By Tara Narayan

IT’S A question which plagues the mind somewhere along the way while listening to various speakers at a two-day Sahitya Akademi and Konkani Advisory Board seminar on “Identifiable Trends in the Western Indian Literature in the First Decade” held at the Kala Academy’s Black Box auditorium on March 6-7, 2010. India has 24 recognised Indian languages, many with a distinguished literary tradition, but in the end the truth is that Indians are on their way to becoming WOGS or “western oriental gentlemen”! Now that may be an archaic expression but it well describes a country like India where the race is on to learn the English language!

Wogs generally speaking will dress like they do in the countries of the West, speak English for convenience (or Portuguese, French, Spanish, German by way of making a status statement), drink, eat, live, socialise, entertain one another in the manner they do in the countries of the West. The English speaking make up the aristocracy of modern India cutting across all barriers of caste, class or political limitations. Aren’t Indian language schools making way for schools to be educated in English instead of Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil? Who doesn’t want to send his or her child to a convent or an English mission school to be educated in the medium of English?

Call it the tyranny of language, one language - English! With dwindling number of readers in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, just to take the western Indian states, give or take a few more decades…say by 1050, how many readers will there be in the 24 official regional languages of India and consequently how many writers, poets, playwrights, essayists, film-makers will there be in the Indian languages? And don’t forget English itself is an officially recognised Indian language! India was a British colony for 350 years and Goa was a Portuguese colony for 400 years but the British and Portuguese have gone back to their countries …only their languages remain behind to continue to colonise the minds of Indians from all walks of life.

ENGLISH MENACE

THIS is more so in the case of the English language and this particular phenomenon is not just limited to India, but to China and all the other countries of the world where English courtesy history has become the link language as it is called. Even if in the process in country after country the national language or languages in India are taking a severe beating….and in many cases in real danger of getting lost in the mists of time give or take a few more decades.

In Goa, a fierce battle was fought to recognise Konkani as the language but the truth: Konkani as a language survived Goa’s Portuguese history (when Konkani was suppressed in various ways) but it continued to stay alive on the lips of a Konkani-speaking people — and never mind if the local language had or did not have any script identity! According to one of the speakers at the seminar, Uttam Ambhore, if Marathi — like Konkani - is a dialect of the much older language of Prakriti (with roots in Dravidian rather than Aryan-Sanskrit cultural contexts), then one can always give a Devanagiri or Roman script to Goans…so that the language at least has room to grow into a wealth of literature religious and non-religious….

Mr Ambhore, speaking on the subject of Western Indian literature, is himself a Marathi poet (with two anthologies to his credit) who teaches English in a college in Jalna. He presented a paper on identifiable trends in Marathi literature vis-à-vis poetry in the last ten years. The scene is not so dismal, he said, for a lot has been happening and is happening on the Marathi poetry front…it has come of age or so to speak. But it wasn’t always like today! There were many who gave Marathi literature a boost… Sant Dnyaneshwar earlier and in more recent times Arvind Kala. He spoke of how Marathi as a written language got a boost courtesy religious stalwarts like Sant Dnyaneshwar and Sant Tukaram who were in those old days tired of the tyranny of Sanskrit and in a rebellion fuelled a vast body of Marathi religious literature which later flowered into a sizeable body of drama, novels, poetry…it is thanks to all this that Marathi is thriving as a literary language today not only in Maharashtra but in Goa too (where Konkani did not see the kind of early impetus and flowering which Marathi did). In fact, many Goan writers started their writing careers writing in Marathi and later switched over to Konkani when Konkani became a cause celebre e.g. Laxmanrao Sardessai.

GOING PLACES

Vis-a-vis poetry Uttam Ambhore said that a poet is like a licence holder and has to be as free as a cloud to write in his own voice although the American poet T S Eliot did say that a poet generally comes with three voices i.e. he writes in a voice to himself, in a voice directed to another or other people, and in a voice in the present tense in dramatic manner. There’re dozens of poets writing in Marathi today but Arun Kala who says such things as “Ambedkar is the motherboard of my computer” is definitely a trendsetting name in today’s Marathi poetry. There is also a large body of Dalit poetry now and it is well recognised…amongst the names he mentioned are Loknath Yeshwant, Dhilip Chitre, Hemant Dave, Kavita Mahajan, Shridhar Namdetkar, Ajay Kamdar, Naina Adarkar, Purnanand Chari, Rajay Pawar, Hanumant Chopdekar, Urmila Vaingankar, Datta Naik, Suresh Bhat, Bhimrao Panchal, Salil Wagh of Pune who writes in creative computer language, and there is A Joshi . All’s well with Marathi poetry but basically — as with other Indian languages — there’s always a hope to find more readers not only in the original but also in translation…in the other Indian languages as in English! Writing in the Indian languages is always fraught with worry for there is the question…will there be more and more or few and fewer readers in the future?

But perhaps one should not worry about this! For there is the Sahitya Akademi, the country’s primary literary organisation, which was founded in 1954 with a mission and a vision to keep alive and promote Indian literature in the officially recognised 24 Indian languages and it’s been doing commendable work in this respect. Present at the seminar and co-ordinating the sessions was the Sahitya Akademi officer-in-charge from Mumbai, J Ponnudurai. The aim, he said, is not only to promote reading and writing in the Indian languages but in this respect it will also knit together national integration, “In terms of production the largest amount of literature is produced in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu…we come out with almost 300 titles every year in all the languages.”

LINK LANGUAGE

ASKED if the largest number was in Hindi, he refused to confirm this but said the Sahitya Akademi naturally concentrates more on the primary languages spoken by larger numbers of people in the country and which have a rich literary heritage. States like West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu are states where the state governments are keenly conscious of children speaking their mother tongue and policies and programmes facilitate efforts to make children take pride in speaking their own mother tongue…alas, this is not reflected in other states and so we have a generation of English-speaking parents now literally producing English-speaking children at home and out of the home!

According to Mr Ponnudurai, “Globalisation and economic factors are changing the matrix of our own cultures where there is unity in diversity…” English is also one of the Indian languages because a large number of writers are writing in English, but he says he’s seen maximum creativity and dynamism in Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Tamill, Kannada and Telugu literature…and mentions Yuva Ananthamurthy’s “Samskara”, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s “Pratham aalo”, even Birender Kumar Bhattacharya’s Assamese novel “Mritunjaya”. He says, it is one of the Sahitya Akademi’s aims to promote cultural unity through inter-lingual translations so that India’s multi-language cultural matrix stays alive and further enriched …apart from 24 annual Sahitya Akademi awards of Rs 1 lakh each for original work they also have awards of Rs.25,000 for translation work in the Indian languages. Writers like Maheshwari Devi, Yuva Ananathamurthy, Jaya Kantan, M T Vasudevan are well translated and, of course, the most translated is Nobel prize-winning Rabindranath Tagore!

In recent years, they’ve been concentrating on children’s literature in the various Indian languages and bring it on par with children’s literature available in English — which our children continue to parrot courtesy English medium schools! A problem is the Sahitya Akademi can bring out excellent children’s literature from Indian languages but various State governments must buy these books (which are economically priced at Rs 25-50) and introduce them in primary Indian language medium schools. They have translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s stories for children, Premchand Ki Kahaniya, Jayant Narlikar’s writings and several more, including science fiction, to delight and spark the mind of children in Hindi and in their own mother tongue.

WHAT’S IMPORTANT

IT is important to feed children’s mind at home when they’re young for home is where they acquire a taste for their own mother tongue…or soon, as Vasdev Mohi (convener, Sindhi Advisory Board, Sahitya Akademi) from Ahmedabad, commented dramatically, “Our children will have lost their mother tongue, they will no longer be able to speak it…we have cut off their tongue!” The responsibility of keeping one’s mother tongue alive is really on parents, he feels.

Altogether it was an exhilarating, thought-provoking presentation of papers on the subject of Western Indian literature, specifically Marathi, Gujarati, Konkani and Sindhi literature written in the last ten years. The papers covered poetry, short stories, novels, play writing (interestingly, a literary medium in which no women feature!) in these languages. Speakers included the prolific writer in Konkani, Pundalik Naik (convenor, Konkani Advisory Board, Sahitya Akademi). He speaks fluent shudh Hindi too — something hard to find in Goa! Most of the papers were presented in Hindi and in pretty high-brow Hindi, with just two or three papers in English…driving home the fact that Hindi has become the link language in multi-lingual India. Even as everyone chases English for better employment and business prospects in a mono-cultural globalized society!

Amongst the writers presenting papers were eminent Marathi writer and critic Sadanand More. From Gujarat were Nutan Jani (poetry), Ajit Thakur (short stories), Prasad Brahmbhatt (novels) and Bakul Tailor (plays) and from Goa there were Anju Sakhardande, who summed up the Konkani short story scene in Goa, while Rajay Pawar detailed Konkani poetry and Prakash Vazrikar’s paper detailed path-breaking novels written in Konkani (he himself is a veteran dramatist with several plays in Konkani). Goan Nilesh Mahale spoke about Konkani playwriting which, he says, is a very powerful literary medium to this day in Goa and not only vis-à-vis Romi Konkani’s tiatr.

According to Jess Fernandes, who has won a Sahitya Academy award for his collection of poems in Romi Konkani called “Kirvonnt” (”Treasure”), and who was present at the seminar, “In the last eight or ten years it is Konkani drama or tiatr which has been resurrecting young talent in Goa.” And contrary to common perception, he says, there’re lots of novels written in Romi Konkani which are of a high literary quality….it’s not just Konkani writing in the Devnagiri script which is worthy of awards!

UP HILL PROBLEMS

IT is clear that of the four languages Marathi and Gujarati are happening languages — while Sindhi and Konkani have problems of the up hill kind, specifically of the dwindling readership kind. According to the very eloquent and seasoned Sindhi writer, Vasdev Mohi, the Sindhi community split up badly during Partition. Those who came to India were far too busy seeking a roof over their head, to bother about Sindhi literature, “We lost our land, our Sindh, and in India had to fight to even include Sindhi as one of the official languages of India! And to stop it from being removed from the national anthem! I keep telling my people that we may have lost our land, but let us not lose our language along with it…it is very sad if you put the sunshine of literature in a cage, then our cultural identity is lost, it dies.” The Sindhi community is a scattered, rootless community today, and because it’s also highly Anglocised in lifestyle …there is a real danger of Sindhi literature dying out along with its older generation of writers and readers — and an entire historical, cultural idiom would be lost to the larger cause of keeping India’s collective literature alive.

Konkani in Goa and the Konkani belt could suffer from a similar fate given the schisms tearing speakers and writers in Konkani apart! In Goa where so much heat was generated with the movement to make Konkani (in the Devnagiri script) the official state language….the state’s only Konkani daily newspaper, the Sunaprant, is begging for readers! Goans may talk in Konkani (or even Portuguese or Marathi) but when it comes to reading habits, Hindu Goa reads in Marathi while Catholic Goa reads in Romi Konkani…everyone reads in English!

Where are the passionate readers in Konkani be it in the Devnagiri or Roman script? It’s a shame that a Konkani newspaper has few readers while several Marathi newspapers rule the roost in Goa! Konkani-speaking Goa is not Marathi-speaking Maharashtra. There is the criticism that while Marathi newspapers are full of vim and vigour Goa’s only Konkani daily in Devanagri, Sunaprant, is a dead bore! Look closely and it’s more a case of a vicious cycle setting in which neither political nor social will willing to break or do something about. It’s the tragedy of modern-day Goa. Everybody (except the bhaile who makes up a large chunk of Goa today) speaks in Konkani but few want to read it in Devnagiri or Romani Konkani!

These are the contradictions of the times we’re living in and we must be conscious about them. And all this is not to say that there’s nothing to cheer about vis-à-vis Konkani literature in both scripts offering a sensitive portrayal of Goan life and times through the ages, across class and caste divides (or even conversion divides). The old jewels of Konkani literature are Shenoi Goembab alias Waman Raghunath Varde Valaulikar (the “father of Konkani literature”?), Bakibab Borkar, Manoharrai Sardessai, Ulhas Buyao, Ravi Pandit, Madhur Borkar, Prakash Phadgaonkar… Pundalik Naik’s Achoo and Damodar Mauzo’s Karmelin were milestones, and of recent vintage names like Hari Borkar, Mahabaleshwar Sail, Ashok Kamat, Sujata Singbal come to mind. According to Prakash Vazrikar, Goa will be able to celebrate 100 years of the Konkani novel very soon! Konkani literature in Devnagiri and Romi lipi are being evaluated for Sahitya Akademi awards now…and this is a clear victory for literature in Konkani. Recognition has taken its own sweet time to come, but it has come.