The Last Island, page 5
Jarawa boy, South Andaman, c. late 1990s.
T. N. Pandit (left) with Sentinelese, 1991.
On January 8, 1991, alongside articles titled “Poultry Training for Women” and “Oil Conservation Week Begins,” the following front-page headline appeared in Port Blair’s government-owned newspaper, The Daily Telegrams:
first friendly contact
with sentinelese
Four days earlier, a government contact party had paid a visit to North Sentinel, the first such expedition in more than a year. At first, as the anthropologists, constables, and officials approached the beach in the Tarmugli’s motorized dinghy, they could see no one on shore. Then, finally, a few Sentinelese stepped out from behind some bushes and started to gesture at the explorers, seemingly to indicate that they wanted gifts. As usual, the dinghy moved down the beach to a safe spot, and a crewman jumped out to drop off a bag of coconuts. The Sentinelese rushed down to grab it. But for the first time ever, they brought no weapons with them when they approached the water’s edge—only mesh baskets and the iron-tipped wooden adzes they sometimes used to chop open the coconuts. Emboldened, the dinghy’s passengers tore open another sack of coconuts and threw them into the water. Five of the Sentinelese swam out to collect the nuts, and a few others brought out one of their canoes. The contact team members gestured to them to come closer, but the natives got nervous and went back onshore. Deciding that they had taken enough risks for one morning, the explorers went back to the Tarmugli for lunch.
In the afternoon, however, some of them decided to return. This time, they found at least two dozen natives waiting for them. One, a young man, was holding a bow and arrow, which he pointed at the intruders, but a woman quickly came over and pushed the arrow down. The man took his weapons and buried them in the sand. At this, a great many of the Sentinelese started running down the beach and splashing through the surf toward the dinghy. The leader of the contact party, a small, officious bureaucrat with the title Director of Tribal Welfare, stood up and started personally throwing coconuts out to them. Then the Director leapt from the boat into the chest-high water—one of the young Sentinelese men recoiled in fright—and handed coconuts to the tribesmen as they crowded around. After he had gone through five bags of coconuts, he climbed into the dinghy, headed back to the Tarmugli, and returned to Port Blair to spread word of his triumph.
The news did not create much of a stir. There was some back-slapping among the local officials and, later, a lot of internal squabbling over which one of them really deserved the credit. An editorial declared that the Director of Tribal Welfare was a very brave man, and the Indian government really ought to give him some sort of medal. The story went unnoticed by the overseas press, perhaps because foreign-desk editors were preoccupied that week with a story that seemed far more momentous: the impending war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
T. N. Pandit missed the great event, too; he’d had a family emergency to take care of in Port Blair, so he’d sent two assistants in his place. A few weeks later, however, in February, he returned to North Sentinel with another expedition. This time, several Sentinelese men went so far as to climb into the dinghy and grab entire sacks of coconuts; one of them also spotted a policeman’s rifle hidden in a corner of the boat and reached out curiously to touch it. Toward the end of the visit, Pandit was alone in the water with a group of Sentinelese; the other explorers had returned to the dinghy and started to drift away from him, and suddenly he found himself much nearer to the strangers than to his own comrades. One of the young tribesmen looked at him, scowled, pulled out an iron-bladed knife, and made a gesture, Pandit says, “like he was going to cut out my heart. Maybe he thought I was planning to stay on the island.” But the dinghy quickly returned to pick Pandit up. He would return to North Sentinel several more times before retiring from the Anthropological Survey in 1992.
Pandit says he was thrilled, at first, by his encounters with the Sentinelese. “That they voluntarily came forward to meet us—it was unbelievable,” he recalled, the last time we met at my hotel in New Delhi. “They must have come to a decision that the time had come. It could not have happened on the spur of the moment.
“But there was this feeling of sadness also—I did feel it. And there was the feeling that at a larger scale of human history, these people who were holding back, holding on, ultimately had to yield. It’s like an era in history gone. The islands have gone. Until the other day, the Sentinelese were holding the flag, unknown to themselves. They were being heroes. But they have also given up.
“They would not have survived forever—that, I can reason out. On a scientific basis, we can say that this population might have lived for another hundred years, but eventually . . . Even destruction takes place in the natural course of things; no one can help it, it happens. But here we have been doing it in a very conscious way, knowing full well what the consequences could be. What would be and what could be are the same.”
It is difficult—perhaps impossible—for us to know exactly how the moments of contact were perceived by the Sentinelese themselves.
Throughout the five centuries since the Age of Discovery began, Western travelers’ fascination with first contacts has inspired them to chronicle, in great detail, their own experiences of such encounters. These accounts usually follow formulaic patterns, always self-flattering ones: Sometimes the brown-skinned savages, shouting war whoops, rain down volleys of arrows and spears upon the stout-hearted explorers. More often, natives are portrayed bowing down before the strange apparitions as if worshiping new gods, and marveling at the newcomers’ vastly superior technology.
Yet some rare accounts from an indigenous perspective survive. Nearly all were transcribed by Europeans, interviewing members of a native group after they had established a means of mutual communication. Sometimes this happened several generations later. Still, the tendency of non-literate groups to preserve their histories carefully through oral tradition means that we can probably tease out some threads of authentic experience.
For instance, a missionary in the 1770s interviewed native elders whose primeval island had been “discovered” by Europeans in the previous century, when it lay at a remote edge of terra incognita. Tribal memory still preserved the details of that first contact.
One day many years ago, the elders told the missionary, some native fishermen were out in a canoe when they saw a dark, hulking shape drifting—or perhaps swimming—across the surface of the water. They hurried back to shore and alerted their countrymen, who gathered on the beach to watch the apparition drawing closer. Some thought it must be a sea creature; others, a very big canoe or house. Finally, the thing arrived and they saw that it was indeed a floating house full of white-skinned people dressed in strange colors, including a man clad all in red to whom the other strangers seemed to defer. The natives decided that this man must be “Mannitto”—which, the missionary parenthetically noted, meant “great or Supreme Being.” Moreover, they decided that the other white men must be lesser gods accompanying the brightly clothed deity. They worshiped the Europeans accordingly, bringing offerings of food and other gifts.
That primeval island was Manhattan. (One thinks of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, watching the sun sink low above London: And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.) The natives were a subgroup of the Algonquian Indians, who inhabited much of the region that is now the Northeast Seaboard of the United States. The year was 1609, and the man in red was Henry Hudson.
It appears that the missionary scribe in the 1770s misunderstood certain key details of what the Indians told him. In Algonquian cultures, the word manitou (which he recorded as “Mannitto”) does not translate as “Supreme Being.” Rather, it denotes, in the words of one historian, “the manifestation of spiritual power, a manifestation that could occur in almost any form.” Manitou also means a numinous, all-pervasive force that can bring about sudden changes, for good or ill. The natives of Manhattan, then, were not worshiping Hudson and his companions, so much as greeting and welcoming them—probably with a degree of apprehension—as spirit-visitors.
In fact, scholars studying first contact experiences around the globe have observed that members of many indigenous cultures believe they inhabit a world teeming with supernatural beings that arise from the earth or sea, often in the shape of humans, animals, or the bleached corpses of the dead. Perhaps it is even misleading to call such apparitions “supernatural” in the way that Western cultures use the term, since the spirits are believed to be as real and as integral to the natural environment as any common rock or tree.
This human tendency to shape unfamiliar experiences into familiar narratives is probably universal. Think of the European explorers themselves, for whom each new land was another Eden; each fresh colony a rebuilt Jerusalem; each foreign culture a lost tribe of godless heathens, ready to receive the Book and the Cross.
One English anthropologist who worked among the Great Andamanese a century ago reported that they believed in various special classes of spirits, known collectively as lau, who had originated from the souls of dead men and women. More specifically, the different groups included lau of the jungle, lau of the sky, lau of the sea. The lau of the sea, the natives told the Englishman, were grotesque creatures with pale skin, long arms, and bushy beards, who carried mysterious lights that could sometimes be glimpsed across the water in the darkness. Thus, the sudden appearance of light-skinned strangers with floating houses and fire sticks often does not challenge or overturn the natives’ cosmology, but rather confirms it. The spirits are made visible; the shamans were right.
By now, a skeptic might note, it is unlikely that the Sentinelese—after so many contacts and near-contacts—would perceive intruders (whether John Chau, T. N. Pandit, or anyone else) as anything but fellow human beings, rather than apparitions from some realm of gods and magic. Certainly they have observed the outside world as intently as the outside world has observed them; more so, probably, since our boats and flying machines have by now become familiar parts of their surrounding world, and since hunter-gatherers are famously perceptive observers. They may not know exactly what helicopters or jet planes are, nor how they stay aloft—but, for that matter, how many of those jet planes’ passengers could explain exactly how a million pounds of metal, plastic, and refined petroleum are able to lift them into the sky?
Still, this point of view is based on our own, rather arbitrary, distinctions between the natural and the unnatural, the human and the divine. Vishvajit Pandya, the present-day scholar who lived among the Onge tribe of Little Andaman, has noted that even after generations of frequent contact with British colonizers and Indian settlers, both they and the Jarawa refer to outsiders as Ineny, a term deriving from ineny-lau, the spirits who come from the sea. In the traditional Andamanese understanding, the spirit world is inseparable from the mortal world: humans and animals, natives and strangers, the living and the dead, all inhabit a shared space. What changes constantly are the power relationships among them. Just as humans hunt and gather animals, spirits—moving invisibly on the wind—hunt and gather humans. Human life is absorbed by the spirits; the death of one is the birth of the other.
At eighty-eight, T. N. Pandit still lives in New Delhi, his body frail but his mind undimmed. I no longer need to make a pilgrimage to India to see him. We chat on FaceTime, he in his living room and I at my dining table with a mug of coffee, seven thousand miles away.
He has returned to the Andamans several times, most recently in 2014. Pandit is still remembered by the Great Andamanese, whose numbers have increased to seventy or so, several of them having taken spouses from outside the tribe. On his last visit, he was embraced by the grandchildren of Loka, the Great Andamanese chief, and by those grandchildren’s grandchildren.
After John Chau’s death, Pandit’s phone rang constantly with calls from journalists all over the world, wanting to know about his own encounters with the mysterious islanders. “They seem to be my claim to fame, right or wrong,” he says. As to the American’s murder, the old man feels pity—and even, it seems, a tiny bit of respect—for this young man who, however foolhardy, possessed such stalwart religious faith that he was ready to sacrifice his life for it. More, though, he respects the islanders: “The Sentinelese gave the opportunity to him to go back alive. They were generous—they did not want him killed. I was there so many times, and even when they let us approach, they also told us not to come ashore. We obeyed but he did not.”
Even before Chau’s death drew the world’s attention to the Sentinelese, Pandit’s memories of them—and of the Jarawa—remained a living presence for him: “In my consciousness, they are always there.” Occasionally they visit him in dreams. “Happy dreams. They have been part of my life for so many years. I gave no real gifts to them, but they gave a great gift to me.” He vividly remembers the face of one young Jarawa woman as she sat in the explorers’ boat, perfectly naked in the midday sun, carrying herself with the upright dignity of a queen. He remembers, too, the individual faces of men, women, and children who splashed toward him through the surf at North Sentinel Island—both their smiles and the sudden flashes of anger that convinced him to go no further.
Several years ago, a New York Times reporter interviewed Pandit and then published an article headlined “A Season of Regret for an Aging Tribal Expert in India”—implying that he had gradually come to repent those contacts with the remote Andaman tribes. This is not true, he says. Rather, his regret is about what he believes to be the islanders’ inevitable fate. “My regret is that they will not remain forever. Their distinctive culture will cease to be. But are we also romanticizing a hard life that we do not know? The Jarawa invited us to come in; I say, let us wait for the Sentinelese to invite us. The day they want us to come ashore, we should go.”
In the twilight of the anthropologist’s life, his thoughts stray even more frequently to Kashmir, to the now-alien world he was born into. The ruling princes are long gone, and with them many of the landmarks of Pandit’s youth. In 1990, amidst the outbreak of fierce sectarian strife, his family members and most other Kashmiri Hindus fled for their lives. A Muslim neighbor burned their ancestral house to the ground. Pandit says he holds no rancor against the man, or against any single perpetrator. His Hindu faith teaches that we inhabit a universe propelled through a perpetual cycle of creation and destruction, a wheel that turns for reasons only the gods know. His scientific observations of human beings have shown him that historical cataclysms often occur not through individual decision-making, but with a kind of blundering violence that lies almost beyond the reach of free will.
And yet the immutable truth remains that the home of his forebears has disappeared from this earth. His father’s library, with its rare volumes in Hindi, Urdu, English, Sanskrit, and Persian, has crumbled into ash. The ancient scroll with its many generations of ancestors is irretrievably lost; those names will never be read or spoken by Pandit’s children, or by their children’s children. Thus a culture vanishes—an entire world erased, with a single turn of the wheel.
Chapter 3
“You will find the Andamans very complex, very interesting,” Pandit told me in October 1998, before I left New Delhi for Calcutta, where I would board the steamer to Port Blair. “In many ways, they are a throwback to the nineteenth century.”
He was more or less right. My sense of traveling through time began on the ship itself, on the morning when, after five days and almost eight hundred miles, land appeared at last, far off our starboard bow, a faint, thin stripe at the horizon, just a few shades darker blue than sea and sky. This was the eastern coast of Great Andaman. About a hundred and fifty miles long and only a dozen or so miles wide, it is where the British situated their penal colony, and where nearly all the population of the Andamans lives today. Still, most of the modern development remains clustered around Port Blair, near the southern tip, and most of Great Andaman remains blanketed by trackless forests, as thick as they have been since time immemorial.
As the shore approached, I took out my telescope: an ancient, cumbersome thing, bound in brass and leather, that I had purchased on a whim in a cluttered curio shop in Calcutta—doubtless, I’d imagined, a relic of some long-dead Conradian sea captain. I unscrewed its lens cap and pointed it toward the thickening band of blue. The jungle now revealed itself, a fringe of treetops silhouetted against a higher, paler fringe behind, and then another behind that, higher and paler still. We edged slowly closer, past mile after mile of desolate beaches and rocky islets garlanded with surf. For many hours there was no sign of any human habitation. Then a few sudden flashes of sunlight on metal roofs among the trees, like signals from a heliograph, announced that we were reaching the outskirts of the settlements around Port Blair harbor.
Lazily, our big boat swung against the jetty, and at last we disembarked alongside a dingy passenger hall with a big sign reading “gate way to the andaman & nicobar islands.” The town beyond had winding, narrow streets thronged with mopeds, stray dogs, auto-rickshaws, pedestrians, bicycles, market peddlers, paan-wallahs, wandering cows, and just a few mud-stained cars. In the central bazaar, near a concrete tower with the town clock, was a Government Telegraph office. Outside one shop, I saw a poster that listed daily screenings at the archipelago’s only cinema, a place quaintly called the Mountbatten Talkies. Most evenings, I would soon discover, the town’s electrical grid suddenly failed, and for an hour or two, life went on by candlelight. But amidst Port Blair’s rickety hodgepodge were also signs of a budding tourist industry. Half a dozen hotels had opened up, and in their lobbies stood racks of color brochures that advertised fishing trips, scuba dives, and nature walks.
