Death of a tradition?

Typically a language is not a standalone entity. It coexists with a culture, a way of life and comes bundled with folk tales, proverbs, folk songs, literature, slang, mythology. There is also the script, the grammar, pronunciation which are the building blocks of a language but I am not going to talk about them here. I am more concerned with the first few things I referred to. Ofcourse there do exist languages which might not have all the elements, but I am concerned about every single one of them

Supposedly we have 6912 active languages today ( Source: Ethnologue) and more on the verge of extinction every day. So everytime a language is lost we lose each of the elements I named. There are scholars and researchers about loss of languages and their preservation and efforts are on, but I feel every stone in the foundation is important…. Ok that was a long preface to what I wanted to say

I have friends from Bengal and the joy that arrives (and the sluggishness if I may say so) in their lives with the arrival of Puja is to be seen to be believed. Navratri or Dasara is a celebrated widely in India and the pandal culture of Bengal, the dandiya culture of Gujarat, the ram lila in parts of North India are all distinct forms of celebrating the same sentiment - victory of good over evil and worshipping the feminine form of 'shakti' ( although I am itching to deviate here and talk of how this is derided by certain cultures as 'pagan" I Desist). Karnataka has a very distinct form of celebrating Dasara - days of pooja - I remember Saraswati pooja, where my books got all the attention, to Ayudh Pooja, the day when we as kids got together and cleaned the vehicles and worshipped every form of tool , to vijay dashami a simple pooja to seek blessings - a part that never was practiced in my own home but have seen is the "Doll arrangement". It is a unique form of depicting mythology, themes from the texts and anything considered worthwhile….. As a kid although I have seen such arrangements I never appreciated it.

This time, I kept thinking, it’s a part of our tradition as Kannadigas (maybe a sweeping generalization, not sure if the practice is so prevalent in North Karnataka or in other Dravidian states) but I don’t see the sensitivity to this dying aspect of a festival. Also I kept wondering how and why is it that we don’t have such things on a grand scale in the form of pandals like we celebrate Ganesh festival or why didn’t it evolve into the Pandal culture of Bengal - Giving it a public form might bring back this practice of our culture which served a interesting purpose of being educational while fun.

As an aside, the practice of "doll arrangement" is associated with some wonderful songs in Kannada movies, so if it doesn’t revive very soon, those movie clips will be the only record of this bit of culture….hope it doesn’t come to that