Who're The Jarawas?

ONE of the four nomadic hunter-gatherer Negrito people of the Andamans, very little is known about them. Even the word Jarawa is a term neighbouring tribes use to denote them—it literally means The Other People. While the other three Negrito tribes—Great Andamanese, Onges and Sentine-lese—use canoes, Jarawas use rafts, live in oblong or oval huts, and are excellent swimmers. They've been landing up in civilian settlements during the past year by swimming for four to five hours from their habitats.

Anthropologists speculate the Andaman islanders, including Jarawas, are remnants of the Negrito population once inhabiting much of east Asia. Others say they represent a sub-species of the original Australoid people. One big impediment to establishing communication with the Jarawas is their language: it's still indecipherable even after two centuries of sporadic contact. Ongoing efforts to crack the code are yet to yield results though it is possibly related to the language of neighbouring Negrito peoples. In the jungles of Tirur, linguist Raja Singh of the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages has done some 30 hours of Jarawa talk recordings over the past two years. "The language has no similarity at all with the 18 scheduled Indian languages," he says. "It's a time-consuming process."