The Nine Totems" [AK, 1], Spoken by the Same Speaker, Was Also Originally Contained in This Collection but Has Since Appeared in the Appendix of Peterson (2010)
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Kharia Texts Glossed, translated and annotated by John Peterson 2010 Copyright: John Peterson Note: This is copyrighted material – it is the intellectual property of the author and should be quoted accordingly. ii Table of Contents Page Introduction iv Literature viii Abbreviations ix Freely Spoken Monologues Anil Virendra Kullu [AK, 2] How the Kharia lost their priesthood 1 [AK, 3] The first two people 6 [AK, 4] My family 8 [AK, 5] Life in Saldega 10 Rayem Olem Dungdung [RD, 1] The Shepherd 15 Marcus Soreng [MS, 1] The history of the Kharia 18 [MS, 2] The distribution of the clans 61 Written Texts Marianus Tete [MT, 1] The Origin of the Kharia 67 Basil Ba [BB, 1] Millet bread 98 [BB, 2] A peaceful sleep 109 [BB, 3] The dog's friend 118 Rayem Olem Dungdung [RD, 2] The Beloved Son 125 Speaker - Tarkeleng Kullu [TK, 1] The talkative turtle 138 [TK, 2] The fruits of labor 144 Songs Singer – Anand Masih Tete [AT, 1] Ode to Chotanagpur 149 [AT, 2] Shimmering Heaven 149 [AT, 3] Back to the village 150 [AT, 4] The Kingdom of Heaven 150 [AT, 5] My father is calling 151 Singer – Basil Baa [BB, 4] The dreamer 151 [BB, 5] Farewell, friend 152 iii Singer – Ranjit Kullu [RK, 1] Don't wear a skirt! 153 [RK, 2] The wild cat in the millet field 153 [RK, 3] Let's go for a ride! 154 [RK, 4] A church song 154 [RK, 5] Where is everybody? 154 [RK, 6] What shall we offer you, Father? 155 [RK, 7] Serve the Lord, my son 155 [RK, 8] Jesus is born! 156 [RK, 9] This is a sinful world 156 [RK, 10] Don't forget Jesus 157 [RK, 11] Too tired for the mountain 157 [RK, 12] My friend, not my slave 157 [RK, 13] Come to me, Lord Jesus! 158 [RK, 14] A Christmas song 158 Singer – Tarkeleng Kullu [TK, 3] Sarhul song 159 [TK, 4] I will not go! 161 [TK, 5] Tearful separation 162 Singer – Julia Kullu [JK, 1] Marriage song 162 Singer – Rayem Olem Dungdung [RD, 3] The Wandering dove 163 Singer – Anugrah Kullu [AnK, 1] Marriage song (2) 163 Singer – Sylvester Kerketta [SK, 1] Oh people of Israel! 164 Singers – Saroj Kerketta and Rose Dung Dung [SaK/RoD, 1] Devotion 164 [SaK/RoD, 2] Marriage song (3) 165 iv 1. Introduction The present volume is a collection of texts which I gathered, analyzed, and discussed with native speakers of Kharia during five trips to Jharkhand between 2001 and 2005. The texts are broadly divided here into three groups: spoken texts, written (but not published) texts, and songs, both traditional songs as well as two songs which were composed by the persons who sang them for me. I had originally planned to include excerpts from published data in this collection, especially Kerkeʈʈā (1990), but as my translation of Kerkeʈʈā's drama has progressed, it has become clear that its inclusion would have virtually doubled the size of the present volume and would have delayed its completion considerably. I have therefore decided to publish my translation of Kerkeʈʈā's drama as a separate volume when that translation is completed and to make these original texts available to the interested public now. Originally, this collection was merely intended to be a corpus for my own research and was not meant for publication. As the text collections in Pinnow (1965a; 1965b) and Ḍuŋɖuŋ (1986) had already been published, I felt that there was no need for yet another volume of Kharia texts and mainly collected these in order to learn the language and to have a ready supply of examples. However, since then it has become apparent that there is such a need, and I have occasionally been asked whether I would publish these texts to allow others access to the data, as many researchers are either unaware of these other collections or have not been able to work with them for various reasons. To begin with, Ḍuŋɖuŋ (1986), an excellent collection of texts which also contains many of the texts given in Pinnow (1965a) as well as a Hindi-Kharia / Kharia-Hindi glossary and much more information, is written in Hindi and is thus not accessible to many western scholars who might be interested in Kharia. It is also not well known, neither in India (outside of Jharkhand itself) nor in the west, and it can be quite difficult to obtain. The case is somewhat different with Pinnow's two studies. Despite the high quality of the texts, the translations, and the copious notes, for those who do not read German these texts are virtually inaccessible. But even for those who do know German, these texts will be difficult to interpret if the reader does not already know Kharia or is not at least familiar with one other (South) Munda language. For example, in Pinnow (1965a) each line is accompanied by a word-for-word German translation but unfortunately, this is not a gloss in the usual sense of the term. Rather it is a German translation of the respective (segmented) word, e.g. poʔda-ʔ 'des Dorfes' (English: 'of the village') and the reader who is not familiar with Kharia grammar will often have to guess as to the proper analysis. Although in this particular case the difficulties are perhaps minimal (poʔda 'village', -ʔ (from -aʔ) 'GENitive'), in many cases the non-initiated reader will face the almost insurmountable task of determining which part of the German translation refers to which part of the Kharia word(s). Pinnow (1965b), on the other hand, although of equally high quality and carefully commented, contains no word-for-word translation of the text but only the colloquial German translation and notes. This will clearly hinder all who do not already know both Kharia and German from gaining access to these texts. It is undoubtedly for these reasons that the three works just mentioned have still not received the attention which they certainly deserve. Finally, the text collections mentioned above have the added disadvantage for those interested in the modern language in that they are now somewhat dated. For example, Pinnow's texts were collected in the late 1950's and, as is the case with any relatively small minority language, things can change quickly, especially with respect to the lexicon. It is my hope that the present collection will aid those who would like to familiarize themselves with the Kharia language as it is now spoken and written but who have until now not been able to do so. Any reader who has worked through the following pages should have little difficulty with the texts in Pinnow's two works or, if they read Devanagari, with those in Ḍuŋɖuŋ (1986). This will then also allow a more detailed comparison of the modern language v with the language as it was spoken just a few decades ago and possibly allow us to draw conclusions as to how quickly and in what areas the language is changing. 2. The texts The texts are broadly divided here into three groups: Freely spoken monologues, hand-written texts, and songs. Each line of text is segmented into morph(eme)s, and each morpheme is glossed in the line directly below this segmented line of text. Infixes in the text itself are surrounded by the sign "< >", and in the gloss the meaning of this morpheme follows that of ʔ ʔ the lexical morpheme in which it is embedded, e.g., me< b>ti b 'assemble(ITR)-<CAUS>' 'assemble (TR); bring together'. With respect to parts of speech in the gloss: As virtually any lexical morpheme in Kharia can be used in attributive, referential or predicative function, it seemed unnecessary, and perhaps even misleading, to gloss these in each case by the closest corresponding form in a particular English sentence, e.g. lereʔ 1. 'joy'; 2. 'joyous'; 3. 'rejoice'. Instead, I have in general opted for one particular gloss and stayed with this as much as possible, deviating from this principle only for the sake of clarity. As the enclitic grammatical markers (as well as the English translation) clearly indicate the function of the respective morpheme in the text, this should not present the reader with any problems. The gloss is then followed by a free, more-or-less colloquial English translation, although I stay as close to the meaning of the text as possible in this translation. Among other things, I have, to the extent that this was feasible, translated e.g. tense in English corresponding to the Kharia original, even in cases where this meant translating sequences of actions in the past sometimes by past-tensed and sometimes by present-tensed predicates, as this is common practice in both spoken and written Kharia (e.g. 'He came and sees…'). Where I feel that the free English translation may not be close enough to the literal meaning of the Kharia text for the reader to be able to match these two together, the literal meaning of the Kharia text is given in parentheses, e.g. "(= …)". Where I have added elements to the English translation which are not explicitly given in the Kharia text, this additional text is marked by the sign "[…]". The same sign, "[…]", is also used in the text itself as an aid to the reader to denote a segment which is not spoken, whether this is "omitted" in actual speech, as is often the case with the glottal stop (e.g., iɲ=a[ʔ] [1S=GEN] 'my' in the text for written <iɲaʔ> and spoken [ɪɲɑː]), or whether this follows from the phonotactic rules of the language, such the automatic "deletion" of the irrealis, active marker =e after roots ending in a high front vowel or glide (e.g., karay[=e]=iɲ, [do=A.IRR=1S] 'I will do', is given in the text for what is written <karayiɲ> and pronounced [kʌɾʌjɪɲ]).