A-maize-ing language

When Reena Parteti first stepped into her in-laws’ home in Lonadei village after marriage, she was surprised.

“Even young children in the family could speak fluently in my mother tongue [Gondi],” she recalls. Reena, on the other hand, could barely understand the language of her Gond community as “no one spoke Gondi in my village [Moya],” says the 34-year-old Adivasi farmer.

Around 80 per cent of the population in Lonadei are Gond tribals. “Even people not belonging to the Gond community manage to speak the language,” she points out.

Reena’s nephews and nieces would playfully tease her, “maami ko Gondi bolte nahin aati, chachi ko Gondi bolte nahin aati [Our aunt doesn’t know how to speak in Gondi]! She laughs while recalling the incident and adds, “even though initially I stammered a lot, eventually I began talking to them in my mother tongue.”

Gondi is a Dravidian language that was once spoken widely across not just Madhya Pradesh but other parts of central India. Today, it is listed as one of the potentially vulnerable languages by UNESCO. Although the Gond community is one of the largest Adivasi communities in the state, their language is under threat.

Many Gondi speakers are increasingly choosing to talk in other link languages such as Hindi due to the fear of exclusion as they migrate to the cities for education and job opportunities. Only one in two Gond Adivasis is literate, and school dropouts among the community are quite high, says social worker Ramnath Uikey.

Read: ‘Gondi language is our religion and caste’

Like most of the other roughly 1,000 residents of Lonadei, Reena and her husband Mantram are farmers. They cultivate an acre of land on which they grow corn for their own consumption. Their home in Lonadei, Pandhurna tehsil, is a short distance from their land.

On the day PARI met them, the couple were worried about imminent rain on the standing crop.

Dark clouds had gathered above, and following thunder, the drizzle had turned into heavy rain. Reena and Mantram hurried towards the farm to check on the almost-ripened makka (corn).

“Chhui, chhaur, booch, tota…” The words roll out one after the other. Reena’s hands move in sync with the Gondi words for parts of the corn plant. The rain stops, and it’s time for a quick Gondi vocabulary lesson. Reena shows us chhui, which she quickly peels to reveal fresh, pearl-white corn seeds that shine through the booch. The chhui are outer leaves of the corn, also called pataud in Gondi, while booch is a set of silky strands that hang at the top of the corn, Reena tells us, quietly proud of her familiarity with the Gondi words.

“No part of a corn plant ever goes to waste, not even the tota,” says the 49-year-old Mantram, referring to the skeletal piece left behind once the seeds are taken off.

Tota (also known as thoonth) is the stick of the cob, often used as cooking fuel and for making a bonfire in winter. Booch and chhui are later given to the cows and goats as fodder along with the tota. The flower of the corn plant is called chhaur, Mantram continues teaching us.

Chhindwara is popularly known as the corn city in Madhya Pradesh. The state is the second largest producer of the crop after Karnataka.

Maize or corn (Zea mays) is a plant belonging to the family of grasses (Poaceae). It has emerged as the more profitable and economically viable crop for farmers in the district. Like Reena and Mantram, Gonds in the district practice mixed cropping – growing pulses like urad, tur and vegetables like barbatee (string beans) alongside wheat, soyabean, sugarcane and cotton. Over the years, there has been a significant decline in the production of jowar (sorghum) and wheat. “Only those who have access to tubewells can actually get a good harvest of wheat,” points out Mantram.

The family has been planning to plant santarang (orange) saplings. “It gets us a much better price and also gives a good yield for the next four to five years,” says Reena. Other farmers in the village, too, are gradually shifting to orange cultivation, as several companies offer higher prices than other crops and also end up buying the entire harvest.

When Reena came to Lonadei after marriage, she observed that corn yields were quite low. It was between three to one and a half quintals a year. She says, "fertility increases when you add the right mixture of cow dung manure and urea to it.”

Earlier, the roof of every Gond house had ears of corn hanging, covered with cotton cloth to save it from the rainwater, pests and roaming livestock. Today, most families no longer follow this traditional practice as seeds are available in packets in the market.

“We [Gonds] love rotis made from cornflour; it keeps us healthy and strong, and it is more nutritious,” says Reena, adding, “saawan [June to September] is the busiest time as corn plants grow fast and so do the weeds.” Nidaai (Gondi for weeding) is a job mostly done by the women of the village.

“My mother-in-law tells me they would sing nidaai geet in those days,” says Reena. “But I don’t know any,” she laughs awkwardly. “These days, don’t we have chaara maar dava [herbicide]?”

With time, the weeds in the corn fields were successfully killed, and the nidaai geet, just like many other farm traditions, has disappeared.

This story was originally reported in Hindi.

The reporter would like to thank Ramnath Uikey from Pradeepan NGO and Manjiri Chande, founder-member of Pararth Samiti NGO in Chhindwara, for extending their help with the story. She also expresses her gratitude to Reena Parteti, Kiran Admache and Dikhsa Inwati for helping with the interpretation in Gondi.

PARI's Endangered Languages Project (ELP) is part of an initiative supported by Azim Premji Foundation. It aims to document the vulnerable languages of India through the voices and lived experiences of people who speak them.