Sikh organisations, ally Shiromani Akali Dal and local units of the BJP in J&K and Punjab exerted pressure to include Punjabi in the list of official languages. Over the years, various ethnic groups exerted constant pressure to include Hindi, Punjabi and Dogri in the official languages, so that government work could be done in these languages. In fact, Dogri, which is the mother-tongue of 20 per cent of the region’s population, is much closer to Punjabi, and was for a long time thought to be a dialect of the language.Īmong the arguments in support of the abrogation of Article 370 was that successive state governments continued the use of Urdu to allow the Kashmiri elite to dominate governance. According to census data, 71 per cent of the people in the region speak Kashmiri and Dogri, 2.4 per cent speak Hindi, and 1.75 per cent speak Punjabi. The sixth schedule of the constitution of the erstwhile state classified Kashmiri, Dogri, Balti (Pali), Dardi, Punjabi, Pahari, Ladakhi and Gurjari as its regional languages. However, Kashmiri and Dogri continue to use the Persian script along with the Sharda script. Others, like Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Jharkhand, Delhi, Bihar and West Bengal, continue to have Urdu in the list of official languages but along with the native tongues. The erstwhile state remained the only one to continue with Urdu as its official language. In 1956, J&K’s constituent assembly continued with the tradition of Urdu while adopting the state constitution. However, the royal family themselves spoke Dogri.
Gulab Singh’s grandson Pratap Singh ended this dominance of Persian in 1889 and adopted Urdu (along with English to converse with his British overlords) as the language of the court. Persian had been in use even before the Dogra empire the Mughals, Afghans and other rulers of the region used the language alongside their native Turkic and Pashto tongues as the court language.
After the 1846 Anglo-Sikh war, the Dogra king Gulab Singh established the Jammu and Kashmir state with the help of the East India Company, and continued using Persian-the court language of the Khalsa empire.
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