Stephen Morey
La Trobe University
Dr. Banchob Bandhumedha’s birth centenary is an opportunity to place her pioneering work in a context of linguistic research dating back more than two centuries. Up to six different Tai speaking groups have settled in northeast India since the 1200s: Ahom, Aiton, Khamti, Khamyang, Phake and Turung (whose language today is a variety of Singpho). Research on these languages, undertaken by speakers themselves, dates back to at least the 1790s with the composition of the Bar Amra, a lexicon of words in the Tai Ahom script with glosses in Assamese (written in Ahom). This was the first of a long tradition of making dictionaries to help interpret Tai Ahom manuscripts, a tradition that continues until the present day.
Very soon after, from the early 1800s, British officials, who were often also scholars, started to collect information on the various Tai languages. Among these, the article by William Robinson (1849), employing a word list provided by Rev. Nathan Brown, was the first to try and notate the tones of a spoken Tai language in northeast India, work that was not undertaken again until the first arrival of Dr. Banchob in northeast India in 1955.
In the paper, we will first present a short video that gives an overview of the research undertaken by Dr. Banchob and the response that the Tai communities in northeast India have had and continue to have to her work. In 2003, for example, the people of the Turung village of Na Kthong (Pathargaon) in Jorhat district held a prayer ceremony to honour Dr. Banchob. In the Phake village, a special song was composed in her honour (by the late Ngi Pe Pang) and sung for her and recorded by her. This song is still sung today on special occasions. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I was able to record songs and stories from some of the same singers and story tellers that Dr. Banchob had recorded 30 years earlier.
Dr. Banchob’s work was pioneering in so many ways; she was the first scholar since Robinson’s paper in 1849 to seek to understand the tonal systems of the Tai languages and the analysis she made of Tai Phake – as well as her transcription system – has been adopted by all researchers, including naming the tones in the order that she described them (one, two, three up to six).
In this paper, I also present translations of some of the songs that she recorded, work that she herself was not able to complete. Thanks to the kindness of her niece, Dr. Navavan, I was able to get the original recordings digitized in the early 2000s and to return these materials to the community. The songs recorded by Dr. Banchob are now held in high regard and have become a standard of traditional songs valued by the Tai communities in India.
(Presented in the 2020 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Thai-Tai Language and Culture, 20 July 2020, The St.Regis Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Department of Thai, Department of Linguistics, Southeast Asian Linguistics Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University)