From GN Devy's new book: How Adivasis have become activists to tackle the neglect of their languages

The 2011 census report indicated that the Bhili language group recorded an 85 per cent increase among the speakers, whereas the population increase in the corresponding geographical area was just about 15 per cent. Therefore, the figures for the speakers of Bhili need to be read together with the figures of the neighbouring main languages. When that is done, it becomes clear that nearly four million persons who had previously claimed either Gujarati or Marathi as their mother tongues – the languages of the states where they live – now claim one of the varieties of Bhili as their mother tongue.

For a tribal/indigenous language, this increase is remarkable. It will be necessary to take into account the role played by a language-based development movement initiated by the Bhasha Research Centre’s Adivasi Academy in that area over the last two decades. The movement placed linguistic self-consciousness at the heart of the development programme initiated among the Adivasi communities. Nearly three hundred community workers were trained using the local language and the local idiom of development for intervening in over a thousand villages. Organic agriculture, traditional medicine and healthcare practices, folk songs and oral narratives, local pedagogic conventions, Adivasi arts, and craft were...