Rediscovering the Kharia Tribe through Play

Session 99 summary

Sneh was born and brought up in New Delhi. She did her schooling from KV Masjid Moth, then she went to NIT Hamirpur for her bachelor’s degree and did her masters from SPA Bhopal. Her interest in design was there since her childhood which actually bloomed in her schooling year when she got the chance to design her school magazine. From then onwards she decided to take up architecture since it is also in the field of design. There she got the chance to lead as the design head in college magazine. She, basically gained all her design experience during her schooling and in her college years. Later she decided to pursue master of design from SPA Bhopal.

During her course in SPA Bhopal she did many projects and for one of her semester projects she decided to take her own tribe. Initially the topic was not language learning game design in kharia bingo but it was like a preservation of indigenous communities. She started with autoethnography – i.e. she studied her own ethnic/ethnicity and after that she came across few basics of kharia;

“Kharia is an Austro-Asiatic tribal ethnic group from east-central India. They originally speak kharia language which belongs to Austro-Asiatic languages. Population: 4, 82,754 (census 2011). Kharia speaker’s location: Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. Writing system: Latin, Devanagari and Odia. Kharia tribe has 9 gottar (clan): Soreng, Kerketta, Dungdung, Kullu, Kiro, Tete, Bilung, Baa, Toppo.”

Another thing about the kharia language is that it is a dialect, which means that it has no script. Earlier there were people who tried to create a script specifically for kharia language but failed. Now the kharia literature is divided into two parts; before independence and after independence. Majorly the non-kharia people only did the primary work on kharia literature but after the independence many research work were done.

Coming to the current scenario, tribals are migrating looking for living better livelihoods. They are actually leaving behind their native place, their culture, their heritage, their language and also the written literature are actually not meant for kids. The new generation, who actually wants to know their roots or maybe learn their own language to preserve, for them only the university level kharia language courses are available that too very few. Also the kharia parents try to teach the next generation through conversations only as they don’t know that there could be any other way to teach their kids the language.

Problem statement: Sneh summed up that there is a gradual decrease in the number of kharia speakers. There are less interventions to learn and teach kharia language. The new generation is showing no or very little interest in learning their mother tongue.

The objectives of the project were; language plays a crucial role in one’s identity and personality. Also it is the key to preserve indigenous knowledge culture and heritage. Hence the project aimed to device a game kit to teach an urban kid to understand and speak in kharia language or at least encourage them towards their roots. Sneh focused on urban kids because in rural areas people talk in their own native language. When people from rural places migrate and get situated in urban places they don’t learn their own mother tongue. So through this project she wanted to device a game by which a family can teach their kids through play. Her methodology included interviews –which included interviewing kharia scholars for detailed insight about kharia literature and documentation on kharia texts and getting in touch with the stakeholders who are working for the same in Ranchi (people who are working in the field of anthropology and kharia literature). She did the data collection by conducting survey on young urban kharia kids and she tried to understand their visual connection towards their culture. The process included: empathising with the urban kharia parents who try to teach their kids their language but the kid only is able to understand but unable to talk in kharia, then defining the problem and then ideating few solutions about the problem and making a prototype out of it and then testing it.

During her initial research Sneh went to Ranchi and met a few stakeholders, like Dr. Abhay Minj, who talked about the psychology of urban parents (indigenous parents). He pointed out that “the parent doesn’t know, how to actually incorporate culture and language into their kid’s life”, so designers have to look into the solutions of it. Then she met Dr. Tarkeleng Kullu, who actually handed her a children’s book, which is a translation from english to kharia to teach kharia kids how to write and how to read kharia but in Devanagari script. There was also Anuranjan Kiro who showed her a compilation of everyday used words Pataar where she found easy and everyday words which can be taught to a kid. Then she met a retired air force officer’ son of late Julius Baa, a famous writer and author of kharia phonology. After meeting him she realised the big language generation gap which is not new and it is far beyond two generations.

Her insights were: 1) Language gap between generations is not new. 2) The primary education system on kharia language is a mess. 3) Parents do not know how else to teach kids the language apart from making kharia conversations. 4) Appropriate age for a kid to learn any language is 5-10 years. 5) Kharia people living in urban area find the language difficult to practice, hence an early age start can be beneficial for one.

The solution Sneh came up with was a language learning game design for kids of 5+ age. She looked into some existing games there in hamlets and most of the games were physical and digitally intervened. One of the games she looked at was Zingo, a game through which a child learns to speak as the child has to say out loud what tile it is to win the game. She converted this game into ‘Kharia Bingo’. The game consists of three components: shuffler, tiles (2 sets) and cards (2 variations). In Zingo, the card is where the player shouts the correct number which the shuffler is taking out and whoever says it first will take the tile and put on their card so that whoever completes the whole card will win the game. Sneh converted this game into kharia, where instead of 1, 2 or 3, or the Hindi – ek, do, teen, she uses kharia language. In the cards the fingers represent the number with the numerical values in kharia language.

How to play and rules:

• decide whether one player will serve as a dealer and operate the shuffler or players will pass the shuffler each turn.
• Dealer slides the shuffler to reveal the two tiles.
• Player sees a number tile that matches an image in his/her bingo card and the first player to call out the number takes the tile and covers the printed image on the card.
• Unclaimed tiles go back into the shuffler.
• Player has to give up one tile of other player’s choice for every wrong call. When the tile comes out of the shuffler and the kid has to shout out the number, the kid is actually learning how to speak in kharia language. She also made a mood board for the whole colour scheme of the game and chose bright colour applying kid’s psychology. There can be variations in the card to make it more flexible. The cards can be customized, by using simple numbers, fruits, vegetables, etc. by which simple words can be learnt in different languages.

To cater the modern-day child’s interest, Sneh mixed the game and made a ‘Phygital’ game (physical: shuffler and tiles + Digital: multiplayer card/game platform). So, one of the component of the game can be in physical form and the other in digital form, e.g. the shuffler can be in the physical form and the cards can be on the phone.

The user journey of the app: it will have the bingo game as well as a separate section for learning, there can be kharia dictionary, songs and videos which parents can play for their kids and try to teach more about and in the language. There will be a game shop as well if they want to buy a separate category of tiles e.g. fruit tiles, vegetable tiles, etc. for making the game more interactive.

Another project she did was her academic thesis project: ‘The Nine – An illustrated book on Kharia folktales’. The abstract was same as the previous project and the objective was same as well i.e. the preservation of kharia culture and history for urban kharia population and the target audience were urban kharia parent and urban kharia kids age 5-8 (end users).

Folktales and illustrations: According to Gregory A. Cajete the role of stories is to, “present deep insights into the affective dimension of human learning, socialization in community and the role of story in the transfer of cultural knowledge and values” to the coming generation. Since kharia language is a dialect without any script, it is easier to educate young urban kharia through visual communication. Illustrations in a picture book help children understand what they are reading. If children are having difficulty with the words the illustrations can help them figure out the narrative which can increase their comprehension in the story and the language.

Data Collection for the book:

• recollecting all the folktales told by my grandparents.
• Karia texts by John Peterson (2010).
• Kharia samaj by S.C. Roy (2018).
• Karia jeevan or Parampryan by Fr. Joachim Dungdung (1999).

Case Study: Sneh also did a case study before starting her book. It was on Biksu a graphic novel published by Ektara. Made in madhubani art, the entire book is actually written in Chotanagpur dialect. Another case study she did was on Karo-Koelim, an illustrated storybook on Santhali mythology by Gurucharan Murmu, and watercolour is used as the medium of illustrations. After collecting all the data Sneh jotted down all the things which she wanted to teach the kids to know about their own culture. So, she found these few folktales which include the history of kharia, how kharia lost their priesthood and distribution of clans. The materials and other details of the book was decided on what the book should be and who is it for, she wanted the book to look more like a valuable book to the family. Next she tried illustration medium exploration – how the illustration should go. She started first with outlining sketches, then she tried it with crayons, then with pencil colours and the final illustration she made was in the digital colouring format. She then explored how the kharia facial features should look like to give a kharia reference and the final references were taken by the photographs and through those photographs she tried to create an illustration pattern and a visual hierarchy for her illustrations. For the mood board she looked at the colours in the photographs to make the book. The book is in English, she chose to have it in Hindi as well so that kids can easily understand them.