Expressives in the Santali Poetry of Sadhu Ramchand Murmu

chapter 9 Expressives in the Santali Poetry of Sadhu Ramchand Murmu

Sarada Prasad Kisku, Ganesh Murmu and Nishaant Choksi

1 Introduction

Santali is a member of the North Munda (Kherwarian) subgroup of the Munda family within Austroasiatic, closely related to languages such as Mundari and Ho. While speakers are called “Santal” and the language “Santali” by outsiders, community members refer to themselves as Hoɽ (people) and their language as Hoɽ Roɽ (Speech of the People). Santali speakers are dispersed across the east Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa and also reside in neighbouring Bangladesh and Nepal. Santali has two major varieties: the Northern variety, spoken in northern Jharkhand, northern West Bengal, Bangaladesh, and Nepal, and the southern variety, spoken in southern Jhark- hand, southwestern West Bengal, and Orissa. The Santali language in each region has also been influenced by the dominant Indo-European vernaculars spoken in the area. However despite the dialectal variation, there is a strong language ideology present among many Santali speakers that the Santal language is a marker of a sense of unity and oneness among geographically dispersed Santali communities. Santali grammar is very similar to its neighboring languages such as Mundari (see Osada et al. this volume). It therefore has a rich repertoire of expressives that also follow the pattern of Mundari and Birhor (Jora, this volume), in that they usually consist of identical or partial reduplication of words that do not have independent meaning outside the expressive morphology. Linguists such as Ghosh (1994) and Neukom (2001) have devoted some part of their grammars to the expressive lexicon, and Santali expressives have been collected from Bod- ding’s five volume dictionary (Bodding 1999 [1932]) and have been presented as comparative data by Osada, Purti and Badenoch in the Dictionary of Mundari Expressives (2019). In addition to the grammar, expressives also play a significant role in the cultural life of Santals. Anthropologist Marine Carrin for instance has docu- mented how Santals appreciate expressives as a form of “twisted speech,” or what in Santali is called benta katha, which is a form of metaphorical discourse

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439153_011 224 kisku, murmu and choksi in which metaphorical similarities are invoked to index other metaphors, cre- ating multiple semantic displacements (Carrin 2003). While appearing opaque to outsiders, such forms of discourse are understood by Santals to reveal even greater insights into the reality of the world, as the process of speaking slowly unravels the density of meanings embedded in sound forms (see also Bade- noch, this volume). Carrin also writes that expressives are critical for the language socialization of Santal children in learning about the natural world around them. She says, “the continuity between plants, animals, and humans … is expressed in the sounds and echo-words as the intimacy between the sound and the meaning of the words … this synaesthetic sound symbolism … is used as a cognitive device by native speakers as they elaborate folk taxonomies” (Carrin 2015, 19). While everyday talk in Santali is suffused with expressives, they also play a special role in the performance traditions, appearing in songs and stories. As the scholar of Santali music Onkar Prasad has noted, there is only a very minor distinction between everyday speech (roɽ) and musical language (rəɽ) (Prasad 1985), and depending on the genre of performance, everyday situa- tions can easily be converted into an occasion for music or dance performance. Expressives play a central role in bringing both the aesthetic into the everyday and also the cognitive experiences of the world into the performance space. Yet even though expressives are very common in the oral genres of performance, no scholarly attention has been paid to the way they manifest themselves in the relatively recent written tradition. Unlike many written traditions in areas like Southeast Asia (Diffloth, personal communication) or the Andes in South America (Nuckolls 1996), where literacy has had an adverse impact on the use of expressives, modern Santali writers and poets have inte- grated expressives into their literature and have developed them in the written form in new and unique ways. This paper will examine the use of expressives in one of Santali’s greatest modern poets, Sadhu Ramchand Murmu, who was a schoolteacher from a small village in West Bengal, near the bor- der with Jharkhand. As literary historian Parimal Hembrom has discussed, Murmu was the first Santali poet to combine the high poetic tradition of Ben- gali and Sanskrit literature with the cadences and aesthetic sensibilities of Santali oral tradition (Hembrom 2011). His poems covered various aspects of Santal life, including political calls for an independent Jharkhand; messages about social issues affecting the Santal community such as alcoholism, poverty, and education; and elaborate poetic descriptions of nature, rituals, and everyday village life. Murmu connected poetry and the oral traditions in a way that effectively ushered in the modern era of Santali literature. This chapter will