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 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. Many language activists, language educators, and language policy planners advocate revitalizing dying languages. We do not suggest that the linguistic creations mentioned above should be revived, as they cannot be. The world has changed, the times have changed, and people have changed. All we can do is carefully document what is gone and what may go sooner or later. This is what we are doing here. Our illustrative examples are from Odisha, but the discussion is not restricted to Odisha. And it is from an urban, lower-middle-class 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, and then they talk pleasantly, unhurriedly and meanderingly, moving from one topic to another, and freely, without being over-conscious of what one is saying—that is, being conscious all the time of what can be safely said to another, be it a friend or a casual acquaintance, and what is not politically and socially correct 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 airports in our metropolitan cities, and you will find manuals on 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 the workplace, 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 do read, but not for aesthetic satisfaction, intellectual illumination, or as a quality leisure-time activity. They read primarily for information, be it a newspaper, a news magazine, or a book, and only occasionally do some read biographies, if they are not too long, of celebrities—especially in the fields of sports, cinema, and business. Then there is 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 of critiquing or reflecting on the same.
The “library culture” has weakened. From my own experience in Odisha about 60 years ago, some undergraduate and postgraduate students of 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 found 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. Thus, book-reading is work.
Much like walking. In the mornings and evenings, in cities big and small, in parks and gardens or on side roads near small water bodies, or in walking areas of apartments, one finds many morning and evening walkers. Ask one of them who is in their forties when he last had a 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.
Ask him 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, just looking at the sky from his room or at whatever met his eye. I am sure he would hardly have done so, because that would amount to wasting time.
Now, our rivers, which are tributaries of 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 truckloads 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 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 sewage and industrial waste more easily and at 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 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 generation, 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”.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own)
Prof. B.N.Patnaik
Retd. Professor of Linguistics and English, IIT Kanpur
Email: bn.patnaik@gmail.com
(Images from the net)