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.
Prasanna Sree started work on the Kupia script in 1991 and gave it a final shape in 2009. But that is not the only script to her credit; in 34 years, she has devised alphabets for 19 tribal languages spoken in the hills and plains of India. These include Gond, Bagatha, Gadaba, Koya, Goudu and Savara languages. Her early interest in linguistics was the result of some interactions and incidents. “When I was a child, my grandmother once asked me, ‘what is your identity?’ That question made me reflect deeply on my culture and language,” recalls the 60-year old. In 2010, when the last member of the Bo endangered tribal community died in the Andaman islands, she mourned the loss of not just a life but a language as well. “When language disappears, so does its culture and identity,” says Prasanna Sree.
This February, she made history again when she was appointed vice chancellor of Adikavi Nannaya University in Rajamahendravaram, Andhra Pradesh. She is the first woman from a tribal community in the Telugu states to be appointed to the coveted academic post.
But her community’s tryst with history began long before she was born. The British government criminalised Prasanna Sree’s tribal community—Yerakala—under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, forcing them into a reformatory village in the open fields near Guntur town. Named after then home secretary Harold Stuart, the village still goes by the name Stuartpuram. For decades, its residents were subjected to suspicion, shame and ostracism. Growing up in Stuartpuram, Prasanna Sree heard stories of how the police would come knocking on the doors whenever any unlawful activity took place in the region. There were also a few Robin Hood-like individuals who took to crime to feed families as employment was denied to them or breadwinners were serving jail time. The Britishers also established a Salvation Army to provide good health, education and spiritual values to villagers. Thanks to that, her grandmother could speak multiple languages and her father became a central government employee. And, Prasanna Sree became the first child in her family to study in an English medium school.
Her connection with Stuartpuram faded as she travelled to study in West Bengal, Maharashtra and then Vijayawada. “After completing my bachelor’s in English literature, I was selected for a job in the customs department. I resigned in one day,” recalls Prasanna Sree. She then enrolled for a master’s degree in archaeology and history at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, eventually joining its faculty. While the thought that she had not done anything for tribals niggled her, she says she wanted to be financially stable before working with and for the tribal community.
Whether for research, passion or mere exposure, the next phase of her life was all about familiarising herself with different tribes across the country. Having embraced an urban, modern life, she went back to her roots to strike a chord with the tribals. “As a woman, you experience patriarchy everywhere in society,” says Prasanna Sree. “So, a woman walking alone in the jungles may make them (tribals) uncomfortable. They may not like modernity easily. It took me years to gain their trust and friendship.”
That was no cakewalk. “Tribals do not open up to strangers easily. Once, they misunderstood me when I was handling a camera and attacked me with it, injuring my face,” she says. On another occasion, she travelled to Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where Maoist-police clashes were frequent, and walked through rugged terrain for two days, risking gunfire and landmines, to help a foreign researcher communicate with the tribals there.
Prasanna Sree gradually adjusted to each tribe’s customs. Her dressing style and communication methods would change depending on the tribe. She can now speak and understand multiple tribal languages, which are not supported by any ancient or modern script. When she decided to develop scripts for each of the tribal languages, she reached out to acclaimed linguists from around the world for assistance.
“There was no written format to these languages, but only oral literature,” says Prasanna Sree. “I have included sounds associated with the tribes in the scripts. Contrary to the trend of having lines for letters, I came up with pictorial symbols that are close to the expressions and elements related to the speakers, so that it would be easy for them to identify and learn.” The scripts are digitally archived and accessible online.
Winner of multiple awards like the Union government’s Nari Shakti Puraskar 2021, Prasanna Sree hopes her script would some day be introduced to tribal children in schools. “This would be the best way to celebrate our culture and identity,” she says.