The slow death of a language

Tulu, my poor mother tongue, is dying. Now before anyone with any insight into this matter raises their cudgels, I want to qualify my statement. Tulu, as spoken by South Kanara Brahmins, is dying.

Tulu does not have a script of it's own, not one that is in current usage in any case. So it was at a disadvantage right from the beginning. There are many dialects of Tulu, and the more widely spoken one is the Bunt dialect. Incidentally, this brand of Tulu is flourishing (relatively speaking, of course). It's spoken by many more people, and all the Tulu mass media (films and songs) that I have come across (I have seen exactly 1 Tulu film and 1 Tulu song) are in this dialect. The my-kind-of-Tulu-speaking folks are a minority among minorities. So while the Bunt Tulu might be okay for a while, I am concerned about the "Brahmin" Tulu. While I am embarassed to be even making this Bunt/Brahmin distinction (too many negative connotations related to the caste system), that is the easiest way to distinguish between the two dialects. For the rest of this blog, when I say Tulu, I mean the one spoken by South Kanara Brahmins.

As long as the South Kanara Brahmins were in South Kanara, Tulu was used widely. Tulu-speakers living outside South Kanara found that other languages competed for dominance - Kannada in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka, other regional languages in other states, Hindi and English. My parents speak Tulu fine, since they were raised by first-generation immigrants/native settlers. I, on the other hand, was raised in Bombay by a second-generation immigrant (my father) and a quasi-first-generation immigrant(my mother traveled quite a bit in her childhood). My Tulu is considerably inferior and less frequently spoken compared to my parents. My daughter, born and being raised in the US, may not speak Tulu as an adult, going by the experience of other families such as us. Given that most of the younger Tulu-speaking population lives outside of South Kanara, the newer generation is going to grow up outside of their native place, and many even outside their country of origin. The language is doomed!

So what can we do? I hardly suggest containing emigration, cross-cultural marriages, or any such ridiculous proposition for the sake of the preservation of my mother tongue. I wouldn't even go so far as to say that we should force our children to speak our mother tongue. I encourage my daughter to speak in Tulu, but with even my Tulu-speaking husband speaking to her mostly in English, I find it's a losing battle. I am no Tulu pandit, but the thought of even my beginner's Tulu ending with me is disconcerting. I am surprised that I feel like this, and am beginning to think it's the evolutionary instinct at play here. Aware of our mortality, we want to transcend death by leaving behind our language, culture and genes with our children. A tenuous hypothesis, but enough to satisfy my puzzlement at my sudden affinity to my mother tongue. For now, I am a passive observer, witnessing and doing little else about the slow death of a language.

Literature, art, music, movies - they make the world a better place

Books made me a better person. Good books make us think about our ethics, morals, they paint a true and honest picture of humanity and force us to think about the kind of person we are and who we'd like to be. The same holds true for good music, movies and art. There is something ennobling in each of these, something that stirs the better selves in each of us. Music transports us, lifts beyond the here and now into a better place, a place where we feel more alive. Books make us reflect and introspect. They make us take a pause from reading to digest the profoundness of what we just read. Movies make us cry and laugh and "feel good" as we walk out of the movie halls.

What this powerful pull is I can't name, but there is something about art (and I am using this umbrella word to cover all the forms of art - visual, audio, literary, sensory, that I just discussed) that cold, hard science and commerce just can't match. We need our scientists and bankers of course, but we need our artists and actors and writers just as much.

There used to  be a time when I didn't think art amounted to much. What a waste of time, I would say, when I heard of someone spending years on a novel. How pointless, I would say, when people would urge me to visit the Arts Museum. Poetry, paintings and sculpture were too dense for me to understand. Prose, movies and music were more accessible to me. But  I have come to realize that art, be it in any form, can be beautiful and uplifting, if we can train ourselves to see the beauty where it does exist. Have someone explain the underlying meaning behind a poem, and it lights the bulb in my mind. The poem is not just exquisite lyricism, it is also a metaphor for something deeper and more pertinent to life! Then I re-read it again, relishing this time the intelligence and aesthetics of the poetry. Help me understand what a painting symbolizes, and again, I look at the painting this time with much appreciation.

The point I am trying to make is this - if you think it is a waste of time, energy and matter to fund the Violinists Association of Johannesburg when there are people starving in Nairobi, you are right. It is important to fulfill the basic needs of food, water and safety, and that is the priority of human endeavor, but once those needs are fulfilled, art ranks right at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - the need of self actualization. Art is a form of self-expression for the creator and a form of catharsis for the patron. The world needs good art, and we all would do well to remember that.