Aheli Moitra
And so it happened, on February 21, a day before they started school, the 6 years and below children in our colony came up with a new game to play. They called it ‘bandh-bandh’.
They blocked the road using a string of shoes and a few toys. “Only the dead with black flag can pass,” they said with a mighty shrug of the shoulder. They wrapped up in their tiny traditional weaves and declared them “our bandh dress.” They stood guard, stick in hand.
From the hidden windows and terraces of their homes, children looked and learned the ways of a new cultural wave that took shape through the past few weeks. Woven literature—women have been weaving sovereign Naga cultural narratives to life through the loin loom since ‘time immemorial’—had been reduced to a language of limitation. Incidentally, February 21 also happened to be a worldwide annual observance of the lingual diversity of peoples, termed International Mother Language Day (IMLD). In Nagaland, only the Governor seemed to have noticed the importance of commemorating the day. The Morung Express Learning page carried an educative segment on the same.
Scholars and laypersons alike recognize that language is integral to what it means to be human. Local languages, especially minority and indigenous, transmit cultures, values and traditional knowledge, thus playing an important role in promoting sustainable futures, stated the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) on IMLD 2017.
But languages are fast disappearing and 25 Naga languages appear to be ‘vulnerable’. And “if nothing is done,” humanity would not just lose cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded in, particularly, indigenous languages, noted UNESCO.
Naga communities have been proactive in preserving, writing and promoting native languages. Most have their own literature boards that have been codifying languages and thus making a great contribution towards helping school children in Nagaland learn their native languages in an organized manner. The current Chief Minister of Nagaland, Dr. Shürhozelie Liezietsu, for instance, has done commendable literary work towards upholding and upgrading the study of Tenyidie. Apart from enhancing education, he has written books, poems, essays, plays and translations.
Though he has come into power following strange circumstances, he stands as a symbol of how language, and associated cultural manifestation, lives on through active engagement and positive upgradation.
Children have the ability to pick up cultural markers, symbols, and indeed languages, from a very young age. Many linguistic theories recognize that children pick up their cultural roots, varied as they are around the world, through imitation, and this process starts first at home and then through the immediate public arena (streets, schools, etc.). Learning a native culture is thus subject to how we, as adults, project that culture at our homes and streets.
A mother may be drying out her traditional weaves every other month and a father may wear it out to a bandh—a child learns an amalgamation of these images in multiple ways that becomes today’s native culture in the future adult’s worldview. In our progression, thus, it is essential that we uphold our mother cultures but equally important is what changes and innovations we subject them to given our location in the world today.
Related notes may be shared at moitramail@yahoo.com
