The Darai People and Their Language

The Darai (ISO 639-3: dry) language is spoken primarily in the inner Terai and the western hill area of the Tanahun, Paalpa and Gorkha districts of Nepal. Tanahun has relatively large village clusters consisting of numerous hamlets in the foothills and on the banks of Madi and Narayani river. It stretches over the whole ridge of mid-western mountains to the border of Gorkha, Palpa, Chitwan and Nawalparasi districts. Darais also recently settled on the plains of Chitwan district. The social situation contributes to the fact that Darai is increasingly being supplanted by Nepali and Tharu languages. The variety of the Darai language spoken in Chitwan is different from Pipaltar (Tanahun) and Damauli; so there are already three dialects of Darai (viz. Chitwan, Damauli and Tanahu) identified in my previous research (ref. Paudyal 2003). At a purely lexical level, based on cognate counts from the Swadesh 100 word list, the similarity between the major branches of Darai is about 50 to 60 %; which exhibits a high level of intelligibility between them. The count between Chitwan and Damauli, for example, is 57 %. Intelligibility between Chitwan and Pipaltar is lower in comparison to Chitwan and Damauli (Paudyal 2003). All three names of the dialects are exonyms, and the speakers themselves, regardless of their dialect, refer to their language simply as Darai Kura (Kura is a Nepali term for ‘language’). This is the language Grierson (1909) calls Darhi and Dahi and Hodgson (1874) calls Dadhi. The complex ethnic and historical interrelationship makes a study of this language especially interesting. The special nature of the language implies that a grammar of Darai would be of great interest in our understanding of the effects of language contact and borrowing.

Physically Darais look like Tibeto-Burman people. But linguistically they speak Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European family. A genealogical development route of Indo-Aryan languages shows that Old Indo-Aryan languages (OIA) split into several Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) dialects; among them the most popular were Maharashtri Prakrit, Sauraseni Prakrit and Magadhi (Jain 2003) and Ardhamagadhi Prakrit. Darai along with other languages, such as Bote, Majhi, Danuwar, Tharu2, Kumal, Bengali, Oriya, Asamese, Magahi, Bhojpuri, Maithili form a linguistic group. Their source is the Ardhamagadhi Prakrit or Eastern Prakrit, which was brought to this area from Magadh. Lassen (in Clark 1924) tried to prove that the Prakrit dialect spoken in the Prabodhacandrodaya by the Digambara Jain monk, by the pupil of the Carvaka, and by the messenger from Orissa is Ardhamagadhi. Bhattacharya (1993) notes that Magadhi was the spoken language of eastern India, which was inhabited by large numbers of fishermen. He summarizes that Magadhi has some strong phonetic similarities to Tibeto-Burman languages which scholars think are due to its close contact with Non-Aryan languages. It is true that Darai people were also prominently boatmen and fishermen, but instead of phonetic and phonological features, the syntactic and morphological features of Darai are similar to Non-Aryan languages, particularly to Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman languages.

Darai is on the verge of extinction. Though the number of Darai population recorded is 10,210 (CBS report 2001), there are barely 1000 active speakers of this language. If nothing happens it is likely that the current or the next generation will be the last one to speak Darai. This language does not have its own written tradition (they use the Devanagari script), and it will definitely vanish within a very short period of time. The reasons for the decline in the use of Darai are many and varied. Prominent among them is undoubtedly the one-nation-one-language policy of the Nepalese state in the past. At present people are increasingly aware of the need for language preservation and promotion, but without a supportive language policy by the state, and support from the government, most languages are doomed to die. Nepali as the national, official language is being used extensively in administration, education, the media and so on, and therefore speakers of other languages have no choice but to use their language less and Nepali more. As opportunities for using their own languages decrease, the younger generation tends to use more Nepali, thus losing their language loyalty. Nepali has been a “killer’’ language to most of the minority languages in the country.

Other factors are migration, education and inter-caste marriage. During my fieldwork on Darai in 2003 I noticed that the Chitwan and Damauli dialects of Darai are already heavily influenced by Nepali, Tharu and Gurung languages. However, the Pipaltar dialect of Darai remains less influenced by other languages.

Darai religion is highly syncretic and in many respects does not conform to orthodox Hinduism. For example, worshipping ancestors and nature (eg. sansari devi), offering and consuming alcoholic drinks (local beer), and shamanic healing are part and parcel of their religion.

Netra Prasad Paudyal
University of Leipzig & Tribhuvan University