‘Voices From The Lost Horizon’

An Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal ,the three hundred Andaman Islands are known for their palm-lined, white-sand beaches, mangroves and tropical rainforests. The islands are home to small indigenous tribes. Singular as the Andamanese are, their stories and songs form a great cognitive content. This book is a tribute to the people and their oral traditions.

‘Voices From The Lost Horizon-Stories and Songs of the Great Andamanese’ by Anvita Abbi ( Niyogi Books/ New Delhi) with illustrations by Subir Roy is not only timely, it is a unique documentation too. Says the blurb of the book: ‘The Andaman islands-great Andaman, little Andaman, and North sentinel islands have been home for millennia 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.’

The great Andamanese is a stagnant language of the onlysurviving pre-Neolithic tribe, snorting its last breath. ‘When
a language is on the verge of extinction, its history, culture, ecological base, knowledge of the diversity, ethno-linguistic
practices, and the identity of its community-everything is endangered.’ That prompted Prof. 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’ is a collection of several folktales and songs of the great Andamanese. These stories and songs representing the first-ever collection were rendered to Prof. Abbi and her team by the great Andamanese people in local settings.

Professor Abbi who taught linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University for four decades and who was the President of the Linguistic Society of India is also a distinguished researcher on minority languages and possibly 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.

She had the good time to identify 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 most prestigious in the field of linguistics Kenneth Hale Award from the Linguistic Society of America for her outstanding contribution to the documentation and verbal description of Indian languages.

Author of Dictionary of the Great Andamanese Language. English-Great Andamanese- Hindi (2011) and A Grammar of
the Great Andamanese Language: An Ethnolinguistic Study Prof. Abbi has been invited as a visiting professor and researcher at prestigious institutions in the USA, Europe, Canada, and Australia. She served long as an expert from UNESCO on issues concerning languages.

Writes Abbi in the Preface of the book : ‘This is a collection of folktales and songs of the Great Andamanese. The
moribund language of the only surviving pre-Neolithic tribe, the remnants of the first migration out of Africa 70,000
years ago. When I visited the island in 2005, the surviving eight speakers informed us that due to loss of fluency in the
language, the narrative power in any of the two languages that they used was already lost.’

None of the speakers was proficient enough to tell any tales, either in Great Andamanese or in Andamanese Hindi-the former was already on the brink of extinction, while the latter was a pidgin with broken linguistic structures. It was the most daunting and challenging task to extract stories from a tribe that had heard no stories in the last 40-50 years.’ Therefore, these stories and songs represent the first-ever collection rendered to the compiler by the Great Andamanese people.

Also, the compilation comes with audio and video recordings of the stories and songs to retain the originality and orality of the narratives. With the extinction of storytellers and singers, this is the only collection of 10 rare stories and 46 rare songs in the native language.

With her personal interest developing in tribal languages, she somewhere in her journey realised how these languages
were actually endangered because of a lack of institutional support. In 2000, she convinced the director of Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, to fund a pilot survey of Andaman. The results were positive enough
for Abbi to secure funding from the University of London and thus began her comprehensive work on the Great Andamanese language in 2005.

In about 175 pages with detailed field notes, explanations, exuberant illustrations plus the original songs rendered both in English and Hindi, Prof Abbi’s book is a brilliant effort in bringing out the autochthonous of a tribe and their nearly-extant traditions. Niyogi Books must be congratulated for this publication because it has significantly contributed to the preservation of India’s extinct languages.

By-Bhaskar Parichha

‘Voices From The Lost
Horizon’
Anvita Abbi
Niyogi Books
New Delhi 110020
Rs 995

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