When a child is scolded for clumsy handwriting in Himachal Pradesh, a common statement is “What Tankri have you scribbled?” In all irony, Tankri, which is now a metaphor for an illegible scribble, was once a script used to write over 20 Pahadi languages. Until the late 1940s, it was the primary script for business, revenue records, and literature in the state. But today, with fewer than ten people knowing it, the lines and curves of Tankri faded away after the standardised imposition of Devanagari following India’s independence.
The script entered 28-year-old Akriti Dhiman’s life not through family or cultural heritage, but through Instagram. Hailing from Mandi district’s Sundernagar, she had grown up speaking Pahadi, but her first encounter with Tankri left her unsettled—the feeling of glancing at her mother tongue and not being able to read a word. It wasn’t just her; even her grandparents couldn’t recognise it. This moment of disorientation led her to trace the script of her mother tongue down the map of history and step out on a quest to breathe life into Tankri.
Along with heartfelt scribbles in personal diaries, inscriptions on miniature paintings, and embossings on the rim of utensils, Dhiman discovered Tankri in the ruins of old Himachali temples. She says, “Having spotted signatures in Tankri on bank documents, I have encountered the script on property papers and accounts logs.” Dhiman is building the vocabulary to understand the lost script, piece by piece. After receiving the Green Hub x Royal Enfield Conservation Grant 2025, she relocated to Kangra—the district with the most remnants of Tankri. The first step in her journey was learning the script herself. “I wanted to be able to decipher what was written on each temple wall and every family heirloom.”
To revive Tankri, Dhiman is now working on a digital archive. For on-field documentation, she travels to places deep within Himachal, capturing Tankri through photographs and extracting audio narratives from natives. “When I go into deeper parts of villages, people instantly clean slabs of Tankri surviving in forgotten corners or take me to the farthest ends to discover inscriptions—all with the enthusiasm of someone finally valuing their script,” she says. In the process, she recalls having struggled with her own language. “As words are not denoted as separate units in Tankri, it was hard for me to make meaning from a cluster of letters,” she says.
Working on the revival has been a personal journey for the NID graduate. She connects to Tankri with a feeling of loss—not just of the script, but of all that was written in it. “It is heartbreaking to see how much is written in Tankri, but we can’t read it,” she says. Tankri has been used to document alternate narratives of history—rituals, folklore, ecology—but when one chances upon an old manuscript, flips a page, and is unable to decipher the script, all knowledge is rendered pointless. Ask her what she feels is lost if a script is lost, and she says almost instinctively—everything. “The script takes with it the expression and identity of its people,” she adds. “I once read about a custom of planting a tree after a child’s birth, which would be cut to build their house in future, but this tradition was lost along the way because we forgot how to read,” she adds.
Dhiman wants to make the script popular among the Pahadi people of Himachal Pradesh. “Pahadi is not recognised as a language only because of the absence of a script. If we had continued writing Tankri, Pahadi may have been a recognised language today,” Dhiman says.“But in this era of nostalgia, the script is being received well. A recent Tankri workshop in Shimla received more than a hundred registrations. Maybe other Pahadis share this sentiment with me,” she says.