Speaking in Code: Language, Identity, and the Banchhada Community

Language as a Social Code

Language does more than carry information. It tells you who someone is, where they belong, and who they trust. Every community develops its own way of speaking particular words, rhythms, and references that mark insiders and exclude outsiders. This is not accidental. Sociolinguists have long argued that speech is a social practice, shaped by power, context, and relationships rather than by grammar alone. When a group faces surveillance, stigma, or exclusion, language adapts. It becomes layered. Meaning gets coded, shared only with those who already know. In marginalized communities especially, how people speak is inseparable from how they survive. The Banchhada community of central India is one such case, a group whose language carries not just vocabulary, but history, protection, and identity simultaneously.

Who Are the Banchhada?

The Banchhada are a community based primarily in Madhya Pradesh, historically marginalized through caste, gender, and occupation. For generations, they have existed at the edges of formal social recognition excluded from mainstream institutions, subjected to inherited stigma, and dependent on informal economies for survival. This social position has shaped everything about how the community organizes itself, including how it communicates. The Banchhadas are not a linguistically isolated group by accident. Their communicative practices developed in response to a world that watched them with suspicion and offered them little protection. Understanding their language means understanding this context first not as background, but as the condition that made a distinct language necessary.

Language as an Identity Marker

Within the Banchhada community, language functions as a boundary. It separates those who belong from those who do not, and it does this quietly, in ordinary conversation. Identity, as Bucholtz and Hall (2005) argue, is not something people simply have, it is something they perform and negotiate through interaction. For the Banchhadas, speaking their language is an act of membership. It signals trust, shared history, and social recognition that no outsider can easily replicate. This matters especially in a community where formal markers of identity documents, institutional belonging, social legitimacy have historically been denied or made inaccessible. When those markers are absent, language fills the gap. It becomes the primary way the community recognizes itself and holds itself together.

One illustration of this comes from fieldwork in the Neemuch area. A community member recalled a teaching fellow from an earlier organization who had learned the language so well that he was indistinguishable from a community member. The exact words used to describe him were: “Aap dekhkar bata nahi sakte the ki yeh bhaiyya community ke nahi hain.” The admiration in that account was unmistakable. The ability to speak the language was understood as something far larger than communication; it was recognition, respect, and acceptance made audible.

Language as Trust and Safety

In communities shaped by exclusion and risk, coded language is not a stylistic choice it is a practical tool. The Banchhadas use language to manage information: what gets shared, with whom, and under what circumstances. Historian James Scott (1990) described how subordinated groups develop indirect, concealed forms of communication precisely because direct speech carries risk under conditions of domination. For the Banchhadas, this plays out in daily life. Certain words signal safety. Others mark danger. The language creates a channel of communication which outsiders cannot easily intercept or interpret.

A concrete example is the phrase “Bori Nasija” or “Bora Nasija” translating to “girl hide” or “boy hide” used to alert community members that police were approaching, that an unfamiliar person had entered the area, or that people should be on guard. An outsider hearing the phrase would register ordinary words. A community member would immediately understand the instruction. This is not secrecy for its own sake, it is a system built for mutual protection, where trust is established through the shared knowledge of how to speak.

About the language : 

The secret language used by the community is known as Parsi. According to one study by Dr. Madan Meena, this language is also referred to as Narsi Parsi.

A notable feature of this language is that it is not spoken exclusively by the Bancchada community. Members of several other Denotified Tribes (DNT) communities also use the same language. For instance, the Kanjars in Rajasthan also speak this secret language, known as Parsi.

While certain words vary across regions, the broader vocabulary remain largely the same. According to a community informant, this is a language shared by the entire Bhantu Samaj, which, in this context, broadly refers to many DNT communities. 

The Language Up Close

What makes the Banchhada lexicon analytically interesting is its dual structure. Some words are entirely unique to the community, with no equivalent in Hindi or other regional languages. Others are words that exist in common speech but carry entirely different meanings when used inside the community. This second category is particularly significant; it allows members to communicate in plain sight, using familiar-sounding language that means something different to those who know.

The vocabulary around insider and outsider identity illustrates this clearly. The language encodes a distinction that most everyday speech systems do not bother to mark: whether a person belongs to the community or not. A married woman from within the community is bahatini; a married woman from outside is kajji. A man from the community is bhantu; a man from outside is kajja. A girl from the community is bori or chori; an outsider girl or unmarried woman is daodi or daili. 

These are not simply descriptive labels. They reflect a social world in which the insider-outsider distinction has been significant enough, across generations, to become embedded in the vocabulary itself. As Bourdieu (1991) observed, language carries symbolic power it encodes the categories a community considers worth naming. The existence of these words tells you something about the community’s experience of social boundaries long before you learn what any single word means.

Historical Roots and Why the Language Persists

The Banchhada language did not emerge in isolation. Colonial-era policies like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 criminalized entire communities on the basis of birth, placing them under permanent state surveillance and suspicion. For communities like the Banchhada, operating under that kind of scrutiny, coded communication was not optional, it was necessary. Foucault (1977) described how sustained surveillance does not just monitor behaviour it shapes it, encouraging people to regulate themselves in anticipation of being watched. A language that outsiders cannot understand is one response to exactly that pressure.

That history did not end with colonial rule. The structures of caste, stigma, and exclusion that made the language necessary have largely persisted. Community members describe situations where, if a theft occurred in a nearby village, suspicion could fall on Banchhada residents simply by association regardless of any involvement. In such an environment, speaking among themselves in their own language allowed people to discuss what was happening and make sense of a situation without immediately exposing those conversations. The Banchhada language survives because the conditions that created it have not fundamentally changed. It endures not out of tradition alone, but because it continues to do real work in people’s lives.

Contemporary Relevance : 

The existence and continued use of the language cannot be divorced from the present social realities of the community. Its contemporary relevance lies not merely in its linguistic structure or vocabulary, but in what its persistence reveals about the lived experiences of the people who speak it.

To understand why the language continues to be used, it is necessary to understand the social position of the community. Living on the margins and facing longstanding social exclusion, the community continues to experience stigma due to its hereditary association with sex work, along with, at times, harassment from police and other state authorities. In such a context, the language functions as more than a means of communication. It serves as a marker of trust and safety, allowing community members to communicate freely in the presence of outsiders without being understood.

The continued use of the language, therefore, reflects the continued existence of the social conditions that gave rise to it. Its persistence highlights the enduring realities of stigma, marginalization, and exclusion faced by the community. Understanding the language today is thus not only a linguistic exercise but also an attempt to understand the historical and contemporary realities that it mirrors.

This is not to suggest that the language will disappear as the community’s social conditions improve. It may continue as an important marker of shared cultural identity and belonging. However, the extent to which it functions as a protective in-group code is shaped by the community’s relationship with the wider society. Greater social acceptance may reduce the need for this function, even as the language endures as a cultural symbol.

Conclusion

The Banchhada language is not a curiosity or a relic. It is a living system that encodes identity, manages risk, and sustains community in conditions of ongoing marginalization. What looks like secrecy from the outside is, from within, a sophisticated practice of belonging and survival. The Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum’s documentation of a Banchhada community dictionary marks an important moment of recognition but documentation alone does not address the structural conditions that made such a language necessary in the first place. To understand how the community speaks is to understand something larger: that language is never just words. It is the shape that survival takes when other forms of protection are unavailable.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press.

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.

Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press.

Acknowledgement 

Special thanks to Dr. Madan Meena, an independent artist and folklore researcher from Rajasthan, for sharing his insights on the secret language. Dr. Meena has previously worked on documenting the secret language of the Kanjar community, and his perspectives provided valuable context for this article. 

This article was edited by Ms. Anushka Saraswat (District Coordinator – Jan Shaurya)

About the author 

Ms. Sakshi Aggarwal worked as a Research Intern at Jan Shaurya from May to June 2026. This article draws on her work and learning during the internship. 

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Disclaimer

This account has been prepared solely for documentation and knowledge-sharing purposes, drawing on field observations, conversations with community members, and available secondary sources. It represents a partial and interpretive understanding of the community’s language and does not claim to be exhaustive in any form. Given the oral nature of the language, variations in vocabulary, usage, and interpretation may exist across individuals, families, and regions.

This article is not intended to codify, standardize, or appropriate the language, nor does it seek to replace or redefine the community’s own understanding of its linguistic and cultural heritage. Rather, it is an effort to document and acknowledge an important yet underexplored aspect of the community’s intangible cultural heritage. As this is an evolving initiative, the document may be revised and expanded over time based on continued research, field engagement, and inputs from community members.