The 2011 census report indicated that the Bhili language group recorded an 85 per cent increase among the speakers, whereas the population increase in the corresponding geographical area was just about 15 per cent. Therefore, the figures for the speakers of Bhili need to be read together with the figures of the neighbouring main languages. When that is done, it becomes clear that nearly four million persons who had previously claimed either Gujarati or Marathi as their mother tongues – the languages of the states where they live – now claim one of the varieties of Bhili as their mother tongue.
For a tribal/indigenous language, this increase is remarkable. It will be necessary to take into account the role played by a language-based development movement initiated by the Bhasha Research Centre’s Adivasi Academy in that area over the last two decades. The movement placed linguistic self-consciousness at the heart of the development programme initiated among the Adivasi communities. Nearly three hundred community workers were trained using the local language and the local idiom of development for intervening in over a thousand villages. Organic agriculture, traditional medicine and healthcare practices, folk songs and oral narratives, local pedagogic conventions, Adivasi arts, and craft were brought to bear upon the developmental discourse in the area. At the Adivasi Academy, higher educational courses were introduced for promoting alternate/green development. All these measures triggered a will to survive and a linguistic energy unmatched among other Adivasis in the country.
There is now a greater understanding among tribal activists all over the country that tribal identity and culture cannot be preserved unless their languages and literature are foregrounded. Every continent has its own stories of the colonial experience, the marginalisation of the indigenous, their struggles, and the emergence of their voice in the respective national literature.
The first decade of the present century was marked in India by the emergence of the expression of the voice of the indigenous communities. Throughout the first decade, there was a remarkable manifestation of this voice through little magazines in various languages. Previously, the literary creativity of the indigenous communities came to us solely through the recordings made by anthropologists, linguists and folklorists. Besides, the translations through which the folklore was rendered were largely unreadable. Perhaps, the only exception was the works by Verrier Elwin. In a way, the imaginative life of the “Janajatis” – as the official term likes to describe the indigenous people – or the Adivasis of India, has remained inaccessible to the rest of the country.
During the early part of the 20th century when the Dalits started registering their voice in Indian literature, the Adivasis kept themselves entirely within the confines of their oral tradition of epics, stories, and songs. In fact, it took a sympathetic observer like Verrier Elwin to articulate on behalf of the Adivasis, for they remained quiet. Even after Independence, the fiction of the Adivasis had to find expression through the writings of Gopinath Mohanty and Mahasweta Devi, who were tremendously sympathetic to the plight of the Adivasis but were not Adivasis themselves.
It is in this context that the Malayalam author Narayan’s (1940–2022) Kocharethi acquires a tremendous historical significance. Kocharethi, written in 1988 and published in 1998 in Malayalam, is decidedly the first novel written by a person belonging to the tribal community in India. Indian literature has reason to celebrate the work not only as the first such novel but also as a remarkable literary achievement. It is important both as history and as literature. It is even more important to perceive it as paving the path for emerging voices of Adivasis all over the sub-continent. In our time, when the larger society is content in looking at the Adivasis as perennially marginalised, and when the state is in a way demonizing the discontent among the Adivasis, Narayan no doubt has accomplished the feat of building a crucial bridge.
In the stunningly rich tapestry of Indian literary creativity, an important strand has been the lyrical and dramatic traditions of Adivasi communities and the picaresque narratives constructed by the nomadic communities. In most cases, the literary works in the languages of India’s Adivasi communities have been oral in nature. The number of languages in which Indian tribal communities have been expressing themselves is amazingly large.
The reorganisation of Indian states after Independence was along linguistic lines. The languages that had scripts came to be counted for. The ones that had not acquired scripts, and therefore need not have printed literature, did not get their own states. Schools and colleges were established only for the official languages. The ones without scripts, even if they had a stock of wisdom carried forward orally, were not fortunate enough to get dedicated educational institutions.
It is in this context of gross neglect that one has to understand the creativity in the languages of India’s Adivasi communities. Some four decades ago, when Dalit literature started drawing the nation’s attention towards it, it was usual to include Adivasis and nomads among them as part of the Dalit movement. At that time, the Northeast was no more than a rumour for the rest of India. During the early 1990s, I decided to approach the languages such as Kunkna, Bhili, Gondi, Mizo, Garo, Santhali, Kinnauri, Garhwali, Dehwali, Warli, Pawri, and so on, expecting to find at the most a few hundred songs and stories in them.
As a beginning of the work, my Adivasi colleagues and I launched a series of magazines in Adivasi languages. These languages included various subgroups of the Bhili family and a couple of languages of nomadic communities, such as Bhantu spoken by the Sansis and Gormati spoken by the Banjaras. I am now painfully aware of how little of the vast literary wealth my humble efforts have managed to tackle. If a systematic publication programme is created to document the oral tribal literature in India, several hundred titles containing the oral traditions could easily be launched.
Indian civilisation is based on knowledge developed through oral traditions. However, during the course of history, the oral came to be perceived as inferior to the written word. Colonialism and print technology have contributed further to this marginalization. As a result, the education system and knowledge transactions in India do not consider oral learning and oral reproduction of knowledge as viable modes of knowledge processing and knowledge production. The current state of the oral tradition is entirely bleak, though attempts are being made to restore to it the privilege that it deserves.
This, however, is not the story of most of the indigenous languages in India. Nor is the situation very different in most of the Latin American, African, and Asian countries, where a few indigenous languages and cultures have been showing great resilience, while others have been languishing in neglect and have lost the nerve and the desire to survive. Take, for instance, the case of the Nahuatl as reported by Gabriel Estrada:
Nahuatl is an ancient indigenous language with Uto-Aztecan affiliations that now span from Central America to Canada. It has many dialects in Mexico, and is also linguistically related to the Pipil of El Salvador; the Wixarika, Cora, Yoeme, Coahuiltec, Raramuri, Opata, O’odham, and Tepehuan of Mexico; as well as the Hopi, Comanche, Coahuila, Paiute, Ute and Shoshone that stretch from Mexico north to Canada across the Western US. According to linguistic theory, these members may have shared a common past in the US Southwest before parting ways and evolving across North America….
Nahuatl was a lingua franca at the time of the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century and spoken by tens of millions of indigenous peoples. According to the 1990 Mexican census “speakers of all Nahuatl varieties” numbered 1,376,898 just ten years before the third millennium began (Gordon 2005). Today, Nahua communities struggle to maintain language in the face of urbanization, free-trade economies, and modern educational practices that continue to privilege popular culture and use of the Spanish language (Estrada, 2008).
As against the instance of Nahuatl is the case of the new life breathed among the Australian aborigines with the establishment of the “Garma” as reported by Peter Phipps in 2009:
In 1999 Galarrwuy Yunupingu established the Garma Festival of Indigenous Culture with his equally famous brother Mandawuy, lead singer of the popular rock band Yothu Yindi.The Yunupingu brothers, both separately recognized as ‘Australian of the Year’, mobilized this unique cultural-political initiative under the organizational structure of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, supported by a shifting alliance of Yolngu clan groups, principally the GumatjRirratjingu. These two brothers were perhaps uniquely well-qualified and resourced in Australia to breach the chasm of mainstream Australian ignorance of Indigenous realities and to make a cultural leap in the process of decolonization. Over the years Mandawuy Yunupingu’s vibrant creativity and Galarrwuy’s political momentum, both drawing on a very strong grounding in Yolngu cultural life and law (röm), had gathered together a well-connected network of talent and support from across Australia and a reservoir of goodwill particularly amongst educated urban ‘southerners’, as the population from the south-east of Australia is known “up north”. Mandawuy had a university degree from ‘down south’, had been the first Indigenous school principal in Australia at the bilingual Yirrkala Community Education Centre, and his bi-cultural rock band had an international following which broke into the Australian mainstream with the overtly political hit-song Treaty in 1992 (Phipps, 2009).
Excerpted with permission from India: A Linguistic Civilization, GN Devy, Aleph Book Company.
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