Adivasi - v25_No.1-4

Abstract

Desia-A Tribal Dialect of Koraput, Orissa. Professor Khageswar Mahapatra's study of the Desia language-the Desia dialect of Oriya-should be of interest to several kinds of scholar-as well as to those outsiders working in the Koraput district of Orissa (in an earlier period part of the Madras Presidency)-most of them from coastal central Orissa-wanting to know more about this chief local dialect. But Koraput has not been a popular place with these people-the administrators and businessmen from the coastal districts-it being considered an unhealthy, 'Jungly', and generally unpleasant place-a place to get out of as soon as one can. There have been exceptions of course; the distinguished novelist Gopinath Mohanty, who spent many years in Koraput, set a couple of his novels (about tribal s-'Porojas') there. Students of Oriya will have to examine another `southern' dialect, one different from the Southern Oriya of Berhampur and the Ganjam region. Desia, for instance, differs from the other Oriya dialects in lacking all the aspirates of standard Oriya (and Indo-Aryan). It also lacks the retroflex and, which lack is characteristic of 'central' (i.e. the central border region between 'North'-roughly, Indo Aryan, and 'South', i. e. Dravidian) India, Indo-Aryanists will want -to know something about the south-western most Indo-Aryan language of mainland India, a frontier language fronting not only the border of Telugu-speaking Andhra, but in contact with several other languages in what is still-and probably has long been-a highly multilingual region, one of the regions in 'central' [i. e. no] Himalayan or extreme northeastern (Assam, Meghalaya, etc.) ] India of greatest linguistic diversity. In Koraput at least five different Munda languages are spoken, as well as that many or more tribal Dravidian languages, this in addition to varities of Telugu, and standarrd (coastal) Oriya and several other (presumably closely related , to Desia) Indo-Aryan dialects. The Dravidianists and the Munda linguists have, as usual, preceded the students of 'tribal', 'substandard' or 'offbeat dialectal'-Indo-Aryan in coming to Koraput to do linguistic research. There is at least one reason why Desia ought to have been studied first and the results of the study made available to the Dravidianists and Mundalogists : it is clear, at least for the study of the Munda languages of the region Gutob (Gadba), Remo (Bonda), Gta (Didayi), Sora (Saora) and Gorum (Parengi), that these languages have been heavily influenced by Desia. How heavily was not fully apparent until Dr. Mahapatra's work appeared. Not merely laxicon (Gutob and Gorum have borrowed particularly heavily, and where Dravidian borrowings were noted in these languages it now looks as if most of these have come through Desia), but verbal categories, and pieces of syntax and semantics of some of these Munda languages have obvious sources in Desia. If there was-or is-a Munda influence on Desia, not much evidence of it has been noted so far. Desia, as Dr. Mahapatra shows, is very close to 'Bhatri'. More and better work is now needed on the various dialects of `Halbi' in order to provide a reliable and reasonably full description-and some notion of the history of these southwestern and southcentral interior Indo-Aryan languages. The historic connections of these claims on behalf of Marathi, Hindi (Chhatisgarhi) and Oriya have been made are still unclear. The region-like most regions in India-has been long known to history but not a great deal of its history, has been worked out. There has been some, but not much anthropological work done on particular groups (i. e. the Sora and the Bonda) in the area, but we know practically nothing about the complex interactions of the many different (and I don't mean only linguistically different, social groups in Koraput. Like other regions, this one is changing (some parts of it at a very rapid rate)-in the wake of the building of hydroelectric projects, airplane factories, etc., and the influx of outsiders (mostly people from outside Orissa) that these developments have brought with them. Professor Mahapatra has also collected a rich sample of texts in Desia, most of them not included in this volume. The song types, their contexts and occasions, are common to many of the groups of the region and no doubt to a wider region. Most of the speakers of the Munda languages of Koraput are bilingual in their own languages and in Desia. Some of them are giving up their own languages in favour of Desia. Nobody has tried to do for Koraput and e.g., the adjacent district of Srikakulam in Andhra, the sort of typological study that John Gumperz and associates did on the Maharastra-Karnataka border. The situation here-and Koraput also shares a long border with the Bastar District of Madhya Pradesh (Andhra, but not Srikakulam, farther south also shares a long border with Bastar) is more complex ; for one thing there are many more languages, and one more linguistic family represented For any such areal study too-and such studies are very much worth doing Dr. Mahapatra's book will be an indispensable source.