University of Calcutta building on College Street, Kolkata. File | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Several members of two tribal communities from West Bengal will spend most the next week in Kolkata to participate in events that are being held with the aim of saving their languages from extinction.
The six-day event, starting on Monday (November 17, 2025), which includes a translation workshop, is part of a University of Calcutta-led project on endangered languages, particularly Lodha and Toto, the only ones in the State to have received Central funding recently.
“A translation workshop on endangered languages is a rare event in India. About 40 people from both the Lodha and Toto communities will be here for the event. The Government of India and UNESCO have placed special emphasis on their languages. This is part of our community partnership-based research, sponsored by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), and the ICSSR-Eastern Regional Centre,” event convenor Mrinmoy Pramanick, founder-coordinator of the university’s Centre for Translation and Literary Geography, said.
“There will also be nearly 50 people representing the Bengali language, and that’s because there are some texts that are written by the Lodha and Toto people, but in the Bengali script. We will be discussing the translation of their texts into English. Besides, there will be performances, such as a Lodha performance of their indigenous theatre form, and also an exhibition,” Prof. Pramanick said.
“Our research will also be discussed with the community people for transparency and achieving better goals. We are dealing with Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG). There are 75 PVTGs in India, and of them, three are in West Bengal. The ICSSR calls for applications for funding every year for different schemes for their benefit, and this year, 34 projects were given funds across the country; we are the only one from Bengal to receive this funding,” he said.
The workshop, titled ‘Field to Folio’, will be held at the Asutosh Siksha Prangan, the College Street campus of the University of Calcutta, and the exhibition, which Prof. Pramanick said “will include handicrafts manuscripts of literature produced by the communities, and photographs collected from our fieldwork”, will take place simultaneously at the Asutosh Museum of Indian Art, also located in the university building.
Published – November 15, 2025 06:32 pm IST
