Language finally on paper

“It used to be said that missionaries go in and destroy people’s cultures,” says Fr Robert McCulloch, an Australian Columban missionary who has devoted 32 of his 40 years of priesthood to the people of Pakistan.

“In Pakistan it was the Catholic Church that saved the culture of the Parkari Koli people.”

Fr Robert was born in Melbourne in 1946 and educated by the De La Salle Brothers at St Bede’s College in Mentone.

“When I was at school it was just by chance that I read The Far East, the magazine of the Columbans, and I thought, that’s what I want to do,” he recalls.

“I was in eighth class… I had De La Salle Brothers who nurtured vocations, and parents who were interested but not forcing.”

On the completion of high school he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship.

“I remember entering into negotiation with the government authorities on education, as to whether I could defer it for one year, because I didn’t know if I would stay in the seminary and I was trying to say to them: ‘Would you mind if I deferred for one year?’

“They said: ‘No, you’ve got to decide right now.’ So, at 18, that’s when I cast my bread upon the water, so to speak.”

After studying with the Columban Fathers in Australia, Fr Robert was ordained on July 4, 1970.

His first posting was to the Philippines for four years, followed by liturgical studies in Rome, and Church history studies in Washington.

Fr Robert then volunteered for the new Columban mission in Pakistan, arriving there in 1978.

He has worked there ever since.

He commends the preparation he and the other Pakistan-bound priests received from the Columbans before departing Australia, but says they resisted the Pakistani bishops’ plan for them to undertake just one month of language classes.

“We did 18 months of language school, studying Urdu [the national language of Pakistan] … we had classes six days a week,” he says.

“At the end of that we came out speaking, comprehending, reading and writing Urdu very well.

“We were the first group of missionaries in Pakistan to do that, and after that the perceptions of missionaries changed and they all followed our example.”

So great was their belief in the importance of language that when the Catholic missionaries were banned from attending the Protestant language school, the Columbans established their own.

“I was one of the two-member team who translated the liturgical text for the rites of baptism, marriage, funerals, confirmation, penance; it turned out to be 1000 pages of Urdu text, and certainly it was because I had that  grounding.”

These texts received Vatican approval in 2001.

Fr Robert stresses the importance of learning the “local accent, pronunciation and phonetics”.

“Pakistan is a country that has been formed on the basis of  religion, not on the basis of language or culture.

“The current reality of Pakistan is that it has many languages and many cultures.

“For the first three or four years we didn’t learn another language – we were sticking with that Urdu – but just by hearing Punjabi we picked up quite a good knowledge of Punjabi.”

Fr Robert was originally based in the diocese of Lahore, now an archdiocese.

In 1983 he moved to the Hyderabad diocese in response to the bishop’s request to work with tribal people in the area.

“When we got down there the people we were working with were the Parkari Koli people … really regarded as the outcasts in the caste system of the Hindus,” he says.

“When we arrived in this area, right over in the desert area on the India-Pakistan border, we found that their language was only a spoken language. It wasn’t written.”

With the help of two linguists, Fr Robert and the Columban  missionaries began the process of preserving this language, starting with creating the first Parkari dictionaries.

“We’d write down the Urdu word then write down the Pakari equivalent in Urdu, because at this time their language didn’t even have a script.

“After a year of being there, we gathered those people of the tribe who were literate, whether in Urdu or Sindhi or Gujarati or Hindi, and over a period of two days we presented to them that to save their language would be to save their culture.

“We invited them to choose which script they wanted for their language, and they chose the Sindhi script.

“The Bible is being translated into their language, books have come out with their riddles, their folk stories, preserving all of those, and in our schools the children now have their school materials available in their mother tongue up to class three.”

“When I arrived in Pakistan I had no idea that this is where it would go,” he says.

“It just shows that the gaining of skills in depth really pays off as a missionary.”

Source: Catholic Weekly article by Sharyn McCowen, August 2010

Read more about Fr Robert McCulloch's work in Pakistan