“Abun Ari Re” (Our Surroundings) will soon become the first-ever children’s book published in Birhor, an endangered Munda language spoken in India. We are in the final production stage of creating this book, and will be printing many copies in early 2021 for educational use in Birhor tribal communities. Here is a draft of one of the pages:
Draft of a page about local bird species in the “Abun Ari Re” (Our Surroundings).
Finishing this project through remote collaboration has not been easy, but well worth the challenge. This project was made possible by ongoing work by Living Tongues linguists, Birhor speakers, and indigenous artists in India (with support from the Zegar Family Foundation). Full credits below.
In early 2019, we began a new project documenting Birhor language and culture. Our field team, comprised of trained tribal/indigenous Indian linguists, worked closely with Birhor indigenous experts to digitally document their fragile and now disappearing knowledge domains, such as local hunter-gatherer strategies, ethnobotany and rope-making techniques.
Much progress has been made on the project. Our Living Tongues research collaborators in India have undertaken many field trips to Birhor communities and accumulated a large quantity of linguistic and cultural data that have contributed to the various project goals outlined below.
Goal #1 – The Birhor Audiovisual Collection
We have undertaken the creation of an annotated/translated audio-video collection of interviews documenting traditional Birhor cultural practices and local ecological knowledge base. We have filmed a series of short narrated videos of several traditional activities of the Birhor. These are currently being transcribed and translated by Living Tongues project coordinator Dr. Bikram Jora, who is based in India, and local indigenous facilitator Anukaran Mardi. Both have developed a longstanding, trusting relationship with members of the Birhor communities.
Their regular collaboration ensures a high level of detail for the project, and the fact that Mardi is indigenous to the region also adds a high level of authenticity and accuracy to the collected data. Our aim is to professionally archive the grammatical annotations as well as the fully annotated set of narrated videos in the Birhor collection by the end of the project.
Anukaran Mardi (right) interviews Mr. Biswanath Birhor (left) about “isroll” – a climber plant whose root (“isjor”) cures snakebites and body aches. Footage by Dr. Bikram Jora. Mr. Biswanath Birhor observed, “The plant is a root known as isjor. For treating snake bites, about 4-5 inches of root is ground with water and drunk at regular intervals…. for a headache, a small amount of isjor paste is applied to your forehead.” A still from a video depicting Mr. Biswanath Birhor collecting and processing “jom bayer” [ʤom bajer] – a highly useful climbing plant that is used to make rope. Filmed by Dr. Bikram Jora.
The short films we have collected have covered many cultural and ethnobotanical topics (see list below). We also filmed a narrated nature walk with a local Birhor expert who detailed the many subsistence and rope-making uses of the local plant species we encountered on the way.
Birhor Short Films: Cultural Topics
Traditional utensils
Birth ceremony
Death ceremony
Daily life activities
Seasons
Marriage
Directions
Clan (types and names)
The Birhor origin story
Traditional forest dwelling
Leaf and twig hut-making
How to make traditional liquor
Birhor Short Films: Ethnobotanical Topics
Short films of people collecting raw materials and producing traditional rope with “jom bayer” [ʤom bajer], a local creeper vine
Home remedies used to cure ailments such as snakebites and body aches
The importance of three local tubers for food: Ukuc, Baula, and Kundri
Wild plants and roots with various uses: Kateja (which stops dysentery), Malec, and Alkusi (to stop itching)
Spontaneous dialogs on related plant topics
Furthermore, we have filmed a handful of examples of traditional oral culture and music. This includes a marriage song, a song about Soso village, as well as over a dozen other local cultural songs that we still need to analyze and transcribe. More video data continues to be collected as well.
A Birhor Family in Sadbhaiya village, India.
Goal #2 – The Birhor Talking Dictionary
The framework for a trilingual, online, mobile-friendly Birhor Talking Dictionary with images, recorded words and phrases has been established and it will be populated with thousands of words and phrases in 2020. These entries will also be used for a Birhor-Hindi-English print dictionary. Here is a sample of data from our spreadsheet of collected words. In the coming months, the Birhor Talking Dictionary will be easily accessible on any mobile device as well as on desktop, both online and offline in places where there is limited internet access.
Goal #3 – Bilingual Birhor-Hindi printed materials for primary schools, including a pocket dictionary for class use.
The raw materials for the print dictionary have largely been collected and are being transcribed and translated to produce the dictionary. This has covered a range of basic vocabulary domains like body parts, kinship terms, names of various members of society and other words relating to humans, animal terms, plant terms, including a range of plants that have significant nutritional, economic or ritual functions or purposes in Birhor culture, a number of cultural products and concepts relating to the material and spiritual worlds, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, color terms, abstract terms, verbs, an array of terms relating to the natural world of the Birhor, social events and festivals, and deities.
Photos of Birhor traditional rope-making activities in Sadbhaiya village (Mahudi block, Hazaribagh District, Jharkhand, India). Photos by Dr. Bikram Jora, 2019.
Ethnobotanical Photos We have taken over 450 photos that document plant knowledge and the material culture of the Birhor people. These beautiful images will populate the printed pocket dictionary, be available online in the Birhor Talking Dictionary and also in the pages of the primary school materials that will be used in Birhor communities. The latter will probably also be supplemented with hand-drawn sketches from Birhor community members, as some interest has been expressed in this. A very small sample is included below.
Who Are 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.
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