Other Tongue: The Quiet Revival of EI Marathi

Time of India

13-07-2025

A year ago, when Chef Freny Fernandes opened Freny's in Bandra, she had no greater goal than to run a stellar East Indian restaurant in the city. Today, she's considered a cultural evangelist, thanks in part to the morsels she dishes out—on Instagram.
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Her reels serve up a crash course in EI culture, with her 'word of the day'—bite-sized East Indian Marathi lessons that describe menu dishes and dining customs—a particular hit. Her followers, newly schooled in words such as tope (a poha-and-meat dish) and itroz (a pre-Lenten feast) tend to follow up lessons with a taste test. "I started storytelling to spread more information about who we are and what our language is about," she says, pointing out that East Indian Marathi is different from regular Marathi, with regional and ethnic variations within the dialect.
Even as rabblerousers have brandished Marathi yet again as a yardstick, a linguistic Lakshman Rekha, its kindred East Indian Marathi, has been witnessing a dignified, inclusive and clever campaign for relevance. And at its vanguard are East Indians like 30-year-old Fernandes, whose promotion of the dialect on social media has kindled a new interest among people, especially young people, in their mai boli.
East Indian Marathi is a dialect composed predominantly of North Konkan Marathi—with a mix of Portuguese and a sprinkling of English and Hindi words—that uses the Devanagari and Roman script.
Spoken by Bombay East Indians (native Christians of the North Konkan) in Mumbai, Dharavi island, Thane, Uran and Vasai, the dialect varies in pronunciation, and sometimes meaning, across regions and ethnic subgroups.
Over the years, its circle of influence started to shrink as urbanisation, education and social mobility privileged English. However in the past decade, EI Marathi has regained prominence thanks to organisations like the Mobai Gaothan Panchayat (MGP) that published the first EI dictionary in 2019 as part of its broader cultural revival project, and individuals like Mogan Rodrigues, who has been researching and writing about the language and culture.
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Millennials and Gen-Z have joined their ranks, taking the message to a medium many consider their native place—social media.
Candida Remedios, 34, gamified language learning through her Sunday quizzes on Instagram. She invited people to guess the original English title of a popular song or Hollywood movie that she translated into EI Marathi. Sutera Manus? Spider-Man. Navricha Bapus? Father of the Bride. "I started with the alphabet—a basic A-Z series of East Indian words to familiarise people with the language," she says.
This was no linguistic lark; Remedios was chief project coordinator of the East Indian Dictionary.
The EI dictionary, which sold 1,000 copies, will launch a second, expanded edition next year, says Gleason Barretto, its founder-editor. "Earlier, people bought it as a collectible; now they actually want to learn the dialect," he says.
The best way to learn it, insists Mogan Rodrigues, is to speak it at home like he does.
"My 8-year-old son is fluent in it," says the researcher, who has been compiling his own inventory of EI words. A convenient source of these is his mother, whose recent contribution to his lexicon was the word benja—the space between two fingers. "Nobody writes books or articles in this dialect," Rodrigues continues.
But a sizeable body of literature has emerged in song. "Every year about 25-30 East Indian singing competitions are held throughout Bombay, for which people compose original songs on a range of themes, from news events to marital and housing problems.
The songs are a record of our times," he states.
Interestingly, it's the youth who are actively contributing to this social documentary. Triston Gonsalves, a 23-year-old resort manager in Uttan, is a rising star in the EI firmament, having participated in over 50 singing competitions and won over 30 prizes. His song Bapus (Father) scored 174K views on YouTube. "More young people are participating in singing competitions these days," observes Gonsalves, "And they make up about 60-70% of the audience," he adds, attributing their interest in community events to the cachet that cultural identity commands today on social media.
Remedios believes people today want to talk about their roots, stories and folk songs. "And because reels are the most consumed format of content these days, many East Indian content creators have appeared on the scene," she says. They're designers, bodybuilders and amateur comedians, creating bilingual content in EI Marathi and English. And though they may not speak out as campaigners, they're nevertheless preserving the dialect—if only by speaking it.