ABOUT THE BIRHOR PEOPLE

The Birhor are a Munda-speaking, forest-dependent semi-nomadic tribal community with fewer than 20,000 members concentrated in the eastern central Indian state of Jharkhand and adjacent northern parts of the state of Odisha. Only a few thousand fluent speakers of the Birhor language remain at present as their way of life and their language are both under threat.

Until recently, many Birhor subsisted as hunter-gatherers living in leaf-huts setting up camps at the edge of village market areas, selling rope and rope products in local village markets; many now have been forced to live in settled agricultural communities, as forest degradation and urban encroachment has made hunting and gathering no longer viable as a way of life.  Officially a ‘primitive’ tribal group, the Birhor stand at the very bottom of the complex and multi-tiered ethno-religious and linguistic hierarchies that dominate Indian life. In northern Odisha, two different groups are officially known as ‘monkey-eaters’ and overtly despised.

The cultural and environmental context that the Birhor people are living in is changing rapidly and their language and culture are both poorly documented. Both will likely soon disappear without immediate action. Their knowledge of medicinal and nutritional uses of forest products is vast and unrivaled in India.

 

SUMMARY OF BIRHOR PROJECTS BY LIVING TONGUES

A Survey of the Ethnobotanical Knowledge of the Birhoɽ People of India
(ISBN  978-1-953999-01-6, Published in 2022)

Our work documenting the traditional plant knowledge of the Birhoɽ resulted in a 159-page study of 94 local plant species as well as their Birhoɽ names and various types of uses. This study deals with the cultural traditions of the Birhoɽ tribe, how they manage and wield knowledge of their local ecology or natural habitat, and specifically how they use some of the many plants found in their area of habitation.

PDF available upon request: A Survey of the Ethnobotanical Knowledge of the Birhoɽ People of India. Contact us

How to cite: 
Lakra, S., Jora, B., Anderson, G.D.S. 2022. A Survey of the Ethnobotanical Knowledge of the Birhoɽ People of India. Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages: Living Tongues Indigenous Language Publications, Munda Languages Initiative Series #2. Ranchi, India.

The intention of the study is to acknowledge that  indigenous Birhoɽ people are of vital importance for local biological (and linguistic) conservation. It also serves to celebrate the vast environmental knowledge that the Birhoɽ community of India possesses and utilizes to their benefit. While this study is published in English to allow the widest possible group of readers worldwide to gain insight into the vast environmental knowledge of the Birhoɽ community, we are also preparing a version in the Birhoɽ language for local community use alone.

There is a diversity of knowledge regarding local environmental resources that characterizes different members of Birhoɽ society, resulting from the different and varied roles and activities of each social actor in their community depending on their age and duties, as well as the level of specialization needed to attain knowledge of certain features.

We examined Birhoɽ traditional plant knowledge by conducting interviews with members of the same family from different age ranges and genders to determine gradients or specialization of knowledge across these groups, and how they may differ or have changed over time. Male and female members of the community with their specific gendered, individual, ethno-medical knowledge were encouraged to share their specialized domains of information. This volume was reviewed by an ethnobotanist colleague who provided valuable feedback as well as wrote a foreword for the book. We are including screenshots of the final book below.

RESEARCH ACCESSIBILITY

• These plants and their ethnobotanical uses are all systematically included with their scientific names in the Birhor Living Dictionary (activate the “Plants and Other Vegetation” search filter to locate the plants).
• Furthermore, because we strive to be inter-disciplinary and collaborative across scientific fields, all of the plant names collected in Birhor Hindi and Santali throughout the course of this project will become available in the Tropicos database (maintained by the Missouri Botanical Garden) by the end of 2022. Thank you to Dr. Robbie Hart for assistance with this aspect of the project.
• The ethnobotanical study is also described on its own page on the Local Contexts Hub and tagged with the “Biocultural” and “Traditional Knowledge” notices, which help protect and promote this work for future Birhor generations.

The Birhoɽ Trilingual Dictionary – print format (2022)

We also have completed a first edition of A Trilingual Dictionary of Birhoɽ: Birhoɽ-Hindi-English. It has over 4,000 entries with three sections of headwords corresponding to the three languages included in the dictionary (Birhoɽ, Hindi and English). This is the first-ever Birhoɽ dictionary. It contains a vast array of words in Birhoɽ translated into English and Hindi.

The dictionary is intended for use by teachers of primary and secondary school students as well as to make data on this important language available to Indian and international scholars alike. To this end, the Birhoɽ forms are rendered in a modified version of the Devanagari script used for Hindi (to which one symbol had to be added for the glottal stop which is lacking in Hindi, but using the Sanskrit visarga (:) which has been used in other languages of India to render the glottal stop successfully) as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The need for the glottal stop symbol is clear: ​​its presence or absence is contrastive as seen in such pairs as  seta सेता ‘dog’ vs. setaʔ सेता: ‘morning’. A sample dictionary page is included below.

The Birhoɽ language was almost entirely undocumented before this project. It is therefore not surprising that there is also interest among the global scholarly community to access data on this language, and this means that multilingual, publicly accessible data is appropriate. Also, the use of IPA (phonetic alphabet) in parallel with local orthographies has been previously used in other Munda-speaking tribal language communities with success such as the Sora community of Odisha, which facilitated acquisition of this among the community members themselves.

A Birhoɽ language committee was constituted as a result of this project consisting of community elders and younger activists: Anil Birhoɽ, Bishwanath Birhoɽ, Kameshwar Birhoɽ, Etwa Birhoɽ, Birsa Birhoɽ, Bitni Birhoɽ, Madhuri Birhoɽ, Malti Birhoɽ, Kaushila Birhoɽ, and Seema Birhoɽ. 

 

Birhoɽ Living Dictionary (electronic format)

The print dictionary serves as a basis for the online Birhor Living Dictionary. The Birhoɽ community is slowly gaining access to online resources through their mobile phones now. They are very happy and eager to expand their own online presence through continued collaboration on this electronic resource they can have and work on directly from their phones in the coming months and years. Unlike the print dictionary (which of course can and will be revised based on community feedback), the Birhoɽ Living Dictionary is never in a final state, and can be edited and expanded with multiple contributors over time. We have imported large number of forms (2747 forms to date) from the print dictionary in 2022, along with accompanying sound files and images, and this will be expanded over time by various stakeholders in the process.

 

 

The first-ever Birhor Children’s Book:
“Abun Ari Re (Our Surroundings)”
ISBN 978-1-953999-00-9

In February 2021, we published “Abun Ari Re (Our Surroundings)” the first-ever book written in the Birhoɽ language (a tribal language of India belonging to the Kherwarian subgroup of the Munda language family) with translations in English and Hindi. We printed and distributed 500 copies of the book to Birhoɽ communities.

The content of the book focuses on plants, animals, foodways, other aspects of Birhoɽ daily life and traditional knowledge. Our production, publication and distribution schedules were of course seriously impacted and delayed by the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic in India and the extreme vulnerability and risk that the indigenous community find themselves in with respect to this disease, but nevertheless we accomplished our goal.  

 

SUPPORT & SUMMARY

The generous support of the Zegar Family Foundation has made the dream of the Birhoɽ community of Jharkhand that their language could one day be written realized and that it could be taught in schools much closer to reality. The community stands as one of the most marginalized socio-linguistic communities in the world, positioned at the very bottom of arguably the most highly complex and structured ethnolinguistic hierarchy found globally. The press coverage of the Birhoɽ children’s book brought welcome attention to this often misunderstood and frequently discriminated-against community in Jharkhand.

As the photos of the children gleefully reading their language for the very first time above demonstrate, simple facts such as the existence of a Birhoɽ children’s book with locally appropriate images and content can have a significant impact on the attitudes that the younger community members have towards their own identity, which often has considerable knock-on benefits for their intellectual and emotional development and well-being in the long-term.

We have committed to developing a second-level reader with local stories as content for the school children, as well as to create a local version of the ethnobotanical study with less botanical detail and focused exclusively on the cultural content on the medicinal, nutritional, religious and economic uses of the plants found in their local surroundings. These additional resources are very much desired by the Birhoɽ community as they continue to fight to maintain their unique cultural identity and perspectives in the face of massive pressure to assimilate to mainstream, Hindu Indian agriculturalist norms which are actively promoted by state actors and apparatuses in present day India. While we have not yet secured funding for the next phase of the Birhoɽ  project, we remain optimistic we will do so and we are bolstered by the continued support and enthusiasm that the community expresses for this project as we help in what way we can to make their goals a reality. 

 

← Back to Munda Languages