Bihar's indigenous languages hold the key to water resilience

Indigenous languages are not just ways of speaking. They have grown out of a long, close bond between people and nature and they hold vast reserves of traditional knowledge that today are increasingly recognised as essential to sustainability. 

Embedded within the oral traditions, proverbs, folk songs, art forms, and cultural practices, including rituals, festivities are profound understanding of local ecosystems, passed down through generations. There is a hidden, invaluable but overlooked wisdom for water ingrained across vast landscapes between the Himalayas and the Ganga in Bihar, often ignored in our modern water management strategies. However, the erosion of these languages threatens to erase centuries of localized expertise, leaving India's water security more vulnerable than ever.

The North Ganga Plain in Bihar is a playground of rivers and streams. More than 200 flow down from the Himalayas, turning the region into a maze of channels and meanders. The dialects of this alluvial plain evolved alongside the shifting curves of the rivers, producing a rich vocabulary for describing floods, water bodies, farming practices and weather patterns that are reflected even in their rituals and festivities. This lexicon is a living record of an intimate relationship with water, refined over millennia.

Nowhere is the link between indigenous languages, local water systems and loss felt more strongly than here. In the sacred land of Bharat, rivers are revered as mothers and in Bihar many names carry positive associations. But under colonial rule, they were recast with darker connotations: the Damodar became the “sorrow of Bengal”, the Kosi the “sorrow of Bihar”. This shift in naming marks the erosion of cultural wisdom. 

Rivers that shaped a lexicon

English, for instance, has only “flood” and “deluge” to describe the extent and severity of such events, but in Bihar at least five terms exist, badh, boh, sah, huma and pralay, in hierarchical order. One can only imagine the danger of miscommunication and generalisation when communities start using just flood and deluge in place of their own lexicon. 

For people of North Bihar, floods were an integral and natural part of their lives. They replenished soil with silt, brought fertility and secured livelihoods. Villagers adapted to the river’s moods instead of trying to dominate them. “Tairne wala samaj ab dub raha hai” (the community that once swam is now sinking) is how water expert Anupam Mishra captured the shift. 

Proverbs along the Balan river, such as Aibo Balan to badbo daalan, jaibo Balan to ghatbo dalaan, linked prosperity with the floods. Today, decades of misguided flood “control” have turned the river unpredictable, earning it the name Bhutahi Balan – the ghost river. The lexicon itself has been disrupted by a few decades of western education and mishandling of rivers, and ‘flood’ is now a disaster. 

Floods as friend and foe

The Ganga plains of Bihar are blessed with monsoon rains and Himalayan rivers Gandak and Mahananda, creating a landscape scattered with ox-bow lakes and ponds. This mosaic of waterbodies, celebrated in the saying Pag pag pokhar, machh makhan (every step a pond, every meal fish and foxnuts), has long provided natural flood management, absorbing surplus water and sustaining livelihoods. Vast reservoirs known as mann – the word also means “mind” – are thought of as deep and endless, a poetic reflection of Champaran’s waters.

Local speech encodes ways of predicting floods. In the Gandak basin, the onomatopoeic phrase chhap-chhap paani refers to the sound of ankle-deep water spreading over fields – an early sign of immediate flood. In Angika, villagers say boha aa gail (“the flood has come”), while in Bhojpuri, pani chadha ta signals it is time to move people and animals to safety. A single word like hall – a noise without meaning – acts as a warning cry when floodwaters approach. These linguistic cues were once crucial to survival.

Nature’s signs and local speech

Nature itself provides signals: Red ants carrying eggs in a line foretell heavy rain, bengchi beng (small frogs) mark the onset of showers, byagar beng (yellow frogs) the continuation, while the leaping of baikhi fish warns of floods. Language captures these patterns, embedding ecological memory into daily life.

Poetic sayings capture the seasons with striking clarity: Bihana ke dhoop chhup gail, badra kahani sunawat ba (“the morning sun hides, the clouds tell their tales”) describes the monsoon’s arrival. Sawan ke paani, sona ke khani celebrates rain as “a mine of gold”, vital for rice planting. Yet other phrases reveal the double edge of floods: Badhi main machri ke din, kisaan ke dukh (a boon for fish, a curse for farmers), or badh mein dhaan, akaal mein jaan (crops lost in floods, lives lost in drought).

Traditional proverbs offered farmers guidance. Purwa purbaiyya pabe tab sukhli gadaiya nao chalabe linked easterly winds with heavy rain. Another set of sayings detailed the best times to transplant rice at different stages of the monsoon. This was practical citizen science – knowledge every farmer held, drawn from lived experience.

River names, too, carry meaning. The Budhi (old) Gandak flows sluggishly but far, unlike its swifter cousin Gandak. The Dhanauti promises prosperity (dhan). The Bagmati rushes with energy (beg). The Kosi, depositing tonnes of sand and swallowing villages into its “womb” (garbh), is personified as a mother with destructive powers. Even women’s curved or circular ornaments – chandrahar, anguthi, hasuli – mirror the rivers’ loops and bends, reflecting how deeply meanders shaped everyday life. Villages are criss-crossed by rivers in a concave or concave fashion, so that every guest can enter the village only after washing their feet by default.   

As the Budhi Gandak, Kamala, Koshi, Bagmati and Gandak wind their way across Bihar’s plains, they carry not just water but immense cultural and geographical meaning. Their endless meanders and bends create a landscape that locals have long described in rich, poetic language, capturing both the beauty and the complexity of these rivers. The flowing patterns reflect a living relationship between rivers and the communities that grow up along them. This deep bond is summed up in the proverb: kos kos pe badle pani, tin kos pe badle vani – “every few miles the water changes, and with it, the speech.”

Why language loss matters

It is evident that languages carry specific linguistic terminologies and concepts that relate to social evolution along the river. The water in the river holds spiritual and cultural significance in the speech communities of Bihar, and this has been reflected linguistically.

This correlation between linguistic and ecological abundance is an astute representation of cultural diversity intertwined with ecosystem resilience. Protecting indigenous languages protects ecology, as these codes carry traditional knowledge offering insights and practices enhancing resilience.

The challenge of vanishing vocabulary in the regions of Bihar about water resilience and its impact on human nature and relationships can be comprehended in multiple ways. The languages within Bihar possess unique linguistic forms that reflect the region’s experiences with the river and its annual cycle of floods. Language attrition not only silences words but also leads to the loss of precious traditional knowledge of the human-nature relationship. 

Many of the metaphorical sayings carry cultural significance, conveying wisdom, resilience, and adaptation strategies. In order to combat linguistic loss that would safeguard the traditional knowledge, efforts to document and promote these languages can help maintain the region’s distinctive perspectives on human-nature dynamics.

Language preservationists and environmentalists can collaborate to preserve languages and the cultural heritage tied to ecosystems, spearheading community-based projects and action plans to foster language use, green practices, and environmental sustainability.

Devina Krishna is a doctorate from JNU and currently working at Patna Women’s College with expertise in the areas of phonetics, phonology and language documentation and Kushagra Rajendra is a doctorate from JNU and at Amity University Haryana with expertise in contextualising environment and sustainability.

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth