Deserted Villages and Destroyed Dreams: An Indication of Culture Extinction

Abstract

What I propose to pen in the following pages is not about the history of my people, but about their contemporary condition of living that I aspire to explore. I come from the badaga community, a distinctive sect of tribes accommodating most regions of the Niligiri district of Tamilnadu. I have no doubt that those who are familiar with the Niligiri district are well aware of the people in it. Especially, nobody would have left their thoughts of Nilgiris without contemplating about the special race of people that the district is blessed with. It is quite an unfortunate thing that so far a community with such cultural merits has remained unpopular and out of the picture due to lack of script. We have been incapable of expressing ourselves, our culture, customs and rituals in the form of historical records. It is a great disadvantage to live without a language of our own to express. We have indeed lost our finest antiquity and the lifestyle of our forefathers entirely due to lack of education and script. It is at the same time very disappointing to mention the fact that among us not many have attempted to investigate or research our origin. Undeniably, it is true that we have not shown interest into our own community even to the extent it was considered with admiration by scholars from abroad. This paper will attempt to explore the contemporary condition of the badaga people specifically focusing on the impact of dislocation. DJ THE DAWN JOURNAL Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2012 Rajesh Bojan www.thedawnjournal.com 45 Introduction Displacement has always been a very challenging and unavoidable issue in human history. We have been so far forced to displacements in variety of ways. Turning the leaves of history, we could notice tremendous displacements where men have left their homelands due to battles, due to natural disasters, sometimes because of poverty, for survival, even for education and business. Such unnatural movements have been a gateway for innumerable problems. This has given rise to immigrant literature as well, where authors have expressed their agonies of being away from their homelands, of being uprooted from their family, society and culture, of sufferings they have been facing in the alienated society, of their constant battle with the dual roles they are tied to and many such unpleasant things are well recorded in modern works. Undeniably, only a handful of gifted people are left with the luxury of living in their native soil. Most of us in one way or the other fall as victims to displacement. Moving from place to place whether we like it or not is an ancient unquestionable strategy and survival need. We may not be able to prevent such migrations because it is something very common in every nation. My purpose here is only to let the readers understand this in an awareness perspective specifically concerning the life of the Badagas. In no way this short piece of writing expresses anything against urbanization.