The Takri alphabet developed through the Devāśeṣa stage of the Sharada script from the 14th-18th centuries and is found mainly in the Hill States such as Chamba, Himachal Pradesh and surrounding areas, where it is called Chambyali, and in Jammu Division, where it is known as Dogri. The local Takri variants got the status of official scripts in some of the Punjab Hill States, and were used for both administrative and literary purposes until the 19th century. After 1948, when Himachal Pradesh was established as an administrative unit, the localTakri variants were replaced by Devanagari. Takri itself has historically been used to write a number of Dardic and Western and Central Pahari languages in the Western Himalaya, such as Gaddi or Gaddki, Kashtwari and Chambyali. Takri used to be most prevalent script for business records and communication in various parts of Himachal Pradesh including the regions of Chintpurni, Una, Kangra, Bilaspur and Hamirpur. The aged businessmen can still be found using Takri in these areas, but the younger generation have now shifted to Devanagari and even English. This change can be traced to the early days of Indian independence.
Revival movement
Since Takri fell into disuse, there have been sporadic attempts to revive the script in Himachal Pradesh. Recent efforts have been made to teach the script to Himachalis. The Takri script was also used in cinema. The first film in Himachali dialects called Saanjh directed by Ajay Saklani released in April 2017 used Takri script in its title and beginning credits. Workshops are being conducted in small scale in the state of Himachal Pradesh, in districts like Chamba and Kullu, Kangra and Shimla. An organization named based at Dharamshala has decided to develop fonts for this script. A Western Pahari Corridor from Shimla to Murree has also been proposed under the Aman ki Asha initiative to link the similar Western Pahari language-based regions of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu, Azad Kashmir and Pothohar Plateau and revive the script. The Himachal Pradesh government under the National Manuscript Mission Yojana has set up a Manuscript Resource Centre and so far 1.26 lakh manuscripts, including those in Takri, have been catalogued and has decided to be digitised.
Varieties
There are several regional varieties of Takri, “with each Hill State or tract having its own style ”. There is considerable variation in the spellings of the names of the regional forms and the languages they represent. The names of languages have also changed, so that the names used in Grierson and other sources differ from current practices. In order to assist in the identification of languages and the forms of Takri associated with them, the language names below are denoted using ISO639-3 codes. Specimens of Takri representative of the regional form is also indicated.
The standard for the script has been the Chambeali version; which has been encoded in the Unicode. A variety of Takri which was used for Sirmauri and Jaunsari has been proposed to be encoded in the Unicode.
The Unicode block for Takri is U+11680-U+116CF: The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Takri block:
