Tribal Literature and Oral Expressions in India

Language, both in written and non-written form has proved to be a very powerful tool for empowerment, subjugation and linguistic apartheid. It is ironical that multilingual nature of a nation provides environment which historically has been the vehicle to all types of oppression. India with its strong plurilingual and multilingual society has known to nurture the equilibrium of language maintenance and social cohesion. However, with the advent of modern education which ignores the oral tradition and the indigenous knowledge locked in unwritten languages, we have reached a point where society is facing a big divide of those who master the dominant language of the state and those who still speak the indigenous language of the region. This is a recent phenomenon. It has risen in the new rule of imposing the so called modern education of the elite on the ones who were educated but illiterate in written languages. The strict adherence to dominant language education as a medium has created a cleavage between those who are creative in indigenous languages and those who mastered the 'out of the box' language and its underpinnings. In addition, English alone in the school as the medium of education has given rise to a big divide in the society where the non-English-medium school going children feel disadvantaged not only in social networking but are also deprived of choices to enhance their capabilities unlike the children hailing from English medium education. Unfortunately, in the so called 'modern' society, language without a script does not have the status of a 'language', it is merely a dialect or patois. The organised machinery of the government fails to realise creativity of thinking in a child who hails from language background of unwritten languages.