Extinction: The Last of the Bo

Extinction: The Last of the Bo



Floating in the clear blue waters of Bay of Bengal, east of the Indian mainland and on the edge of the Indian ocean, are a group of five hundred and seventy two emerald islands, islets and rocks, collectively known as the Andaman and Nicobar islands. This hilly archipelago with dense evergreen forests and endless varieties of exotic flora and fauna, stretches for more than seven hundred kilometers from north to south. It is also witness to a Darwinian dance of Shiva.

Since pre-historic times Andaman’s aboriginal tribes have lived on these Islands but their numbers have been steadily dwindling. Around three hundred thousand people inhabit this tropical paradise and only around a thousand belong to these indigenous ancient tribes. The rest are settlers from the Indian mainland setting the stage for the inevitable clash of cultures. The tribes include the Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Onge, Shompen, Sentinelese and the extinct Jangil. When we speak about these ancient people, we speak in long millennial terms. These tribes have been living in the Andamans for at least sixty five thousand years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth. They are the stepping stone in a great pre-historic coastal migration of humans from Africa via the Arabian peninsula, along the coastal regions of the Indian mainland and towards Southeast Asia, Japan and Oceania.

Anthropologically, these tribes are a unique and very special people. Genetic analysis indicates that male Onges and Jarawas almost exclusively belong to Haplotype D, which is also found in Tibet and Japan, but is rare on the Indian mainland and elsewhere in Asia. However, one particular subgroup of the D Haplogroup has never been seen outside of the Andamans, which marks the insularity and rarity of these tribes. I find it amazing that the only other group that is known to predominantly belong to Haplogroup D are the Ainu aboriginal people of Japan, who live across the oceans many thousands of miles away.



Boa Senior, a portly woman with sad eyes, had been lonely the last few years of her life. She was the last member of the Bo people of the Great Andamanese tribe who now number just fifty two. When she died last week on January 26, 2010, she was no longer alone — she took her tribe and language with her. The eighty five-year-old, who had survived the tsunami of December 2004, was the last speaker and final custodian of the Bo language, one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, that faded into extinction. She had no children and with her death, her tribe has become extinct and its language, which linguists have been studying for a long time, is lost.

Bo was a highly endangered language because of several reasons ranging from external forces like economic, religious, cultural and educational subjugation to internal forces such as a community’s negative attitude towards its own language. Language is a critical register to understand communities and their social and cultural histories, and the death of a community, like that of the Bo, often signals the death of a language and our ability to understand the ebb and flow of society. With the death of Boa Senior and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory and her death brings a silent catastrophe to the community which has lost a heritage and an identity. It is a loss to humanity but in the animal world of the survival of the fittest and destruction of the weak and unprotected, this is an inevitability. Life goes on as usual elsewhere.

Boa had survived the terrible tsunami of 2004 and had vivid memories of the catastrophe.

“We were all there when the earthquake came,” she later told linguists who had interviewed her.

“The eldest of us had told us ‘the earth would part, don’t run away or move. The elders told us, that’s how we know.” Her face lit up and her full throated laughter was infectious, humor expanding beyond the confines of language.

So, what is it like, when you are the only one left on earth speaking a language that no one else understands and you have no one to talk to? In the final years of her life, Boa Senior was marooned in an island of solitariness, of extreme loneliness. There was no one alive with whom she could speak in her native Bo tongue, no family, no friends, only memories and ghosts of the past.

To the global citizens of today, tangled up in the World Wide Web and fettered to one another by a lingua franca, Boa’s reality would appear obscure, even fantastical, the stuff of science fiction. The scene could well belong to absurd drama or even of a futuristic nightmare, in which one wakes up to find oneself trapped inside a bubble, alone and unheard in a sea of voices. Or, think of a person in solitary confinement in a prison cell. Only, Bo Senior would have been free in the open, speaking all by herself in the wilderness. The truth of Boa’s predicament can be glimpsed at in surreal contexts or in indulgent fantasies. Think of Robinson Crusoe alone on a desert island before he found his man Friday. How would it be if one has to live in the company of fictional beings, without the comfort of real voices?

In the final analysis, when the last soul of a group of similar physical beings merges with eternity, past present and future become one at this critical juncture. The community has vanished, and the distinctions between emotions, feelings, fact and fiction have become one, shimmering like a mirage in the great beyond. There is a lingering feeling of pathos and we, all of us, mourn the loss of someone we didn’t really know.