Somewhere between the bus stand and Dogra Chowk, the lettering on the signboards changed. Not the language on them — Dogri has been an official language of Jammu and Kashmir for years — but the script. The looping, angular characters now sitting above the Devanagari are Takri, the script Dogri was written in for centuries and which almost nobody under thirty in this city can read.
The Jammu Municipal Corporation has installed Dogri signboards in Takri at more than 24 prominent locations across the city — the major chowks, and also Jammu Airport, the railway station, the bus stand and some religious places. A further 40 localities have been identified for the next phase, including markets and residential colonies, taking the boards off the arterial roads and into neighbourhood streets.
The work is running under JMC Commissioner Dr Devansh Yadav, and it began with a request from an NGO rather than a file. The Siyana Nagrik Muddad Seva Sanstha approached the corporation about two and a half months ago and has contributed signboards itself. Kulbhushan Khajuria, Joint Commissioner (Revenue and Enforcement) at JMC and Additional CEO of Jammu Smart City Ltd, is coordinating it. The corporation had tested the idea earlier with Dogri signage at the Waste to Wonder Park in Bhagwati Nagar.
The J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages has been involved on the language side. Its Dogri editor, Reeta Khadyal, put it plainly: "We are happy to see the signboards in Dogri language in Takri script. It is a great initiative for the entire people of Jammu."
Why a script, and not just a language
Dogri's problem has never been official status. It is in the Eighth Schedule, it has an Akademi, it has award-winning writers. What it has been losing is ordinary daily use — the conversations, the shopfronts, the reading that makes a language feel like something you live in rather than something you study. We wrote about that gap in whether Dogri survives if young Dogras stop speaking it.
Takri is a further step removed. Dogri today is written almost entirely in Devanagari; Takri survives in manuscripts, in museum cases, and in the memory of a shrinking number of people who learned it. A script that exists only in archives is a script that has stopped being read.
Putting it on the board outside the railway station does not teach anyone to read it. What it does is make it visible — turn it from something in a museum into something you walk past on the way to catch a train, often enough that you might eventually wonder what it says. JMC has said the point is to reconnect the younger generation with Duggar's linguistic heritage, and on that narrow measure the boards are well placed: airport, station, bus stand, chowks. The places people stand around waiting.
Whether it goes further than visibility is a separate question — one the next 40 localities will answer better than the first 24.
