Once upon a time, goes a Munda folktale, a cowherd couple finds a non-tribal girl crying in the jungle and they bring her home. The girl grows up to be a beauty, sone jaisi kaaya hai uski . News of her beauty reaches the king, who sets out to find her and, enraptured, decides to make her his queen. The girl protests. Her outraged parents wield their axe. The king pushes the girl into a room and locks it before being killed by the parents. Trying to break down the strong door, the couple dies of exhaustion.
“Is it a story of today,” asks Ashwini Kumar Pankaj, the Jharkhand-based tribal activist, “or is it just a folktale?” Well, replace the golden girl with natural resources, the king with market forces and the story takes on a contemporary hue, one where “lesser” cultures and languages are forced out in the face of the all-consuming market.
This folktale was narrated during the debate on vanishing cultures at Samanvay, the third edition of the Indian Languages’ Festival held in Delhi. With the volume-by-volume release of People’s Linguistic Survey of India this year, the largest language census since George Abraham Grierson’s in the 19th century, the slow but imminent death of Indian languages has made headlines regularly. But the panic had set in earlier in 2009, when Unesco declared 196 Indian languages “endangered”. “Till even the early 1990s, 70-75 languages were used in NCERT textbooks. Today, they are written in just 30 languages,” said Anvita Abbi, JNU professor of linguistics. To borrow from G.N. Devy, the man behind PLSI, India was fast becoming a graveyard of languages.
The stricken audience cooed in agreement and murmured darkly at the bleak fate staring our languages. At this point, Alok Rai, a Delhi University professor said, “All that is living, dies, but all that is living also lives!” The fight, he explained, is two-pronged. Any language, whether threatened or not, needs to be preserved and archived. Linguists and historians can only operate as documenters and record-keepers. When it comes to survival or revival of a language, the fight takes a political colour. “
Rai and Pankaj pointed out that the “powerful” are at best bilingual, the “less powerful” are unarguably multilingual. According to Pankaj, Sushma Asur, the Asuri bhasha poet from Jharkhand who had read out from her first collection at the festival, can speak in Hindi, Asuri, Oraon, Munda, Nagpuri and Kurukh. Oddly enough, the festival organisers presented her with Roald Dahl’s Bedtime Stories (she returned the book).
In a Konkani pallana (lullaby) from coastal Karnataka, a mother converses with a crow that has returned from Goa. An excerpt:
Katya katya (crow) you’ve been to Goa
Katya katya have you seen my little son’s wife?
Katya katya did you meet her?
Katya katya is she coming to our place?
Languages, it has been widely reported, are losing many of their components — terms of kinship, names of colours, numbers, grammar and oral traditions such as lullabies, riddles, proverbs, work songs, harvest songs and epics. This simple lullaby is also a thread of history that runs from the Konkan parts of coastal Karnataka to Goa before the Portuguese Inquisition, reminding Konkans of roots.
In Tulu, said Chinnappa Gowda of Mangalore University, folklore traditions of Siri-epic and maha kavya performances are alive only in some places. In a Siri-epic, the longest poem in Tulu, a brave performer recites 15,682 lines from memory over nine days. Even though dwindling, most oral traditions have survived in some form, thanks to folklore practices called bhoota rituals. Kabitas , work songs in Tulu, are on the verge of being lost, said Gowda. They are sung by groups of women during seed planting in paddy fields. In a paper on Tulu oral traditions, Viveka Rai writes about an interesting kabita that describes different parts of an animal, its actions and gestures. “At the end of the poem, the bull lies amorously in wait for the cow. While singing, the women at this juncture catch hold of each other, simulating the act of desirous waiting. The kabita is interpreted as the women’s desire for mating and motherhood.” Tulu, spoken by five million and written in the Kannada script, has a 17,000-word vocabulary; 7,000 of those words are already lost because no one remembers them anymore.
The language of preservation and revival, a preoccupation of these two discussions, found an echo across debates and panels. Over four days, the festival played host to discussions that traversed territories of controversy, tradition and modernity, literary movements, displacement, feminism, activism, dissent, small towns and big cities.
However, more worrisome questions remained unresolved — the growing distance between the younger generations and their languages; defining “progress”; the “economic capital” of languages; and, as Pankaj put it, “to stop the one-sided exchange of language and culture.”