A Wedding invitation in tribal Gondi script!

Have you heard of a wedding invitation that was written in the tribal Gondi script? If not, here’s your first! The Gondi community members in the deep jungles of Adilabad have come up with their own written invitations to invite their folks.

The concept has become a major hit as it attracted the focus of campaigners for tribal literature and arts. Named after Gunjala village of Adilabad district where the Gondi language users lived, the Gunjala-Koyatur script could be extended to speakers of Koya, another Adivasi language.

The script has come into light in 2006 following a State-Centre coordinated survey but there were only four who could use the script till 2010, but there are hundreds now says a visiting professor at the Center for Dalit and Adivasi Studies (CDAST) at University of Hyderabad, Jayadhir Tirumala Rao.

Professor Rao said that the Adivasi scripts are in the endangered arts and they discovered the Gondi script five years ago in a few manuscripts. His team of researchers is working on the font of the script to publish it online.

Clarifying that Gondi and another script called Modi were different, Prof. Rao suggested that the scripts may be the same in some quarters but ‘Modi’ is a script to be used for accounting purposes in Maharashtra.