The United Nations consider that there are around 500 million ‘Indigenous’ people in the world. The Oxford dictionary defines Indigenous as “coming from a particular place and having lived there for a long time before other people came there; relating to, belonging to or developed by these people, synonym native.” According to this definition, because most of us consider the Oxford dictionary as ‘Gospel truth’, then we are all indigenous people. In Sri Lanka many believe the indigenous language is Sinhala, and we could call our indigenous literature as Deshiya Sahitya.
I believe all our Deshiya Sahitya should be a part of Vishva Sahitya, because our identity should be as members of the human race, Homo sapiens. All other labels and identities created by man, by ethnicity, nation, race, religion, caste, tribe or even language are immaterial and irrelevant.
We have to be proud of our own deshiya sahitya, created in our own Mother language, but the pride will be enhanced immeasurably if we can share it with all our extended family, around the world.
The development of Social Media, where any writer is free to write, and which we are free to read, has enabled us to get closer to real freedom of expression. I believe the first social media wall was the mirror wall at Sigiriya, the 5th century rock citadel in Sri Lanka, used by our poets from the 6th century to post their poetry, which I consider are far superior to what is called Haiku written in languages other then Japanese today.
We need to emancipate creativity, allow total freedom and then we can once again use the term Sahitya in its ancient meaning. Open Source literature has been with us ever since man began to tell stories. There was no copyright or ownership of such creation. This applied to folk tales, Origin stories, sacred literature and ancient epics.
It has been suggested that people would become totally illiterate by about 2050, because there would not be any need to write or to read. We can dictate to and we can listen to a machine, where the machine could be just our wrist watch. We also have a more modern term, Cyberliterate, and in cyberspace no one need to be illiterate, as long as they can speak and listen in one or more languages, and with simultaneous machine translations, we could all be language independent. Today the global village is the cyberspace and indigenous means anywhere and everywhere on Mother Earth.
Unfortunately we do not have an equivalent term in any of our South Asian languages, for cyberspace, unless we use the term Vishva (just as the seven bright rays of the sun and the brightness of Agni light up the entire world of inanimate and animate objects, so do the learned people with their wisdom gracefully illuminate the minds of all beings for mutual benefits). (Rig Veda with commentary by Dayananda Saraswati. Arya Samaj, Jam Nagar. p. 761)
We have been moving with the times, evolving slowly, from Homo aestheticus, to Homo Digitalis today, as the world went Digital. We evolved from orality, through secondary orality and today we use speech-to-text and audio books. Literacy today means cyberliteracy.
We already have e-books, over the past 50 years. India has been ahead of all other South Asian countries in offering e-books. Public Library of India offers around 700,000 resources. NMEICT National Mission on Education Through ICT. The National Digital Library of India (NDIL) is a virtual repository of learning with over 72 million resources.
Today cyberspace has been invaded by audio-books, or a-books, which we can listen to, while engaging in other tasks, driving, cooking, or just relaxing in the wilderness.
LearnOutLoud.com is for free listening of all religious texts and many ancient books, including Ramayana and Buddhist Jataka Stories.
We as poets, writers, journalists, we have a responsibility to unite all mankind. We have to begin in South Asia. I have always suggested that we need to form, ‘A South Asian Sahithya Academy’ and ‘Comparative Literature Association of South Asia’, without isolating our Sahitya by country and language, if South Asian literature is to make its mark in Vishva Sahithya or World Literature.
Literature, just like art, music and dance, through link languages and translations, offers one of the best ways to understand, accept and live in harmony. However, to achieve this harmony the literature has to be shared with all the people, across all physical and man-made barriers. Before going out to embrace the whole world, we could make a start in South Asia with South Asian literature. We need more anthologies, literary reviews, conferences and online discussions about all literature published in South Asia. To enable online discussions and webinars, we need to go online with our literature, as e-books, and wherever possible by publishing them in the public domain, to be shared with all.
We need to use all the latest technology, instead of just talking about a Global Village. Since we believe that we are the most intelligent, most capable and efficient animal beings on earth, we should be able to use all the communication facilities and the media to share our thoughts, our visions, our traditions and clear up all doubts and misunderstandings that keep us within barricades we have erected around ourselves. Let us live in a real village, as it used to be, as one family, with no walls or fences around the houses, without the need to close and lock our doors, and without the need to hide anything from anyone.
Let us forget ethnicity, identity and indigenous, let us look forward to a Vishva Bhasha and a Vishva Sahitya for all the human family.
Daya Dissanayake