In Hyderabad Telugu is spoken differently - the tone, accent and manner of speech is markedly different from that of the rest of the State. The city is in the midst of a region called Telangana - a politically explosive term in recent months. The dialect spoken in this region is called Telangana Telugu.
The regions are not official segmentations of the State, but a common conversational device to indicate a geographical area within the State. The Telugu variant spoken in this region sounds funny to people from other regions and vice versa. Even people originally hailing from other regions quickly adapted themselves to the language, though the customs and the cultural milieu remain foreign and impossible to assimilate. Many families, like mine, remain unaffected either by the language or the local customs; the language is used primarily to talk to the maid servants, the labourers and others who are born and bred here.
The language divide has been one of the fault lines along which the Indian body politic experiences tremors and sometimes even fissures. The linguistic division of the nation into self-governing entities is now sadly leading into separations based on dialects also. Hyderabad being at the heart of the Telangana region, and simultaneously the State capital, is in the grip of a violent agitation for a separate state. The seeds were sown in 1969 and after 40 years again riots broke out in several parts of the city, especially in the campus of the Osmania University. Time erases memory? Human memory is short? Alas, no. Nothing is forgotten, ever. Memory is only buried and at the first opportunity it rears its ugly head up and charges, taking energy from the young and the gullible in the present. And the politics of opportunity has always found the Indian mind a fertile field to take root and flourish.
Hyderabad occupies a unique position in this battle for separation between the separate-Telangana trumpeters and the rest of the Andhra state. It is the Urdu heartland in the south of India and has a sizeable population of Muslims. People from the rest of Andhra easily outnumber the so-called natives and have established flourishing industries and trade routes that cut across linguistic boundaries. The Telangana dialect exists only in speech; it is not the reason for the bad blood among the people. Hyderabad is caught in the crossfire and the conflicting interests of centre-state politics.
Telangana thrives on a folk culture that is at once colorful and lively. The Bonalu celebrations and the Bathukamma festival create a flurry of vivacity among the people and provide glimpses of women draped in colourful sarees standing in long queues in front of a temple, carrying steel plates of rice, incense and vermilion and pots on their heads with eye-catching designs. The Bathukamma is a prayer to the earth mother to ensure sound health for the husband – it means the festival of life, according to some or the festival of flowers according to others. Women decorate steel or reed trays with wild flowers in splendid colors and structured in the shape of a cone with a broad base. Bonalu are the pots that women balance on their heads and dance to wild trumpeting sounds while a potharaju – a half-naked man with a huge mustache and a saffron dhoti – whirls about in frenzy as he rouses himself with whip lashes. The Bonalu is an offering to the deity, the grama devata, for her continued patronage over their lives. The festivals occur in the months of August, September and October – follow the lunar calendar. Like most Indian festivals, especially of the local sub-cultures, the opinions regarding the origin and the purpose of the festivals vary, even as the manner of celebration itself varies from age to age. It is an incomplete presentation of Telangana without the mention of a Jatara – a ritual coming together of different tribes who pay obeisance to the local deity of Sammakka near Warangal about a 100 kilometers from Hyderabad.
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