Linguistic Identity of an Endangered Tribe- Present Great Andamanese (Andaman and Nicobar Islands - India)

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Although there have been a number of sociological investigations on the Andaman Island and their inhabitants beginning from Lt. R.H. Colebrooke's 1795-essay 'On the Andaman Islands (Asiatic Researches, IV: 385-394) examples of which could be found in A.R. Brown's Andaman Island, A Social Study' (1922, London), or the description under the Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1909, Provincial Series, Andaman And Nicobar Islands' (Calcutta), R.F. Lowis' 'The Andaman and Nicobar Islands' (Vol.II; Census of India, 1911) or Edward Horace Man's four works between 1919 and 1922. Sir Richard C. Temple's (1903) Census of India, 1901-report under volume III on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a seminal work, no doubt but Radcliffe-Brown's 1914-work, titled 'Notes on the languages of the Andaman Islands', (Anthropos, Ix: 36-52) as well as his 1940-book from Free Press, Illinois, titled 'The Andaman Islanders' are also worth mentioning.

The field has been further enriched more recently with D.K. Chakraborty's 'The Great Andamanese: Struggling for Survival' (1990, Seagull) and Zarine Cooper's 'The origins of the Andaman Islanders: Local myth and archaeological evidence' (Antiquity, 1993:67 (255): 394-399), or her 1996 work 'Archaeological evidence for human settlement in the Andaman Islands', (In Ian C. Glover and Peter Bellwood, eds. Indo-Pacific Prehistory: The Chiang-Mai Papers (Proceedings of the 15th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory: The Chiang-Mai Papers (Proceedings of the 15th Congress of the Indo Pacific Prehistory Association, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 5 to 12 January 1994), Vol.2, 139-142; Canberra: ANU). R.C. Majumdar's 1975-work published by the Gazetteers Unit. Department of Culture, Ministry of Education and Social Welfare. Government of India (titled 'Penal Settlement in Andamans') is also useful as much as Vaishna Narang's 1999-paper 'Time, Tense and Aspect in Jero, 'The Great Andamenese Language', presented in the International Seminar on Theories of Signification, held at JNU and N.Iqbal Singh's 1978-book 'The Andaman Story' from Vikas Publishing House (New Delhi). In spite of all these, there had been a void in our understanding and description of the language and society in the Andaman Islands which had been filled by the two authors. We hope that the work will be useful to a great extent. It is needless to say that there have been more recent works on the island including our own project work on the Nicobar Islands in particular and we will soon be out with a good description of those islands also. The present work gives a comprehensive account of the culturallingustic space and the changes these islanders have undergone over a period of time, which will be a valuable material for today's researchers.

At this institute, we expect that this book will be heavily used by the teachers and researchers as a tool and will also be found useful both by the people and administrative officials in the islands. Specific comments on the aspect of production, including typographical and other errors that may have crept in or stylistic changes could be sent to Mr. S.B. Biswas, Manager, CIIL Press (e-mail: biswas@ciil.stpmy.soft.net).

The studies on the tribes inhabiting the Andaman Group of Islands are of more important and interesting subject matters for the anthropologists and the linguists because of their Negrito origin and complete isolation from the unknown past to the known past and till recently. From the very beginning of their contacts, both the administrators and other social scientists from different fields have shown interest in studying their customs and habits, physical type and languages. On their languages, the data collected by Colebrooke, the co-partner of Archibald Blair in 1789 from the persons whom he could interrupt near the present Chatam Island was the first specimen. E.H. Man, Colonal Temple and Alexander Ellis were the first to show keen interest on the study of their languages. E.M.Man after becoming the incharge of Andaman Homes in 1875 started his indepth study on the languages of the tribes of the South-Andaman. He wrote series of articles and had published two books; one on their habits and customs (1885) and the other on the language of the Aka-Bea tribe (1923).

M.V.Portman who succeeded E.H.Man in 1879 as the incharge of the ' Andaman Homes continued the tradition. He was the first person to give a comparative vocabulary for the five different languages spoken by the five different tribes of South Andaman. His publication brought out in 1898 not only included comparative vocabulary but also gave a small description of the languages of the following five different tribes: Aka-Bea, Akar-Bale, A-Puchikwar, Oko-Juwoi and Aka-Kol. Radcliffe Brown was the first to report the different tribes of the North and Middle Andaman. Based on his field-work that he conducted during 1906 and 1908, he could publish an article (1914) on the language of the tribe inhabiting Little Andaman Island, the Onge and kept a chapter on the languages of the different tribes of the Great Andaman in his book Andaman Islanders (1948). Mc Carthy was the first to give a small description of the languages of the Jarawa, with whom contacts have been established only very recently. Based on the data that he could collect in 1938 from some of the captives, he brought out a small book in 1940. Anthropological Survey of India continued the language researches among the Negritos of the Andaman Islands - R.C.Nigam (1964), Pranab Ganguli (1966), Dipankar Dasgupta and Suhnu Ram Sharma (1982) on the Onge language; D.N.Basu (1952) and S.Manoharan (1980, 1982,1983, 1986, 1989, 1997) on the language of the Great Andamanese and S.C.Nair (1979) on the language of the Jarawa are the outcome of the projects undertaken by the Anthropological Survey of India. The study on the language of the Jarawa is in progress.

The Central Institute of Indian Languages started to explore the languages of the Negritos from 1990 and has brought out Onge-Hindi Bilingual Primers, Andamanese-Hindi Bilingual Primers and pictorial glossaries on both the languages. Recently, the institute has brought out a hand-book on the languages of the Jarawa. The studies conducted by the Central Institute of Indian Languages are undertaken in collaboration with the Tribal Welfare Department of Andaman and Nicobar Administration. Currently both, the Central Institute of Indian Languages and the Anthropological Survey of India are engaged on the studies of the language of the Jarawa tribe who were hostile till recent past.

Though different administrators and anthropologists attempted to study the languages of the ten different tribes of the former ten different tribes of the Great Andaman Group, none of them except M.V.Portman, kept the individual languages apart. Man, and Brown gave a description of their languages in their ethnographic studies. But, on their languages, they have written in a general way as Andamanese language, except for the occasional words given for the different languages in their ethnographic description. Manoharan's field-works conducted during 1976-77 and in 1982 were extremely important in the series of field-works conducted among the Great Andamanese by different scholars. But, by that time their population was reduced to a minimum total of 23 persons.

Andaman and Nicober Islands, the floating islands of Bay of Bengal, being placed in between the Indian subcontinent and the Southeast Asian countries, were known to the sea voyagers atleast from the very beginning of the millennium. The existence of the Andaman Islands, the Insulae Bonae Fortunae of the Bay of Bengal has been mentioned by Cladius Ptolemy, the Greco-Roman geographer belonging to the second century A.D. He referred to these islands as Aathoudaimonos Island of Good Fortune (Portman, 1899: 50; Majumdar, 1975:35). Portman (1899:50) was of the view that Agathodaimon, the cartographer who prepared the maps of Ptolemy might have named these islands after himself. During the beginning of the millennium, they were known to the Chinese and Japanses travellers as Yeng-t'omang and Andaban respectively. I'Tsing, a Chinese monk belonging to 671-672 A.D. has referred to them as Andaban.

The first reference to the people of the islands, possibly has been made by the two Muhammadan wanderers, who in the ninth century travelled the greater parts of India and China and mentioned "these islands being inhabited by Negritos" (Mouat, 1863:7). Marco Polo, the Venetian traveller passed through these islands in 1290 A.D enroute to China and referred to them as Angamanian. The fifteenth century traveller, Nicolo Conti has called them as Andamania, the 'Island of Gold'. John Francis Gommeli, the seventeenth century Italian doctor called them as Andaimon. It appears from the common name used by the various travellers belonging to different periods of time; "all these terms seem obviously to be based on the Malaya name for the islanders, as the Malaya of the Peninsula have, for many centuries, used the islands for their piratical practices and for a trade of Andamanese slaves to their own country and Siam (this upto about 1860) and have known them by the term Handuman" (Andaman and Nicobar Gazatteer, 1908: 13). From time immemorial, these people have been referred to by the Malaya as Handuman, a corrupt form of Hanuman 'the monkey God' of Hindu mythology and the epic Ramayana (Bonington, 1931: 172). The term Angmanain used by Marco Polo, according to Colonal Yules is the Arabic (obique) dual indicating the two Andamans viz., the Great Andaman and the Little Andaman, inhabited by the people belonging to the same Negrito stock (Man, 1885: 2).

The Tang dynasty of China described the islands as the 'Land of Rakshasas' (Singh, 1994: 2). The Tanjore inscriptions of 1050 A.D. have mentioned the Andaman Islands as ti:maitti:vu (Singh, ibid). In the same inscriptions, the Nicobar Islands have been referred to as Nakkavaram. According to Krishnaswamy Iyengar, the over sea expeditions of Rajendra Chola II of the Tamil country included Nagadipa 'the great Nicobar' and Kardipa, 'the Car Nicobar' (Bonington, 1931: 172). "The Nancowry Island was connecting the Southern Indian empires and the Srivijaya empire of Java" (Radakrishnan, 1981: 40).

Marco Polo described the natives of the Andaman Islands as; "Angmanain is a very large island, not governed by a king. The inhabitants are idolaters, and are a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes and teeth resembling those of the canine species. Their dispositions are cruel, and every person, not being of their own nation, whom they can lay their hands upon, they kill and eat" (Masefield, 1908: 347). Some of the statements made by Marco Polo about the tribals of Andamans that; "the natives live on rice and milk and that they have coconuts and plantains are incorrect. It is evident that all he knew of the islands was derived from hear say' (Brown, 1949: 7-8). Master Caeser Frederik, who happened to pass through these islands in 1566 wrote 'From Nicubar to Pegu is, as it were, a row or chain of an infinite number of islands, of which many are inhabited with wild people, and they call those islands, the Island of Andemaon, and they call their people savage or wild because they eat one another also, these islands have war with one another, for they have small bargues and with them they take one another, and so eat one another, and if by evil chance any ship be lost on those islands, as many have been there is not one man of these ships lost there that escapeth uneated or unslain" (Frederik, 1625, Vol II: 710). Brown (1948:8) has made it clear that "Inspite of the repeated descriptions of the Andamanese by early writers as ferocious cannibals, there is good reason to think that they have not deserved quite so evil a reputation. If they had even been cannibals, they had certainly abandoned the custom by the time the islands were occupied in 1858. It is improbable that such inveterate maneaters, as they are supposed to have been, would have entirely altered their ways in the course of a century or two. The legend probably had its origin in the fact that the Andamanese attacked all strangers who landed on their coasts and (in the North Andaman, at any rate) often disposed of the bodies of slained enemies by cutting them into pieces and burning them on fire".

The hostile activities of the Andamanese tribes, never allowed any la:w 'outsider, ghost' to come in contact with them. The trend continued till 1858 A.D., the establishment of the first Penal Settlement in Port Blair and the third attempt to colonise the islands. The first Penal Settlement was established in March, 1858 "which inaugurated the ceremonial establishment of the outsiders" and the decrease of the population of the various Andamanese tribes, the natives of those islands (Manoharan, 1989: 4). The first attempt towards establishing friendly relations with the natives was initiated by Rev.H.Corbyn and the Chaplain at Port Blair. Initially, they built huts in Ross Islands which later came to be known as 'Andaman Homes' in 1863. Man, who became the officer in-charge of the Andaman Homes in 1875 was the first who made any serious attempts to study their customs and languages. Portman succeeded him in 1879. Portman kept the studies of their languages continued and he could describe at least five different languages (Bea, Bale, Puchikwar, Kol and Juwoi) spoken by the five different tribes of South Andaman. Radcliff-Brown studied the Andamanese tribes during 1906-1908. Most of his data were from the North Andaman tribes and by that time itself, most of the tribes of the South and Middle Andamans either started dwindling or at the verge of extinction.