Orality and the Lasting Archive of the Mother-Tongue Through the Lens of the North-East

Orality and the Lasting Archive of the Mother-Tongue

Through the Lens of the North-East

By Tannishtha Bhattacharjee

A Humble Proposition

In this short space that I am honoured to occupy, I wish to emphasize a simple yet essential point—can we think more deeply about the question of orality? Though my examples are rooted in local textures—Sylhet, Khasi Hills, Assam, Manipur, Arunachal—the proposition holds weight in wider frames of reference. What, historically, has allowed mother-tongues to survive the grinding force of colonial modernity, the lure of literary sophistication, and the institutionalisation of language?

Indian Sylhetis, for instance, have long used formal Bangla for literary production and public communication. It is a choice tied to a complex historical identity and sensibilities shared with wider cultural pathways. Yet, something fundamental is lost in that translation from tongue to text. The lived resonance of the mother-tongue—its flesh-and-blood intimacy—resists the stiff polish of written expression.

Why ‘Mother’? Why ‘Tongue’?

Let us begin at the most vulnerable, intimate, and authentic threshold of human expression. The moment of being truly bare, exposed, and emotional. In that moment, it is always the mother-tongue that rushes to your lips. Not the language of state or school. Not the language of a poem carefully written in ink. But the sudden outburst—Dhur beta in Bangla, Thait in Khasi, Okora in Assamese—that arises from the body, not the mind.

Why call it the mother-tongue? Why not father-tongue, or ancestral language?

The answer lies in the corporeality of the phrase itself. ‘Mother’ evokes visceral, wombed origin—a taan, a pull, an umbilical connection. It is the maternal that grounds our first experiences of language, memory, emotion. Between maternal and paternal, it is the former that suggests a more fundamental intimacy and originary attachment.

And then, the ‘tongue’. Why is tongue the chosen visceral tool in this expression, and not the vocal cord, or the throat?

 

Because long term practice of language, its phonetic specificity, alters the modality of the tongue altogether. Ask a long-term Korean speaker to articulate coffee and copy—their tongue may struggle with unfamiliar phonemes. The vocal cords remain untouched, but the tongue remembers. In this way, the tongue becomes the primary site of linguistic enunciation. Language leaves its archival trace as the muscle memory embedded in the use of the tongue.

Thus, both ‘mother’ and ‘tongue’ bind language to the body. And that body, in turn, becomes the living archive of speech traditions. I propose this: if we understand the body as the historical locus of language, then we will understand why orality—a bodily practice—is the most enduring life of the mother-tongue.

The Body as Archive: Reclaiming Orality and honoring the Subaltern Guardians of Language

Language lived on long before it was written. And it continues to do so in songs, conversations, work chants, lullabies, jokes, and quarrels. The body, not the book, has preserved it. As people migrated, fled, or were displaced, they carried no textbooks of grammars—only the praxis of language-speech within them.

Fundamentally, in orality, the bodily practice of language, is archived not only the memory of a community, but also the rhythm of ecology and labour. The way one speaks of jowar bata (tidal current), or the chauri of harvesting grain, evokes an entire ecology. A way of life that is imprinted not in literature, but in habit, sound, and gesture.

At this point, it is imperative to point out that the most remarkable carriers of these oral practices and traditions, are not the elite literary classes-poets and publishers. Instead it is the non-literate communities that we have, to thank for the sustained life of language—peasant women, boatmen, Vaishnav kirtanis, sufi faqirs, fishmongers, and field labourers. If not for them, the mother-tongue would have become an extinct whisper long ago. Let us take a moment to honour these invisible stewards.

Take bhatiyali, for example—a folk genre from the floodplains of Bengal and Assam, also recognized as songs of the river, often sung by boatmen. Its melody mimics the rise and fall of water. The dip of the oar becomes the pitch of the note. Similarly, the tempo of dhamail—another Sylheti tradition—is embedded in agrarian life, shaped by the recurring floods of the Surma, Barak, and Brahmaputra.

In 1789, colonial officers mapping Sylhet struggled to understand how the same lands shifted identities from being haors, baors, beels and jheels in different seasons. These were geographies flooded with unruly terrains of water, something that oral musical traditions captured and remembered, but surveyors could not. The songs archived a timeless fluidity of the region-the rhythm of shifting lands and itinerant lives, that colonial bureaucratic notes violently flattened.

The same could be said of the Khasi phawar. These are witty couplets, recited during festivals and rituals, creating a spontaneous poetic duel. One singer challenges, another responds—an oral dialogue preserved in community memory. These are now being transcribed and translated,^[1]  but their true flavour remains only in performance, in voice and gesture.

The sonic inheritance of land travels in the voice. That is how a boatman’s call in bhatiyali echoes the ripple of the oar, or the tidal rhythm of the jowar and bata currents. That is why a grain-grinder’s rhythm—123_123_—resonates across folk musical traditions amongst agrarian communities in Chottanagpur Plateau, Assam, and Bengal. The way that ecology and labour are perpetuated through music, despite diasporic histories is so visible in the affinities amongst Sylheti dhamail, the Assamese bihu, Santhali cchau, and the tea-garden’s jhumoor.

Orality Across the Region: Sylhet, Khasi Hills, Manipur, Arunachal

Nowhere is the idea of the body as an archive of language more evident than in South Asia, specifically the North-East, where oral traditions do not merely supplement literacy—they define cultural continuity.

In Manipur, the revival of the Meitei Mayek script is a significant step toward reclaiming a written heritage, but the soul of the Manipuri language still sings, quite literally, through performance. It is in the undulating vocal expressions of Lai Haraoba, the age-old ritual of pleasing the gods and recalling creation myths, that language becomes a living, breathing entity. Here, gods and humans do not converse through prose or print, but through gestures, songs, and stylized utterances—a choreography of memory. Language here is not inscribed, it is embodied.

Folk theatre forms like Shumang Leela also serve as visceral archives of linguistic flavor. These courtyard performances, enacted in open spaces and watched in the round, give Manipuri speech its theatrical musculature. The actor's intonation, the modulation of a line from lament to laughter, captures inflections of the mother-tongue that cannot be pressed into print.

And then there is the tradition of Khongjom Parba—melodic ballads often sung to the soft accompaniment of the pena (a traditional string instrument). These are not mere songs; they are repositories of collective memory—of the Anglo-Manipur War, of Meitei heroes, of ancestral pain and pride. Passed orally from elder to child, these ballads collapse the difference between history and myth. They resist the erasure of experience by paper and pen, clinging instead to voice and vibration.

Even in the growing urban centers of Manipur, where English and Hindi pervade digital and administrative spaces, the maternal pull of oral Manipuri remains. Whether in lullabies hummed by grandmothers or teasing phrases exchanged at paan stalls, the everyday music of the language resists reduction into standardized syntax. The rhythm is not just heard—it is felt in the ribs.

In Arunachal Pradesh, the stakes of orality are even higher. With over 26 major tribes and more than 100 dialects, and in the absence of any local lingua franca, the region is a miracle of sonic multiplicity—and a fragile one. Many of these languages do not have a standardized script, and even where writing exists, it has not displaced oral tradition as the core of community life.^[2]

Among the Nocte, Monpa, Apatani, and countless others, language survives in ritual performance. Take the chants of the Miji or the Sherdukpen, where the very act of recitation becomes a form of sacred continuity. In the Losar festival celebrated by the Monpa, for instance, traditional chants precede every communal activity. The body becomes the vessel of memory; the voice, a tether to the ancestors.

Storytelling sessions—held during community gatherings or after a day’s work around the fire—continue to pass along cosmologies, genealogies, and moral codes. These aren’t just stories. They are maps of being, sonic blueprints of identity.

The Apatani people, known for their sustainable practices of wet rice cultivation and forest preservation, narrate their ecological wisdom through oral verses and proverbs, each embedded in local experience. Their oral culture is tightly interwoven with the natural cycles of their land. This form of knowledge transfer is both poetic and precise—what plant to sow, when to cut, how to cook—all spoken into being.

Modernization and external linguistic pressures—particularly from Hindi, Assamese, and English—pose a looming threat of flattening these pluralities. Yet, it is in dance, in ceremony, in chant, that Arunachal’s languages refuse extinction. Oral traditions here are not nostalgic residues—they are the active frontline of resistance against cultural homogenization. The children who watch and mimic these movements are not passive consumers of tradition—they are its next breath.

Thus, in both Manipur and Arunachal, language lives in the limbs. It is not imprisoned in books or buried in bureaucratic reports. It is whispered into bamboo groves, wailed in mourning songs, and laughed out during communal meals. Here, orality is not the absence of literacy—it is a different kind of knowledge ecology, one that remembers with the tongue and dances with the foot.

Buddhist chants of Tawang, the warrior dances of the Nocte, the rhythm of grain-pounding in the fields—all speak a language that cannot be written without losing something vital. The pressure of Hindi and English has made written language more uniform, but orality still holds the uniqueness of place and people.

The Khasi Hills offer a musical mode of language retention. The phawar is not merely folk poetry—it is oral philosophy, spoken wisdom. The Khasi tongue, like the Garo and Jaintia, refuses to fossilise because it is still sung, joked with, responded to.

 

The Sylheti mother-tongue, too, survives its marginalisation because of its oral creativity. Despite adopting Shuddho Bangla for formal writing, Indian Sylhetis return to their native rhythms in song and domestic chatter. They speak with taan—an accent—from the land, not the academy. It is curious to note that the Bengali words taan is a homonym, and it sometimes contextually means ‘a pull’, and sometimes ‘an accent’. Both of them blend magically in the context of mother tongue—an accent (taan) is an unmistaken pull (taan) of the land.

In villages across Sylhet, storytelling and wit still flourish in everyday speech. Wedding songs (biya gaan), pala gaan (improvised lyrical duels), and lullabies are passed on not in notebooks but in kitchens, tea stalls, and boats on the Surma River. These oral forms are layered with humour, irony, and emotional intelligence—ways of making sense of migration, partition, and memory, and are quotidian knowledges sustained primarily by the invisible and gendered labour of women.

In diasporic communities, from the UK to the Barak Valley, Sylhetis often retain their spoken tongue while letting go of the written form, though amongst many Muslim Sylhetis, a revivalist movement of the old Sylheti Nagri script is not gaining credence. This creates a unique linguistic identity: deeply felt, richly intoned, yet almost invisible to the textual gaze. Sylheti orality becomes a form of quiet resistance—a refusal to flatten speech into standardised grammar, a way of carrying the homeland in the mouth.

Multiplicity and the Sonic Continuum

The sonic inheritance of India’s North-East and adjoining cultural belts is not linear. It does not conform to clean categories of language, script, or state boundary. It is multiple, intersecting, overlapping. It spills across rivers and ridges, carried on the backs of migrations, devotional currents, and resistance movements. The result is a sonic continuum—a spectrum of speech, song, and performance that defies political demarcations.

Few artists understood and enacted this continuum as intuitively as Bhupen Hazarika and Hemango Biswas. In the 1960s, as part of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), they staged folk theatre that refused to recognise the hardened borders of linguistic nationalism. Their performances did not draw distinctions between an Assamese peasant’s grief and a Bengali labourer’s anguish. They recognised that sorrow has no dialect. That song is its own script.

Bhupen Hazarika’s voice—resonant, riverine—was not confined to Assamese. He sang of Brahmaputra and Ganga in the same breath. His songs referenced Shah Jalal of Sylhet, a mystic whose teachings transcended orthodoxy, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the ecstatic Vaishnavite saint whose kirtans stirred collective devotion. Hazarika didn’t just sing songs—he carried cultural transmission lines, connecting village boats with city balconies, hill echoes with delta rhythms.

Hemango Biswas, likewise, lent his harmonium and pen to interwoven musical geographies. His collaborations with Bhupen broke barriers—not just between Assamese and Bengali, but between genres, castes, and classes. Their joint compositions placed a boatman from the Barak Valley alongside a clerk in Shillong’s AG office; not as characters from different worlds, but as participants in a shared emotional archive.

Their IPTA productions rejected the notion of ‘pure’ cultural identity. Instead, they offered an aural alternative to the politics of separation—a mode of listening that sought resonance, not difference. Their music reminds us that even as languages seek standardisation, the voice refuses to be standardised.^[3]

Theirs was not merely art—it was an act of cultural synthesis. In a region often described as fractured by ethnicity and linguistic assertion, their songs imagined a common chorus. They blurred the edges between Sylheti dhamail and Khasi phawar, between Manipuri Lai Haraoba and Arunachali ritual chant. These forms did not stand isolated. They leaned toward each other. They whispered across state lines, hummed under closed doors, and danced from one tongue to another.

This is what Bhupen Hazarika called the unity of sound. His music was the river that refused to be dammed.

 

Conclusion: A Quiet Invitation

In closing, I invite you to embrace and recognize the invisible. The mother-tongue may not always be loud, grammatically pristine, or officially recorded. But it is always there—in the lilt of a lullaby, in the rhythm of rice pounding, in the affectionate scolding—Thait! Dhur beta! Okora!

It is there in the way your grandmother shaped her vowels. In the way your grandfather sang to the river. It is there in movement, in swaying bodies, in unguarded conversations. In the taan—the accent as well as the pull of the land, the memory, the body.

Language does not survive because it is taught. It survives because it is lived. And the mother-tongue lives—resolutely, rhythmically, quietly—in the oral.

Let us listen more. Speak more. Sing more.

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