When I first started writing Hindi poems, I heard people from the Hindi literary world say: “The voice in your poems is masculine and feminine at once. This makes it hard to guess the poet’s gender.” Sometimes they also claimed that the author of those poems must be a man, since they have a greater presence of the masculine voice in them.  

I found it to be true that my poems contained voices in both the masculine and the feminine genders. This prompted me to look within myself in a bid to understand why I wrote in that manner. I realised that every individual, woman or man, grows up carrying a society within them and is constituted by its languages. The way they think, act and write draws upon this outer world carried within.  

The Adivasi community that I belong to did not have Hindi for its language, therefore I was not brought up in a Hindi-speaking society. I learnt the language later when I started school, by reading books, and it then became a part of my writing and speaking. But I lived and grew up among different Adivasi communities, such as the Oraons, Santhals, Hos and Mundas, and their way of thinking lives on in me, travels along with me, and informs my writing style. 

The language of the Oraon tribe is Kurukh. As far as we know, it belongs to the Dravidian language family, but according to some Adivasis, it could possibly belong to a different language group, because many Kurukh words carry nuqtas (a nuqta is a diacritic mark in the form of a dot placed below a character), which alter their meanings. The assignation of the feminine and the masculine genders in Kurukh is vastly different from that in Hindi. In this language, most earthbound things—forests, mountains, rivers, waterfalls, cows, bulls and so on—are feminine. It also especially allows for more privileges to women, enabling them to speak in both male and female voices. Women speaking Kurukh talk to men in a male voice and to women in a female voice. So, an Oraon Adivasi woman can speak like both a man and a woman. Perhaps this society and its worldview come to me naturally while writing poetry. Perhaps even after my transition to Hindi, this ancient language lives on in my writing, along with its distinctive characteristics. 

The grammar of the Kurukh language also accords a great deal of respect to the existence of people outside the framework of male and female identities. For example, if a person is approaching from afar and their gender identity is unclear yet, then until it becomes clear, one refers to that person simply as a human being and not as a woman or a man. Even after they have drawn near, one does not associate them with any particular gender until they make a self-declaration of it.   

The Adivasis are deemed uncivilised and undeveloped by the so-called civilised society, but we find in an Adivasi language this inbuilt acknowledgment of people and identities outside the compartments of male and female. It is remarkable that an ancient language should evince such sensitivity towards a subject that has given rise to debates all over the world today and led to the coining of new words and usages in many languages. This could probably be the reason why within Adivasi societies, people belonging to a third or other gender identities have never been a subject of debate or contempt. Instead, they have existed just like any other individual. At some places, they are considered special and such people also lead others by gaining special knowledge.  

An Adivasi writer, by virtue of having grown up with this expansive language (and its attendant community), is liable to assimilate its fundamental characteristics into their thinking and writing, even if they were exposed to the worldview of a different language, such as Hindi, during their time in school. This is the reason that though I am a woman, the voice in my poems has never been singularly and exclusively that of a woman, but those of men as well as women. 

An Adivasi writer writes of all the things existing on earth as if they are alive and animated. This, too, engenders curiosity among people from the Hindi literary world. The Adivasi society considers itself a part—a very small part—of the universe and not as something different. It believes that everything in the universe is infused with life and that the earth has its own wisdom.  

Human beings, too, carry wisdom, the purpose of which is to help them understand the vastness of the universe and to live in harmony with it. That is why, in my poems, everything breathes, everything is alive, and nothing is inferior to humans or lifeless. All the various forms of life are interconnected. Without water, trees, land and air, there is no human existence. An ever-present theme in my poems is that we are in a world of living things, throbbing and pulsating, and connected to one another by many visible and invisible threads.  

Hindi speakers also quiz me about a perceived lack of people in my writings. “Forests, mountains and rivers abound in your poetry but there is no mention of people,” they say. I think that they pose such questions because as part of “civilised” society, they understand the concept of people not as human beings in their ecosystem but as markets. But if people are removed from the markets, the entire structure of this society will collapse. This is a society that uses those whom it calls “people” to operate and expand its businesses, to survive and to get material comforts, but still finds itself unable to respect many of those same people as humans.  

In its narrow framework, community and society are constituted by a select number and type of people. One’s communication and socialisation are limited to being with those chosen few, and dining, drinking and partying with them. But unlike the denizens of this “civilised” world, Adivasis do not view things in isolation. They see them in their mutual connectedness. When they speak about a forest, they envisage the creatures, people and community associated with it. When they speak about a river, they speak about the civilisations that live around it. When they speak about the wind, they are referring to all the creatures connected with it. Therefore, in our writing, we are not talking only about humans, but about the entire natural world associated with us.  

Adivasi languages evoke everything, visible and invisible, simultaneously. Behind the overt meanings conveyed by many of their words, there lies an invisible sense of things that are not named but simply have to be felt. One hears the same thing from the people of Africa as well. Recently, I met a woman from an indigenous African community, and she gifted me a book of poetry. Her name is Nnimmo Bassey, and her book is called I see the Invisible. 

In the Kurukh language, multiple words are used to convey different shades of meaning. Take, for instance, the verb “to cut” or “kaatna”. You cannot use one and the same word to talk about the cutting or chopping of a tree or vegetables, and the hacking and killing of animals and human beings.  

For each of these actions, there is a different word that tells us about the object of the act and the feeling and intention with which the act is performed—whether it is sorrow, regret, compulsion, carelessness, accident or something else that accompanies the action. Thus, different words are used to refer to the cutting of trees, vegetables, animals and humans.  

The Kurukh grammar is rich. The language also has its own script now, called Tolong Siki. It was invented by Narayan Oraon Sainda, a resident of the village Sainda in the Gumla district of Jharkhand. A doctor by profession, Sainda is also a language expert and a social worker. The letters prepared by him are all related to the everyday activities of the Adivasis. Their curved appearance mimics the Adivasi way of life. Among the activities reflected in their design are the sowing of paddy, the threshing of paddy, the repeated circular motion of the bulls while extracting rice from paddy, and traditional ways of wearing clothes. The script is being taught in several schools of Jharkhand. In some schools, it is also the language of examinations. Tolong Siki is also being used by graduates, postgraduates and doctoral scholars. Kurukh teachers teach the language in government schools as well. All these efforts notwithstanding, the possibility that this ancient language may soon go extinct cannot be ruled out. 

The speakers of Kurukh are spread across different countries, but their number is few. The Oraon community has progressed rapidly. Many of its members are in well-paying jobs and are part of the so-called mainstream society. But that society has a pejorative outlook towards Adivasi languages, so the Oraon youth, burdened by a sense of inferiority, have stopped speaking their own language. They are fluent in Hindi and English, but do not speak in their mother tongue even within their Oraon families.  

The first and second generations to come out of the villages and to the cities struggled to earn a living. The belief took root in them that learning Hindi or English is essential for economic survival in the mainstream. They felt that their children would not be proficient in their own language in any case, therefore it was better to teach them the languages of the mainstream, which would at least ensure a smoother path to earning a livelihood, something that the older generations did not have.  

Under the influence of this survival logic, parents stopped speaking their mother tongue in their homes. Sometimes, a husband and a wife were employed in different places and did not find people around them who spoke their language. This also became a reason for leaving the mother tongue behind. Sometimes people stopped speaking Kurukh to avoid standing out and being identified as Adivasis. 

All of the above has led to the Oraon youth of the new generation being deprived of their mother tongue. The loss of the language has been accompanied by the loss of an entire and different world of experiences, of traditional knowledge and wisdom, and a comprehensive understanding of Adivasiyat (tribal identity and ethos). And along with a new language like Hindi comes the attitudes of discriminating between men and women, thinking in hierarchical casteist terms, denigrating things present in nature and branding Adivasi communities living in close proximity with nature as backward.  

Thus, the Oraon people have been corrupted through their membership of “civilised” society. Deprived of any living connection to their language, it is difficult for them to lead a life based on Adivasi life values. With their rapid rise into the middle class in a “civilised” society, most of the educated youth have also become increasingly disconnected from the land. Those who remain in the villages are also disoriented and immersed in a different kind of mental slavery, helplessness and despair. 

Unlike the Oraon Adivasis, the people of the Santhal community did not abandon their language even as they embraced development. Because Santhal families use the Santhal language in their homes, their children grow up learning many languages simultaneously. Their literature is also rich. I spent my childhood in Santhal villages and was able to learn their language quickly.  

Counterpose this to the fact that even though I was born in the Oraon community and lived among Oraon people, I could not learn Kurukh. This was owing to the fact that nobody in my family or surroundings spoke their mother tongue. Later on, when I lived in the Ho and Munda areas of Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, my knowledge of Santhali stood me in good stead and helped me understand the Mundari language as well.  

Like the Santhals, the Hos, Mundas and Kharias also speak their mother tongue in their homes, and this has ensured that their languages survive. Santhali, Ho, Mundari, Kharia, etc belong to the same language family, known as the Austro-Asiatic language family, and therefore are similar to each other. 

Our language constructs our consciousness and subconscious. When we learn a language, we also imbibe specific frameworks of thinking, feeling, dreaming, imagining and recalling memories. Speakers of Adivasi languages are able to do all this differently. They listen, speak and understand differently. All this changes when they lose their own language and adopt a non-Adivasi language. When we take up residence in a new language world, we also absorb the ways of the society that speaks that other language. With the loss of Adivasi languages, Adivasis are losing their tools of resistance against a society based on notions of high and low. Their dreams of a world free from supremacism are fading away. We are losing the possibility of a world where respect for nature and all humans can coexist. In the end, an important thought comes to mind: Adivasi languages can survive only if the Adivasi communities survive, because it is only in and through the survival of the people that we can speak meaningfully of the existence and essence of their languages. 

(Translated by Kaushika Draavid)

Jacinta Kerketta is a journalist, poet and activist. Her work deals with identity crisis of the Adivasi community

(This appeared in the print as 'Of Jungles, Rivers, and Mountains')