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The
roots of India's literary tradition go back to the rich tribal
or 'adivasi' (the first inhabitants) literature of India. However,
of the numerous languages in India only a limited number of languages
are recognised and promoted by the 8th Schedule of the Constitution
of India and the national bodies like the Sahitya Akademi and
the National Book Trust. There are more than eighty other  languages
for each of which
there are more than 10,000 speakers.
Anthropologists, sociologists and historians
who have worked on some of these languages have made valuable
observations on the state of literary and imaginative activity
in these languages. In the case of some of these languages, the
literary works - songs, stories, narratives, episodic verses,
etc. - have been rendered into the recognised and scheduled languages
of India. Occasionally, English renderings of such collected
works have been  published. Many of these
languages have been facing the threat of extinction mainly owing
to the absence of educational institutions employing these languages.
The new generation has to attend schools in which the medium
of instruction is one of the recognised and scheduled languages.
Similarly, there are few job opportunities available within the
non-scheduled and non-recognised languages. It is important to
recognise that though the communities using these languages may
be socially and economically backward, the linguistic and imaginative
activities in these communities calls for attempts at careful
conservation and sincere promotion. It becomes necessary therefore
to collect and publish literature available in these languages
before any further depletion of their rich literary heritage
takes place.
The
Oral Traditions of India
Until the practice of printing and publishing
literary works became well established during the nineteenth
century (and for some languages in the early years of the twentieth
century), literature in India existed mostly in oral traditions.
Even when the literary works were written and handed down the
generations in manuscript form, the general dissemination of
literary work depended on its oral circulation. This oral casing
included works from scriptures to folksongs and drama. Even after
the medium of printing became well established in India, some
of the oral traditions have survived. They include |
plays, songs,
stories and aphorisms. In recent years, the desirable spread
of literacy in our country has made the survival of the oral
traditions difficult. It will be desirable to document, examine
and study the enormous wealth of oral literature in India. Such
an attempt will add extremely valuable materials to our literary
histories and substance to our literary criticism. The task involved
is so vast and involves so many languages that only a central
body with resources and expertise at its disposal such as the
Sahitya Akademi can undertake it if atleast a partial justice
is to be done to these traditions. The work will be almost identical
in nature to the work involved in the study of tribal literature
and performance practices. That is, the oral traditions of Indian
literature will have to be documented and published as 'performances'
with the help of audio and video recordings. The difference will
be that many of the oral traditions are to be found in the main
languages - Assamiya, Bangla, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri,
Kannada, Konkani, Manipuri, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali,
Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Sindhi, Urdu, etc. Therefore,
a number of scholars from these languages can be involved in
the work of documentation of oral traditions. That is to say,
the procedures of study involved will be identical for the tribal
literatures and the oral traditions but the expertise required
will be of different nature and order.
The
Plan of Action
Considering that communities speaking the non-scheduled
and non-recognised languages are spread all over the Indian sub-continent,
it will not be possible for any single individual to undertake
the entire work of collection of literature in these languages
belonging to four different language families.
It will be necessary to involve a large number
of compilers in the project and to carry out the work over an
extended period of time for its successful completion. Therefore,
a body like the Sahitya Akademi will have to undertake the work
as an integrated national project.
In 1996, the Akademi launched the Language Development
Board to meet this need. As per the recommendations of this Board,
a project office has been established in Vadodara. The initial
phase of the project is planned for a period of five years, though
the entire project may extend to a period of ten to fifteen years. Many national
seminars and workshops have already been organised under this
project. |
