Careful Wording

Teaching the Madia in their own tongue

Lok Biradari Prakalp teaches Madia children in Madia Gondi through the pre-primary level. One ashram official called it “nurturing the ground for us to plant later.” Debarshi Dasgupta
01 April, 2015

AS HE STRUGGLED TO READ the first lesson in his Marathi textbook, Swapnil Keye Wadde tugged repeatedly at a frayed handle of the thick nylon carrying bag he uses for school. Rucksacks are an extravagance for children here in Midadapalli, a small village deep within a swathe of east Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district with a strong Naxal presence. When I visited, on a mid-December morning, Wadde, seated in a multi-grade classroom at the village’s government middle school, pored laboriously over the words, failing to recognise even individual letters. He was not exceptional in this. Another student, Sapna Wachami, sat silent when I asked her to read out the word “metre,” written in Marathi on a flashcard. A large chart of the Devanagiri alphabet on one wall had clearly not helped the children’s reading skills much.

Wadde and Wachami are members of the Madia Gond tribe—a small community within the larger Gond tribal family, which is spread across central India and numbers about 16 lakh people in Maharashtra alone. The Madia inhabit a border region of east Maharashtra that has much more in common with the adjacent Abujhmad area of Chhattisgarh, which also has a large population of Gond and other tribals, than with Nagpur, Maharashtra’s second capital, over 300 kilometres away. The community speaks Madia Gondi, a Dravidian language, and very few of them understand Maharasthra’s official, Indo-Aryan Marathi; yet the state remains adamant in teaching Madia children in this unfamiliar language. This has been catastrophic for these children’s learning, both immediately and in the long term. Bhamragarh block, which takes in Midadapalli and where many Madia are based, had an official dropout rate of 18.4 percent in the 2011–2012 educational year, the third highest of all the 373 blocks in Maharashtra. PS Biswas, the school principal at Midadapalli, said this was, in large part, down to poor attendance. “Parents simply do not send their children to school,” he said. “They would rather have them as farm hands.” The language barrier plays a role in low attendance too, he said, since it makes government schools unfriendly places for Madia children.

These children’s fate is emblematic of the problems facing linguistic minorities throughout India’s education system. Despite official recommendations in the 2005 National Curriculum Framework that textbooks incorporate more of local cultures and languages, India’s tribal children, but for rare exceptions, continue to be taught either in Hindi or one of the country’s 21 other official languages. In Chhattisgarh, where children in government schools are mostly taught in Hindi, only 35 percent of children in grades 3, 4 and 5 in the tribal-dominated Bastar district can read first-grade texts—this according to the 2014 Annual Status of Education Report by the NGO Pratham. The same report showed that only about half of children in the same grades in Gadchiroli district can do the same.

On the same day I visited the school at Midadapalli, I arrived in the village of Hemalkasa, which lies about 30 kilometres away over densely forested tracks navigable only on foot or on two wheels. At the single pre-primary class at Lok Biradari Prakalp, or LBP, an ashram established by the social activist Baba Amte in 1973 to aid the local tribal population, the mood was vastly different from that in the Midadapalli classroom. Excited Madia children flipped through a large picture book written in their native language. A teacher walked in, and they gathered around her for story time. The day’s tale, narrated in Madia Gondi, stressed the importance of sharing.

For over a year now, LBP has been pioneering Madia Gondi education at the pre-primary level. To better engage Madia children, the ashram brings elements of their culture into the classroom. The results have been promising. A recent survey by LBP found that significantly more of its students between the third and seventh grades could read and understand a simple Marathi story compared to their counterparts at two randomly selected government schools also in Bhamragarh block.

Bhamragarh block, where most Madia live, had the third highest dropout rate of all of Maharashtra’s 373 blocks in the 2011–2012 educational yea Debarshi Dasgupta

I spoke to Samiksha Godse, LBP’s educational coordinator, who was instrumental in creating the ashram’s Madia Gondi module. Godse, who holds a prestigious postgraduate degree in economics, moved to LBP four years ago. She has been learning Madia Gondi ever since, though she admitted that “these children probably laugh at the way I speak.” “Imagine what it is like,” she said, “for a child who has been only spoken to in Madia Gondi to find himself or herself learning not just a foreign language but also new subjects, and that too in closed spaces with intimidating teachers.”

Unlike the conventional alphabet chart in the classroom in Midadapalli, which featured standard Devanagari letters, here a chart showed a customised alphabet combining existing Devanagri characters with new ones for sounds particular to Madia Gondi. It omitted, for instance, the harsh consonant kha, which the Madia aren’t familiar with. The chart also matched each letter with an item familiar to Madia children. Where conventional Marathi charts pair a with ananas, or pineapple—a fruit most Madia have never seen—this one paired it with anam, a grain receptacle that they use everyday.

The sound of hammering drifted into the classroom as Godse spoke. Outside, children were chipping intricate floral patterns into standing logs forming the frame of a ghotul, a large hut meant for gatherings of young people once ubiquitous in Gond villages but now disappearing, which the ashram was helping them build—another example of LBP’s embrace of Madia culture.

The ashram’s approach, Godse told me, helps children open up, and improves their retention. “The children really enjoy school, and there are fewer discipline issues too,” she said. “They feel their language and culture is being respected, that they are being respected. They feel nice to realise we consider what they have as good.” For comparison, I spoke in Gadchiroli town, the headquartes of the eponymous district, to Lalsu Soma, a 36-year-old Madia social worker who had studied under the conventional system. He was taught that a was the first letter of ananas, and ga of Ganpati—a deity foreign to Madia culture. “Nearly all my education was imaginary,” he told me. “Very little of it was related to my surroundings or my culture.”

The linguist Chris Vaz, who has spent nearly two decades with the Madia and helped develop LBP’s Madia Gondi programme, told me over a hurried restaurant lunch in Nagpur that the “trauma” of a Madia student in a Marathi-medium school is similar to what a kid from Delhi might experience if sent to a school teaching in, say, Khasi, or any other unfamiliar language. “Being taught in an alien tongue adversely affects learning,” Vaz explained. “Mental faculties are focused on learning a new language and, consequently, they miss out on the content.” But, he added, “research has shown that being taught in one’s mother tongue helps one learn the content better.”

Perhaps recognising the need for a different approach, in Janaury 2013 the Gadchiroli district administration published a Madia Gondi textbook to help staff learn the local language. Vaz praised the move, but added that a larger “shift in policy is urgently needed” to make formal education “more inclusive of minority languages.”

Opponents of such a shift argue that teaching in minority languages delays students’ integration into wider society. But the LBP model addresses these fears: it only uses Madia Gondi at the primary level, to better prepare youngsters for further education, and in higher grades the language is phased out in favour of Marathi. “We are only nurturing the ground for us to plant later,” Godse said.

Meanwhile, LBP is working to bring its programme to more students. The organisation has developed an app based on its Madia Gondi primary school module that is currently being tried out on ten tablets distributed to as many villages in Bhamragarh block. Instead of entrusting these to government schools, many of which function only sporadically in this remote area, the tablets have been given to local community leaders, and LBP is monitoring their use. To concentrate on this effort, the ashram plans to close its present programme. “There are about 2,500 children who will eventually benefit from this approach,” Godse said. Why, she asked, should they “be kept away from the benefits?”


Debarshi Dasgupta is a National Foundation for India Media Fellow, exploring linguistic aspects of the Maoist conflict.