Survey tracks down only speaker of Majhi in India

For the speakers of Majhi, a language mostly spoken in Nepal with just one living speaker in Sikkim in India, there are 15 different names for river. After roads were built in Sikkim following its annexation by India in 1975, Majhi speakers who earlier used the Teesta to ferry people from the upper reaches of the hilly state towards the plains of Siliguri in their boats lost synonyms of river one after another. Eventually, the whole language was overtaken by Nepali language and Lepcha, one of the official languages of Sikkim.
 
The story of 80-year-old Thak Bahadur Majhi, the lone speaker of Majhi in Sikkim, and many other speakers of endangered and rare languages have now been documented in a voluminous Peoples Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), released on Thursday. Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, which carried out the survey, reveals that the country had 1,100 languages in 1961, but that nearly 220 of them have disappeared. Socio-linguist Ganesh Devy is the writer and lead co-ordinator of the survey.

The loss of languages is of particular significance to the ecology and culture because they encode the entire way of thinking and culture of the community that spoke it; languages are also repositories of local knowledge and wisdom about ecology. So, when a language dies we lose this knowledge also, as happened with Majhi.

PLSI is a historic survey, as it is the second time that the number of languages spoken in the country has been counted; it has estimated that in total there are 780 languages spoken in India, which includes scheduled languages having constitutional recognition, non-scheduled languages, sign languages and even codes. The survey was carried out with the help of 3,000 volunteers representing various communities.

The earlier linguistic survey was conducted between 1898 and 1928 by British administrator George Abraham Grierson following which the Census of India in 1951 conducted a survey to determine the number of languages.

The Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) planned a government-sponsored Linguistic Survey of India in 2007, but the government abandoned the exercise immediately, “developing a cold feet”.

PLSI, on the other hand, does not consider the survey to be a part, substitute or sequel of Grierson’s work. “PLSI is a non-heirarchical, public consultation and appraisal, intended as an aid to cultural impact assessment of development, and as an acknowledgement of the self respect and sense of identity of all, especially the endangered speech communities of India,” state PLSI members.

PLSI looks at languages as social systems. For each of the languages documented by the PLSI, there is an interesting narrative attached to it. According to Balaram Pandey, a linguist from Gangtok who worked on the survey from 2011, it was only after the survey involved communities that the lone speaker of Majhi could be traced to a village in Sikkim. “Earlier, this language was spoken in parts of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Sikkim, mostly by the boatpeople community. Such communities were crucial as they transported people over long distances. However, slowly this language was appropriated by larger linguistic structures,” says Pandey.

When Sikkim was annexed by India in 1975, Majhi speakers were put under the Scheduled Caste category.

Interestingly, the community waged a long battle against Government of India to delist their community from the SC category as it brought discrimination to their doorstep. While on one hand, roads brought an end to their profession, socially they were ostracised for being in the SC category. It was only recently that the government of India delisted Majhi community from SC category, giving in to their long standing demand. “But it was too late. Now people from his village tell us that Thak Bahadur Majhi has to go into a trance to speak in this language, while his family members speak either Lepcha or Nepali,” Pandey says.
 
On the other hand, the completion of the peoples’ survey was a moment of celebration for Ambeshwar Gogoi, Bibha Bharali and Banani Chakravarty from Assam. “We have discovered 55 languages in Assam itself, many of which are endangered with one or two odd speakers in various parts of the state,” adds Gogoi. The discovery of 55 languages, each having a distinct vocabulary and ethnic root, according to Gogoi, is a great moment for state often in the news for ethnic conflict. “This shows that people are much more tolerant towards each other,” he says.

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