|
By Anosh Malekar Boa Senior, the last speaker of a language called Bo -- one of the ten Great Andamanese languages -- died last week in Port Blair. She was aged around 85. With her death, the language that may have constituted the sixth language family in India has become extinct
It was a quiet death amid the din caused by the war of words between politicians purportedly representing the interests of two mainstream languages -- Hindi and Marathi -- on mainland India. Nobody in the vast country even heard about it for days until a UK-based charity Survival International announced the death on its website. ‘Extinct: Andaman tribe’s extermination complete as last member dies’ read the chilling announcement on February 4, declaring the death of Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language, at the age of around 85 in the faraway Andaman Islands. With Boa Sr’s death last week, during which India celebrated 60 years of its existence as an independent republic, the country and the world lost a vital link to a language, and an important member of the Indian Ocean tribe that dates as far back as 65,000 years. “The announcement was first made by the well-known linguist Professor Anvita Abbi from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She knew Boa Sr for many years. It was only after it was picked up in the western media that India woke up,” said Professor Ganesh Devy, Baroda-based writer-activist who is behind the Sahitya Akademi’s Project on Literature in Tribal Languages and Oral Traditions, seeking to set the record straight. “Professor Abbi has been engaged for the past several decades with Boa Sr and other tribes on the Andaman Islands. But for her the world would not have known of the death of a language.” Abbi recalled that “since she (Boa Sr) was the only speaker of (Bo) she was very lonely as she had no one to converse with… But Boa Sr had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious.” “You cannot imagine the pain and anguish that I spend each day in being a mute witness to the loss of a remarkable culture and unique language,” Professor Abbi -- who runs the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (Voga) website -- added. “Boa Sr’s death was a loss for intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages, because they had lost “a vital piece of the jigsaw”. “It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times,” Abbi says on her website. “The Great Andamanese tribe speaks a language that no one else in the world does. A study suggests it may constitute the sixth language family in India.” Boa Sr lived in India’s Andaman Islands and was the oldest of the Great Andamanese, who now number just 52. Originally ten distinct tribes, the Great Andamanese were 5,000-strong when the British colonised the Andaman Islands in 1858. Most were killed or died of diseases brought by the colonisers. “Having failed to ‘pacify’ the tribes through violence, the British tried to ‘civilise’ them by capturing many and keeping them in an ‘Andaman Home’. Of the 150 children born in the home, none lived beyond the age of two. The surviving Great Andamanese (now) depend largely on the Indian government for food and shelter, and abuse of alcohol is rife,” Survival International said. After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30-40 years, but had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people. About surviving the Asian tsunami of December 2004, Boa Sr is reported to have told linguists: “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us ‘the earth would part, don’t run away or move’. The elders told us, that’s how we know.” B N Sarkar, an anthropologist with the Anthropological Survey of India, said: “Most of the Great Andamanese have forgotten their mother tongue and speak in Hindi now. They have been rehabilitated in Strait Island, located northeast of Port Blair, since 1978.” He noted that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage. Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old. The islands are often called an “anthropologist’s dream” and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world. Academics have divided the Andamanese tribes into four major groups -- the Great Andamanese, the Jarawa, the Onge, and the Sentinelese. Abbi is concerned that all except the Sentinelese have come into contact with “mainlanders” from India and have suffered from “imported illnesses”. The Great Andamanese are about 50 in number -- mostly children -- and live in Strait Island, near the capital Port Blair. The Onge community is also believed to number only a few hundred. The Jarawa have about 250 members and live in the thick forests of the Middle Andamans. Boa Sr reportedly expressed the view that the Jarawa tribe, that has not been decimated, was lucky to live in the forests away from the settlers who now occupy much of the islands. Writing on the issue, Abbi points out: “Languages are a connection to a culture that cannot be achieved in any other way. One cannot translate a people’s history, songs, stories, jokes, legends and way of life without losing key parts of them… Languages hold cultures together. Through language we can keep traditions and pass them on. Language is our first link to our heritage.” While across the world, English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese are becoming popular at the cost of less common languages, in India it is the mainstream languages of the various states that are dominating the so-called dialects mostly spoken by indigenous peoples. Professor Devy is worried that, like Boa Sr and her language Bo, there are many other languages in the country on the verge of extinction. “I am afraid this century is proving itself a century of global ‘phonocide’ (combining the word Greek ‘phonetics’ with the Latin word ‘cide’, or killing), not so much a century of genocide,” he said. “Especially in a country like ours, where the speakers of so many indigenous languages have been systematically silenced for nearly a century.” Sir George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1923) identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. The 1961 census reports mention a total of 1,652 ‘mother tongues’, of which 184 ‘mother tongues’ had over 10,000 speakers, and of which 400 ‘mother tongues’ had not been mentioned in Grierson’s survey; 527 were listed as ‘unclassified’. In addition, 103 ‘mother tongues’ were listed as ‘foreign’. In 1971, the linguistic data offered in the census was distributed in two categories, the officially listed languages of the 8th Schedule of the Constitution, and the other languages with a minimum of 10,000 speakers each. All languages spoken by less than 10,000 speakers were lumped together in a single entry ‘others’. Devy pointed out in one of his articles that during the re-organisation of Indian states after Independence, carried out along linguistic lines, only languages that had scripts were counted. The ones that had not acquired scripts, and therefore did not have printed literature, did not get their own states. Schools and colleges were established only for the official languages. The Indian state operates primary schools in nearly 50 Indian languages, and there are constitutional guarantees built in educational programmes aimed at promoting all listed languages. “But an unimaginably large number of children seem to join schools that charge exorbitant fees and use the English language as the medium of instruction. In sum, the schooling is all geared towards enabling children to join the 45,000 institutions of higher learning, more than 60% of which are devoted to information technology,” Devy said. He added that when a child joins a school giving instruction in an Indian language, it is seen as an act of social disadvantage. “Under these circumstances, the preservation of languages, particularly the ones that need a very special effort, is a daunting task, and not one that can be accomplished merely by initiating structural changes.” Devy is of the strong view that the creation of texts, dictionaries, glossaries and grammars in the declining languages will be useful; documentation, museumisation and archiving too will help. But if languages are to survive, communities must be given the dignity and respect they deserve, not as anthropological ‘others’, not as the last and underdeveloped traces of the self, but in their own right as deserving of respect because of who they are. “It takes centuries for a community to create a language. All languages created by human communities are our collective cultural heritage. Therefore, it is our collective responsibility to ensure that they do not face the global phonocide let loose in our time,” he said. Infochange News & Features, February 2010
|
