In the nineteen-nineties, the word “endanger”
and its forms, such as “endangerment” and “endangered”, entered linguistic, and
then educational and popular discourse on language. UNESCO played a significant
role in the process. But the term “endangered” need not be restricted to the
species and languages. It can be applied to attitudes, belief systems, social
systems, cultural practices, and the unspectacular and uncelebrated myths,
tales, songs, proverbs, idioms, names, riddles, jokes, vachanas or wise sayings, tongue twisters, dahuka boli (ritual couplets used by a category of servitors during
the Ratha Yatra in Puri), euphemisms, among others. Because of the popularity
of the “uncle” and “auntie”, the relevant local language kinship terms have
virtually gone out of use. Encouraged by UNESCO, many language activists, language
educators, and language policy planners advocate for revitalizing dying
languages. We do not suggest that the linguistic creations mentioned above be
revived, as they just cannot be. The world has changed, the times have changed,
and people have changed. For future generations to know their past, we should carefully
document what is gone and what will go, sooner or later. This is what we are
doing here. Our illustrative examples are from Odisha, but the general
observations are not restricted to endangered things in Odisha alone. Here we
are observing the process of change from an urban, educated, elderly lower-middle-class
person’s perspective.
Think of “conversation” – a conversation that
is not an information-sharing act or focused on some specific gainful purpose. For
instance, one drops in at a friend’s place or meets a friend or someone one
knows, say a colleague, during a walk, for instance, and then they talk, pleasantly,
unhurried and meanderingly, moving from one topic to another, and freely,
without being over-conscious of what one is saying, that is, all the time
conscious of what can be safe to say to another, be a friend or a casual acquaintance,
and what is not politically and socially correct to say and must be avoided. Such
a conversation as this is increasingly becoming infrequent. Friends meet on the
beach or in a park, but their exchanges are purposeful, information-centric and
short. Talking for pleasure is considered a waste of time. Visit the bookstalls
at the airports of our metropolitan cities,
and you will find manuals of effective communication. Useful,
well-written books. But they are about successful communication in the
workplace. You would not find a book about how to become an engaging
conversationalist outside of the workplace, in day-to-day life, using the word “conversation”
in the sense above.
The same holds for reading purely for pleasure.
Contrary to what is generally said about the younger generation’s disinterest
in reading these days, a careful observer of their reading habits would find
that they read, but not for aesthetic satisfaction, intellectual illumination
or as a quality leisure-time activity. They read primarily for information, which
they think would be of use to them in some way. It could be a newspaper, a news
magazine, or a book, and only occasionally do some of them read biographies, if
they are not too long, are of celebrities especially in the fields of sports, cinema,
and business, then popular AI literature, sports narratives, travel writing, current
politics, social intelligence, stress management, personality development and
the like, not for the quality of thought or expression, but for information,
and with no intention for critiquing or reflecting on the same.
The “library culture” has weakened. From my own
experience in Odisha about sixty years ago, some undergraduate and postgraduate
students of the local colleges in Cuttack used to visit the city's public
libraries fairly regularly. They didn’t go there for any academic purpose. They
went there for the pure pleasure of reading whatever they would find
interesting. They would go to the bookshelves, see what new books had arrived,
flip through the pages of some book, and if they found it interesting, they would
spend a while on it. Reading is no longer a pastime; you read a book for an instrumental
purpose. Book-reading is work now.
Much like walking. In the mornings and the
evenings, in the cities, big and small, in the parks and the gardens or on the
side roads of the small waterbodies, or in the walking areas of apartments, one
finds many morning and evening walkers. Ask one of them who is in their forties
when he had his last leisurely walk, without a thought about time or work to
attend to. I guess he wouldn’t remember. Maybe he never had a purposeless walk!
Walking has now become an exercise for physical fitness; walking for walking’s
sake is a forgotten concept.
I recall how, when I was a nineteen-year-old,
on a moonlit evening, I once walked, all alone,
on the nearly one and a half miles or more long railway bridge on the
river Mahanadi from the Cuttack end to the other end, just for the experience
of a long and lonely walk on an unusual, in fact, a forbidden, place to walk.
From the other end of the bridge, I walked to the Jagatpur railway station and
booked a ticket to Cuttack and had a late dinner in my hostel. There was no
intention of being adventurous or to boast about it before my batchmates. It
was more about doing something that many would not do.
Ask one in his forties how often, during the
last twenty years, he sipped his morning tea, without watching television or looking
at a smartphone to find out what had happened to the world while he was asleep
or reading a newspaper, instead, at the sky from his room or at whatever met
his eye. I am sure he would hardly have done so, because that would have
amounted to wasting his time.
From cultural practices, let us turn to a cultural
attitude.
Now, our rivers, which are tributaries of the
long rivers, are among the most unsafe things. Deo, Banshadhara, Salunki, Karo,
Sapua and Jira are among the many rivers that
become rivulets except during the monsoon. The
river Baulimal is drying up. The sacred
river Prachi flows like a stream for most of
the year. When the day arrives for a holy dip,
it is filled with tuck-loads of water. People
have to take a dip in the ‘constructed” river. No one minds. The river is not
important; the ritual is.
Aquatic weeds have covered many lakes, ponds
and streams. In some instances, one cannot see the water. Water bodies in and
around big cities and industrial towns are polluted.
At the same time, the number of rivers that are
worshipped with regular evening arati is increasing.
To us, the condition of the rivers described
above is a symptom, not the problem. Our attitude towards the rivers, lakes and
other water bodies has changed. Our cultural attitude was to respect them,
which translated into maintaining their cleanliness. We were in a living
relationship with them. In gratitude, we worshipped them ritually on certain
days. We no longer relate to them in the same way. They are “objects” for our
use. Thus, we pollute them in the name of modernity – where else can we release
the sewage and the industrial waste more easily and with less cost? We offer
arati and fill them with water from outside on days of the sacred dip in the
name of tradition. From time to time, we hear talk about rejuvenating or
reviving a dying or near-dead water body. We feel good, but unless our attitude
changes and we respect water bodies in the sense above, can there be a
permanent, or at least a long-term solution to the problems of water bodies?
There is no need to crib, one might say. Hasn’t
the poet said, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new”? We are not
cribbing, only ruminating over the process of change. Many old things have
faded into non-existence. New things have come. With them have come new
challenges. But for us, the older generations, what meaning we give them is
important. What they mean for us is important. For younger generations, we
know, there is a new understanding of the “meaning of life”.
