A Brief Note on Kurukh

Oraons are the second largest Adivasi community of Jharkhand who prefer to call themselves Kurukh or Kurukhar. While they live primarily across central and eastern India in the states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, they are also to be found in Assam, Tripura, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where they originally went as migrant labourers to work on tea plantations and to clear forests for cultivation.

While Oraons refer to themselves as the Kurukh, Kurukh is also the name of the language spoken by them. As per the 2011 census, it is spoken by 19,88,350 persons in India, and by 9,52,164 persons in Jharkhand. Kurukh was originally transmitted across generations through oral traditions, customary practices and cultural institutions. The Adivasi litterateurs of the contemporary period refer to Kurukh oral narratives as ancestral literature or Purkha Sahitya.

In the colonial period, efforts were made by missionaries to record Kurukh as a language with a distinct grammar. Rev. F Batsch of the Gossner Evangelical Lutheran [hereafter GEL] Mission was the first to prepare a grammar of the Kurukh language in the Roman script in 1852. Other missionaries of the GEL Mission like Rev. A. Nottrott and Rev. F. Hahn also learned and documented Adivasi languages while documenting different facets of Adivasi culture. Hahn, who lived in the largely Oraon-inhabited region of Lohardaga, wrote Kurukh Grammar in 1900 and the Kurukh-English Dictionary, Part I, in 1903; in addition, he transliterated Oraon folktales and published these in 1905 as Kurukh Folk-lore in the Original. Along with Hahn, W.G Archer, then Sub-divisional officer at Gumla, and Dharmadas Lakra collected hundreds of Kurukh songs of the Oraons. These were published in a collection titled The Blue Land, the Kurukh version of which was Leelkhora Khekhel.

Since language is a marker of Oraon identity, the importance attributed to the Kurukh language has increased in more recent times. Journals have been published in Kurukh: while Bij Binko was the first journal published in Kurukh in 1940, this was followed by Bolta in 1949, Dhumkuria in 1950, and Kurukhan in 1962. There has also been a search for a unique script for Kurukh. After several failed attempts over the years, a medical practitioner, Narayan Oraon, developed in 1999 the Tolong Siki script for this language. This script was promoted by the ‘Kurukh Literary Society’, a society created for the promotion of Kurukh language and culture in 2006. This society has been instrumental in approaching the government for the acceptance of the Tolong Siki script; it also distributes books in this script to schools, organizes seminars for its popularization, and engages Oraons in rural areas for its propagation.

Teaching Kurukh at universities became visible after a ‘Tribal and Regional Language’ (TRL) Department was established in 1980 at Ranchi University. Ranchi University was the first state university of undivided Bihar to have a TRL department where five Adivasi languages (Kurukh, Santali, Mundari, Kurukh, Ho and Kharia) and four regional languages (Nagpuri, Khortha, Kurmali and Panchpargania) were taught. Later, with the formation of the separate state of Jharkhand in 2000, Kurukh was taught in two other universities: the Nilamber Pitamber University with its headquarter at Medininagar, and the Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee University at Ranchi.

According to UNESCO’s Atlas of Endangered Languages, Kurukh is a vulnerable language. The Oraons live with other Adivasi communities in a multilingual setting. Their language is affected by neighbouring languages and is often mixed with words from Hindi, English, Mundari and Sadri. Further, Oraons in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam and Tripura have adopted Sadri or Nagpuri as their primary language of communication.

Today, audio and visual mediums, along with social media platforms, play a major role in the preservation and popularization of the Kurukh language. Kurukh songs, extremely popular among Oraons, are recorded in several studios of Jharkhand. During Christmas, Christian Oraons are especially interested in releasing devotional song albums in Kurukh. As for films in Kurukh, Meghnad and Biju Toppo, documentary makers from Jharkhand, claim that their film, Kora Rajee [The Land of the Diggers], is the first film in Kurukh. This film deals with the life and problems of migrant Oraon labourers who work in the tea gardens of Assam and West Bengal and are part of the Chah Jongosthi or tea tribes. Some of the other films and documentaries in Kurukh are as follows: ‘Edpa Kana’ [Going home] in 2017; ‘Sona Gahi Pinjra’ [The golden cage] in 2011; and ‘Jahar Jinagi Gahi’ [The poison of life] in 2022.

Published

Abbi, Anvita. 1995. ‘Language contact and language restructuring: A case study of tribal languages in Central India’, International Journal of Sociology of Language, Vol. 1995, No. 116, pp. 175-186.

Dasgupta , Sangeeta. 2022. Reordering Adivasi Worlds: Representation, Resistance, Memory, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

Ishtiaq, M. 1998. ‘Determinants and correlates of language shift among the tribals of Central India’, Geo Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 189-200.

Lakra, Alisha Vandana & Md. Mojibur Rahman. 2017. ‘Vitality and endangerment of contemporary Kurukh’, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. IX, No. 2, pp. 351-368.

Singh, Anjana. 2018. ‘Linguistic politics and Kurukh language movement of the Oraons in Jharkhand’, Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies, Vol. VIII, No. 2, pp. 37-50.

Unpublished

Kumar, Awadhesh. 1991. Word formation in Kurukh (Oraon): A study of linguistic typology and language change, PhD Thesis. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1991.