Making of the Mushar
As soon as the Mushar or Musahar word comes in the mind of a Hindi speaker or a person who knows hindi, it flashes a picture of the people who catches rat. The literal meaning of Mushar is: Mus- Mouse, Har- eater. In my village there were around 15-20 huts of these people who does some work as a labour in the filed of upper caste/middle caste people and also make pattals (leaf plates). Most of them were illiterate but one of them was a respected primary school teacher. His name was MIthai (sweet). In the childhood he also teaches us maths at home as well. Unfortunately, he died due to some unknown disease around 45 years of age. Mostly in the literature and also 20 years ago they were considered as untouchables. But still in the Aryan society they had a major role in rituals as bringing the pattals for serving the food in any ceremony. There was an incident of untouchability in childhood, when I used to play cricket with them and once my Grandmother saw me, and I had to take bath with the cold water to get an entry permission to my house! I already had a curiosity on these people while playing cricket in childhood with them. As there phenotype was different from us as well as their older people did speak two language (bilingual): one same like us- the Bhojpuri and other which was a Munda language.
There exotic imprint remained in my mind which pushed my further to find their ancestry and finally we used them as a model to test the Language Shift issue in South Asia. At the same time Prof. Mohan Reddy invited a paper in his edited IJHG issue, we thought to submit it there. The article was published there and appreciated by many in the field.