided to work in Dogri on purpose.
Six of the eight people who presented or chaired at this seminar are researchers working period-by-period on a literature most Jammu students are never formally taught. That is a field with room in it.
It is also a field with an unusually short distance between the bottom and the top. In a national language with thousands of active scholars, presenting a paper at a Sahitya Akademi seminar is a career milestone reached after years. In Dogri, the pool is small enough that serious work gets noticed quickly — and the people who convene the boards and edit the journals are reachable, in Jammu, at events like this one. Scarcity is a problem for the language and an opportunity for anyone willing to work in it.
The obvious counter is that none of this pays like an engineering seat, and that is true. But the framing that treats Dogri as a choice between heritage and a career is a false one. Translation, editing, archival research, theatre production, subtitling and language documentation are all live and all short-staffed — and a graduate who can work fluently between Dogri and English is doing something a much larger pool of graduates cannot.
A note on the record
One small discrepancy worth recording: the Sahitya Akademi's own listing gives the venue as the K. L. Sehgal Hall, while press coverage rendered it "Saigal". It is the same hall at the Writers Club; we have followed the Akademi's spelling.
What's next, and it's free
The Akademi's Jammu calendar does not stop here. On 3 September 2026 at 10:00 am, it holds an Asmita programme in Punjabi at Government College for Women, Bhagwati Nagar, Jammu.
That is a national literary academy running a session on a Jammu college campus, mid-morning, mid-week. If you have ever thought literary institutions were something that happen in Delhi to other people, this one is happening at a women's college off Bhagwati Nagar and you can walk into it between classes. The Akademi's notice gives the start time but not a closing time or a participation format, so treat it as a morning session and check locally before planning around it.
We asked the harder version of this question a fortnight ago — whether Dogri survives if young Dogras stop speaking it. A seminar does not answer that. But it does show that the institutional half of the answer is already built and currently under-occupied.
Sources: Sahitya Akademi (seminar and Asmita programme listings) and Daily Excelsior (speaker list and session structure).
