Santali

Description

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Context: A Professor in Purulia, West Bengal, translated the Constitution of India in Santali language.

Details

Sripati Tudu, an assistant professor in the Santali language at the Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University in Purulia, West Bengal, translated the Constitution of India in Santali language.
He started this initiative because he wanted the document to be more accessible and available for a wider group that may not necessarily be familiar with languages in which a translation of the Constitution is available.
- He said that “The nation runs on the basis of the Constitution. But the community has been historically deprived and so people in the community need to read it to understand what their rights are, the provisions and what is written inside,”
He translated the Constitution of India in the Ol Chiki script.

About Santali Language

Santali is the most widely spoken language mainly in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Tripura and West Bengal.
Santali was a mainly oral language until the development of Ol Chiki by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925.
- Ol Chiki is alphabetic, sharing none of the syllabic properties of the other Indic scripts, and is now widely used to write Santali in India.
According to the 2011 Census of India, there are over 70 lakh (seven million) people who speak Santali across the country.
- The community is the 3rd-largest tribe in India.
- Their geographic distribution is not limited to India—the community is also spread across Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.
In 2003, the 92nd Constitutional Amendment Act added Santali to the 8th Schedule to the Constitution of India.
- This addition meant that the Indian government was obligated to undertake the development of the Santali language and to allow students appearing for school-level examinations and entrance examinations for public service jobs to use the language.
In 2005, India’s Sahitya Akademi started handing out awards every year for outstanding literary works in Santali, a move that helped preserve and give more visibility to the community’s literature.