Introduction

In this paper we will examine poetic forms of four languages spoken in Upper Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, India: Nocte, Singpho, Tai and Tangsa. As far as we know there are no words that equate to English ‘poem’ or ‘poetry’ in any of these languages, though each of the languages has a word for ‘song’, and has words for different song styles, such as dance song or antiphonal (call and response) song. Except for the Ahom texts in §5 (which are taken from manuscripts), the examples in this paper were all performed with melody and sometimes rhythmic accompaniment such as the beat of the pestle on the mortar during rice-pounding (see below §3). All could thus also be termed ‘songs’ and it is not easy to make a distinction in these communities between ‘poem’ and ‘song’. Some styles resemble sprechstimme, a style of song more approaching spoken form, and some styles are more melodic (see List 1963: 9 for a discussion of such different styles). In this paper we will not deal with the musical melody. Poetic devices are also found in story telling, but we will not deal with those here.

Kiparsky (1973: 231) claimed that the “fundamental stylistics of poetry … have existed from the beginning”, based on comparison of poetics in ancient and modern times. We expect that the features of the poetry discussed in this paper represent very old and deep cultural artefacts, and will illuminate our knowledge of these languages.

The Dimasas and their language

The Dimasas are known as ‘sons of the great river’ i.e., the word ‘di’ means ‘water’, ‘ma’ means ‘big’ and ‘sa’ means ‘sons’. The language of the Dimasas is known as ‘Grau Dima’ or ‘Magrau’ (mother tongue). This tribe migrated from the Himalayas and came to the Brahmaputra river valley via the Gangetic Plains and made it their land (Thaosen 2007: 4). The Dimasas are mainly concentrated in some parts of Nagaon, Cachar and Karbi Anglong, the entire North Cachar Hills and in and around Dimapur in Nagaland. According to 2001 Census, the Dimasa speakers are approximately 65,000 in N.C. Hills and 40,000 in Karbi Anglong in Assam.

The Dimasas belong to the Bodo-Garo group within the Bodo- Jingpho-Konyak branch of Tibeto-Burman (Lewis 2009). The Dimasas are multilingual. The Dimasas of North Cachar Hills speak Haflong Hindi which is the lingua franca for the various ethnic tribes of the region. Those from Cachar plains use Bengali which is the majority language there, and those of Karbi Anglong and Nagaon use Assamese for communication. Dimasas in Nagaland speak in Nagamese with speakers of other languages.

The dialects of Dimasa are Hasao, Hawar, Dembra, Dijuwa, Humri, Semsa and Walgong. Hasao, spoken in North Cachar Hills district of Assam, has been adopted as the standard dialect by Dimasa Literary Society in its meeting held on the 9 March, 2004 at Haflong.

Geographical location played an important role in determining the social behaviour of the people of the southwest coast. Malabar was traditionally divided into vadakke or north Malabar and thekke or south Malabar by the Korapuzha or the Kora river. This river functioned as a social boundary for the Hindu Nayar women of north Malabar who, by custom, did not cross the river as it meant losing one's own caste. Similarly, for the Mappillas too, it was a social frontier. Says Hamid Ali, ‘The more one proceeds to the north in the district beyond Korapuzha river, the more strict is the observance of the rule of the matrilineal system of descent.’

Systems of Descent

The matrilineal system of descent in Kerala is called marumakkathayam. The origin of the marumakkathayam system is still debated among anthropologists, sociologists and historians. In Malabar, it is believed that the marumakkathayam system was a fall-out of some kind of practice of polyandry, the evolution of which has not been historically researched. The practice was most common among the Hindu Nayars. The most accepted view on the origin of the marumakkathayam was the peculiar social custom of having hypergamous relationships between a small section of the Nayar elite and the Nambudiris in certain regions of Kerala, and also the occupation of Nayar men in the royal militia because of which they were away from their homes for an indefinite period of time.

Islamization in Malabar

Historians have always been intrigued by the processes of Islamization in various parts of the world. Nehemia Levtzion, in a study which has influenced subsequent scholarship, perceived of Islamization as a movement of individuals and groups, departing from some form of traditional religion and following a process which ends with normative Islam. Writing about Islam in West Africa, he argued that as long as Islam was confined to the trading communities, it operated on the fringes of West African societies where there was actually a dispersion of Muslims rather than a spread of Islam. He identifies social interaction, intermarriage and the role of traders as the important factors of Islamization. Similarly, Trimingham explained the spread of Islam on the East African coast as the result of trans-oceanic contacts, the role of traders and the intermarriage of Arab and Persian settlers with the local Bantu women. He also observes that sections of the people of Hadramaut in Yemen, cut off by the desert from the interior of Arabia, had long ago turned to the sea for a livelihood. The role of intermarriage as a major factor of social integration in the Islamization of East Africa has also been emphasized by Guennec-Coppens in her recent study of the Swahili-speaking groups of the Comoros Islands.

In port enclaves, the primary concern of the foreign merchants was commerce. During their short stays in the different ports, many of the Arab merchants entered into temporary marriages with the local women and in certain regions, multiple marriages were contracted to create a network of lineages in the host societies.

The Muslim political leaders had begun to exercise their influence in the matter of Mappilla girls' education by the late 1930s and early 1940s. It would be most appropriate at this juncture to show the emergence of an educated Mappilla intelligentsia which gave a cohesive political leadership to the community.

Growth of the Press in Malabar

Apart from its position as the administrative capital of the Malabar District, Kozhikode also became the centre of the print culture from the late nineteenth century. A study of the ‘Native Newspaper Reports’ reveals that a number of newspapers were published from Kozhikode. The list included the Kerala Patrika, the Kerala Sanchari, the Manorama and the Malabari, in Malayalam and they were mostly owned by the Nayars. These papers seem to have effectively voiced their opinion on British policy matters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their reports generally dealt with regional and local issues such as legislation related to marriage reform, inheritance, partition of properties, school education and other such debates. Other vernacular papers such as the Malayala Manorama and the Swadeshabhimani were published from Travancore. These papers also sometimes expressed their views on Malabar issues.

By the 1920s, the emergence of political parties in Malabar saw the birth of Malayalam political newspapers with their publishing offices in Kozhikode. For example, with the formation of the District Congress Committee at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, a Congress daily called the Mathrubhumi was published from Kozhikode.

In the pre-colonial period, Kerala had an unusually high proportion of literate people, including women, compared with most of the Indian subcontinent. The reasons were attributed to the extensive growth of overseas commerce, the buying and sale of lands, cash rents and mortgages that needed the knowledge and use of accounting and legal documents. Also in matrilineal castes like the Nayars, where the women held a higher status, it was customary for them to learn to read.

Sreedhara Menon and Gough have both argued that in the early British period, there was ‘an alarming increase in illiteracy’ because of the wars of the late eighteenth century in which schools were disrupted, and the British, by introducing English as a medium of instruction, discouraged Sanskrit learning and the running of the vernacular village schools. Both in British Malabar and in the princely states of Cochin and Travancore, regular public instruction was re-established only towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Traditional Muslim Education

Trade, both overseas and inland, was the traditional economic activity of the Mappillas of the coastal towns of Malabar. Therefore, the Mappilla traders and merchants, by virtue of their occupation, would know basic arithmetic and accounting, and in the case of overseas merchants, at least have some geographical knowledge.

Mappilla religious learning was centred around the mosque.

In a situation where there is more than one religious community in any region, the question of ‘religious space’ always holds an important place in any society. In Malabar, the Mappilla settlements were found within a wider Hindu countryside, dominated by the Nambudiris and the Nayars. Like any Muslim settlement in the Islamic world, the Mappilla settlements grew around the centre of Muslim worship, the mosque. In the acquisition and construction of mosque lands for the purpose, the question of ‘religious space’ was often contested by the Hindu community from the nineteenth century. Particularly in south Malabar where the janmi-tenant relations were quite fragile, coincidentally, since the bulk of the tenants in the Ernad and Walluvanad taluks were Mappillas, the contestation of ‘religious space’ by the wider Hindu society became imminent in the wake of the peasant uprisings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As Stephen Dale has observed, the sense of economic insecurity and dependence among the Mappilla tenants of south Malabar was also reflected in their inability to acquire mosque lands. Therefore, when disputes over mosques arose, they resented their subordination in a corporate sense, as members of a religious community. One of the social consequences of the uprising, particularly that of the twentieth century episode, was the friction over places of worship, which sometimes took violent forms.

In the coastal Muslim settlements of north Malabar, the Hindu-Muslim friction over ‘religious space’ from the early twentieth century was not a consequence of the rebellion, but of economic rivalry.

Introduction

Most Tibeto-Burman languages have clause-chaining discourse structure (DeLancey 1991), where several clauses are chained together in a sequence with only one finite verb. Lhasa Tibetan (DeLancey 1991) and Lahu (Matisoff 2003) are examples of Tibeto-Burman languages with clause-chaining discourse structure. It has been well attested that clause-chaining discourse structure facilitates serial verb constructions, which, in turn, facilitates the development of grammaticalized verbs in such languages. In this process, grammaticalized verbs may even further develop into prefixes or suffixes. (DeLancey 1991). These grammaticalized verbs mostly develop from motion verbs like ‘go’ and ‘come,’ and postural verbs like ‘stand’ and ‘sit’ (Foley and Olson 1985).

Boro, a Tibeto-Burman language, has both a clause-chaining discourse structure and a serial verb construction. We will talk about these two constructions in detail below. The focus of this paper is a small set of verbs which can occur in the serial verb construction. Some of these verbs have developed a fair amount of grammatical meaning, while others still retain their lexical meaning. Some of them have undergone vowel change too. However, they are still identifiable with their non-serialized main verb counterparts. We will call these verbs ‘serialized verbs’ rather than grammaticalized verbs for obvious reasons. The paper has the following structure: §2 gives a brief background on the Boro language in general, and the dialect on which this work is based in particular.

Kerala, fondly known as the ‘God's Own Country’, has always been famous as the cradle of different religions since the ancient times. Islam, Christianity and Judaism have flourished side by side in this region for centuries. Kodungallur, in southern Kerala, is a living example of how a Hindu temple, a mosque and a church stand alongside each other as witnesses to the early arrival of Islam and Christianity to this land. The Jews arrived in Cochin as early as 68 ad and a small Jewish town exists even today in this region surrounding the oldest Jewish synagogue in the world.

Apart from the historical facts, Kerala is a land where all the different religious communities have coexisted in harmony over several centuries. It has therefore set an example to other regions in India. Having said that, the reader would certainly have a question in mind regarding the ‘Moplahs’ who have made history by boldly attacking the British colonial administration in Malabar. Eventually, they have acquired a scarred reputation in the historical records, books, among history students and the general public.

This book is an attempt to construct the social history of an Arab-Islamic community on the southwest coast of India. So far, students of history have only learnt about the ‘Moplah Peasant Rebellions’ in their classrooms. However, recent historical writings have made genuine attempts to correct the charred image of the ‘Moplah revolts’.

Introduction

The basis for the current research is our linguistic work among the Hajong community in 2004–2006. The language is spoken by approximately 80 to 100 thousand people (Hajong 2002: 9) in the North-East Indian states of Meghalaya and Assam.

Hajong is classified as an Indo-Aryan (IA) language. It has some degree of similarity with Assamese and Bengali, the two IA languages spoken in the region. At the same time, certain grammatical similarities such as case marking can be found between Hajong and some Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages spoken in the same geographic location (Phillips 2008).

The paper presents the distribution of the vowel and consonant segments, with contrastive pairs, syllable and stress patterns where applicable. At the end of each section we will compare the phonological features of Hajong with the corresponding ones in TB, represented by Garo and IA, represented by Assamese. The scope of the current study covers segments distribution patterns at the syllable level, with some comments on their position within the word.

Analysis of consonants

In this chapter, we will talk about consonant segments of Hajong. A segment is defined as “any discrete unit or phone, produced by the vocal apparatus, or a representation of such a unit” (Loos 1996: S). The next linguistic level above the segment is the syllable. Since our analysis is based mostly on syllable structures, it is important to establish the definition of this notion. A syllable typically consists of a central peak of sonority (usually a vowel) and optional less sonorant segments before and/or after the peak (Loos 1996: S), commonly called onset and coda.