A script ’good to drink’. The Invention of graphic systems among the Sora and other tribes of India Cécile Guillaume-Pey To cite this version: Cécile Guillaume-Pey. A script ’good to drink’. The Invention of graphic systems among the Sora and other tribes of India. P. Steele, P. Boyes & N. E. Astoreca (eds.). P. Steele, P. Boyes & N. E. Astoreca (eds.) The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices, Oxbow books, Oxford., Oxbow books„ 2021. halshs-03263281 HAL Id: halshs-03263281 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03263281 Submitted on 16 Jul 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350766595 A script 'good to drink'. Invention of graphic systems among the Sora and other tribes of India, in P. Steele, P. Boyes & N. E. Astoreca (eds.) The Social and Cultural Contexts of... Chapter · April 2021 CITATIONS READS 0 12 1 author: Cecile guillaume-pey École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales 10 PUBLICATIONS 4 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: “From Spirit to Letter. Or how to manipulate the alphabetic body of gods”, HASTEC research project, “ History and Anthropology of Knowledge, Technologies and Beliefs (HASTEC), ANR-10-LABX-0085 View project All content following this page was uploaded by Cecile guillaume-pey on 09 April 2021. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. This pdf of your paper in The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices is from the open-access on-line version of this book, available at: http:// books.casematepublishing.com/The_Social_and_Cultural_Contexts_of_Historic_ Writing_Practices.pdf. The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for copying any part of the online work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Materials provided by third parties remain the copyright of their owners. AN OFFPRINT FROM The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices edited by Philip J. Boyes, Philippa M. Steele and Natalia Elvira Astoreca Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-478-5 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-479-2 (ePub) Oxford & Philadelphia Chapter 9 A script ‘good to drink’. The invention of writing systems among the Sora and other tribes of India Cécile Guillaume-Pey The god foresaw that at the end of time there would be devastation and ruin, and on the first day of Creation he wrote a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils. He wrote it so that it would reach the most distant generations and to insure that chance would not touch it. No one knows in what characters it is written nor where it is written, but it is certain that it exists as a secret and that a chosen one shall read it. I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of time and that my destiny as the last priest of the god would give me access to the privilege of intuiting the script. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The God’s script’, in El Aleph (1967[1949]) Introduction About to dissect a dead body in the hospital where he was working, Mangaya Gomang, a man belonging to the Sora tribe, became aware of the significance of possessing a script, his disciples recount today. ‘What is missing from this body for it to be alive?’ Mangaya wondered: ‘This body is like the Sora: even if they are rejected, insulted, they do not react, they do not rise up against those who persecute them and laugh at them’. Comparing the body without life to a language without a script, Mangaya prayed to obtain ‘clothes for the voice’, a script to shield the Sora from derision and sarcasm. In 1936, he allegedly discovered alphabetic characters engraved on a stone near his village and founded a religious movement whose adepts worship these letters. Among the tribal groups of India, the Adivasi1 – a term meaning ‘first dwellers’ – we observe many cases of script invention since the colonial period. The proliferation of 1 ‘Scheduled Tribe’ is the official designation used by the Government of India. The term ‘Adivasi’ was invented in Central India at the beginning of the twentieth century by Christian students belonging to the Munda group and was adopted later by other tribal groups of Central India (Carrin 1996). Nowadays, 160 Cécile Guillaume-Pey tribal scripts in contemporary India is linked to the identitarian strategies deployed by social groups who are linguistically, religiously, politically and economically marginalised. These new graphic systems enable them to promote their language, to elaborate new ritual forms and to assert territorial claims in proto-nationalist movements (Carrin 2016; Guillaume-Pey 2018b). From letters engraved on funeral stones to school books, from signboards to websites or artistic installations in foreign galleries and museums, scripts created by Adivasi groups are transmitted and ‘exhibited’ (Petrucci 1986) in spaces and on media whose diversity reflects the plurality of their uses. This paper focuses on the issues raised by the invention and the circulation of writing systems among these minority-language communities and, more particularly, among the Sora, a group of farmers who live mainly in rural areas at the border between Odisha and Andhra Pradesh (East central India) (Fig 9.1). The Sora originally speak a Munda language – a branch of the Austroasiatic language family – whereas neighbouring castes speak Indo-European or Dravidian languages: Odia in Odisha and Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, official languages recognised by the Constitution of India that the Sora children learn in public schools. While in some tribal/Adivasi groups the invention of a graphic system gave birth to a militant literature spread by various media, such as village theatre and newspapers (Carrin 2002; 2016), the Sora script is used in a ritual context and its circulation is controlled by religious specialists. Nowadays, in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, the Sora are followers of Matharvanam, the religious movement born in the late 1930s and whose founder, Mangaya Gomang, is said to have discovered an alphabet of 24 characters to transcribe his native language. Each letter of this script embodies a spirit which the devotees incorporate into themselves through an alphabetic potion drunk during rituals. The discoverer of the script is worshipped today along with the god Jagannath, the main deity embodied in the alphabet. Promoted to the rank of tutelary deity of the Odisha kingdom in the twelfth century, Jagannath is, to this day, a central religious figure in the state (Eschmann et al. 1978; Kulke & Schnepel 2001). Present-day Matharvanam followers claim that the Brahmins and Rajas formerly stole Jagannath from them before the god, leaving Hindu temples, returned to his original Sora devotees in alphabetic form. The Matharvanam movement therefore offers a striking image by a tribal community of the reappropriation both of Jagannath, a deity integrated for centuries into the Hindu mainstream, and of writing, a medium intimately linked to colonial power. The once purloined god returns in alphabetic form, shaping ritual practices centred on an embodied script that defies colonial investments in literacies of different sorts. Why do scripts play a crucial part for Adivasi in India? How do the Sora apprehend an alphabet that most of them cannot read, but that they can touch and even drink? tribal activists try to establish an equivalence between the word ‘Adivasi’ and the term ‘indigenous people’ used on an international scale (Karlsson 2003). 9. A script ‘good to drink’ 161 Fig. 9.1. The Sora, a Munda-speaking group living mainly in rural areas at the border between Odisha and Andhra Pradesh (East central India) (Andhra Pradesh 2013). Photo by C. Guillaume-Pey. What impact does the embodiment of deities in letters have upon modes of ritual communication? In this chapter,2 I will show how the Sora have reshaped writing through ritual, and how the creative appropriation of writing in return plays an important part in the redefinition of their religious practices and their identity. In order to understand how, among this group, spirits happened to be embodied in letters, I will first highlight the conditions of emergence of both the Sora alphabet and other graphic systems devised by charismatic leaders in tribal India. Then, I will examine the divine 2 This chapter is based on data collected among the Sora of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha during my PhD fieldwork on Sora ritual practices (2007–2008), and research projects financed by the Fyssen Foundation, the FMSH (CEFRES), the Labex HASTEC and the CNRS (2012–2018). The research reflected here has benefited from discussions at Yale University (Institute of Sacred Music and Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group), Queen’s University Belfast (School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics), CEFRES–French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences and Charles University of Prague, Sorbonne Université (École doctorale V Concepts et langages – GRIPIC – CELSA), The Laboratory of Social Anthropology (Collège de France/CNRS/EHESS, Paris), and the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Classics).