Doing it the ‘write’ way

A biologist, an Army jawan, a homemaker and a geography graduate.

Off the busy road in Ranchi, this unlikely group of people have come together on a warm summer’s day. They are all members of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) and are participating in a writing workshop at Jharkhand’s Tribal Research Institute (TRI) in the capital city.

“I want our children to read in their mother tongue,” says Mavno speaker Jagannath Girhi of the Mal Paharia community. The 24-year-old has come from his village in Dumka more than 200 km away to write the grammar of his endangered mother tongue Mavno. “We also want to publish a book in Mavno.”

He is the first and only person in his village Baliakhora to have obtained an MSc degree — it’s in biology and he did it in Hindi. “The language of the community that has bigger numbers is taught in the university,” he points out. “Even the Jharkhand Staff Selection Commission (JSSC) syllabus is available in [Adivasi] languages like Khortha and Santhali but not in our language [Mavno]. If this continues, my language will slowly disappear.”

Mavno is an endangered Indo-Aryan language with Dravidian influences. It has less than 4,000 speakers and does not have ‘official language’ status. According to the Linguistic Survey of India, Jharkhand, Mavno is not used as a medium of instruction in schools and does not have a separate script.

The Mal Paharias are cultivators but also depend on forest produce. They speak Mavno at home but official communication happens mainly in Hindi or Bengali, which are the state’s dominant languages. Hindi or Bengali are preferred as the medium of instruction in most Jharkhand schools and colleges; even the teachers are Hindi speakers.

Other than these dominant languages, there is also the issue of ‘link languages’ for the state’s Adivasi communities. “[The] unstated expectation from a child is that s/he will speak the commonly understood link language. This takes the child further away from their mother tongue,” says Pramod Kumar Sharma, a retired teacher appointed by the TRI to assist the PVTGs.

In the case of Mavno, the link languages are Khortha and Khetri. “We are forgetting our mother tongue under the influence of the languages of stronger communities,” says 23-year-old Manoj Kumar Dehri from Saharpur village in Pakur district, who is also a Mavno speaker and a geography graduate.

At the end of the workshop spanning over two months, each of the speakers of these endangered languages will come up with a primer — a basic grammar sketch for their respective mother tongues. These books will be the first of their kind, written by people from the community and not linguists.

“Other [non-PVTG] communities have access to books written in their language. They even get better jobs when they study in their language,” says Jagannath. “Today, only my grandparents and parents can speak fluent Mavno. Only if our children learn the language at home, will they be able to speak it.”

The 2011 Census lists more than 19,000 distinct mother tongues in India. Of these, only 22 are officially recognised as languages in Schedule VIII of the Constitution. Several mother tongues do not get the ‘language’ tag for lack of a script and/or diminishing numbers of fluent speakers.

More than 31 mother tongues in the state do not have an official language status. Santhali is the only Adivasi language from Jharkhand that is listed as a Schedule VIII language. For the 31 other tongues in the state, particularly those spoken by PVTGs, there is a real danger of losing the language itself.

“Hamari bhasha mix hoti ja rahi hai (our mother tongue is getting mixed),” says Mahadeo (not his real name), an Army jawan of the Sabar community. He says the marginalisation of their language also manifests in the lack of community representation in gram panchayats. “Sabars are so scattered. In the village where we live (near Jamshedpur), we have only 8–10 houses.” The rest are people from other Adivasi communities; there are some non-Adivasis as well. “It hurts to see my language die.”

The TRI was established in 1953, ‘with the aim to connect tribal communities with other communities’ by researching their social, economic, cultural and historical features. Since 2018, the TRI has published language primers of several vulnerable Adivasi groups, among them the Asur and Birjia communities. The books carry folk stories and poetry and make accessible the proverbs and idioms of these endangered languages.

The primers, created by the communities themselves, have not had much success, though. “If the TRI books made it to schools, our kids would be able to read in their mother tongue,” bemoans Jagannath.

Ranendra Kumar, a former director of the TRI, who had a big hand in initiating the publication of these primers during his tenure, agrees: “The books must reach the schools where PVTG children study, only then will the real purpose of this work be fulfilled.”

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It’s evening now and Jagannath, Manoj and Mahadeo have stepped out with other participants for a quick tea break at Morabadi Chowk. Rimpu Kumari of the Parahiya community, who dropped out of school in Class 8, breaks her silence a bit hesitantly: “When I talk in Parahiya, people laugh.” The 26-year-old has married outside her community. “What can I tell the world if my own in-laws make fun of me?”

She wants to end the “shame” that she and others in her community feel when they speak in their mother tongue. “I don’t want to talk about it here. If you want to know more, come to my village.”

Original article courtesy: People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI)