Charting her own destiny
Herald Review October 26, 2014
Vithai Zaraunkar is proud of her roots and has begun
documenting the folklore from her community
LISA ANN MONTEIRO
Harsh words can leave one scarred for life. ‘You’re a Kunbi
and you’ll remain a Kunbi. You will never improve’. Vithai Zaraunkar’s fifth
standard teacher would tell her. She could never forget that caustic remark. Of
course at the time Vithai confesses she didn’t know the connotation her teacher
attached to the word Kunbi. “ I thought it meant rural and traditional. Later
when I went to University did I realise that this wasn’t just a comment but an
insult to us.” Vithai hails from Gaval- Khola a village in Cabo de Rama in the
southernmost Taluka in Canacona and doesn’t wish she was born anywhere else.
She is proud of her roots, her culture, her people. This year she completed her
post graduation in Sociology at Goa University becoming the first from her
family to pursue higher education.
Others from her community told her there wasn’t any point
studying and that she would find it difficult getting a job later. She turned a
deaf ear and fortunately had her family backing her up.
Today she is in the process of documenting oral stories from
her community which will be lost and unknown to future generations. The project
is titled ‘Old Songs New Stories: Tales from Velips of Goa’ and is funded by
the Ministry of Culture under the scheme ‘ Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural
Heritage and Diverse Cultural traditions of India’. She is recording the
stories in the audio format, transcribing them in Konkani in the Devanagiri
script and translating them into English. She will then be submitting them to
an archive maintained by the Sangeet Natak Academy, New Delhi, India’s national
academy for music, dance and drama and an autonomous body of the Ministry of
culture.
The stories Vithai is recording are not new to her. She has
been listening to them from her childhood. “Since people in our community
weren’t formally educated these stories were told to children to educate them.
They threw light on moral values and spoke of how relationships between people
should be.” At every stage of her life Vithai has had to deal with casteist
discrimination, at times subtle and other times downright explicit. As a
result, during her college days, she began to distance herself from her culture
that others termed backward and too traditional.
“ I wanted to become modern just like my other college
mates.” Making her more conscious of her looks, a colleague in University even
remarked. ‘Oh I didn’t know you were a tribal. You don’t look like one.’ This
struck Vithai rather deeply. Was she supposed to look different? It was only
once in University where she studied sociology that she began to appreciate her
community. “I realized my culture is beautiful too. I also learnt that
backwardness is someone else’s creation and perception imposed on us,” she
says.
Her story inspired video journalist and documentary
filmmaker Gasper D’Souza who decided her story needed to be told. He has made a
feature for Euronews’ Learning World which broadcasts weekly TV programs in
thirteen languages. The program features personal stories that have global
resonance and highlights education issues from around the globe. The feature
will premiere on Euronews TV in Europe and North America on November 21 and
will thereafter be accessible on its website euronews.com.
“Instead of being beaten by all the verbal abuse, Vithai
turned everything on its head, pursued her higher education and is working on a
project on her community today,” Gasper says.
He has also gone ahead and made another short film together
with Vithai and Shrinivas Narayanan for the international filmmaking
competition Storytelling Parade. Titled ‘ami
konn?’ (who are we?), the film has Vithai playing the central character
who narrates her own story in her search for her identity. But Vithai points out that the film goes beyond a search for
identify. “It’s more about me valuing my own culture.
Whatever we have is rich and beautiful and I’m not ashamed
of it,” she says.
In fact she even throws back the question in the film, ‘Are
we who we say we are?’ The film will be accessible online on www.storytellingparade.com
and vimeo.com/gasperd by October 29. Review Bureau
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