A PERSPECTIVE ON NOMADS
Cultural expressions in a country are as varied as there are culture group and languages to express them. Languages use in a multilingual country like India can be best exemplified by the help of a cultural parallel in naming.' When a child is born, he is given a pet name by the parents. This is the sraddha nama 'the affectionate name', which with or without variations is used by all around the child to address him. After sometime a formal christening ceremony is held in which a name is given to the child which is used for most public purposes. A child is born in a social milieu where he develops emotional identity with the language spoken around him. This langue with its social dialectal variations is still comparable to his sraddha nama. This he uses for the expression of hi self identity, creativity and extended group solidarity. If he is exposed to variations, he still recognizes in them his own extended self and his capacity to extend his expressiveness. He then begins to realize that of the many forms one is more acceptable to the society. This is the natural standard, socially the most acceptable form. If the child is exposed to two languages rather than to two dialects from the beginning he appears to be treating them as variations of one until both are clearly differentiated. Both chare his affectionate attention and he develops ambidexterity in their use.
Schooling is a major break in the natural acquisition of language where ignorant pedants teach the non-existent logic, identify varieties as incorrect, create a low self image be branding the home language as non-standard and try to establish their right to teach the correct and the standard. It creates the first major emotional disturbance, the first alienation from reality and it sows the first seeds of social discrimination, violation and repression. His real image of man is sought to be moulded into a plastic substance and rebuilt into the plaster men and women of George Segal or white painted wooden sculpture of Frantisek, Storek, beautiful but broken, mutilated and emptied. In the naming parallel this can be compared to the ritual renaming of the bride at the time of marriage to signify realignment of relations. But when this new name seeks to replace the old in the process of institutionalization of relation, it represents the latent nausea and dreams of the past and the wreckage, anger and hopes of the present.
The claim of the school that it teaches as well as helps create a standard needs to be examined carefully. Standard resulting from the interpenetration of different varieties of language in use is a natural process. This no only results in the mutual enrichment of languages in contact, but also results in an enriched variety mutually acceptable to the groups in contact. It is in this sense that India is a linguistic area and the languages belonging to Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families have come so close to one another that if the process continues then scholars trying to reconstruct the past on the basis of modern spoken languages are likely to reach a common ancestry different from both. An induced standard is not only prescriptive prohibition of natural fertility.
If one takes a map of India and marks every ten miles on a straight scale from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, one will find that there is no break in communication between any two consecutive points of the scale. Break of communication may be noticed only in the extreme points. For one who walks there is no problem of communication. Probably this explains how Shankar from the South and Agastya from the North traversed the whole country. People who use low energy transport have all the time to make friends. Those who use high energy and high speed transports face communication break as they skip the intermediate linkages. Short range communication gives rise to and nurtures multilingualism. induced standardisation promotes monolingualism. This is as much true of a multi-dialectal situation as of a mulitingual situation, more so if the languages in question are cognate languages.The claim about mother tongue teaching is equally pernicious. Every native speaker of a language already knows it. One cannot be instructed in a thing one knows. By teaching then is meant, in case of mother tongue teaching, the creation and propagation of a plastic language which is a marker of classes as distinct from people. Underlying the claim are the assumptions that (a) the language spoken by untutored people is degenerate; (b) unless one is schooled his learning of his mother tongue is not complete; (c) those who are not schooled in mother tongue are uneducated; and (d) schooling in mother tongue not only adds to social respectability but also provides one with a tool to communicate with the socially superior. The circle is now complete. Having destroyed the mother tongue and the creative ability and self image attendant on it, the professional educationist has assumed the right to modernize the person by teaching him his own language. This is like emasculating a person intended for circumcision and trying to help him get a baby of his own through artificial insemination.
The nomads provide an interesting example of both small range and extended communication. The Romanis in Europe and USSR, for example, share a common core vocabulary. They add additional feature of languages of the area which they pass in course of their itinerant life cycle. This keeps their own identity intact while giving them facility of communication with other groups with whom they come in contact. This is also largely true of Romanis in India and probably of other itinerant groups. To standardize their language would not only deprive them of their way of life, but is bound to impoverish and destroy their culture. From days immemorial the itinerant tribes have been wandering minstrels, court and public entertainers and even couriers among chieftains and kings. With the greed for land and competition for food, with scramble for possessions and a monetised market economy, they are already sufficiently pushed around so as to give up barter and diversify their traditional occupation. With a minority elite setting the standard of success and defining the mainstream, with professional de-gooders trying to modernize and educate them, the pressure is to convert them into settlers. No wonder that in most cases where such transformation has taken place they remain in the outer fringe of the caste society, disabled in their mother tongue and consequently become early dropouts form the school system.
As Christianity sought to impress on the simple folks that they live in original sin, educationists seek to impress upon them that they live in original stupidity. Both brought the sense of quilt and shame to them, each competing with the other to save soul by its esoteric principles, in the process destroying their original faith, language, customs and cultural traits. By branding them as simple folk, the professionals have established their right to improve their standard of living, to educate them and bring them to the mainstream. By calling them primitive they have taken unto themselves to civilize them by destroying their pride in their own tradition. By calling their language inadequate, undeveloped and non-language they have succeeded in stifling their creativity and lowering their self image.
It is in their perspective that the development of scheduled tribes, in general, and nomads, in particular, is to be seen. The educationists in India who re for uniformity and standardization of process and product, the economists who are tutored in the western models of capitalist industrialism or state capitalism, both destroyers of individual and group autonomy, have joined with the planner to produce schemes which plan them out. By encroaching into their territories, their free access to land and food has been curtailed. By establishing outside right over forest produce their autonomy in devising a viable economy has been curtailed. By enacting laws in favour of outsiders they have been acclaimed offenders in their own land for pursuing their age old practices. By forcing them to join schools, they have declared early dropouts, wasted and stagnated. In short, by imposing the outside view of development, they have been disabled, deprived and exploited. They are asked to live in houses which are not homes. They are asked to eat food which either they grow for others or which is rationed to them thus making them dependent on the outside. They are introduced toe dresses which makes them dependent on outsiders. They are introduced to languages which disables them from either being creative or acquiring knowledge. They are exposed to an education system which alienates the educated from the society and creates exploiters within their ranks. Having completely impoverished them, the professionals have moved in to work for their development and bring them to the mainstream. Instead of trying to increase the efficiency of their societies based on use value system and accepting the notion of autonomy underlying their socio-cultural organization, the planners and professionals have forced commodity centered values on them. With the dice havily loaded against them, they stand condemned, damned, deprived and exploited. Unless this fraud of exploitation in the name of development is unmasked, further incursions into their autonomy is halted, and the process of disabling them in their own languages is stayed, in no time their cultures will be subjects of study by professionals in the universities and they will inflate the statistics of persons below the poverty line. Radical alternatives to the so called mainstream by way of strengthening their social and economic autonomy can only save them from total ruination.