The Story Of Preserving Culture
By Mahesan Niranjan –July 19, 2016
Prof. Mahesan Niranjan
Last week started well for my friend Sivapuranam Thevaram, the Sri Lankan Tamil fellow who is my drinking partner in the Bridgetown pub that stretches my intellectual creativity. Earlier in the week, he spent several hours, checking exam scripts from UpNawth University in Sri Lanka, an institution to which he acts as an external moderator. He was pleased to see some of his suggestions from the previous year had been included in the teaching of the module he was helping with. He had also, with some difficulty, set up a post-graduate scholarship which his department had offered to a junior member of staff from UpNawth. Thevaram was pleased that in some small ways he could engage with that institution and wished he had the time and energy to do more.
Whistling his favourite tune from the beautiful film Vasantha Maaligai, Thevaram started a long drive to Wales to attend the wedding of a cousin. Manimekalai, his wife, and two of his children, Senguththu and Sarivakam, were in the car. Thevaram enjoys long drives with the family – an opportunity to tell the children about his culture, teach them a little Tamil and tell them wonderful stories about his great grandfather, back in the oor (Sinhala: gama, English: village).
The wedding, the Thevaram’s uncle had suggested, was to be held according to Hindu tradition and the guests were to dress accordingly. This meant Thevaram was to be in a verti (a wrap-round rectangular piece of cloth with patterns on the border, yet not really clear when the verti became Hindu), a shirt (even less clear when this became Hindu) and a salvai (another rectangular piece of cloth to put on your shoulder, which could also be folded neatly and wrapped as a turban on your head, should the priest be minded to instruct you to crack a coconut as part of the ceremony).
“Can you speak Sinhala, also?” Senguththu asked the father. “Is it a difficult language for you to learn, given that you are Tamil, and you said Tamil is a Dravidian language and Sinhala has Indo-European roots?”
“Quite easy, really,” said Thevaram, “I usually speak Sinhala to people who are already multi-lingual, i.e. they also have a reasonable English vocabulary, so there are some simple rules by which you can get by.” He went onto explain a rule he had learnt from his friend in BusyTown University, an expert in computational linguistics:
For example, constructs like “car eka reverse karanna” and “chair eka lift karanna” are perfectly legitimate, and would pass as fluent Sinhala.
“So how many people have a reasonable English vocabulary, back in the gama?” challenged Senguththu, to clarify if this trick has effective.
“Quite a few, actually” Thevaram said with a sense of pride and went onto give a five-minute lecture on some key statistics about post-independence Sri Lanka, literacy rates boosted by free education, improvements in infant mortality rates due to free healthcare, the public health inspector (PHI) talking his grandfather into building water-sealed toilet, and so on. The narrative ended with the usual story of calibration, which the kids have heard mentioned on nearly every car journey in which they were captive audience: “You see, back in the late Fifties, when my mother went to University, three hundred miles from her home in the oor, lived in a hostel and made friends with people across the ethnic divide, women were still not allowed to some high table diners in Bridgetown, remember!”
