The Secret Village

I am still hot on the pursuit of my "silent village," though my pursuit of the infamous GOI research clearance is more and more riddled with difficulties. Everyone tells me that the Indian government is concerned with how India is viewed in the world, and that perhaps they are worried I will portray the situation of deaf people here in a way that reflects negatively on them. This of course is not the case, but since I have no direct contact with them it is difficult to convince them of my goodwill. I am still sending monthly reminders to Fulbright to send reminders to the Ministry of Human Resource Development to send reminders to the Ministry of External Affairs. I hope they don't find my blog and say I am giving a bad image of the Indian government's efficiency in processing visas.

I am still moonlighting as a sign language intepreter, though given my lack of professional (read: any) training I am often just making signs up. After meeting deaf people and volunteering at schools for the deaf in Wales, Ecuador, the US and France, I am thoroughly confused about which sign goes with which country. Some of you might think it's universal, but in fact every country and sometimes even community has its own sign language. In fact Bangalore has one, while Delhi has another! The deaf people here are working on a project to videotape a dictionary of Bangalore signs - I've been helping them with some of the lighting, though I think my training from Tom Denove might be just a bit too cinematic for their purposes. What's interesting to note is that when I lit for one of the Indian signers and then stood in the lights myself, I looked terrible - washed out and pasty! So I think I really might be white after all. The people of Karnataka often have a very rich, brown skintone - I can't tell whether I'm not tanning very fast or I'm just much pastier than I thought.

Next weekend the sign language team and I will visit a town in Northern Karnataka, on the border with Maharashta, to give seminars to rural deaf people. I am hoping they will lead me to the "silent" village in Tamil Nadu, since my searches through archives have so far led me nowhere. If the silent village doesn't work out, I will probably resort to making a film about a silent person in a normal village, which is essentially my original idea for a documentary about deaf people who invent their own language or have no language at all, just rudimentary gestures. I think I am still a linguist at heart - I find the idea of the personally invented language fascinating. I just read about a village in North Bali where 50 out of 2000 people are deaf and everyone has used sign language for the past 800 years. The head of the research is keeping the location of the village a secret to protect the integrity of the project; so if I find my village, that will be a secret too!