Prof. Anvita Abbi
interviewed by Bhoomika Meiling

Bhoomika: Considering the fact that three or four decades back, Linguistics must have been a nascent field in India, I would like to know what prompted you to choose Linguistics as your area of research and profession.

Prof. Abbi: Well, it is easier for you to ask me that than it is for me to answer it. It was not my choice. After graduating from Miranda House in Economics, I took admission in Delhi School of Economics for M.A. But my father was against my choice of Economics. He felt that a good short story writer like me must study some kind of literature. On the contrary, I felt that if I can create literature, why should I study it too? My father worked out a via-route for me and told me to take up Linguistics instead. He was sure it would be very good for me as I always had a knack of learning new languages. So I quit D.S.E just after admission and joined the Linguistics Department of Delhi University. After M.A., I applied to six foreign universities for Ph.D and all six of them agreed to take me. I chose Cornell University which belongs to the prestigious Ivy-League.  I finished Ph.D in 1974 and started teaching in the U.S. I quit after one and a half years as I wanted to work on Indian languages. When I came back to India, JNU still did not have a Linguistics Department. So I joined as a CSIR Pool Officer. This was a scheme to check brain drain from India. When CLE was created in 1978, I joined as one of the founder faculty.        

Bhoomika: When and how did your tryst with the Great Andamanese language begin?

Prof. Abbi: It happened in 2000, while I was a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. At that time I was working on A Manual of Linguistic Field Work and Structures of Indian Languages. In my JNU career, I have worked on approximately 50 languages and I have done field study on at least 35. But the Great Andamanese is the most endangered of all of them. So I made a proposal to the Institute to do a pilot project on the Andamanese languages. The scientists there were very supportive in spirit as well as in providing funds and the infrastructure for the pilot project. My book Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands was born out of that project.

I went for my first field trip to Andaman in 2001-02 with two of my students. The book along with a CD-Rom was subsequently published from Germany in 2006. It brought me a lot of attentione because this was the very first comparative study of the three most endangered languages of India- Jarawa, Onge and Great Andamanese. Out of these Great Andamanese is virtually lost. The eight speakers are not very fluent and there is no inter-generational flow of the language any more.

Bhoomika: Why is it called Great Andamanese? Do the speakers have a native name also for their language?

Prof. Abbi: Actually, Great Andamanese is a conglomeration of ten languages- Jeru, Sarre, Khora, Bo and so on. Now the point is that all the speakers speak different languages of the Great Andamanese family. Though they are able to understand each other and communicate, yet it gives rise to a difficult situation in documentation, writing a consolidated grammar and even revival. Because of all these reasons, I decided not to quit this field and to carry forward the research work initiated two years ago. This time I applied to the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Fund, School of Oriental and African Studies, London for funding under their ELDP programme. Since the funding agency wishes to document the culture of the people also, the research has taken on an ethnographic dimension too. We are trying to document their grammar, folk tales, folk songs, narrations, indigenous knowledge etc. We are preparing videos of their dances and routine activities. We’re also preparing a triscriptal dictionary of Great Andamanese. And the entire project work is run from my room. Imagine such a mammoth project with four personnel employed, all share my room as Jawaharlal Nehru University could not provide me a single room for conducting this project.

And I must say that our repeated visits to the area and our serious attempts at recording their language and culture, gave the community a reason to take pride in their language and culture. They are trying to remember the forgotten details of their languages and also to revive them. At times, they do sit together and try to converse in Great Andamanese and not in Hindi for a change. You would be surprised to know that for the last four decades the community had not even been sharing folk tales. It took me a great while to make them recall those tales. And when they finally narrated some, I found them amazing…. 

Bhoomika: We hear a lot about the preservation of dying languages nowadays. What exactly does that mean? Is preservation what you are really looking for?

Prof. Abbi: No, preservation is not what we wish to accomplish. We don’t want to make Great Andamanese a museum piece! One can say that we want people to speak their languages. It is revival we are really looking for. Every linguist must document at least one dying language to make some difference. I always tell my students that the grammar of the language of a people is a window to their culture and society. Language is the witness to the ways in which man has perceived the world. We wish to restore as much as possible so that the coming generations understand their past and therefore, their future too. It has been proved through mitochondrial DNA testing that the Great Andamanese are a very ancient tribe. They are remnants of the first migration out of Africa 70,000 years ago. They are the descendents of early Paleolithic colonizers of South East Asia. I am convinced and have proved in my work that Great Andamanese is a different language group than Jarawa and Onge which form the Ang family of languages. In other words, I have proved that there are six and not five language families in India, the sixth family being Great Andamanese. I found this and wrote about it a year before C.C.M.B, Hyderabad came to the same conclusion. In this case the linguists surpassed the  genetisicts! As you might have gathered by now, this has been a breakthrough research in many ways.

Bhoomika: What would be your comment on the role of the State in this kind of documentation?

Prof. Abbi: I have literally been harassed by the State. People at the top in the related Ministries have been very prompt, cooperative and compassionate. I was never refused a permission to go and visit the community in Andaman. Everything was always made conducive to my research. But the moment one reaches Port Blair, harassment begins. While the Chief Secretary is extremely cooperative, the bureaucracy under him is loaded with the ills of babudom. Most of them are absolutely against our research. They refuse to let me go to the tribal reserves. They expect bribes which I can not give. But by now I have become so popular among the tribal community that the moment they come to know about my arrival in Port Blair, they visit me wherever I am staying. However beyond Port Blair, even this arrangement becomes tough.

Bhoomika: You have mentioned the hegemony of ’major’ languages and its harmful consequences on the ’minor’ languages in many articles and interviews. Could you please elaborate on that issue?

Prof. Abbi: The distinction made by the Eighth Schedule of our Constitution between the major and minor languages is a dangerous thing. Numerous tribal languages have been left out of it. Tribal languages belong to the most enduring tribes of the world. They are ancient people and therefore their languages are the most highly evolved ones. Contrary to our stereotypes regarding things belonging to the tribals, these languages have developed over thousands of years and hence are nearer to perfection than our modern ’major’ languages. They are thus as fit to be used in education as any other language. As an Advisor to UNESCO on language issues, I have suggested in a paper that up to a stage a child should be taught in her mother tongue. I think that the present method of education is reductionist in many ways. A child who is already acquainted, for instance to the concept of colours in his mother tongue, on going to school, is made to learn the same concept all over again, this time in the ’official’ language be it Hindi or English or any other dominant tongue. This is sheer wastage of time. I think that the beginning of formal education must be in the mother tongue only.  I have seen Oraon mothers beat their children if they speak Kurux, their mother tongue, instead of Hindi. This is the outcome of policies that demarcate between ’major’ and ’minor’. People are abandoning their own languages so as to be part of the mainstream and to be able to advance in society. There are two causes of annihilation of any language- depleting populations and decreasing inter-generational flow of the language. The State policy is contributing to the second cause.      

Bhoomika: Are we hypothetically moving towards a monolingual world then?

Prof. Abbi: Looks like it. You know, English is said to be the killer language. Wherever it goes it kills the indigenous languages gradually. But there is a flip side to the problem too. The U.S is promoting multilingualism now while we are promoting monolingualism. While in a hospital in California once, I was surprised on being given forms in English and Gurmukhi! There’s a huge Punjabi population there and they mistook me too for a Punjabi. Similarly forms are available in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. They want their people to be comfortable.

Bhoomika: Are you satisfied with the social and academic space given to Linguistics as a discipline in India?

Prof. Abbi: No, I’m not. Language is a very important issue. We all know that language has been used frequently to divide people and the linguistic issue is an important political tool. If the situation in India is such, then why are linguists not consulted while taking decisions on this issue? No one asked the linguists when the Eighth Schedule was formulated. The Eighth Schedule is not egalitarian- Sanskrit with only 2500 speakers (1971 Census), has always been on the Schedule while Santhali, with a much larger number of speakers was inducted only recently. It is easy to do things when you don’t understand the gravity of your actions. We also face lack of funding. India has approximately 2000 surviving languages. We need financial support to not let the number fall further. We don’t even have an entire Institute dedicated to Linguistics. History has ICHR, Social Sciences have ICSSR. Similarly, there should be ICLR or some such thing too. Space and infrastructure are both lacking. There are no such job opportunities which would encourage students to take up linguistics. UGC has given only one JRF  to linguistics. Their logic is that since the number of fellowships is directly proportional to the number of candidates appearing for the exam, this is all you are going to get. We feel that once the number of fellowships is increased, the number of candidates will rise automatically as more students would rush to take up linguistics. So you see it is a vicious circle in which we are caught. Linguistics is useful in Computer Science, Cognitive Science and even Medical Science. It connects to so many disciplines. Yet the Government is not interested in advancing it. But I must say that JNU has always been very supportive in all that we wish to do. Funds and permissions are smoothly worked out here. There has never been lack of funds for students’ field trips. People in other Universities are jealous of us. Thanks to all the people dedicated to the discipline, we have managed to reach so far.