Mamma and the Teaching of the Script Outside Punjab

Gurmukhi is now taught in places its scribes never anticipated. Punjabi communities established in Britain, North America, East Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia over the last century and a half have had to decide how to pass on a script whose everyday usefulness, in a country that writes in Latin letters, is limited to a single language and a single scripture. The usual answer has been the gurdwara class, in which children who speak English or another language at school learn the painti at weekends, often alongside instruction in kirtan and in the reading of the scripture. That setting shapes what is taught.

A learner in Punjab acquires the script as the way to read everything; a learner in the diaspora acquires it substantially as the way to read one book, and teaching materials written for that situation tend to move quickly toward the scriptural register rather than through general literacy. High frequency letters like Mamma are the ones such a course reaches earliest, and the rare cells of the grid are the ones most likely to be deferred. The traditional recitation of the painti in strict order survives in these classes nonetheless, because the order is part of what is being handed on and not merely a way of arranging a syllabus.