| II |
Abujhmarias,
the descriptions of whose language is the subject matter of
this monograph, are referred to by the name Hill-Marias. They
call themselves ‘me a
Koitor’ or simply ‘Maria’. They form a sub-tribe of the great
Gonds, inhabiting Abujhmar hills which extend over Narainpur,
Bijapur and Dantewara tahsils of Bastar district, M.P., but
most of the area and population are in Narainpur tahsil. “Abujh”
means ‘unknown’ and “mar” means ‘hill’ or ‘mountain’. So Abujhmarias
means ‘people of unknown or little-known hills’. There are four
conventional territorial divisions made by the inhabitants.
They are Barsurmar, Narainpurmar, Orchamar and Kutrumar-all
named after the nearest known place of the respective hills.
The term ‘pargana’ is also used interchangeably with the word
‘mar’. Every mar has a few villages. Narainpurmar, where the
people of the present study live, encompasses the following
villages: Enmetta, Kokametta, Kodkanar, Nendnar, Tadunar, Higpad,
Okpad, Katulnar, Kotenar, Tadukur, Mahandi and Kalmanar. The
village Nendnar situated at a distance of 25 to 30 Kms, from
Narainpur, was the field headquarters of the authour of the
present study during summer months of the year 1975.
|
A bulk of
Abujhmaria population lives in the Narainpur tahsil. Abujhmar
area is the most thinly populated portion. Abujhmarias are the
third largest tribal group in the tahsil, the largest being
the Muria Gonds. The second largest group is the Halbas who
speak Halbi, an Indo-Aryan language. Both the Abujhmarias and
the Gōul
Murias occupy villages which are relatively contiguous whereas
Halbas are scattered throughout the Maria and Muria areas. Abujhmarias
regularly visit the weekly markets ( called hā
being held on every Sundays at Narainpur) to buy clothes, mahua
flowers for liquor, dal, chillies, salt and sell the forest
produces they collect from Abujhmar. They also visit frequently
the nearby Halba villages in order to get mahua liquor and arrow-heads
for hunting. Thus, the Abujhmarias are in regular contacts with
Murias, Halbas and other local businessmen. Consequently, most
of the Abujhmaria males are bilinguals speaking their mother
tongue and Muria or Abujhmaria and Halbi or Hindi. As abujhmaria
being a dialect of Gondi, it appears to be mutually intelligible
with Muria Gondi as spoken in and around Narainpur. Where these
populations are geographically non-contiguous to other Gond
sub-tribes such as Dandami Marias, and Dorlas, their dialects
are not intelligible to Abujhmarias.
|
Earlier Works
|
Grierson (1906,LSI,Vol.4)
gives a short account of the Madia dialect and considers the
same as a mere local dialect of Gondi. The phonology and morphology
of the Hill Maria dialect of Chanda of Maharashtra was described
by Veena(1962)in her thesis entitled, “ A Descriptive Analysis
if Mãdia dialect”. The phonology of Abujhmaria was described
very briefly by Shesh(1965). Some aspects of Abujhmaria phonology
were described by Gordon (1968, 1969,1976).
|
Except these
works no other linguistic description of Abujhmaria is availble.
In this work an attempt is made to describe, in as adequate
a manner as possible, the language of the Hill-Marias inhabiting
the Abujhmar hills of Narainpur tahsil, Bastar district. Madhya
Pradesh. The Corpus on which this grammar is based consisted
of about 2500 lexical items, about 500 sentences in isolation,
a number of nominal and verbal paradigms and a few folktales.
For the elicitation of data, the words and sentences list prepared
by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, was utilizes.
The entire material was transcribed and was recorded on cassette
tapes.
|
A study of
the phonological system of Abujhmaria, a study of morphemic
alternations, description of morphological system, description
of clause and phrase structures, a comparative study of the
phonological and morphological systems of Abujhmaria with other
Dravidian languages, the comparison of certain important features
shared by this language with other Gondi dialect such as Muria,
Koya of Gommu dialect, Koya of Khammam, Gondi as spoken in adilabad
district of A.P., Gondi as spoken in Betul district of M.P.
form the subject of this monograph.
|
|
|
