On an 80-year-old living in this small village in the valley of Jorethang, on the West Bengal-Sikkim border, rests the hopes of India's most threatened language. Thak Majhi is among the four recognised speakers of Majhi, once the flourishing mother tongue of his hill tribe, deriving its name from their main occupation as boatmen.

From 10-year-olds to adults, everyone in the area knows Thak and his unique connection to Majhi. The octogenarian, belonging to the oldest family in Majhigaon, himself doesn't speak much. His grandsons who surround him say he is an orthodox man who has been disheartened by the infusion of the "Hindi culture" in his tribe.

The dialect that he learnt from his parents as a boy is slowly fading even to him under the dominance of this "Hindi culture" and the vestiges of age. Apart from him, only Iswari Prasad Majhi of the four Majhi families here knows it now. Fifty-year-old Iswari is among the ones fighting the hardest to keep it alive. Anil Majhi, 50, and Sisir Emmanual Mark Majhi, 29, Anil's relative, also speak Majhi, but in snatches.

The script itself is believed to have been lost more than 100 years ago.

Thak speaks with nostalgia about his dying mother tongue. "Majhi was the language of fishermen in the hills. It was a tribal language which never had any proximity to Nepali and Hindi. However, since the influence of Nepali culture is predominant, the next generation has accepted Nepali as the mother tongue. I too hardly remember Majhi now," he says.

Once Majhis were the only ones who could ferry people across the Rangeet river in Sikkim. "Steering a boat in a rapid mountain stream like Rangeet was an art only known to the Majhi tribe. The Majhi community made a special boat using stems of trees locally available," says Anil, a member of another Majhi family from the village. Boating and fishing in the river were their main occupations.

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