A few unconnected events coalesced to create a feeling of a deafening
sound of a bell tolling. It was a wake-up call without there being any sound-
quite eerily it was because there was no alarming sound at all that it was a
matter of such urgency. Was it was too late already? Let’s see what actually happened.
***
Some months back a cousin of mine emailed me a family
photograph that he had dug up from his archives. It was a black and white group
photograph taken in the back drop of the trellis of our now razed ancestral
home. My cousin, a few years my junior, had queried me if I knew anyone from
the group, he being my father’s younger brother’s son. Yes, I replied back, I
knew only two people from the group of perhaps thirty, all faces being clearly
visible. Two children sitting in the front row at one end were identifiable-
one, a boy, was my grandfather’s younger brother, and the little girl next to
him, was his younger sister, now in her late eighties, and the only living link
between that group of thirty and us. Replying to my cousin was not a matter of
a resounding “yes” for me, since apart from these two close family members whom
I identified, I could not place anyone else from the group, though I knew that
each one of them was somehow related to me, most of them by blood.
***
A fortnight back an acquaintance of mine, a man settled in
the US for the last thirty years, came in with his mother to consult me for the
lady’s knee pain. After the clinical formalities were done, we got chatting
since our families were connected back in the past. He mentioned that prior to his coming into our
city he had visited his unlce in Mumbai, the third and the only living brother
of his late father. There he had asked his uncle to speak about his family’s
history, their ancestral home, and their ancestral vocations and so on, while
he recorded all of it in his device. This acquaintance told me that ever since
he had lost his father, he was looking forward to somehow connect with his
past- his family- that he knew nothing about, and to him it felt deeply
satisfying to be able to know first-hand what his family was like in days gone
by, prior to his birth.
***
Few months back the Times of India carried a story of a man
who had died recently on one of the islands of the Andamans- the far flung
group of islands of India in the Bay of Bengal. This man happened to be the
last individual who spoke his native language. At that point, I remembered the
book, The Way Finders, by the
Canadian Ethnobiologist, Wade Davis. He affirms that at present, once in every two weeks one entire language
becomes extinct in the manner depicted above, and with that extinction is
erased a sizeable record of human civilization in that part of the world where
the language was once spoken. He poignantly exhorts the reader to imagine a situation
where he or she is the last living human being who can speak a language which
will be no more available in a few days when he is gone forever. What would be
your feelings in such a situation? Though he does not ask this, I feel he might
as well: would you still want to converse with others exclusively in English, even
when the other person can still speak another language of common inheritance?
***
A lot was transmitted through the oral communication, it
still is, and it is possible to save that method of communication and
transmission, if we just wake up to this looming crisis of rendering everything
to a universal uniformity.
Our civilization, our histories, our scriptures, our
cultures, our values, our customs, our national and regional identities have
come down to us from the oral traditions, from practices that were as diverse, as
they were rich and meaningful. In today’s parlance these oral transmissions
would be archaic- but is something so profound, something that has birthed the
various civilizations really ever archaic?
If your mother tongue is not English, and you work and live
where English is the main language outside the house, what would you do for the
preservation of the language in your branch of the family? What would you do to
preserve your larger cultural heritage?
A young person, not yet married, when being told about these events just
mentioned above, questioned me: what if it was just herself who did not coach
her children to speak in her mother tongue? I asked her, what if all the young
people do the same? She sensed the
answer and nodded with a smile. After a while, she confessed that of course she
would teach her mother tongue to her children, when they came into the world.
***
Let me leave you with a story that happened in my consulting
room sometime back.
A man I will name as Hardik, had immigrated to the US after always
having lived and conducted business in my city till the age of 40. At age 55
years, he comes in to consult me for his shoulder problem, with a MRI scan in
his hand. As I started explaining to him his problem, as reflected in the scan,
in the Gujarati language, which I thought was the mother tongue for both of us,
he interrupted me, and with a smirk, he asked me to explain what I thought was
his problem in English.
I told him English was his problem for he had forsaken
Gujarati which would have been the easiest for him to make sense of what was
being told to him, while if I communicated in English, he would still be left
in the lurch, for English was still a foreign language for him. In all fairness
to him, he apologized: not to me, but to his mother tongue, for the huge loss that
he perceived was his alone.
