The science of writing or grammatology had a firm hold over humanity for a long time. unfortunately, its foothold is getting weaker with every passing day. Writing is in a state of closure. The book is already moving towards its death as readers themselves are migrating into a new digital world. The coming of the web out of nothing but electrons gave a death blow to the materiality of a book. Those that are sensitive to the climate change also banned the use of paper that formed the body of the book. With the twilight of book, we are fast facing the demise of paper book. People have been diagnosing and even celebrating the imminent death of a book for quite sometime now. Maybe we have to diagnose the fate of Konkani in such a scenario.
In the world where the myth of Sisyphus has become real that even tv programmes are designed in such a way that it also does the laughing for us. Slavoj Zizek calls it as canned laughter. We have entered the world of interpassivity. In our country perhaps the news at prime time gives us a sense of relief that it is fighting our battles. Some of us may have a habit of just buying books and lining them up in our book racks as if the book racks are doing the reading for us. But with the book being in danger of death and with it what will become of this canned reading as Zizek might call it? Maybe even a nagrization of Konkani might be a form of interpassivity. It is may a way of letting the script do the fighting against a small catholic community that favors a Romi script.
Marshall MacLuhan in his book , The Gutenberg Galaxy, appears to teach us that seed of the death of the book were already sowed with the coming of the printing press which brought about an profound orientation to the visible. The language which was uncontainable affair between the oral and aural was flattened, squeezed into lines evenly arrayed across the rectilinear space between margins. Langue come under strict policing of the regime of grammar. Although print technology is a blessing, it also stole our spontaneous freedom living in our speech. With the coming of the internet and AI, we are have the possibility of returning to spontaneous freedom and creativity. With inter-script transcription possible to AI singularization of Konkani to a nagri sript appears to be a step towards impoverishing of Konkani.
In 1967, Jacques Derrida took up the theme of the end of the book in his magnum opus, Of Grammatology. He proclaimed the death of the civilization of a book. To Derrida the death of civilization of book stood for the entire Platonic edifice that renders all that we do as a mimetic effort trying to copy what is thought to be already given and cast in unchanging forms and moulds. Thus, we can only copy the text that is already there somewhere in the past which is thought to be given by God, nature, tradition, caste etc. Derrida indicates that mimetic force of the civilization of the book is against the rebellious and creative energy of difference that is tamed by enforcing totalized sameness on modes of writing ( Derrida see writing as an aphoristic force of disruption) and speaking. The civilization of the book, thus civilizes us. This is why nagrization of Konkani is also viewed as a way of civilizing the Konkani speaking community.
Although, the book is dying, it will not disappear from our memory. It will still come into our dreams. We are a civilization of book. We have texts, they are no written and verbal. But They are thought to be absolute. All we have to do is try to reproduce those text. We have to faithfully reproduce the. Our lives have to fall in line and be ordered by those texts. Caste is definitely one such text. Konkani in nagri script is also given that status of a text. We carry its signature. Some of us seem to be unable to stage a rebellion against it. This is why we may need the mad man of Fredrich Nietzsche to declare that with the death of the book , writing scripts are dead. This is because the physical death of the material book may not bring about the death of the civilization of the book. The scripts of the those texts are ingrained in our traditions, cultures and everything that we consider as sacred and important to us. In Goa, nagri is surviving on ventilators and without Government active help might have died long back. Nagrization of Konkani is a clear symptom of the civilization of the book.
The challenge that we have is to contest the civilization of the civilization of book living in us. We are still the remanent of the civilization of the book. We still are chained to the assumptions and the presuppositions of our society. We seem to be unable or unwilling to stand out the Platonic cave. With the disruption of the death of the book, we do have the challenge to being about a what Paul Ricoeur calls distantiation and embrace the hermeneutics of suspicion. It is only by such a distantiation and critique of the hermeneutics od suspicion, we shall be able to reinterpret our tradition emancipativey. The coming of AI we have the possibility of inter-scriptic transcription. We have entered a Post-book era. In such a situation for the first time Konkani can grow not in isolation but in dialogue with other communities that speak Konkani but write it in different scripts. We can thus, transcript nagri into romi and vice versa. The Post-book condition of our society is challenging us to embrace Konkani in all its scripts. Let Konkani come to live with all Konkani speaking communities.