Ethnography in the Andamans, Part 2

[This is part 2 of a two-part post; the first bit is here]

DK said there were full-blood Burmese in Port Blair, including some monks, and promised to take me to them the next day. Privately, I wondered if any of the priests were refugees from the Saffron Revolution of September, 2007. Many monks had fled overland into Thailand; maybe a few had also escaped the country by boat?

Up the steps of another cracked, blue building, and a row of footwear at the base; a sure sign of Burmese residents. And facing away at the first landing, walnut skin crinkled by sun and years, a robed monk sat in the relaxed posture of his people, peeling garlic with a thick knife.

He turned towards me. “Hello.”

I put my palms together, bowed my head and explained what I was looking for: folks like him.

He peeled the garlic slowly. A dog hopped on his bench, yawned dramatically, and snuffled its head between its paws the way dogs do. When the monk spoke, it felt like every word was measured lengthwise and crosswise with a small ruler before escaping his mouth.

“No Bah-mese today. Some in Chennai, getting medical treatment. Some on other islands. Just me. And one more.” He yelled over the porch; someone yelled back; he turned to me. “He’s getting tea.”

I sat down. A little Indian girl walked out of the house and began playing with a toy cell phone, blaring faux ringtones. In India, you’re never too young to make a lot of noise. The monk of a prophet who praised silent contemplation, plus tolerance for others and universal kindness, smiled at her with indulgence. Slow indulgence.

Cut, peel, rip; naked clove in the metal basin between the legs.

Some robes and Burmese calendars hung inside the austere house, floored, like a good Burmese home, with oil-smooth, forest-at-night dark teak wood. “Can I look inside?” Maple syrups poured faster than his nod.

Here and there: pictures of Shwedagon pagoda, pictures of famous Burmese monasteries, husbands and wives in Civil War-sepia photos, the women with hair piled into elegant buns and men shining in their best silk longyis (sarong) and gaung baung, a sort of lopsided turban. A stack of disintegrating books on Buddhism strained a table; I picked up Buddhist Therapy and lingered over a chapter on letting go of longing.

“Were you born in Burma?” I asked, coming outside while an unseasonable soft rain of garlic skin fluttered over the porch.

“No.” Slice. “I am from Assam.” Tear.

He was born and raised and lived in that Northeast Indian state for many years. Look at a map of India; the protruding arm of the Northeast States lays in a distinct geographic and cultural region that is, by rights, more a blend of Tibet and Southeast Asia than subcontinent. That is why the Burmese claimed the wet valleys of Northeast India in the 19^th century, and that is how the British found the justification to add their kingdom to the Empire.

But this has always been a land that resisted the claims of any but its own, its indigenous tribes of Tibetan-descended nomads and Vishnu-worshipping plains-dwellers and yes, Burmese Buddhists. In the grand scope of world affairs, Assam’s hills, some of the rainiest on Earth, have given the world two globally recognized goods: tea, and the bih-jolokia, or poison chili, the hottest natural variant in the world. How hot? There is a measuring table for this sort of thing: the Scoville Scale. A shot of Tabasco gives 2500 Scoville Units of heat; bite into a Jalapeno for 8000 or a Habanero for 300,000. The bih-jolokia laughs at you, standing in some quasi-mythical level of spiciness: 1,041,427 Scoville Units. Guatemalan Insanity Pepper, you’ve met your match.

But what you read about in Assam today is separatist violence; some 70 people were killed a few weeks ago in a bomb blast in Guwahati, the state capital. The news merited a few days on the front page here; I never heard it mentioned in the West, whereas similar casualties from the London bombings dominated headlines for a month. “Wrong zip code,” say reporters when a family is killed in the projects and no one covers it, but wrong zip code is nothing compared to wrong country code or unpronounceable capital.

The monk had been silent for several minutes. “I was a monk at the Mahasi in Yangon – Rangoon,” I said, switching between the old and new names of the city, trying to find some common ground. But there was none. This wasn’t just a half-breed’s attempt to connect being stonewalled by the full-blood, I realized; this was a full-blood who has seen less of Burma than me. I felt as if I was wasting both our time. I bid farewell, walked to the bottom of the steps and put my shoes back on.

***

Unlike the aquarium, Port Blair’s tribal museum, run by the Anthropological Survey of India, is well-executed. But as much as I was here to peruse the exhibits of fishing rods, spears and fetish icons of the indigenous Andamaners, I was also seeking out an expert. The pilot’s words had not left me; “And to your left, ladies and gentlemen: the Stone Age.” I wanted to suss out these ‘savages.’

Spears, baskets, bows, arrows, a twist of bark fashioned into a corset-like chest guard; to protect from branches or weapons? A picture: a Shompen man standing naked but for a loin cloth, somewhere deep in the forest. That there are still people who live like this; it makes me curious and yes, automatically judgmental. It seems as if their lives are survival. What else can they accomplish with these bare implements? Cunningly crafted tools, yes, but the Wheel is the Wheel and it was never invented here. Then again, the Mayas never got the hang of the wheel either, and they measured eclipses, used zeroes and counted 365-day years. And left great stone buildings in the jungle.

What of the people here? Their traces seem that: traces, sketches, bare outlines of humanity. The settled, indigenous Nicobarese are agriculturalists, and they leave some material evidence of culture: painted statues, wooden houses. That might as well be a lost city compared to what the hunter-gatherers produce.

But the Sentinelese place a wild pig skull on the floor of their lean-tos for some unknown reason, and there are small geometric patterns painted onto the Jarawa chest guard, and in the latter’s barely discernible language anthropologists know one word: lalay. Friend. My eyes are trained to seek sparks in things, histories and philosophies, but as Arkady puts it in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, some people measure intelligence by their ability to alter the external environment, and some, by their ability to preserve it.

I met a Montanan and his Canadian girlfriend in the museum. He was a nice guy, but a bit of a Spicoli; long, drawled “duuudes,” no qualms about entering a nice Indian restaurant in full backpacker grime and gear (imagine if some dirty, loud and demanding young Indians who spoke three words of English between them walked into a nice family restaurant back home and you’ll understand why Indians are remarkably patient to put up with backpackers). He had a love of risk I recognized and remembered.

“Why take malaria pills, man,” he said over dinner later that night. “That stuff just fucks with your body anyways. If you’re gonna go, you’re gonna go. I don’t wear a helmet when I get on a bus here, y’know?”

He had read a few books, so he knew everything. He explained to his girlfriend, “Yeah, so in the US we have, like, the First Amendment, which lets you say stuff, but right after that passed they made another one that says you can’t talk shit about the government.”

“The Second Amendment is the Right to Bear Arms,” I said.

“That’s the First.”

“No, the First is free speech.” My inclination to boil was doing a good job of lightly simmering.

“Right, but after that there was some other law.” Pause.  “Right?” That was the first uncertainty I heard in his voice. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his girlfriend – he was a nice guy – but school’s school.

“Are you talking about the Sedition Act?” I asked.

“Uh…maybe. Yeah!” He smiled.

“I think that was overturned. Over 200 years ago"(actually,it expired with John Adams presidency in 1801--woops).

He said, “Right, right,” but I suppose that gave him enough room to save face and for historical accuracy to be preserved.

In the museum we stared at a Jarawa lean-to.

“I hear you can go to the north islands and just, like, chill with the tribes,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to,” I replied. “They sound like they don’t need to be contacted.” Maybe that’s paternal of me, but first contact seems to follow a depressing pattern around the world: two societies with different levels of technological accomplishment meet, and the ones with steel, no matter how well intentioned, grind the ones with stones into dust. Maurice Vidal Portman, the British officer in charge of administering relations with the native Andaman tribes, put it well in the late 19^th century: "Their association with outsiders has brought them nothing but harm, and it is a matter of great regret to me that such a pleasant race are so rapidly becoming extinct. We could better spare many another."

Before I left the museum, I knocked on the door of the office of BK Das (DK, BK: Indians have a knack for names that match American fast food icon acronyms), an anthropologist employed by the Indian government. A small, dark man with a bushy gray mustache and gold-rimmed glasses sat behind a desk covered with cards for local businesses and a tide chart of the islands. A young Bengali with a wide-brimmed bush cap sat across from him. I interrupted their conversation, rudely, I’m afraid.

“Mr. Das? My name is Adam Karlin. MA, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.” Yes, I sounded like a pompous ass. But credentials go a long ways in India, and for all of the nation’s patriotism and anti-colonialist pride, degree letters from the UK come off as particularly impressive; I once made the above statement to enter a temple in Madurai, and the caretaker, who looked as if he’d never left Tamil Nadu, smiled and said, “Euston,” the London neighborhood that abuts my old university.

Das gestured me into a chair, and without much prompting, we started discussing the state of the indigenous islanders.

“The Great Andamanese now number 55, and of their seven original clans, only two remain. They have been resettled onto a small island, where only a handful speak the Great Andamanese language.” The anthropologist used his hands to accentuate the statistics.

“Will they survive?”

“In a mixed form, but they have had to intermarry to continue their existence, and in the intermarriage they have lost their cultural identity.” The other tribes were not in quite as dangerous straits, but their futures were also uncertain.

“The Onge remain in their reserve in Little Andaman island, and they occasionally come out to trade. Some are learning Hindi, but in that process they also risk losing identity. The Jarawa remain isolated.” This, I had heard, was partly true; the Jarawa stayed in their tribal reserve, but the main highway through the islands cut through their jungle, and sometimes they were mocked by Indian tourists as they stood on the road. In addition, a common if illegal trade had developed with Bengali and Tamil settlers in the interior jungle towns. Das confirmed all of the above was true, and shook his head at the fact.

“And what of the Sentinelese? Have you seen them? Gone on any of the expeditions to make contact?” I asked. I may never meet a man who had come as close to a living Stone Age culture. I asked DK the night before if he knew any fishermen who would take me to the edge of North Sentinel, out of bowshot, just to see it. He shook his head vigorously.

“No! Fishermen do not go that way unless they want to be killed. It is far too dangerous.”

As an ethnographer attached to official government research missions, Das had seen both the island and its people – before they shot arrows at his boat. The projectiles fell short of their mark, but they drove the scientists away.

“Now we don’t go out as much. We don’t try and initiate as much contact because it seems fruitless. But every now and then some visiting dignitary will come here and…” he trailed off.

“Demand to be taken along on a contact expedition to the island of the savages?”

 Das laughed. “Yes. Exactly.”

“What,” I asked, “Was it like to see the Sentinelese? Not just as an anthropologist; what was it like to experience first contact as a human being?” I silently added in my mind, Who else in the world has done so?

Das’s smile made his mustache take in his cheeks. “They are different, you know? Bigger and…bigger than I expected. They moved fast in their boats, and they seemed strong, and healthy. There can’t be more than 150 of them,” he added, with palpable sadness.

“Do you think they knew, from other tribes, what has happened to other Andaman natives since they interacted with the Indians? If so, that might explain why they don’t want contact.”

Das shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Who can say?” It could be that, or the isolated island was just that: too isolated. Even in this world. Long, I thought, may it remain so.