Sushila Sawant Mendes
We celebrated Asmitai dis on the 16th January to commemorate our separate identity and culture when the people of Goa rejected merger and to be part of a Marathi speaking State. Thereafter we celebrated, when a pillar of our culture, Konkani was granted its due recognition on 4th February with the passing of the Goa, Daman & Diu Official Language Act, 1987. For this day to dawn, seven martyrs were killed in December 1986, Konkani Projecho Awaz was on the streets with motivation provided by the Konkani writers and tiatrists. Konkani was later recognised in the Eight Schedule of our Constitution on 22nd August 1992. However we are on a continuous hunt of safeguarding Goenkarpon as our geography is getting affected and the debate on culture and identity rages on.
Dr S M Khatre (Director, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Poona) in his Presidential address at the sixth session of the Konkani Conference, in Podar College Hall, Bombay in 1957, organised by the Konkani Bhasha Mandal had advised that, “those quarrelling over the relative superiority of scripts ought to be educated in the growth of our scripts” and that “a language lives on the tongues of its people; but it is immortalized in literature which is recorded”. He emphasized the need of moving forward in unity in the development of a satisfying literature and that folk literature, folk tales and proverbs are an expression of the culture of the people.
Spanish-language Peruvian novelist, 2010 Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa and the author of over two dozen previous books in his “Notes on death of a culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society”, wrote that we're living in an age without culture or conviction, that culture, at least as we used to understand it is now officially "dead." It may have survived in some "small social enclaves, without influence on the mainstream, but everywhere else it has been replaced with mere entertainment”.
This happens when speakers seek to learn a more-prestigious language in order to gain social and economic advantages or avoid discrimination. The gradual disappearance of Coptic (liturgical language of the Coptic Catholic and orthodox Church) as a spoken language in Egypt following the rise of Arabic in the 7th century is one example of this type of transition. Modernity and globalization have strengthened these forces, and people around the world now face unprecedented pressure to adopt the common languages used in government, commerce, technology, entertainment and diplomacy. Many indigenous languages are disappearing as a result of the (non) transmission between generations, political issues or lack of legal recognition.
The resulting migration of people, causes linguistic communities to fragment and mingle with other languages. Languages have become extinct as a result of this cultural process leading to language shift, and the gradual disappearance of a native language in favor of a more acceptable foreign language. Linguists estimate that of the world’s approximately 6,900 languages, more than half are at risk of dying out by the end of the 21st century. With every language and script that disappears, thinking, culture, tradition and the vast knowledge it encompasses is lost! Willfully permitting it to disappear is like burning books or bombing art repositories in wartime. Thus when a language and its script disappears, we say goodbye to an important piece of our lives, its history and way of understanding the world – disappears forever.
“With indigenous languages, inevitably a collection of environmental, technological, social, economic and cultural knowledge disappears that its speakers have accumulated and codified over millennia,” explains German Freire, specialist in social development at the World Bank and author of the report, ‘Indigenous Latin America in the 21st Century’. Attempting to slow down the loss of these languages, the UN launched the Indigenous Languages Decade (2022-2032). The aim is to guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples to preserve, revitalize and promote their languages and scripts and integrate aspects of linguistic diversity and multilingualism in sustainable development efforts.
A subordinate population may shift to the dominant language, leaving the native language to a sudden linguistic death and this gradual process may occur over several generations. Institutions such as the education system, as well as forms of media such as the internet, television, and print media play a significant role in the process of language loss. For example, when people migrate to a new country, their children often attend school in the majority language rather than their parents language. My generation is a witness to schools enforcing a fine on students who spoke in Konkani instead of English especially in the village schools in Goa.
In ‘Notes toward the Definition of Culture,’ T S Eliot defines culture as existing in, and through, three different spheres: that of the individual, the group or class, and the rest of society. As for what forms the individual, it’s the family, and family, in turn is formed by the community and society. That group proceeds to exercise its idea of culture on society as a whole, with the elites, the educated and artists ¬ channelizing their access to the media and academia to influence the tastes of the average citizens, and of the next ¬ generation too. To complain about the death of culture is to complain about dying ¬ yourself. Language revival is the attempt to re-introduce an extinct language by a new generation of native speakers.
All the people of Goa fought the language issue shoulder to shoulder to make Konkani Goa’s official language in 1987.This agitation was fought for Konkani and the script issue was not raised then. Today all other scripts in Konkani face discrimination, as their publications are excluded from Sahitya Academy Awards and these writers are either not appointed or are a minority to bodies and departments that can enrich the Konkani language like, The Goa Konkani Academy, Official Language Cell, Art & Culture Dept., even the Kala Academy stopped awards to Konkani writers in this script.
Tomazinho Cardozo has pointed out that majority of the members of the Goa Konkani Academy were from the Devnagari sympathetic group and the same was seen in the constitution of Advisory Board of Sahitya Academy. Now to add fuel to fire, written examinations are made mandatory in the Devnagari script for recruitment. Are our youth whose mother-tongue has been Konkani for generations, but cannot write in a particular script, not Goan and do they deserve to be denied jobs? Is there no future for them in their homeland and the land of their fore-fathers? I often have mindful conversations with my late father and his friend Gomant Vibhushan Lambert Mascarenhas, another freedom fighter to understand if this was the Goa that they envisaged?
Tiatr has been successful in making Konkani a part of Goa’s culture. Konkani is spoken for almost three hours in tiatrs and many Goans, have grown up reading the Konkani ‘Romances’ and thus both have played a role in preserving the spoken and written language of Goa.
To safeguard our identity and culture for our next generation there is need of inclusiveness. No group should get the feeling of being let down and excluded. We are after all from the same modki, as the popular Konkani saying defines our inclusive Goan identity as one family.
(The writer is a Professor in History, Author and an
Independent Researcher)