Cultivating a mother tongue in Assam

In Assam’s Jorhat district bordering Nagaland lies the quaint little Tai Turung village of Pohukotiya Shyam, known as Tipomia Habi gaon in the official records.* Winding old mud roads and rich vegetation dotted with traditional sang ghars (houses on stilts) with little gardens and weathered bamboo fences make up its pristine landscape. In the village lives a 77-year-old farmer, Ananta Turung, who is building a unique ‘granary of words’ in his mother tongue, Tai Turung.

"Language is like water, a flowing river – it’s not going to remain the same. But it shouldn't change all of a sudden and die," he says. And guided by this conviction, this marginal farmer has dedicated more than five decades to documenting his mother tongue. Researching the roots of his Turung tribe, collecting words, understanding the etymology, grammar, the impact of multiple migrations and cultural assimilation on the changing form and usage; and writing about these in books, magazines, and newspapers.

All at his own expense from the little income that he draws from the 5 bighas (1.6 acres) of land he owns. His more than 40 years of service in a venture school as an ‘unofficial’ teacher and administrator never brought him a salary. By the time the government aid grant finally came, and he was entitled to a clerk’s salary, he was just three months away from retirement. But nothing came in the way of his mission to save his language.

Tai Turung in the 2011 Language Census data is not listed as a separate language but falls withing the larger group of Tai languages. Which makes it is impossible to get a definitive figure of the active speakers of his language through official documents. A few years ago when some researchers approached Ananta Turung inquiring about the same, he did systematic field work. He visited every house in his village, wrote letters to other villages seeking information, and arrived at the conclusion that his was a critically endangered language with just 1,456 active speakers remaining. All spread across six different villages in Assam and a few families residing in Arunachal.

The loss, the cultural erosion, was imminent. He has seen traditional folk songs, sweet lullabies, and distinct dances disappear. He has also witnessed migrating families leave the language behind as they go in search of work, and seen young people abandon native melodies to sing Assamese Bihu songs. But Ananta Turung has continued building his granary.

He has created a handwritten wordbook Turung ga dum (A granary of words) listing everyday words for human body parts, names of animals, things in nature – all in Turung, Assamese and English. He is working on completing a dictionary and a grammar book for future generations. Creating a repository for a language without expecting any rewards “He had a longer version of the wordbook,” his wife Bhanumoti Turung, 63, tells me. “More than ten years ago he gave it to the Assam Sahitya Sabha, hoping it would be published someday. We are still waiting,”

For Ananta Turung it is simple, “Turung should live beyond me.”

*The names of villages in the film may not appear the same way in the Census, as many of them are hamlets.

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.