In Geetanjali Shree’s Booker-winning novel Tomb of Sand is a passing mention of a language in Kerala’s Vypeen that disappeared from the world. It should not have been much of a surprise that a creole – a language formed by a mix of European and local languages – existed in Kochi, once ruled by the Portuguese and then the Dutch and then of course colonised by the British. But that the Indo-Portuguese creole existed all the way through the 1900s and 2000s and there may still be some speakers left is cause for excitement. Especially if you have lived in Kerala all your life and were unaware of this because it was limited to very few pockets in Kochi, Kannur and Kozhikode.
Beginning from 2006, Hugo C Cardoso, professor of linguistics at the University of Lisbon who has for long researched and written an essay on the Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar, visited Kozhikode, Kannur and Kochi many times in search of the last speakers of the language. “The existence of a Portuguese-based creole in Kerala has been known for long. But, when I started my research, there was no published reference to a creole in Kerala for about a century and it was assumed that the language had disappeared. I began my research in India working on the Indo-Portuguese Creole of Diu in 2004. During that research I visited Goa, where I heard that perhaps there might still be some speakers left in Cannanore (Kannur) or in Cochin (Kochi). So, I decided to investigate,” he tells TNM in an interview.
In his investigations, Hugo discovered that Portuguese-lexified creoles had existed in Kannur, Thalassery, Wayanad, Mahe, Kozhikode, Kodungallur, Vypeen, Kochi, Alappuzha, Kayamkulam, Kollam and Anchuthengu. Though the creole was thought to be extinct, Hugo’s fieldwork revealed that it is still spoken in Kannur and marginally in Kozhikode.
Hugo managed to interview a few speakers in Kannur in 2006. However, when he visited Kochi the next year, he was able to find only a single speaker of the creole – William Rozario, a resident of Vypeen. “Other residents had some knowledge of the language (expressions, songs, isolated words), but only Mr Rozario could speak it fluently,” Hugo says.
He kept visiting them in the years that followed (until 2015) and built what he calls a ‘corpus of recordings’. He interviewed them about the vocabulary, about how the language functions, and documented short sentences and formulae, most notably from Kochi and Kannur.
In his essay, Hugo writes that Portuguese and Malayalam are the most important sources of grammatical structures recognised in the modern Malabar creoles. His theory is that those operating under the aegis of Portugal – there were other Europeans outnumbering the Portuguese in military ranks – would have had to learn Portuguese, turning into non-native second language speakers.
“It gives strength to the hypothesis that a Portuguese-based pidgin (a simplified non-nativised linguistic code used for specific and limited purposes) must have developed in the region,” the essay says. Hugo suggests that the Portuguese element found in the Malabar creoles need not have come only from first-language speakers but also from these second language variants (of pidginised Portuguese). A pidgin stage is assumed by some scholars as a precondition for the formation of a creole.
Hugo’s essay also talks about the possible influence of African languages on the creole because a significant number of Africans were brought to India as slaves. “A few words presumably of African origin are in Indo-Portuguese texts, including batuque (a type of drum), calumba (a medicinal plant), machila/machira (palanquin).” Conversion to Catholicism is cited as yet another possible reason for creoles to have formed. Hugo's theory is that this process of Christianisation, as a direct influence of the Portuguese presence, 'created local populations of Portuguese cultural orientation' -- people who were willing to learn the Portuguese language and impart it to the next generation.
But of course there was a dominant language in the region – Malayalam. So it is still a surprise that the creole had developed into a first language among the people.
At the time Hugo met Rozario, the last speaker of the creole in Kochi, Rozario had not spoken the language for years. “He told me that he hadn’t had a chance to speak the creole for a few years, after one of his neighbours who also spoke the language had passed away. I was extremely well-received by him and his family, so I visited him frequently between 2007 and 2010, whenever I had a chance. Mr Rozario passed away in 2010. At that time, a few reports were published in the press which documented our encounter and collaboration.”
Hugo also wrote about the creole and his meetings with Rozario in the Open magazine. He theorises that the language must have waned in the years of British colonialism when English became prevalent. From his interviews with speakers in Kannur, Kochi and Kozhikode, Hugo zeroed in on rough time periods when the creole, once a vital family language, must have faded. “These testimonies offer an impressionistic glimpse of when the transmission of the creole to the younger generation must have discontinued,” he writes in his essay and gives these dates –
Kannur – until 1950s
Wayanad and Vypeen – until late 1930s
Thangasseri and Kayamkulam – until 1920s
Alappuzha and Kozhikode – until the early 20th century
“Mr Rozario in Vypeen and a few speakers in Cannanore (who still live there) represent the last generation who grew up with the language as a vital part of family communication. It is possible that there are a few people in the region who either speak the language fluently or have some partial knowledge of it. My inquiries over the years haven’t led me to them, but we cannot rule out that they still reside there. And, in fact, there appears to be some knowledge of the language among the Anglo-Indian diaspora in places like Australia,” Hugo says.
Interestingly, his essay also includes some words in creoles outside Malabar, which have been traced to a Malayalam source. These are mainato (meaning washerwoman from Malayalam ‘mannattan’), apa (flatbread from ‘appam’), khadya (tiger from ‘kaduva’) and pata (sash from ‘patta’).