An Island of Stories  
Folk Tales of the Great Andamanese.

Reliving past Memories
(An account of eliciting stories from the tribes)

Imagine a scenario where mothers tell no bedtime stories to their children. Imagine a scenario where people spend their entire lives with their children without telling them any stories and fables. Imagine a people entirely oblivious of their heritage, past practices and beliefs, utterly unaware of the richness of intangible cultural assets and indigenous knowledge. Can such an unthinkable state of affairs come to pass?  Unfortunately yes. This may happen, and this does happen when the heritage language dies and the succeeding generation ceases to speak or even understand its heritage language, a phenomenon known as moribund language in the discipline of Linguistics.

Regrettably, the present Great Andamanese language, perhaps one of the world’s oldest languages, is a language of this kind. Neither the present community of the Great Andamanese remembers any folk tales nor have the living members ever narrated any tales to their children. The functionality of the language is past, representing a pathetic situation where no one even feels the loss. As if stories were never told in this society! As if the art of narration never existed! For the first time in more than thirty five years of linguistic fieldwork experience, I encountered this dismal state of the ‘lack of the feeling of loss.’

When I asked pointedly, “Don’t you feel bad that no one among you has heard any story in the last forty years?” The answer – was a quick “No”. When I ventured further, “Do you want someone to tell you the stories that your great-grand-parents would have known?” their only reply was in the form of a hopeless counter-question “What’s the use?”

 The state of affairs when  the members of a speech community adopt a ‘couldn’t care  less’ attitude makes the task of eliciting stories, or any story at all,  next to impossible. Not only does one have to make the community see the importance of the exercise but there is also the need to motivate, at least some of them, especially those who are above the age of fifty, to remember what had been told to them when they were children growing up in the jungles of the North Andamans. I was certainly not prepared for these two daunting jobs but by my knowledge of the past heritage of the language, its structure and the additional knowledge given to us by the current research in genetics, it was clear that the Andamanese were the last survivors of the first human migration out of Africa  during the Pre-Neolithic  period. This spurred me to plunge myself into this most difficult arena. Needless to say, the efforts were worth their value in gold. What I describe in the following pages is my journey of eliciting the tales, the kathaa yaatra and how I finally succeeded in achieving the impossible.

Out of the six or seven adult speakers, not all fluent in their respective languages, two people turned out to be really helpful. One was Boa Sr., a woman of 84 years and the other was our main consultant Nao Jr., a man of 55 years.  Nao was the one who narrated most of the stories given here in this book. Each story, for him, was like going down memory lane. At times, he would stop, think, and think again, trying to remember and  when he totally failed to recollect the exact sequence of the events in the tale, he would ask to be  excused, saying he would come back to see me the next day. I confess that in the first visit in December 2005 we were so preoccupied with eliciting data for the main objectives of this project, i.e. dictionary making and grammar writing, that we did not pay much attention to the issue of story telling.

It is commonly known that in a situation when a language is dying, the process is accompanied by the continuous loss of the stock of fables, tales and stories. Great Andamanese is no different. Out of the total population of fifty three, only six or seven members remembered the language and that too not very fluently. A few members, not more than four, could sing a line or two of some songs but no one, no one at all remembered any story. However, one of my research assistants had collected some information on a story that related to a creation myth. He had some elicited sentences but not the complete form. Though on the face of it we seemed to have ample time, for reasons I gave to Johanna Nichols, friend and fellow linguist in an email sent soon after reaching Port Blair we were desperately running against time.               

When I look back, I realize that it must be my abnormally curious and inquisitive nature which motivated Nao to remember and narrate the stories that he did. However, I cannot take the entire credit since Nao did strive hard to remember and to render these stories with utmost care. Soon, he became obsessed with the idea of delivering these tales, thinking of them day and night. Suddenly, he became aware of the lost world that he had ceased to live in. It was his sheer desire to relive and experience the good old days when his Abba, the father or the grandfather used to take him hunting in the jungle or in the sea. When he travelled in his boat in the middle of the night to hunt for dugong, he had often witnessed the sparkle and the shimmering streak of light emitted from the sides of the dugong swimming fast in the sea water. There were times when the dugong hit the boat from below and split it in two parts, he lying with his mother on one while his Abba on the other trying to save the remains of the boat in the moonlit night. The vacuum he had been experiencing for a long time suddenly seemed unbearable. And this newly awakened urge to share all his experiences with me helped him to revive his memories and narrate these wonderful stories. I am sure, while I write this; he must be remembering some more stories and reliving the ones that he narrated to me. Such touching nuances precede the stories that are presented in this book.
 
When Nao decided to help me record the stories, he promised to narrate the one he distinctly remembered. This was the creation myth, The Tale of Ancient Phertajido, the story of human evolution. As part of the project on Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese we were to spend sometime on Strait Island, the island which is 53 nautical miles away from the city of Port Blair and is banned for public visits. To reach the island one has to take a ship, which sails only twice a week. The ships never have Strait Island as their destination but have a brief stop at the island en-route to Mayabandar or Diglipur.

It was in January 2006 when I went to Strait Island along with two research assistants for the second time in the five weeks that we spent in the Andaman Islands. The AAJVS (Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti) had given us government guest-house accommodation of two bare-walled rooms, each with a dirty but functional attached bathroom, windows without wire mesh, and a hard, wooden bed to sleep on.  The only other furniture in the roomwas three plastic chairs for each of us (one for each, Narayan, Abhishek, the research assistants in the project and myself.) Flying objects, birds, bats or insects had full freedom to roam our rooms at night since the sultry, humid nights and fan-less rooms precluded closing the windows. The good old Indian mosquito net was the only shield we had against these intruders. The only luxuries here were the sheet which to cover ourselves and the other, the solar power generated electricity connection at 9 pm for two hours, every night, enough to facilitate the charging of our recorders, cameras and other equipment.

As Nao Jr was seemingly always busy either ‘on duty’ in the only Medical unit on Strait Island, or fishing in the early morning or late evening, or just sleeping, his favourite pass-time, he only agreed to help me record the folk tale in the night after 9 p.m. I agreed to his terms as I was happy to find at least one person in the entire localityof eight households who claimed to remember a tale. I was very excited and was prepared to receive him at the stipulated time.

I remember distinctly it was January 21 2006. Nao came to the guest house, thinking that he would finish the job in one evening. Little did he know that linguists have the bad habit of checking each and every word and phrase that is uttered. In the very first sitting, he tried to narrate the story in Andamani Hindi. He would halt in between, groping for the right words or the right expressions. When he was not satisfied by the Hindi version, he would suddenly revert to the appropriate Andamani word. This was rather exciting and educative for me. The long lost language was getting revived gradually in an ancient tale. I never expected this!

The crickets and frogs had started making noises in the Tsunami-created marshes and swamps behind our guest house, the supplier of solar power had been switched off and we were all sitting in the dark. We knew it was past 11 p.m. Nao wanted to retire. I extracted a promise from him to visit us the next day, at his convenience but with the Andamani version and not with the Hindi one. He said he had forgotten it all. When I insisted that he could remember at night while going to bed, he agreed but was sure that he would fail in this attempt. “chaaliis saal se sunaa nahiin, kaun bolega?” (It had been forty years since I heard any story, who would narrate?) He was sure he would disappoint me.

I was making some grammar notes sitting on the wooden bed the next afternoon. I saw Nao standing at my door with an expectant look on his face. The moment I raised my face he said “kuch kuch yaad aataa hai” (I could remember a little). I invited him inside and then we sat around the bed turned make-shift table. He started narrating the same story in short Great Andamanese phrases, not very fluently but code-mixed with Hindi. This is how our long journey of Great Andamanese narration started, a journey into the past. I would interrupt him to get Hindi equivalents and he could, with 90% success rate render one. It took us several days, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes after 9 p.m. as he was always busy fishing by the side of the jetty after  sunset, to get the full version of the narration of Phertajido and thesubsequent word for word translation. This was a great story and I could see he loved narrating it.

The translated version of Narayan had some gaps, which I realized only after coming back to Delhi. I decided to go through the entire process again in the next trip. I was lucky enough as Nao obliged me in the next trip to Port Blair in December 2006, almost eleven months after our previous visit.

On reaching Port Blair in December 2006, I realized that Nao was now on Strait Island and the officials at the AAJVS were not only non-cooperative in honouring the already sanctioned permit to visit the Strait Island, but were also on the lookout to catch and arrest me if I pursued my research 1. There was no way of informing Nao of my arrival at Port Blair. The Strait Island had no phone connections. The only wireless communication that Strait Island had was in the hands of the Government officials. I had no option but to visit the Port Blair jetty and take the chance of meeting my tribal friends on the ship. Ships for Strait Island leave very early in the morning, about 5.45 a.m. I made it there. A crew member from one of the ships recognized me. By 2006, many local officials had started recognizing me as a friend of the Great Andamanese tribes, especially those who worked on ships and boats. As soon as this man, a ticket checker at the departure gate saw me, he indicated towards the next ship moored in the distance and said “See Reya, she is going to the Strait Island”. This was the girl from the Great Andamanese tribe who had married a Bengali and I knew very well. I ran towards her, lest I lose her. She immediately recognized me and did namaste. She introduced me to her husband. She asked me “kab aayaa” (when did you come?). Reya is one of those Great Andamanese tribal girls who loves to amalgamate in our society and is happy to forget her heritage language. I told her that I desperately wanted to see Nao. She informed me that Nao was on Strait Island and had no plans to visit Port Blair. My world was coming to pieces.

I knew requesting the administration to transport Nao Jr. to the city of Port Blair would not help. It is really demeaning to see that these tribes are kept as captives on their own land and are restricted from meeting other Indian citizens. Had it not been the initiative of the Great Andamanese themselves, they would have never befriended locals and visitors like us. I immediately fished out a piece of paper from my purse, wrote a note in Hindi in bold letters and gave it to Reya to pass on to Nao. I told her to ask him to get it read from one of the school-going children. I also told her that the sole purpose of my coming to the Andamans was to meet Nao and other tribal friends, but Nao in particular. She promised to deliver the message. This was what I wrote to Nao in Hindi. Following is the rough translation of what I wrote on 19th December 2006.
Dear Nao,
I have come to Port Blair to meet you. If you have no problem, please visit me for few days. I cannot come to the Strait Island. Hence I will wait for you here. I am staying in the Circuit House.
With affection
Annu madam 2

After giving this short note, I visited Adi Basera, the home [a kind of guest house with cooking facilities] for tribals near the Central Secretariat in Port Blair. I could only find loitering dogs and closed doors. I returned to the Circuit House with a heavy heart.

It was not until 21 December 2006 that I got an opportunity to meet Nao Jr again who did respond to my humble request and made the journey back to the city of Port Blair just for me. He came to the Circuit House and told me that he had got my letter. He needed some money desperately and I obliged. He looked frail, weak and sad. When I commented on his health he immediately complained of loneliness and the desolateness of his life. I brought him to my room and we talked of gone by months, his solitary life on Strait Island and the irritating officials.

He was missing my student Abhishek and had tears in his eyes when he mentioned his name. He told me the Phertajido story all over again and helped me translate word to word. This story is very dear to him, I think; it satisfies his internal desire of creating a soul-mate for himself. I remember vividly that when I stood up to bid him goodbye that evening, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. When I saw this, I asked him point blank “you love this story, don’t you?” He nodded in affirmation. He finds that creating your own partner according to your own liking is the best part of the story.When I commented that “perhaps you like this story so much because you also feel that you could create a partner of your choice and not one like Boa, right?”3 , he said in Hindi “this is the greatest love story I have ever come across in my life”. His voice was hardly audible with emotions.

Nao visited me the next two days to complete this story. When he visited the Circuit House on the 23rd evening he was very drunk and was in no state to help me with my translation. He was very sorry for himself and promised to visit me the next day. He did come the next day with his son Bea, aged 8, who used to go to the Vivekanand School at Port Blair. We finished inter-linearizing the story, while Bea watched us and I further collected some words for birds and reptiles for my dictionary. Bea helped me with some words and I realized that he knew a couple of names of the birds because Nao had been teaching him whenever they visited the jungle on Strait Island.

On Christmas afternoon, 25 December 2006, Nao visited me accompanied by his son again and to my surprise, volunteered to narrate a new story of Juro:the Head Hunter. I shelved my linguistic work and sat down with my notebook. He instructed me, to my amusement, to switch on the recorder. He wanted in return a gift of a mobile phone. I promised to present him one and I kept my promise. The story of Juro was a bonanza for me as I never expected to hear anything after the story of Phertajido. While narrating the story, he tried to establish the similarity between Juro and the Goddess Kali for my understanding when I asked how a woman could eat human flesh. He was not sure whether Juro wore the necklace of human skulls as the goddess Kali did. This story also reveals the superstition that people who die unexpectedly are born again, or turn into ghosts to trouble the community. To avoid this, it is enjoined that the dead must be cremated and not buried. This ensures complete annihilation of the person concerned. From the stories, I learnt that there are four kinds of cremation in the society.

Juro’s story raised mixed feelings of remorse and pity. Juro’s son loved his mother but could not bear her atrocious habits of head hunting and thus he becomes instrumental in her killing. Nao thought what he did was right and beneficial for the society. I was amazed at the way he compared Juro with the Hindu goddess Kali.

After that, he narrated two more stories in the next few visits. He had by now started enjoying narrating stories to me and had realized the importance of the whole exercise. These stories were Maya Lephai, another favourite, and Maya Kabo and Jire. The latter had elements of verbal revenge in the form of a pronouncement of a curse. Till then, I had no idea that the concept of the ‘curse’ existed in the Great Andamanese society. He kept insisting on the Hindi word antaryaami [the one who knows the inner self] for Maya Kabo. Nao had mixed feelings while narrating this story. On the one hand, he was all praise for the hunting skills of Jire, specially at night when the visibility is very low, on the other he had respect for Maya Kabo, who he knew all but cursed Jire to die. A slightly  different version of the same story was narrated by 84 year old Boa Sr. to Narayan on Strait Island in 2006. The story is given here in the current book. Despite the arrest of the language in use and its near total extinction, the description given by Nao in this story is very telling.

It was interesting the way he come on his own to narrate the story of Maya Lephai. Every time he would leave for home, I would remind him to think of his parents before sleeping, how they travelled together in the sea for hunting and how his mother or grandmother must have narrated stories to him as a little child. My zeal for getting more and more infected him. One early morning, I had not even had had my morning cup of tea, when he knocked at my door. His eyes were red and he looked disturbed. When I opened the door, he said “Madam, I could not sleep the whole night as I remembered this story and you have to listen to me”. What more could I have asked for?

I invited him in and made him comfortable by offering him a cup of tea. Over tea, he told me that he was trying to remember the story of Maya Lephai which was narrated to him by his Abba when he was about seven years old. He told me that he liked the story very much even then but somehow had forgotten all about it. His bloodshot eyes told me how he must have waited for the dawn to break to come to me to narrate the tale of Maya Lephai. He first narrated it in Andamani Hindi for me to understand it easily. He then gave it to me phrase by phrase in Great Andamanese and then followed it by the Hindi translation. I was amazed at the organized technique of giving information. He was better than many of us in the educated world. Whenever I got stuck, he would repeat and explain. The story has many dialogues and Nao obliged me by speaking out each and every one of them with the proper intonation. Not only this, he would put the ear phones in his ears and would ask me to rewind the tape so that he could listen to his own voice. Sometimes, he used to hear his own rendering to remember the next episode or the next sequence in the story. All this was very educative for me. He had learnt to use the tape recorder and was assisting me unknowingly to achieve the near perfect version.

When he was describing the final scene he was lost in his own world. I could see he was in a trance as if we had all vanished from the scene and he was transported in the hills of Boing Taina [an indigenous name of the north side of the Jarawa Reserve in the Middle Andamans, near Bluff Island]. 

I was collecting names of various endemic birds from Nao when I suddenly asked him “don’t you remember any story of birds?”4 He said he had heard one story where all the Andamanese people become birds but informed me that he would have to think overnight to narrate it to me. I liked his willingness to help and we set up a time on the 4th of January 2007 to meet in the circuit house to hear his story on birds. Thus, was recorded the story of Jiro Mithe, one of my favourites. He was very happy when he came as he could remember the story very well. He told me that he had been thinking of it all through the night. This was an unusual story as the names of the various Andamanese birds are taken from the names of the Andamanese people, contrary to the general phenomenon where the reverse is true. That is, most often it is the names of the birds that are given to human beings. The description of Mithe sitting inside the belly of the crocodile was explained to me so well that I did not have to use my imagination. The whole scene was clear in front of me. By now, Nao had become an expert in narrating stories. Not only could he recollect what he had heard in his childhood but could also remember words from his heritage language, and thus I could enrich the dictionary as well. The episode when everyone is looking for Jiro and calling out for him was really enacted by Nao. He would act like phatka who called three times the name of kaulotu with rising intonation. He would switch back and forth between Andamani Hindi and the Great Andamanese language, like a perfect bilingual. In some ways I felt very proud of myself in helping him to revive the sense of a lost language.

Nao used to often interrupt his narratives with observations on the depleting population of the Great Andamanese like “there were many people at that time. No one is left now”. I heard him lamenting in Hindi ‘koi nahin bachaa.’ He once said that “the names of the birds are so many because they were transformed from human beings”, a myth most of the tribes believe in. I was surprised at the logistics.

On the same day, i.e. 4th January 2007, he narrated another story, the story of ‘Dik and Kaunmo’, the evil man and his wife. Initially, he was a little hesitant to tell the story but I asked him to be comfortable. He said “this is a story I feel shy telling in front of a lady”. When I persuaded him to shed off his inhibitions because of me, he started narrating it. I had thought that the story might have had sexual overtones, but it was funny and a little gross as it mentioned farting several times. He laughed heartily while rendering the Great Andamanese words thure thure ‘aroma aroma’ repeatedly as he found it very funny. When I asked him why the wife of Dik behaved so badly with her husband, prompt came the reply “for her children. Dik never bothered about his wife or the children”. He further explained, “when the wife asked him to take the children along with him (to the sea shore), he would not listen to her. She was heartbroken”.

Nao surprised me with his sophisticated behaviour, unparalleled by any other person I met on the Islands. I would not have been surprised if educated and intellectual Indians would think twice before narrating a story like Dik in front of a lady. Nao was also very proud of his heritage and his upbringing.

Among all the Andamanese tribes that Nao knew he considered the Pujjukars the strongest. He would never tire telling stories of their valour and fearlessness. He once narrated a story of two brothers, Tae Daniel and Golat who were captured by the British soldiers and were kept in the Port Blair jail. Nao told me in detail how Golat broke all the iron chains and ran away from the jail to take refuge in the sea. Golat was known to be a friend of a crocodile as he was often seen riding the crocodile’s head in the sea and swamps. I could not believe these stories, but he pledged time and again that these were not fiction but true stories. The Pujjukars are known to be violent and hot-headed as there are several stories involving their fights with the crocodile with bare hands. He thought even the British feared the Pujjukars. Interestingly, one of the speakers of the current language, Lico, a female in her mid fifties was brought up by a Pujjikar.

Another story by the name of Maya Boro and Jurwachom exposed me to their supernatural beliefs. The word ‘maaya’ in Great Andamanese means ‘late’, or ‘ancient’. The naming system of the Great Andamanese tribe is not gender specific as the name of a child is given when it is in the womb. Thus a name like ‘Boro’ or ‘Nao’ could be either given to a male or a female child. Moreover, the name of a child changes four times in a life span depending upon the various stages of life he or she goes through. The last stage is when the person leaves this world and becomes ‘Maaya’ which is prefixed to the same name that was given to her/him when s/he was in the womb of her/his mother. Jurwachom is a story that was narrated to Nao by Moroi, the father of Nao Jr. when Nao was a child. Nao Jr. said that he remembered Boro, his grandfather and was convinced that Boro had some supernatural powers. Nao Jr. reported this as a true incident that took place not very long ago, perhaps seventy years ago. The mention of the dog, pipe, tobacco, and tea-leaves in the story certainly indicates its recent origin, to the time when India was ruled by the British. This also implies that cannibalism did exist till very recently, though it is always despised in the stories. The character of Jurwachom seems very interesting as the so called ‘devils of the sea and the jungle’ were kind and helpful to the protagonist of the story yet they practise cannibalism and offer human flesh to Boro for consumption. I have kept the first person narrative here to maintain the authenticity.

There is only one story in this collection which is not narrated by Nao Jr. The short story of ‘Dik the Demon’ was narrated to us by the eldest member of the community, Boa Sr. about eighty years old and popularly known as chaachii, the Hindi word for ‘aunt’. Though she kept saying that she had forgotten all the stories she had ever heard in her childhood, yet after many visits to her little cottage and several requests, she obliged us finally with the story of ‘Dik the Demon’. Perhaps it was possible for her to recollect the events of the story as the hiding place of the fish and the famous rock still existed in Mayabandar, the place she spent all her life before she was resettled on Strait Island in the seventies. When one is forcibly uprooted from one’s home, one tends to lose interest in the present life but relives the past over and over again. She is the only member of the community who has no one of her own. All her relatives are gone yet her laugh is infectious. I vividly remember that Boa Sr. could never complete a sentence without a hearty laugh. An ever smiling lady she missed Mayabandar so much that no incident or visit was without a mention of her life at Mayabandar, the north of the Andaman Islands. Later, I realized that she did not share her past life with any one else in the community as no one among the existing people came from the same place. We were, perhaps, the only ones who were interested in her past life. Her narration, though minimal, was so vivid that I was tempted to visit the place and see the rocks mentioned in the current tale.

Most of the stories in this collection depict revenge being taken by the affected party. The hunter and gatherer societies, while giving full freedom of movement to their fellows, adhere to specific allegiance and loyalty to the near ones. The stories may appear to us very violent in nature, but the society of the Andamanese thinks otherwise. Nao had the opinion that these stories were tales of valour and hunting skills. They were fearless people who would go to any extent to protect their honour and children.5 The women in these stories are as powerful, smart and as skilled in hunting as the men folk.

Anvita Abbi