India-Culture/Arts/Books/People
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| Chhau Dance |
By Madhusree
Chatterjee
New Delhi
Language is
the verbal expression of a nation’s culture and history. In a country of 1.2
billion people, culture draws its eclectic strength from the hundreds of
tongues spoken by the people, their distinctive lifestyles, anthropological
roots and expressions of creativity.
The
linguistic heritage of India that dates back to as early as 5,000 years – to
the Indus Valley Civilisation — has negotiated a troubled history down the
millennia with the extinction of several linguistic heritages, fusions,
corruptions of root languages along the borders where people have overlapped
and merged into different communities, imposition of alien languages from
outside the country and creation of hybrid tongues. As a result, the language
is India is in a state of perennial flux.
A mammoth
project to map the language diversity of the country – the People’s Linguistic
Survey of India —has just completed compiling the genesis, roots, classical
evolution and the colloquial manifestation of 780 languages spoken across 23
states and Union Territories of the country after dissemination and collation
of data from the grassroots for four years.
Assembled in
52 volumes, the printed archives are being published by Orient Black Swan. The cache
will be in print by 2014.
Led by the
Bhasa Research and Publication Institute in collaboration with in collaboration
with the Sahitya Akademi, Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Indira Gandhi National
Open University, Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, Indira Gandhi
National Centre for Arts, Ustad Allauddin Khan Academy of Dhrupad Music and Nav
Siddharth Arts Group, the survey team of 3,000 researchers dedicated their
endeavour (52 manuscripts) to Mahatma Gandhi and to the nation in a
consecration ceremony at the Gandhi Smriti in New Delhi on September 5 to
generate awareness about the project.
The survey
team led by professor and noted linguist G.N. Devy and scholar-bureaucrat
Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty bargained land for a cultural diversity park on the
premises of the Indira Gandhi where 780 trees will be planted in honour of the
languages survey. The number of trees will go up as more languages are included
in the fold of the lingua map.
The survey
at a cost of approximately Rs 2 crore (with support from the JRD Tata Trust) was
essentially a voluntary exercise by workers – as contribution to the country’s cultural
regeneration, professor G.N. Devy, the powerhouse of the project, observed.
The
dedication ceremony was accompanied by two-day open session on the exercise and
the future course of action — to context the languages of India in their
habitats with an ethno-cultural and an eco-cultural mapping (that will include 800
survey booklets about ethnic and nomadic groups in their natural habitats along
coasts, forests and hills) of the country in the next phase. The booklets will
be compiled by members of the community (for distribution among themselves).
In course of
the two-day ceremony, addressed by scholars and researchers including Union
culture minister Chandresh Kumari Katoch- who called upon the team to embark on
a culinary mapping of the country on the basis of its linguistic diversities — the
first five volumes of the language encyclopedias were unveiled by publisher Orient
Black Swan.
The
publications released included The Languages of Uttarakhand, The Languages of
Maharashtra, The Languages of Assam and The Sign languages. The states were
mapped in all its linguistic variations – including the major, minor and unheard-of
derivative languages spoken by the people.
The most
significant among the publications released was an introduction to the survey,
“The Being of Bhasa: The General Introduction to the People’s Linguistic Survey
of India (by G.N. Devy) that explained the objective and the significance of
the exercise to preserve spoken languages of India in written formats and in
the process document the communities who use it in the greater picture of a culture-community
revitalisation.
Languages in
India can be classified into two broad categories – mother tongues and
languages that have evolved from the mother tongues. Besides, there are three
roots language –the Indo-Aryan tongues (with Sanskrit as the central tongue),
Dravidian language clusters and the Indo-Persian language — that forms the
classical scaffolding of India’s linguistic heritage.
Indian
government estimates available cite that according to the 2001 census, 29
languages have more than a million native speakers each, 60 languages have more
than 100,000 speakers and another 122 have more than 10,000 users. The
government has granted official status to 22 languages under the eighth
schedule of the Constitution.
The Indian
Census of 1961 had identified 1,652 languages spoken in the country.
The premise
that several of these languages, not officially nurtured, are disappearing from
the country’s lingua roster is the basis of the survey. The rate of extinction
is very high, warns the chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi, Kalyan K.
Chakravarty, who has been assisting G.N. Devy to preserve indigenous language,
cultures and arts in the country for the last 20 years.
“The biggest
challenge has been to give legitimacy to spoken languages in writing. We did
not try to codify the language – just document the language as it stands in its
immediate environment. It is a kind of preliminary exercise to slow down the
process of endangerment of languages. We cannot arrest the extinction,”
Chakravarty told this writer.
One of the
linguistic dilemmas that the survey has tried to address is the “disdain for
languages across speakers’ communities”. “We are trying to deal with the
contemporary mindset (especially among the youth) that your language does not
matter to me and vice versa. One of the messages that we are trying to get
across with the survey is that our languages are the producers of intellectual
seeds and language of development rooted in national and human consciousness.
“We are
trying to develop several bridge elements between the different languages. The Grierson’s
Survey (1898- 1928) had not studied the fusions in mother language and their linguistic
habitats. We have tried to understand the hybrid fusion in languages rather
them listing them,” Chakravarty said. The Grierson’s Survey had collated
information about 354 native Indian languages.
The survey, participatory
in nature involved the common man, speakers and scholars. “We tried to explore
every facet of the language and its related cultures- whether it was the
proverbs, idioms, epigrams and ritualistic and ceremonial bridges between the
language and the traditional knowledge systems,” Chakravarty pointed out.
Giving the
communities recognition for their languages gives them the opportunity to grow in
the era of globalization that is killing diversity in dialects.
Furnishing
statistics, professor Devy, the chair of the Vadodara-based Bhasa Research and
Publication Institute, said 85 per cent of languages in India are oral and 96
per cent of the people speak on 4 per cent of the languages. “You will lose
your identities as you lose your languages – you will get homogenized as the culture
leaves. This disbalance is accepted as inevitable but it calls for
life-enhancing strategies,” Devy said enumerating the triggers that spurred the
exercise.
According to
Devy, 20 per cent of the languages have fallen off the country’s linguistic map.
The survey which identified 780 languages missed out around 100 tongues. The
rest are extinct.
Devy cited
the “principle of cultural and environmental determination which looks at the country
as open land for development” in the perspective of the need to “break through
the silence of the people to look at development with the revitalization of
communities sharing resources from outside and inside the government”. He said the
“current rate of extinction of species and cultures was 40,000 times than what
was previously recorded”. “If species extinction is to be arrested, languages
will have to be conserved”, Devy said. “Languages cannot exist in vacuum”.
Art and Language
The three-day
symposium of People’s Language Survey Sept 5-7 was complemented by an
exposition of ethnic and ancient arts, “Abhivyakti: Multi-Art and Eco-Cultural
Mapping of India” that displayed traditional and contemporary masks,
photographs of ethnicities and nearly 100 reprints of ancient Jain, Buddhist,
Hindu and Persian manuscripts from the Jahangirnama, Akbarnama Shahnama, Shiv Lila Amrit and Krishna Lila at
the Lalit Kala Akademi-the country’s highest node of visual arts.
The exhibits
were sourced from IGNCA, Indira Gandhi Manav Sangrahalaya and Sangeet Natak
Akademi. Six audio-video shows of cultural performances by lesser-known
communities in far flung areas compiled by the Sangeet Natak Akademi
established the broad linkages between languages, communities, arts and performance
traditions.
“The language of culture is also the language
of development. Visual arts are central to the language of culture, which is
vital to the national human resource management strategies. We have not been
able to respect the locational cultural problems – that the ethno-cultural and
arts solutions for Lahaul and Spiti are not the same as those of Bengal or
Kerala. Each community has to be studied locally,” chairman of Lalit Kala
Akademi Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty told this writer.
The argument
gathers storm: Arts cannot exist in isolation of local or national culture. Art
cannot be treated as exclusive exhibits on the national stage for aesthetic
delight – and business proposition. It is a part of the holistic communal
culture, vital to existence.
The Lalit Kala Akademi, in collaboration with related
institutions will launch a visual survey of all the “community art” and publish
exhibitions in books as an action instrument for “Living Museum Movement” later
this year. The new museum movement that has been striving to create people’s
archives outside the institutional spaces is rooted in the notion that the
“habitat is the king” and bodies like the Lalit Kala Akademi only serves as a
catalyst to allow the communities to assemble and practice their art.
“We will
expand our workshops on the comparative history of arts movement. Art has to be
seen as art for life,” Chakravarty said.
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