VK Neelarao blows the dust off a DVD before putting it in his television’s disc reader. The title song of his latest film plays from the rooftop of his home in Jai Hindpuram, in the southern Indian city of Madurai. “I sang this song myself,” he says. “And the hero of the film is my son.”

Neelarao, a retired silk-weaver and magazine editor, is one of the last guardians of the fast-vanishing Saurashtrian language, a mostly oral Indo-Aryan tongue. “Around 80% of the language has been forgotten already,” he says. “My grandchildren don’t understand me when I speak Saurashtrian. My family, everyone around me speaks Tamil,” he adds, referring to the dominant language of Madurai. “I fear that soon they will turn me into a Tamilian.”

In an attempt to save the language, Neelarao and others are capturing it on camera in films that are generally homemade and self-financed. Last year his work Hedde Jomai made waves after screening in several cities. In the next few months his latest film will be shown in cinemas around the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Over the opening credits at an early screening, Neelarao explains how his idea came about. “I didn’t make this film to become famous,” he says. “Our language is nearing extinction. It is my mother tongue. I can’t give you a reason why I love it.”

In Tamil Nadu, the popularity of films in the regional Dravidian languages, Tamil, Telegu and Malyalam, has eclipsed that of Hindi-language Bollywood pictures.

Neelarao sees his films as a last chance to save his language. “Many people had started using the Tamil word maupillay for son-in-law, but after watching my first film they know the Saurashtrian word is jomai,” he says.

CS Krishnamoorthy, a community historian, traces Saurashtrian origins to the Harappan civilisation in his book The Migrant Silk Weavers of Tamil Nadu. “When the British colonisers conducted their census of India, they saw that we were silk weavers, and so they labelled our community as being from Surat, which was a textile hub at the time,” he says. “But that was wrong.”

The palkars, or silk-thread people, were an elite caste known traditionally for producing the finest materials for India’s maharajas and nawabs. Their craft was considered so noble and complex that they were sometimes traded as part of marriage dowries or as gifts to neighbouring kingdoms.

Krishnamoorthy says the rise of the British raj in India saw the downfall of their craft. “The British crushed the Indian nobility, which made up most of our clientele. Instead they started exporting Indian cotton to Manchester for their new textile industry. They never cared for fine silks, and so our craft was ruined. Many silk weavers started to work in the cotton industry instead.”

With the rise of the Indian independence movement in the early 1900s, an effort to unite India’s diverse cultures under a single national language, Hindi, emerged in the north, and the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerela and Andhra Pradesh responded by enforcing their own regional Dravidian languages.

The battle for linguistic dominance, coupled with the rise of inter-caste marriage in newly independent India, saw many unique ancient customs give way to a new national identity. Now a new emphasis on learning English in globalised India is adding to that trend, and the result is the disappearance of 220 Indian languages in the last 50 years, the highest rate of linguistic extinction in the world.

The Saurashtrians, however, are fighting back. Music and magazines have been produced, as well as films, in an attempt to prevent the language’s disappearance. The fact that the community has remained somewhat isolated from other cultures, and has a vibrant tradition of song and poetry of its own, has resulted in the tongue being passed down almost intact. “We have been accustomed to keeping ourselves aloof,” Krishnamoorthy says.

Social media has also helped. The Saurashtrian people have started sharing films and music videos online. Neelarao, who comes from a simpler time, dusts off the DVD again before replacing it in its jacket. “I’m not sure it will make a difference,” he says. “But I feel it is my duty to go on.”