Uwe Gustafsson

Uwe Gustafsson
Born	Uwe Gustafsson 1938 Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Known for	Linguist, Scholar, and translator
Notable work	English-Kotia Oriya, Kotia Oriya-English glossary, Telugu-Adiwasi Oriya vocabulary, Adiwasi Oriya-Telugu-English dictionary

Uwe Gustafsson (born 1938) is a Canadian Missionary, Scholar, Linguist and social worker who stayed at Araku Valley of Vishakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh, South India for more than 43 years and changed the lives of more than 250,000 indigenous primitive tribal population (PTG) of Paderu Agency areas. Gustafsson compiled and written an Aadivasi Oriya-Telugu-English Dictionary and few scholastic and resourceful books and contributed to the work on Bible translation into Adivasi Oriya language. He worked primarily living at Araku Valley, Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, South India. He also was a social reformer and activist who lived with the primitive tribes (then, now they are not to be called by the name “primitive”) and changed them positively towards development, income, livelihood and empowerment in many life-basics and MDG indicators. He was associated with Summer Institute of Linguistics.^[1]

Early years

Uwe Gustafsson spent his early years of childhood in Canada where he completed his both secular and theological studies. He was ambitious and enthusiastic for social reform and learning the indigenous culture, language and doing gospel works. His passion brought him to India; especially to the border areas of the states Andhra Pradesh and Orissa (now Odisha) where there were deep forests part of Eastern Ghats and forest dwelling/depending primitive tribes. There is still primitive-natured people living in the forests and the fringe villages and thus one can understand the situation some 43 years back and the same also exemplifies his dedication towards his passion.^[2]

Journey to India

In the first half of the 1960s Gustafsson came to India along with a team of social reformers and missionaries. Finding the backwardness, pathetic conditions and need of the forest-dwelling and depending tribal populations and their habitations, the team travelled to the forest areas of Aaraku Valley and Paderu in Vishakhapatnam. Owing to the hardships of living in the forest areas and the difficulties arisen, almost all the companions and members in the team had returned to their own hometowns. But he had stayed back and decided to work among the tribes and to help them in to have development in their socio-educational, health, livelihood and economical backwardness.

In Aaraku Valley

In Aaraku Valley, he, along with his family (His wife Elke and son Andrew) stayed in one of the tribal families’ house and started to study the culture, nature and language of the tribes. His principle intension in staying at Aaraku Valley with the tribals, was to script the oral languages of the tribes. There are over a 13 types of tribes occupying the Agency areas of Aaraku Valley extending to Paderu and the borders of Odisha state like Khonds, Koya and almost all of them speak the Adivasi Oriya dialect.^[3] During his stays’ initial years the tribal population was experiencing a lot of issues and problems in health, income, basic needs, food, livelihood, illiteracy, ignorance and social struggles too. He and his wife used to help the people in many ways; Mrs. Gustafsson ran a 24-hour medical clinic in their home to help the people even in the night. As his book of study Can Literacy Lead to Development?: A Case Study in Literacy, Adult Education, and Economic Development in India says, he started a mobile schooling programme; a bilingual literacy programme.^[4] Under the programme, every year, they trained 100 Adivasi Oriya-speaking people to give night classes in 100 villages in and around the Araku Valley and thus both the Gustafssons’ effort reached a coverage of 5000 km² area and total population of more than 12,000 men and women making them literate. Such activities became routine in both the Gustafssons’ life and along with that he separated time to study the Adivasi Oriya Language.

Though the Adivasi Oriya-Telugu Language was the language for the tribes for thousands of years had been spoken and the other languages of the states in which they live have scripts; Telugu and Oriya, but they had no even script. So his next effort was to find a script for the Adivasi Oriya language, which is an Indo-Aryan language.^[5] So he studied the script and sounds of another local language to re-apply to Adivasi Oriya. With a vision to help the tribal peoples to coalescence with the wider population, he chose Telugu, the state language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, in which states most of the Adivasi – Oriya language spoken tribes live. Thus it took 20 years of tremendous and hard work even without computers or any such advanced devices, but using only two old type writers and with the help of two tribal people to assist him.^[6] By 2002 he had written, compiled and published a variety of scholarly books including Adivasi Oriya Language Script (Using Telugu Script), Adivasi Oriya-Telugu-English Dictionary, English–Adivasi Oriya vocabularies, and Kotiya–Oriya Phonetic Summary. Among them the Adivasi Oriya-Telugu-English dictionary, a 1,047-page opus is the great work of Gustafsson in India, for it is the only basic for the tribal children and others’ study and reference and is the written preservation of a language or an oral tongue, spoken over thousands years as mother tongue of one of the major tribal populations in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.

Finding the need for an exclusive participation, oneness, social bonding and common platform and the literacy, livelihood and other developmental activities further, it was he and his wife established the AASSAV (Aadivasi Abhivrudhi Samskrithika Sangam Aaraku Valley). Though the society AASSAV was started in the late 1980s, the income generation and livelihood activities of AASSAV was started much earlier onwards by Gustafssons. Major income generation activities introduced and carried out by ASSAV includes coffee cultivation, black pepper cultivation, cardamom, beekeeping, printing press etc. and a variety of additional activities too having a headquarters at Humbriguda, Araku valley over an eight-acre campus, where it has all basic infrastructure, shops and machineries too. It was he who introduced coffee and black pepper cultivation over the Agency areas and AASSAV's coffee-growing ventures expanded staff enrolling 1,000 tribal farmers in 80 different villages to use their one-acre plots to grow organic coffee thus restoring Aaraku Valley to once blanketed by lush green jungle. Besides providing jobs, the annual profit of the society is being shared among the tribal population. It also helped to develop and safe-guard the degraded, dessertified and eroded lands due to the “cut & carry” destruction of forests, trees, animals by the tribal population in ignorance. Now Aaraku Valley ranks as one of the main coffee-pepper growing areas in the south as well as the whole India ^[7] AASSAV now directly provides works, income and livelihood to more than 900 tribal people through its income generation projects. And later AASSAV invited another organization (Naandi) to tie-up with them in coffee production, processing and marketing.^[8]

Scholarly work

Some of the major works and books of Gustafsson in India, besides his other numerous articles and publishing:

Other contributions

Other areas of Uwe Gustafssons contributions in India is the translation of Bible into Adivasi Oriya Language for which he developed and compiled The Great and only Adivasi Oriya –Telugu-English Dictionary. He also published a variety of Papers on the Tribes of Agency areas of Vishakhapatnam, Literature, Culture, Education etc.^[18]

References

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