Voices from the Lost Horizon- Stories and Songs of the Great Andananese

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About the Book The Andaman Islands-Great Andaman, Little Andaman, and North Sentinel Islands have been home for millenniums 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 10 languages among a family of languages that were once spoken by 10 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 the biodiversity, ethno linguistic practices, and the identity of its community everything is endangered. This is what prompted Prof. Anvita Abbi to conduct a research 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 a number of folk tales and songs of the Great Andamanese. These stories and songs represent the first-ever collection rendered to Prof. Abbi and her team by the Great Andamanese people in local settings. The compilation comes with audio-visual recordings of the stories and songs to retain the originality and orality of the narratives.

About the Author PROFESSOR ANVITA 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, 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.

Prof. 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 USA, Europe, Canada, and Australia. She served long as an expert for the 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).

Foreword Fifteen years ago, Boa Sir, the last speaker of Bo, a language of the Great Andamanese family, made an impassioned appeal to her interlocutor: 'Don't let the language slip away, keep a hold on it: Elder Boa Sir passed away on 26 January 2010. As far as we know, there are no other living speakers or even 'rememberers' of the Bo language.

This tragic reality is offset-albeit only modestly-by the fact that Boa Sir could not have made her petition to a listener better positioned to recognize and accept the challenge. For some years already, Boa Sir had been in conversation with internationally-celebrated linguist and award-winning champion of marginalized and Indigenous languages, Anvita Abbi. Since her first trip to the Andaman Islands in December 2001, Professor Abbi has worked tirelessly to ensure that the unique linguistic and cultural traditions of the Andaman’s would not vanish from human consciousness without record. Voices from the Lost Horizon: Stories and Songs of the Great Andamanese, taken together with Professor Abbi's large oeuvre of important and interdisciplinary publications, offers a tangible demonstration of this commitment.

Preface This is a collection of folk tales and songs of the Great Andamanese. T a 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 not heard any stories in the last 40-50 years. Hence, these stories and songs represent the first-ever collection rendered to the compiler 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.labelWith the extinction of storytellers and singers, as mentioned in the foreword, this is the only collection of 10 rare stories and 46 rare songs obtained in the native language.

Introduction A cluster of approximately 324 islands and islets in the Bay of Bengal, running from north to south and located southeast of the Indian subcontinent, constitutes the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Andaman Islands lie between 10°13'-13°30N latitude and 90°15'-93°10E longitude. These are truly oceanic islands never having been connected to the mainland during Pleistocene glaciations. They are separated from the Malay Peninsula b the Andaman Sea, an arm of the Bay of Bengal, and are pa of the union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands which belong to India. The Andaman Islands are broadly divisible into two sets of groups, Great Andaman and Little Andaman.

The area covered by the Andaman Islands is made up of isle clusters. From north to south, the various islands are North Andam Middle Andaman, South Andaman, Baratang, Ritchie Archipelago and North and South Sentinel. Collectively, these are called the G Andaman.

**Contents and Sample Pages**