‘Gondi language is our religion and caste’

The last class is over and the playground of the government school in Lonadei is alive with laughter and hectic activity. Having just played an intense game of tag, Prarthana Parteti and her friends sit down for a bit of rest. The conversation doesn’t stop, though. The words roll off, in Hindi.

That Prarthana and her friends choose to talk to each other in Hindi is interesting – and intriguing – because Lonadei is a Gond village. Even non-Gondi speakers are said to be able to speak Gondi in this village located in the Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh. Prarthana, a Gond Adivasi, however, speaks only a smattering of her mother tongue: “Thoda thoda bolna aata hai [I can speak a little bit],” says the Class 8 student.

What about her friends?

“I speak Hindi, I don’t know Gondi,” says Manvi Parteti. “Even I speak only Hindi,” Parul Deheria chimes in.

“All of them speak in Hindi,” says Prarthana, pointing at her friends. “That’s why I speak in Hindi too. Not everyone knows Gondi.” Yet, the language is not unknown to her. She still hears it spoken at home. As does her friend Ameeta Ahake: “My father speaks Gondi at home.”

The Gond community makes up more than a third of the total tribal population in Madhya Pradesh. Despite their significant numbers – 50,93,124, according to the Statistical Profile of Scheduled Tribes in India 2013 – fewer Gonds seem to be speaking their language. In fact, UNESCO lists Gondi, a Dravidian language, as potentially vulnerable.

Gondi has seen better days, though.

“…Gondi was the official language of an ancient kingdom called Gondvana and it had its own script, grammar, figures of speech, etymology, and literature, which are available even today,” Motiram Kangali, a scholar of Gondi literature is quoted as saying on the website of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre.

Gonds once ruled large parts of present-day Madhya Pradesh. “We are the descendants of Goddess Gaura [also known as Parvati and Durga in Hindu mythology], that is why we call ourselves Gond,” says Ramnath Parteti, a Gond social worker from Chhindwara. However, he adds, in contemporary times, the rich legacy and history of the community receive only token gestures, such as naming a railway station after the Gond queen Rani Kamlapati.

Their language has suffered a decline too, relegated mostly to the confines of their homes. Outside, in public spaces, people from the community often tend to switch to Hindi. And it is mainly the older population that still speaks Gondi; the younger generations are increasingly hesitant to learn or speak the language. Many attribute this to the fear of being misunderstood, or worse still, being ridiculed by non-Gondi speakers.

Prarthana’s father Mantram Parteti, a farmer in Lonadei, speaks to his children in Gondi only when they are at home; outside of their home, though, the family members communicate in Hindi, even with each other. “They [non-Gondi speakers] make fun of us or sometimes misunderstand our words,” he says. “Even now people tease us [when we speak Gondi].”

Mantram narrates a recent incident when he was visiting his son, Prithviraj, at his residential school. “I started speaking to him in Gondi. The teachers and other kids, who did not know the language, started laughing at us. I felt ashamed,” he says. His son has since forbidden him to speak in Gondi when visiting him at school: “‘You can speak as much Gondi as you want when I am home, he told me.”

Despite being a predominantly Gond village, Lonadei is fighting a difficult battle to get its young population to speak and take pride in their mother tongue. Ramnath points out that what is happening in Lonadei is only a reflection of the larger situation in the district itself. “Here, in Chhindwara, Gonds are considered to be of low caste. So, they fear that if they speak in Gondi in public places, they may be looked down upon by others. Hence, they prefer to speak in Gondi only among themselves,” he says.

Ramnath believes that the school system also perpetuates discrimination against Gonds, besides playing a role in alienating Gondi from its speakers. He remembers how children from his community were subjected to humiliation at the government school he attended in his village in Atarwada block.

The upper-caste teacher would make Gond children sit separately, at a distance from the other caste and Adivasi classmates. He did not stop at that. “I must have been in Class 10 when I saw Sharma sir beating and cursing two Gond boys from my village, saying, ‘You are the sons of Gonds. You will never learn anything; however hard I try to teach you.’ The boys stopped coming to school after that day.”

Access to secondary education continues to be a challenge for Gond students. “Fifty per cent of children in our villages drop out after Class 8. There are only elementary schools in the villages. Our children have to leave the village and study somewhere else if they wish to study further,” says Ramnath. “Very few get through Class 12 or receive college education. This is even worse in the case of girls.” The Tribal Development Report 2022-23 estimates that the literacy rate among the tribal population in Madhya Pradesh is around 50 per cent.

“I was one of just four students from my village and community who could complete graduation. It was a great struggle,” says Ramnath. Now in his forties, he is pursuing a Master’s in Social Work while working with a non-governmental organisation.

In Lonadei, as in most Gond villages, continuing education after Class 8 involves moving to schools in other villages - places where Gondi might not be spoken, understood, or accepted.

Meanwhile, young people from the community who drop out of school have few livelihood options in Lonadei. Many migrate to villages and towns near and far looking for work as construction and agricultural labourers. ‘‘There are no jobs here. Companies that come here to take young men for manual work at construction sites usually employ only people from tribal communities,” says Ramnath. “They make even the educated ones do the same hard labour.”

Once they are out of their village and working with people from other communities at construction sites or on big farms at distant locations, speaking in Hindi becomes a practical choice.

Exploited by employers who first underpay them and then charge them high interest rates on loans they are forced to take – for events like marriage, childbirth, and so on – the Gond youth remain trapped in a cycle of indebtedness. “This is how these people continue working at the construction sites for two-three years to be able to pay back the loan,” says Ramnath.

The longer they stay away from Lonadei, the more distant they become from Gondi, until they eventually lose all contact with it.

“I ask my children to learn Gondi. Even if it is broken Gondi, they should try to speak and follow it completely.”

As more and more people in Lonadei forsake Gondi, thirty-two-year-old Reena Parteti’s words echo the fear lurking in the hearts of many in her village – the fear of losing their language and their unique Gond identity. A reality faced not just by their community but also by speakers of other vulnerable and endangered languages across the country.

According to the Mother Tongue Survey of India (2012-2017), conducted by the Union government, Madhya Pradesh's 46 Adivasi communities speak 40 distinct mother tongues. Gondi is one of them. Many of these languages are now at risk of disappearing and are listed as vulnerable to critically endangered.

Reena, who is married to Mantram, has adopted what she sees as a pragmatic approach to the situation. “I believe in learning six-seven languages, such as Marathi, Hindi, and English, among others. Even if children don't speak these languages fluently, they should be able to follow them,” she says. “If we don't understand what people are saying, it becomes a problem.”

Interestingly, Reena learnt to speak Gondi only after she married Mantram and moved to Lonadei to live with her husband and in-laws. “They [her in-laws] would always speak to me and everybody else in Gondi. I began to follow them quite soon because I had heard and learnt a little at my mama’s [maternal uncle] village,” she says. “Hearing me speak Gondi made my in-laws very happy.”

According to Reena, although few children in the village speak Gondi, much of the older population continues to speak the language, even if it is mixed with Hindi. “People have started speaking in Gondi-Hindi mixed language. For example, when my husband was narrating a Gondi story recently, he said ‘hawa taaki laagche’ [The wind has started blowing]. ‘Hawa’ is a Hindi word. He should have used ‘vadi’,” she says, laughing away the seriousness of the discourse. She thinks this is a practical choice since “nobody will understand pure Gondi."

Fifty-year-old Sukhvati Parteti, however, holds a much grimmer view of the situation of Gondi. ‘‘Those who can speak [Gondi] are very few. Children in many families don't even follow it.” A view that is contested by another group of villagers – according to them, the situation is worrisome only in those parts of the village that are located close to the highway and have some non-tribal population; one can still hear Gondi in the more isolated parts, across the river, they say.

The growing incursion of Hindi into their language is not the only concern for the Gonds of Lonadei. Mantram explains how he is worried about his people losing their unique Gond identity and their ways of living as a tribal community. “Tribal people have now integrated into Hinduism even though they are not Hindus. We are Gond. We are tribal people. We get identified by the language we speak, wherever we speak it. Our songs and hymns may sometimes resemble those in Hindi, but we speak a different language – Gondi,” he says. “However, we fear that we may lose our identity to Hinduism.”

In an environment where tribal languages are disappearing rapidly and where many Gonds of Lonadei themselves feel they have been significantly acculturated by the dominant culture, language, and religious system, people like Mantram are trying to hold on to their language and tribal roots. “We continue to speak in Gondi because this language is our religion and caste. We will not be able to forget it,” he says.

“But we want our children to learn other languages as well,” he adds, agreeing with his wife on the need for the children of Lonadei to become multilingual.

The reporter would like to thank Mantram Parteti, Reena Parteti and Ramnath Parteti for acting as interpreters at different points during her interaction with the people of Lonadei. She also expresses her gratitude to Manjiri Chande, founder-member of the NGO, Pararth Samiti, Chhindwara who made it possible for her to get to this village and interview the villagers.

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

With inputs from Ritu Sharma