Scripting history

S. Prasanna Sree, Andhra Pradesh's first tribal woman vice chancellor, has created scripts for 19 tribal languages

- RAHUL DEVULAPALLI

ONE OF THE most unique wedding cards came from a house in the tribal village of Sujanakota in Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh.

In 2011, around 200 invitations were distributed among the Valmiki community members. Except for the date and time, which were in numerals, the rest of the invitation was in a script that no one, including the groom and the bride, could decipher. It was for the first time that an attempt was made to mainstream Kupia, the spoken language of the Valmiki tribe. Like most tribal languages, Kupia, too, had survived generations without a script. The Valmiki tribe is primarily found in parts of north coastal Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.

The man behind this unconventional step was S. Rudrapati, a central government employee, who saw his brother's wedding as an opportunity to create awareness. "We gave out the cards and then proceeded to teach the recipients what was written on them," he says. "We encouraged our relatives and friends to not just speak but also write our language." It was a milestone for the villagers, as they realised that their language could exist in a written form.

The credit for developing the script goes to then Andhra University professor S. Prasanna Sree. Rudrapati was a PhD student at the university when he came to know that Prasanna Sree was working on the Kupia script. "By then she had visited villages inhabited by our community members and grasped not just the language but also our lifestyle, food habits, culture, traditions, livelihood, clothes and behaviour. She went on to document them, based on which she prepared a script." Rudrapati also felicitated the professor during his brother's wedding. He has now taken it upon himself to promote the script through pamphlets and WhatsApp channels in the hope that more and more people will adopt it. "This is the only way our language can survive," he says.