Since her husband Abrahm Soreng died two years ago, 70-year-old Veronica Kerketa doesn’t get the chance to talk in her mother tongue at home. None of her children or grandchildren speak the Kharia language.

In her village, under Bormachhara tea garden area of Moulvibazar’s Sreemangal upazila, only one other person — her younger sister, 65-year-old Christina Kerketa — speaks Kharia.

“Except for the two of us, the nearest person who knows this language, Jaharlal Pandey Induar, lives three kilometres away from our village,” said Veronica.

“I talk with my sister or sometimes talk with him in this language when we meet.”

She added, “Nobody else from my own family speaks this language now. So, I need to talk in Sadri or Bangla with them.”

The use of Sadri is largely prevalent across the various ethnic communities in the tea gardens.

“After our death, nobody will speak this language [Kharia]. I tried to teach the language to the younger people but they do not show interest and laugh at me when I speak in Kharia,” said Veronica.

Jaharlal Pandey Induar, 65, of Sreemangal’s Mangrabasti, said that as a tea workers’ family, they are always under financial stress. “We do not have enough time to give for our own language.”

He said, “I still can’t speak Kharia fluently, as I have mostly used Sadri for a long time now.”

Dayaram Kharia, 60, also from Mangrabasti, said 110 Kharia families live in the village.

“There is no one in our village who can speak our own language fluently — there are only five people who know a few words of Kharia.”

In Krishnanchura village of Habiganj’s Chunarughat, of 41 Kharia families living in the village, only four old women can speak a few words in the language when they meet each other, said 45-year-old Manik Kharia.

Rajshahi University student Simon Kerketa, 23, from the Bormabosti area of Sreemangal upazila, said at least six members of his father’s family still know Kharia.

“But I myself can’t speak the language,” he said.

A DYING LANGUAGE

Mashrur Imtiaz, assistant professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Dhaka, who conducted a survey on the language in 2018, found less than 20 people in Sylhet speak Kharia.

“Only 10 to 12 people from their community know this language. And a few others know some Kharia words and some stories and rituals. But they cannot really make sentences or continue a conversation,” he said.

“There is no written form of this language in Bangladesh. I wanted to work on their grammar but did not get adequate people who speak the language.”

Kharia, a language belonging to the Munda branch of the Austro-Asiatic language family, is one of Bangladesh’s endangered languages, he said.

George Abraham Grierson’s “Linguistic Survey of India”, published in 1928, described Kharia then as a “dying” language, noted Mashrur.

Kharia people, who live in various tea gardens in Sylhet, were enlisted in the government’s updated list of 50 small ethnic communities, which was made in 2019.

Before this, they were not even recognised as a separate ethnic group in Bangladesh.

Pius Nanuar, a Kharia social activist, who conducted a study on the Kharia population in early 2020, told this correspondent they found around 5,700 Kharia people in 41 villages in Sylhet division.

“New generations do not talk in this language — they hardly know one or two words. This language is going to be lost from our country very soon as only 12 people from the community can speak the language,” he said.

Pius, who knows a little bit of Kharia, said he learned it from his grandmother when he was a school student in the ’90s.

His grandmother used to take classes informally every evening, telling stories of Kharia heroes, myths, riddles, rhymes, singalongs, harvest stories, Karam (a harvest festival) and other festivals, hunting, and folk traditions.

“In our boyhood, a good number of Kharia children at least learnt a few Kharia words and came into connection with our Kharia roots and culture. But after her death, that effort was lost,” he said.

In 2017, an initiative was taken to teach the language to the younger generation through a youth organisation called “Beer Telenga Kharia Language Learning Centre”, Pius said.

But it was a failed effort to save the Kharia language and culture in his community.

“Kharias in Bangladesh do not have our own alphabet. Kharias in India too use Roman and Latin alphabets,” Pius added.

According to the website Omniglot, an encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, Kharia is spoken in the Simdega and Gumla districts of Jharkhand state, in the Surguja and Raigarh districts of Chhattisgarh, and in the Sundargarh district of Odisha in India.

There are about 256 speakers of Kharia in the Mechi and Kosi zones of Nepal along the border with India.

Kharia is written also with Devanagari, Odia and Bangla alphabets, according to the website.

NOT JUST A LANGUAGE LOST

The majority of Kharia people in Moulvibazar, Habiganj and Sylhet districts are descendants of people who were brought to the plantations from various parts of India by the British colonists around a century and a half ago, according to the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD).

In 2016, SEHD identified 658 Kharia households in 16 tea estates in Sylhet division.

Not just Kharia, even the more commonly spoken ethnic languages are in danger of disappearing.

Pranesh Goala, chairman of Kalighat Union Parishad in Sreemangal, said those who still speak Sadri also mix in Bangla and Hindi words while speaking.

AFM Zakaria, professor in the anthropology department of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, told The Daily Star losing a language means closing the entrance to a civilisation, to a storehouse of cultural resources.

Sukra Kharia, 65, a younger brother of 70-year-old Gopia Kharia, a freedom fighter from Nalua tea garden in Habigang’s Chunarughat upazila, said as Bangladeshis, they are proud to be part of the country’s history and culture.

At least six Kharia people participated in the Liberation War in 1971.

“But it is very sorrowful to say we are waiting to see the death of our own language,” he said.

In the month of February, Pius Nanuar said, Kharia children pay homage to those who sacrificed their lives for the Bangla language but will never know how to speak the Kharia language, their own mother tongue.

Director General of the International Mother Language Institute Prof Dr Jinnat Imtiaz Ali told The Daily Star it is difficult to preserve a language spoken by less than 20,000 or 30,000 people.

“Finding the source of the language then becomes very difficult. We do not know then what exactly the oral form of the language was.”

“However,” he added, “we have formed a committee to compile the grammar in a dictionary to save endangered languages. We have started work.”

Workers busy plucking leaves in Rangichhara tea garden in Kulaura of Moulvibazar recently. Photo: Mintu Deshwara

By Mintu Deshwara
May 4 2020 (IPS-Partners)

After her mother passed away, her father remarried and moved elsewhere, and so attending school became a luxury for 12-year-old Sheuly Munda.

Along with her grandmother Belmoni, a registered tea-garden worker, Sheuly now plucks leaves at a tea garden in Moulvibazar district’s Srimongol upazila.

“I wanted to continue my study, but my grandmother said she could not bear my education expenses. Instead, it would be better for the family if I could earn something,” she said, while helping Belmoni achieve her daily leaf plucking target of 20-25 kg to earn the day’s wage of Tk 102.

In the same garden, 16-year-old Sakhina Munda started plucking leaves two years ago after dropping out of school at grade VII.

“My mother, a registered worker in this garden, has tuberculosis and my father died a few years ago. So, I have to work here to feed our family of four,” she said. Like other tea workers, she works at least seven to eight hours a day.

A 2018 baseline survey by BBS, funded by Unicef, found that 18.8 percent of all children between the ages of five and 17 in tea gardens of Moulvibazar, Habiganj and Sylhet districts are engaged in child labour.

The percentage of tea-garden children aged 5-17 and involved in child labour in Habiganj is 29.8 percent, in Moulvibazar 15.6 percent and in Sylhet 19.3 percent.

The study, the first of its kind on the country’s tea gardens, was conducted under Unicef’s Global Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) programme.

Another MICS report from 2019 shows the total child labour in the country for children aged 5-17 is 6.8 percent.

The findings from the tea gardens show that low wages, malnutrition, inadequate maternity and health services lead children to work in tea gardens.

Tea-garden children mostly work as a substitute of or in addition to a family member, mentioned yet another study.

Faisal Ahmmed and Ismail Hossain, professors of the Department of Social Work, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, conducted a study titled “A Study Report on Working Conditions of Tea Plantation Workers in Bangladesh” and published in 2016 and funded by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Some children work as a replacement of a parent who is unable to work, so that they do not lose their residence in the workers’ colony. Living quarters are given only to active workers, the study said.

During peak season, the tea-garden authorities welcome children to work alongside their parents to finish the plucking within the stipulated timeframes. Workers also take their children to work to meet targets or secure more income, stated the findings.

“We do not want our children to work. We want to send them to school. But how can we afford that when we cannot even afford three meals a day?” Ajit Banerjee, a tea worker in Barlekha upazila of Moulvibazar, asked.

Pankaj Kondo, vice president of Bangladesh Cha Sramik Union, told this correspondent that, according to national law, children under 18 are not allowed to work in tea gardens, but they still do.

Generally, male child workers dig canals, repair broken roads in the tea gardens and take care of the tea plants. Female child workers pluck tea leaves and sometimes put tea into sacks in the factories, he said.

GM Shiblee, chairman of the Sylhet branch of Bangladesh Cha Sangsad, the tea garden owners’ association, said they rejected the MICS survey findings.

“They conducted the survey without contacting us,” he complained, adding that some people take jobs in the tea gardens with fake documents.

Shah Alam, chairman of Bangladesh Cha Sangsad, told this correspondent, “We do not employ any child.”
When asked about the findings of studies, he said action will be taken against those who employ children in tea gardens.