People

When we met the Great Andamanese people in 2001 December there were only 36 members in the community with nine or ten members speaking the language at varying competency-level. There were no accounts of each of the members available with any government or private body. When we visited the community again in 2005 it was felt that we first must take note of each member of the community. The bio-data was collected and Dr Alok Das was entrusted the job of writing about his impressions of each of the Great Andamanese folks that he communicated with. Subsequently, we had to add on some material when any member left this world and deprived us of their company and friendship. By 2006 the community had enlarged and there were 50 members, mostly children. As you roll down the page you will see the Generalia prepared by Alok Das of the community members in 2006. Also, see the Current situation. 

Profile

Boa Sr. is the eldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe. She is about 80 years old and looks rather fit for her age. Otherwise, how else could she have managed to climb a hill when tsunami hit Strait Island? She is also the only member in the tribe who does not have anybody in her family surviving. Her mother, To, was a Bo, and father, Renge, was a Jeru. She was married to Nao Sr., a Jeru, at an early age. Her parents’, as well as her own marriage only testifies further a point made by her that in earlier times marriages used to take place between different language communities, i.e. different tribes. A preference for the same could easily be seen in most of the earlier matrimonial alliances. For example, out of six most senior members of the tribe, which we have recognized as having four different family lineages, four have had mixed parents.

Although she claims Jeru to be her mother tongue, which might well be the case, her language has quite an evident and strong influence of Bo. Nonetheless, she is the most proficient of the surviving Great Andamanese speakers and still retains a vast repertoire of songs and narratives. Many of her songs have such strong influence of Bo that most of the other speakers of Great Andamanese today are unable to derive any much meaning from them. Little wonder then that Boa Sr., like most of the other Great Andamanese, insists that there is no similarity between Sare, Bo, Khora and Jeru. As we moved on in the project she confirmed that she was primarily the Bo speaker and her claim on Jeru came from the dictats that the officials gave her. 

She is presumably the richest surviving member of the Great Andamanese tribe in terms of linguistic-reservoir. Her love for life is quite evident when she says that she would love to stay in Port Blair. For a society which was not acquainted even with a barter system, it is interesting to observe that she understands the value of modern currency. Among the things she would often ask for are scissors, blades, and different biscuits (pickies). It is a treat to watch her when she bursts into laughter upon things she would herself say. Our predecessors would have very much been like her!

Obituary

Boa Senior. known as chaachii died on 26th January, 2010 at 11.30 pm in the Port Blair hospital. She was the last speaker of Bo language. It pains to see how one-by-one we are losing speakers of Great Andamanese and the language is getting extinct. This is a very fast erosion of the indigenous knowledge-base that we all are helplessly witnessing. She was the only member who remembered the old songs. Most of the songs on this website are sung by her. One may refer to the latest book Voices from the Lost Horizon to witness videos of her songs. Though Boa had no one to talk to in her native language she was often sighted talking to birds in her language as she maintained that birds were her ancestors and understood her. She was very concerned about the death of the language and wanted the young generation to learn Great Andamanese. She remembered songs and would sing while working. I can not forget her full- throated laugh which she obliged us with very often. In fact, each elicited sentence will be followed either by a smile or by a laugh as she was amused to hear herself. Boa Sr. was dislocated from her native place Mayabandar, North of Andaman in the early seventies by the government of India. All the Great Andamanese tribes moved to Strait Island, 53 nautical miles towards the east of Port Blair in the early seventies so that they could interact among themselves and could be protected from the outside inversion. Boa was respected by all her folks. She and Boro Sr. were friends and after Boro’s death in November 2009, Boa became very lonely.

Special mention should be made of the fact that her death was publicized all over the world and every TV channel of some importance in Europe, America and Australia covered her demise as the ‘Breaking News’. Some of the excerpts can be read at the link Media.  The journalists' world over realized that with the death of Boa Sr., the world has lost the last link to an ancient civilization and an old language. She was a celebrity overnight but alas when she was alive no one knew of her!

Profile

Boro, female, 74 years, is the second oldest member of the tribe. Frail in health and introvert by nature, she rarely hesitates in showing her displeasure at anything and everything. Deep within, she is very soft and passionate and one needs to really get close to her to extract any information from her. You have to fine-tune her like an old Radio-set. Her frank and uninhibited gestures are a treat to follow. Her typically feminine negation reminds us that femininity is as old as human civilization.

Obituary

Boro died in November 2009 in Port Blair. She was hospitalized for a long period though we are not very sure what she was suffering from. She was the last speaker of the Khora language. She had shifted to Andamani Hindi much more readily than her friends such as Surmai and Boa Sr. With her we have lost the world of Khora, an ancient world-view.

Profile

Peje is now the second eldest male member of the tribe. His father Ilfe was a Jeru, whereas his mother Muku was a Khora. He is also the stepson of Boro who had later married Ilfe. Born from mixed parents, Peje is linguistically most different from the rest of the tribe. He is the one who possesses a labialized [l] in his speech, which is not present in the speeches of anybody else in the tribe.

Peje is married to Noe with seven children, four sons and three daughters. Two of their children are married. Peje is one of those who still spend most of his time hunting and gathering in the scant but virgin jungles of Strait Island.

Profile

One of the most introverted and submissive of the Great Andamanese men, Golat has physical features surprisingly closer to the mongoloid type than to the Negritos. We were told that he was fathered by a person from the Karen tribe living in North Andaman. He is very fond of fishing and would often go for the same even while in Port Blair. He along with his family no more wants to live on Strait Island and already lives in a rented house in Port Blair. It’s been a task almost impossible to get him to speak in his mother tongue – Jeru. He speaks Andamani Hindi.

Profile

He is the eldest male member of the tribe and a true heir to his brother the former king, Jirake. He is by far the best specimen of the vanishing language. He knows three of the four languages which have come together to form what we call today the Present Great Andamanese (PGA). He is very intelligent and interacts well with outsiders, so much so that he often displayed a remarkable understanding of the linguistic nuances hidden in our relentless queries. He too is unrelenting in giving. He is employed as a paramedic at the medical dispensary in Strait Island, which he is very negligent with. He possessed immense knowledge about the flora and fauna of the Andamans. He is the only one who remembers folk tales and marvels in indigenous knowledge. He breathed his last on 22nd February 2009. 

Obituary

The younger son of Maro, the father and Kaubo, the mother Nao Jr breathed his last on February 22, 2009 due to kidney failure.

Nao Jr. was a rare individual who remembered many aspects of the Andamanese life. It was he who knew the Great Andamanese language, its ecology and folk tales. He was the sole light house who showed me the way whenever I was lost in the sea of ignorance. His knowledge about birds, their names and habits, flora and fauna and insects was remarkable. This showed how keen an observer he was. But for him our dictionary which has more than 150 words for fishes, and 121 words for birds and several other species names for shells, corals and sea creatures could not be enriched. He coauthored with me the first ever Book of Letters of Great Andamanese.

           He was the only one in the community who remembered ten folk tales and he narrated one by one in a manner which will make the most educated teacher envious of her narrative skills. He had mastered the use of the digital tape recorder and would not be satisfied unless he listened to the whole narration before proceeding further. His favourite one was ‘Phertajido’, which exposed me to his emotional side of his personality. He was very sensitive and caring person. He was soft spoken to the extent that at times our tape recorder missed recording him.

       Nao was very lonely especially after his wife Boa left him. This was the prime reason that he took to drinking. He wanted to give up the habit but could not. However, he had a decency of not making a scene or appearing in a drunk state in front of me or for that matter any woman.

His willingness to cooperate with me and with my team only shows that he was aware of the importance of language documentation as well as of the significance of his native language. His speech was primarily Jeru but was influenced by Sare and Bo.

With his death we have lost a gem of the Great Andamanese community and knowledge tank of one of the oldest heritage of the country.

Nao was the younger brother of Late Jirake the Chief. His wife came from a Khora community. He has left behind a son Bea aged 11 studying in the Vivekanand School of Port Blair.

Profile

Very stylish, elegant, outspoken and smart is this lady, who is very fond of modern cosmetics. No wonder her attractive looks defy her age. She prefers Port Blair to Strait Island, despite her husband’s liking for the latter. In absence of the former King Jirake, she is the one who represents the community in their deliberations with the administration as well as for anything else. She is still one of the best speakers of the Great Andamanese language. At present, she keeps herself on Strait Island as she met an accident and burnt part of her face which she is very conscious of. 

Profile

Surmai is the wife of the recently deceased king of the Great Andamanese tribe, Jirake. She is 48 years old and one of those senior ladies of the tribe, who are tipped to become the head of the tribe in absence of the king and also of any legitimate male contender for the same. Both her parents were from Jeru tribe and her mother tongue is also Jeru. She has ten children; six sons and four daughters. Besides, she also has a step daughter in Lico, who is from Jirake’s earlier marriage. Only two of her children are married. One of her daughters, namely, Reya, has an unmarried male child. She does not want to disclose the name of the father and this is quietly accepted by the community. In absence of sufficient eligible bachelors in the tribe, most of Surmai’s children have little option but to marry outside the tribe. This is not easy given the fact that Government approval is required before they could do so, and government policy, not surprisingly, is against this. But one of her daughters Renge, who works with the Archaeological Survey of India, married outside her tribe, a Bengali boy.

Profile

Lico (pronounced as licho) is the first child of Jirake from his first wife, Loka, who was from the ‘now-extinct’ Pucikwar (Pujjukar) tribe. It is important here to note that she was brought up by her foster maternal grandparents; her grandfather being a Pucikwar and grandmother a Sare. Her biological grandparents were both Khora. Her mother Loka had died just after she gave birth to Lico. She is married to Golat with five children; three sons and two daughters. Only one of her children is married.

Lico presently works with the Education department of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and she is one of the smart women in the tribe.

Obituary

With profound grief, I would like to share that Lico, (pronounced as Licho by her community members), one of the last speakers of Sare, the Great Andamanese language breathed her last on April 4th, 2020. She was not only my friend but one of those who taught me the Present Great Andamanese language. There are so many years of memories of the last 20 years that I had known her it is difficult to fathom that she would not be there when I visit Port Blair next. Great Andamanese people, according to the population geneticists are the remnants of the first migration from Africa that took place 70,000 years ago. Licho worked with the Education department of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and she was one of the smartest women of the tribe. A vibrant and articulate woman, she had opposed the construction of a road through the territory of the Jarawa, another endangered tribe living on the Andaman Islands. “The Jarawa will be decimated, just like us,” she feared.

My very first introduction to her was when I reached the Island in 2001-2002. She came out to be a bold and forthright person, who was also an activist, ready to fight with the administration for the rights of tribals. She was ambitious and wanted her children to be educated in Nicobar so that they keep away from the city of Port Blair which she considered a city of vices. She not only taught me the Present Great Andamanese (PGA) language, a Koiné of a kind (mixture) where words are drawn from four North Andamanese languages viz. Bo, Khora, Sare, and Jero/Jeru but the grammar is based on Jero. She hailed from the Sare background, as her foster grandmother who brought her up, was a Sare speaker. With Licho’s death, we have lost the last speaker of Sare.

Her speech was influenced by Sare. She was one of those who could identify which word came from which of the North Andmanese language. Her married daughter, Kobo died several years ago in childbirth due to lack of timely medical facilities. Kobo had very sophisticated manners. All her children are married except the youngest son Berebe.

I was honoured to have her launch the first book of folk tale of Great Andamanese creation myths. 

When I was working on the grammar of the language, I would visit her at Adi Basera—the Tribal Home for the Great Andamanese tribes in Port Blair. She would leave whatever work she was involved with and sit with me for hours without showing any sign of boredom or tiredness. Her judgement about the grammaticality of the sentences helped me in framing the grammatical rules of the language. Often, she would identify the etymology of a word in the language and inform whether it belonged to Sare or Khora or Jeru. I cannot forget the day when I cracked the puzzle of the PGA grammar (as despite my wide experience working on the languages of India, I could not get hold of the grammar of this language) I was in Leipzig, Germany. I called her on the phone and corroborated with her a few sentences that I made up myself to test the grammaticality.  She was thrilled to know that every sentence I spoke was perfect. She was so happy as she said in Hindi "you have caught our language!" This was the biggest gift for me. 

Although she was known in her community as a person who would pick up fights easily, I came to know her as a strong individual who struggled despite all the odds for the betterment of her children. She was battered and bashed but nothing brought her spirits down. She carried the legacy of one of the oldest civilizations and its language on this earth. While others in the community were proud to forget their language, she remembered the heritage language and often lamented that the community at large had taken to Andamanese Hindi. Licho was proud of her ancestry—those who were known for valour, courage and fearlessness. She told me that she was taught hunting in the jungle by her father and grandfather.

She had a soft side too. When I reached the Strait Island in March 2008, I was disappointed to see that the so-called ‘government guest house’ did not even have basic facilities such as clean sheets for the bed or mosquito nets, despite the fact that these items are supplied free by the administration for the use of the researchers. On seeing this dismal situation, she took no time rushing back to her basti ‘hamlet’ and brought back clean sheets, a cover, a pillow, and a new mosquito net for me. It was a large room with three empty wooden beds. I remember vividly it was an eerie dark night, with bats flapping their wings somewhere in the room, quite scary with strong winds lapping against the windows, raining hard outside and the room was pitch dark as the Island had no electric power. The room was next to a swamp created by the tsunami, with frogs croaking and crickets making loud noises. Licho sensed uncomfortableness and fear on my face. She immediately offered to sleep in the room to give me company. I was touched by her offer. She ran again to her home in the rain to fetch another set of beddings for herself. I remember we kept on talking past midnight like two lost friends meeting after ages. She was the only friend I had in Port Blair and I never failed to visit her whenever I went to the Andamans. She was very unhappy due to her varied illnesses but never forgot to smile.

I have shared happiness on many of her joyful family occasions like the birth of her youngest son Berebe, the marriage of her children, announcements of their employment and promotions as well as sorrows of losing her father and her daughter Kobo. She was the only person from the tribe who was available on the phone and thus she turned out to be the most indispensable contact person. In fact, she trusted me to the extent that she would call me even when I was outside India in Germany or London or in the USA and seek my advice on various household decisions as well as how she should invest her savings or whether she should take a loan to buy a boat.

Recently, her children visited me at home when they came to New Delhi for sightseeing. Both Lephe her daughter (also known as Tamtam) and her son Buli married outside the Andamanese community. 

I have developed a kind of reverence for the Great Andamanese language primarily because of my association with Licho and Nao Jr (who died in January 2009), that has helped me in writing an encyclopedic talking dictionary, a grammar of the language, material on indigenous knowledge, a book of alphabets, a book of names and classification of birds, a CD of songs and hundreds of images. Most of the materials are being archived with the ELDP program of SOAS https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI64241 and on this website. Refer to our publications for more information

Licho had been ailing with multiple diseases of the heart and lungs including tuberculosis which she had been fighting for many years. I met her last in 2019 at her home in Port Blair. May her soul rest in peace!!