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Last Of The Colonised

A possible food crisis causes the Jarawas to shed their 1,000-year-old reticence and isolation

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Last Of The Colonised
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SOMETHING's amiss on this cloudy morning in Shantanu, a tropical rainforest village nestling alongside a circuitous 250-km-long trunk road in the heart of Middle Andaman island. Curious villagers crowd around a bus stop, gaping at a group of ebony-skinned people asking for food. The women are bedecked in leafy neck and arm sashes, shell and fruit necklaces; the menfolk sport tree bark waist girdles. A group of their children squat inside a tea shack, absorbing cable fare on a small black-and-white TV. "When they first came a month back, we were running scared," says shack owner Nagaswami. "Now we feed them because they seem hungry, and they don't harm us." So he and fellow villagers feed their guests bananas, coconuts, biscuits and rice.

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Nagaswami and other Shantanu residents had enough reason to run scared when the Jarawas, whom British colonial officers of the last century found most 'hostile' and least receptive to their ministrations among the people of the Andamans, entered their placid lives a little over a month ago. The Jarawas—one of the four nomadic Negrito people of the Andaman isles whose numbers the 1991 census put at 200-odd, though anthropologists believe it to be close to 300—have lived in isolation for over a thousand years in their 642-sq km habitat in the forests and coastal belts of South and Middle Andaman islands. Over these years, they've steadfastly refused contact with the rest of civilisation and fiercely resisted intrusion into their habitats. Armed with lethal wood-and-iron arrows, they have killed 86 intruders and injured another 43 in nearly 200 attacks since 1947. In the past 10 years alone, they've slain 22 'civilians' straying into their habitat. "They're the original inhabitants of the Andamans whose origins are still not fully understood," says Frank Myka, anthropologist at the Washington State University, who has authored an authoritative tome on the Andaman tribes.

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Confounding anthropologists and local administration further, the Jarawas have suddenly, without notice or warning, begun descending in hordes on populated villages after swimming the tidal creeks that criss-cross their forested habitats. This time, however, they're showing little signs of hostility. They're desperately seeking food, fuelling speculation about a food shortage in the forest—the archetypal hunter-gatherers feed on wild boar, fish, bananas and coconuts. This unprecedented turn of events has thrown the island administration in a tizzy. Their nightmare: bloody skirmishes sparked off by a spiralling demand for food. "It's an extremely worrisome situation," says Andamans superintendent of police Ujjwal Mishra. "On the one hand, continuous contact with 'civilians' could lead to serious law and order problems, on the other it could lead to the extinction of the tribe itself."

The first such 'intrusion' in the history of the isle was reported on October 21 last year when eight Jarawas, four of them women, emerged near the Lukra Lungta village near Kadamtala in Middle Andaman. Signalling for food, they pointed to their bellies. They were fed bananas and coconuts by petrified villagers and sent back. Next day, another two tribesmen came out and had food. Two days later, on October 24, a group of 31 swam across the creeks and landed at a neighbouring jetty in search of food. Over the year, this trickle of Jarawas has turned into a flood at Kadamtala, some 125 km from capital Port Blair: an astonishing 2,008 Jarawa arrivals (over 150 every month) have been recorded by the local police outpost between last December and November 29. "They've become a part of our lives," says Kadamtala resident Kartick Chandra Dhali. "But the problem begins," says Mishra, "after the curiosity value wears off and villagers stop feeding them."

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 The warning signs are already flashing. In the Tirur area of south Andamans, villagers are protesting against the Jarawa invasion. When Outlook reached here, some 45 km from Port Blair, angry villagers stopped a police van carrying 13 Jarawas back to their habitat and blocked the road. "They break into my home every other day," complains S. Sushila, a banana plantation owner. "They take away the bananas, utensils and clothes." Adds another resident, Nirode Bairagi: "The Jarawas have taken away saris, trousers, shirts and towels from my home. This can't go on." This February, the tribesmen shot to death 60-year-old local Phulmala Mondal, with arrows near a ditch. But the Jarawas keep coming for food: since this October, they've visited Tirur on 21 occasions from their nearest habitat a km away. The largest single group comprised 58 members, more than half women and children. "There's a fear psychosis in the area," says Middle Andaman circle inspector of police Daya Shankar Singh, who mans the Tirur outpost. "The locals are complaining; we don't know whether the Jarawas have shed their hostility just because they're hungry."

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Even as government officials and anthropologists insist the Jarawas are becoming friendlier, the bonhomie during meetings between the primitive bush people and awe-struck 'civilians'—a cover term for all settlers—could prove deceptive, even ephemeral. Only this March, a group of 30 Jarawas attacked a Jarawa protection police outpost in Tirur at night and rained it with arrows. The police fired 600 rounds of blanks to scare them away after an arrow struck one policeman, who's now paralysed. (There are some 26 Jarawa protection outposts located between their habitat and civilian population and a third of the isle's 3,000-strong police force is engaged in keeping the two groups peacefully segregated.) In April, the Jarawas killed a Jirkatang villager, suspected to be a poacher. In Herbertabad, a village near Tirur, Nakul Roy, 65, was struck down by an arrow which grazed his head during a sudden Jarawa attack on his home. And in Temple Myo, frightened homemaker Anjana Chowkidar is using a Rs 50,000 compensation from the administration to build concrete walls around her village home and fortify it after the Jarawas killed her husband in an attack in March this year. "I live in fear. I don't step out after dark," she says. "I often see them moving through our coconut plantation."

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But despite a shrinking habitat, rise in poaching and illegal felling of timber, there's little evidence of a food crisis in the forest which might be forcing the Jarawas to scour settler territory. Not only do they look robust, but says Port Blair-based anthropologist K. Mukhopadhyay of the Anthropological Survey Of India, who has visited a Jarawa habitat: "I've seen them roasting and smoking wild boar, boiling sea shells and fish and collecting honey, turtle eggs, fruits, roots and tubers in their homes."

Clearly, sloppy efforts by an over-enthusiastic local administration to assimilate the Jarawas into the mainstream has led to this flood. The process was kickstarted after a former chief commissioner of the isle sent out contact-building parties in the early '50s when the settlement of refugees from east Pakistan triggered fresh colonisation of the islands. Such contact parties became regular from 1974. The seven-member parties—including administration officials, doctors, nurses, policemen and anthropologists—visited the shores of the Jarawa habitats on full-moon nights, carrying bananas, coconuts and red sashes as gifts. Even as the tribals reciprocated by coming to the shores and taking away the gifts, the contact parties were eventually reduced to touristy picnics with politicians and VVIPs hitching a boat ride to see the exotic and mysterious tribespeople. There were 100 such contact expeditions between May '90 and February '97 alone. Early this year, a chastened administration stopped the parties after the Jarawas poured into villages. "The process seems to have backfired," says Samir Acharya, head of the Port Blair-based Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE), a strident NGO. "Efforts to hurry Jarawa socialisation have created this situation."

Acharya is right. The administration and anthropologists now agree that the Jarawa incursion may possibly be related to the royal treatment 'civilians' meted out to a teenage Jarawa boy who spent three months in a Port Blair hospital convalescing after a fracture last May. The boy, popularly called as Enmei, was put in a separate cabin outfitted with a TV. Doctors and authorities lavished him with attention, taking him on drives, giving him gifts, feeding him food. "This boy possibly carried back tales of good life in the city to other tribe members," says Mukhopadhyay. "It led the others to come out and find out what civilian life's all about."

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But such curiosity can backfire. Though the traditional methodology of anthropological research among tribes includes establishment of field rapport with those under study, some scholars believe a methodology could be devised to study 'hostile' tribes such as the Jarawas. In fact, a voluminous 1990 master plan on Jarawa subsistence, health and culture by Andaman tribal welfare director S.A. Awaradi talks about building medical inns for the tribe in their habitat, air-dropping seeds to replenish food plantations in their habitat, and creating buffer zones around the settlement area to isolate them from the rest of the settlement area. The plan also talks about risks posed by contact parties. "Gifts like puffed rice, coconuts and bananas may prove hazardous," warns Awaradi, "as Jarawas could turn dependent on them for survival."

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BUT none seems to be heeding these suggestions. On November 24, BJP MP B.P. Singhal, leading a parliamentary committee in Andaman, travelled to the Jarawa heartland, met some tribes people wandering on the trunk road, offered toffees, posed for pictures and suggested giving them raincoats and plastic roof shelters. This happened even as a harried Andaman and Nicobar Islands Adim Janajati Vikas Samity, a 23-year-old voluntary organisation working with the administration to protect the health and prevent the extinction of primitive tribal groups, prohibited Jarawa contacts by villagers and non-tribals, photography, presenting them food and clothing. "The Jarawa habitat has to be developed and enriched," says the isle's Lieutenant-Governor Iswari Prasad Gupta. "We must be careful not to overwhelm them." But there are now plans to take two Jarawas to New Delhi next month and parade them as part of the isle's tableaux for Republic Day celebrations .

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Such conflicting policies could easily herald more confusion—and disaster. "There's very little time at our disposal," says Mishra. Clearly, the choice is between assimilating the Jarawas into the mainstream or ensuring their survival in splendid isolation. "The socialisation process hasn't worked till now," says Calcutta-based political scientist Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chaudhury, who has worked on the tribe. Anthropologists cite the disastrous attempts by the British administration at socialising the Great Andamanese tribe by keeping them in homes—ravaged by pneumonia, syphilis, measles and influences, the tribe's population has now dwindled to 38, down from 1,882 at the turn of the century. Anthropologist Myka strongly advocates a "hands-off" policy by the administration. "Further attempts at contact must be stopped," he says.

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But it may be already too late. Last week, the Jarawas at the bus stop at Shantanu were feasting on snackfood and rice, moving around in gifted soiled clothes, and singing popular Hindi ditties after watching TV. On the trunk road that cuts through their heartland they were stopping vehicles and begging for food. The administration was clueless about stemming the tide and an officer of the London-based Survival International, an organisation for the world's 300-million aboriginals, camped in Port Blair, taking stock of the situation. "At this rate," says SANE's Acharya, "they'll turn up as beggars and servants and prostitutes." That will surely be a sorry epitaph for one of the world's proudest hunter-gatherers.

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