Indian Antiquary Vol 52

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 152

13€
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(JUNE, 1923
that Malaka is not an uncommon village name in the Nicobar Islands. There are two prominent instances which I can recall: one to the east of Car Nicobar and another to the rforth of Nancoyry in Cainorta Harbour. Myrabolan trees are not a product of the Nicobars, so far as I remember; certainly they are not prominent objects.
With reference to Dames' note on the Nicobars, I wish to draw attention to three official books here, as they seem, from this note and others by first rate authorities, to be practically unknown. They all give a very full account of the Nicobars from every point of view: (1) Census of India, vol. III. Andamans and Nicobars, 1901. (2) Imperial Gazetteer of India (Nicobars), ed. 1909. (3) Gazetteer, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Provincial Series, 1909.
Az regards the term Nicobar, it means the Land of the Naked People, and is one form out of very many of Nakkaváram, the name by which the islands appear in the great Tanjore Inscription of 1050 A.D. : vide Marco Polo's Necuveran 1292; Rashidu'ddin's Nakwaram, 1300 ; Friar Odoric's Nicoveran, 1322 : all lineal ancestors of 15th and 16th century Portu. guose Nacabar and Nicubar, and of the modern Nicobar (from at least 1650). The people are not, and never have been, quite naked, and the story of the tails, repeated by the Swede Kjocping as late as 1647, has arisen from the appearance of the long streamer attached to the loin cloth, which looks exactly like a wagging tail as the men walk along : see Round About the Andamans and Nicobars, J.R.S.Arts, vol. XLVIII, 1900, p. 105.
Passing on to the Malay Archipelago, the early Portuguese name of Jao for the people of Java was in common use for Javanese on the West Coast of India as far as Surat at any rate. And with regard to the origin of the inhabitants of Java and the mainland generally, Daines more than once remarks on their probable northern origin from the highlands of China proper. This migration to the South is still actively traceable among the Kachins for in. stance, and has undoubtedly gone on steadily for ages, as is indicated in all tradition, so far as I have heard it. In the Nicobars, where the inhabitants are "wild Malays," though really, I think, representative of some tribes of Môn origin, the tradition of migration from the North is still traceable in language and story, while the general likeness of Nicobarese to Malagasy struck me most forcibly when studying the latter language.
Another general likeness in these migrants from a Northern cradle is to be found in the belief noted by Barbosa (p. 192) that "nothing ought to be over the head." The idea, in varions inconvenient forms, is common to Chinese, Shâns, Talaings and Burmese. Until quite recently the essentially democratic Burmese, for instance, often put on an apparently cringing attitude in order to get the head lower than that of a recognised superior, and in many instances the idea affected their domestic building operations, as Barbosa notes that it did in the case of the Javanese.
Barbosa's 'white folk ' of the Celebes and Sulu Islands raises a question of more import. ance than seems to have been recognised. Such people have been so often reported in the East and Far East among the Kafirs of the Pamîrs, the Kanôts of the Himalayas, the fisher. men (Maguvan) of the Malabar Coast, and of Pulo Aor and Pulo Condor of the Far Eastern Islands, the Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula, the Talaings and some Shâns and Burmans, and certain tribes in the hinterland of French Extrême Orient, that the whole question is worthy of detailed investigation. For the present we may predicate them to be migrants, originally from the Western Chincso highlands.
Returning to the Asiatic Continent, Barbosa calls Champa, now in French Cochin China, a " very great island," probably a mistranslation of some form of the term 'dufpa' which