Kisku focuses on creating content in the Santali language using Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, the three most commonly used social media platforms by the indigenous Santali community in South Asia. Once a young man reached out to him after watching one of his videos on “romantic words in Santali”. The man wanted to say “I love you” to his girlfriend. He knew the phrase in English and in Bengali, but he did not know it in his mother tongue — Santali.
It was then that Kisku realised how he was filling major gaps that existed for Santali internet users and that ‘Olitun’ (translated to ‘primary education’ in English) — the name for his platform — fits just right. “Expressing love in your mother tongue evokes sentiments that we can’t in a language that is not our own,” Kisku says.
According to the 2011 Census of India, there are over 70 lakh people who speak Santali across the country. The community is the third-largest tribe in India, concentrated in seven states in large numbers, including in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha. The community’s geographic distribution is also spread across Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
Sometime in the summer of 2021, as India was grappling with the second wave of Covid-19, Kisku began working on ‘Olitun’, a one-of-a-kind initiative for creating content in Santali language. The platform rapidly became popular among the Santali community in India and overseas.
In addition to creating content that imparts general knowledge about Santali history and culture, Olitun also shares slides of picture dictionaries designed by Kisku, to help users learn the Santali equivalent for common words they know in Bengali or English. Every week, Kisku picks a theme — names of fruits, vegetables, countries, pronouns — and provides translations of these everyday words in the Santali language.
“In our Santal community, as well as in other indigenous communities, we have been observing the influx of foreign words from other languages that we have been using in our everyday conversations. Santals who have moved into what we call the ‘market areas’ or urban settlements for work or education, have adapted to lifestyles that are different to that of Santals living in the villages. The language among these groups is slowly being adulterated,” says Kisku.
In the Santal community, education has historically been imparted differently from what is witnessed in conventional classrooms. Language and knowledge are taught through oral education, passed down from elders in the family and the community, and it has also been preserved using this method. Previously, the language did not have a particular script; for instance, Santals in West Bengal used the Bengali script, while those in Jharkhand and Bihar used the Devanagari script. The invention of the Ol Chiki script by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925, and in 2003, the 92nd Constitutional Amendment Act’s addition of Santali to Schedule VIII to the Constitution of India, resulted in Ol Chiki being recognised as a universal script for the language.
“When Santali was included in the Constitution, it began getting taught in schools, and books started getting published in the language. Professors and academics began conducting research on the language and literary works started getting published in larger numbers in the language,” says Kisku.
“People who are living in rural West Bengal, are speaking in pure Santali. But when they move to cities, their children are growing up in cities, and their social circles are made up of people from outside the community. So while younger Santals may speak to their parents in Santali, outside the home they are speaking in Bengali and Hindi. So many common words in Santali aren’t learnt,” says Sripati Tudu, Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Institute of Language Studies and Research, Kolkata.
Kisku’s video ‘10 Romantic Words in Santali’ has over 10,000 likes on Instagram, an impressive number for a social media account focusing on a niche subject, and is among his most popular videos. For this video, Kisku picked some common words used in the community, like ‘lover’ or ‘dulariya’ in Santali, ‘relationship’ or ‘sagai sikri’, and spells out these words in Ol Chiki and English to help his viewers learn the correct pronunciation.
The popularity of the platform largely spread through word of mouth. Chandani Murmu, 25, a resident of Paschim Medinipur district’s Raskunda village, learned about Olitun when the platform had just started. “There were many words that I didn’t know in Santali. For instance, the word ‘husband’ is called ‘shami’ in Bengali. But in Santali it is called ‘chatadare’ and I didn’t know. My grandparents would use this word, but my parents don’t. Many of these words aren’t used any more in the community and so we are losing it,” says Murmu. When she discovered Olitun, she realised that the youth in the community were slowly losing knowledge of basic words in the language.
According to a 2022 report by UNESCO, around 3,000 languages could disappear before the end of the century, at a rate of one every two weeks, where of the 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, 6,700 are indigenous, and are most threatened.
Since 1987, Mahendranath Saren has been teaching Santali language in a government school in Bhangabandh village in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district. “It is not that the youth cannot speak Santali at all. But sometimes, parents keep children away from their mother tongue by enrolling them in English-medium or Bengali-medium schools, where they are not taught Santali in the same way. Parents feel they will get better exam results or better jobs if they learn in English or Bengali,” says Saren.
All of this stems from a desperation to give their children better education and opportunities in life, Saren says. The sentiments are understandable because of the challenges indigenous communities face. “If they study in Santali-medium schools, they will get better marks because they are writing papers in their mother tongue. But some parents fear that their children will go nowhere in their careers. The indigenous population is largely very uneducated and they are easily misled,” he says.
In English- and Bengali-medium schools, children are exposed to cultures and languages different from Santali and it becomes a major part of their lives and vocabulary, Baski says, explaining the adulteration that has seeped into spoken Santali.
Building Olitun’s bank of words is an everyday job, says Kisku. He goes to book fairs and government institutions that have literature in the language and speaks to Santali language experts to collect words and phrases that he feels the youth should know. “Many Santals who are studying don’t have access to resources that would help them learn. But everyone is spending time on smartphones and on social media. So I thought insteading of sharing memes, I should create content that would help younger Santals learn the language, culture and the developments happening in the field.”
It isn’t that books and Santali language learning resources do not exist or are entirely inaccessible. But Kisku believes that the use of graphics and videos makes learning easier because of its visual component for a new generation of Santals accustomed to online content. “After Covid-19, in our community, a large number of Santali youth have been spending time on social media. They are using Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. But even before that in the Santal community, for a long time, social media was being used for entertainment and there were few resources for educational purposes. So I use formats like graphics, videos, reels etc. to create content promoting Santali language and culture,” says Kisku.
While it’s difficult to get the exact numbers, Kisku estimates that 75 to 80 percent of his approximately 53,000 followers on Facebook are between the ages of 18 to 30, and some are likely to be younger, using the platform by giving false age details for registration. “Some of the comments indicate that they are students or young professionals in villages and in cities in West Bengal and in other Indian states. Plus, there are also many followers living overseas,” says Kisku.
But many of his users are also between 30- 65 years of age, who follow Olitun for content where he introduces words that have been new additions to the Santali lexicon. Kisku points to words relevant to computer and internet use like ‘file’ and ‘Google search’ that are important for people above 50 years of age who may not be technologically savvy and may not be aware of newer words. For instance, the Santali word for ‘file’ is ‘redh’ while the word for Google search is ‘sendra’, and is very different from the word used for the act of searching or looking for something in a given space.
Linguists and language experts in the Santal community have been monitoring the impact that rapid developments in the age of internet and social media have on language. Acknowledging the need to update their dictionaries, these experts have been working to study and put together the most appropriate Santali language equivalents, because sometimes the translation for a word simply may not exist in Santali. With the creation of these new words, platforms like Olitun, help introduce these to people in the community who may not necessarily be aware of the constant developments in the language.
A few months ago, 21 year-old Sagar Kisku, from Bankura district was using Facebook when Olitun’s page popped up under recommendations. “On Facebook, I get content in a mix of Santali, Bengali and Hindi. But this is the only page in Santali that focuses on education. It is of use to me because it allows me to explore my own language,” said Sagar who studies in a Bengali-medium educational institute, which does not provide opportunities to study in the Santali language.
“Due to the influence of other languages we are losing our own. I think adulteration is happening more in our language than perhaps others because of the backgrounds that we come from. When we move from Santal villages to cities, the lack of exposure to the Santali language in cities forces us to use languages like Bengali and English. So when we move there, there is a feeling that we should just continue using these other languages. The knowledge of these words get lost in the process,” Sagar says.
For now, for people in the Santali community, both young and older, Olitun is likely the only platform of its kind helping people keep track of changes in the language. “If we don’t use our language, we will lose it. If we lose our language, we will ourselves be lost as a people,” says Murmu.