Sora love poem

Thanks to Ravi Gomango for this translation of my poem into Sora (other names and dialects: Soura, Savara, Sourah, Soira, Sabar, Saora, Sowrah, Swara, Sabara, Saura, Saonras, Shabari, Sawaria, 𑃐𑃚𑃝, ସଉରା), the southern Munda (Kolarian) language of about 300,000 speakers who live in the eastern states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha in India.

Sora, an Austro-Asiatic language, long time influenced by the neighboring languages Telugu and Oriya, is primarily oral. It is not uniform and can vary for pronunciation from a village to another, as well as with the age and gender of the speaker.

Even if in Odisha Sora has been introduced in primary schools, more generally, its neglect and bilingualism with Oriya and Telugu, make it considered today as an endangered language. A language that is even classified as vulnerable to extinction, hence the great importance of all efforts which can be made to keep it afloat.

Among these other efforts, let us mention the textbooks written by the most literate Soras and the Sorang Sompeng script, created by Mangei Gomango who was a poet from the Rayagada district.

The Soras who are Kols (aborigines of India), have often suffered oppression from the Aryans and Dravidians who arrived after them in their region, they have been most often sidelined, dispersed, or even relegated to the mountains and forests. This resulted for a long time in many clashes between the two groups, with punitive expeditions of extreme violence.

Vedic literature, Sanskrit literature and Buddhist texts mention them.

Before the arrival of the Aryans, the Soras had already a real civilization, with its religious rules (animism, shamanism), political and social (heredity).

The Soras generally live from a little agriculture (vegetables, rice and millet), and hunting.

If little by little the assimilation of this tribal group is done, it is still possible to observe their thousand-year-old clan traditions.

Their rich oral tradition, with a backdrop of dance and music, still carries their myths and stories from a generation to the next.