Vol 5 No 3 | Oct-Dec 2025
The Last Song of the Desert
Story by Nita Bajoria | Art by Somil Porwal
The inspiration behind the comic
From Nita Bajoria, the writer of this comic: Though we are from Rajasthan, my parents and in-laws converse with me in Hindi. My in-laws converse with each other in the Marwari language. I fondly remember how my grandmother-in-law loved talking to me, and she knew only Marwari. I would sit by her, trying to catch a known Marwari word or two to understand the context, and then would nod or smile accordingly. But I enjoyed those conversations as the rhythms, metaphors, and certain phrases she used held a music of their own.
However, my husband is the only one in his generation who speaks Marwari. The younger kids of our entire extended family know nothing of the language. Sometimes, the elders of our family lament that soon no one in the family will know our mother tongue.
Dhundhari is one such language of Rajasthan. Like many regional tongues, it is gradually fading from everyday use. I was struck by how easily a language can disappear – silently, without protest, when the last person who speaks it is no longer heard.
But the story is not just about loss. It’s about rediscovery, too. How a teenager, far removed from her roots, begins to build a bridge across time through curiosity and compassion. Piyu’s journey is inspired by the idea that even the most forgotten voices can be understood if someone chooses to listen.
With so many of the world’s languages at risk of extinction, I wanted to tell a story that reminds us that every language holds a world, and every speaker is a world-keeper.
Dhundari – echoes of Rajasthan
As of now, people who speak Dhundhari, also known as Jaipuri, are found in Jaipur, Karauli, Hindaun, Sawai Madhopur, Dausa, and Tonk. Jaipuri was coined by European scholars such as MacAlister, Grierson, and Abraham. MacAlister completed the grammatical analysis on 24 February 1884. The Serampore missionaries translated the New Testament into Jaipuri proper in 1815.
Some interesting features of Dhundhari are:
1) Nasalisation: Nasalisation is a known phonemic feature of the Dhundari language, where vowels become nasalised, particularly in certain contexts like the word ‘pũ:cʰŋo’, which means ‘to wipe’ and has a nasalised vowel sound.
2) Repetition: Repetition is a process in which a word is repeated twice to express a higher intensity of the base word. In Dhundhari, gebo means fast and “gebogebo” means “very fast”.
https://www.dhundari.org/en/about-0
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4hWKAUG11Os
To lose language is to lose culture
Dhundhari, a dialect spoken in parts of Rajasthan, holds centuries of oral tradition, folk tales, and wisdom. Its extinction would mean the loss of unique proverbs, idioms, and regional storytelling. Younger generations would grow up disconnected from their ancestral identity. Traditional knowledge, such as farming practices, herbal remedies, knowledge of medicinal plants, village history, weather cycles, and moral values tied to language-specific stories passed down orally, would also disappear. It is seen that rituals lose their original flavour and emotional resonance when translated into Hindi. Cultural pride may erode as communities shift to Hindi and perceive Dhundhari as outdated. Local art forms, especially folk theatre and forms like Swang or Rammat, local puppet plays, and songs that depend on Dhundhari’s rhythm and phonetics, may lose their charm. Local artisans and performers lose a platform when the language in which their craft thrives disappears.
Not just in the case of Dhundhari, when a language dies, it takes with it an entire way of seeing, understanding, and interacting with the world. Language extinction erodes cultural identity, memory, and wisdom that no translation can fully recover.
https://news.yale.edu/2023/05/04/new-database-offers-insight-consequences-language-loss
