Stories and songs of the great Andamanese - The Lost Horizon

New Delhi, July 9 The Andaman Islands Great Andaman, Little Andaman, and North Sentinel Islands have been home for milleniums to four tribes: The Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, and Sentinelese.

Their languages are known by the same name as that of the tribes. ‘Great Andamanese' is a generic term representing ten languages among a family of languages that were once spoken by ten different tribes living in the north, south, and middle of the Great Andaman Islands. These languages were mutually intelligible like a link in a chain.

However, today, Great Andamanese is a moribund language of the only-surviving pre-Neolithic tribe, breathing its last breath. When a language is on the verge of extinction, its history, culture, ecological base, knowledge of biodiversity, ethno-linguistic practices, and the identity of its community everything is endangered.

This is what prompted Anvita Abbi to conduct a research study to give life to the lost oral heritage of the vanishing world of the Great Andamanese.

"Voices from the Lost Horizon" (Niyogi Books) is a collection of a number of folk tales and songs of the Great Andamanese. They represent the first-ever collection rendered to Abbi and her team by the Great Andamanese people in local settings. The compilation comes with audio and video recordings of the stories and songs to retain the originality and orality of the narratives.

An example: Song 6: ‘Lele phurjole ?okhat korme lele'

Meaning: I swing your cradle of bamboo back and forth, back and forth.

This is a rare lullaby in Great Andamanese which describes the to-and-fro motion of a bamboo cradle.

Unfortunately, lullabies are lost to the community and at present, most Andamanese mothers put their babies to sleep without humming any lullaby.

Abbi is a distinguished researcher on minority languages and perhaps the only one in the Indian subcontinent who has done first-hand field study on all the six language families from the Himalayas to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

During her studies in 2003–2004, she identified a new language family of India the Great Andamanese, which was corroborated in 2005 by population geneticists. Her pioneering work was recognized by the Government of India and she was awarded the Padma Shri in 2013.

In 2015, she received the Kenneth Hale Award, the most prestigious in the field of linguistics, for her outstanding contribution to the documentation and description of Indian languages, from the Linguistic Society of America, where she was also elected as an honorary member.

Abbi taught linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University for 38 years and was the President of the Linguistic Society of India, and has been invited as a visiting professor and researcher at prestigious institutions in the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia.

She served for long as an expert from UNESCO on issues concerning languages. She has 22 books to her credit, including the Dictionary of the Great Andamanese Language, English-Great Andamanese-Hindi (2011) and A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language: An Ethnolinguistic Study (2013).