Tribal verse and a different Worldview

Abstract

This paper presents an exploration of the loss of authentic Adivasi perspectives in mainstream literature. India has a large body of work on these peoples, but much of this romanticises them and fails to treat them as the inhabitants of a modern, industrial and globalising India. The tribal literature available in several non-mainstream languages has not been recognized because the tribal discourse, including folktales and songs, is mainly oral in nature. In addition to this, the communities which produce it tend to be far from urban jungles, and so their creative works have been largely overlooked. In this article, I discuss a popular extract from ‘Painted Words’ written by Indian linguist, G.N Devy which is featured in the text, ‘Tribal Verse’. It provides arguments for alternative approaches of representing Adivasis, which become important to understand the Tribal worldview and their reasoning behind their several social and cultural traditions. This paper certainly is not an attempt to ‘speak for’ the marginalized languages. It is just a modest intention to explain why all human languages and linguistic creativity at large simply deserve greater respect.