All right, hello everyone! My name is Jonathan Loar and I am a South Asia reference librarian in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress. Today I'd like to welcome you to Script Invention and Revitalization in Eastern and Northeastern India since 1950. Our featured speaker is Tim Brookes, director of the Endangered Alphabets Project, and I will be serving as the host and moderator during the Q and A session to follow. I would like to add that today's event is co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Asian Division and the Endangered Alphabets Project. It is also the second part of the Library's lecture series Endangered Alphabets and Why We Write. The third and final lecture will take place in one week from today on Wednesday April 21st at 12 pm Eastern Time, where tim will talk about Southeast Asian Scripts From the Centers to the Margins. You can register for that lecture on loc.gov/events or the events page on the Asian Reading Room website. We will also put the link to register for that lecture in the chat box below. In addition, please note that this session is being recorded. If you choose to participate, any of your comments or questions will be included in the recording as part of the record. For today's Q and A session, please use the Q and A box at the bottom of your screen here on Zoom. You can upvote the questions you want to see answered. I'll read the questions for tim at the end. One other item of note at the beginning of our program here today, we will put a link in the chat box below which will take you to a document with all the links that will be mentioned in today's presentation. If you want to save a copy of that document you can explore those links at your leisure after the program. But before we virtually visit the world of South Asian writing systems I'd like to say a brief word about the Library's Asian Reading Room and its new website. The Asian Reading Room is the public gateway to access more than 4 million physical items as well as numerous electronic resources organized into the Asian collections namely the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Tibetan collections as well as the Asian American and Pacific Islander collection. At present the Library's reading rooms remain closed to the public in response to the covid-19 pandemic, although researchers can continue to access the Library's digital resources through the loc.gov website. Which brings me to... I'd like to invite everyone here today to explore the new and improved Asian Reading Room website. The new layout makes it easier for researchers and visitors to learn more about the Asian collections, the Asian Reading Room user services, digitized materials, web archives, research guides, databases and other resources, as well as upcoming news and events. And as always you can email your questions to our reference librarians through the Ask a Librarian service which is available at ask.loc.gov/asia. In the Asian Reading Room, researchers can access the South Asian collection, which contains materials in South Asian languages from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. We have books, newspapers, journals, manuscripts, government publications, and much much more. One strength of the collection is its linguistic diversity. For example if we only consider books in the South Asian collection we find more than 300,000 titles in almost 100 languages and dialects. This chart shows estimated percentages of books by language. Many of these are recognized as the official languages of India and Pakistan and other South Asian countries, but approximately 15 percent of the total reflects publications in less commonly spoken languages such as Rajasthani, Newari, Tulu, Santali, Brahui, and many others. And during today's lecture you're going to hear much more about the Santali language and the Ol Chiki script. And I just wanted to include a small representative sample of some relevant publications in the South Asian collection. We have a grammar book, a primer, and a reader all of which are in the Santali language and all of them in the Ol Chiki script. These materials are available to researchers in the Asian Reading Room or through Interlibrary Loan. In the upper left hand corner is an interesting image from this particular Santali reader showing each letter of the Ol Chiki alphabet and providing transcriptions of words starting with that letter in three other scripts: the Devanagari script; the Bangla script, used for writing Bengali and other languages; and Oriya, all of which point to the geographic spread of Santali speakers in India today. Here are three more examples illustrating the different types of literature in the Santali language from the South Asian collection. We have a book of poetry, a novel, and then on the right hand side you will see an issue of Hora Sombad, a Santali-language serial printed not in Ol Chiki but rather in the Devanagari script. And this topic of different scripts used for the same language is going to come up throughout Tim's lecture here today. All of this is basically to say in very brief fashion that the Library of Congress holds a wealth of possibilities for research pertaining to South Asia. For help navigating the Library and for finding specific resources, please feel welcome to contact me and my South Asian librarian colleague Charlotte Giles through the Ask a Librarian service, which again is at ask.loc.gov/asia. We look forward to speaking with you. And we're also really really excited today to introduce our speaker Tim Brookes, a world authority on endangered writing systems. For nearly a decade, Tim has led the Endangered Alphabets Project, a U.S.-based non-profit that supports endangered, minority, and indigenous cultures by preserving their writing systems through artwork and educational materials and also partnering with revival organizations to create new publications in endangered alphabets. Everyone is encouraged to check out their website at endangeredalphabets.com. I've also included a screenshot of another one of Tim's websites the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, a project launched online in 2019 with curated information on nearly 100 endangered writing systems. The atlas is available at endangeredalphabets.net. As one can see from the indicators on the atlas, Tim and his team of researchers have done an amazing amount of work in the geographic areas of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, which mirror the three lectures that we have in the Endangered Alphabets and Why We Write lecture series. Finally, I will also note that Tim is a very accomplished artist and woodworker and many of his carvings in endangered scripts have been featured in exhibitions around the world. But that's enough from me, so without further delay I will invite our speaker to take the floor, Mr Tim Brookes and go ahead and start and tell us about the world of South Asian writing systems. Take it away, Tim! Okay thanks Jon, thanks to everybody who's been involved in organizing this, thanks to everybody who has joined us. As always it's a very distinguished audience, which means that there are by my count 83 people who know more about this than I do. This is great because it means the Q and A session is going to be extremely informative and I'll be taking notes. Okay so here we go. The subject of this three-part talk is writing and in many instances people define writing as being a means of capturing the sounds of speech and making them available over time and space, and I'm going to be arguing that that is an extremely narrow self-centered definition that really misses out an enormous amount of what writing is and can be. Today we're going to look at some of the scripts and some of the events in South Asia sort of as a means of looking at them but also looking back at ourselves and recognizing our own limitations and the limitations of our understanding of writing. With that in mind I am going to get into the screen sharing business and we go into the whole slideshow area, all right good. Things are happening. As Jon was saying in his introduction South Asia is an area of extraordinary diversity. Anybody who's been there has recognized diversity of culture, diversity of custom, diversity of cuisine, all kinds of things beginning with C, in fact. Plus diversity of language and writing. And so as many of you know, Sir George Abraham Grierson was appointed superintendent of the newly created Linguistic Survey of India in 1898. In fact it was his idea. He was an Irishman. He was a civil servant. He was an amateur linguist. He was fascinated by the diversity of language in in British India, and he documented spoken languages. He recorded voices, and for 30 years, he did his best to explore and document the full richness of language and script in India. Eventually he published his findings in a series that consisted of 19 volumes, 179 languages, 554 dialects. Nobody has managed to repeat this feat, and yet, ladies and gentlemen, even in this massive undertaking, he missed more than he found. A 1991 census found 1,576 mother tongues and that's just in contemporary India alone. It doesn't include other countries in the South Asia region. So this is a pretty extraordinary set of information in itself, but I should add that as no census that I'm aware of asks questions about writing and writing systems used, we really have no idea at all how many scripts there are in use or that have been in use in South Asia. It's an extraordinarily fertile area, and with this I'm going to start sounding a little bit like David Attenborough: No region on Earth has such a diversity of indigenous writing systems and no region on Earth has seen so many efforts to suppress alphabets and eradicate them entirely from use. We actually- Before you strain your eyes looking at this slide here, it's intended to be sort of overwhelming and tiny and when the recording of this talk is made available, then you can look at it and pour over it in detail. This is just intended to kind of smack you between the eyes and say, yeah this is how many indigenous, custom-made, purpose-built scripts have been created in South Asia that I know of and there are almost certainly more, even though i've spent a lot of time asking and trying to find out about these. This is the business of creating a writing system, as anybody who's tried to do so, for example, for a novel or a film, is technically complicated in the extreme, especially in languages that are tonal and have all kinds of sound variants that we don't even acknowledge in English. So it's a very difficult business. But what you may not realize is that creating a writing system is also a hazardous business. We know of at least four people who have been assassinated or murdered for creating a writing system for their people. If you go to the endangeredalphabets.com blog and search, there's an article I've written called Another Script Author Murdered, which talks about these four. One of them is in fact from this region. For example, there was a scholar who taught the Kirat Sirijunga script in Sikkim who spent- he made it his life's work to collect and copy and compose Limbu literature, teaching the Limbu language, and the importance of Limbu history and cultural tradition, while at the same time preaching openness to other cultures and other knowledge. He was executed by being tied to a tree and shot to death with arrows. What we see then is a paradox - we see an extraordinary tension in South Asia in particular between the desire for unity and uniformity and the fact that the region has this extraordinary diversity. How are the people who are in favor of uniformity going to treat those who are proponents of diversity? These are, you know, these are going to be the subtext of much of of what it is that I'm talking about. As we see here, the fact that so many scripts have been created for individual minority languages is one feature of this region. Another question that comes up when we ask, gosh if it's so much work and so so dangerous, so hazardous to create a script for your people and their language, why not just use one of the majority scripts? And in fact there are plenty of people who will say to you that the Latin alphabet is the most efficient, it's the most useful alphabet in the world, and everybody should just learn the Latin alphabet. I'm going to dismantle that argument in another talk. I also did so during the Africa talk. Let me just say briefly at the moment here that the Latin alphabet has come to dominate the world not because of any intrinsic values but because at crucial moments in history it had more lawyers, guns, and or money than someone else. We can only understand writing by getting outside of the majority scripts and getting out among the endangered alphabets and seeing things from their point of view. One of the most fortunate things that happened to me in the 11 or 12 years that i've been running the Endangered Alphabets Project is that I got to meet people who were in these marginalized communities and could tell me what it's like from their point of view. Some of that is what I'm going to share with you today. We're going to start with a language and a script that Jon mentioned in his introduction. This is the Ol Chiki script which was created for the Santali language. The Santali language, as you can see in the slide, it's spoken by 7.6 million people. So it's not an endangered language, but you can have a non-endangered language that does have a traditional or endangered alphabet. In Bali for example there is a writing system, a beautiful, beautiful writing system that has been used for centuries but on independence, the Indonesian government decided the Balinese script was just not going to be used. Within two generations it dwindled virtually into complete disuse. Endangered alphabets, endangered languages - two different, similar overlapping areas and we're going to look at that. Also Santali is spoken quite broadly in Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Tripura, West Bengal, and even outside India as well. So why why would someone create a writing system for a language and in particular in this instance for Santali? I want to tell you about the Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who here is photographed, you know, in in his elder years. One of the interesting things about people who create writing systems is that they often do so very very young. I'll tell you a little bit about him. Raghunath Murmu was born in 1905 in a small village in what is now Odisha and in 1912 he started his education at primary school, three kilometers from his village, presumably walking there and walking back, very common in those days. Here's the thing - Even though he spoke Santali and he's going to school in this nearby village the education was in Oriya. This is remarkably common. It's remarkably common all over the world. It is not simply a thing in the past. And I want to tell you now about the Welsh Not. When I was doing research, I got contacted by a Welsh speaker who said, do you know about the Welsh Not? And I said no. And she said in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was standard practice in schools in Wales where the medium of education was English that if a child spoke Welsh out loud in class anywhere in the school in fact then they would have this piece of wood on a string hung around their neck as a badge of shame. It was called the Welsh Not and if somebody else spoke Welsh during the day it would be transferred to the next offender. I was sort of horrified by this and I wrote a blog post about it and immediately I heard from people all over the world saying - yes exactly the same thing happened in Brittany for example if someone spoke Breton. So what you see then is a process of shaming, whose aim and whose effect is to try and not only get somebody from a minority culture to switch to a majority language but also to reinforce the sense that they are inferior and this switch is for their own good. You develop a kind of ingrained and taught self-loathing, which again happens in minorities all over the world. This seems to have been the impetus that Raghunath Murmu needed because he started school in 1912 when he was say seven. In 1914 he was admitted to another non Santali-speaking primary school which is seven kilometers from his village and he's now walking 14 kilometers back and forth for an education. In 1925 he created the Ol Chiki script for the Santali language because he was aware of the outsider-ness of not only himself as an individual but his people in general. And he created it at the age of 20. Even though this is actually slightly earlier than the 1950 date we put in the title, I'm including this because it's a spectacular example for a number of reasons. First of all especially in South Asia people who create scripts for their people are almost invariably individual males. There's one spectacular exception we're going to come to later. They are often very young. They are often the ones who take on the task of teaching the script and promoting the script. And in this case this became his life's work. Probably the most remarkable thing about this series of events was that his efforts were seized on by the Santali community. He was recognized, he was dignified, and he became a figurehead not just for the script but for his people. This is the next really important point that I want to make about writing. Writing is such a deep visual representation of the culture that uses it that their identification with it is so deep and so powerful that we know of many instances around the world where a letter or letters of a culture's script are used for example in jewelry or in a flag or on coinage or on stamps even though the people of that culture can no longer read that script. Perfect example - you go to Ireland, you buy a pendant, you buy an earring with an Ogham letter or phrase. Now the fact is, Ogham hasn't even been completely deciphered but it is regarded as being, this is ours this is our script. If you're a minority culture and of course the Irish have spent much of the last 350 years being told that they're a minority culture by the English then visual manifestations of your identity are extraordinarily important, the thing that says, we are here, you cannot ignore us, or, we have been here for centuries and we deserve our place on this land. That is one of the functions of writing. That's why if you go to Tahlequah, Oklahoma and you go downtown, then much of the signage there is in English but it's also in Cherokee because Tahlequah is the home of the western branch of the Cherokee Nation. And it is a way of saying, yes this is our land, or, this is our land too. In South Asia this particular quote has a kind of a dark side. This is a quote from Thomas Carlyle, writer, philosopher, Scotsman, 19th century. Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. The word miraculous strikes us nowadays as being odd and and perhaps overdone, over poetic, because for us writing is - it's sort of mundane. Everybody can do it. We do it, you know, on our phones. We write grocery lists. It's not that miraculous to us but the fact is - it is miraculous. And other cultures are more aware of that miracle. And we'll get some of those in a minute. However the dark side especially in South Asia is that if writing is so miraculous and in particular if writing is one of the manifestations of being a civilized people, then it means that people who do not have writing, who are pre-literate or an oral culture, or people who don't have their own writing system, have been the subject of contempt and derision and marginalization because they don't write, they cannot, therefore, be civilized, they must be tribal, they must be marginal. In here is a great statement in which somebody says what that means. So the Karen people live sort of a little bit mostly to the east of our target area today in Southeast Asia in Myanmar, also in southern regions of China, in the uplands between northern Southeast Asia toward the Himalayas. Anyhow this is such a spectacular statement of what it's like, I'm putting it in. In the 1820s, Karen villagers informed a Baptist missionary that God had given them writing on leather... and in my next talk I'm going to be talking a lot more about these writing creation and writing loss narratives. ... but that it had become lost and since that tragic event we have been an ignorant people without books without a king without a government of our own, subject to other kings and other governments, we have been a nation of slaves, despised and kicked about, trodden underfoot by everybody like dogs... So this passionate bitter statement is just the the most concise way I've ever found of expressing what it's like to be a people who are the subject of contempt and derision and abuse and manipulation by their more powerful neighbors, because they don't read and write or because they don't have their own writing system. With that in mind we start understanding a little better the motivation for creating a script such as Ol Chiki. This is what Ol Chiki looks like. This is part of an exhibition that I did where I carved the phrase, thank you all, in a dozen different endangered writing systems. This is, it's a really interesting script in a number of respects. First of all it's actually an alphabet unlike most Indic scripts as you'll see. Unlike the Devanagari and other related scripts, it doesn't have the line running along the top of the letters but it has many more qualities than that. As a script it's not only indigenous but also ingenious. It's been created specifically to be easy to learn. One letter for example represents a sickle used for cutting or reaping, so it can be recognized. People know what that word is therefore they know what the sound is. Others depict a kind of vessel used for preparing food. The peak of an unusually high mountain, a mushroom. And some of them are kind of visual onomatopoeia. There's a shape that's rather like a flying bee and that represents a buzzing sound. These qualities are not merely cute nor are they signs of a primitive culture that needs these cues in order to be able to learn how to read. First of all let's remember that for foreigners or non-native English speakers learning to read English using the English alphabet is notoriously hard. You would think that we could actually learn from something like this. Just as importantly when you have a script whose very visual identity is based in the visual experience of its community then it's not only familiar, it reinforces that sense that we and our community have a place in the world, we deserve our footprint on the Earth. For people who speak English or you use the Latin alphabet, we don't really understand that because it's used everywhere. We are subject to what I call the Elf station phenomenon. If you travel around Europe everywhere there are gas stations owned by the Elf corporation and they all look exactly the same. You could be anywhere at an Elf station. In that sense the Latin alphabet, if you see something written in Latin, you could be anywhere, whereas if you see something in Ol Chiki and you can read it, you know where you are. You know you are home. And as Jon was saying earlier the Ol Chiki script has flourished remarkably well. Whoops I'm too far, let's go back here. So here are a collection of publications in the Ol Chiki script. We have books and magazines, we have Ol Chiki fonts, we have Ol Chiki newspapers. In West Bengal, education is imparted in Santali from class one to the masters level using the Ol Chiki script. At North Odisha University, bachelors and masters levels education are provided in the Santali language using Ol Chiki script. There are now railway stations with signage in Ol Chiki. It is a remarkable achievement. There's an argument that can be made that Ol Chiki is the most successful consciously created writing system since Hangul in Korea, 500 years previously. What we're looking at here even if this the script is largely unfamiliar to us may well be the most successful community developed custom-made writing system in 500 years. I think that's pretty remarkable. Okay, moving on. Let's go from the 7.6 million Santali speakers to a real minority minority, the mro people. Perhaps 20,000 people, also written as Mru, most of whom are Buddhist, live in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts... And to talk about oppressed minorities will fit the Mro extremely well. Those of you who know what's going on with indigenous people in Bangladesh and in particular in the Hill Tracts, which is now a militarized area, know that life is not easy nor is it respectful of minorities, their languages, or their scripts. Education is in Bangla the national language and once again there is the issue of shaming people who actually have a background in a minority mother tongue. A good friend of mine actually grew up in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and his first day at school he was beaten by the teacher for not paying attention. The teacher was speaking Bangla. My friend is an ethnic Marma and that's his mother tongue. He was beaten for not paying attention to a language he did not understand. So this is where things stand. But the another reason why I want to look at Mro is because Mro is a great illustration of perhaps an entirely unexpected reason for the creation of indigenous writing systems. It really reflects the influence of evangelical Christianity. Starting in the 19th century this area of the eastern part of India and Southeast Asia was much visited by missionaries and whenever they came across a culture that was largely an oral culture and even some that weren't, then they would study the language very carefully and and very intelligently and quite often write grammars of the language and then they would look to print materials for that culture. In many cases they would adopt the Latin script or adapt the Latin script, even though it often didn't really represent the sounds of the language in in an entirely faithful way, because of course the Latin script was what they were familiar with and of course it made it easier to print. In the face of these well-intentioned incursions shall we say one of the things that happened a lot in especially in the uplands of Southeast Asia and South Asia was the springing up of extremely local charismatic millenarian religions. In several cases, actually rather like Christianity, these identified with a specific charismatic leader. Again like Christianity, this leader may have died or been killed or been arrested but part of the dogma of the religion was millenarian. He will come back, he will bring the religion back to us, we will be saved when he returns. The other feature of many of these micro religions, which by the way were also inherently political because they served to unify a small outcast community that had previously been largely powerless. So they were unified in part at least because in many cases this charismatic leader also created an alphabet or a writing system, specifically for that religion. And so the alphabet or the script became a visual gathering point for the people. It also meant that their doctrinal materials could be written in that text that other people couldn't read. That of course made it very alarming for more powerful neighbors because they're seeing the rise of a political, spiritual, social force that is unifying people and is giving them the sense of self-respect that comes with having literacy and literacy in their own writing system. And we're going to talk about this more in southeast asia where it was somewhat more common. But I've introduced the Mro here partly because the Mro are technically in South Asia but partly because of an extraordinary piece of breaking news. Until a week ago, I knew that the Mro are galvanized around one of these micro-religions called Krama. And I knew that the religion had been founded in the 1980s by a Mro called Manlay Mro. But frankly I knew virtually nothing about him or where he was now, what happened to him, and none of the standard sources did. About a week ago I heard from his nephew. His nephew is Fungpre Mro and Fungpre was kind enough to say, I will tell you about my uncle Manlay Mro and the religion that he created and his life. And so you are going to be the first people who hear about this because this information- as I say, I have been looking for it for eight years and for it to suddenly appear is extraordinary. So if you'll excuse me, I'm actually going to read from this sheet in my hand because I'm reading from Fungpre Mro's letter about his uncle. Manlay Mro was born in 1965 in a poor Mro family in a village called Kretkong in the Bandarban District of Bangladesh, which is in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. And his father named him Manlay but people over time came to know him as Kramati. The word Kramati is closely associated with the name Krama, a word meaning possessing infinite knowledge. Until that time, most of the village schools in the area taught in the Marma language and the Marma alphabet which is a version of the Burmese alphabet. And so once again you have a kid who is going to school and being taught in a language that he doesn't speak or he barely speaks in a script that he doesn't read and write and that sense of being an outsider. And Fungpre Mro wrote, the ignorance and superstition of Mro society starts from there. So at the earliest age they're being convinced that they are outsiders, they are not, their own cultural assets are not what will see them through in life and in the world in general. In 1980 the Mro residential school in Bandarban was established and Manlay was admitted at the age of 15. There he actually could speak in the Mro language, I believe. And Fungpre writes, meditation begins here with studies and daily work. Every night the teenage Manlay meditated under the ashvattha tree near the school. In 1981 - bear in mind he's 16 at this point - he started to create a Mro script which you can see on the slide, underneath him seated in the, you know, this holy posture. After a year he'd completed it and he began to write poems and songs, the first in the Mro language to be written in the new script. This is the next thing - what having your own script does is to act as an invitation and a release. It's like, yes we can use this to celebrate ourselves individually and culturally and so there's this efflorescence begins to take place. In 1982 the alphabet was reported in the school. The teachers were surprised, Fungpre writes. And he left school and continued meditating and teaching the alphabet. So again this is another of these scripts which begins with one person who is the creator but also the teacher. He was well aware of his role both spiritual and social, so he took it on himself to organize village life and to create essentially a kind of council of experts who ran different aspects of village life. And he traveled and taught the script and taught the religion and this went on until he was 18. Okay so 18 at this point, it's 1984. And he chose to leave and he gathered people around him and he said, I will be back after I fulfill my austerities. Which I take to mean the rigorous task of becoming more enlightened by meditation. He said it can take a minimum of 15 years. So Fungpre wrote, he gave a speech before he left, giving lots of information to the Mro community and Mro people still listen to the recording of his speech when they get tired on physical work or emotions. And here's the thing- nobody has seen him since. There is a sense that he may have gone to the Himalayas, to Mount Everest but here we have somebody who created an alphabet, who created a religion, who created social structures for his people and then left. And to me, that is, it's not only an extraordinary feat on those three levels but it also creates this absolutely magnetic quality about the script itself because the script is now representing him and it's standing in for him until such time as he returns. As I've said, this is true of various other millenarian religions in in the area. I just happen to have heard of this one from his nephew. So I want to tell you a little bit about what the Endangered Alphabets does in circumstances like this. I've worked with a school in the Hill Tracts where they're teaching in mother languages including Mro. One of our team created a font book, there's the Mro font book, thank you Tom Sanalitro. We created various educational materials including this, which I think may be unique. This is a six language dictionary, illustrated dictionary, for children. Each page has a picture and then it has the word for that picture in six languages. Starting at the top left that's in Tripura, in Marma, in Mro, in English, in Bangla, and in Chakma. Four of those are indigenous languages of the Hill Tracts. Then you also have Bangla the national language and English the international language, and this dictionary is now being used in mother language schools in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. This is not what the Hill Tracts look like. This is a carving that I did, this was for International Mother Language Day. This says mother tongue in Mro, which I carved. And that is the the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont where it is a lot colder than in Bangladesh. But I thought I would let you see what the Mro script looks like, and give you a little insight into one of the things that the Endangered Alphabets is up to. So moving on to what it is, if anything, an even more remarkable sacred script, Sora Sompeng. Sora or Savara is a language spoken by about 300,000 people mainly in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh in the east of India but the Sora Sompeng is actually used only by an extremely small minority of this group and it is safe to say that this is one of a small number of writing systems in the world that is not merely a means of capturing speech and making it visible but is a gateway between the material world and the immaterial world. The Sora people especially before the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in the region and also the introduction of missionary Christianity had - oh I'm sorry I'm out of sequence here. This is a letter in Sora Sompeng script but that gives you absolutely no idea of what's coming next. And what's coming next is something about this culture. Piers Vitebsky, an anthropologist who wrote this terrific book after having lived with them intermittently for several decades, writes, in the 1970s they held what may well be the most elaborate form of communication between the living and the dead documented anywhere on Earth. Almost every day in every village living people engaged in conversations with the dead who would speak one after another through the mouth of a shaman in a trance. Together living and dead would chat, weep, or argue for hours at a time. This is an extraordinary spiritual and cultural resource. The whole idea that you can call upon your ancestors and your relatives as you're trying to navigate the difficult way through, you know, this material world is a really incredible thing. But what is if anything more incredible is what had started to take place before this, which was the creation of an alphabet for this sort of spiritual, cultural group. I'm going to tell you how this alphabet was created. So that's what it looks like but it is one of a number of scripts found around the world that really arose out of a dream or a trance or a vision. This particular vision, you have to bear in mind, came to somebody who was a member of an animist religion. What that meant was that for him - there is no solely material world. Everything that is is physical is also possessed of its own spirit or its own immaterial identity as well. In this particular vision what happened was the sonams, so each of these spirits is called a sonam, and there are 24 sonams, who were resident in this landscape in this particular area. Each of them came to him one by one and gave him a letter that was the first letter of that sonam's name and as often happens, the case when somebody is not used to reading and writing, if someone gives you a letter you then forget it. But he went off and meditated and worked with other members of his people and sort of recreated the symbols that had been given him. But the important point is these letters are not just - here's a sound - these letters are the initials or if you like the calling cards of the spirits of the their landscape. To use that letter, to speak it out loud, to write it down is to call on and participate with an exchange with that sonam. Bear in mind these are people who are used to talking to the members of the spirit world. So what developed out of this is several things which are just truly extraordinary. The people became known as the alphabet worshipers because for them there is no distinction between the alphabet and sort of the religious pantheon of their beliefs. It also meant that in their ceremonies because this is mostly used in ceremonial purposes they would recite or chant or sing their alphabet. So unlike the Sesame Street thing where people sing the alphabet song as means of just learning the words, here by singing their alphabet they are communing with the spirits of their religion. And I find that just sort of an extraordinary illustration of another role that writing plays and has played in various areas throughout history. They are by no means the only people for whom the invention and development of writing has not been to bookkeeping and you know to denote ownership of crops or materials or whatever, but as a means of manifesting something that is a gateway to the immaterial world. I mentioned earlier that most of the creators of scripts in India and elsewhere are individual male, amateur linguists, but there is one spectacular exception. Oh I'm sounding like David Attenborough again aren't I? But there is one spectacular exception. And her name is Professor Prasanna Sree. Professor Sree of Andhra University and Andhra Pradesh, who is herself from a minority background is therefore really aware of the marginalization and even contempt that minority groups or hill tribes as they're often called are viewed, has spent a couple of decades now creating writing systems for groups that do not have their own alphabet. She does this in a very particular way which I think again is really important in terms of understanding what writing is and what writing can be. She lives with the target group for a period of time and gets to know their habits, their agriculture, their customs, their social structure, their marital practices, their religious beliefs, their sort of ancestral mythologies, and out of that, she chooses an element that reflects them culturally in a positive light. In this particular script that we're going to look at, which is one of 20 that, I believe she's at 20 right now, that she's created, the Kupia script, which was created for the Valmiki people. What she's done is she has based it on their belief that they are descended from the great sage Valmiki, the author of the Hindu epic the Ramayana. This is really important, this is not let us create abstract symbols that represent the sounds, this is let us create symbols that hark to the rich cultural heritage and dignity of the people. So this is how the story goes. According to legend, Ratna Kardah was a thief and a bird hunter. One day he shot an arrow at two pigeons and one of the birds fell dead. The sight of the surviving pigeon in tears beside her dead partner made the thief regret his crime. He was so consumed by remorse he did not notice a vast ant hill, called Valmikam, grow up around him. God appeared and instructed him to write the great Indian epic Ramayana. The holy sage was named Agni Sharma and after his emergence from the ant hill, or valmakam, he was known as Valmiki. The language his descendants spoke was the Kupia language of the Valmiki tribe. So their script is designed around the form of a bow and arrow. What that means is if you look at every single letter there is a common element to each. It's a vertical element. We might think of a bow and arrow as being more horizontal but you see the chevron at the top and the wavy line underneath. This is the bow and arrow. Every letter is a variant on this basic element and every letter harks back to their ancestry and their connection to their the Ramayana. It's literally, it becomes an epic letter for them. So we also were talking about the notion of script revitalization and in a sense script revitalization is a more straightforward process than script creation. It is important to know why scripts need to be revitalized. I'm going to tell you about this one in just a second. There is a movement that's been going for about between five and ten years, certainly since I started the Endangered Alphabets, all over the world where individual cultures are starting to try and reclaim their heritage. And they're doing so in different ways by, for example, reviving traditional agriculture practices, reviving traditional song and dance or art or crafts, or in some cases reviving traditional writing systems, which may have been either barely in use or not used at all for decades or even centuries. Again this is how important writing is. It's a visual manifestation that they are here, that a culture is here, and we have been here, we can no longer be silent, we can no longer be ignored. We're looking at Nepal. In Nepal the Newar languages alone in the Kathmandu Valley have been written for a thousand years in a total of nine closely related scripts. So you would think okay, so this can't be an Endangered Alphabet, this obviously has tremendous history. But in fact the Rana dynasty so opposed traditional Nepali scripts and Newari scripts that in 1912 Rana Prime Minister Chandra Shamshere officially nullified all property ownership documents and deeds written in any language other than Gorkhali and any script other than Devanagari. The assault on the script continued for decades. In 1941 all poets and writers using it were thrown in jail, their property was confiscated, books were seized and burned. But many Newar families hid their books in their dhukus, secret wardrobes, while others, to save their ancestral texts, cast them afloat in rivers. So this is what I was talking about at the beginning when I was talking about the tension between uniformity and diversity. Here we see one of at least two conscious efforts to stamp out a traditional script and to replace it with a more mainstream script namely the Devanagari script. When we look at the script in question and I'm going to look at one particular manifestation of the script, which is called Ranjana. This is the Ranjana script which is just glorious. It's extremely regal. It is inherently calligraphic. Each letter has a head, a backbone, a tail, in some cases a hand or a torso. This by the way is a piece of typography by Ananda K Maharjan, who is a type designer and teacher in Kathmandu. This was part of an exhibition that he did with his students. But another fascinating thing about the Ranjana script is that it can be written, you know, side by side like this. It can also be written in monogram form. This form is called Kutakshar or secret writing. It was traditionally used to write sutras or to send secret messages. What happens is that the letters are superimposed on top of each other, so it's actually much harder to read, but it's also extraordinarily ornamental. You can totally see something like that manufactured in gold, sort of as, you know, a sacred item or an icon. I'm going to draw your attention to actually what's written in the Latin script if you turn your head left and look at the gold writing, it says Callijatra. So Callijatra is an organization that just in the last couple of years has started trying to reintroduce and re-dignify the Nepal Lipi scripts. Thank you so much Tim and thank you to everybody for attending today especially our audience from South Asia staying up late tonight. This is an amazing lecture and it's got something for basically everybody. There's something for the anthropologists, there's something for the sociologists, linguists and historians of course, and then a lot of really interesting food for thought for people who are studying religious traditions and different modes of spirituality in South Asia today. So it's just generating a ton of questions that we have and I would like to first remind everybody to add your questions to the Q and A box at the bottom of your screen. And how it'll work is if you add them there then I'll read them out for Tim with the time that we have left here today. I'll just go ahead and start with a little bit of a comparative question. So we had a lecture last week, the first in the series on African writing systems and the idea of challenging what we define and what we recognize as writing and here in South Asia we have the topic of script creation. The question would be something like can you compare the two situations in kind of broad strokes between Africa and South Asia? Do you see the same types of scripts newly created in South Asia as you do in Africa and vice versa? This is a really interesting situation that until I started doing all the research for the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets had never come up, and as far as I'm aware nobody else has been talking about this. So no they're- the types of script created and the reasons for creating them are quite different in the two continents. In Africa it is amazing how often the creator of a script will say as part of his intention, I want this not only to be to work for my language but for all African languages. There is this really interesting pan-African ambition that you hear over and over again. In India I've never heard that. The ambitions are much more, this is for for my people, for our people. Secondly what that also suggests to me at any rate is that the impulse to create a script in Africa is more likely to be an anti-colonial or a post-colonial impulse. In fact in many cases script creators have articulated that very thing, we don't want to use the alphabet of the colonizers, we want to have our own alphabet. In South Asia the enemy is less likely to be a colonizer and more likely to be one's neighbor. This diversity and fragmentation that we talked about from the beginning of the show means that you have a whole series of a sort of dynamics between neighboring cultures throughout the country. The third difference, and I'm going to do a reveal here, is that in Asia the scripts that are created tend to be recognizable as what we think of as writing. You tend to have characters that are roughly uniform in height, that are roughly uniform in terms of the amount of space they take up on the page. And there is a sense that they have, they're trying to take on the dignity of the writing tradition, the accepted writing tradition. In Africa the origins of the symbols used and the way they're used are way wilder. So I'm going to take off my shirt here. This is a first for Library of Congress talks, I suspect. So I'm wearing a t-shirt which is shows the newly created Ndebe script for the Igbo language. And as you can see that is kind of going in many dimensions. This is actually a series of names of deities in Igbo culture and this is, that is not what we in Europe think of as writing. Similarly I've got one of my carvings here in the Mandombe script which is from the DRC. It's another religious script. As you can see it has this remarkable quality, the letters of which are syllables in fact are not uniform in terms of height. They are free to explore all over the page, very difficult to digitize and put in unicode or to print for that reason. This was also a dream script and it came about so it sort of took its form because the dreamer who was the founder of of a religion was looking at a brick wall and was looking at the shapes the mortar created around the brick and used some of those basic shapes as means of of creating these syllables for the language. I just love that stuff. Great thank you, so much. We've got a question, it's a little bit of a longer one here so I'm just going to read through. So the question begins, I need clarification here. When you say that Murmu invented the writing system for Santali are you saying that he actually invented a script system and not developed an already existing script system? Correct. And then also we've got here just some additional kind of interesting comparative context. I cite the case of I believe it's pronounced Meitei. Yes, yep. A language spoken in India's northeast especially Manipur, Assam, which used archival texts that date back to the 11th century. Following the state imposed forced conversion to Hinduism this script was replaced by the Bengali script in the late 17th, early 18th centuries. The 1940s then saw a revivalist movement named Sanamahism and it also entailed the revival of the script for the language. However in this case there is no creation or invention of a script, it's more of a revival. Is there a comparative dynamic here between what happens in Santali or are they kind of different scenarios? The comparative, the strongest comparison between the two actually is the destruction of the script is very reminiscent of what we heard earlier about the oppression of the Nepali scripts. And I believe maybe your your participant, the questioner can clarify this for me. In my notes it says that this event when all the documents in Manipuri were burnt was so traumatic and catastrophic that even today events and marches are held to commemorate the destruction, which is believed to have occurred on the 17th of October 1729. So there you have the destruction of a script being so traumatic that you actually have even today a celebratory or kind of I guess defiant ceremony is taking place to sort of say, yes that's what happened. You know it's kind of like the gunpowder plot on November the fifth in England. But no what we're talking about are two different, two different processes. So when I think about the Endangered Alphabets Project I really think about scripts that are in decline or threatened or scripts that are emerging and new. Both of them are endangered because a new script, I mean Ol Chiki is the exception. Most new scripts struggle for survival. They're like fledgling birds you know. The fact that someone's created a script is no guarantee it's going to survive. And in that sense it's endangered, but yes there are a number of cultures around the world where they have very consciously researched and sorted out ancestral documents and then used them as a means to recreate a script that will work for today. So Sundanese in in Indonesia on the western part of the island of Java is another example of that. That's almost a perfect segue into the next question here, so that's awesome. We're gonna stay with Ol Chiki for just a moment and the question is, what made Ol Chiki so successful and why did it succeed while others have failed or achieved less success? And then also kind of a little bit of a meta unpacking question is like how would you define success when it comes to efforts to recreate a script? Yeah yeah well frankly I'm hoping that somebody in our audience knows the history of the creation of the Ol Chiki script especially between say in the 1930s and 40s excuse me because I haven't got that information. I know why other scripts that have been created managed to flourish and that's because I've actually interviewed a number of script creators and basically it all comes down to power. I mean frankly whether a script is used or not used, is endangered or thriving, these are all issues of human rights, social justice, and power. And if local government is on your side there is more of a chance that will be adopted in a school for example. If state government is on your side then it may well, there may will be funding that's made available, although that is by no means universally the case. In South Asia for example states are much more likely to adopt at best a kind of a blind eye or tolerant attitude towards script revivals and only to sort of get on board when it's clear that there is a strong enough groundswell movement. But yes, the scripts that struggle are the ones, and there are many of them where there is still one person who's created that script who is teaching it in some instances in a single room with a blackboard and chalk. I know somebody who's doing that. In some cases it's one person who's teaching it to a Facebook group, that's very common in South Asia by the way. And I would love to hear from anybody who can tell me more about the sort of the the adolescent years of the Ol Chiki script, especially as before the Second World War you had such a strong sort of pro Hindi pro Devanagari movement because frankly it was a way of uniting india to kick the British out. And I'm fine with that by the way despite being British I'm all in favor of that but it did mean that it was a tough time for local and regional scripts which were sort of sacrificed in the name of national unity. That's great, and we've got a comment here that makes another kind of comparison. So, Sora Sompeng's links with shamanism reminds me of Meitei Mayek's link with the dance of the Maibis, the priestess of Sanamahism, if you might be familiar, which embodies the making of the supreme being from whose various body parts the script is supposed to be derived. Okay you are going to go to endangeredalphabets.com find the contact and send me everything you know about that, that is fantastic. And it's yet another illustration of how when I give these talks I wind up learning way more than I teach. Let's see we've got one more question here, so back to Santali. So was it a conscious decision for the Santali to choose an alphabet as the basis of the Ol Chiki writing system as opposed to the abugidas used by the majority of the languages in the surrounding area? If so what would you think were the underlying factors in play in terms of maybe power relations, historical context, things like that. Yeah so this is another interesting question that I wish I knew the answer to. Excuse me. It does strike you that it is significantly different from other Indic scripts in their traditions and that difference, I'm looking not specifically at Santali now but looking at kind of panorama of all of the scripts I know that have been created, it tends to be really idiosyncratic. Quite often as I say in most cases new scripts are created by one person working alone. And so their processes may well be entirely idiosyncratic. They may well have a preference for an alphabet. They may deliberately not want to use an alphabet because it is closer to the Latin tradition. The shapes of the letters may well be chosen specifically as in this case to be easy to learn. That's also true in the Wancho script which has recently been created further northeast. But equally they may be chosen sort of on a Hangul principle as a means of you know mapping the mouth and how the letters are articulated. Again I would love to know more about this and the truth is if you look at the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets it seems as if I know stuff but actually I know way less than I seem to and I literally spend more time trying to find people who can fill in these blanks than almost anything that I do. The carvings that I do you know you would think, boy they take a lot of time and skill and effort. That's nothing compared to trying to find somebody who can tell me about the sort of the adolescent years of a script or how it is actually being used right now on the ground. I would love to have my volunteer spies on on the ground in a number of places in the world who can literally go around say, oh yes well now this is being used for this or this was just used in a bakery, here is the sign in a baker's shop window. In Tulu for example there's a tremendous following of the of the Tulu movement right now and so most of what I'm finding is through Twitter and Facebook but if somebody were to send me stuff then I'd be super grateful. And that kind of leads us to the last question that we have time for today. On that note we would of course as Tim said encourage everybody to reach out to him through the Endangered Alphabets Project the website but the last question is asking a little bit about what you and the team are working on currently. Do you have any ongoing research taking place with South Asian writing systems? Or are you working with other different parts of the world? So as I sort of just implied I am constantly in conversation with people everywhere just trying to know what's going on. It's been a very exciting process being the only person in the world who's doing this but it also means that I am constantly aware of how little I know. So yes I'm having conversations with people in literally every continent except Antarctica right now. In terms of major initiatives yes the Endangered Alphabets Project is in the process of manufacturing and we're about to launch a board game called Ulus whose purpose is to introduce the west, the rest of the world to the culture and language and script of Mongolia, the traditional script, the bichig vertical script, which is under threat in Inner Mongolia. And with luck it's under revival in Mongolia the country, which has been using Cyrillic since roughly the Second World War. In order to change westerners' perception of the Mongols - we think of them as a savage horde because frankly once upon a time you know they they overran us and we've never forgiven them. And so in this game you get to meet the Mongol gods and figures from history and mythology and extraordinary sacred sites and features of Mongol culture. You get to meet the champion wrestler of all time who was a woman and retired undefeated. You get to meet another woman character who is probably the most influential woman in the history of the world. Both of them are figures in the game. So that game you can find out more about us, actually best way is to go to kickstarter.com and just type in Endangered Alphabets or the word Ulus, U L U S, and that will give us give you the big explanation but that's our major effort that's going on at the same time as all of our our little conversations and efforts taking place. And thank you for asking. Oh sure you're welcome and thank you so much Tim for joining us today for talking to us about these different examples of script invention and revitalization in India. A big thanks to our audience out there especially people joining us from India and the rest of South Asia. But as we wrap up, I'd like to just remind you of three important things that we have been putting in the chat. Number one, we have the registration for next week's lecture Wednesday April 21 12 p.m eastern time where Tim will return and talk to us about Southeast Asian Scripts From the Centers to the Margins. Number two, we also have the link there for the endangeredalphabets.com website and encourage you to contact Tim with information regarding different endangered writing systems around the world. And then finally we have the ask.loc.gov/asia, the Ask a Librarian service for any questions about the South Asian collection or the materials at the Library of Congress. And with that I'd like to thank everyone once again for coming today and we hope to see you here next week. Thank you for joining.