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The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders
Natural History, Sept, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall
by Madhusree Mukerjee Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003; $24.00
Global technology, for better or for worse, has made it possible for Lapland caribou herders and Amazon hunter-gatherers to watch reruns of The Simpsons with the cultural savoir faire of Los Angeles suburbanites. So it comes as a bit of a shock to read about the near-total isolation of the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, a smallish member of the Andaman Islands chain, which lies some 750 miles south of Calcutta in the Bay of Bengal. The island's hundred or so inhabitants--the only remaining group of Andamanese still untouched by modern civilization--may still, like their fellow islanders a century ago, live as hunter-gatherers who wear no clothes, do not plant crops, and have only minimal use of fire (they cannot make it, but preserve hot embers to transport from place to place). They may even still be oblivious to the connection between intercourse and conception--just as they were in the nineteenth century, when travelers found that the Andamanese all believed that women get pregnant through certain spirit-laden foods.
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Geopolitically, the Andamans seem an unlikely place for such an aboriginal stronghold. They lie smack in the middle of major trade routes that connect India, Singapore, and the Far East; native islanders must have long been accustomed to seeing sailing ships from the great mercantile empires pass within hailing distance.
Yet for centuries hailing was about all that happened--the islanders had a reputation for being fiercely hostile people who resembled African pygmies. Indeed, for two centuries the natives (the name "Andaman" has been linked with a Sanskrit word for "naked man") met most approaches by foreigners with arrows and stones. (That attitude was perhaps warranted by the fact that when ships did enter the island's precincts, they had a habit of abducting stray natives and selling them as slaves or curiosities.) With their dense jungles and fearsome population, the islands held little attraction for permanent settlements until 1858, when British colonists from India established a penal colony at a harbor on South Andaman, calling it Port Blair.
The arrival of Westerners led to the dissolution and demoralization that has befallen so many other groups of indigenous peoples: a once impenetrable society began to slowly come apart. The British brought unfamiliar diseases that drove one native tribe of Andamanese nearly to extinction by the end of the nineteenth century. Japanese invaders in the 1940s cleared swaths of island land for airstrips and military installations. An Indian government replaced the British after the war, and the islands became a prime target for development to accommodate the subcontinent's refugee population. By the 1970s the remaining members of the Onge tribespeople, living on the southernmost island, Little Andaman, had been forced into settlements after seeing their forests bulldozed so that authorities could resettle a flood of refugees from Bangladesh.
Madhusree Mukerjee, a former editor at Scientific American, has been coming to the islands since the mid-1990s to document the condition of the native population that remains: about 500 individuals of various tribes and dispositions. Many of them occupy a strange limbo between traditional and modern, living part-time in government housing but carrying on old ways whenever they can. Most Jarawa tribespeople still dwell in forested areas of the largest island, where they are openly hostile to settlement and to settlers. And then there are the Sentinelese, protected from any contact with the outside by government edict and by their isolated location, to the west of the island chain.
The story is a distressing one, and ironic in that the Indians, once British subjects, are now colonizers themselves. "We have to teach them some morals," the local secretary of tribal welfare tells Mukerjee, in a voice that echoes Queen Victoria's provincial governors. But the forces at work here are too impersonal and too relentless for either blame or hope. To be sure, the North Sentinelese are still more or less untouched, but one senses that they, too, will not remain that way for long. At the end of her tale, Mukerjee comes close enough to their island to see them, then retreats at the last minute as if she were carrying a contagion--as, in a way, she is. There's little she can do for the Andamanese, other than give us a glimpse of indigenous people still reeling from their first encounters with global civilization, seen through the eyes of one who wonders what it all means, both for them and for us.
Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K. T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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