Forgotten languages of love

Language has its own language. My great grandmother used to write letters in Kaithi bhasha to my great grandfather. Not many could understand it, so there was a sense of privacy and it was their language of love too.

The Kaithi bhasha has been used predominantly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and is one of the earliest dialects among Indo-Aryan languages. Kaithi has been the foundation of languages like Bhojpuri, Maghadi, Urdu, Awadhi, Maithili, and forms of Bengali since the 16th century. In other areas, it was used primarily by the kayasthas. Widely used until the early 1900s, there are some claims of it being used for correspondence in some parts of Bihar.

I always dreamt of having a command over a language that would be my language of love. Many years later, I came across something that made me yearn for that language of love. My father, a writer, was pursuing a story in the Bhojpur area of Bihar about how Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam - renowned as the Father of the Nation in Mauritius - was related to the village.

The Bihar government was pursuing it as well. Ultimately, a well was found in the village and a cemented block discovered deep inside it. It had an inscription in Kaithi language that credited Moheeth Mahto as the man behind the construction of the well near the house and that’s how it was discovered that Bhojpur’s Harigaon was the village Ramgoolam hailed from.

Soon after, the then prime minister of Mauritius, Dr Navin Ramgoolam revisited the village. Like Kaithi, many languages like Abahatta faded away, leaving just a few anecdotes and fainting memories. It was the essence of poet Vidyapati’s famous works, like Keertilata and Keertipataka. Abahatta survived from the 6th century to 14th century, creating a foundation for the birth of many languages.

Many poets composed both in Abahatta and a modern language. Take the Charyapada poets, who wrote dohas or short religious verses in Abahatta. Pali, the beautiful Prakrit language of the subcontinent, has an interesting story as well. Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan, father of the Hindi Travelogue, brought in rare inscriptions and documents in Pali from Tibet. These were archived in the Mithilia Research Society in Patna.

This institute was locked for a long time and is now in a considerably diminished condition. The efforts of Mahapandit stand wasted and disrespected. A survey conducted in 2013 by the People’s Linguistic Survey of India said that 220 Indian languages have disappeared in the last 50 years, and there is a possibility that another 150 will vanish in the next century as there are very few speakers left to carry the languages and the present generation doesn’t even know about them.

Roads can be rebuilt, buildings can be restored and heritage can be flaunted, but the departure of languages can never be recovered. My grandmother still knows the verses of Vidyapati by heart and it aches when I try my best and fail to comprehend their meaning and essence. She recently shared it again with me and I repeatedly asked her for the meaning of the couplets.

She said: "Vidyapati once said about his work with pride and not vanity,

• "Baal chandra bijjavayi bhakha,
• Duhu nahi lagaye, dujjan hasa,
• Se parmesar, harsir so aayi,
• Nichhai na ar mann moai..."

It means:

• Vidyapati’s language is as beautiful and pure as the moon,
• No one can mock it, no impurity can touch it.
• His language resides on Lord Shiva’s head,
• It will catch the attention of everyone’s love.

The great Maithili and Hindi poet Nagarjuna was asked once, “What is language?”

He simply said, “Bhasha bhoosa hai (Language is fodder). The interviewer was shaken, wondering if the poet was offended by the question. He apologised immediately for maybe asking an odd question."

Nagarjuna smiled and replied, “No! I am not offended. It was a genuine response. I mean it. When a cow consumes fodder, it gives milk. Language is the fodder of mankind, through which you create something as pure and pious as milk.”

During our regular long walks, my father use to share stories with me. Once, he mentioned the great Maithili poet Surendra Jha Suman who lived in Bihar's Darbhanga.

When my father gifted him one his works, McCluskieganj, a novel on the only Anglo-Indian village in the world, he asked my father, “You have narrated a village’s story. Do you know what the meaning of dehaat is?

My father said, “I would like to hear it from you.” “Dehaat means, deh and haat. Body and hand. Rural India is our dehaat,” explained Suman.

Such a simple, rural word defined the essence of India. The land of villages. That’s what language is capable of and that dehaat contains many languages.

I have heard the stories of river Ratnavati that flows through my village and merges in the Himalayas via Nepal.  On the banks of Ratnavati, we have an ancestral agricultural plot, a very fertile paddy plot. My father used to tell me, this plot is ziraat. I thought he meant the animal, giraffe.

Many years passed by and he kept saying ziraat and I kept assuming giraffe. One evening, he showed me a really old pale yellow Anglo-Indian dictionary and confessed that till that day, even he didn’t know what ziraat meant. He had heard the term from his grandfather, father and uncles and that’s how he began using it. Ziraat, it turns out, is an Arabic word which means self-irrigated land.

It doesn’t need any external irrigation arrangement. We both were excited to discover its real meaning. Ratnavati irrigated it every year. An Arabic word that travelled miles, to define an idea in an Indian village that was unaware of its meaning. That’s how language travels and settles and runs in you. It’s there. It’s for us to discover and rediscover within us.

Memory is a rowdy river. I use to converse with my grandfather in Maithili when I was barely three years old. That was the first language I spoke and felt. It was our language of love and that’s the most beautiful memory I have till date. My father continues to taunt me on many occasions about how I have erased Maithili from my memory and asks, what will I pass on to my children? I still know it by heart, but I don’t feel like having a conversation in it.

I still haven’t discovered my present language of love, my private love, to write mysterious letters, to have secret conversations. I am trying to learn and find the leftovers of Kaithi and Abhatta bhasha. Hope the language of love finds me now.