Voices of Irular children to resonate in American Tamil Radio

Coimbatore: S Kannika, a Class XI student from the Irular tribal community in Rayar Oothupathi village, Naickenpalayam, has been writing stories in Irular language.
Earlier, she had read these stories in Tamil and had been retelling them in her language, but when it comes to writing it down, she faced certain hassles.
“As we had to use the Tamil script for our language, we didn’t know which ‘la’, or which ‘ra’ would suit our pronunciation. We also didn’t know the Irular names for certain objects, so we had to consult our elders to learn them. For example, we didn’t know what the moon was called in our language. After consulting with elders, we learnt that it was ‘dhovi’,” Kannika says. “I wrote down two stories, but I was doubtful, so I abandoned them. I have to try my hand at it again,” she says.
Like Kannika, her younger brother Ragu, their friend M Kanishka and around 20 Irular tribal children from her village have been reading stories in Tamil, and have been retelling them in their own language, for the past one year. Subsequently, they also took up writing down the stories in their own language, using Tamil script. Along the way, they also learnt stories of their tribe from their grandparents and parents. “Our grandparents tell us incidents that happened in our village, and stories they know. We have been writing them down,” they say.
This retrieval of words, language, and a culture, through stories was the motive of this exercise, says Odiyen Lakshmanan, a writer, and collector of Irular songs, who has undertaken the ‘Reading and Language Retrieval Movement’ for Irular tribal children from 2018-end.
When mobilising help for tribal people hit by the lockdown, Lakshmanan told about the initiative to his friend Surya Nagappan, a Tamil teacher in Iowa City, USA, who is also a volunteer with the American Tamil Radio. Surya took it to the radio’s administrative director Arumugam Pechimuthu. “He was very interested in the project and we decided to broadcast recordings of the kids’ stories in our radio,” says Surya over a phone call.
The online radio, based in California Bay Area, has been active for around six years now, and has dedicated listeners among the Tamil diaspora in the US, Canada, Malaysia, and Singapore, Surya says. “As the Irular language is much like Tamil, we don’t need to have an explanation or commentary. We have planned to broadcast it twice, for the benefit of listeners across timelines.”
The radio would broadcast the programme on Wednesdays for one year. The first episode would be on August 19, an important day in the history of Lakota tribal people in the US. “We have material for around 25 episodes. We would collect more. We hope this initiative would create enthusiasm among tribal people across Tamil Nadu,” Surya says.
Through the initiative, Lakshmanan says, his team has reached to around 200 Irular kids in villages in and around Coimbatore, such as Melpathi, Keezhpathi, Koottupulikkadu, Kondanur, Kandivali, and Alamaramedu, in regions such as Anaikatti and Athikadavu. Soon they were also planning to reach Irular kids in Sathyamangalam, he says.