Isolated Totos fight odds to keep their language alive

Pinak Priya Bhattacharya,TNN | Jan 13, 2014, Jalpaiguri: It is the last village in India and there is no road connecting it. Located on the edge of the Howrikhola River and guarded by the Himalayas in the north, Totopara is isolated from the rest of the country and during the monsoons the village gets marooned.

Located 22 km from Madarihat in Jalpaiguri district, Totopara, the home of the Totos, is rapidly getting dominated by other communities, including Nepalis, Biharis and Bengalis. The Totos actually have no say in local governance and that includes panchayat.

With only four graduates and an alarming unemployment rate, the Toto youths who lead their lives with diverse activities are unhappy and helpless with the state of things. A huge chunk of land given to the Totos during Victorian era has been occupied by other communities and the actual land at the hands of 1,600 Totos has come down to only 387 acres. The Totos, who are agriculturists in nature, are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain life with limited land and many of them are forced to join the bandwagon of daily labours inside Bhutan located one km away. They fight an everyday battle for their existence.

But there is another battle going on in Totopara, a quiet war that has been waged to retain a sense of community, of identity and of culture, against the forces of economy and the pull of traditionalism that grips so many of the world's small cultures.

The Totos are fighting to keep a language alive.

It is believed that India speaks around 900 distinct languages though only 122 are recognised in the Census and just 22 are scheduled as official languages in the Constitution. Of mother tongues - the vernacular first learned at home - it was estimated in 1961 that India was home to more than 1,600.

But as well as being one of the world's most linguistically diverse nations,

India is losing languages faster than any other place on earth. Unesco currently lists 197 Indian languages as endangered or vulnerable.

Totos' language is listed as critically endangered, the final stage before extinction, with only 1,600 speakers. Totos speak their own language Yaa Waa, a tongue that shares no close derivation with any of those spoken around - Nepali, Bengali, Hindi or Bhutanese. But they fear their language, culture, history and way of life, are fast getting lost, consumed by an education system that obliges their children to speak Bengali, and an economy that pushes them towards Hindi and English.

The children in the village go to a Bengali medium school. Most speak Hindi and Nepali. Lack of English tends to keep Totos in the village, but it hinders their employment opportunities, in particular preventing them from securing well-paying government jobs.

Despite these odds, the Totos are desperate to keep their language and culture alive. Realising the necessity, Bhakta Toto, an elderly man, has written a manuscript in Toto language which waits to be published as a dictionary. After working out on the matter for more than 10 years, Bhakta succeeded to pick up two-and-half thousand Toto words and has completed writing the manuscript. The document contains Toto words and its pronunciation in English and the meaning of the words in both Bengali and English.

"This is not only our problem. Whenever people from outside come to Totopara for research work, they face problems. There are some dictionaries on this language but in most of them, the interpretation and pronunciations of several words are wrong. Therefore, I felt the necessity of writing the dictionary. More importantly I wanted to keep my language alive", said Bhakta Toto. Not only has the word list, the dictionary also contained primary information about the tribe.

Meanwhile, organisations like Toto Kalyan Samiti has extended a helping hand for keeping the Yaa Waa language and Toto culture alive. "We speak exclusively in our language when at home. We want our language to survive all odds. After all this is our mother tongue," says Bakul Toto, secretary of Toto Kalyan Samiti.