The vanishing islanders

The author raises a little discussed topic, the fate of the vanishing tribes of the Andamans.

The Land of Naked People
Encounters With Stone Age Islanders
Madhusree Mukherjee
Penguin
2004
Pages: 256
Price: Rs 250
ISBN: 0143031015
Paperback

This title is classified as travel/anthropology, but it also contains a large share of personal history – the author's concerns are never very far below the surface and quite often show outright. Her account makes it clear that she has every reason to be concerned, and draws attention to an area that most Indians don't often encounter outside tourism brochures – the Andamans.

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What Mukherjee does with great success is shatter our blinkered, picture-postcard view of the islands as an idyllic combination of blue seas, white sands and swaying palms. In the process, she raises a topic that only a few have publicised so far: the fate of the vanishing tribes of the Andamans – the 'naked people' who, as Mukherjee says in the foreword, conceivably gave the islands their name: a variant of the Sanskrit nagnamanaba (naked man).

Travelling to the Andamans on a Guggenheim fellowship, Mukherjee, a nuclear physicist by training and an editor at Scientific American, combines her investigative instincts and a gift for lucid prose to come up with an immensely readable work, one that is intended to appeal to the lay reader perhaps more than the scholar. As Mukherjee writes at the outset, "Just five hundred or so islanders still survive, and their lives are changing fast. Their tale is one of conflict with outsiders such as me."

Going back nearly 50,000 years, the Andamanese probably descend from humans who arrived in Asia. Mukherjee deals with the four main tribes: the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese. Here's an extract from a passage on the Onge on www.andamanindia.com, which promotes tourism in the islands: "They have been provided with pucca hut type houses, food, clothes, medicines, etc. by the Administration. They eat turtles, fish, roots, and jackfruits and etc (sic). They have developed artistry and craft."

Here is Mukherjee's take: "…with rice and wheat having replaced their varied diet of forest and reef produce, the Onge now suffered from nutritional deficiencies such as of Vitamin A and iron. One anthropologist, meeting some Onge men in 1949, had been awed by their powerful and exuberantly healthy bodies. Years later, a glimpse of them on TV shocked him…."

There's more. The benevolent Administration has not merely provided 'pucca type houses' that are simply too hot to live in, it has also cleared miles and miles of forests, thus killing a vast portion of the reefs that were a prime source of food for the tribes, and it has actively aided encroachment, thus forcing the tribes to live cheek by jowl with all manner of germs and pathogens, which have ravaged once healthy populations.

In contrast, the islanders have proven their inherent skill at conserving the islands' fragile eco-system and even nature has stepped in to ensure that their populations never go out of control. Ironically, the low reproductive rate may actually be going against them.

Mukherjee talks about her wonder at the "defiance — of airplanes, computers, answering machines, and everything else that made up my world", a defiance that she has "come to worship".

Beyond all else, Mukherjee successfully conveys the complete disharmony between 'our' world and theirs. "None of the vocabularies compiled for the Andaman languages includes a word for rape," she writes, "and in all of Andamanese history, not a single settler has so much as accused an aboriginal of rape…."

But the long-standing policy of trying to win over islanders with gifts - which the British instituted and Indians enthusiastically follow - has caused occasionally hostile contact, thus leading to fearful stereotypes of bow and arrow wielding tribes who slaughter every 'civilised' intruder. "You could smell where they stood," a farmer tells Mukherjee of the Jarawa. "They smell so bad, don't clean themselves."

At the end of the book, Mukherjee talks about her wonder at the "defiance — of airplanes, computers, answering machines, and everything else that made up my world", a defiance that she has "come to worship". One can only suggest that more and more people partake of this wonder – perhaps the Andamanese can still be saved.