All That I Didn’t Know about the Andamans

Hostile tribes, human safaris, earthquakes by the month, seaplanes, micro volcanoes, jobless elephants and really stupid tourists

Jarawas are a lonely people and they have been this way for some time. Their group of Andamanese Negritos is believed to be the most isolated in human history. Ever since migrating from Africa an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 years ago, they have lived in the Andaman forests without any contact with the outside world, protecting their privacy by being relentlessly hostile to outsiders. The Indian Government has demarcated a tribal reserve for them to lead undisturbed lives. This is a jungle spread over South and Middle Andamans. Despite the Centre’s best intentions, a big fat highway called the Andaman Trunk Road runs through it. Although the Supreme Court ordered the road closed in 2002, it is clearly still in use. And thus we have the oddity of hundreds travelling to and fro daily through a place designed for seclusion—listening to loud music and littering the reserve while they do so. Curious Jarawas stand along the road, and some tourists treat them like foreigners treat beggars in Mumbai. They take their snaps and give them knick-knacks. In this circus was I a silent observer, travelling in a state transport bus from Port Blair to Diglipur, in the last week of May.

It was my first time on the islands, but I felt connected to the place. After Independence, my grandfather, a forest officer, was posted here. My mother was born in Port Blair’s Cellular Jail, part of which had then been converted into a hospital. She told me bedtime stories about the islands. About Lilliput volcanoes that could be destroyed with a twig, sharks flapping noisily in the sea and lapping up humans, hostile tribals attacking outsiders with arrows. Once there, the tales became vivid.

I did come across miniature volcanoes, little mud piles bubbling over in Baratang. I didn’t see any sharks, but I did see a crocodile accused of eating an American tourist. The tribals my mother feared were also there. They were Jarawas, whom she had never seen but I did on my bus journey. There was a woman standing on a hillock, dressed in nothing but a red girdle of sorts, holding a cherubic baby at her waist while older children stood by the road. The bow and arrows of my mother’s childhood nightmares were missing, though.

Having tea at the reserve entrance, waiting for the gates to open, a tourist had asked the shopkeeper what Jarawas liked to eat—“Biscuits? Bananas?” The shopkeeper said it’s illegal to take photographs or give anything to them, but the uncle couldn’t fathom why: “They should be given food. They should be given clothes. The poor people!”

It’s common to think indigenous people who live in the forest are poor because they can’t afford to pay rent in the city, that they can be saved from starvation with Parle G and Kurkure. I couldn’t control my laughter. The man bought biscuits from the teashop.

He was breaking the law, but while it’s illegal for us to interact with Jarawas, it is legal if they want to. Two young Jarawa boys hitched a ride with us on the state bus. One was in his traditional loincloth, the other in hip-hop attire. He wore loose checked shorts, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Complemented by his African features and dark skin, he looked like an American rapper. Human safaris, as foreign newspapers call such voyeurism, are a lot more rampant than we would like to believe. A tour operator offered to take me to Strait Island, a restricted space strictly meant for the Great Andamanese, a conglomeration of near-extinct tribes. Entering such a forbidden zone is easy, it seems. He ran me through pictures on his computer of exotic people who awaited us. There were three topless, big-bosomed tribal women posing amid turquoise blue waves, like Kingfisher bikini calendar girls minus the bikinis. It’s more likely that the women were Jarawas, not Great Andamanese as the operator boasted, and it’s very likely that they are being exploited.

There are many things that we don’t associate with the Andamans. The next time you see an orange Rs 20 note, notice the beaches and palm trees imprinted on it. It is the Andamans. But the islands are more than that. Port Blair is a hill station emerging from the sea, with an archipelago of hilly-islands around it. The islands are home to some of the best forests in India, lands that harbour monstrous centipedes, birds with edible nests and the Andaman padouk, a timber so famous that the Queen of England’s palace is said to have a table made of it.

The forests harbour more than just biodiversity. We know that the Andamans was called Kaala Pani by Raj-era prisoners, but we don’t know that locals now call it mini Bharat because of the cosmopolitan mix of cultures and people. There are Bengalis, Tamils, North Indians, tribals from Chhota Nagpur, colloquially called ‘Ranchis’, and a refugee population from East Bengal. Then there are also people who George Weber, an anthropologist, wrote ‘represent a period of Indian prehistory so ancient that it makes even the earliest Indian epics look recent’. Andamanese Negritos—Jarawas, Onges, Great Andamanese, etcetera.

The islands are situated in a seismic zone. The epic Tsunami-causing event of 2004 also tilted the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. New coastal areas emerged, exposing corals and rocks, and fields drowned forever. The northern tip of the north Andaman Island is now higher by 3 metres. And the southernmost tip of India, Indira Point in Great Nicobar, has sunk by more than 4 metres.

Earthquakes are so normal here that people in the northern town of Diglipur worry if they don’t experience a rumble every week or two. It means something bigger is in store. In the month I spent there, I experienced two earthquakes, measuring 6.5 and 7.5 on the Richter scale. While I ran out for the first one, I stayed in bed the next time.

The sense of instability is worsened by a geo-political headache. The Chinese have parked themselves at nearby Coco Island, a place they’ve leased from Myanmar. There was a time when the British government aggressively invited people here to inhabit the place. After Independence, the Indian Government decided to populate the islands with Indians, a way to counter foreign claims over the place. Land was distributed as freely as temple prasad in some places. Even now, people just can’t stop coming: illegal immigrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, and labourers brought over from mainland India.

Among the jobless today are an unlikely group of immigrants—elephants. Many were brought by the British to aid timber-logging activities. Many more were brought by the Indian forest department and private timber firms. Now that timber felling has considerably reduced, the elephants are jobless, with nowhere to go. Not wild, just out of place. A timber company PC Ray abandoned one such group on the uninhabited Interview Island in the 1960s, and a curious term is used to describe them: ‘feral elephants’.

Meanwhile, the islands’ languages are vanishing. Recently, the last Bo speaker died and the dialect went extinct with her. What everyone now speaks, resettled tribals included, is Hindi, or an Andamanese version of it that has the syntax of Bambaiyya Hindi and speed of spoken Tamil. It takes a minute of concentration to realise that it is Hindi. Hearing an old lady yell, “Kaan patti ke neeche degi”, on Ross Island made me feel at home. The echoes of Mumbai slang extend to its spirit too. Ingeniously, the nightmare of learning numbers in Hindi  has been avoided—35 is ‘tees-paanch’ and 41 is ‘chaalees-ek’.

In April this year, The Economic Times reported India’s first ever seaplane service to be launched in the Andamans (later this year) by a joint venture between Pavan Hans and the local administration. The article ended with the huge potential of seaplanes in India. What the report didn’t mention was that this wasn’t the first time a seaplane took flight here. That happened in the early 1990s. An islander recalled witnessing the first flight of the first service. The pilot attempted to land on the water, the plane cartwheeled, capsized, and took the service down with it for the time being. Few mainlanders know. But then, most also consider Kanyakumari the southern-most tip of India, not Nicobar’s Indira Point. Somehow, the boundary that defines national news in the Indian media excludes far-off places like Lakshadweep, the Northeast and Andaman & Nicobar. Perhaps that explains the existence of 26 local newspapers in Port Blair, a city with a population of 100,186 by the 2003 census. Newspapers here have their own brand of journalism with clear priorities. On the front page of a local newspaper called Andaman Express, sharing space with the Prime Minister’s visit, was a report on the natural demise of a bus conductor in Diglipur, 12 hours away from the capital. In some parts of India, the death of a bus conductor matters.

There is something else the local newspapers report that goes unnoticed in mainland India. On 20 June, a baby boy weighing 1.8 kg was born at GB Pant Hospital in Port Blair. With his birth, the population of his depleting tribe of Onges hit a grand 100. A feat of some magnitude, considering that their number was 96 a decade ago. 

There are many other things about the Andamans that we mainlanders aren’t aware of. India’s only active volcano, Barren Island near Port Blair, turned active once again after the 2004 Tsunami, although its tremors are inconsequential, bordering zero on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. And a few months ago, a crocodile attacked an American tourist on Radhanagar beach at Havelock Island. A beach that was proclaimed as the best beach in Asia by Time magazine. Locals were in disbelief, as crocodiles aren’t known to attack in broad daylight over open, coral waters. The forest department caught the errant crocodile, and I saw it in the Haddow zoo. I can tell you what a man-eating crocodile looks like. It looks lonely, lost and utterly sad. 

The Cellular Jail in Port Blair was built by the British after the Uprising of 1857 to keep freedom fighters and notorious criminals away from the mainland. It was the Guantanamo Bay of its time. Today, hundreds throng every evening to the place to watch a melodramatic light and sound show depicting its history. While watching it, a lady sitting next to me asked, “Is the story real?” We were watching the struggle of VD Savarkar who had been kept in solitary confinement here. The story was India’s freedom movement. I told her it was real.

About The Author

Shubhangi Swarup