Sirohi District is a district of Rajasthan state in western India. The town of Sirohi is the district headquarters. Abu Road is the biggest city and the main financial hub of Sirohi District. It is bordered on the west by Jalo , on the north by Pali , and on the east by Udaipur. On the south of Sirohi is the Banas Kantha District of Gujarat.

Sirohi District is broken up by hills and rocky ranges. The ranges of Mount Abu divide the district into two portions, running from north-east to south-west. The south and south-east part of the district, which lies between Mount Abu and the main spine of the Aravallis, is mountainous and rugged, and is drained by the West Banas River. Sirohi has been home to various tribals populations since time immemorial and is historically known for brilliant craftsmanship in sword making.

The organization I work in, Room to Read got an opportunity to work in a few schools in Sirohi. When we were setting up classes for early language and literacy learning, as well as libraries for children in Sirohi, we encountered a linguistic complexity in the region that was intriguing.  It seemed people in Sirohi seamlessly traversed between three or more languages in their daily social transactions. If one asked officials in Sirohi, they would all claim to speak Hindi, while the regional language visibly was Marwari. And then there were home languages of people which shared a lot of linguistic similarities with both Marwari and Hindi.  It seemed like people there happily situated themselves in a linguistic continuum. When I went from school to school, I was asking myself, “Which language do they speak?” They switched from language to language so effortlessly and often, and perhaps not even consciously, that I wondered -- was I imagining separate linguistic communities there? The question was, was it one language or was it a language continuum that I was witnessing, between at least four kinds of variations?

Room to Read commissioned a research to answer this question to the Zakir Hussain Center for Social Science, in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. The team, headed by the distinguished Professor Minati Panda , brought back interesting insights.

The analyses of the data (Minati Panda, 2016) revealed that the presence of multiplicity of languages in different domains generated a dialogical circle where uninterrupted classroom communication between the teacher and children seemed to have become possible by ‘translanguaging’.  What does “translanguaing” mean? It means that rather than using languages one-at-a-time, multilingual speakers often utilize their languages as an integrated communication system.

The conversation data clearly showed constant translanguaging among the students and between students and teachers in the classrooms. A majority of teachers and students reported that mixing of Garasia, Marwari and Hindi was a common practice in rural area schools. Garasia and Marwari were used for translation and explanation of the subject matter. Teachers reported that children understood better when they mixed languages as opposed to when they taught only in Hindi. Though translanguaging was a common practice in schools in Pindwara and Sirohi district, the teachers chose to limit this to lower classes only.  But, the children supported mixing of languages as it helped them understand things better. Younger children felt that mixing of language was a good practice.

Interestingly, only 14% of the students spoke only two languages; while, the remaining 86% spoke at least three languages. Fifty one percent (51%) of the total sample spoke Adivasi Garasia at home whereas they spoke other languages like Rajput Garasia, Marwari, Hindi and Rewadi to varying degree outside the home. The interview data also showed that most of the respondents changed the language depending on the language of the person with whom they were conversing. Almost everybody used at least two to three languages in the market (Panda, 2016). However, when asked, everyone stated that they wanted to learn Hindi as that was the language through which they could reach a larger section of the society around them. It was also the language which gave them more economic opportunities. It seems that a child in Sirohi is exposed to a continuum of languages where one easily blends into another and linguistic characteristics are ‘shared’. And yet, literacy instruction, by popular demand, had to be in Hindi, in the Devnagari script.

As Room to Read is committed to designing enabling literacy instructions and environments for children, Sirohi was an interesting case study in itself.  Once again, the importance of the oral utterances of children was brought to the forefront. We are left wondering how to accommodate not only vocabulary variations in the classroom, but also, certain phonetic and syntactic differences. Currently, we are deeply engaged in trying to understand how to use local stories in the classroom and in our libraries. We also have to ponder upon what kinds of texts should be made available to children while they are learning aksharas and are gradually gaining fluency. And, we clearly see that many of our popular assumptions about the linguistic experiences of people in India, are falling short of reflecting the complexity of the landscape in classrooms.  We are acknowledging, yet again, that probably, every Indian, in any part of our country, was a ‘polyglot’ (speaker of multiple languages) – and this must be taken into account in our curriculum and pedagogy.

Room to Read believes that a comprehensive literacy experience must enable children to negotiate through print not only at the surface level, but also must enable an intense, varied, multi-layered interaction with its layers of meaning. Reading can be about processing dense information for making informed choices, or reading for pleasure; to put simply, reading can be for various purposes and opportunities, as life unfolds.  And we must realise that the much of the world, in which literacy is considered so powerful a tool, is multilingual. The multiplicity of languages in a child’s life can be approached in many ways. It could be a simple step-by-step transition from one language to another, following some specific societal aspirations. It could be a situation where the population at large, is proficient two or more languages, and the ‘sharing’ of the languages becomes a bit larger than just sharing some common vocabulary or syntactic structures.

Thus, if classroom transaction focuses on one language – the premise on which literacy instruction is currently based, it probably ignores the multiplicity of oral utterances that children bring to classrooms.  More, there could be more than one orthography that children may have to deal with. Over and above, they may also have to learn literacy instructions in English parallel to their main stream language- orthography instruction.  

It is in this context, in large parts of South Asia, that one probably needs to re-visit popular assumptions about ‘comprehensive’ literacy experiences for children.

To read more about the complexities of linguistic diversity in India, read the paper by Dhir Jhingran on dealing with multiple languages within a classroom.