Jammu deserves more than a Stopover

Zorawar Singh Jamwal

zorawarjamwal123@gmail.com

Every year, lakhs of pilgrims stream through Jammu on their way to the most revered cave shrine of Mata Vaishno Devi Ji. They land at the airport, check into a hotel for a night, catch the helicopter or begin the trek to Katra, complete their darshan, and leave - often without a single glance at the extraordinary civilisation that has thrived in these hills for over a thousand years.

Jammu, for most of them, is a transit point. A layover between the plains and the shrine. And that, quite simply, is a tragedy the region can no longer afford to ignore.

Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to Odisha as a devotee, drawn there by the pull of the world-famous Konark Sun Temple. What struck me most was not just the grandeur of the temple itself, but the intelligence of the system built around it. The moment you arrive as a pilgrim or tourist, the local authorities do not simply let you complete your visit and vanish. They introduce you - deliberately, systematically - to everything else Odisha has to offer: its other temples, its craft villages, its coastline, its tribal heritage, its cuisine. What was meant to be a two-day religious trip for our group turned into a week-long exploration of an entire state, because someone, somewhere, had designed the experience to hold our attention rather than let it slip away.

That single observation should trouble anyone who cares about Jammu's future as a cultural and economic destination. Here is a region sitting on a treasure chest of heritage - forts that have watched empires rise and fall, temples older than most nations, a language and a body of folklore that risk vanishing within a generation, a cuisine and craft tradition found nowhere else on earth - and yet it has failed to build even a fraction of the storytelling infrastructure that Odisha has perfected.

Jammu does not have a heritage problem. It has a packaging and promotion problem. And the most urgent step toward solving it is the establishment of a dedicated Centre for the Promotion and Preservation of Dogra Art, Culture, Heritage and Languages.

A Region Defined by What It Is Losing

The Dogra homeland is not short on material. Its architectural inheritance alone could fill a dozen museums. The Krimchi temple complex, with its cluster of ancient shrines rising out of the forest floor, predates much of what tourists travel across India to see. The Babor temples at Manwal, the sacred confluence sites of Purmandal and Uttarbehni, the imposing silhouette of Bahu Fort overlooking the Tawi river, the faded grandeur of Mubarak Mandi Palace, the elegance of Amar Mahal, and the strategic forts at Akhnoor, Ramnagar and Bhimgarh in Reasi together form a chain of monuments that tell the story of Dogra statecraft, devotion and artistry across centuries. Add to this the temple towns of Basohli, Billawar, Kishtwar and Bhaderwah, each with its own distinct architectural vocabulary and local legend, and what emerges is not a scattering of tourist spots but a coherent, layered civilisational narrative - one that nobody has yet bothered to tell in full.

The same neglect extends to the region's artistic legacy. Basohli painting, one of the most original and distinctive schools within the broader Pahari tradition, is spoken of in art history circles around the world, yet remains virtually invisible within Jammu itself.

The Jammu school of painting, along with traditions of mural work, miniature art, wood carving, metal craft, pottery, embroidery, weaving and traditional jewellery-making, survives today largely through the memory and skill of a shrinking number of elderly artisans.

Manuscripts, ceremonial costumes, antique weapons and other objects that hold the physical memory of this region's past lie scattered - in private collections, in disrepair, or simply lost - for want of a single institution mandated to collect, conserve and display them.

Language and oral culture face perhaps the gravest threat of all. Dogri, a language with centuries of literary and folk tradition behind it, is losing ground among the young, many of whom grow up more fluent in Hindi and English than in the tongue their grandparents used to sing in. Folk art forms such as Kud, Bhaakh, Geetru, Jagarana, Bakh and Karak - performance traditions that once animated village festivals and religious gatherings - now survive mostly in memory rather than practice.

The instruments that once accompanied these performances, the storytelling traditions that carried them from one generation to the next, and the poets and writers who gave Dogri its literary weight all risk being reduced to footnotes unless a serious, sustained effort is made to document and revive them.

Even Dogra cuisine - a culinary tradition every bit as rich and distinctive as those from more celebrated Indian regions - has never been given the institutional respect it deserves. Rajma with rice, Ambal, Khatta Meat, Dal Dogri, Maa Da Madra, Auriya, Kimb, Kaladi, Kasrod, Patrode, Maani, Babroo, Khameera, Sund and Doodh-Dal, along with the sweets and preparations tied to Dogra festivals and the ceremonial Dhamm feast, represent generations of accumulated culinary knowledge. Yet there is no audio-visual archive, no demonstration kitchen, no structured effort anywhere to record how these dishes are traditionally prepared before that knowledge disappears along with the generation that still holds it.

Why a Dedicated Centre Is the Answer

The solution to this scattered, slow-motion erosion of heritage cannot be piecemeal. It requires a single, well-resourced institution built specifically for this purpose - a Centre for the Promotion and Preservation of Dogra Art, Culture, Heritage and Languages, established in Jammu and designed to function as a permanent hub for research, documentation, display and promotion of the region's cultural inheritance.

Such a centre must be conceived with serious infrastructure, not as a token gesture. It needs to be equipped to support scholars, researchers, artists and students undertaking genuine academic work on Dogra history, art, craft, literature, language, architecture, traditions and folk practices. This means proper archival facilities, research libraries, digitisation labs and spaces for scholarly collaboration - the kind of backbone that allows a cultural institution to produce real, lasting knowledge rather than merely host occasional exhibitions.

The centre should also function as a window into the region's built heritage for visitors who may never have the time or means to travel to every fort and temple scattered across Jammu's districts. Carefully constructed models and prototypes of key monuments - Krimchi, Babor, Mubarak Mandi, Bahu Fort, Akhnoor Fort, Ramnagar Fort, Bhimgarh Fort, the temple complexes of Purmandal, and revered shrines such as the Ranbireshwar Temple and Raghunath Temple - would allow a single visit to the centre to double as a compressed tour of the region's architectural and religious landmarks. For a pilgrim who has only a day or two in Jammu before or after visiting Vaishno Devi, this kind of curated introduction could be transformative, converting a rushed transit into genuine engagement with the region.

Art and craft deserve equally serious treatment within the centre's design. A dedicated gallery space showcasing Basohli miniature painting alongside the Jammu school of painting and other traditional artistic expressions would finally give these forms the visibility they merit. Beyond static display, the centre should actively support living artisans - offering them workshop space to demonstrate Basohli painting, Dogri calligraphy, folk music, dance, embroidery, weaving and woodwork to visitors and, crucially, to teach these skills to younger generations who might otherwise never encounter them. A craft tradition survives only as long as someone is still practising it; an institution that merely displays old objects without nurturing new practitioners will preserve the past while still losing the future.

Food, too, deserves institutional memory. The centre should maintain an audio-visual archive recording the traditional preparation of Dogra dishes and festival cuisine, ideally paired with live demonstrations that let visitors taste and understand this culinary heritage rather than merely read about it on a placard.

More Than a Museum

What Jammu needs is explicitly not another static museum where objects sit behind glass and gather dust. It needs what could genuinely be called a living institution - one built around research, learning, preservation and active promotion of Duggar identity, capable of connecting a new generation to its roots even when that generation cannot fluently speak the language of its ancestors. Interactive galleries, digital archives, immersive audio-visual presentations, hands-on workshops, live demonstrations and detailed replicas of the region's monuments would allow young Dogras - and curious outsiders - to encounter this culture as something alive and evolving, not embalmed.

The economic logic here is as compelling as the cultural one. Positioned strategically, such a centre could become a major draw in its own right for the enormous number of pilgrims already passing through Jammu on their way to Shri Mata Vaishno Devi and Shri Amarnath Ji, as well as for tourists using the region as a gateway to Kashmir and Ladakh. Instead of Jammu functioning as a place people merely pass through, it could become a destination that extends stays, generates local employment for artisans, guides, researchers and hospitality workers, and channels tourist spending directly into the preservation of the very heritage that draws visitors in the first place - exactly the virtuous cycle Odisha has managed to build around Konark and its surrounding attractions.

The blueprint already exists elsewhere, quite literally proven at Konark. What Jammu needs now is not another study or another committee report gathering dust in a government office, but political will, sustained funding and a serious architectural and curatorial vision translated into an actual building with actual programming. The heritage sites are already standing. The art forms, though endangered, are not yet extinct. The language is still spoken, even if by fewer people each year. The recipes are still remembered by grandmothers across the region's villages. What is missing is the single institution capable of gathering all of this together, giving it a permanent home, and finally telling the world - and, just as importantly, telling Jammu's own children - the full story of who the Dogras are and what they have built over centuries in these hills.

The window for doing this while the last generation of master artisans, storytellers and cooks is still alive to guide the effort is not indefinite. It is closing. The time to establish this centre is now.

(The author is Spokesperson BJP JK UT)