Genetic studies suggest the Andaman tribals go back over 65,000 years, but why don’t our history and culture books acknowledge these depleting communities?
By KP Narayana Kumar
As a bus carrying a group of tourists speeds through a highway cutting through the forest on the outskirts of Port Blair in the Andamans, one of the passengers exults: “There they are.”
The passengers in the bus promptly stand up and crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the celebrated tourist attraction they have been briefed about by the tour operator. The tourists comprise mostly middle-class professionals and their families from around the country. The object of their interest happens to be a group of bare-bodied, dark-skinned children with mops of curly hair, crouched on a patch of grass by the highway.
The children are Jarawas, aboriginal tribals. There is much excitement in the bus although the tourists barely catch a glimpse of them — that too for not more than two seconds. Since making contact with the tribals is illegal, the visitors have to be content with seeing them through the windows of the speeding bus. The tourist guide repeatedly announces that no one is to photograph the tribals as it is an offence and would invite a jail sentence. There are several instances of “Jarawa spotting”, accompanied by mass hysteria every time a Jarawa man, woman or child crosses the road.
The bus is making its way through the Jarawa Tribal Reserve, which was set up in the early years of Independence. Ironically, it was meant to give the tribals a right to their own way of life and to protect them from intrusion. That, however, doesn’t seem to have prevented the tribal people from taking to the basic trappings of the modern world — many of the adults are seen in shorts and housecoats. They do not wave or smile at the tourists; they just silently watch the tourist vehicles speeding by.
In other parts of the country, it is the tiger, the elephant and other wildlife that are spotted during tours into forests. In the Andamans, it is a group of humans.
Not a Tourist Attraction Survival International, an organisation that advocates the rights of indigenous tribal people, has been campaigning to get the tours through the Jarawa Reserve stopped. “The tourists treat the Jarawa like animals in a safari park,” said the NGO in a campaign newsletter. The consequence of the entry of nontribals into aboriginal territory in the Andamans is not confined to their objectification.
While the tourists, at best, are only taking part in a rather insensitively marketed tour that violates the human rights of the aboriginals, the danger they face from a section of the population that resides around the tribal reserve is even more palpable. Several instances of sexual exploitation of the women have been reported in recent years. Most recently, the New York Times carried a story about the killing of a Jarawa child allegedly by a tribesman because the child was suspected to have been fathered by an outsider.
Activists fighting for the protection of Jarawas say that the nature of the touristic gaze underlines the fundamental problem: in democratic India, the right of the tribals to their dignity is casually trampled upon and that too by their fellow citizens. “Why can’t we consider them as human beings just like us? Why do we treat them as exotic specimens at best and as savages at worst?” asks Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle, a daily newspaper.
According to Giles, turning the Jarawas into a tourist attraction indicates a complete lack of awareness about the identity of these people. According to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), a biotech research unit of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Jarawas and the other tribes of the Andamans are the first people of India who go back 65,000 years. The CCMB’s research says that the first group of Jarawas left Africa and arrived on the island all those years ago. The other Negrito tribes in the Andamans such as the Great Andamanese, Onges and the Sentinelese too have been around for as many years. The Negrito tribes are also believed to have migrated to south India.
The significance of genetic research in unravelling the origins of human migration to modernday India appears to be lost on policymakers in education. Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a senior principal scientist at the CCMB, says that the Jarawas, the Onges and other Andaman tribals are the most ancient people of India. “We mapped the genetic tree of India and found that they are at the root while others are branches. We are all part of that first migration out of Africa. There is no doubt in my mind that they are the people with the oldest history of living in India.” Thangaraj adds that the aborigines of Australia are also related to the Andaman tribals.
Given that the history of these people has never been explained in schools, not many have a clear idea as to who these people are; this, perhaps, explains the senseless gawking by tourists on the islands. The ignorance about the Jarawas has also led to the local non-tribal people of the islands creating myths about them, associating the tribals with black magic and so on.
‘Now The Jarawas Fear Us’ Venkat R is in his 30s and drives an autorickshaw in Port Blair. His grandfather came to the island from Tamil Nadu in the 1950s to start a business. Asked about his assessment of the Jarawas and their culture, Venkat says rather succinctly. “Till around 20 years ago, we used to fear them and would run if we saw them. As children, we were told that their spit is poisonous. But in recent years, they have turned friendly. That was a mistake on their part, as the new settlers started taking advantage of them. Now they fear us.”
The ancient Indian history, now taught in schools and universities in the country and abroad, essentially focuses on the period after people living in this part of the world took to agriculture, which is about 11,500 years ago. The Indus Valley Civilisation, which is about 5,000 years old, remains the earliest major reference point. The archaeological sites associated with the Indus civilisation suggest a period when architecture, urbanisation, handicrafts, metallurgy and, of course, agriculture was in evidence.
While the excavation of the Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro sites in 1920 is celebrated all over the world, few are yet to understand the significance of the Andamans’ connect with the modern world in the last 200 years. This is despite the fact that unlike Indus Valley, where archaeologists have to depend upon the remains from the past, in the Andamans there still exist people who carry the knowledge that governed life in the forest for some 65,000 years.
Y Sudershan Rao, chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) did not respond to an email seeking his view on why the findings of genetic research project and the discovery of the Andaman tribals as the most ancient people of the country has not been taken up by the institution. An official concerned at the NCERT too did not respond to requests for a meeting.
Early Freedom Fighters The tribals do not follow any of the languages spoken in other parts of India. Their belief system centres on nature and ancestor worship, while the only vocations they know are hunting, fishing, gathering honey and other activities associated with the forest. But they do have a culture and a way of life that revolve around knowledge of their ecology. They are considered repositories of knowledge about the flora and fauna of the islands, especially medicinal plants. They also have myths, history and legends passed down generations. “There was no tradition of writing among the tribals. Scientific history relies on what is recorded. We have, therefore, ignored 65,000 years of human history,” says Samir Acharya, a tribal rights activist based out of Port Blair.
Apart from being the most ancient people of India, the tribals of the Andamans are also perhaps among the early freedom fighters of the country. They lived in a world unto themselves, deep inside the forests of the Andamans, and are practically invisible in the recorded history of India until the British landed on the islands at the end of the 18th century.
As the empire began to convert the island into a penal settlement, they came into conflict with the tribes, especially the Great Andamanese. The Battle of Aberdeen, as it came to be called, was fought between the tribals and the British in 1859. The tribals were no match for the gun power of the British and were massacred. The British went on to establish the Cellular Jail on the island that housed freedom fighters and criminals from the mainland.
A Press Information Bureau feature on the battle, issued in 2002, says that the loss of lives was “so huge that a considerable share of the Andamanese race was wiped out in one day at the Battle of Aberdeen”.
If the British started the story of annihilation of the earliest people of India, free India does not appear to have followed best practices in the context of the island tribals. To begin with, says Giles, independent India took to looking at the tribals through the same lens as the British.
He says, “For instance, the real name of the people who are now called Jarawa is Ang. The British had information about this tribe from the Great Andamanese, some of whom worked for them. The Great Andamanese used to call these people ‘Jarawa’, meaning ‘outsider’ so the British also called them by the same name. We just followed suit.”
The story of the planning of the Jarawa Reserve too is rather bewildering. After declaring huge tracts of land in the islands as reserved for the tribals in the ’50s, refugees from Bangladesh were allotted land around the Jarawa Reserve in the late ’70s. About two decades later, the proximity of the settlers and the easy access they had to the Jarawas was to set the stage for their exploitation.
According to an article written by conservationist Manish Chandi, in 1956, the government notified areas in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago as tribal areas exclusively for the native islanders. “The ensuing population influx through colonisation and rehabilitation schemes saw a number of such areas de-notified in 1979 and converted either into logging coupes, settlements for refugees or as sanctuaries and reserve forests.”
Many of the new settlers were farmers and required flat lands for cultivation. Valleys and evergreen forests were cleared to make space for their settlements and farmlands, said Chandi. “Firepower and force have been used many times to drive the Jarawas away from areas that they had traditionally occupied,” he added. It is this proximity to the Jarawa Reserve that allowed some settlers to poach and subsequently exploit the tribals in recent years.
The number of the Andamanese tribals is down to near-extinction levels (see The Tribes of Andamans). The last of the Great Andamanese were shifted from their natural environs to the Strait Islands, another tribal reservation, in 1970. According to Giles, this has contributed to many of the surviving Great Andamanese “turning alcoholics and dying in the gutters”.
The Boy Who Said Vande Mataram Giles is particularly angry that despite the evidence available of the Great Andamanese being driven to near extinction, the Jarawas are now facing a similar future. Due to the sudden arrival and takeover of land by the settlers, the Jarawas took to attacking them. This phase of violence between the tribe and the recently arrived settlers was in full swing between the ’70s and the late ’90s. The nature of the attacks included robbing houses and murdering the residents.
The Jarawas were known to plan their attacks on villages, especially on full-moon nights. The hostilities continued for many years — until they became friendly in 1996, courtesy of Enmei, a Jarawa teenager. The teenager is an iconic figure on the islands as many commentators refer to relations between the tribals and others in terms of preand post-Enmei.
Twenty years ago, history was made when Enmei, a 14-year-old Jarawa boy, was admitted to a government hospital in the Andamans after fracturing his leg, and repeated after an encouraging hospital staff: “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Vande Mataram”. This was the first time in the history of the island that a Jarawa chanted nationalistic slogans.
The story was recounted by Dr Ratan Chandra Kar in his book The Jarawas of the Andamans. Kar worked with the health department and treated the tribals, visiting their homes and otherwise, for over 12 years.
ET Magazine spoke to Kar at his apartment in Port Blair. The softspoken, mild-mannered doctor says that the Jarawa boy did not know Hindi or any of the languages that are spoken in India; nor did he understand the concept of a country, let alone the symbolism of nation as mother. But he was grateful to the people who saved his life and hence responded to all their requests, including chanting the slogans. Over the couple of months of his stay at the hospital, he also picked up Hindi.
Enmei was admitted to the hospital after getting injured while attempting what is colloquially referred to as a “raid”. He was part of a group that tried to steal coconuts from a house at midnight. When the raiding party was fleeing, the boy’s foot got trapped in the roots of a tree. The local people took him to the hospital and saved his life.
“It was at the hospital that he wore clothes and used a toilet for the first time in his life. He also tasted food that he never had before such as rice, dal and roti,” recounts Kar. The authorities had to alert all the police stations en route to the hospital as there was the danger of the vehicle being attacked by the Jarawas those days.
After recovery and his persistent complaints of homesickness, Enmei was discharged and he went back to the forest.
A year later, he came back to a village with a group of friends. They were greeted warmly with an offering of coconuts. This was the first instance of a warm-hearted interaction between the tribals and their fellow countrymen.
Fifteen days later, 70 more Jarawas reached the same village, says Kar. “The villagers arranged coconuts and bananas for all of them. This was the beginning of Jarawas turning friendly.” That friendly gesture also contributed to their downfall over the next couple of decades.
Against Racial Mixing No sooner had the Jarawas lowered their guard than poachers and other criminals started intruding into their space. They took advantage of the friendliness of the Jarawas and, over the years, began manipulating them into submission. This explains why most atrocities against the tribe have been taking place only after 2000, a little after Enmei encouraged his tribal people to become friendly with the outside world.
According to Kar, the Jarawas are among the happiest and simplest people he has met. “They live as one community and it is their tradition to choose partners on their own. They have a happy conjugal life. There is no female infanticide and boys and girls are treated as equals. Sometimes, when I hear about caste and gender violence in the mainland, I do wonder who is more civilised.”
The ritual killing of “illicit” children is a different matter altogether. Jarawas take offence to sexual relations with widows or unwed girls within the tribe and inter-racial relationships. There have been many instances of tribals neglecting or putting to death children born of such relationships that they consider illicit.
Kar says that widow remarriages are encouraged. “It is only that they take the idea of fidelity rather seriously as they believe the well-being of the community rests on that principle. The idea is to think always as a member of a community rather than as an individual. They also abhor racial mixing.”
In 2000, the doctor had convinced a childless Jarawa couple to adopt a child from a different part of the island who was fighting for his life after he was left to die by the tribals as his mother was unwed. “Now he is about 15 and soon will be a good hunter,” says Kar.
The tribes have traditional knowledge of forests and nature that sometimes appears to be clairvoyant. For instance, the modern world is still to come to terms with the fact that not a single Andaman tribal was killed in the tsunami of 2004 as they had fled to the higher reaches of the island hours before the waves hit the islands. The tribals claimed they had a premonition about the catastrophe and that they were warned by their ancestors through folklore of the impending disaster.
Modern civilisation is yet to make sense of that one.
