THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: What happens to an alphabet which gets mercilessly kicked out from the script of a language? Where does it go? Perhaps it gets stuck in a limbo, hoping against hope that one fine day, someone would remember it well enough to return it to the fold.
On Sunday, Malayalam Pallikoodam, a forum which encourages the study and popularisation of Malayalam, organised a function to honour ‘’ the vowel that was dropped from the Malayalam script decades ago.
There was another reason for organising the event in the capital city. ‘’ - pronounced ‘Ilu’ - was the theme of a short story written by Director of Public Instruction and writer K V Mohan Kumar in the Onam issue of ‘Prasadhakan,’ a literary weekly.
Not surprisingly, Mohan Kumar was the chief guest on Sunday. At the event, he likened the ill-fated vowel to people who went missing. In the short story, ‘Ilu’ laments its fate, and sets out in search of a good samaritan who realises its true worth.
The story is filled with dark humour, but also a requiem to regional languages whose ultimate fate is to be smothered by global languages like English.
“What will happen to Malayalam? The language itself will go to waste if the current trend persists. There is a joke circulating on WatsApp that the only reason the Malayalam ‘Ru’ is still in circulation today is because of the IPS officer Rishiraj Singh. Who uses words like ‘Rishabham’ nowadays?” said Mohan Kumar.
‘Ilu’ was edged out by reforms made to the Malayalam script years ago, but the same fate awaits many letters which gradually fades into disuse.
“The mother tongue is our mother. We should study English. It is a global language. But first, we must study Malayalam,” Mohan Kumar said, adding that it was the duty of the younger generation to preserve the language and help it grow.
“In the Onattukara region where I grew up, we used to pronounce it ‘Eelo’,” recalled novelist and journalist C Rahim. The fact that Mohan Kumar chose to write a story on ‘’ shows the love he has for Malayalam, author Vattaparambil Peethambaran, who presided over the function, said.
At the beginning of the event, the young participants in the get-together greeted Mohan Kumar with placards displaying ‘’