इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Bastar · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Bastar is a Dravidian-speaking region with an Indo-Aryan lingua franca, which is unusual anywhere in India. Gondi — Dravidian, in Muria, Maria, Dorli and Koya varieties — is the language of the forest villages, but it is not mutually intelligible across all of them. Halbi, an Indo-Aryan language sitting between Marathi, Chhattisgarhi and Odia, became the market and administrative tongue and is now a first language for many households that have no Marathi or Odia ancestry at all. A trader who works the haat circuit needs Halbi and some Gondi; a bureaucrat needs Halbi and Hindi; nobody needs all four.
बोलियाँ
The lingua franca of the plateau and the language of the weekly haat, of Bastar Dussehra's public proceedings and of most Bastar folklore in print. It carries Marathi and Odia features at once, which is what a trade language between three linguistic regions looks like.
बोलने वाले: Around 7.7 lakh returned in the 2011 Census, with far more using it as a second language
Written in Devanagari where it is written at all. Abujhmaria, spoken on the Abujhmarh massif, is the most conservative variety and is not readily understood by Gondi speakers from the plateau edge.
बोलने वाले: Around 29 lakh Gondi speakers nationally, of whom a large minority are in this region
Spoken by Bhatra households on the eastern plateau and closely related to Halbi and to Odia's western dialects. Its speakers are often counted under Halbi or Odia in census returns.
The Dhurwa language, spoken around Jagdalpur and into Koraput. Central Dravidian rather than South-Central, which makes it a separate branch from Gondi despite the two being spoken in the same villages.
Strongest in the towns and in the northern districts towards Kanker, where the plateau meets the Chhattisgarh plains, and increasingly the school and shop language everywhere.
स्थानीय शब्दावली
| शब्द | अर्थ |
|---|---|
| Ghotul घोटुल | The Muria youth dormitory — a walled compound with a hut, in which the unmarried young people of a village met, worked, sang, slept and organised themselves under their own officers. Described in detail below. |
| Chelik and motiari चेलिक / मोटियारी | The male and female members of a ghotul. Officers carried titles of their own, and membership ended at marriage. |
| Haat हाट | The weekly market, held on a fixed day at a fixed ground. In Bastar it is a unit of time as much as of commerce — a village will date an event by which haat it fell before. |
| Madai मड़ई | The winter fair at which one village's deity is carried to visit another's, moving from settlement to settlement across the season on a circuit fixed by custom. |
| Pen | Gondi for a deity or clan spirit. A clan's pen has a physical seat — a stone, a post, a bundle of iron — kept by a named lineage and carried out at Madai. |
| Angadev आँगादेव | A deity carried on a pair of bound wooden poles by two or four men, which moves and tilts to answer questions put to it. The commonest form in which a village god appears in public. |
| Gaita and sirha | The village priest who conducts the sacrifice, and the medium who is entered by the deity and speaks for it. Two different offices, usually held by two different men. |
| Penda पेंदा | Shifting cultivation on a forest slope — a plot cleared, burnt, cropped for two or three seasons with millet and then left. The Abujhmarh farming system. |
| Salfi सल्फी | The fishtail palm and the sap drawn from it. A tapped tree is individually owned, inherited, named and counted as property in a marriage settlement. |
| Landa लांदा | Home-brewed rice beer, made for a sacrifice, a marriage or a work party rather than for sale. A household that cannot supply landa cannot host. |
| Chapda चापड़ा | Red weaver ants and their brood, and the sour chutney made from them. Also called chaprah locally. |
| Ghadwa | The caster community that makes Dhokra, and by extension the trade itself. A Ghadwa house is identifiable by the wax and clay drying in the yard. |
कहावतें
| कहावत | शाब्दिक अर्थ | अर्थ |
|---|---|---|
| Johar | A greeting | The standard greeting across this belt and northward through Gondwana into the Munda-speaking plateau, used in place of namaste and increasingly asserted as a marker of Adivasi identity in its own right. |
| Aamcho Bastar | Our Bastar | Halbi for "our Bastar", and the phrase the region uses about itself — on shopfronts, on buses and in the names of local enterprises. The possessive is the point. |
| Bastar ka Dussehra Ram ka nahin, Danteshwari ka hai | Bastar's Dussehra is not Rama's, it is Danteshwari's | The formulation locals reach for first when the festival is explained to an outsider. It is a statement of fact about the ritual, and also a correction offered in advance. |
Bastar की बोलियाँ, स्थानीय शब्दावली और कहावतें। (15)