Ethnography in the Andamans, Part 1

“And to your left, you will see an island that is inhabited to this day by cannibals. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is North Sentinel Island, and the people there are still living in the jungle…”

The thin whine of the captain’s overhead announcement went on while I winced at the un-PC description. Then, hypocritically, I stood up to peer out the window. An old woman in a Tamil sari, her nose plugged by gold medallions, stood in my way. So much for spotting the mysterious savages of  North Sentinel Island.

The Indians, for awhile, came every year: with coconuts, buckets, candy. Contact was made a few times; during the others, the Sentinelese shot arrows and threw spears and, in so many words, drew the ‘Welcome’ mat inside. Theirs is the most isolated human settlement on Earth, and perhaps the last uncontacted human society in existence.

And I missed spotting their home from the air, a passenger in a plane run by a beer company. I was flying Kingfisher airlines, bought by the enormous Indian brewery of the same name. Maybe when I get home I can charter a flight on a Budweiser prop, or take flight lessons on a Michelob piper cub, but until that day my relationship with the skies and an alcoholic beverage brand remain limited to a two-hour flight from Chennai to the Andaman Islands.

This is where I am: a place explorers marked on maps with ‘Here be Monsters,’ with dog-headed men, men with faces in their chests, men whose ears hung to their feet and men who hopped on one leg and enormous, springy feet. Where a true tribe of man has cut itself off from the settlement, conversion and development – and here we may use the word in the context of the scar of prefab subdivisions – that has reduced the Great Andamanese, who once numbered 7,000, to 55 survivors.

Who lives here, in these islands at the end of the Earth, closer to Burma than India but looped into Indian time, so there is sunlight at 4:30am and night falls by 5pm? Indian settlers, mainly: from Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, the Punjab, Jharkhand, Kerala. The flowery rapid lilt of Tamil replaced by the staccato ha-chah-chah-keeri-hai of Hindi, which is how the tongue sounds to my untrained ear. Nicobarese, from the islands of the same name just south of here, looking Malay or Burmese, who they are likely descended from. They’re the only native tribe to grow under Indian rule thanks to their embrace of Christianity, agriculture and other measuring sticks of ‘civilization.’

And the Onge and Jarawa, also native islanders, now numbering in mere hundreds; black negritos who would not look out of place tracking Birds of Paradise through the Solomon Islands. Their diet, as well, seems to have been carried over from a menu on Guadalcanal: wild pigs, root vegetables and birds shot from the sky with arrows that have been turned, in the past, on the local Indian population. Perhaps with some justification.

I’ll add the caveat that Indians here are not like the ones on the mainland, and are proud of the fact. To my surprise, most Indian Andamaners, while descended from settlers, are now native born, and to the last, they all say they prefer their islands to the mainland.

“India is too bloody polluted and loud,” says one.

“Everyone in those cities is trying to cheat you,” says another.

“When I get to the mainland, all I want to do is turn around and come home.”

I can’t blame them. I have been spending time in Port Blair, capital and largest city of the Andamans, and even this small settlement, busy as it is with mainland tourists and merchant vessels, feels like a stage set city just holding off the encroachment of what really dominates these islands: green and blue, jungle and ocean, a Pas de deux of natural forces swept along with salt wind so the entire chain is like an illustration pulled from the cool spectrum of the color wheel.

The shades may be gentle, but the land is hard. From the surface of a small passenger ferry to Ross Island the Andaman environment looks as user friendly as an instruction manual; teal water so glittery you have to will yourself to stay in the boat and not immerse your face in the waves’ sun sparkle. But on Ross itself, former British capital of the islands, you see nature is not, in fact, so kind. An earthquake in 1941 flattened this town, then called the ‘Paris of the East’ (at the time there must have been a round dozen cities with that nickname, including one I’ve already tramped through on this trip); what the quake didn’t tear apart the invading Japanese did. Their presence was no less temporary and devoured by nature; clambering over a ridge I kneeled into a Japanese machine gun nest that was split apart by ficus, fig and banyan root, the concrete upheaved and uplifted, the cubby hole entrance a root-mass doorway. The gunner’s window looked out onto fringed palm and blue sea, but even those postcard waters can be cruel, building and peaking when the land shakes and coming as a tsunami to reclaim an ocean’s due, like in 2004, when some 7,000 islanders -- including a fifth of the remaining Nicobarese – were drowned.

The waters are not all death though. There is some amazing marine life here as well, although you’re not likely to find it in Port Blair’s aquarium. No immersive halls of sharks here; just row after row of fish preserved in formaldehyde, and a few live ones in tanks that a visit to your local pet store could top. In one jar, eyes more glazed and fishy than usual, a striped corpse silently screamed at me through glass; the pinned card said ‘Clown Fish.’ I scribble in my notebook, “I’ve found Nemo.

***

Like all outposts and border settlements, the Andamans don’t lack for characters and eccentrics.

“Burmese Buddhist Mission in Port Blair,” was painted in salt-faded white on a light blue wooden building around the corner of yet another Gandhi statue. Above a small entrance: the seven-colored Buddhist flag. I walked in and nobody there but a few carpenters sawing a plank. A woman glimpsed me from the edge of a curtain in an apartment set into the foyer of the building; her eyes vanished behind a wall. I shrugged, moved on up the steps into a wash of sunlight and a small, Burmese stupa. The familiar, upturned bell shape design, the golden-robed Buddha with his Cleopatra eyes and Mona Lisa smile, a slight smirk that says, “I’ve found it,” and the loops of the script inked into my arm made me almost gasp with longing to be in Southeast Asia again, to walk barefoot over marble tiles and watch the slow shadow of Buddhas and monks grow low and slow past the lick-flame of dozens of orange candles.

I sat and meditated in the stone courtyard for awhile; ironically, I have gotten better at sitting in place even as my job increasingly flings me far and wide. But it was hot, as it gets here; the sun is white, and I mean that literally, white and heavy and strong, baking the land with the after steam of the rains so it constantly feels like you’re in a wet furnace. I have found new sweat glands here, and put old ones into overtime.

I walked back into the foyer and out into town. A man stood at the doorway to the niche apartment. Indian, and something else, something East Asian and given to epicanthic eye fold.

“What are you looking for sir?”

“Well,” I said, and tried to figure out how to explain this one, and settled on just coming out with it, “I’m looking for Burmese. Are their Burma people here?”

He eyed me. “What is your intention?” In the West the phrasing is rude and accusatory, but I’ve found in India (and especially among Hindi speakers, where questions are asked in a polite imperative form) what may feel like an abrupt command or query is only good manners lost in translation.

“Well, I’m half-Burmese, and…”

“Really?” The man’s eyes widened. “And from?”

“From USA. America.” I said Amrika, the way most Indians pronounce it.

“Ah, OK, OK! Come inside! Have some coffee!” He barked something at this wife, and I saw her Indian and something else eyes, the ones that had been watching me before, shuffle out, robe-clad, into the kitchen. On the walls were posters of the snowy alps with inspirational quotes, the sort of thing your teacher my have hung on the walls of a 4^th-grade classroom, an inexplicably popular decorative motif from Kenya to Port Blair. Next to the posters was a picture of a sexy Disney princess look-a-like wrapping her arms around a distinctly phallic candle twice her size.

My host, DK, smiled at me. “I’m half-Burmese too. And so is my wife.”

My coffee dribbled. “Really?”

DK explained. The Andamans have always attracted misfits and refugees, and were held by the British for many years besides. The Raj settled Burmese loggers here in the deep jungle of Middle Andaman, and others arrived by boat; pirates, fishermen, poachers, perhaps even the Sea Gypsies, water nomads who spend their lives under sun and salt in the backwash of the Mergui Archipelago.

When the Indians took control of the Andamans after independence they needed security forces to tame the wild islands and protect their new settlers. So they settled on the Punjabis, the loyal, turban-clad men whose names end in “Singh,” or “lion,” the commonality of all Punjabi surnames. A Singh had come, DK said, and fallen in love with a local Burmese girl, and the radio control operator for the docks in Digilipur, northernmost settlement in the archipelago, was born.

“My daddy loved my mummy very much. My wife has a similar story. Say something in Burmese to her! She understands, even if she cannot speak it!”

She must speak a damn sight more than me, I thought, but I thanked her in Burmese for the coffee and she grinned.

“So DK,” I asked, “You work with boats here?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. His eyes glowed; I want to say it was the cheerful spark all Burmese eyes eventually betray, but his hospitality was as much Sikh as Southeast Asia, and outside the language of cultural stereotypes I could get physical with my cliches as well. DK was a big man with broad shoulders, and his friendliness was of the shoulder thumping, overbearing guy school of camaraderie, a vaguely menacing affection that is entwined in some Y chromosomes and doesn’t alter across the world.

“You ever get out to the little islands?” I said.

“I go to the Nicobars often.” He paused, and his voice dropped a clear register. “I had to go many times after the tsunami.” The eye light suddenly vanished. “So many friends, so many acquaintances – dead.”

The Delhi government, which runs the Andamans and Nicobars (the islands are a union, i.e. federal territory, rather than their own state, similar to Washington DC) responded well to the disaster, DK said. After three days. But for 72 hours it was chaos, and homegrown rescue convoys, and people helping each other if they had survived, as the majority of the forest people did. After the land shook, they told interviewers, tribal lore told them to seek the high ground.

DK crewed a boat that sailed to the Nicobars and saw miles of aide relief, food supplies, medicine and dehydration pills and water purification tablets, all sizzling under the equatorial sun on the docks. He took nothing, he says – what use did he have for other people’s food and medicine? In his home they were safe and spared. No, there others, so many others, to help…

The conversation had taken an emotional toll on DK, so I tried to gently shift the subject.

“Are the Nicobars beautiful?”

My host’s face immediately regained its fire. “Beautiful? Oh, so beautiful, like a mountain in the sea all alone.” I wasn’t sure how this was different from the other 577 Andaman Islands (38 inhabited), but let it slide.

“That’s why you’re not allowed there,” said DK, and it is true; foreigners may not step foot in the Nicobars. “If you came,” and he started laughing, “no one would go to the Andamans any more! They’d all come to the Nicobars!” His laughter howled in the house, and I thought: one day, the Nicobars, one day.

I asked DK and his wife if they wanted to pose for a picture. They happily agreed, and when DK sat down, he splayed his legs over his living room chair the way my grandfather does in Rangoon. There’s something in the national memory of Burmese that instructs them to occupy a space with as much comfort as possible, and this is why, I believe, I can sleep on almost any train, plane or bus in the world.

Comments

[Matt, Survival International]

Dear Adam,

What interesting adventures you have had! Survival International works on behalf of tribes including the Onge and Jarawa that you mention in this article. I thought it worth noting that there are other uncontacted tribes on the planet, besides the Jarawa. There is more about that on our website:

http://www.survival-international.org/campaigns/uncontactedtribes

We wince with you in response to the 'un-politically correct' comments you heard from the plane's captain. Our 'Stamp It Out' campaign deals precisely with the issue of crude language about tribal peoples, much of which amounts to sheer prejudice and racism. See our page about it here:

http://www.survival-international.org/campaigns/stampitout

Matt,
Survival International