Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday praised a 28-year-old Santhali tribal youth, Ramjit Tudu, for his efforts in preserving the Santhali language, during his Mann ki Baat programme.
“There are some languages which are used by very few people, but you will be happy to know that today, unique efforts are being made to preserve those languages. One such language is our ‘Santhali’ language. A campaign has been started to give a new identity to Santhali with the help of digital innovation. ‘Santhali’ is spoken by the people of the Santhal tribal community residing in many states of our country,” Modi said.
“Shriman Ramjeet Tudu, resident of Mayurbhanj, Odisha is running a campaign to create an online identity of the Santhali language. Ramjeet ji has prepared a digital platform where literature related to the Santhali language can be read and written in Santhali language,” Modi added.
Tudu, an assistant revenue inspector under Jashipur tehsil of Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, has been providing Santhali voices a digital platform to express themselves.
Though there are over 6.2 million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan who speak Santhali, there has been little effort made to bring it to mobile phones, internet and mainstream media. Santhali is written using several scripts including Bengali, Devanagari, Oriya, Latin, and Ol Chiki. Ol Chiki, the newest of these scripts, was developed between 1920–1940 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu to create a writing system that met all the orthographical needs of the Santali language and could unify its literature under one script. The Ol Chiki script has 30 letters, out of which six are vowels and the remaining 24 are consonants, along with six diacritics.
Tudu said when he got his first smartphone in 2014, he found much information in almost all the languages except Santhali. “This whetted my interest in promoting my language and I found a few tools. However, the Ol Chiki script of Santhali language was not supported by the smartphones. So, I launched Ol Chiki Tech - a platform on Facebook with two other language activists, R Ashwani Banjan Murmu and Bapi Murmu. I also started outreach programmes and writers’ conferences so that these tools can be installed for typing in Santhali,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}Tudu said when he got his first smartphone in 2014, he found much information in almost all the languages except Santhali. “This whetted my interest in promoting my language and I found a few tools. However, the Ol Chiki script of Santhali language was not supported by the smartphones. So, I launched Ol Chiki Tech - a platform on Facebook with two other language activists, R Ashwani Banjan Murmu and Bapi Murmu. I also started outreach programmes and writers’ conferences so that these tools can be installed for typing in Santhali,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}Once Ol Chiki Tech became popular, he started contributing to Wikipedia and conducted workshops to guide people in creating entries in Santali. In 2018, he and other digital activists launched the Santali Wikipedia, which has over 11,000 articles in Santali language on various topics.
He then joined O Foundation (OFDN), that encourages volunteer-led digital activism for languages and collaborated with others to create an Ol Chiki Unicode converter. With it, Santali language text typed in Ol Chiki using ASCII (a standard character set for computers and electronic devices) can now be converted to Unicode so that the text can be used universally, online content can be easily searchable, and users can reuse content with ease.
As little Santali literature was available on the web for the community, Tudu founded and designed ‘Birmali’ (www.birmali.com), the first literary e-magazine in Santali language in 2020. “The magazine gives a platform to Santali writers to publish their work online. So far, the magazine has over 3,000 articles written by Santali people,” he said.