A book about the Andaman islands
I’ve been reading the 2003 book The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders by Madhusree Mukerjee.
It is not a very well written book and at times a bit grating (although it is overall less cringe-inducing than its title might make it seem to be).
Nevertheless it’s an interesting account of both the author’s personal experience with the indigenous people of the Andaman islands (although cringe-inducing nonetheless because self-conscious gawking is still gawking) and their tragic history from the first contact with European colonizers until the year 2000.
For those who don’t know what and who the Andaman Islands and its indigenous people are, here’s a quick recap :
The Andaman islands are an archipelago in the east of the gulf of Bengal, off the coast of Myanmar, that consists in a mainland made up of four very close islands collectively called “Great Andaman”, another big island which is further south called “Little Andaman”, and various minor dependent islands among which the moderately famous North Sentinel island.
The Andaman islands’ first inhabitants came to the islands probably some 60 000 years ago or so, and probably belonged to the first waves of modern humans to leave Africa, much like other indigenous populations in the Philippines and Malaysia (collectively these people are know by the problematic-sounding monicker “negritos”), and also probably like papuans, aboriginal australians and Tasmanians. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the history of the Tasmanians and that of the Andamanese :
After thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the world in their picturesque tropical paradise, barely ever disturbed by the odd merchant ship (that nonetheless gave the earliest accounts of the place), the Andamanese came into contact with western civilisation when the British, having conquered India, decided that the Andamans would be a good stop on the way to China (the Andamans are just north of the strait of Malacca), and founded a penal colony in the south of the Andaman because that’s what the British fucking do with every oversea possessions, apparently they have a never-ending supply of convicts.
For the Andamanese, contact with the so-called civilisation resulted in unmitigated disaster.
The colonisers brought not only their ordinary patronizing racism towards dark-skinned people living naked in the jungle but also all kinds of diseases, and the usual colonial plagues (including alcohol and tobacco which was deliberately introduced to make the andamanese dependent on “trade”).
It was such a disaster that from an estimated 5000 (which I personally think is an underestimation but heh), the Andamanese were barely a few hundreds in the mid 20th century.
In 1948, India became independent. And looking at the Andaman islands it said to itself :
And so, from about 3 000 inhabitants in the 50s, the Andaman islands population grew to about 350 000 today. And the new colonizers fell a lot of trees and created ecological problems and fucked up the islands in various ways, the most glaring of which being a road that goes right through tribal territory.
Today most of the Andamanese “tribes” are extinct, the only surviving cultures being the Jarawas and the Sentinelese. A few Onge and Great Andamanese are left as well but they seem to have lost most of their traditional ways and certainly their languages.
The Jarawas have shown a certain amount of hostility to outsiders encroaching on their territory and hurting them in various ways, but the coup de grâce for them is the Great Andaman Trunk road, a highway that cuts through their land and through which buses full of tourists come gawking at them like they were in a human zoo. It’s clear that the very existence of the road is a threat to the Jarawas.
The so-called Sentinelese are a people that live on the isolated North Sentinel island, 36 km off the coast of the Great Andaman.
They have attained international celebrity in 2018 when they killed a fucking idiot of a missionary who had landed on the island, and are probably at this date the most famous “uncontacted people”.
It should be pointed out that they are not the only ones (there are also uncontacted people in the Amazonian jungle and possibly in New Guinea), and also that given their traumatic encounters with the British in the 19th century, “uncontacted” might be something of a misnomer.
Anyway, in conclusion western civilisation (especially the British) is like a King Midas but for genocide instead of gold, especially towards dark-skinned people.
