Explorations of my
cultural-linguistic community

I come from a tiny community that originated centuries ago in the Konkan area of India, a strip of land running down the lush green coast between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats. The community's footprint stretches across modern administrative boundaries of India, through the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, and Kerala. It is united by a shared dialect, Konkani, which is such a dominant part of its identity that many in the community refer to themselves as Āmcigelo or Āmcigelī, which literally means "people speaking our tongue."

Yet Konkani is only a spoken language - it has no written script, instead borrowing the scripts of more established local languages. Konkani people who live in Maharashtra use the Devanagari script, while those in Goa use the Roman script. the Kannada script in Karnataka, and the Malayalam script in Kerala. As a result, written archival material is relatively rare, and the community relies chiefly on oral narratives to preserve its history and traditions. One example of a written archival document is my eight-generation family tree reproduced below - it was created by my great-grandfather originally using the Kannada script, and then transcribed into the Roman script.  The family tree commences with our forefather, who was born in 1787, and ends with my great-grandfather's generation, who were born in the 1880s. ​That forefather established our ancestral family home in Katpadi, in Karnataka, two centuries ago.

​

I travelled with my grandparents to discover that ancestral home and the community around it. Ever since, I've been fascinated with the idea of how a people preserve their stories and their culture from generation to generation. Over the past year I have helped my grandmother in her project to document and preserve these stories in scrapbooks and digital media that can be shared with our global family diaspora.  ​

View the glimpses of the archival material on the next page.