The Land of Naked People Trade cloth - 2003

Details

• Title The Land of Naked People
• Author Mukerjee, Madhusree
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 288
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Wilmington, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
• Date 2003-08-01
• ISBN 9780618197361

Preface

Angamanain is a very long island. The people are without a king, and are Idolaters, and are no better than wild beasts. And I assure you all the men of this Island of Angamanain have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are all just like big mastiff dogs! They have a quantity of spices; but they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race.

So said Marco Polo after coasting by the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 1290. On his way home to Italy and immortality, he was dropping off a Chinese princess in distant India to wed a king she’d never met. After his ship left Sumatra, sailing past a spattering of small green hills in the ocean, Marco Polo did not land. Had he done so, he might have learned more about the dog-people; but by then, he’d learned something about self-preservation.
To end up on the Andamans, one had to be singularly unlucky — to be swept off course by contrary winds, or wrecked by a monsoon storm. A long, delicate chain strung off the southern tip of Burma, and aligned north to south as though on a longitude, the islands had long sheltered a race of terrible reputation. “The people on this coast eat human flesh quite raw; their complexion is black, their hair frizzled, their countenance and eyes frightful, their feet are very large, and almost a cubit in length, and they go quite naked,” related two Arabs in 850. “They have no sort of barks or other vessels; if they had, they would seize and devour all the passengers they could lay hands on.” Stories abounded of the savages dismembering and roasting hapless sailors. “No one to this day has landed on the Andaman where people are cannibals,” recorded the eleventh-century text Ajaibal-Hind. One wonders who lived to tell the tales.
Southward the archipelago gave way to the Nicobars, where lived a far more peaceable people who offered coconuts to seafarers. Almost two millennia ago, the Ten-Degree Channel separating the Andamans from the Nicobars had become a popular route for ships laden with silk, grain, elephants, slaves, and other merchandise to cross from India to Sumatra and then on to China. Even so, many early scholars seem to have confused the two island groups. Ptolemy wrote of the Andamans as Bazakata, derived from the Sanskrit vivasakrata, meaning “stripped of clothes.” The name Andaman conceivably came from nagnamanaba, Sanskrit for “naked man”; the name Nicobar derived from nakkavaram, Tamil for “naked.” So both island clusters were called the Land of Naked People, a Chinese variant, Ch’uuan- wu, being no more helpfully translated as Testicle Display Country.
The Andamanese intrigued all who sailed by, and not just by their nudity and alleged ferocity: with their small, dark bodies and frizzy hair they resembled Africans rather than Asians. “Some have supposed that a Portuguese ship, early in the 16th century, laden with slaves from Mozambique, had been cast on these shores, and that the present Andamanese are the descendants of such as escaped drowning,” wrote Michael Symes of His Majesty’s 76th Regiment of Great Britain upon visiting the archipelago in 1795. Given the antiquity of legends about the inhabitants, however, he guessed that Arab slave ships of earlier centuries might have been the culprit.
Today, scientists believe that the Andamanese directly descend from early humans who colonized mainland and southeastern Asia perhaps fifty thousand years ago. These forebears, likely the first Homo sapiens in Asia, were elsewhere overwhelmed by later arrivals.
Some encounters surely contributed to the islanders’ abiding distrust of foreigners. In 1694, Alexander Hamilton, a ship’s captain, met a forty-year-old Andamanese in Sumatra who’d been sold into slavery as a boy but was freed by his dying master. The first outsider to leave a detailed account of the archipelago, surveyor John Ritchie, noted in 1771 that the islanders knew of guns and feared them; twenty years later a French merchant vessel was reported to be offering Andamanese slaves for sale. In the early nineteenth century such slaves were a regular part of the tribute paid by the raja of Keddah (in present-day Malaysia) to the king of Siam.
The wary natives took from the outside world only the fragments of shipwrecks: the nuts and bolts that washed up on their shores and which they hammered into arrowheads. Although the islands lay on a busy trade route connecting two great civilizations, India and China—and so were at the center of the world, one might say—they remained almost entirely untouched until modern times.
To this day, a hundred-odd individuals survive on tiny North Sentinel Island, repelling with bowss and six-foot-long arrows all boats that approach. They may be the most isolated humans on earth.

On my first visit to the Andamans in 1995, I was entranced. It’s the light I remember best of all, a clear golden glow filling the sky and touching the leaves with glitter. My father (for I went with him, my mother, and my niece) walked over hills and swam over reefs, miraculously cured of his asthma. “There is an air of peace and restfulness,” I wrote in a letter to a friend. One beach in particular—strewn with soft white sand, shaded by towering green trees, and lapped by water as clear and blue as the innards of a gemstone—I recall as though from a dream, so ethereal that I felt the gods must steal down to play there.
I did not know then how deep my involvement with the islands would become or how much the Andamanese would teach me. I had grown up in Calcutta, some seven hundred fifty miles to the north of the Andamans; I knew where they lay on a map but little else. (Calcutta is now spelled Kolkata, but throughout this book I use the old spelling.) In the early 1900s, Calcutta had been home to some fiery young men who sought to rid India of British colonizers by violent means. Most of these freedom fighters (terrorists, to the British) were captured before they could hurt anyone and sentenced to life on the Andamans. I read of their hardships and of their being killed by savages in the islands’ forests when they escaped from jail. Indians knew the Andamans as Kalapani, across the waters of death.
As a teenager, I met a dashing adventurer who’d traveled from Calcutta to the Andamans in a rowboat. His accounts thrilled me, as did other stories that drifted by, of beautiful corals, wild jungles, and unexplored islands. Many years later, after I’d come to the United States to study physics and metamorphosed into a science writer in New York City, I decided to visit the islands as a tourist. At the time a journalist friend in India mentioned that some of those “savages” still survived alone on an island, threatening anyone who sought to land.
Disbelieving, I read whatever I could about the Andamanese. Those still isolated as Stone Age hunter-gatherers used bone, wood, or iron acquired from shipwrecks—not stone—to tip their arrows. They had their own languages, which seemed unlike any other. They shot fish and pigs with bows and arrows, believed that birds talk to the spirits, couldn’t make fire but kept it forever burning in their huts, didn’t have words for numbers greater than two, adored children, and laughed a lot. In short, they lived in a time capsule that preserved the ways of our prehistoric ancestors.
I made use of that trip to interview scientists and officials, learning enough about the Andamans to write a short piece in Scientific American, where I worked. In 1858 British colonists had established a penal settlement on South Andaman at Port Blair, now a sizable town where my family and I spent most of our visit. “No doubt was felt as to our right to occupy [the islands],” stated colonial administrator Maurice Vidal Portman in his two- volume 1899 tract, A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese. Their inhabitants were so dreaded, he went on to explain, that no other nation had bothered to claim the Andamans. The islanders, who had other ideas about sovereignty, led raids into the settlement. But Port Blair spread fast, consuming the jungle around it.
At its center rose the imposing red-brick Cellular Jail, so called because of its rows of solitary cells, radiating outward from a central tower like the arms of an octopus. The cells had small windows that overlooked the sea but were too high to see out of. We met a freedom fighter in his nineties who remembered the bulbuli birds that would fly in and out of those slits, for days his only view of the world outside. This prison in paradise is now a museum, displaying among the sackcloth and fetters a roster of famous political prisoners, mostly Bengalis like myself. I found myself oddly moved by the list. “They gave their lives so we could make a mess of our country,” I mused in the letter to my friend.
The British overlords lived on tiny, nearby Ross Island, now covered with picturesque ruins of brick buildings, ripped apart and then held aloft by the intricately twining roots of huge fig trees. Arched doorways that led to nowhere framed the stunning ocean. “This must have been a charming little town at one point,” I noted. “Bakery, market, oceanside houses, church, even a hospital, and the inevitable cemetery.” I couldn’t make out the tennis courts or the nine-hole golf course where the expatriates had whiled away their postings; the ballroom, I later learned, was demolished during the Japanese reign in World War II. From beneath the coconut tree where I sat writing my letter, I could see the tower of the Cellular Jail across the water. Doubtless the overseers signaled to Ross Island in times of trouble.
Ross was abandoned in 1942, just before the Japanese arrived. It was a short but memorable occupation. The invaders murdered many inhabitants, most of them the descendants of ex-convicts who’d settled on the Andamans. The Japanese constructed feverishly, building an airstrip and thousands of bunkers along the periphery of the Great Andamans—the South, Middle, and North Andaman Islands—to repel the Allies who were on the seas. They also allowed Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, a Bengali firebrand who’d recruited a ragtag army to fight the British, to plant an Indian flag.
At the end of World War II the British returned, but two years later, in 1947, left for good, handing the Andamans over to newly free India. The ex-colony then had a colony of its own, which it promptly used for dumping refugees from various mainland conflicts. Since independence the population had grown nine times, a zoologist told me. The crowding was threatening to exterminate the Andamanese.
Early administrators of the settlement had grouped the aboriginals into four categories. Some ten tribes, altogether between five and eight thousand souls, occupied most of the Great Andamans and their adjacent small islands; they had borne the brunt of the British occupation. These so- called Great Andamanese were at war with the elusive Jarawa, guessed to number about six hundred, who sheltered in the dense western forests of South Andaman. Seven hundred or so Onge tribal members lived on Little Andaman, a not-so-little island farther south, and perhaps a hundred Sentinelese—no one knew what else to call them—roamed the eighteen square miles that compose North Sentinel, off by itself to the west.
The Andaman islanders were the “most carefully tended and petted” of the “races of savages,” British administrator Portman had commented. But by the end of the nineteenth century, syphilis, measles, influenza, and other ailments introduced by outsiders had driven the Great Andamanese to the brink of extinction. Having been isolated for thousands of years, the islanders had no resistance to the killer diseases that thrive in the relatively dense populations of agricultural societies. In the late 1960s the survivors were collected on tiny Strait Island to the east of Middle Andaman. A local paper recently noted their population rising to thirty-seven, “with Smt. Surmai, wife of tribal Chief Jaraki, delivering a male child on Jan. 16, 1995.” They were the most assimilated of the aboriginals, eating boiled rice, wearing Indian clothes, speaking Hindi, and living in wooden cottages. The government’s policy was to give them the “fruits of modern civilization” without destroying their culture, said the director of tribal welfare, whom I met in his little wooden office perched on the side of a hill.
Next to fall were the Onge. In the 1960s and 1970s, Indian authorities resettled thousands of families of expatriates from what is now Bangladesh on Little Andaman, leveling vast tracts of forest to make room for fields. A hundred or so of the Onge were still alive. The government had constructed huts in the hope of making the tribe stationary, so that it would be easier to deliver the dole they needed now that the jungle no longer sustained them. They insisted on nomadic ways, however, and spent much of their time hunting and fishing. “On the files their income level has increased,” commented the director, who was new to his job, “but they have no zest for life.” He envisaged teaching the children soccer and volleyball to dissipate their obvious “sadness and depression.” Because of their enmity with the Great Andamanese—and everyone else—the Jarawa had been spared the devastating epidemics of the nineteenth century. Squeezed into shrinking forests on the western coasts of South and Middle Andaman, they still defended their remaining territory with vehemence. In January 1995, just two months before my visit, they’d shot a pregnant settler with an arrow and killed a calf. At the same time, anthropologists and officials had for decades been landing on some Jarawa beaches to offer food, iron pieces, and red cloth. (The Jarawa wore no clothes, but drew thread with which they made ornaments.) “When you go there, the Jarawa don’t carry weapons,” said the director. “They light a fire to signal it is safe to land.” The “contact mission” would last for a few hours. The naked Jarawa—who were physically exuberant—danced with joy over their presents, sat on the laps of the visitors, pinched their paunches, or claimed piggyback rides. The whole time a boatload of plainclothes policemen with hidden guns hovered near the shore.
Mercifully, neither the British nor the Indians found a reason to colonize North Sentinel. Its inhabitants saw ships and boats in the sea, and helicopters and planes in the sky, but otherwise lived free of outside influence.
In 1995 I spent all of an afternoon and evening pleading with one official after another, seeking permission to join a Jarawa contact mission leaving that night. I explained my credentials to skeptical anthropologists and seemingly sympathetic administrators, who sent me on to someone else. The Andamanese were so vulnerable to germs and harmful influences, I was told, that all visitors had to be minutely scrutinized. Around nine p.m. I ran uphill, sweat-drenched, to the gorgeous bungalow of the lieutenant governor, the islands’ chief administrator and the final arbiter of who would get on the boat. The guard turned me away.
The next morning someone called with an offer to take me to the Jarawa forest. The trip was illegal and probably dangerous as well, so I declined. Now I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken the chance. “This is a gold mine for anyone with curiosity,” I wrote to my friend. So many questions seemed to have no answers. How did a people who looked like Pygmies happen to be in Asia? How did they get here, given that their boats are not adequate for long ocean journeys? How did someone living in the Stone Age view our world, with its ships and helicopters?

What intrigued me the most, perhaps, was the last question — allowing that many of us accustomed to the information age also find technology amazing. In my view the four groups of Andamanese, having encountered outsiders at different times, provided a clear-cut experiment displaying the stages by which a dominant culture subsumes a marginal one—stages played out in virtually every corner of the globe. But over the years the islanders came to reveal themselves as individuals, personable and poignantly clear-eyed as to the trap in which fate had flung them. My initially dispassionate, scientific interest was transformed by a vivid personal sympathy. I began to feel that in their experience lay shades of my own past.
Starting around four thousand years ago, waves of horse-borne invaders and pastoral migrants, speaking an Indo-Aryan language and wielding iron implements, pushed into India from the northwest. Their civilization came to bloom along the fertile riverbanks of the Indus and the Ganges, beating back the aboriginals. Many of the latter retreated to mountaintops, deserts, and inaccessible forests, there to hide forgotten— until modern India found a use for their remote homes, for mines, dams, and timber, and banished them once again, this time to the slums and shantytowns of cities. Others were inducted into a caste system, which reserved the most menial and distasteful jobs for the defeated — rendering them useful while ensuring they could never rise to threaten the rulers.
I couldn’t help wondering if the aboriginals of eastern India — my ancestors—might be connected with the Andaman islanders. The Great Andamanese believed that before a spirit enters a woman’s womb to become a child, it lives in a fig tree; curiously, fig trees are worshipped throughout India as givers of fertility. If you sneezed, an islander might have asked, “Who is thinking of you?”—just as a Bengali asks if something goes down the wrong way and you cough. Shaving the head was a common funeral rite in their culture and in mine; animals, to them, were intriguing and powerful, just as they still remain to most Indians. Such links will forever remain unexplored, for they’re too flimsy to tease apart; another hurdle is the number and variety of Indian tribes, whose home ranges once formed an intricately patterned patchwork laid over much of the map.
In this ancient hierarchy, the British fit in easily: their skin, whiter than that of the purest Brahmins, attested to their right to the top of the heap. When they left, many of their policies, especially toward the tribes, made sense to the new rulers. Indian administrators and academics, trained by imperialists, were insulated from winds of change blowing abroad: the infant nation’s poverty, the sheer cost of Western books and journals, and distrust of most things foreign saw to that. As a result, policies toward the Andamanese remained substantially the same for most of the century and have shown progress only now that it’s almost too late.
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.

Copyright © 2003 by Madhusree Mukerjee. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.