Is ‘Pahari Renaissance’ a Path to Economic Revival in Himachal and Beyond?

The first of November, observed as Pahari Day across Himachal Pradesh to commemorate the 1966 merger of Pahari-speaking areas, is a reminder that reviving Pahari is not just about language. It is about reclaiming a long-suppressed cultural identity. Uplifting it could enhance regional cooperation in the Western Himalayas, potentially supported by platforms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

“A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language” — Noam Chomsky’s words resonate for anyone concerned about the status of Pahari language in Himachal Pradesh.

Most people in the state speak various Pahari dialects, but lack of standardisation and formal support and the rise of Hindi, associated with political power, marginalised Pahari, disconnecting many from their mother tongue and cultural heritage.

The rise of social media has now enabled initiatives seeking to restore Pahari to its rightful place in the cultural landscape. Conversations with content creators, influencers, advocates and community members reveal that this is about reclaiming a long-suppressed cultural identity, not just language.

New Delhi-based lawyer and Pahari language activist Arsh Dhanotia finds it sad that while millions speak in Pahari dialects, the language is “disregarded to the extent that it is not even the second official language of the state after Hindi.”

In contrast, Sanskrit, identified as a mother tongue by fewer than 1,000 speakers in the state, was declared the second official language in 2019. There is even a dedicated university and numerous colleges to teach Sanskrit in the province, but “even after 50 years of statehood we do not have a single college or university dedicated to teach and preserve Pahari and trans-Himalayan dialects,” said Dhanotia.

Linguistic zones

On 14 September 1949, India’s Constituent Assembly after two years of debate designated Hindi in Devanagari script as India’s official language, while retaining English as an associate official language for 15 years to aid the development and standardisation of Hindi. This involved using British-era Hindustani, eliminating Persian and Arabic words, and incorporating vocabulary from various dialects spoken in the Hindi belt, including Khari Boli, Braj Bhasha and Bundeli.

However, anti-Hindi agitations in southern India led to the continued use of English as the de facto official language.

In this confrontation, many faultline linguistic zones affected by Partition were overlooked. While Punjabi and Bengali are recognised, Pahari is often neglected.

The Pahari linguistic zone lies between the outer and lesser Western Himalayas, stretching from Shimla in India to Murree in Pakistan are where people speak mutually intelligible Pahari dialects.

In Himachal Pradesh, Pahari was further neglected as most of the present-day province was part of Indian Punjab until 1966, where authorities preferred promoting Punjabi. Dr Yashwant Singh Parmar, a key figure in the creation of Himachal Pradesh, emphasised Pahari linguistic identity as a central argument for a separate province. Dr Parmar classified Pahari as a distinct language from Hindi, Punjabi and Dogri.

His efforts led to merging Pahari-speaking regions like Kangra and Kullu from Punjab into the then Union Territory of Himachal on 1 November 1966. The state’s Art and Culture Department has designated that date as Pahari Day across Himachal.

After the State of Himachal Pradesh Act was passed on 18 December 1970 granting full statehood to the Pahari-speaking region, Parmar initiated a resolution in the Himachal assembly declaring Pahari as the state’s mother tongue. Simultaneously, he tasked linguist Narain Chand Parashar with standardising Pahari dialects spoken in the province like Kangri, Chambeali, Mandeali, Kulvi, Kahluri, Hinduri, Mahasuvi, and Sirmauri.

Parashar was also tasked with getting the language recognised as Pahari (Himachali) under the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution. This has yet to happen.

Shimla-based academic Dr Devender Sharma told Sapan News that efforts to standardise Pahari in Himachal Pradesh were going well until the mid-1970s, when “some pro-Hindi lobbies” exacerbated tensions between speakers of different Pahari dialects in public offices leading policymakers “to believe that the use of Hindi was the sole solution to this problem in official spaces”.

In the 1980s, television became more accessible but the state-owned Doordarshan was the only entertainment source in the province, with all its programmes exclusively in Hindi.

“This led to the expansion of Hindi and associated cultures of the Hindi belt in unofficial spaces,” said Dr Sharma. As a result, Pahari as well as trans-Himalayan dialects spoken in tribal areas like Kinnaur and Lahaul Spiti “took a blow”.

Pahari resurgence

Social media has revived Pahari dialects, a resurgence in Himachal Pradesh driven by content creators using social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Speakers are creating and consuming content in their mother tongue, which was not possible during the television era.

Radio jockey Abhimanyu Rai, 32, one of the first Pahari content creators, recalls starting to make funny videos in the Pahari dialect Mandeali, in 2016. It was tough initially, “but slowly and steadily people from across the province started to resonate with my work and gave me a lot of encouragement and support,” he told Sapan News. “In fact, the popularity I got through making content in my mother tongue helped me land a job as a radio jockey.”

“I take pride in calling myself a Pahari speaker,” says 24-year old content creator Bhavna Pathania. “At a time when most content creators are men, I feel as a woman I need to do my bit to make content which resonates with Pahari-speaking women.”

Pahari needs its own film industry — ‘Pahariwood’, she says, like ‘Bollywood’ as the Hindi film industry is known, or ‘Tollywood’ for Telugu language films. This will gain a Pan-Himachal reach, and with English subtitles “we can also reach global audiences”.

Pahari language is gaining visibility in short stand-up comedy clips, thanks to comedians like my namesake Vishal Sharma, 31. Recently, Sharma left his job to focus on his career as a Pahari stand-up comedian, performing in Indian cities with large Himachali Pahari communities. He aims to take his shows worldwide.

Emerging vloggers doing their bit to promote the language include Canada-based Shilpa Golra, a 34-year old doctoral researcher who makes food vlogs in Pahari to stress the importance of “speaking in our mother tongue.”

While applying for a Canadian academic scholarship recently, she was astonished that it includes Pahari as an option in the languages column, something she had not seen even in India.

Based in the United Arab Emirates, chef Santosh Thakur, 37, likes making vlogs in Pahari dialects “because I want the youth to be connected to our roots.” He respects all languages including Hindi, but feels the need to protect Pahari “even if we are less in number”.

Upcoming vlogger Abhay Chauhan, 18, started making vlogs in Pahari “just for fun” after moving to Sydney, Australia. He was surprised by how rapidly his followers increased.

Such unstructured social media efforts have revived Pahari, but a planned approach is now essential to elevate it from the margins to the mainstream. Despite being spoken by more than 4 million of Himachal Pradesh’s nearly 7 million residents, according to the 2011 Census, Pahari remains marginalised due to insufficient official promotion and media representation.

This situation persists in the entire Western Himalayas and even Britain.

Pahari is one of Britain’s most spoken minority languages, as highlighted by British academic Dr Serena Hussain in “Missing from the Minority Mainstream: Pahari-speaking Diaspora in Britain”, published in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2014. This was the first such study on British Pahari speakers published in a Q1 journal, in the top 25% publications in its subject category. The Pahari dialects spoken by the British diaspora come from Mirpur and nearby areas of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir princely state.

Breaking barriers

To elevate Pahari language content to the next level requires high-quality audiovisual production, suggests Yaduveer Singh, 30, a promoter and artist manager from Shimla, now based in Delhi.

Vlogger and podcaster, Mukuldev Rakshpati, 33 makes educational reels to promote aspects connected to the Pahari language movement. But without political and executive encouragement, the momentum gained will be “worthless”, he says.

Proper infrastructure is also necessary to make Pahari folk music global, says Chiraag Jyoti Majta, 32, a Mahasuvi dialect folk singer in Shimla. Without that, “it will be difficult to foster young talent, drive innovation and ensure growth of our music industry”.

Nirmal Joseph, a doctoral researcher in the Central University of Karnataka and Megha Manju Promodu, a communications expert now based in Swansea, Wales, both originally from Kerala, have independently researched Pahari dialects and one of its scripts, Tankri.

Promodu says that while the “standardisation of many diverse dialect chains has led to the emergence of globally recognised languages like French and Persian”, dialect chains like Pahari have not been effectively standardised or promoted “due to internal dialect rivalries”.

She believes that promoting a standard Pahari “is the only solution” to foster the creation of written works and enhance oral proficiency.

The fear that promoting a standardised Pahari “will lead to one dialect superseding others needs to be dispelled,” says Joseph. In Kerala, “we speak Malayalam, and we also have dozens of dialects which differ from each other.”

Promoting standard Malayalam helped protect all dialects, as well as preserve folk songs and literature through formal documentation. “It also led to proverbs and oral traditions being kept alive in everyday life”.

In 2021, Shimla-based lawyer Bhawani Pratap on behalf of fellow lawyer and Pahari language rights activist Arsh Dhanotia filed a petition in the Himachal High Court about the neglect and promotion of Pahari. He told Sapan News that the reactivation efforts should be similar to successful linguistic revivals like Welsh in Wales.

This requires absorbing Pahari into the educational curriculum under the New Education Policy, 2020. While the Devanagari script may be used in the short term, “a long-term plan should be in place to encourage the use of a nuclear Tankri script as traditionally our dialects were written mostly in various versions of Tankri”.

“The upcoming Census in India, which has been delayed for several years, will be crucial for the future of the Pahari language in Himachal,” he adds.

Currently, most Pahari dialects are categorised under Hindi. “To protect the linguistic heritage of the province in the long run it is essential to categorise Pahari dialects separately”.

A well-crafted strategy could preserve the language and spark a cultural renaissance, fostering a renewed progressive linguistic identity.

In his book, “Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature” Kenyan novelist and post-colonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o advocates for linguistic decolonisation, a concept which applies to the treatment Pahari has received in Himachal Pradesh. Even after independence from British colonisers in 1947, Pahari language continued to be suppressed by those in power.

The BJP-led union government recently approved classical language status for languages like Marathi, Assamese, Pali and Prakrit. Now it should also turn its attention to languages like Pahari.

Meanwhile, the Indian National Congress-led provincial government has yet to fulfill their 2022 election manifesto commitment “Himachal, Himachaliyat aur Hum” which promised to standardise Pahari dialects.

Uday Pathania an independent journalist based in Kangra makes it a point to have serious policy discussions with policy makers in Pahari – his attempt at protecting the linguistic heritage of the state. “If policy makers don’t do anything then common people will do something”.

Musician and audio producer Aasheesh, 34 in Shimla district also echoes a lack of faith in policy makers. “Leave Pahari dialects, the situation is so out of hand that even traditional Pahari instruments are being replaced by those which are alien to our culture, in shows promoted by government-backed institutions. How can we expect to go global with our music when we can’t even preserve authentic sounds of our folk music?” he asks.

Beyond Himachal

Given the declining political and economic situation in Himachal Pradesh and the entire Western Himalayas on both sides of the Line of Control, regional cooperation based on Pahari linguistic linkages could help strengthen economies of this mountainous region.

Advocate Hamender Singh in Solan district of Himachal Pradesh, recalls that his late grandmother, born in modern-day Solan, moved to Murree, at age 5 and lived there until 1940. She always fondly remembered the shared Pahari way of living in both areas.

He believes that the Western Himalayan region could have remained economically connected “even after 1947 if the majority religion practised in both sides of the LOC have not been mixed with domestic politics.”

“I hope to see a day when peace and progress will prevail over hostility in this region,” he tells Sapan News.

Policymakers on both sides of the Line of Control could learn from the economic initiatives in the Western Balkans, where many countries speak mutually intelligible dialects, like in the Western Himalayas. Despite ethnic divisions, these governments, realising the need for economic stability, are now working together as a unit with the European Union.

With its emphasis on peace and security the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation could be a constructive platform for such an initiative. The recent visit by India’s foreign minister to Pakistan for the SCO Council of Heads of Government Meet, the first in nearly a decade, highlights the SCO’s potential as a platform which can be used for fostering such regional cooperation in the faultline Western Himalayas.

Such an initiative could strengthen the entertainment, tourism and trade sectors in the mountainous region, while facilitating collaboration in agriculture, horticulture and climate change.

The same argument can be applied to bordering faultline areas of many SCO countries which desperately need an economic boost.