The god foresaw that at the end of time there would be devastation and ruin, and on the first day of Creation he wrote a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils. He wrote it so that it would reach the most distant generations and to insure that chance would not touch it. No one knows in what characters it is written nor where it is written, but it is certain that it exists as a secret and that a chosen one shall read it. I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of time and that my destiny as the last priest of the god would give me access to the privilege of intuiting the script.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The God’s script’, in El Aleph (1967[1949])
Introduction
About to dissect a dead body in the hospital where he was working, Mangaya Gomang, a man belonging to the Sora tribe, became aware of the significance of possessing a script, his disciples recount today. ‘What is missing from this body for it to be alive?’
Mangaya wondered: ‘This body is like the Sora: even if they are rejected, insulted, they do not react, they do not rise up against those who persecute them and laugh at them’. Comparing the body without life to a language without a script, Mangaya prayed to obtain ‘clothes for the voice’, a script to shield the Sora from derision and sarcasm. In 1936, he allegedly discovered alphabetic characters engraved on a stone near his village and founded a religious movement whose adepts worship these letters.
Among the tribal groups of India, the Adivasi1 – a term meaning ‘first dwellers’ – we observe many cases of script invention since the colonial period. The proliferation of
1 ‘Scheduled Tribe’ is the official designation used by the Government of India. The term ‘Adivasi’ was invented in Central India at the beginning of the twentieth century by Christian students belonging to the Munda group and was adopted later by other tribal groups of Central India (Carrin 1996). Nowadays,
tribal scripts in contemporary India is linked to the identitarian strategies deployed by social groups who are linguistically, religiously, politically and economically marginalised. These new graphic systems enable them to promote their language, to elaborate new ritual forms and to assert territorial claims in proto-nationalist movements (Carrin 2016; Guillaume-Pey 2018b). From letters engraved on funeral stones to school books, from signboards to websites or artistic installations in foreign galleries and museums, scripts created by Adivasi groups are transmitted and ‘exhibited’ (Petrucci 1986) in spaces and on media whose diversity reflects the plurality of their uses.
This paper focuses on the issues raised by the invention and the circulation of writing systems among these minority-language communities and, more particularly, among the Sora, a group of farmers who live mainly in rural areas at the border between Odisha and Andhra Pradesh (East central India) (Fig 9.1). The Sora originally speak a Munda language – a branch of the Austroasiatic language family – whereas neighbouring castes speak Indo-European or Dravidian languages: Odia in Odisha and Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, official languages recognised by the Constitution of India that the Sora children learn in public schools.
While in some tribal/Adivasi groups the invention of a graphic system gave birth to a militant literature spread by various media, such as village theatre and newspapers (Carrin 2002; 2016), the Sora script is used in a ritual context and its circulation is controlled by religious specialists. Nowadays, in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, the Sora are followers of Matharvanam, the religious movement born in the late 1930s and whose founder, Mangaya Gomang, is said to have discovered an alphabet of 24 characters to transcribe his native language. Each letter of this script embodies a spirit which the devotees incorporate into themselves through an alphabetic potion drunk during rituals. The discoverer of the script is worshipped today along with the god Jagannath, the main deity embodied in the alphabet. Promoted to the rank of tutelary deity of the Odisha kingdom in the twelfth century, Jagannath is, to this day, a central religious figure in the state (Eschmann et al. 1978; Kulke & Schnepel 2001).
Present-day Matharvanam followers claim that the Brahmins and Rajas formerly stole Jagannath from them before the god, leaving Hindu temples, returned to his original Sora devotees in alphabetic form. The Matharvanam movement therefore offers a striking image by a tribal community of the reappropriation both of Jagannath, a deity integrated for centuries into the Hindu mainstream, and of writing, a medium intimately linked to colonial power. The once purloined god returns in alphabetic form, shaping ritual practices centred on an embodied script that defies colonial investments in literacies of different sorts.
Why do scripts play a crucial part for Adivasi in India? How do the Sora apprehend an alphabet that most of them cannot read, but that they can touch and even drink?
tribal activists try to establish an equivalence between the word ‘Adivasi’ and the term ‘indigenous people’ used on an international scale (Karlsson 2003).
What impact does the embodiment of deities in letters have upon modes of ritual communication?
In this chapter,2 I will show how the Sora have reshaped writing through ritual, and how the creative appropriation of writing in return plays an important part in the redefinition of their religious practices and their identity. In order to understand how, among this group, spirits happened to be embodied in letters, I will first highlight the conditions of emergence of both the Sora alphabet and other graphic systems devised by charismatic leaders in tribal India. Then, I will examine the divine
2 This chapter is based on data collected among the Sora of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha during my PhD fieldwork on Sora ritual practices (2007–2008), and research projects financed by the Fyssen Foundation, the FMSH (CEFRES), the Labex HASTEC and the CNRS (2012–2018). The research reflected here has benefited from discussions at Yale University (Institute of Sacred Music and Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group), Queen’s University Belfast (School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics), CEFRES–French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences and Charles University of Prague, Sorbonne Université (École doctorale V Concepts et langages – GRIPIC – CELSA), The Laboratory of Social Anthropology (Collège de France/CNRS/EHESS, Paris), and the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Classics). I am also grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this chapter for their constructive comments.
Fig. 9.1. The Sora, a Munda-speaking group living mainly in rural areas at the border between Odisha and Andhra Pradesh (East central India) (Andhra Pradesh 2013). Photo by C. Guillaume-Pey.
bricolage made by the Sora script’s creator and the changes generated by the worship of ‘spirit-letters’ in the Sora’s ritual practices. Finally, I will address the issues raised by the circulation of the Sora alphabet and other Adivasi scripts. Special attention will be given to competing media: the competition between co-existing writing systems used to transcribe the same language but also between scripts and other graphic forms such as paintings or oral modes of ritual communication.
Writing from the margins. The appropriation of literacy and the emergence of tribal movements in India
In colonised societies, there are numerous cases in which the colonised will appropriate literacy, which remains an instrument of knowledge and power associated with administration, Christian missions, and the education given by the latter (Guha 1983;
Hawkins 2002; Kirsch 2008). For groups among whom literacy campaigns went hand in hand with religious conversion, learning how to read and write often meant becoming Christian and vice versa (Kulick and Stroud 1993; Kirsch 2008). The ritual uses of writing are consequently numerous. Incorporated by societies who already had tacit and non-tacit conventions regarding ritual communication, writing has therefore been more or less diverted from its ordinary function as a mechanism for encoding spoken language (Lévi-Strauss 1955a; Probst 1993; Keane 2013). How, therefore, do the Sora and other Adivasi groups appropriate writing?
Rebels armed with blank papers: Petitions and divine missives
Ranajit Guha (1983), in his pioneering study dedicated to peasant insurgency in Colonial India – a founding text for Subaltern Studies – describes the extreme reactions of dominated groups toward literacy, a medium that may either provoke an unconditional rejection, leading to a massive destruction of written and printed material3 or, on the contrary, pique interest and inspire charismatic leaders. Among the Santal, a tribal group of Central India, Sidhu and Kanhu, two brothers who led a rebellion against the British in 1855 claimed that they had a vision of a god. This divine being, who appeared as a white man, wrote his commands on papers that he subsequently gave to them.
The written documents carried by the brothers as ‘both an emblem of authority and an instrument of mobilization’ (Guha 1983, 248), included a book about locomotives, a few visiting cards of an English engineer, a translation in some Indian language of St John’s Gospel and blank papers said ‘to have dropped from heaven’ (Guha 1983, 248).
The two brothers were supposed to distribute these papers that fell on their head to the Santal in order to prepare the insurrection (Carrin 2002). Before taking up arms against the British, Sidhu and Kanhu also tried to send petitions to administrators and
3 ‘There was hardly a peasant uprising on any significant scale in colonial India that did not cause the destruction of large quantities of written or printed material including rent rolls, deeds and bonds, and public records of all kinds’ (Guha 1983, 51).
landlords (Carrin 2006). As they were illiterate, they were helped by scribes belonging to the Dom community, a low-status caste that, like the Santal, was oppressed by the Hindu dominant castes (Guha 1983, 187–188).
Between the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, some tribal leaders who were educated by Christian missionaries used the Roman alphabet or Indian regional scripts to send petitions to the colonial administration in order to claim the land of which they had been dispossessed (Roy 1912; Fuchs 1965, 27). Others, illiterate like Sidhu and Kanhu, made a symbolical appropriation of writing. Among the Santal and the Oraon, another tribal group of Central India, some chiefs claimed to have received letters sent by a god to guide their group. Thus, a leader of the Tana Bhagat, an Oraon reformist movement, affirmed that a god wrote to him, commanding him to establish a kingdom for his followers and to liberate them from their oppressors: British officers, land owners, money-lenders, Christian missionaries and Muslims (Dasgupta 1999, 32).
During the First World War, adepts of the Tana Bhagat movement even hoped that the German Kaiser would liberate them from British domination and would teach them how to read and write (Dasgupta 1999, 41).
An alphabet of its own: Script competition and ‘amphibious translators’
Later, from the end of the 1930s, modes of appropriation of literacy changed with the emergence of religious movements led by charismatic leaders who, instead of borrowing existing writing systems, created scripts to transcribe their languages.
Before the invention of a specific writing system, tribal languages had generally been transcribed with various Indian regional scripts or with the Roman alphabet.
It is in a context of competition between several writings – one of them, the Roman alphabet, being intimately linked to the spread of Christianity – that tribal leaders devised scripts of their own. Unlike other Indian writing systems, these scripts were not alphasyllabaries but alphabets. Regarding the shape of the letters, their inventors were inspired by both characters of the Roman alphabet or Indian regional scripts and vernacular graphic forms such as ritual diagrams used to communicate with their ancestors and deities, as shown by Marine Carrin (2016) and Nishaant Choksi (2017) in the Santal’s case. Thus, India appears as the birthplace of many new scripts, first created and propagated by religious leaders belonging to an educated elite (Zide 1999; Carrin 2002). Such inventors could be compared to the figure of the ‘amphibian translator’ as defined by James Scott (2009, 126): ‘In the great Taiping Rebellion, in the hundreds of cargo cult uprisings in the Pacific Islands, in the rebellions of New World prophets against Europeans, the key figures are often culturally amphibious translators who move relatively easily between the worlds they inhabit’. Mangaya Gomang, who is credited with the spread of the Sora alphabet by most of the Sora4, fits
4 Religious specialists of the Matharvanam movement generally attribute the ‘discovery’ to his father-in-law, Malia Gomang, an influential Sora leader who then entrusted Mangaya Gomang the spreading of the script. Nevertheless, Mangaya Gomang nowadays outshines his father-in-law.
perfectly with this definition. Circulating between schools, hospitals and sanctuaries, this man presents an atypical profile for a Sora villager in the 1930s. A schoolteacher and a compounder at a pharmacy, Mangaya became an influential social reformer and religious leader after having created an alphabet to transcribe the Sora language.
Before the invention of the Sora alphabet, various scripts were competing for the transcription of the Sora’s Munda language. In the early 1930s, the Telugu linguist Gidugu Ramamurti used the International Phonetic Alphabet with an educative project in mind. With the support of the Government, he published a Sora-English dictionary and a Manual of Grammar. Nowadays, some non-Sora, who have heard about the script worshipped by Matharvanam followers, confuse the script spread by Mangaya and Ramamurti’s transcription. The linguist’s project was not warmly welcomed by the Odia and the Telugu people, who wanted to impose their respective alphasyllabaries on their Sora neighbours living at the frontier between two politico-linguistic spaces. This scriptural conflict reflects the local tensions when regional frontiers were redefined.
In 1936, the very year when the Orissa region was created, regrouping the speakers of the Odia language, the Sora script was invented or, according to Matharvanam Fig. 9.2. The Sora graphemes allegedly discovered engraved on a rock by Mangaya Gomang in 1936 (Marichiguda, Odisha 2017). Photo by C. Guillaume-Pey.
devotees, ‘discovered’ by Mangaya. After fasting in the forest, the Sora leader allegedly found some graphic signs near his village, engraved on a rock where tigers used to kill their prey. Inspired by a deity, Mangaya could decipher these graphemes and founded a religious movement, Matharvanam, whose adepts, even now, continue to worship this script (Fig 9.2).
Besides prayers and astrology booklets, Mangaya wrote, according to his disciples, books dedicated to mathematics, medicinal plants, architecture, the history of the Sora and the history of India. Driven by an encyclopedic set of interests, Mangaya shares, in this respect, some affinities with many script inventors from dominated or colonised groups in India and elsewhere who, during the last century, used their writing to create complex and protean works, reinventing the history of their group, recording their knowledge and even codifying the knowledge of their oppressors (Smalley and Wimuttikosol 1998; Amselle 2001; Escudier 2008; Kelly 2012; Bruly Bouabré et al. 2013).
Inventions or discoveries? When ‘Prophet-Champollions’ decipher stones
In other Adivasi groups of Central India, inventions of scripts – considered as
‘discoveries’ of graphemes engraved on stones – also follow the emergence of socio-religious and reformist movements. Among the Ho in the 1950s in Bihar, Lako Bodra, born into a wealthy family, studied in a Catholic school, became a catechist and devised a script called the Varang kshiti. One night during a full moon, he discovered luminous letters inscribed on a memorial stone (sasan-diri) dedicated to his ancestors. The Ho prophet claimed that the alphabet he found had been in fact created in the thirteenth century by a shaman named Dhawan Turi, whose visions he revisited in his own dreams (Carrin 2002, 248). Lako Bodra consequently founded a religion that centres, in large part, upon tribal deities. Inspired by his books, his disciples elaborated rituals aimed at gathering Ho people around the sarna or ‘sacred grove’, a religious space shared by Munda-speaking tribal groups in central India (Carrin 2002, 248). During the same period, in Bengal, a Santal schoolteacher named Ragunnath Murmu discovered, in a forest nearby his village, graphic signs also engraved on stones. The discovery of these signs, said to have been hidden by the Santal deities themselves, could be considered a ‘capture’ (sap) (Carrin 2016, 305). Thus, Murmu employed this Santali term used by the religious specialists in his community to describe the act of shamanic predation that consists of locking up deities in their hair. If, unlike the Sora letters, Santali graphemes do not embody spirits, they are nevertheless ‘implicitly compared to deities who, finally, pervade the mind of the prophet like indelible marks’ (Carrin 2016, 305).5 A parallel can be drawn with the invention of scripts that occurred in colonised groups in Africa (Turner 1967; Peel 1968; Swiderski 1984), in America (Dubelaar and Pakosie 1988; Déléage 2013), or elsewhere in Asia (Smalley et al. 1990; Culas 2005; Kelly 2018a) where most of these creations are linked to the emergence of socio-religious
5 Personal translation of the following sentence: ‘Les lettres sont donc implicitement comparées à des divinités qui ont finalement imprégné l’esprit du prophète comme des marques indélébiles’.
movements in reaction to a dominant religion and/or an endogenous rival institution (Guillaume-Pey 2016). As David Dalby (1968) stresses in the case of West Africa and Surinam, the elaboration of new graphic systems, far from being considered as a mere appropriation by their users, is conceptualised as a ‘revelation’6 or a
‘discovery’. Signs seen in dreams or engraved on stones and other media, like divine hieroglyphs, are deciphered by inspired religious leaders who can be seen as moderns ‘Champollions’, as Jean-Loup Amselle (2001) qualified them in the case of West African prophetic movements.
As in numerous cases of script creation reported elsewhere in colonised or dominated groups, script inventions in tribal India are therefore legitimised by divine intervention and, in some cases, myths recounting their creation even convey the topos of the ‘purloined letter’, whose prominence Amselle (2001) emphasises in similar cases in Africa: the community that develops its own writing system would have possessed a prior script in a long-ago past, which was destroyed or stolen by a dominant group. Narratives related to the loss or theft of a script are also numerous among ethnic minorities located at the border crossing between China, Thailand, and Myanmar (Tapp 1990; Walker 2003; Culas 2005; Scott 2009) and can be found as well in India. Among the Kurukh,7 a story on a website dedicated to a script created in 1999 recounts that this group had once used a script and had a rich literature, both annihilated by invaders like the Aryan and the Mughal.8 In the Sora script’s myth of origin we do find such a dispossession theme, but it is not exactly a graphic system, as an instrument of power and knowledge, that is then seized by a dominant group: it is a divinity that is appropriated, as we shall see now.
When deities become letters
Various myths recount the origin of the Sora script. At the sanctuary of Marichiguda, the very place where the script was ‘discovered’ by Mangaya, his eldest son Warnay distributed printed versions of this story in Sora, Odia and English languages.9 It is said that the Sora used to worship Jagannath as a wooden statue until the god disappeared.
After having been taken from his Sora worshippers and held by a Brahmin, Jagannath finally returned among his first devotees in alphabetic form, as Akshara Brahma:
Akshara-brahma form of lord Jagannath, the most beloved deity of the Sabaras S.P. Mangei gives the following statements regarding the origin of the script.
6 On revelatory scripts see also John Monaghan (2008).
6 On revelatory scripts see also John Monaghan (2008).