The tsunami disaster of the 26th December 2004 has suddenly drawn the  attention  of the world to  the six endangered Negrito and Mongoloid tribes of Andaman  and Nicobar islands in the Bay of Bengal. It is indeed a matter of great concern world over  particularly for the Andamanese who are too few in numbers anyway. 

 It is  also a matter of great relief that the Jarawas, the Onges, the Sentinelese, and the Great Andamanese  are safe / have been spotted in their respective islands. The extent of loss in terms of human lives in the case of the Nicobarese can only be, very roughly estimated. With the scale of disaster that was Tsunami 2004, no one can tell. 

 This website on the Great Andamanese,  primarily the Jero tribe was due to be launched in the middle of December 2004 but got delayed due to some unavoidable  reasons, and then in the meantime Tsunami waves played havoc in the region. Since the day of the disaster, I have been getting mails from friends, colleagues from all over the world  wanting to know about this tribe. So here it is, with a changed introduction, as you can see.  

  This is a report of the documentation project on the Great Andamanese which was jointly sponsored and funded by Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and the Department of Culture, MHRD, Govt of India, in the years 1994-96 and 1998-99.  

 While the complete  report of the project is under publication, I would like to share some of the important features, data and analysis, some pictures and some video clips with those who wish to know more about our people, our heritage, our culture through studies of different tribes of India. In order to understand people, a tribe, a race, a civilization, it is important to share information on various aspects of human life, across disciplines. As a linguist I wish to put my part of the study on record, on web and wait for the other pieces of the jig-saw puzzle to come from the archeologists, historians, anthropologists, geneticists and others to have a comprehensive account of the object of investigation so that the data could then be interpreted to make sense.  

 The data was collected during this period (1994-96) and (1998-2000), on several visits to the Strait island and consists of audio and video recordings of the speech and language of the Jero people, and phonetic/ phonemic transcriptions of the speech and language of  some of the senior members of the tribe collected through interviews. 

 For the historical accounts we rely on the travel diaries and notes of people who came in contact with these tribes as early as 1669, for a comprehensive report and distribution of the tribes in the Andaman islands, one relies on the 1901 Census report which was written by Sir Richard C.Temple (1903), and  for  anthropological insights Radcliffe-Brown,1948 is the most reliable source.  

 As far as the linguistic descriptions are concerned, Manoharan’s descriptive grammar of Andamanese, 1989 is probably the first study with extensive data in IPA, collected by the author using the field techniques of structural linguistics, while Chakraborty,1990  gives an anthropological description and the present day profile of the surviving members/ families of the tribe. These two studies are important because when these two authors  collected data for their respective studies, there was Loka I, who knew his language well, who also knew the local language of communication with the mainland people (Port Blair Hindi) who was very active, very versatile,  well informed and was an excellent source of data on language and culture of all the ten tribes called the Great Andamanese. Loka I died in 1986 at the age of 100 (approximately).  

In addition to these and several other studies ( Dass 1937, Basu 1952, Mathur 1968, Lal 1976….and others)  there are reports of the Census 1901 to 2001 on population details and some more descriptive accounts.

Readings on the Great Andamanese

The website introduces Jero, the language and culture of the tribe called Jero, the Great Andamanese. The home page introduces the tribe, includes some details about their nomadic nature, culture and history, important sources of information and some observations on speech and language which make it different and distinct from any other known language families of the world. Different links lead us to the Sounds of Jero, for the time being articulatory descriptions, acoustics of vowels and prosodic features to be included later; Jero in IPA transcription links you to the data - words, phrases and sentences in IPA transcriptions with glosses in English; Photo album & video clips give glimpses of their life and more data on their language; and Jero voices includes clips of audio recordings, primarily from the oldest couple Nao (who died three years ago) and Bowa who should now be around 75 years old. These voices are being studied in detail. The section will be upgraded as soon as the spectral analysis of the vowels and acoustic analysis of these two voices is complete. Readings on Jero gives a select bibliography on the subject.

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