ABOUT SOME ENDANGERED THINGS

 

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.

Incidentally, the fate of a river, however small, or a big waterbody like Lake Chilika, is connected with the fate of the people in the villages on its banks. The livelihood of the fisherman community is seriously affected; an avenue of income, however small, for the villagers is closed, as the river fails to attract tourists. Sometimes, those who can leave the village for a better place leave, but adjusting to the new place, where they are considered outsiders, is far from easy for them. And a river has stories. A small tributary would not have stories originating in the Puranic literature, but it would have local stories associated with it that reflect the local cultures. As a result of the migration, these beautiful stories face extinction in two or three generations. 

 

 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; we are 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 and new possibilities. They are what meaning we give them. What they mean for us is not what they mean for the younger generations. We know, for them, there is a new understanding of the “meaning of life”.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

ON "ENJOY LIFE"

 

When I retired from IIT Kanpur in 2004, a couple of my younger colleagues, who wished me well, told me that the time had come for me to “enjoy life”. And they gave content to that expression. What they said is something like the following: “eat well, enjoy your food, eat out at least once a week, take long walks morning and evening, generally take care of your health, go for pilgrimage and on secular travel too, especially abroad, see the programmes you want to watch on TV, read two or three newspapers a day, a good time-pass reading, and whatever else interests you, try to avoid reading anything from an academic point of view, give time to the family, play with your grand children and the like. Theirs was a dissenting view. At that time, the norm was different; those who retired sought equivalent assignments at similar Institutes or universities. In fact, getting such an offer from such an institution was viewed as a recognition of one’s standing in one’s discipline, especially in the case of the faculty of the Humanities and Social Science Department and the Science Departments. The reason for specifying these departments is that faculty members can be compared with their counterparts in some of the best universities in our country. Finding a teaching job at an Institute of Technology wasn’t difficult for the retiring faculty of the engineering departments. Those were the days when there was a proliferation of colleges and Institutes of technology in the country. A former IIT faculty member was welcome in whichever place he chose to work.

 I recall a colleague of mine saying this about a professor in my (Humanities and Social Sciences) Department who was retiring and was hoping to get an extension: “ Why is he asking for an extension? If he thinks he is good, he should find a job for himself at a good place.” I know my colleague didn’t like him and desperately looked forward to his leaving the Institute, but the logic of the observation can hardly be faulted.

A young colleague of the Civil Engineering Department explained to me the meaning of superannuation. “From now on, you are not going to be at a certain place at a certain time of someone else’s choice. No longer would you have to walk through a thick fog to teach a class at 8 AM or attend some boring and pointless administrative committee meeting.” This freedom can be thought of as part of the “enjoy life” idea.

A few months later, sitting next to me, a warm-hearted fellow traveller in his forties told me during a flight that since my sons were settled in life, I should make sure I don’t save anything from my pension: one month over, one month’s pension should be over. I should spend money on travelling, visiting my relatives, eating out at the best restaurants, etc. “You must enjoy life”, he told me (what remains of it, I thought), closing this topic and moving on to another. 

During that time, I once ran into a former colleague of mine at the Delhi airport, who asked me pleasantly what I was engaged in those days. He was from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.  I said that I was working on a fifteenth-century Odia version of the Sanskrit Mahabharata. His response was spontaneous and genuine. “ You are doing the right thing”, he told me, “that’s the kind of books you should read at this age”, he said. His words were not from the “enjoy life” perspective, as were those of the others, but from a modern version of the vanaprastha perspective, when life’s goals must change, and so must the aspirations. Behind his observation was surely the traditional idea that reading religious texts lifts the mind from the mundane.

In short, what all these opinions and suggestions amount to is that post-retirement, one must not do what one did while in service.

Whatever might be the merit of these well-meaning suggestions, I must confess I didn’t try to follow any of them. I had superannuated but not retired. Unlike my ten colleagues who superannuated from IIT Kanpur that year, I did not take a faculty position, although I had a couple of offers. I joined a research Fellowship at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, to write a book.  Thus, I had not reached the stage of following the advice of my well-wishers and the suggestions regarding how to live a good retired life.

All the same, I knew that implementing the suggestions would not be practicable, and not just for me. For example, consider the idea of giving time to the family. Needless to say, it applies to those who go to stay with their son. Now, one has time to give,  but there are no takers. Young people are busy, as we were when we were young. And they have to negotiate with a more difficult world. So, they take care of your needs and try to make you feel comfortable in your new situation, but it is too much to expect them to have leisurely conversations with you, the kind of conversation you want and need. Then, there are hardly any common topics for the same. What interests them is unlikely to engage you, and what interests you is unlikely to engage them. The world is not the same for us. I left behind my world of twenty-seven years one night to board a train for Puri. I had no inclination or energy to enter a different world and be at ease there. Anyway, this was not just my problem. Most of those retired people I meet during my walks in the apartment working space travel abroad to spend some months with their sons or daughters, who, they say, have little time for them and even fewer things to talk about with them. As for spending time with the grandchildren, they are busy with their schoolwork and homework, and they do not have sufficient time to play, let alone spend time with their grandparents.  

Morning and evening walks are fine, but if one lives in an apartment in a metropolis, then the walking space is limited and fixed. There is no opportunity for novelty. Those who you run into are the same people, but one doesn’t feel like sharing anything with them. They are familiar to you, but at the same time, distant from you. As for travel, it is expensive if you want to have a hassle-free journey. Apart from this, careful and detailed planning of the journey is a must. This was taken care of by the host during the service period. It is one thing when the host is going to receive you at your destination; it’s quite another when there is the hotel taxi instead. This is no problem for those who enjoy travelling. During my job period, I travelled quite a lot, but it was for work, and I enjoyed that. One attends a seminar, gives a guest lecture, participates in an important academic meeting and the like, and goes sightseeing with the host and other visitors at the event, after the work is over. I never enjoyed travel for travel’s sake. I knew I would hardly find it agreeable to do so post-superannuation.

Now, let’s leave these mundane matters here and focus on something else. What exactly does this expression really mean? If I remember correctly, it was only when I superannuated that I received this expression. So let me start by saying that it is a feel-good, valedictorian expression with no real content. “Enjoy” is a beautiful word. It is near-onomatopoeic for me. When I utter the word to myself, I get a taste of comfort in my mouth. Now, one “enjoys”, in the sense of “relish”, a mithai paan of Ram Ashrey in Lucknow, butter chicken or if one is averse to the idea of cooking a chicken, dal makhani of Moti Mahal in Old Delhi or golap jamu at Bikalananda Kar’s sweet shop in Cuttack. One enjoys a football match, a film, a book, visiting a ruin, a bit of trekking, watching sea waves rise and break, gossip, a conversation, writing personal letters, or the company of a friend. While some enjoy cooking fancy dishes, some love raising flowers. The world is full of resources for human enjoyment. But life is clearly not of the same category as these. It does not have the same relation with the “enjoyer” as, say, the mithai paan. The enjoyer enjoys because he (she / they) has life. The dead cannot enjoy. So how can one enjoy life, which is inseparable from him?

Now, language is not governed by logic but by coherence, and coherence is not a concept restricted to the real world, but covers possible worlds and imaginary worlds, as well. And, language brings into existence things that are not permissible by logic. Hence, Coleridge’s “sunny pleasure domes with caves of ice” has poetic, or in other words, “linguistic reality”. The same holds for Shelly’s “…the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean”. In the same way, in “enjoy life”, language creates the separation between the enjoyer and life, and makes the latter the object of the former’s enjoyment. H.W. Longfellow did the same when he wrote “We can make our lives sublime”. So, one’s life is one’s slate on which one writes one’s feelings, thoughts and experiences, and that is the content of one’s life. Once life becomes an object to be enjoyed by the “enjoyer”, then one could understand the expression “enjoy life” as advice to do things one likes. Needless to say, “the things” have to be understood as the socially and culturally acceptable things.

What my friends at IIT Kanpur told me can be understood from this perspective. One must withdraw from a busy schedule and hard and stressful work. Since one cannot abandon work, one must do easy work, work that keeps one busy but does not stress out. “Easy work” would mean, in the present context, teaching foundational courses and writing textbooks rather than doing research. “Research” here refers to high-level research, because research is necessary for textbook writing or writing books that present technical knowledge for non-technical readership. With respect to working with deadlines, a friend of mine, a Computer Science faculty member at the University of Hyderabad, put it so well: “Let the deadlines die.”  

Interestingly, no one but Brij Lal, Office Assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,  to which I belonged, asked me not to be dependent, especially on small things. I would ask him to help me do some small things, for instance, putting the pins in the stapler. “You must learn how to do it before you leave. Who will do such things for you?” He was concerned. He taught me how to do it. In addition to his work in the office, he made tea for the people in the Department. I used to take about ten cups of tea a day. I used to work in my office till 7.30 or sometimes 8 in the evening. After 6 PM, he would just refuse to give me tea. It was not good for me at my age, he would tell me. When time to leave the Institute came, he told me to reduce my tea intake and avoid sugar or sugar free tablets in my tea. “You have not looked after yourself well. You must be more responsible. If you take care of yourself, you will remain fit and will not have to depend on others.” Avoiding dependence on others was the main, almost the only, thing he had to tell me about how to live my retired life. Isn’t being independent in the above sense part of the idea of enjoying life? Enjoying life is not merely about “doing” but about “being” too.

THE MORAL CODE IN LAKSHMI PURANA AND A CORRECTIVE TO IT

 

In Lakshmi Purana, considered to be a revolutionary work for its position on caste, that was composed in the sixteenth century by Balaram Das, the great poet, the Moral code, following which one lives a virtuous life, is mainly about what the woman, especially the married woman, must do and must not do on Thursdays, amavasyas, and sankrantis, and what both men and women must not do on any day.  The Code mentions the “don’ts”, and the “do’s” have to be inferred from the “don’ts”, which is an economical way of listing the latter. A list of constraints would always be shorter than the list of the allowable. For instance, if someone has to specify what food to take on a particular day, it would be more economical to say what foods to avoid than to list what to eat: “eat everything except these.”

Despite the term “purana” in the title, Lakshmi Purana does not really belong to the category of “purana”, lacking the scope, complexity and depth of a purana. It is more akin to a brata katha (these are minor Puranic narratives associated with ritual fasts and observances). It celebrates the mahima, the power and the glory of goddess Lakshmi. In terms of the popularity of Odia Puranic works, it is only next, “distant next” of course, to Srimad Bhagabata, which is a highly sacred text, composed in the sixteenth century. If Lakshmi Purana is called a “purana”, it may be because it is also considered sacred, as it tells the story of the goddess Lakshmi and Lord Jagannath. It would not be incorrect to observe that many know Balarama Das today for Lakshmi Purana, rather than Jagamohan Ramayana, a great retelling of Valmiki Ramayana. He is the first to compose Ramayana in Odia.

The Moral Code in Lakshmi Purana is concerned with physical and mental well-being. It is about food, its wastage, and food-related pollution, orderliness, cleanliness, family duties, and respect for culture and tradition. The Code forbids women from eating non-vegetarian food, meat cooked in bottle gourd, roasted food, leftover food, or burnt food on Thursdays, the day of the goddess Lakshmi. On this day, they must not fry raw rice to make lia. They must not beat children. Now, children have to be disciplined, raw rice has to be fried, and spoiled and burnt food cannot always be thrown away, but these things must be done on other days. Both men and women are forbidden to eat rice with curd at night, and on Thursday, amavasya and sankranti nights, one must not take food at all. One must not eat facing the south or the west, nor must one eat sitting on the floor without something to sit on. This emphasis on food may be due to the traditional belief that food determines states of mind. Certain foods are believed to cause undesirable inclinations and passions. Incidentally, some vegetables and green leaves were considered to be like non-vegetarian food in this respect.  Today, we do not live by the belief systems from which these derive, and these prohibitions are no longer part of our common knowledge. Generally speaking, whatever of the past is unintelligible to us, we consider it superstition today. This is not to say that the old belief systems were reasonable or unreasonable. After all, belief systems are only belief systems.

Not washing one’s face in the morning, not washing one’s face after eating, taking food without washing one’s feet, and applying oil to the body after bathing are among the forbidden. A woman must have a head bath on Thursdays. Combing hair and tying it in the evening is forbidden. Sleeping on a crumpled bed, making a clumsy bed to sleep on and sleeping naked are among the forbidden. Sexual discipline is an important part of the code; sex is forbidden outside of wedlock and on certain days for a married couple. Women must treat guests with respect and light the sacred lamp in the evening, etc.; in short, they must respect tradition and observe traditional rituals and practices. And a woman who wants to live a virtuous life must not be quarrelsome, lazy, unpleasant and bold.

The most important part of the Code mentions the way the woman must treat her husband. For her, nothing is more important than serving her husband. No matter what religious acts she does – go on pilgrimage, observe bratas, perform tapas, worship gods and goddesses - she acquires no religious merit if her husband is displeased with her. She must make her husband’s joys and sorrows her own, must always obey her husband, be pleasant in her dealings with him, and never get irritated with him. 

In Lakshmi Purana, goddess Lakshmi, in the guise of a brahmin woman, said all these to a trader’s wife. Thus, the poet Balarama Dasa legitimizes the code by attributing it to the goddess herself. What is interesting is that in the second part of the Lakshmi Purana, which is the goddess’s story, she flouts the same moral code. In terms of the then social system, she was guilty of polluting herself and entering the sacred space of the kitchen without having a bath, and cooking for her family, thereby polluting the family. She asked for a divorce when her spouse, Lord Jagannath, asked her to leave Shree Mandira, their home, where they lived with her elder brother-in-law, Lord Balabhadra, and sister-in-law Lord Subhadra. It could be viewed as an act of boldness on her part. A woman must not be sahasi (bold), says Lakshmi Puran. She was guilty of cursing her husband and ensuring that her husband and her elder brother-in-law suffered hunger and humiliation while looking for food for twelve long years. She did not hesitate to resort to manipulations to achieve this objective. Granted that she had been grievously wronged by her husband, but avenging herself the way she did is not in conformity with the moral code she herself had communicated to the trader’s wife. When they reconciled, her husband requested that she return home, but she put some conditions that caste-based pollution must not apply to mahaprasad. What she asked for was justified, but would she qualify to be a virtuous wife, according to the Lakshmi Puran moral Code? I am not so sure. Her strategy was forcing, not pleading.

But there is not even a mild censoring of the goddess in the text. No one charged her with being a disobedient wife or of violating the code. However, it would not be correct to observe that the message of the story is that she, being a goddess, was not bound by the code for humans. The discourse of Lakshmi and Jagannath on the matter of her dismissal from the Great Temple is in human terms. When Lakshmi wanted a divorce, her spouse refused because it would bring disrepute to his family. This is human social discourse, as is her laying down conditions before her husband to return home. The story, in our opinion, should not be taken to suggest that power legitimizes flouting of the Code.

The narrative is about something else. It highlights a drawback of the code, sanctioned by tradition, that specifies the duties and the responsibilities of the woman, but not her rights. Let alone specifying the rights, it doesn’t even say whether she had any rights. A woman’s marginalization in society was a mere reflection of her marginalization in her own home. The goddess’s protest added a corrective to the moral code. The family must understand that the woman member must have her own space, and her identity and individuality must be accepted and respected. The narrative supports the wife’s resistance against maltreatment in the family; in a way, it does more – it elevates the wife’s protest to the level of almost a moral duty.  This is nothing short of a revolutionary idea when viewed in the context of the ethical thoughts and practices in sixteenth- century Odisha.

As for Balarama Das’s position on the caste system in this work, he certainly does not support it, but neither does he reject it, like Jainism, Buddhism, and Vaishnavism. Here, what he rejects is caste-based pollution. Lord Balabhadra was concerned that goddess Lakshmi would enter the kitchen and cook without having the purifying bath. Let alone going inside a low-caste person’s home, even touching them, even by accident, was considered defiling in those days. One needed a bath to purify oneself. It is this practice that the poet condemns.

Now, articulating this idea in a puranic composition was indeed a bold act against a crucial aspect of the caste system in the sixteenth century.  

Note: The non-use of the definite article before the name of the works (Lakshmi Purana, Srimad Bhagabata, etc.) is deliberate. A name is a proper noun. As for the uniqueness factor, every book is unique in some sense.

REMINISCING ABOUT ODIA DETECTIVE NOVELS OF THOSE DAYS

In 1953, when I was eleven years old, I left my mother, my childhood, innocence and my village behind and went to do my high school studies in Dhenkanal town and with that, I graduated from listening to ghost stories and being dead scared of darkness and the frightening spirits of darkness to reading detective novels and enjoying them. In my village I had never heard of detective stories. Those days for school students, reading anything other than the prescribed text books was considered bad by at least the lower middle class families; forget about detective stories, even newspapers were taboo for me. I didn’t feel the need for newspapers then; the only news that interested me was about the football matches played in Cuttack, which was the capital of Odisha then. A owner of a grocery shop near our school was generous enough to allow me to read the daily paper named “The Samaj”. Whatever was considered worthwhile for us to know about the world outside our school, was given to us in our classrooms: names of our President, Vice-President, Prime Minister, Chief Minister of our State, our Education Minister, Director of Public Instruction, etc.  Like the few classmates of mine, who wanted to experience the forbidden pleasure of reading detective books, I had to find ways of hiding the detective book I was reading from my teachers and my uncle at home. Once in the Mathematics – of all subjects! – Class, I was caught reading a detective novel. I had done this quite a few times in the class even when teaching was going on, but it was very risky. More than once I was caught and my teacher would make me stand on the bench with one hand up. For a more serious offence one had to stand on the bench with both hands up, reminiscent of the kirtan posture associated with Sri Chaitanya’s sect. Padmanabha Rath was a good teacher; he was as good at mathematics as at devising ways to punish us.

I cannot recall the names of those books. As for their authors, we, who had a passion for detective novels, never bothered about them. What mattered was the story. For us, all detective novels were interesting; it was only a question of degree: some were more interesting, some far more interesting, etc. It was only after reading dozens and dozens of such books that I felt some were not really all that interesting; however, all the same I did not fail to read even those; but I did not read those on payment. The dacoits did not scare me all that much; partly because those thugs weren’t ghosts, who we had never seen but were people like anyone on the streets, despite their black gowns with silly hoods and ugly masks. But there was another and weightier reason. I couldn’t afford to be scared because at home a detective book could be read when, if it was day time, there was no one there, which wasn’t very often the case or at late night, when my uncle would be on night duty, which was often the case, and my aunt and “cousin sister” (no apologies for using an “Indian English” expression) would be already asleep in the same room. I would light an oil lamp and go to another corner of the room to relish the doing of the dacoits and then of the private detective. In our detective novels, the private detectives turned out to be much smarter than the police. There was no explicit mention in the books as to whether they earned more money doing private investigation than those who were in the police department, with secured salary and pension. But we were never curious about the lives of those characters outside their job life.

Sometimes one had the urge for reading some particular book about which one had heard so much. Then one had to pay. Many times I paid two paisa (a rupee was sixty four paise) for such a book for a day. That was quite some money then. The day I borrowed a book, I had to forego part of my mid-day snack. But the prospect of mental enjoyment more than compensated for the half-satiated hunger.

The first detective book I read was about dasyu (dacoit) rabin (Rabin) and his younger brother dasyu rattan (Ratan). There was a beautiful princess there in the story who the senapati (army chief) of that small kingdom wanted to marry. He was already married, but had kept everyone in the dark about it. Not being a king, he couldn’t marry more than once. To marry the princess, he had the consent of the king, who was weak and dependent on him for his throne. The helpless princess somehow managed to get in touch with Rabin and Ratan, who she called “brother” and these two not only saved her from that marriage but also exposed the senapati, humiliated him and put him squarely in his place. The good dasyus became my heroes instantly. They were not only good, but very intelligent. What impressed me most was that they would announce in advance that they would be at such and such place and would be there and do what they wanted to do and escape, no matter how many policemen or soldiers were in duty to arrest them. I read that book many times.

Unlike Rabin and Ratan, the dacoits in the books I read thereafter were crooks and criminals – each one of them. There was this book called “Denjer Signal (Danger Signal)”. That was what the thug called himself. He was a ruthless murderer, who always managed to escape after murdering his victim. May be the novel I have in mind was one of a series - Denger Signal series? Except for Rabin and Ratan, I do not recall there to be any detective story in which the rogue was not eventually caught. But it was never the police who caught them. They were always outwitted by the criminals. It was always the private detective who got them - he always had a friend who was his assistant in investigation, like Sherlock Holmes had his Dr. Watson. The police came only at the very end with the handcuffs. Denjer Signal attracted me probably because I was fascinated then by trains and train signals.  

These novels introduced me to the life of the rich, who were not royals. Generally speaking, in these novels only the criminals enjoyed a rich life style. I never read a detective novel or a story where the criminal walked to his destination or rode a man-pulled rickshaw or a cycle rickshaw, as we, the commoners did. He rode for free; the rickshaw wallah did not have the courage to ask him for money. I encountered many words before I saw what they referred to: the crooks who behaved as law-abiding men during the day and killed at night sat on sofas which I had never seen. I knew the word “sofa” before I saw the object called “sofa”. But it was the food that they ate that fascinated me. They would have anda bhaja (egg fry, i.e., omelette), mansa chap (mutton chop), kalija bhaja (liver fry), kukuda jhola (chicken curry), cakes and biscuits. I had tasted none of them, except biscuits, but those I had eaten were pathetically different. As for eggs, I knew the taste of only the boiled egg. In my childhood days it was sick food for me. In the novel, I would re-read the lines containing these food names again and again. They were remote, vague and alluring. When at 15, I went to Cuttack for my college education in Ravenshaw College, I had my first anda bhaja and mansa chap – at the best restaurant for these foods those days: Khan Hotel. Today I cannot say which I relished more: the food words, which I would roll and roll and chew in my mouth or the delicious stuff that I had at Khan Hotel. Before I leave this topic, I must mention that Rabin and Ratan were described eating just biscuits dipping them in a cup of tea. They were vegetarians.

I cannot recall when I began to read Kanduri Charan Das’s detective novels. For the first time, the name of the author mattered to me. At A.H. Wheelers in Cuttack or Puri or Kharagpur railway station I would look for Kanduri Babu’s novels. I must have read almost all his novels. These were intelligent novels where the focus was on investigation. In his novels, it was not the criminal, but the detective, who was the hero of the story. The memory of one of his stories lingers in me still. It was the deeply touching tragic story of Sadakat, a good man who had killed a criminal in order to avenge the killing of the girl he loved.  The criminal was a “king”. Sadakat was found and was arrested, but I hoped for once that the author had planned a different ending!  Now, more than five decades after I read Sadakat’s story, I still feel very sad about Sadakat. 

Language Endangerment and Affirmative Action

 

Endangered languages are a reality in many parts of the world and since at least the nineteen nineties, thanks to the influential work by Professor Ken Hale and other endangered language linguists, language death has been viewed in many countries, including India, as a societal problem that needs to be addressed urgently and seriously. It would be entirely reasonable to suggest that those whose languages are safe, must try to stop the extinction of languages, spoken by the marginalized speech communities. Many sensitive speakers of extinct languages, who had to shift to other languages under compelling circumstances, have a sense of disturbed identity and sometimes even a feeling of lack of self-confidence.  

 

So enabling action is needed to preserve endangered languages. Now, it may sound very unfeeling and unjust, but the fact remains that not all severely endangered languages can be saved from extinction. An unsentimental and reasonable plan of action would be to classify these languages into two broad categories: (a) those that have a good chance to be preserved and (b) those that are so severely endangered – at the “moribund” state - that realistically, they cannot be saved. This distinction may be there in the minds of many endangered language scholars, activists and policy-makers themselves, but they do not say so in public, quite understandably, because it would be socially incorrect to say so.

 

We suggest that affirmative action would not be the same for both. Perhaps the best way to revitalize an endangered language of the category “a” would be to provide it a domain of use where there would be no alternative to it. This can happen if the State ensures that primary education is imparted in the child’s mother tongue and the adults of the concerned speech community attain literacy in their own language. Equally importantly, there is need for strong social support, as suggested above. Endangered language activists should use every platform to sensitize the speakers of the relevant dominant language(s) about the importance of preserving the languages under threat. At the same time, they must try to persuade the leaders of the community of endangered language speakers about the benefits of early education in the mother tongue. The preparation of teaching material for primary school children, based on sound pedagogical principles, teachers’ manuals, story books, etc. in such languages must become the academic part of the endangered language activism. If the preservation of a certain language is the objective, rather than the archiving of that language, then the documentation of those resources of the language that are directly needed for the preparation of the teaching materials at the primary education level must receive priority: basic vocabulary, including the more commonly used words, word formation devices, basic syntax (sentence construction) and conversational interactions in a variety of day-to-day contexts, for instance. Our endangered language projects concerned with the languages of the category (a), must not follow objectives, not directly related to the preparation of the teaching materials, and the competent agency should monitor that this happens. It must also be ensured that the teachers of such languages, who for quite some time would have to be the outsiders to the relevant speech community, must have not only competence in the relevant language but also the right attitude to it.  They must not think that their language is superior to the (endangered) language they are teaching.

 

Now, the nature of documentation has to be different in the case of the more severely endangered languages, which are not in a position to be saved. These languages have to be archived. In the case of such a language, the documentation would be delinked from the production of teaching material and must be exhaustive, so that the future researchers - linguists, ecologists, historians, including the historians of culture, anthropologists, among others – would have a clear idea of the language. Comprehensive documentation is necessary for yet another reason. It is possible that a future generation of such a language would be interested in reviving their language, although this would be a rather rare case. For that to happen, documentation of only the lexicon and the grammar would be inadequate. A language cannot be revived if only its lexicon and grammar are available. Therefore, documentation must include a range of discourses, imaginative and knowledge-based, oral and written. 

 

 Incidentally, probably the most known case of the revival of a language till now, is that of Hebrew. However, it must be noted that it had never really totally gone out of use; it had never become extinct, like, say, Aka-Bo. In course of time, the use of this developed language got restricted to only sacred domains. Its revitalization has meant its being used in day-to-day conversation and in a range of modern, secular contexts. If that had not happened, which was due, ignoring many details, more to the will of the speakers and their collective effort in this direction, than anything else, strong support for the language and its development would not have come from the state. Now, this cannot obviously be said for the vast majority of languages under threat today in our country.

 

  

 

TYPICALLY ODIA: PAKHALA

Friends and fellow travellers in a lazy mood in second AC compartments of long distance trains would occasionally ask me a “time pass” question: is there some food item that is typically Odia? Nothing odd about this question; after all, food is a good subject for lazy talk, and in a relaxed mood talking about food can be as appetizing as the food itself.  That apart, because of a certain history, which need not concern us here, Odias often tend to view it as a rather loaded question, meaning whether there is some food item that Odias eat but their neighbour Bengalis don’t, and more generally, whether Odia culture is not just an extension of Bengali culture. This of course is not to say that every person who asked me this question had the above in mind. However the fact remains that most of us, urban educated Odias, have, more often than not, tended to take this question far more seriously than it deserves. In fact, it is often taken as almost a challenge thrown to the Odias; it is seen as a prestige issue. It is hardly ever realized that this question is based on a fundamentally flawed notion that political and cultural boundaries are sharp and clear. The fact is that political, linguistic and cultural boundaries do not often converge. And as for the specific case of Odisha and Bengal, for hundreds of years, people have migrated from one state to the other. As a result, there has been close interaction between them at many levels. Under the circumstances it would be a futile exercise to look for cultural uniqueness of any one community at the level of day-to-day life, say, at the level of food or dress. However, since culture, like language, is not a homogeneous entity, having subcultures, and even sub-subcultures - like a language has social and geographical dialects - attempt to answer such a question may not really be all that pointless.

   In any case, I have always named three food items – in the secular context - which I believe are typically Odia: pakhala (pronounced as pakhaala), dalma (pronounced as daalmaa), and a sweet called khira (pronounced as khiraa). Pakhala is rice-in-water, and is called panta bhat (pronounced paantaa bhaat) in Bengali, and has been condemned as a worthless, unhealthy food. It is said in both Odisha and Bengal that pakhala is a tamasik food, which causes dullness and stupidity; “eater of pakhala” is an abuse in both places.  Some fifty years ago, I knew of people, mainly social climbers, who would not say in front of others that they had eaten pakhala at home that day. Things have changed now. The status of pakhala is high these days. In star hotels these days one can get it - the posh variety, with curd, small pieces of green chillies, ginger, coconut, among others, and elegantly cut coriander leaves, etc. added to it. It is now recognized as a great summer food.

   Pakhala is basically a poor man’s food. It is this, more than anything else that explains its negative image. It can be eaten with just some salt, one or two green or red chillies, and an onion, if there is one at home. In the villages during the monsoon, people take simple homemade achar with pakhala. A little chutney of roasted dry fish goes well with it, but many educated people dismiss it with a sneer as a poor man’s taste, often quite pretentiously, I think.   In Odia rural literature, a farmer’s wife carrying pakhala to her husband working in the field is a symbol of Odia peasant life. For decades at least, no food item has been the target of so much indignity as pakhala, and with the exception of dry fish, no food has been associated with so much hypocrisy as pakhala. I like it, in its simple, unsophisticated form, not just for its taste, but also for the richness of meanings it has come to be associated with down the years.

ABOUT OUR SCHOOL EDUCATION

The other day the great entrepreneur Mr. Narayana Murthy observed (see The Times of India, Bengaluru edition, 17.11.2015) that whereas RTE (Right To Education) is a progressive step, it is unlikely to yield the expected results. What is needed, he rightly said, is that the government schools, where the children of the poor study, must impart quality instruction. 

I have never been very optimistic about RTE. I have talked to quite a few who are directly or indirectly connected with school education and have noted that  hardly any of them seriously believes that this initiative will yield results. It seems the best that can be said about it is that it is well intentioned. For the successful implementation of RTE, the social environment has to be conducive, which is not the case as of now. The reasons are many but are rather too obvious to need a detailed telling. Schools may be opened but if parents are disinclined to send their children to school because they contribute to the family’s earnings, what can be effectively done by the State? No legislative solution, say, in the form of an Act that would force the parents to send their children to school, can work because it is immensely difficult to implement the relevant law when the poor are concerned. 

But where are the schools in the first place? In many parts of rural India children have to walk considerable distances to reach their school braving all odds including hostile weather, bad pathways, etc. The Odia  television channel, OTV, has, quite a few times, shown children walking on a rope bridge made of just a couple of ropes in order to cross a small river in spate to reach their school. And in all likelihood this situation may not be specific to Odisha. And in such areas more often than not schools have leaking roof. So goes the Odia proverb “nahi mamu tharu kana mamu bhala (better to have a blind uncle than have no uncle)”, that is, something is better than nothing. But when it comes to the roof, one is not sure whether, when it rains and when it comes to children,  the difference between no roof and a leaking roof is really all that great!

Coming to teachers, where are the teachers? Then where are the class rooms? Almost without exception in the rural areas in particular, the number of teachers in our primary, upper primary and even high schools is grossly inadequate. Sometimes there is just one teacher at a primary school. He teaches students of various classes in one room. If he is absent one day, the school becomes non-functional. School teaching is a low-salaried job, so it is not a career option for a young, qualified person; it is often a compulsion. Living conditions can be challenging in the interior rural areas; so no teacher wants to go there.  The children there enjoy the privileges of RTE only technically.

For some years now, in Odisha, as a matter of policy, no student, till the Board examination in class X,  is being detained because of poor performance in the annual examination. Promotion to the next higher class is automatic. And mid day meal system with an egg for every child has been introduced, which is some real affirmative action. There is, however, no clear evidence that the egg market as flourished to the extent expected as a consequence, at least in Odisha. Going by OTV again, the mid day meal scheme isn’t working even satisfactorily, let alone “well” - for the children, that is. The monitoring of this well intentioned scheme is by no means a small matter. However, the “no-detention policy” has been very successfully implemented. Fear of examination and anxiety about promotion to the next higher class has disappeared and so has teaching and learning. The teachers and the taught are both relaxed at school and the former have time to get engaged in other lucrative activities. Teaching is now done at the teacher’s home or the coaching centres in the form of private tuition. But this is a learning facility that the poor and the marginalized cannot afford. (It seems the government of Odisha is presently reviewing the no-detention policy, as is  the government of Maharastra.)

One can go on enumerating the problems, but there is no need. Not just that. It would amount to engaging in an act of self-pity, which can be destructively comforting. The school situation is known to everyone. And everyone has the same solution as Mr. Narayana Murthy’s: the government must act to improve the situation. Let us be absolutely clear about this: for the government to act, no fact finding committee needs to be set up, no survey is needed, statistical data are not necessary - there is no reason for comfort if one knows from the report of such a committee that, say, seventy percent, not eighty percent of our schools are in particularly bad shape. No research is needed to arrive at significant ideas; there is no need for insights from social or pedagogical theories. The issue here is not about availability of information or knowledge creation; it is about doing what is doable effectively.  As for money, it is certainly needed; plenty of it, but it is not that there is a serious dearth of funds today. It is just that it is not reaching where it is meant to reach – the familiar problem!

What is needed is will – social will, not just political will, as the cliché in modern discourse goes. Governmental intervention will always prove to be inadequate without people’s sincere involvement. Conscious effort must be made by all those who have benefited from education to contribute in some way to the task of increasing the awareness of the people living in remote areas with regard to the empowering potential of education. With awareness will come involvement. But this is only the necessary condition. 

Positive change in school education, it must be strongly emphasized, cannot be brought about by the government alone. For even some noticeable improvement to take place, active participation of all those who have been in positions of privilege in our society is needed. Instead of setting up their own private schools, the most privileged and the most visible must sincerely cooperate with the government for setting up government schools where needed and for the improvement of the quality of instruction in the existing government schools. One thing is certain: well meaning words are not enough, neither is purely individual effort. .