In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858-2006)

In the Forest Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858–2006)

Vishvajit Pandya

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“For Ammi, who would have been happiest had she lived to see the book completed, for Madhumita who made this book possible and for all my friends in the forest who may some day decide to read it.”

Contents

Acknowledgment 1

vii

Introduction

1

PART I VISUALITY 2

The Past Imagined in the Dugong Elegies

29

3

The Documentation of the Andamanese: From Photography to Ethnography

71

PART II MATERIALITY 4

Things in Time: Carriers of Continuity and Change

5

Materiality Mapped

99 151

PART III HISTORY 6

Signifying Practices: The “Violent” Other

203

7

Images and Imaginations: Modernist Encounters

260

PART IV CONCLUSION AND BEYOND 8

Towards a Political Economy of Visualized Material

317

9

The Specter of “Hostility”: The Sentinelese between Text and Image

326

v

vi

Contents

Appendix A

Tools As Part of Culture and History

365

Appendix B

Smoking Pipes As Part of Contact History and Culture

373

Body Adornments As Markers of Contact Relations and Culture

377

Maps

387

Appendix C Appendix D Abbreviations

395

Glossary

397

Bibliography

399

Index

421

Acknowledgment

This book is not based on just long durations of intense fieldwork, but on twenty-three years of thinking, about a question that people ask me and I ask myself, “What is going on in the forest?” Even as I pose this question from the position of an Outsider I approach it as one who has been in constant touch with the world inside. My relationship with the Andaman Islanders I must confess, has changed remarkably over the long years of my association with the Islands and its culture. My initiation into the field in 1983 began as a doctoral student working among the Ongees of Little Andamans. The concerns then were with the cosmology that sustained and added meaning to life in the forest for the Ongees. I put these together in a monograph titled Above the Forest (1993). Over a period of time I got engaged in various “contact” expeditions to the Jarawa Reserve Territory and also made regular visits to see the Ongees who were becoming more and more integrated into the system of state welfare. My subsequent engagement with various judicial interventions in the forest particularly in relation to the Andaman Trunk Road that ran through a segment of the Jarawa Reserve Territory gave me a chance to be involved with the Island administration in a critical dialogue about activities focused on the welfare of the ‘primitive tribal groups.’ This new way of engaging in the forest from a position ‘outside’ prompted me to think about the ‘contact events’ that involved the tribal communities and Outsiders including ethnographers like myself. I wondered how the Andaman Islander experienced, interpreted and represented to both themselves and to the world outside, the structure and practice of contact over time. My reflections on contact did not appear to appeal too much to the administration whose own thoughts about it didn’t seem to change very much from the pre-independence days. Nonetheless I was on various occasions given the vii

viii

Acknowledgment

opportunity and perhaps privelege to be in the forest and communicate my observations on “changes” in the forest to the administration. In my attempts to impose the Outsider’s sense of history and change over the Ongees and Jarawas I was compelled to stand back and ask what the past, present or future meant to those whose sense of history continues to elude discursive awareness. Driven by the immense possibilities of this endeavor I returned to the forest again and again to find out how we as outsiders have figured in their consciousness and how they made sense of our contacts with them. These many visits into the forest would not have been possible without the assistance and trust extended to me by the Andaman administration, particularly the office of the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti. There were surprisingly quite a few individuals among the AAJVS staff who expressed interest in my questions and extended valuable support at various times during my field work. I remember with particular gratitude the support of Mr. Awaradi, Bisheswar Das, Anup Mondal, Aloke Dutta, and late Mr. Bakhtawar Singh. They extended critical support at times when my work would draw “official” indignation. Though I confess that I have had my fair share of differences with the staff of the Anthropological Survey of India at Port Blair, I acknowledge the fact that their perspectives on the primitive tribal groups have enriched my understanding of the various implications of the “ethnographic gaze.” My association with the islands has also brought me close to a group of individuals who’ve expressed passionate concern about the islands as a whole, its ecology, culture, and political life and whose efforts have been directed towards creating an awareness about these among the local population as well as the world at large. I express my sincerest admiration for the work of Samir Acharya, George Weber, Pankaj Sekhsaria, Simron Singh and Manish Chandi. I share their passion for issues related to the Andaman Islands and feel at one with a larger community of people who while remaining outside the forest think and care about all that’s going on inside. I am particularly grateful to George Weber for letting me use visual material from his website. From a longer-term perspective my study of the Andaman Islands owes much to my intellectual association with Ralph Nicholas, Milton Singer, Fred Eggan, Valeri Valerio, Bernard Cohn, Marshall Sahlins, Nancy Munn, James Urry, Barry Hewlett, Robert Dentan, and Veena Das. My association with them, in different times has contributed to my approaching the culture and society of Andaman Islands in ways that go far beyond the deployment of particular frame-works of approach. I imbibed from them the habits of both ethnographic rigor and critical reflection. Research grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Victoria University at Wellington have made it possible to carry out fieldwork since 1983 to 2003. Some of the ideas presented

Acknowledgment

ix

in this book were initially presented as seminars and lectures in various university departments. I must acknowledge such opportunities I had at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the Department of South Asian Studies at Heidelberg, University of Leiden, the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, at the University of Chicago, Oxford University and more recently at a seminar organized jointly by the Royal Pavilions Libraries and Museums and the University of Sussex at Brighton. In the preparation of the manuscript my greatest debt is to Ms Niharika Gupta for her invaluable critical interventions. I also thank Anirban DuttaGupta, Kuntal De and Navrang Panchal for their help and enthusiasm to help with processing the visual records for the book. And finally, this book would not have been possible without the warmth, support and encouragement of Justine Nolan and Patti Belcher who encouraged me to put the manuscript to print. The persons who have coped with my dual existence “in and out of the forest” and supported and encouraged me in all my endeavors are my father Shri. Sharad Pandya, my late mother Mrs. Kajal Pandya and Dr. Madhumita Mazumdar who shares my “dual existence” in a true spirit of comradeship. For them no formal acknowledgement of gratitude will ever be enough. This book in some senses is dedicated to them. Madhumita has critically and constructively contributed to this project from its inception to its close. I thank her and her family especially, Mrs. Romola Mazumdar, for taking a keen interest in my work and taking pride at whatever little I manage to accomplish. Last but not the least I am thankful to Ongees and Jarawas who never let me feel that I was an enen (outsider) after all.

Chapter One

Introduction

The ethnographer has not only to spread his nets in the right place, and wait for what will fall into them. He must be an active huntsman, and drive his quarry into them and follow it up to its most inaccessible lairs. And that leads us to the more active methods of pursuing ethnographic evidence. Malinowski, B 1922: 8

The premise of this book is that ethnography is not an objective account of what lies “out there” in the field, but is informed by the ethnographer’s craft. Ethnography is a work of mediation to which visual processing is central, through activities of observation, documentation and display.1 To apprehend anything is to “eliminate as well as absorb visual data” (Phelan: 1993: 13). Therefore what is shown by a culture to the ethnographer is not equivalent to what is seen when selected as worth recording or collected for public display. Re-tracing the gap between the two lets the ethnographer assess the limits of his understanding. That is to say, to achieve a measure of self-awareness, the ethnographer must be aware of the changing interpretations by outsiders of the visual aspects and material productions of a culture. It is because contact plays out through the dynamic between the visual (as a mode of making sense of reality) and the material (things representing cultures or things exchanged between cultures) it becomes a point of entry to the book’s investigation into the way the Andamanese have imagined and have enacted the history of the last two centuries. There are always at least two ‘histories’ of encounter, as each party would tell the story differently. This book seeks to have both sides of the story address each other. The section on Visuality looks at how the ‘Other’ is incorporated into an organized knowledge-system, and includes a chapter discussing 1

2

Chapter One

Ongee boy fishing at low tide, Dugong Creek 2005.

Ongee myths about outsiders. This is followed by another chapter on the early photographs of tribal people by British settlers and ethnographers. The section on Materiality concerns the investment in things made, to influence natural processes or to distinguish the human body, and discusses how these are transacted between cultures. Each chapter contrasts the perceptions of tribal people and settlers of ritual objects and collectibles, ‘civilized’ clothing and modern consumables. The concluding section on History addresses not just represented but actual encounters and developments in which the experiences of both tribal and settler are implicated more thoroughly than in the transaction of objects. The road cutting through the Jarawa Reserve forms a site of encounter, sometimes conflict, and is equally a means of mobility. Thus areas of experience unaccounted for in the dominant discourse are indicated by juxtaposing alternative perspectives on change (Ongee myths) and the provisionality of images is shown by describing their appropriation by their subjects (Jarawas performing as primitives to prevail upon tourists to give them gifts). Such self-reflexivity becomes possible, is indeed demanded, because the interaction between migrants from different parts of India and the indigenous peoples make the Islands a heterotopia within the subcontinental region, or a place where “all the other real sites . . . found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986: 22). The proximity of groups following disparate modes of life, whose shared history has been brief and conflicted, places strains on the “imagined political community” of the nation. Such a definition of the nation, proposed in an “anthropological spirit” by Benedict Anderson (1983: 5–6) offers the valuable reminder that the power of nationalism as an idea is not explained just by invoking the dialectical relation of culture to the political economy, but by investigating how people imagine their relations to those with whom they have no direct interaction. This is only achieved by excavating from within

Introduction

3

our own discourse the representations sedimented over time, and by respecting the different discursive codes of the tribes in the Andamans. So we find the apparent givenness of history destabilized by bringing into dialogue (Bakhtin 1981) settler and tribal versions of the past. One narrative establishes hierarchies of cause and effect between events while the other sees it as an open series. Similarly the demarcation of stages, the configuration of roles and attributions of agency are different in each. The tribes do not explain the past through the grand narratives of colonial occupation and postIndependence development, for shifts in power at the state level are not seen as the primary constraints on action. The Ongee for instance describe change not in terms of colonialism and modernization but by showing how individuals and collective subjects are continually responsive to one another. They unfold a series of actions planned for the specific contingencies of lived experience. What outsiders assume to be static relations between simple material realities and isolated communities with no history of their own the narratives of the tribes show how flexible and dynamic such relations are. For the nation state Andaman Islanders exist as a constructed ‘myth’ but for the Islanders in the forest the outsiders do exist as a sustained historical experience. In the contact and confrontations between the Andamanese and the non-tribals there is also a convergence. (Cf. Levi-Strauss1981: 607). Myths, of both sides come to terms with histories of two sides, to reestablish a state of equilibrium capable of acting as a shock absorber for the disturbances caused by real life events. The outsider’s illusion of changelessness in the forest is called to question by the ceaseless transformations in quotidian life within it. It is these transformations that mark the very historicity of the Andamanese as subjects from the ethnographer’s point of view. For the Andamanese the historical nature of the world that lay to hand when any mind was making sense of it brings about fresh oppositions, transposing the constant pattern of similarities and contrasts onto different levels of a mythological grid offering the least resistance to the flow of events.2 In a way the Andamanese create an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss, which at times loses its value, but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will draw its nourishment. The Andamanese needless to add have suffered historical conditions of tragic and irrecoverable loss and perhaps remain in search for the solutions for their conditions in a new relationship within the world. Andamanese myths are means to open the historicized world around them and provide acts to reset the temporal scale of the ‘lived world,’ obliterating the time that stretches out behind it. For in the Andamanese mythical structures and historical practices, myths while themselves remaining unchanged are seen to work as modes of making sense of change through time. For the Andamanese

4

Chapter One

who constantly move in a dynamic world, history too is apprehended through perceptions of movement. But outsiders have in their relationship with the Andamanese regarded them in general as ‘cold societies’ (Levi-Strauss 1966: 233–4) lying “outside of history.” It is rarely recognized that history for the Andamanese plays itself out in the mutual representations of relations of themselves and the world outside. These relations formed by the Andamanese constitute an ethnographic and historical discourse that is not to be found in the field. It remains embedded in the ethnographer’s construct of what was found, seen and shown in the context of contact between the Andamanese and the outsiders. It should be clear that the above does not assert that the Ongee “speak and know their conditions” as subjects implicated in the projects of imperialism and national development (Spivak 1988: 283). In an influential essay, Spivak has argued that it is utopian to imagine coming into contact with the subaltern’s “consciousness” of the multiple forces constraining his powers of action or expression, for these very forces prevent the subaltern from being fully available to himself (still less to ‘herself’). So the academic may hope only to render visible the mechanism silencing the subaltern, not to render “vocal” one whose position is defined as exterior to the discourse available to the academic (1988: 285). Accepting these caveats, it is only necessary to add that the archival investigation with which her essay is largely concerned has constraints different from those of field studies, and Spivak does concede the provisional value of “information retrieval” in areas silenced in both history and anthropology (1988: 295). Given this book’s concern with the relationship between representation and power, however, it is worth noting Spivak’s related criticism of post-structuralists who conflate endeavors to re-present the voice of the subaltern in art or philosophy with representing them in the political domain. The two are “related,” she says, but “irreducibly discontinuous” (1988: 275). But to the extent that power is perpetuated through discursive representation, it is also the case that those subjected to power may adapt these representations for their own ends. That is to say, if outsiders have appropriated the world of the tribal in images colored by their own assumptions and interests, today the latter in turn incorporate these images in their own version of the “politics of representation.” This is to argue that the broad sense of politics includes a community’s mobilization of identity in the face of the “means of coercion” (Weber 1978) in which representations of Andamanese history participate. Both tribal and settler populations today interact within what Clifford (1997) terms a “multi-locale ethnographic present,” in which one does find resonance in the argument of Foucault (1982: 220) that “a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” in the face

Introduction

5

of power relations where the ‘Other’ over whom power is exercised must be “recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts.” When a knowledge of the extended history of contact is brought to bear on an investigation of recent encounters, we can see how the projection of clothed or unclothed bodies as the occasion demands presents itself as a political option for the problems of the Jarawa as the outside world presses in on them.3 Throughout this book are interleaved images, in which textual and visual components may complement or qualify one another. The semiotic analysis of these shows how ideas are conceived circulated and come to change through the periods of colonialism, modernization and globalization. Without claiming that the history of the Islands is representative any more than it is unique, the comparison of archival records with field-studies of the narratives of the Ongee and the Jarawa hopes to establish the value of focusing on the late twentieth century in anthropologies of tribal culture. By not centering exclusively on colonialism and its immediate aftermath, new areas are opened up such as how the contours of the world of the tribal are redrawn by the utopian visions of the State and what Gellner (1996: 101–2) terms the “modular” culture of modern civil society, whose members are seen as composed of elements to be recombined as the circumstances of institutional life demand (See also Gellner 1996a).

ISLANDS OF FORESTS: A HISTORY OF CONTACT EVENTS A detailed account of colonial perceptions of the Islanders appears in Chapter Three, but it must be understood that encounters between the Andaman Islands and the world outside do not begin with colonial settlement. Lying in the busy trade route of Southeast Asia, the Islands used to be visited by collectors of trepang and birds’ nests as well as pirates and slave traders. Those collecting natural products often left iron behind in a form of silent trade, and many landmarks continue to be known by Burmese names dating back to the 1850s. Tales were spread about the inhabitants being cannibals with the intention of discouraging competitors, though such accounts did not prevent “small black men” being favored as pageboys, and as late as 1884 they were being captured by pirates and sold in the courts of Southeast Asia.4 In 1788, Lieutenant Robert Hyde Colebrooke of Bengal and Lieutenant Archibald Blair of the Royal Indian Navy were directed to explore the Andaman Islands by Lord Cornwallis, then Governor General of India. By the summer of 1789, Blair had completed his survey of the islands and had initiated uneasy relations with the Andamanese. He reported that his gifts of small knives, mirrors, and glass beads had to be laid out on the beach, as the

6

Chapter One

‘natives’ would not take presents directly from the hands of the colonizers. The ten years it took to set up Port Cornwallis, whose construction began in 1790, saw the first manifestations of the ‘hostility’ of the tribal population towards outsiders, especially the Akabea, and to a lesser degree the Jarawa. Memories of being captured by slave traders would have contributed powerfully to the tribes’ hostility towards colonial explorers, though the Islanders were sometimes unexpectedly friendly towards visitors or shipwrecked crew. Tribes from the forests to the south of the settlement would sometimes visit to ask for food or bits of iron for arrowheads. Yet though gifts of metal were used to win over the tribals, they were greeted with a display of the firepower of Europeans when they returned for more. This set the stage for future relations. Exploration of the thick tropical forests was inhibited by the prospect of encounter with the tribal population, who posed a constant threat which the colonizers were neither able to confront nor willing to admit. Port Cornwallis, which was subsequently renamed in honor of Blair, was fortified with cannons facing four directions, which were fired every alternate day with in the hope of intimidating the arrow-shooting aborigines who periodically emerged from the forests. If these early settlers, attracted by the Islands’ resources and their strategic significance, found their plans impeded by the hostility of the inhabitants, collectors of information, who sought to understand the ‘natives,’ followed them. Their reports sometimes differ sharply from those of the first settlers, whatever the claims of each to objectivity and their common stake in the colonial enterprise. For example, in the 1790s, Colebrook, describing how the Islanders would attack even those from whom they had received presents, referred to them as ugly, and over half a century later, Dr. Frederick Mouat, described their bodies as perfectly formed (Mouat 1863). When studying contact history, one must bear in mind how the Islands figured in the long-term plans of colonizers. Mouat arrived on the Islands in an official capacity, as president of a government commission entrusted with the task of finding a suitable location for a penal colony and also of assessing the possibilities of friendly intercourse with the natives. The middle decades of the nineteenth century being the period when the British Empire was consolidating its position on the subcontinent, the need for a secure penal colony assumed urgency in 1857, when soldiers and rulers of the Indian states mobilized against the British. The Islands appeared to be the perfect location for a prison, since convicts who managed to break out would have no prospect before them except the dense forest with its violent inhabitants and the surrounding rough sea (Portman 1899: Vol.1: 265). Within a year after the establishment of the penal settlement in 1858, the bodies of 240 convicts were found in the vicinity of Port Blair, killed by the Jarawa when they tried to escape.

Introduction

7

Contact thus gave rise to a range of images of the tribal people—as cannibals, as hostile or as friendly—the residual influence of which can today be seen among those who have migrated from the mainland after India became independent, as is discussed in Chapter Six. Initial signs of interest in Andamanese images of outsiders came from anthropology, a discipline emerging in the late nineteenth century to investigate such questions as how “the savage of the Andamans seeks to rationalize his behavior” like the “civilized man of Western Europe,” to adhere to the words of Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 235). In 1908, Radcliffe-Brown observed that the Andamanese used the term “Lau” for outsiders (1964: 137–38). These light skinned people with facial hair and long hair on their heads were believed to feel the cold because they belonged to the world of spirits and came from the sea. In my own fieldwork I have found that the Ongee and Jarawa still refer to the outsider as ineney, derived from inen—spirits who come from the sea, distinct from the Andamanese ancestors who are transformed into spirits. This raises the interesting point of how the outsiders are given a place in the changing world as experienced by the Andamanese. In trying to explain the “speed with which indigenous American people were able to integrate the entirely unexpected appearance of Europeans,” Levi-Strauss proposes that their myths contained a “hollow space” for the outsiders. A fuller account of Ongee notions of borders and of power appears in Chapter Two below, but the following summary shows how the “hollow space” in which they accommodated the arrival of the British account for relations not necessarily antagonistic.5 A fear of the confusion of categories prevails among the Ongee. The campsite represents the creation of humanized space in the wilderness, and is defined against the mangrove swamp where elements of forest and sea mingle and the threat of spirits is greater. At the same time, it is believed that humanized space needs to be continuously ‘charged’ with the power of the spirits, indeed birth is understood to be the descent of a spirit into this world. The Ongee are able to accept simultaneously the vulnerability of humans in the social world and the danger of reverting to being a spirit in the world of nature. The danger of encountering spirits from the known order can be minimized by special rituals (Radcliffe-Brown 1964, Pandya 1993). Similarly, it is ritual that enables humans to return to the spirit state and to assume the power to distinguish unseen spirits from visible humans, safety from danger and culture from nature. In other words, transitions are accepted as inevitable and the spirits around as inescapable. So taking outsiders for spirits would not mean that they are always to be avoided. Contact with them might be a means of acquiring power. Radcliffe-Brown noted that wearing clothes was perceived as an important attribute of outsiders. This means that the Andamanese saw the body of the clothed outsider as “natural” to these alien spirits,

8

Chapter One

whereas the unclothed body of the native Islander was “cultural,” that is to say, its adornments conveyed meanings agreed on by the community. The Andamanese were of course perceived to “live in a state of absolute nature” by the colonial administration, who required them to cover themselves whenever they were permitted to enter the British headquarters, though as discussed in Chapter Five, this did not preclude interest in photographing the “naked native.” Chapter five shows that differing perceptions of the place of clothing in the ‘other’ culture mean that notions of mutual understanding continue to be discrepant today. The administration seeks to add to its knowledge of the Jarawa by, among other means, photographing them without the clothes they are given to wear in Port Blair. Conversations with the Jarawa on the other hand, convey their belief that it is necessary to tie cloth around themselves in Port Blair, “a place where all have clothes on” in order to move about freely, acquire new things and return home safely. Encroachment on their forests led to attacks from the Jarawa, discussed in Chapter Six in terms of the longue durée. Chapter Seven describes “developments” after 1947, from the first Five Year Plans which focused on clearing forests and setting up industries, to the construction in 1978 of the Andaman Trunk Road (hereafter ATR), which cut through the area of forest demarcated as the Jarawa Reserve. The chapter describes the “contact expeditions” initiated by the administration (in which officials of the Anthropological Survey participated), but also presents the settlers’ perspective on government policy. There were sections of the public who explained Jarawa attacks on their villages by the fact that the government had done so little for them and others who felt the government was going out of its way to pamper tribal groups. The latter claimed that their taxes were being misused to fund contact expeditions, which created a taste for consumer products among the Jarawa without getting them to participate as productive members of society. If advocates of development and ‘mainstreaming’ and environmentalists and NGOs who advocated a policy of ‘no contact’ appeared to view the tribal population in very different lights, these seemed to converge through the tourist-lens. There started illegal ventures to take tourists to the Jarawa Reserve where they could take pictures of the Jarawa and give them gifts. From 1999, groups of Jarawa started to undertake excursions out of the forest, coming to stand by the ATR and appeal to passers-by for food and other gifts. This new visibility of theirs overtook the contact initiatives programmed by the government. Concerned citizens litigated on behalf of the Jarawa whom they saw as driven by deprivation to these measures. They were able to muster enough public support to get a hearing in court. Chapter Seven describes the consequences of the case of Ms. Shyamali Ganguly vs. Union of India. The confrontation between settlers and tribals being now fought in the public

Introduction

9

sphere, it quickly gained international attention through organizations like Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE), Survival International and Cultural Survival. What is the lie of the land today? The ATR that had meant progress to those outside the forest was seen by those inside as an invasion to be resisted—and this history of (often unrecorded) deaths, extended legal battles and improvisations that became established as the pattern of contact between the Jarawa, local residents, tourists and the government is told in Chapter Seven. Both battleground and contact zone6, the road has also blurred the line of distinction between “primitives” and “ex-primitives.” Chapter Five describes the Jarawa’s wish to be seen “in clothes, shoes, finger rings” when they go to Port Blair, thus enacting a hyphen between the binaries of primitive and modern unsettling for those who had placed themselves squarely in the zone of the modern. But the hyphen is a risky zone to inhabit. Or as the Ongee would describe it, the Jarawa are caught in the predicament brought about by “the contact between entities that are separate and two” (see Chapter Two). On the one hand, for a people who traditionally would relocate with the seasons, the road represents not just mobility but a yearlong supply of food available at one campsite. Yet even as the road makes accessible certain commodities that appear more convenient than what they forage for or manufacture themselves,

On going maintenance of the ATR near R.K. Nallah, 2003.

10

Chapter One

it makes it easier for the resources of their forest to be exploited by those living outside. They find that the projection of themselves as primitive works to bring them ‘aid and benefit,’ but they are also aware that the government— until only the last few years—looked benignly on those who showed themselves willing to give up their primitive way of life.7 The history of the last two centuries and the overarching presence of the State shape the sense of possibility for the Ongee and Jarawa. The outlines of this future are limned by myths, whose continuing explanatory power—even after the decimation of communities by disease and the disappearance of landmarks under development—may be attributed to the fact that its inhabitants had never conceived the Islands as a self-contained world. The very changes of weather are explained by winds that blow from beyond and on which the spirits ride. In Chapter Two we see how the Ongee vision of a future utopia is defined in terms of departure (of death) and against the present dependence on resources from outside (they will no longer gather food on other islands). In other words, the struggles of the present are accommodated within a more encompassing view of the relations between humans and spirits, between the Islands and the outside world. In the case of the Jarawa, they have in different contexts proved equal to devising a language for interactions with representatives of external political systems. What Jarawas have accomplished through a new ‘language’ is what Errington (1998: 5) defines as the notion of the ‘authentic’ primitive as a fiction against which imperial powers and modernizing nations define their progress, which is used to justify or conceal their human costs. “Ironically, the artifacts of peripheral peoples are sometimes celebrated as examples of national heritage at the same historical moment that the peoples who made the objects are being turned into the urban poor or the most menial workers in oil, timber and mining industries. Thus in an utterly Baudrillardian move by national elites, the sign replaces the referent” (1998: 43). On the Islands one does find this fiction sustained by playing with the signs of primitiveness, often items of material culture used to mediate relations or project identity. In other words, to locate oneself in relation to either a group addressed as primitive or the imposed identity of ‘primitive.’ We may then conclude our overview of the history of contact with some speculations on the relations of history to identity and the implications of this for anthropological enquiry. Identities ascribed by outsiders as well as those embraced by a group for itself are often grounded in a social consensus on the past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Studies of how reconstructions of history shore up identity have shown the past being pressed into the service of the dominant group, entitling them to rights, resources and status at the expense of others (Williams 1989). Conversely, those outside the dominant discourse

Introduction

11

may draw on the past to identify common experiences and interests and forge effective political coalitions. The reclamation of the past of groups once treated as “people without history” (Wolf 1982) has led social science disciplines to look critically at their own past, as well as attempt new avenues and locate new objects of enquiry. Tendentious readings of the history of their colonial subjects lead to over determined interpretations of their cultural artifacts (Cohn 1987: 76). The notion of “isolated primitives” has been challenged by pointing out that their implication in trading systems meant that changes in Europe affected their organizations just as their demands affected producers in Europe (Wolf 1982: 4). Other studies have shown how daily practices outside the domain of ‘public history’ express cultural meanings and social relations that have emerged over time (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 22). Sahlins (1985: 144) has proposed that cultures possess interpretive structures to process the contingency of historical circumstance, at the same time, as these structures are themselves modified through history. The possibility of anthropologists intervening in political struggles (Field 1998) has drawn attention to the complicity of early anthropologists. For example in the creation of “unrecognized” California tribes, many of them later started to work with native leaders in the pursuit of Federal recognition. Essentialist (“culturalist”) strategy focuses on reviving language, material culture, and other practices, and a constructionist (“sovereigntist”) strategy focuses on tribal organization and social continuity (See Borofsky 1987, Erikson 1999, Tonkin 1992, Kohl 1998). However in the context of the Andaman Islanders, the state and its agencies including, policy makers, welfare agencies, politicians and non-tribals settlers, seem to be somewhat confused in their efforts to ‘protect’ the Islander’s culture as well as mainstream them as free citizens of India. The predicament to both “protect” the ‘primitive tribal groups’ and to provide them equal opportunity is well reflected in a recent Report of the Expert Committee on Jarawas (Andaman Nicobar Administration 2003) where despite much effort experts could not come to any common vision of Jarawa policy for the future. At the courts insistence academic and practicing anthropologists together with some administrative officials drew up a Jarawa policy that regards the basic objectives as “protection, preservation, and conservation” through “sensitization and providing provisions” (Andaman Nicobar Administration 2004). The problem here is the inherent contradiction of ‘preserving’ as well as ‘providing.’ Policies of preservation when placed under scrutiny reveal a flawed rationale that prioritizes reasons of state over and against the grain of tribal cultures, knowledge and memory. Living under the sign of the primitive and denied all claims to history, the Andaman Islanders remain subject to the transformative forces of the government agencies. Little attempt is made to know how the Ongees and Jarawas render their historical

12

Chapter One

experiences coherent to themselves in ways they find intellectually and emotionally satisfying -how they perceive their being in the world as inherently transformational, as intrinsically subject to change. The next section of the Introduction analyses contact history semiotically, identifying the changing messages conveyed by visual representations and material objects. The contact expeditions staged by the Indian government refer back to colonial encounters—a standard gift is the red cloth that over a century ago would signal to Jarawa the presence of outsiders in the forest (see Chapter Five). The Jarawas’ adoption of this material in their practices of bodily adornment and the display of these ornaments at subsequent contact events shows that they too are able to assimilate change and to ‘cite’ the past. They participate in the forward movement of time unlike the subjects of research imagined by traditional anthropologists (see Fabian 1985). The revival of interest in material and visual culture among anthropologists in the second half of the twentieth century brings out historical dimensions in areas once regarded as being of purely archaeological interest. It is possible to reconstruct histories using objects, e.g. the history of colonial exchange relations (Gosden and Knowles 2001, Van der Beck and Vellinga 2005). And a sense of history often coheres around objects, as indicated by the revival of the associations of red cloth. Sometimes practices assume continuity because of the objects with which they are associated, but breaks in practice are also easier to trace through objects. And the ‘evidence’ of objects affords the observer a sense of power, in being able to see (understand) and to show (interpret authoritatively). The decline of the tribal population and the impact the growing number of outside settlers do not seem to have affected the visual and material cultural aspects of Andamanese. This aspect needs to be approached so as to substantiate the cultures’ logic that operates upon history. This is a history in which the Islanders were never really isolated and had developed a strategy to represent them for the outside world. If we look at Andamanese history as a semiological system, the relation between signifier and signified is concerned with objects associated with different categories such as the contact events, natives and material culture.8 However in this history the relations formed are not of equality between different categories but of equivalence or a continued coevalness (Fabian 1983: 31). So in the history of Andamans as a semiological system any of the three elements: contact-event, native and material can become the sign constituted from the relation between signifier and signified. What I want to present is the cultural process whereby the signifier, the signified and the sign have a conceptual implication—that of part and whole. As the history of contact continued and evolved (from lithographs to photography) the semiological system got more and more concretized within Andamanese culture. These were evident in the ways in which

Introduction

13

visual impulses were directed towards recording the impact of the changing modalities of contact on the tribal body. The focus was on the condition of “nakedness” or alternatively on “clothing” or adornments. The points of reference remained virtually unchanged. The past was evidently contained in the present. Soon the outsider’s depiction of the ‘native’ acquired a certitude that called for systematic documentation, collection and display within the classificatory structures of the museum.

HISTORY AS SEMIOLOGY: FINDING WAY IN THE FOREST The outline above shows how the history of the Andaman Islands in the last two centuries was often propelled by the dynamic between representation and partial knowledge. We have the colonial administration exploiting the mutual distrust of mainlanders and the tribal population, the tribal population becoming some of the early subjects of anthropological studies, immigrants attracted to a place that promised a new life and resources to ‘develop,’ and official policy and private enterprise acting in response to images of the tribal as violent, primitive or exotic. The relationship between history and the production of images is addressed in another study of interactions between settlers and native peoples. In his study of ‘New World’ encounters, Stephen Greenblatt (1991) argues that representation must be studied alongside reality, without collapsing them into each other. For images are also sites for the exercise of power (through display) and agency (the “mobility of spectacle and spectator”). He relates the problem of the assimilation of the ‘Other’ to what he terms, adapting Marx, “the reproduction and circulation of mimetic capital” (1991: 6). Like capital, representations circulate on a global scale and retain potency through time (“‘banked’” in books and collections, they generate new representations, “transforming cultural contacts into . . . often unexpected forms”), and because they are linked to social relations like hierarchy and conflict they assume their own dynamic, capable of “altering the very forces that brought them into being” (See Thomas and Losche 1999). The dynamics of representation Greenblatt identifies can be observed in different sites and over periods on the Islands. Images are perpetuated in space (museum collections) and in time (contemporary stereotypes may echo the rhetoric of the early colonizers’) and are also contested and reinvented (by different voices in civil society and by the subjects of representation themselves). The organization of this book is informed by the idea that representation and reality are mutually implicated. The Section on the visual imaginary being concerned with representation, the Section ‘History’ with reality, and the Section on material culture form the hinge or point of exchange

14

Chapter One

between the realms of reality. There is in each section evidence of how images are activated or appropriated during conflicts over resources and territory. A page from The Illustrated London News (March 27, 1857) suggests a framework in which to locate contact events in the Islands. It also reiterates the centrality of visual and material culture. Titled “Expeditions to the Andaman Islands,” this page shows how the Andamanese have historically been observed and “collected.” To ‘illustrate,’ or make something visually available to the reader, four illustrations are juxtaposed. There is a long-range view of a historic encounter and a close up portrait of a savage made to conform to Victorian ideas of decency. History and people are absent in the other two im-

Page from The Illustrated London News (March 27, 1857).

Introduction

15

ages, different as they are from each other. The image shows the meticulously rendered the tools made by those living in the ‘primitive’ surroundings evoked by the more picturesque sketch to the right of sticks scattered beneath tropical trees. This sketch of natural forms gestures towards a location further in the interior, away from the coast where the two worlds meet. The image of natives on the coast and in canoes facing a large steam ship, Pluto, from which boats are being let down to proceed to “open friendly connections with the Andaman Islanders” marks an encounter significant in colonial history. Greetings were exchanged between the world of the friendly white colonizer and the hostile black savage, of steam technology and dugout canoe, with guns being fired and arrows responding. One consequence of this encounter in 1857 was the capture of an Islander whom the crew named “Jack,” whose story is given in Chapter Five below. The picture of Jack in the middle of the page, crouched on a chair and dressed in a “sailor’s suit” exemplifies what Sturma terms “exposed make-overs and appropriations” in his study of the concern with clothing the native in early European explorations of Australia and Tahiti (Sturma 1998: 88). The cluster of bows and paddles completes the statement on Andamanese culture, as it serves to confirm the rudimentary level of technology among the people from whom Jack had been brought away. These images assume afterlives. The drawing of the ship Pluto and the Andamanese appear again in 1859, in Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Home Department, attributed to C. Grant). The image of Jack appears in a lithograph developed from a photograph taken by Mr. Pilleau in Calcutta (Anonymous, 1859: xii). This lithograph is reproduced on the title page of Mouat’s Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders (1863). The image of bows and other items of material culture later appear in E.H Man’s On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (1882). Less significant than details of date and provenance showing which image is ‘original’ is the use of these images in different texts at different times. The phenomenon of a picture becoming the generic image of the Andamanese effects a curious flattening out of history during decades in which disease and war were laying waste the tribal population. The page from the Illustrated London News participates in the emerging discourse on the Andamans and the history of its colonial settlement, in which material culture and the appearance of the body became central to assessments of the ‘natives’ and justifications of the need to civilize them. The images in the newspaper became the prototype for subsequent texts both scholarly and popular, and a primary concern of this book is the way images of Andamanese culture feed off each other, or reincarnate themselves in different historical contexts. The illustrations discussed above form a composite image from three separate historical

16

Chapter One

moments. This composite image shows the Andamanese and the outsiders communicating with one other within a larger scheme of communication addressed to the reader of the Illustrated London News. This larger scheme defines what is to be explored through contact expeditions and how it is to be understood. It may even have implications beyond these early stages of colonial exploration, for it fixes a certain image of “the historical encounter.” In the last 150 years there have been great transformations, tragedies and struggles in the lives of the Andamanese, but for those who only encounter them through the media the strongest impressions of their culture continue to be the material aspects on which popular images focus. We can derive from the page from The Illustrated London News a heuristic device to interpret other periods significant for the Andamanese, particularly the Jarawa and the Ongee. The page from The Illustrated London News is a typical embodiment of ‘visuality’ of Andamanese culture that can be used as an analytical principle to understand the history and culture of the Andamanese as imagined by the Islanders and the outsiders. Visuality is the culture manifest in the interaction between viewers and viewed, something that constitutes a visual event and influences all contact events.9 By visual event, I mean an interaction of the visual sign, the technique that enables and sustains that sign and the viewer. In calling attention to this multiple interaction, I am seeking to advance interpretive strategies beyond the familiar use of semiotic terminology. Semiotics—or the science of signs—is a system devised by linguists to analyze the spoken and written word. It divides the sign into two halves, the signifier—that which is shown—and the signified—that which is meant or seen. So a drawing of a tree is taken to signify a tree not because it really is in some way tree-like but because the viewer accepts it as representing a tree. It is possible for modes of representation to change over time or to be challenged by other means of representation. In short, seeing is not believing but interpreting. Visual images succeed or fail according to the extent that we can interpret them successfully. This allows one to build up towards or begin to build upon works of Barthes (1987) where the relations between history as semiology could be established to interpret historical contact through signs.10 Taking history as a semiological system entails the recognition that contact events, material culture and natives may be different in content, but they have a common status in terms of values. They are not content with meeting the facts but they as tokens, define and explore something that transcends dichotomies like primitive/modern, savage/civilized, dressed/undressed, and colonial/post-independence Andamans. The drawing, and reporting that is brought together to depict Andamans in the page from The Illustrated London News is much like the speech, images, and series of other significant units that

Introduction

17

are synthesis of verbal and visual myths to create multidimensional semiotic entity such as film. The page from The Illustrated London News represents a contact event that becomes the sign (Barthes 1987) of a longer historical process, of colonial expansion. Public perception of the implications of colonialism for ‘native peoples’ would have been influenced by the impressions sedimented by the signifiers in The Illustrated London News. The critical signifiers are items of material culture. Aspects of culture observable even without knowing the language or entering formal negotiations, and accessible through collection and transportation to those who had never been to the Islands, Andamanese artifacts signified primitiveness to viewers familiar with exhibitions celebrating industrial manufacture. The deployment of signifiers made the ‘native’s’ body the primary representative of Andamanese culture, for Victorian ethnographers through to visitors from the mainland today. However, the manner of its representation has been affected by changing views on “civilizing the savage” and as the Andamanese have learned how to manipulate the outsiders’ ideological investments in the image of the primitive. What this also implies is that trends in both popular and scholarly discourse can be gauged by shifting representations of the visible aspects of Andamanese culture.11 A document like The Illustrated News of London can be interpretated as ‘art,’ in order to also understand the culture from which it emanates. This culture is inclusive of the producer of the document, and those who contacted and depicted the Andamanese. This contactors ‘culture’ too is the product of contact between two cultures, and generates an interpretation that connects Panofsky (See Recht 1968) to Levi-Strauss (1963).12 The representation of the Andamanese in The Illustrated News of London is no exception in being determined at an unconscious level by historical modes of perception. This perception is determined by the preceding history of the encounter between the two cultures. The page from The Illustrated London News is just a signpost on the way to understanding the non-verbal iconography of Andamanese mythology. The juxtaposition of image in print or in an imaginary underlying the pursuits of the outsiders approaching the Andamans recurs across history in a range of contexts—those of colonizers, explorers, scholars, and settlers, agents of welfare and anthropologists. But could the page be considered as a trope available to the anthropologist for the analysis of cultural and historical material? The chapters in this book are put together with a view to understanding the process of making meaning ‘in the forest’ through constructing the ‘primitive’ in a specific manner. Here the primitive is a notion whose imposition serves to reinforce a sense of “progress” as conceived of in the colonial and

18

Chapter One

post-Independence history that relates to the time and space of the Andamans. We must remember the long history of the relational dynamics between the represented natives and those representing the natives, to appreciate how even after the colonial period (1947) the Islanders know how to manipulate the image the outsiders have of them. Without being aware of being citizens of a free nation state, they recognize that this image outsiders have had of them is something available for them to re-present and re-contextualize to suit their own purposes. The world of the Andaman Islanders seemingly closed and in silent existence in an oral state is open to appropriation by various means of representation and depiction by the world outside it. Photography as a technique, that produces the visual culture and discipline of Anthropology in its largest sense too sustains the unequal relationship between ‘contacted’ and ‘contactor’ through a controlling knowledge apparatus which appropriates the reality of other cultures into ordered structures. Elizabeth Edwards (2001) suggests that such ordered structures, as in the case of photographs, may have ‘apparently trivial, incidental appearance of surface’ but can ‘be meaningful in historical terms,’ and suggests that photographs are ‘very literally raw histories in both senses of the word—unprocessed and painful. However visual documents originating from Andamanese culture are not completely “raw” in the sense of unprocessed quality, their randomness, and their minute indexicality, are inherent to a leveling of equivalence of historical and mythical information. Can one deal with the particular difficulties for historical interpretation and mythical thoughts by unlocking the special heuristic potential of the condensed evidence in visualized culture, representing, as they do, intersections of Andamanese and the outsiders? The visual culture of Andamans starting with colonial times to post independent India presents us with images that represent the points of fracture that communicate indexical certainty, analogical insistence, and beguiling realism. This visual culture is not constituted by socially salient objects, but enmeshed within a visual economy that is reflected in complex and wide-ranging scientific and social networks. The history within them and the histories around them reveal how forms of truth-value are attributed to forms of visual representations over time and space (See Part IV). In chapter nine I have considered the last remaining “stone age hostile Sentinelese” and their visual representations, particularly by texts and images in popular media. It is not what a photograph is of in purely evidential terms that should primarily concern us, but the context in which it is embedded. Both forms of visual culture and material culture of the Andamans represent performative trajectories, that map their social biographies, where a relationship with the viewer as active social objects moves into other times and spaces, of which powers and possibilities emerge in the intersubjective encounters as embodied in the contact events.

Introduction

19

Social relations over time in the Andamans. Andamanese History as a Semiological system (based on Barthes 1987:115)

As mythical and historical accounts of contact conflate a performative reconstruction of social action outside normal or natural contexts necessitates ethnographic analysis of how visual culture and material culture were made, what signifying practices were involved and what claims were made of the signification. Through a sustained analysis of the visual and material culture of the Andamans I wish to show how the perceived cultural essence of those in the forest and those out of the forest undergoes specific forms of reification. My ethnographic analysis based on history as semiology opens up what could be regarded as salvage ethnography, which in turn is also a strategy of engaging history to analyze and consider the continuities between what is salvaged and what is actively performed in contemporary Andamanese culture. Photographs confront us with questions related not just to their content but also to the social relations within which they are produced and exchanged. There are issues of selection and emphasis—whether the subject is photographed alone or as a group, the attention paid to background or ‘setting,’ the significance attached to clothing and other accoutrements. Photographs form the occasion for face to face encounters (tourists wanting to pose with the Jarawa they photograph), but are also a means of circulating messages in time and space, e.g. certain images are chosen by the media to appeal to tourists. The visible body is itself a signifier (e.g. to certain readers it would connote racial attributes) and is also the ground for the second level of signification (bodily ornaments, which to the wearer have precisely understood efficacy and to outsiders are the baggage of the generic ‘tribal’). Any cultural imaginary presupposes an exchange that allows an abstraction to be apprehended through visualization. Our own historical discourse imagines the Andamanese (‘naked savage primitives’) as isolated, unchanging,

20

Chapter One

and therefore incompetent to offer pronouncements based on their way of imagining the world. But if we abandon this position, we can begin to think about how the Andamanese represent themselves within their historical sensibility. How does the community represent itself on the basis of a conceptual system? How does that structure condition the practice not just of rituals, but also of historical experience? This history would be dialogical rather than dialectical. These questions are particularly important in the case of the Andamanese tribes, which cannot be seen as a community struggling to enter the fold of the imagined nation state. They have had a longstanding dialogue with those holding power in the islands in both colonial and postcolonial times. The insiders of the forest and those outside the forest dialogue in a language not mutually understood. Such a dialogue should perhaps be seen as an exchange of signs invested with different meanings and degrees of importance by the two cultures, for example photographic representations would be significant for the settlers, who would not understand the significance of natural features for the Islanders. Over a period of time, however, as each culture comprehends more of the connotative systems of the other, the outsider interprets signs like material culture to construct history, while the tribal looks upon the body as a sign to be manipulated to present a certain image to the outsider.

ENTERING THE FOREST Each an independent essay, the chapters in this book are paired together in a sequence of sections that seeks to weave together the arguments on visuality, materiality and history. On the basis of the analysis above, the book is divided into three sections, each containing a pair of chapters. The chapters in the section on Visuality “show” the colonial encounter first as the Islanders see it, and next as re-presented by the colonizers. The first chapter discusses oral testimonies, myths and songs collected from the Ongee to show how the Islanders see history embedded in the landscape as geological formations and the iron now available to them. The interpretation of contact with outsiders in their historical narrative is analyzed in relation to the way living forms are classified in myth. The third chapter touches on the colonizers’ perception of the Islanders through reference to the histories they assembled through photographs and text. Using the semiotic notion of “photemes,” the analysis addresses both the object and the manner of depiction. This essay probes the investments in projecting a certain image of the Islanders by considering a range of documents, including photography, and the political purposes each served in different phases of colonial history.

Introduction

21

We come to the second section on Materiality. The analysis of the diversity of body ornaments among the Ongee in Chapter Four and Five shows the effects of contact being felt in everyday life. The Ongee classify all forms of body painting and ornament within the scheme of enguibute, or things that are “socially valuable” and have “magical power.” Museum collections and field research indicate changes in the choice of materials used in enguibute, though the underlying principles have remained the same. Consequently, apart from ornaments made from bone or products of sea and forest, material given by outsiders (both colonizer and settlers) has been subject to the culture’s own “taxonomic moments.” Such moments mark the interpenetration of history into the realm of aesthetic. Chapter five takes up ornament design among the Ongee and Jarawa to try and re-braid the relations between the natural, spiritual and social world to suggest how historical experience is registered within the prevailing cosmology and how identity mutates through dialectic. Chapter five provides a different angle from which to see how objects mediate between cultures. It studies body adornment among the Jarawa to argue that their choice of material to adorn the body demonstrates a capacity to manipulate the outsider’s preconceived images of the clothed and unclothed body. The Jarawa put on and remove ornaments from situation to situation, as part of a strategy to “condition” the interaction between the world of the Jarawa and the non-tribal. Material acquired through contact is often deployed during subsequent contact events to compose the image that the Jarawa wish outsiders to have of them. The third section on History contains chapters focusing on historical events, including contact events, in the period after Independence, when the Islands were incorporated as a union territory of the nation-state. It discusses the significance invested in contact-events between Jarawa and the nonJarawa. The Jarawa were the only tribal group in the Andamans to be confined by the government to an area of 765 square kilometers of forest reserve, which forms only a fraction of their former tribal land. Since early colonial occupation government parties have sought out the Jarawa on the west coast of the island, bringing them gifts to try and establish friendly relations. However, there have been settlements on the eastern side of their territory that the Jarawa have raided, and there have also been occasions when the Jarawa have killed settlers and members of the police who have ventured into their territory. Chapter Six, combining notes from the field with historical accounts, presents an analysis of the symbolic construction of hostility between Andamanese hunters and the settlers neighboring the Jarawa reserve forests. It may be projected that there is friendly contact on the western coast and hostile contact on the eastern side, yet is the structure of contact really different in Jarawa experience? How is the contact event on the eastern side different

22

Chapter One

from what occurs on the western side? How is the perception of both by the Jarawa different from the perception of the non-tribal? The boundaries are given meanings by various outsiders as well as by the Jarawa, and these meanings are contingent upon the stakes each group has in the interpretation of events. Although contact was ostensibly made with a view towards establishing ‘friendly’ relations with the ‘hostile’ Jarawa, no true relationship of trust and understanding was established. This underscores the fact that meanings are determined not just by cultural contexts but also by the interpreter’s position in relation to a boundary line. The essay draws comparisons between the activity of pig hunting with the killing of outsiders, drawing on culturally articulated notions of anger and peace. The hostile attacks and the killing of settlers that the non-tribal perceives as acts of violence on the part of the Jarawa, appear in a different light when one adopts a historical perspective which situates these in a dialogue enacted on the islands from colonial times up until post-Independence times. The central question for this study is how the politics of this conflict is articulated. This helps us perceive how both images of ‘the other’ (tribal and settler) reflect back upon one another. This question is only addressed by looking at how the tribal reserve forest is perceived by those inside and those outside it. 1998–99 marks a dramatic turning point in the history of contact between the Jarawa and the non-tribals on the Islands. It was the first time that a large number of Jarawas started emerging from the forest as an organized body. The Jarawa were now on their own initiative establishing contact with the world outside the forest. The forces of modernization, tourism, and road making contributed to the rapidly transformation of the image of the ‘hostile’ Jarawa into ‘destitute primitives’ about to lose all they had to the outside world. The Jarawa had now begun visiting Port Blair, and showed they could project a very different image from the one adopted along the road through the reserve forest. Chapter Seven argues that one can discern the impact of contact and modernization in the way the Jarawa presented their own bodies after 1999, reinventing the images that outsiders had projected of them. In a rare photograph of a communal hut of the Great Andamanese taken in the 1880s, Portman stands in the middle, with the Andamanese posing around him. Photograph like this draws parallel to Barthes (1981, 1987) between the evolution of language (ideographs becoming phonetic signs) and the development of myth. Just as ideographs gradually leave the concept and are associated with the sound, the worn out state of a “myth can be recognized by the arbitrariness of its signification.” In this photograph from 1880, where the native’s shelter is included as is the naked native, but in the presence of the colonizers who had become a force to reckon with on the Islands. (See the contrast it forms with the lithograph from the Illustrated London News where the

Introduction

23

clothed native alone is depicted but the forest shelter and the nakedness is the element that is carried over.) With pressure of outsiders increasing on the island and imposing their image of change the semiological scheme of the Andamanese history grows rigid. While the recorded images are contact events that are signifiers of the Andamanese, the implications of the experience for both the outsider and the Islanders, in making the images is played out in the convergence of their mutual imaginations. Imagination is thus a social relation in which the process of showing and seeing brings the visualized together with the visualizer creating the exchange process of showing/seeing. This exchange of gazes becomes a structure of practice where by the ‘native’ performs the image that outsiders have imagined for them. This involves a practice on the part of the Andamanese who show themselves as experiencing change only of the kind outsiders wish to see and on the occasions they wish to see it. After all, the practice of presenting the self through bodily adornment was a cultural practice in the Islands long before colonial settlers and migrants from mainland India arrived and felt the need to make place for the ‘primitive’ tribal in their history (See Errington 1998: 74–79). Something must be present before it is re-presented, and history for the Andamanese did exist before the arrival of outsiders. However, events of the past become ‘signifiers’ that continue to influence power relations and cultural perceptions. The study of material culture shows how this influence persists. If material culture is used by the Andamanese to

M.V.Portman before Communal hut of the Great Andamanese (1890s) (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association)

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Chapter One

“act out” themselves in specific contexts, it is used to similar effect by outsiders to “act upon” the Andamanese.13 This makes the visual attributes of Andamanese material culture from early colonial contacts to the present not just records but ‘signs’ (Barthes 1987:111–127). This allows us to interpret the history of Andamans as a semiological system14 that requires us to recognize the connotative equivalence of contact events and material culture even if they appear to refer to different realities. Signs do carry a charge that persists over time. On the basis of my work on Andamanese culture, I wish to establish a way in which outsiders have looked at the Andamanese, how Andamanese see the outsiders and how Andamanese have shown themselves to outsiders over time.

NOTES 1. The problems and possibilities of the visual in anthropology are discussed in the essays in Taylor (1994). They assess the claims of ethnographic film to ‘objective documentation’ and the authority to speak for its subjects, set its telling details against its unreflective empiricism, and also brings out its complicities with wider economies (tourism) and with identity politics. 2. Perhaps parallel to the history of Andaman Islanders is the rapid speed with which indigenous American people were able to integrate the entirely unexpected appearance of Europeans only explained by ‘hollow space’ in mythic thought generated by ideas about twins, opposite poles of natural phenomena and organized social life— sky and earth, fellow citizens and strangers—could never be twins (Levi-Strauss 1995: 63). Levi-Strauss regards this as a mind attempting to join them without ever succeeding, a machine of the universe (1995: 239) “chosen to explain the world on the model of a dualism in perpetual disequilibrium, where successive states are embedded into one another—a dualism that is expressed coherently, at times in mythology, at times (historical) in social organization. 3. Performance as a political option is discussed by Deleuze (2004: 14) in the context of psychoanalysis. 4. Some of the Andamanese slaves from the market of Penang were transported as far as England to work in aristocratic homes. They may have been the inspiration for Tonga in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, “the little Andaman Islander,” who though “venomous as a young snake” at the outset is afterwards “stanch and true” to the man who cured him of illness. 5. The passage appears in The Story of Lynx (1995: 63), and has been taken from Gow (2001: 304). 6. The term is adopted from Mary Louise Pratt by James Clifford to describe a perspective emphasizing, “how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to one another” (Clifford 1997: 192). 7. Other recent studies of how the politics of identity among indigenous peoples has had its terrain remapped under globalization include Halualani (2002), a study of

Introduction

25

“native identities and cultural politics” in Hawaii across different periods and sites (explorer journals, governance, museums, tourist sites, discourses and performances) and Little (2004) which looks at how Mayas negotiate the gains and losses of globalization. Little (2004: 209) contrasts the Mayas “neither hostile nor intent on constructing a collective identity” with the native Americans discussed by Dean MacCannell in Taylor (1994: 99–114), “recent ex-primitives” who assert the need to subvert tourist stereotypes and attempts to exploit them. 8. This section is based on Barthes (1987:115). 9. The endurance of this semiological system for Andamanese society is evident even in contemporary scholarly studies. The Anthropological Survey of India (controlled by the government) prepared a series of monographs on Andamanese tribes (Basu 1990, Chakraborty 1990, Sarkar 1990), which presented the same concerns appearing in the lithograph of 1857. That is, each tribe is discussed in terms of the history of contact, assessing degrees of interaction and acculturation. The body of the native is depicted as completely altered (in the case of the Great Andamanese) or as still naked, besides providing an inventory of the material culture. 10. One may find the proposition of ‘history as semiology’ as a futile exercise but psycho-analysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, and some new types of literary criticism exhibit different contents but they also have now a ‘constructed or found’ common status: they are all sciences dealing with values. They are not content with meeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens for something else. 11. Zarine Cooper as an archaeologist seems to be looking for the same ‘primitive’ in her analysis of kitchen middens and is seemingly impressed by the continuity of its the form in the thatched settlements which constitute part of the material culture she analyzes to substantiate her archaeological data (2002:114–136). Interestingly, she also includes a list of all collections of Andamanese material culture across the world. Yet this exhaustive list serves no purpose reflecting upon the Andamanese culture. Cooper deploys a similar synchronic perspective to analyze various sites of debris and campsites for instance of that of the Ongees of South Bay, to posit the fact of coexistent material cultures classified variously as “Traditional” and “Modern.” This positing of synchronicity in which traditional material culture is present with the modern forms of material culture within the Ongee campsites at South Bay and Little Andaman Islands is much like what I regard as an ‘archaeology of values and time.’ One also wonders how a contemporary ideological perspective (in terms of the feminist discourse) manages to enter her analysis, without any explanation of its synchronic implications or diachronic cultural records (Ibid., 140–44). With the aid of little or no ethnographic evidence but on the basis of old ethnographic accounts on gender relations among the Andaman Islanders (2002: 40–44) she wonders why unlike other societies of hunters and foragers, there appears to be equality in the relationships of power between the two genders. Cooper perhaps does not wish to recognize this as an imposition of her feminist concerns on a specific value system and attributing her post-industrial idea of equality to contemporary Ongees for whom the “traditional” and “modern” exist like layers of meanings vulnerable to conflicting ideological interpretations. But the peculiar depiction and representation of the Andamanese culture within the frame of reference of the outsider is further evidenced in the very focus and

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Chapter One

title of Madhusree Mukherjee’s publication The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (2003). As “signs in synchronic plane” the title sustains the political incorrectness Mukherjee chooses to ignore in the interests of the marketed and composed as a major heart wrencher for the reader to be drawn to something that is on a space located in “stone Age” and people are “naked.” Drawing on the marketability of the exotic to convey the pathos of the Andamans. In principle it denies the history of changes that Cooper as an archeologist establishes. Like Cooper’s imposing the feminist issues that she cannot explain, Mukherjee too contradicts the stated intention of the book by the very title. Notwithstanding the post-modern prevalence of the voice of “I” the work is more about her then her ostensible subject, in which her placed ‘encounter’ takes over the history in which encounters have a place. 12. Panofsky’s work opened art history to a greater collaboration with other disciplines in his endeavor to move beyond aesthetic appreciation to decipher the “intrinsic content” of a work. In Studies in Iconology, he argues that interpretations of works of art must move to the stage of iconological interpretation, which seeks to identify “Those basic principles which underlie the choice and presentation of motifs as well as the production and interpretation of images, stories, and allegories and which give meaning even to the formal arrangements and technical procedures employed.” See Panofsky (1955: 38). 13. As in the case of the illustration from The Illustrated London News, using Andamanese tools, and shelter as representation of the Andamanese culture, but Jack in sailor’s suit is a depiction of what the outsiders decided the Andamanese should be depicting about the contact and the use of clothing as a material form of signification. 14. Perhaps other histories too could be read as a semiological system, and Andamanese ‘history’ is not the only one specially suited for this task. In my consideration the discursivity of history, is not a grammar or code, but the case of Andamanes show the code of discursivity in history.

Part I

VISUALITY

27

Chapter Two

The Past Imagined in the Dugong Elegies

I was returning after a gap of eight years to the islands of Little Andaman, at the southern extremity of the Andaman Islands. In 1983 I had come here to do fieldwork for my thesis on the Ongee of Dugong Creek. My own world had changed in the intervening years and so had the islands. Although, as this study hopes to show, if it is impossible to deny change in the world of culture, we must also recognize how the richness of humanity lives on despite all that seeks to suppress it. The sleepy little port of Hut Bay had lost much of its lush green, many of its old trees. The road from the local market to the port had now been tarred, and was lined with huge tree trunks ready to be shipped out. There was now a series of teashops and small department stores in what had been a tiny strip of market, to cater to the growing numbers of settlers. I walked to the market accompanied by the loud barks of dogs and the shouts of schoolchildren excited at the sight of an outsider with a backpack. The increasing volume of a taped Tamil song forced on my awareness that electricity was now available during the daytime. Eight years ago, diesel generated electricity was only provided from seven in the evening to ten at night. As evening neared, I realized that during my stay at the home of local welfare workers among the tribals there would no longer be fireflies and the hooting of owls in the Bay. Instead, there was perpetual loud music all around, perhaps even amplified now that most of the tree cover had gone. There were many more settlers and the small puddles of water along the street hummed with mosquitoes. Where had it gone, the little tropical island known since my days as a graduate student? As a student, coming all the way from the United States to the Andamans had meant for me an introduction to a world I then thought of as quaint, as essentially unaffected by events outside. This time however I was here to understand change. Had the Little Andamans really changed in these last so many years? 29

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And from the perspective of its tribal population, has it ever really changed? As for myself, there was one part of me that did not want to see the ‘native’ transformed. But how could I deny that the Ongee and the other tribal groups of these islands in the Bay of Bengal had always been exposed to contact with outsiders. There had been a continuous process of change; the question was what they made of these changes and how they chose to articulate them. For me, concrete manifestations of change were visible all around in the port of Hut Bay—more outsiders on the island and fewer trees, accompanied by the sense of urbanization and commercialization registered in the increased noise-levels and use of electricity. Do the Ongee see this changed world as having an impact on their lives? Is one of the most terrible signs of this impact the fact that there are now so few Ongee who remain to feel it? My wondering what the next day’s journey into the forest would bring meant that the night afforded more anxiety than rest. Perhaps the world within the forest would also have something different to show me this time! The next morning I reached the teashop at a location known as Bayees (Literally 22), from where the canoe was to take me downstream through the forest to the coastal area, where it would turn northwards in the open sea to move towards Dugong Creek. I would be accompanied by canoes loaded with my supplies, and also by some Ongee who had arrived the previous evening to negotiate the procurement of glass beads in exchange for a large jerry can of honey. On seeing some old friends in brightly colored half pants and white shirts, with a cloth bag slung across, I could not help crying out in surprise and excitement, “Hey Teemai look at you, looking all sharp in fancy clothes, don’t you recognize me?”1 The Ongee remained quiet, behaving as though they did not remember me. All through the two-hour canoe ride they were silent and I could only conclude they had disowned me for good. But the story was quite different once we reached the Ongee settlement at Dugong Creek. Suddenly they appeared excited and happy to see me and we were all old friends again. Teemai, with whom I had spent many hours in the forest hunting pigs, said to me, “You have lost a lot of hair with all these years! But at the tea shop you should not have said I was looking sharp in my clothes, you know how the settlers are—they always think of us as the clothes-less creatures of the forest.” It was only then that I realized my faux pas, for eight years ago such comments had been welcome, when occasionally Ongee men would dress up by tucking a length of cloth into their bark-strip belts, or women would wrap a sheet of cloth over their grass aprons. Indeed, while from my point of view I had picked up a sign of change, from the Ongee point of view complimenting them on this was no compliment at all but a reminder of changes they felt they were being impelled to make. Perhaps it was not a sign of actual change, but a means of continuing in a world that had changed. What I saw was quite different from what the Ongee wanted me to see. After two days of rest at

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Dugong Creek, it was decided I should move into the interior further north where the majority of people had set up camp. I heard that they now had two battery-powered transistor radios. The forest had experienced changes similar to Hut Bay, and there was to be no escape from commercial broadcasting. Thus arrived the realization that their culture was not a text which I could try and read “over the native’s shoulder” (Geertz 1973:452), for I would need to sit face to face with the ‘native’ to understand how they composed the text called culture. I needed to unpack the idea of “cultural change” I had come to investigate, and to try and understand Andamanese culture in an ever-changing world, as well as the way this change is articulated by the Islanders. In whatever context, “outside influence” extends beyond the material or economic to carry implications for the social and cultural. The influence of values from the outside world can be gauged not only by the increased desire for outside commodities on the part of local people, but also by the new forms of inequality to which they subject themselves. It is of course a situation to which there are many different reactions possible on the part of local communities, and the kind of response adopted would also generate a host of new cultural developments. The consequences of such developments suggest indeed that rather than becoming attenuated, cultural diversity is expanding in today’s world. Cultural proliferation occurs at the same time and arguably for the same reasons that the influence of modern capitalism has now become global, and influences social life even in the remote forests of Andamans. But is cultural change among the Islanders prompted by the modern vision of progress, a vision that makes for a new type of inequality? But such a question is informed essentially by the outsider’s conception of the tribal, something we have imagined about the ‘native’ in the forest. As the Andamanese would tell the story, it is not so much that they have changed than that the world around them has changed. This sets up a complicated exchange of messages between the image visualized by those outside the forest and the image presented by the people in the forest. In the interior forest, the first light of morning is the softest light, brushing the clouds to the faintest glow. It bathes Teemai, who, back in his bark strip, is gathering basket and machete as he walks ahead of me down the trail into the forest. This was not another pig hunting expedition, as in the good old days, but a search for the cicada grubs I loved. He was taking me along to gather, roast and eat these in the forest. We did succeed in reviving the old days, our memories and the grubs still tasted as good as what my nostalgia had preserved for me. With great care, turning packs of tombowagey, or grubs wrapped in green leaves and placed on a smoldering low fire, Teemai began to speak: When there were many Ongee here, friends would go together to the forest to eat these and sit around and talk. Now, of course, it is seen as hard and pointless

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work. It is better to get biscuits from the ration station. But the crunch of biscuits is not like the tombowagey! Fewer Ongee now live on this island, many young boys remain unmarried because there are no daughters to be given in marriage. All the wars in which our ancestors fought the outsiders and died are a jugey, a consequence of being caught in a situation that comes about because of the contact between entities that are separate and two! The winds together with the rain and spirits are cutting things apart, and we keep all these things along with the smell tied together, so that we don’t get cut ourselves but can instead cut all that lies around us and continue to live. It is like the fate of the dugong, trapped for all time between land and water in a body that is simultaneously pig and turtle.

THE LAMENT OF THE DUGONG The origin of the dugong as a category of living form is explained as the product of proximity to two distinct domains, which leaves the dugong permanently caught between both. The very ambivalence of the dugong’s predicament makes its suffering emblematic. On the following page is the legend of the dugong . . . All animals used to keep to their own worlds, coming together only to admire the full moon in the sky. On full moon nights, all creatures big and small would foregather from land and water to admire the gorgeous full moon, the painting of whose body in white clay paint had been completed by his wife the sun. One particular full moon night the ants and birds invited everyone for a feast followed by singing and dancing. Everyone was invited save the monitor lizard and the civet cat. The lizard and the cat were perceived as bullies who had recently arrived on the island and would wander all over freely and would get into fights with animals of land, water and air. Sitting on a tree, the cat and lizard spotted all the pigs and the turtles going to the feast covered in red clay-paint. The cat and lizard decided that they would go even if they had not been invited. To join the party they decided to steal some clay paint from the homes of the ants and birds. White clay was brought from the home of the ants. The cat went up the treetops and brought red clay from the home of birds. The cat and lizard decided to eat the two clays and enter the water for a dip. As a result, the cat and lizard lost their body smell and changed color. The birds and ants found out about this and informed the pigs. However, the pigs could not detect the smell of cat and lizard once they had consumed clay paints. It was only a while later that the pigs realized that the cat and lizard had sneaked in among the gathering of singers and dancers. The pig and the lizard had a confrontation. They grappled with each other for a long time. In the course of this fight the lizard dragged the pig into the seawater and left him there. When the pig was dragged into the water he metamorphosed into a dugong.

The Past Imagined in the Dugong Elegies

Now all the birds were very angry and they decided to fight the cat and lizard. The fight became a war, and one by one all the birds were thrown into the sea and they changed into fish. Seeing all this, the turtle went and asked the crab for help. The crab went to the lizard that was devouring all the birds’ eggs and said that he was feeling cold and wanted some red clay. The lizard agreed to oblige and offered his nose to scrape the paint off. The crab took a deep swipe with his claw and cut off the lizard’s nose. In a state of sheer agony, the lizard fell off the tree. All the ants collected and dragged the lizard into the creek. So the cat lost her husband the lizard and in her rage she started tearing the trees apart. The spirits of the monsoons did not like this and it rained and flooded the island. Everyone died in this flood. Very few birds and fish survived with turtles after the flood. On the following full moon, the birds remembered the world as it used to be. The birds and pigs of the forest had used to sing and dance, but now all the pigs were lost. They had been thrown by the lizard into the sea and turned into dugong. So the turtle from the sea were invited to come and have a feast with the birds. Only some turtle managed to swim out and join the company of birds to eat and sing at the full moon. However the dugongs who had originally been pigs grew nostalgic for the forest on hearing the song of the turtles wafting out from the forest. The dugongs tried to leave the sea and join the creatures in the forest. Hearing the commotion, the turtles realized that their home was the sea and that they should start moving back, but some of them were unsure if they really wanted to return to the deep waters of the sea. Birds and ants served white and red clay to these turtles that were not sure where they wanted to be. These turtles soon changed into pigs and remained in the forest. Now on every full moon, the pigs in the forest and the turtle left in the sea with the dugongs remember how the pigs became dugongs and how the turtles became pigs and the few remaining dugongs sing and cry for the pigs of the forest to come back as turtles to the sea water so that they could get out of the sea water and become pigs. But on each full moon, when all the creatures try to return to the world of land and water to which they belonged originally, the commotion leads to further disorder and chaos. So on full moon nights when the tide rises highest and ebbs lowest, the poor dugongs’ song turns into a lament, as they remain caught, part pig and part turtle, in the shallow waters of the sea near the coast. They have flippers like turtles but their visage is like that of the pigs who graze. Yet they can neither move on ground like the pig nor move in deep waters and on sand like the turtle. Dugongs sing their songs again and again, on every full moon night, as they are reminded of the war with the lizard and the cat, who were able to move all over and display their power. It was because of this war that the dugongs are incapable of moving in the deep forest or in deep sea water, and since then they have been forever in-between, not clear where and what they want to be, on land in the forest or in the deep water of the sea, far from the coast or in the shallow depths near the coast. Moreover even if the dugongs knew what they want they cannot change, for the full moon with its tides

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makes it impossible for them to do so. They can only continue as they are and on each full moon sing in recollection and to remind other animals to beware of the deceiving power of the lizard and the cat.2

The lament of the dugong belongs to a large body of narratives known to the Ongee as jugey. Caught between extremes of high and low tide, resembling both pig and turtle, created in their conflict with the powerful lizard and cat, the dugong embodies identity at the intersection, and is a reminder of the disorder this generates. The Ongee have been able to use this myth to account for the disorder experienced after contact with outsiders. Teemai’s account shows the Ongee identifying themselves with the dugongs. It invokes a moment past (“when there were many Ongee”) as well as a continuing condition (the “lament of the dugong”). This encourages the provisional hypothesis that what we are seeing is not so much the rupture of mythic design by historical contingency as the articulation of history within the tragic frame of myth. For the myth of the dugong renews its significance in the interpretation of histories subsequent to contact, whether we are speaking of conflict or the subordination of the Islanders’ interests. Every full moon, the dugongs sing in recollection of the event that made them what they are, that placed them in a state of contraries to which there is no resolution. In other words, time after the defining moment of origin is endstopped, but this past, which has foreclosed all possibility of a future, must be returned to periodically. Just as the time when there were many more Ongee is past, certain changes are defining and can be neither reversed nor transcended for all one’s periodic invocations of the past. The Ongee frequently respond to predicaments with the statement, “Oh it is the lament of the dugong!” The “lament of the dugong” serves as the paradigm for repeated exertion through which nothing is effected. Drawing out the implications of this, outcomes are determined by the first contact, whatever the subsequent efforts to alter the course of events.3 As the Ongee would explain, “Dugongs are able to sing and they continue to sing because of that first event, but dugongs remain (as) pigs who move in water like the turtle but eat in shallow water like the forest pig.” If the presence of the dugong remains as a visible reminder of the irruption of chaos, everyday discourse explaining the past in terms of the lament of the dugong reinforces the sense that the consequences of chaos are irreversible. Do we conclude that the Ongee use their jugey to re-member periodically the event of contact whose consequences they can do nothing about? If the jugey recited appear to be informed by a frame of reference we might translate in terms of tragic fatality, we should also recognize the degree of agency the Ongee manifest in their negotiation of the presence of outsiders. Possibilities of such agency offer themselves when the myth of the dugong is “entextual-

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ized” in another narrative that describes how the boulders dotting the landscape were formed by the anger of spirits.4 When we trace this process of entextualization we are led to modify our initial hypothesis on the previous page, for we come to see the relationship between myth and history as neither one of disruption (of myth by history) nor one of subsumption (of history by myth), but of something better expressed by the idea of dialogue. This second narrative to which we now turn is known as Jugey-ye Kuge, the myth of stones and war.

JUGEY-YE KUGE: THE MYTH OF WAR AND THE STONES The Ongee acknowledge that there has always existed some contact with the outside world. They have never lived in absolute isolation, and they do not see one particular encounter as marking the beginning of destruction and disorder. History does not begin for them with the colonizers landing on their coast. Through the centuries, different needs have brought outsiders to the Little Andamans, and the Ongee themselves have visited nearby islands where other tribes live. The Ongee thus have names for the whole series of islands north of the Little Andamans up to Port Blair. The Ongee perception of contact with the outside world parties is central to the Jugey-ye Kuge, recited during the initiation ritual of tanageru.5 Many moons ago, after winds from many directions had passed, the people in Jackson Creek prepared a big canoe. Many people could sit in that canoe. At that time, the seasons were good. Many men and women with their children went across to the island of Tetale and much further than that too. So the spirits decreed that nothing but stones would remain on the island of Tetale. Then the Ongee decided that they would go beyond the island of Tetale and they all went to Aberdeen and returned with tea and tobacco. The smell of the tea and the smoke of the tobacco were very tasty. We all stopped using our own forest’s leaves for smoking and for drink. Women urged the men to go again to Aberdeen to bring leaves of various kinds. Then one day some young women went along with the men. At this, the Spirits grew very angry. Our forests were full of leaves but the Ongee had stopped using them. The Spirits were furious. The spirits descended bringing winds from all directions and they fought a war (kugebe) with the Ongee. After the war ended all the Ongee were turned into stones (kuge). The winds were so harsh and the spirits were so angry and strong that all the canoes capsized on their way back from Aberdeen. All the people and their canoes became kuge after that kugebe. No one returned from that trip. The young boys who had been left behind grew up without any friends. So the young boys decided to marry old women, and then the boys had to marry into their father’s sisters’ home. Following the stones that jutted from the sea after the kugebe,

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many white men arrived in big boats to Egu Belong (Little Andamans). The white men found only Ongee men. There were no women at all. It was all a bad conjuncture of events (malabuka). Once again there was a war on a great scale. Many were turned into kuge. It was after the arrival of the big boats that the Ongee began to find iron on the shores, next to the stones. Stones were formed from those killed in war were found in places where iron was near by. When all the stones will be gone and the iron we have been receiving from the outside world is used up in wearing away the stones, then no one will go or come and no smell will detach itself from any living body. All pain will leave us. No more will the spirits grow angry. Our fathers and mothers will all remain with us. We will no longer hold onto lower jawbones because the spirits will not come to us. Our own teeth will not fall. No one will die and there will be no spirits. There will be no marriage of young boys to old women and no sending of boys to the spirits. The pig hunters give boys to the turtle hunters and the turtle hunters’ boys are given to the pig hunters. When all the stones are washed away, there will be many young boys and girls who can marry. We will have no need to run and hide from the spirits. Turtle hunters (Eahmbelakwe) and pig hunters (Eahansekwe) will have boys and girls for themselves. There will be no death and the need to wait for a spouse or to die unwed will become inconceivable. So we must all keep sharpening more and more iron so that they can wear the stones wear away.

Typical large Ongee dug out canoe with outrigger. Photographed c.1950. It can hold 25 to 30 people. (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association)

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Large dug out canoe among the Ongees. Photographed during 1984 fieldwork. The construction of such large canoes has been discontinued since 1990 mainly because of deforestation and the spread of non-tribal settlement on the island. The administration has also introduced small-motorized boats and the Ongees do not undertake any long distance journey without the support of welfare agency.

In another version of this myth, the departure of the Ongee from the Little Andamans to the north is elaborated with a variation emphasizing the role of outsiders in providing the critical substance, iron, which comes to be counter posed against stone. Men and women left in large canoes from Jackson Creek and Butler Bay. They went northward killing many large turtles, but they were unable to pull out the bodies of the animals. They left behind a trail of blood and odor in the sea. Canoes reached the island of Tetale (North Sentinel Islands and Rutland Island). At the sandy shores Ongee started eating all the turtles and the eggs simultaneously and this made the spirits very angry. Enraged, the spirits rained thunderbolts and heavy showers down on the places from where the canoes had left and where the canoes had anchored. The sand started to boil and to burn and to smoke, but later as the rain cooled the land it released a distinct odor never encountered before. The cool rain caused what was boiling to condense into cold kuge (stones). The stones continued to exude a distinct smell. The Ongee on Tetale also turned into stones. Afterwards, the people who had set forth to the North and not returned were missed and their relatives went out in search of them. They went looking for them towards the sea but all they could find was the smell from the kuge.

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The relatives were confused since on their own island they could neither see nor smell such stones. For many days they traveled in the canoes and finally they found people living in the forests around Aberdeen (Port Blair). The people of the forest in the north had a leaf that could be boiled to produce a good aromatic drink (tea). They also had leaves that could be burned to produce smoke with a distinct aroma and a taste that could be inhaled (tobacco). These leaves were brought back to the Little Andamans. Ongee gave up their forest leaves for any consumption tukunjumuree (traditional ‘tea’), tukwegalako (traditional ‘tobacco’)). At the insistence of their families men started going to Aberdeen to bring back more of the leaves. Once more the spirits grew angry and descended on the island accompanied by storms to confront the Ongee who had developed the habit of going to Aberdeen. The spirits thundered, “We are all here though rain and wind do not always move along with us! But then in your greed you started eating turtle and turtle eggs at Tetale and now you have leaves to boil and smoke which are not of your own forest. People in the northern forest get the leaves from ineny-lau (foreigners) and give it to you. Did you not notice that Jackson Creek and Butler Bay also have kuge (stones), like the ones around Tetale and Aberdeen! The smell of stones should remind you that your relatives were made into stones, hard cold things that cannot be cut except by spirits, winds, water, and us. You humans cannot bind stones. Ongee tried to offer resistance to the spirits, which led to a kugebey (war initiated by the anger of one side which the other attempts to resist). The spirits turned into stones all the large canoes and the Ongee who had acquired the habit of going northward. These are the stones that one can still see sticking out from the sea between the Little Andamans and Aberdeen. Only a few young Ongee and elders were left alive after the war with the spirits in which the rest had been turned to stone. The Ongee stopped going to Aberdeen for leaves and wondered how they would get rid of the stones. Foreigners of Aberdeen were already at war in the forests of the North. Foreigners in search of the Ongee arrived at the island following the stones formed in the trail of the canoes capsized by the anger of spirits. Ineny lau (foreigners) came in very large totakochee (ships) and possessed the power of throwing fire accompanied by loud noise and smoke (guns), just like the spirits. The outsiders landed at Jackson Creek and Butler’s Bay. The Ongee ancestors sent the women and children to hide in the deep forest and the men went to the coast to confront the outsiders. Many Ongee and many outsiders were killed. The big ships would collide against the stones and all the fire and smoke led to death, all the deaths led to the formation of more stones.6 More outsiders arrived and started to give the Ongee leaves to smoke and drink as well as lohaye (iron). Previously the Ongee had found lohaye only on the bodies of the Ineny-lau or on their ships at the place of war and stones. Some Ongee did go with the Ineny-lau to get more lohaye. Some Ongee had more lohaye than others. It was again a case of greed leading to the same set of consequences. More Ineny-lau came to the island and there was more war and there were more stones. With all the wars and the deaths

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it became difficult to arrange marriages. The anger of the spirits and the Inenylau caused few daughters to be born to the Ongee. Young men married old women who had lost husbands or the men waited for marriage and grew old waiting for the right woman. When all the stones between our island and Aberdeen are cut and washed away by rains, winds and spirits, and then death will also leave the Ongee. Spirits will then forget the deeds of the Ongee that led to war and to the formation of stones. The Ongee will drink and smoke only different leaves from the island’s forest. All pain will go away. Things will always remain sharp to cut with and the things that Ongee bind will never fall apart or come loose. Parents will live on along with their children and their children’s children. There will be more Ongee and fewer spirits. The Ongee will be happy and heavy like stones and will be incapable of being moved by the spirits. These days the Ongee cannot do much ‘as there are not many left’ and the spirits alone cannot shift the stones. When all the stones are gone and we Ongee grow heavy, none will have to wait for marriage and none will have to visit the spirits at the initiation ceremony. That all this may come to pass the Ongee who cannot cut or bind the stones must wait for the stones to disappear.

Our reading of this myth begins by locating internal correspondences across the temporality of the narrative (conflict with the spirits followed by conflict with the outsiders) and moves to a discussion of the symbolic relations between its categories (stone and iron). We then indicate how a discursive aspect of culture like this myth can be understood in relation to changes in Ongee material culture. We conclude by looking at how the myth of the song of the dugong and the myth of stones and war reflect back upon one another, and suggest comparisons with the situation of other tribes on the Islands. The Jugey-ye-kuge explain the story of places containing stones formed during war of a particular type, where the greed of one group provokes the anger of the other, leading to confrontation and resistance. The kugebey with the spirits first demonstrates the consequences of transgressions prompted by greed (hunting and gathering on another island, fetching tea and tobacco from another island). Such inappropriate consumption leads to death and the formation of stones—kuge refers to the stones that serve as a reminder of anger and war (kugebey). Their common root kuge is the most obvious manifestation of the homology between the war with the ancestral spirits and the war with the outsiders. The second war occurs in the wake of the first (it is by following the stones that the outsiders arrive at the Islands), and one again sees how greed (this time for iron) leads to the decimation of the population. Spirits and outsiders are alike in that both subject the Ongee to the lethal power of fire and smoke, imaged prominently in both narratives. If for those outside the Ongee belief-system the war with the outsiders is real in a way the war

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Typical small islands and rock formations around the coasts of the Andaman Islands that Ongees believe are created out of the confrontation with outsiders and the resulting consequences.

with the spirits is not, for the Ongee the reality of both wars is established by the visible presence of the stones and by the immediate and constant awareness of the sharp decline in population and the lack of marriage-partners. In the structure of this myth the activities of cutting and binding are aligned with ideas of order (and by implication chaos). The cutting and binding of material derived from plants and animals continue to be primary occupations for the Ongee hunter-gatherer as means of manufacturing implements, containers, shelters, covering or “talismanic” items like amulets made of human bone. One thing that cannot be cut and bound is lohayey (metal), associated with the body of the ineny-lau (outsider) as it first started being gathered from wrecks washed ashore.7 Stones, also substances that cannot be cut or bound, are arguably symbols of the community’s loss of people, of agents able to cut and bind. So we have on the one hand the stones created by the spirits and formed during the conflict with outsiders, and on the other the iron acquired by the Ongee through contact with these very outsiders. One should be careful not to formulate the relationship between stone and iron as of simple opposition. It is the stones that sharpen blades of iron, but this process of increasing the efficacy of iron wears away the stones. According to this worldview, stones and metal both carry associations with outsiders and both are essential and complementary. Life will not change until the stones disappear from sight. But any endeavor to erase the presence of stones would en-

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tail continued contact with the outside world for the procurement of metal, therefore further conflict with the outsiders, and more deaths of which the stones stand as reminders. Before contact with the British, the Ongee like other Andamanese tribes would depend wholly on bone and wood for fabricating tools and weapons (collectively referred to as maonale). Iron was only available in the form of nails in driftwood or from washed-up wreckage. It was prized not only because of its rarity but also because it was harder, more durable and could be sharpened to a greater degree than the other materials used to make maonale. Ongee narratives often recall how ancestors voyaged to islands north and east of Sentinel Island to procure metal. Both colonial administrators and the Indian Government8 provided metal, along with materials like sugar, tea, tobacco and cloth, to tribals, and today bone or shell is seldom used to make maonale, just as wooden arrowheads are hardly used.9 And yet the Ongee continue to resist introducing the practice of joining things by means of hammer-and-nail. Hammering is an act contrary to their belief in using metal only to cut and never to bind or join. They say: In totekwata (past) we took lohayey (iron) and many of us died, more spirits came into being, animals in the forest and sea went away and no longer come frequently to us, and human children do not come either. If we also start using lohayey for joining, things will get worse. Things are different today because of the lohayey we took. There are more men and fewer women, not enough daughters to be married to the waiting men. Spirits have taken many away. More births can happen only if we remember to cut correctly with lohayey-maonale (iron tools) and keep joining and binding the way our ancestors did, because in doing so we can keep our smell tied to the bones and the life to our bodies.

If at this point we return to the words of Teemai they are lifted into a new resonance: Fewer Ongee now live on this island . . . all the wars in which our ancestors fought the outsiders and died are a jugey, a consequence of being caught in a situation that comes about because of the contact between entities that are separate and two! The winds together with the rain and spirits are cutting things apart, and we keep all these things along with the smell tied together, so that we don’t get cut ourselves but can instead cut all that lies around us and continue to live. It is like the fate of the dugong, trapped for all time between land and water in a body that is simultaneously pig and turtle.

The song of the dugong allows the historical event of contact to be not just explained, but also interpreted for its deeper significance by suggesting how the relationship between categories might play out. The incorporation of the

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myth of the dugong into a myth about a later period works to entextualize the idea of an agent caught between extremes who by the end of the narrative is transformed into something outside the binaries identified in the beginning. To draw from the interpretations of narrative by Bakhtin (1981) and Blackburn (1986), we can think of the two myths as together composing a “performance” in which they are “in dialogue,” in the sense that each develops the implications of the encounters described by the other.10 Thus, as the Ongee describe it, so long as the moon waxes and wanes tides will occur and the dugongs will recall their entrapment between land and water. The Ongee too are trapped within historical inevitability, for in order to continue living they must acquire iron, and so what also continues is their dependence on outsiders and their inability to take command of their destiny. Teemai’s description of the predicament of the Ongee and the dugong as analogous formed the starting point for our entry into the myths. We now suggest that on the plane of action the Ongee negotiate the two situations quite differently. No resolution is offered in the mythical explanation of how zoological phenomena came to be, just as there is none in sight in the historical explanation of how geological phenomena appeared. Unable to see themselves as agents who might effect change, the only role assumed by the Ongee is that of facilitators who continually endeavor to bring separate categories together. Stone and iron are categories that appeared through disruption, but have become necessary for the survival of the Ongee, who bring the two categories together in their material culture. They are thus different from the categories of pig and the turtle that represent a moment of original wholeness preceding the intrusion of the cat and the lizard. This wholeness cannot be restored, and the only end that presents itself by way of resolution is the killing of the dugong. On every full moon the Ongee organize singing sessions often followed the following morning by expeditions to hunt the dugong. The Ongee say that the best time to hunt is during the dry season in the early hours of the morning after the full moon, but the dugongs are declining in number and the hunts are frequently unsuccessful. They are undertaken not only to procure food but also to “visit the domain of the dugong and relieve dugongs of their pain by mercy killing.” They do not see the hunt as achieving anything any more than they see themselves as being able to intervene in the changing times. Yet they must participate in the one action which, being the extreme measure, promises the dugong liberation from suffering. Reference to the Jarawa provides another perspective on the Ongee ritual of hunting dugong and Ongee relations with outsiders. Settlers around Jarawa reserve forest report that it is on full moon nights that the Jarawa are heard singing in the forest and are also more likely to conduct raids on settlers, particularly during the dry season. Some suggest that the moon offers the Jarawa

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greater visibility during the raid, yet it is strange that they seem oblivious of the fact that at the same time they become more visible themselves to settlers. Like the Ongee hunting the dugong, the Jarawa raid seems to be undertaken precisely because of their sense of its futility. I once asked group of Ongees how they explained the behavior of the Jarawa. They replied that they used to attack the early colonial settlements themselves, but they have over the decades come to see the presence of outsiders as inevitable. The Ongee think it likely that the Jarawa regard the growing numbers of outsiders much as they themselves had done in the past, and would be able to appreciate the predicament described in the ‘songs of the dugongs.’ This allows us to use the lament of the dugong as a paradigm for the situation of other Andamanese tribes subsequent to contact. Their sense of entrapment leads the Islanders to undertake actions that appear like a continued worrying at the inevitable effects of contact. The ritual performance of raids and hunts and the constant rubbing of metal on stone is symptomatic of a sense of history that doubts the viability of a future which repeated irruptions of chaos suggest continues to be hostage to the past moment of contact. Before moving to a discussion of the Ongee idea of history, we sum up what the two myths suggest about primary categorical distinctions and the changing relations of these, and how each myth explains original disruption and its continuity into the present. In the first, it is the civet cat and monitor lizard that initiate chaos by breaching the boundaries honored by the other animals. We should however bear in mind that the only categories of animal ever known to the Ongee are those formed during this initial chaos. The disorder described in the myth of the war and stones arises from the initial impulse of greed, excess consumption being a form of disorderly behavior. Yet this confrontation with outsiders in the past had tangible and visible by-products that have become part of the local geography and the material culture of the Ongee, the stones that are the residue of conflict and the iron whose availability perpetuates its necessity. Both stone and metal index the outside world and perpetuate the cycle of greed, war, death and the unavailability of marriage partners. An anomaly, stones must be worn away to reinstate order, but this can only be effected by the use of metal brought by the outsiders. The Ongee ancestors can be thought of as like the dugong, caught between the world of the spirits and the world of the outsiders, but for the Ongee today the parallels are less neat. For the dugong, the periodic return of the tides recalls a moment of origin invoked in lamentation. For the Ongee today there are on the one hand the periodic rituals of reciting jugey that recall in lamentation the arrival of stone and metal in their world, and on the other, the periodic visits of outsiders that allow them to continue to use metal that is sharpened on stone. The enactment of the myth is continued not just during the

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recitation of the jugey but in everyday physical activity. Even during periods of inactivity, such as casual conversation or while waiting, it is habitual with Ongee men to be rubbing pieces of sedimentary stones on metal blades, often singing as they work on sharpening these with an intentness incomprehensible to the outsider.11 And the noise of the metal scraping against stone is referred to as “yousheeyeh,” a piece of onomatopoeia that is also used to describe the call of the dugong.

THE ONGEE IDEA OF HISTORY The Ongee population is estimated to have dropped by 20% in the wars between 1863 and 1867 (Mathur 1968, 1985 and Portman 1899). Estimated at 2,400 in 1867, the population had come down to 672 by 1900. In 1967, the figure was 120. The year I first did fieldwork (1983–84), the Ongee population stood at 90 and since then it has gone up to only 98 (Cipriani 1954,1961 and Census of India). Such a terrible decline in population forces us to think about how the Ongee themselves would articulate what we might describe in terms of “vanishing culture” and the tragedy of life and pathos of history. It is ‘outsiders’ who have provided what is considered the authoritative explanation for the practical decimation of the Ongee. This refers to the violent clashes and to the epidemics of venereal disease and opthalmia that followed colonization. But such an explanation provokes further questions. Can hostility be so easily converted into a relationship of sexual nature that led to disease and a decline in population? And would the spread of opthalmia have had such an impact on demography?12 Teemai’s remark that the situation of the Ongee is like that of the dugong conveys the shared belief that the Ongee are helpless to control the decline in the size of their community. The Ongee do not narrativize the past two hundred years as a sequence tending as a whole to a steep decline in numbers. They see it as a series of contact events, each of which contains the memory of past contact events. Each contact event plays out the same sequence, so the consequences are the same even if the characters involved change. They therefore do not choose to distinguish stages in a span of time, according to which the period of tranquility would be clearly marked off from the period of suffering, and the past when there were many Ongee severed from the present in which they are outnumbered by the settlers. We might describe their perception of history as rhythmic rather than linear, and in their own language this understanding of history is captured in the term totekwata, which literally translates as “as continued from the past,” and is used to describe a constant pattern of wind that passes through the island from different direc-

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tions. When we find ourselves asking how life has changed for the Ongee, we should recognize that this might not be a question to which they themselves relate. The Ongee notion can be separated out from a second way of interpreting the flux of history more familiar in academic discourse. From a particular vantage point in space and time, a period that appears to be characterized by a species of ataxia is seen to arrive eventually at stability following some identifiable shift—a shift brought about by the confusing events themselves. This, however, may be a perspective peculiar to one who is concerned with translating the experience of the “natives” to the outside world. The Islanders living through the changes of the last two hundred years did not distinguish such shifts, for they did not think of peace and order as giving way to conflict and disorder. For them, the two contrary states are always simultaneously present, in the same way as the winds prevail continuously. The question to ask is not whether conditions are good or bad, for they must be negotiated. How this negotiation occurs is suggested in the deployment of the ideas of cutting and binding in the myth of the war and the stones, which posits against the stones that cannot be cut and that were formed in mythological times, the iron that has to be sharpened and that was discovered in historical times. The myth suggests that the dynamic between order and disorder makes for what could be called the “production” of history in the imaginary of the Ongee. Neither stone nor iron can be cut, and both were formed during periods of disorder and loss.13 The endurance of the stones formed during the disorder of mythical times means that the single available solution (their erosion) is achievable only by means of the iron acquired during the disorder of historical times, for though iron cannot itself be cut, it is capable of cutting all other materials. The Ongee translate the confusion of their history (encounters with outsiders, conflict and death) into a ritual discourse for future encounters with disorder, by saying: Days have always been like this ever since the dugongs started singing particularly during the high tides of full moon nights. It will be like this until all the stones around us have been used up in sharpening the metal we possess. Metal is what we have got from outsiders and stones were formed in the wars with the outsiders. We have to keep wearing the stones away and the metal will always be available as long as outsiders are around. Just as the spirits and winds seek to erode the stones, we will continue to use up the metal by keeping it sharp and whetting it on the stones. Once all the metal and the stones are gone, births will increase and death will end. Dugongs will stop singing; they will all become either pigs in the forest or turtle in the sea. There will be no ancestral spirits as death will stop coming, the winds will stir no more, nor will smells spread and disperse!

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We have already suggested that the song of the Dugong, a story from primeval times, sets the parameters for all encounters between different domains in the historical memory of the Islanders, like their encounters with slave traders, pirates, colonial rulers and with collectors, all of which entailed violence, the loss of lives, and the need to re-negotiate established relationships. Thus the temporal co-ordinate for Ongee narrative is not ‘once upon a time,’ for in declaring the narrative to be a ‘jugey’ it is implied that things have continued in the same way. This is not to argue that referring history to myth is a denial of history, for the temporal locatives (“ever since,” “ will be like this until” . . .) in the quotation above would instead suggest the renewal of the meaning of myth in new historical contexts. This together with the recognition of identities being reformed and boundaries being realigned following encounters reinforces the idea that it is a mere reification to imagine that “Andamanese culture” possesses a single essence waiting to be uncovered. Any entry into the world of the Islanders today would have to sift through a tissue of mutual perceptions and interpretations mediated by the separate visions of the natives “seeing” the changes in their world and the colonial powers “showing” the culture of the Islanders. It is also imperative to recognize that over the duration of contact there emerge changes in the point of view of both groups so that the images they have of each other alter. Manifestations of such change would be missed by a study that emphasizes the continuity of local culture, as if it persists in atomistic self-sufficiency, closed to wider influences. Conversely, insistence on the resistance of local people to outside forces would also fail to apprehend the appearance of points of convergence. These caveats in mind, we can proceed to use the concrete details of ritual performance to extrapolate the Ongee perspective on change and their re-negotiation of boundaries. Having emphasized the balance between order and disorder in the Ongee worldview, I seek to trace the process of translation whereby the disorder described in mythological and historical narratives is incorporated as an idea in ritual and non-ritual activities wherein it becomes possible to negotiate. We have in the previous section suggested ways of thinking the relationship between myth and history. We now focus on the relationship of both these to ritual to argue that ritual serves the function of a ‘grammatical tense,’ in the sense that it positions the speaker in relation to the times past and future that myth and history invoke. For the Ongee, the discursive importance of historical relations and material culture extends beyond narrative description. They connote meanings that bear upon all aspects of life. To the question “How has life been?” the Ongee have no response. This does not mean that at any given moment they are unable to talk about the past or future. But to them neither general nor personal

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history present themselves as experiences to be remembered as something ‘out there.’ Instead, ritual is a means to address past, present and future simultaneously. Both past and future are apprehended within the present, and this experience of time is described as totekwata. The past is seen as an experience that has gone by like the winds, not as something left behind for good any more than the winds leave the island permanently. The winds return but when they come from new directions they bring different experiences, leaving places sometimes “wet and cool” and at other times “dry and hot.”14 The Ongee would say it is not the winds that change but the places they pass through. This idea of time as being like wind is expressed below: Whenever the old wind comes around to the island it comes along with rains and spirits. These three, that is rain, winds and spirits, cannot be cut down or tied together but they cause every other kind of experience for all Ongee, their ancestors, and their children.

According to this conception, the winds govern the lives of the Ongee while transcending the two operations around which the life of the Ongee hunter and gatherer revolves, gitehkabey (cutting) and ulokwobey (binding). Gitehkabey is associated with disorder as it brings about death and the release of blood and smell, while ulokwobey establishes order by joining things. The metaphoric link between everyday activities and varieties of historical experience must therefore be seen in relation to the winds. The winds always prevail, so that all the diversity of experience, all order and disorder are accommodated in this continuity. The Ongee regard disorder as the product of relations either given by constants in the natural world or developing through history.15 Preserved in collective memory are the experience of changes similar to the shifts felt in the wind, like the arrival of tomya (ancestral spirits), lau (spirits) and ineney lau, (the spirits of white men who came from sea). What is first manifest as an irregularity comes to abide as part of the natural order, accepted in the same way as the tomya and lau who visit the islands. The actual elements of what combine to suggest confusion may allow for logical series (like a shuffled deck of cards) or proper distinctions (as between the ingredients in a blender).16 Such order is made possible by ritual, which allows the Ongee to negotiate relations with spirits (including those of white men) and assure the continuity of the community. The consequences of the first colonial encounters remaining starkly evident in the shrinking of the community, it is difficult to visualize a future free of the burden of the past. It is rituals that briefly project a less inchoate vision of the future (invoking it as the period when stone and iron will have disappeared) and that allow some kind of active intervention in the present (hunting the dugong).

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INITIATION RITUALS AND IDEAS OF CHAOS AND ORDER In the discourse of Ongee ritual, narrative and performance frequently and directly address tabatamabey or the failure to cut and bind. Tabatamabey is the epitome of disorder. In 1984 the father of an individual going through the initiation ceremony tanageru told me: We have to perform the initiation of young men, otherwise we shall lose the power to cut and bind, it will be tabatamabey just like the kuge, the war we had with outsiders, which led to the tabatamabey and loss of many young and old Ongee.17

During rituals, and especially rites of passage, certain acts of cutting or of tying down are prescribed and others proscribed. These ritual activities cover a wide range, and include transformations of the human body and material culture. All acts of joining, including weaving and pottery, are glossed by the term ulokwobey. At the end of the tanageru ceremony one of the initiators explained to me: We cut animals, taking care to keep our own smell bound to ourselves. This is the way to continue hunting animals successfully and in failing to do so the spirits cut our body. Our smell draws the spirits to hunt us and then there is one person less among the Ongee to see to cutting and binding! If we do not cut and bind, then there is no life! If none are left to cut and bind then there will be no Ongee or any spirits. Only the spirit-like foreigners and stones all over the island will remain. There will be no spirit, no rains and no winds to cut away the stones. We have to cut and bind things right, only then will the stones go away and all of us be happy.

We have mentioned that the ritual of initiation is associated with the song of the Dugong. The predicament of the dugong in the myth is seen as relevant to the transition of a human being to becoming a full member of his community in the present. This would suggest to the novice as much as to the ethnographer seeking to get purchase on Ongee history and culture that the novice is expected to perform certain actions that reify the idea of the disorder experienced by the community, and thereby make it possible to confront it. Thus the ritual does not just mark one person’s transition to manhood but proves him equipped to deal with disorder as encountered by the community. The departure of spirits from the forest is signaled by a change in wind-direction from August to September (Pandya 1987, Radcliffe-Brown 1922). Once the spirits leave the island the initiate is isolated for three days in a special thatched shelter built by him in the part of the forest where the bones of

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his ancestors are buried. During this period spirits offended by the initiate for having hunted in the forest while they were present bear the light body of the fasting initiate to their home in the sky. Transported above the forest, the initiate has a bird’s eye view of the location of the stones. The initiate promises the spirits that if they will be generous and return him to the forest by casting him down where the stones are he will never again hunt in an area where they are hunting at the same time. The impact of the initiate’s fall causes some of the stones to break and he gathers up the broken pieces. At the end of three days, weak and tired, he returns to the camp with a pig he has hunted and a basket full of tejage (wedges broken off from the kuge, or stones). His campmates bring the initiate their old iron maonale (tools and weapons). For two days and nights the initiate is engaged in the arduous exercise of untying the maonale and using separate pieces of tejage to sharpen the iron of each family’s maonale, before rebinding them, and placing each set in a newly made basket with the tejage (including unused tejage). He then goes from house to house distributing all the products of his labor—gachingey-maonale (sharpened and glowing iron implements), pieces of tejage (stones that cut the iron to make it capable of cutting again), tejage-kuge (unused tejage) and portions of pig meat. At the close of the initiation ceremony the entire community participates in a singsong to acknowledge (embooteye) the initiate’s work and that he has proved himself as one “who can cut and bind without getting cut.”18 With the initiate seated silently in the center, people follow a set pattern when joining in the chorus: Ka ule ule narenchema inachekame maa enkutata Kuge kuge konyune narema Say it again and so we don’t forget: the place where stones are not found. Ka ule ule narenchema inachekame maa enkutata lohaye lohaye konyune narema Say it again and so we don’t forget: the place where iron is not found Ma eye ma narema tabatamabey enekutata ye totekwata ebe In those places where chaos is not. There will be our future Enekutata tolakebeyeh buku buku kuge bechatolayeh Enekutata tolakebeteh buku buku lohaye benchatolayeh We will cut until the stones disappear and die. We will cut until the iron disappears. Enekutata narenchema inachekamey maa gaa ule warn ule enekutata benchameyeh ebukubuyeh Then we will never forget. Then we will be done with death forever

The deliberate recollection in the song articulates a relation to time where the present addresses both past and future. It invokes ideas from the narratives

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of the dugongs and the stones to contextualize them within the ritual activity of sharpening iron on stone. As the initiate goes from shelter to shelter distributing the new material, he is expected to recite the gilemame, or all that he has to “remember not to forget.” Allusions to the stones and metal serve to mobilize sentiments grounded in the knowledge of myth and history in order to intervene in historical process. The role of memory is central in understanding. Society uses the new initiate to re-collect the welter of the past that is always being composed and recomposed in collective memory.19 The imperative “not to forget” underpins the normative world of the Ongee. All things in the forest and around the campground (and today around the settlements) connote either gileymamey (“things to remember”) or inacekamey (“some things not to be forgotten”). Although they are contraries, forgetting and remembering are invoked for the same purpose of acknowledging taboos. Taboos fence practically every activity of theirs and are not limited to a few special domains, and so must always be borne in mind. The way the initiation ritual plays out shows both the primacy of human activity as it mediates the relation between the opposites, stone and iron, and the threat to human identity carried by the forest and the spirits. As the Introduction indicated, the forest is the world most familiar to the Ongee, yet is

Prescribed way of singing songs on ritual occasions, where individuals sit with their faces covered so that no one can see the ‘tears of memory’. (1984, Dugong Creek Little Andaman)

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also associated with agony and the possibility of the reversal of states. In the forest one experiences disquieting shadows of encounters with spirits (tomaya, lau). One of the first things I learned in the field was that the campsite is a space cleared of wild vegetation in order to keep at bay all spirits with the exception of those transformed into helpers and protectors of living humans. The camp represents security even as the Ongee know that in this humanized space power ebbs continually. The proximity of spirits and the likelihood of being their prey increases during liminal periods, like the change of tides, and in ambivalent spaces like the mangrove where salt water merges with sweet. In other words, the threat from spirits is associated with occasions of categorical confusion, whether encountered regularly (transitions between night and day) or occasionally (showers in sunshine). On the one hand, humans who seek power have only to cross the boundaries of the humanized space (the campsite) and confront the spirits, on the other, spirits can enter the camp when the spoils of the hunt are brought back or a child is born. The entry of these invisible spirits is apprehended as winds that “make you shiver” as well as when they enter food or the human body to cause pregnancy or sickness. So to remain within the campsite assures security if not necessarily power. The presence of the spirits around is seen as unavoidable, just as the smells ubiquitous among living beings may be transported anywhere by the winds. People are aware that individuals often come in contact with spirits and might then become like them and wield power over other humans. The state of being human is viewed as a descent from the state of being spirit, but rituals make it possible for all humans to become spirit for a brief duration while continuing to be human, and thus achieve a temporary balance between human and spirits. For in the worldview of the Ongee being human is an aberration in a world of spirits. For humans to survive at all in a world of spirits, power must be continually negotiated between spirits and humans. Rituals serve to reproduce power, so as to control the process by which humans continually dwindle, so to speak, from the state of being spirit, and to allow humans to realign their actions with those of spirits. The Ongee see humans themselves as transformed spirits, but it is only by performing rituals (gekonetorokey) that they may revert back to being spirits. At all other times, taboos (inachekamey) that emphasize the distinctness of their identity from that of the spirits are used to reinforce awareness of the constant presence of spirits all around. So what tanageru demonstrates is that to sustain the human order, humans must all their lives work towards “charging” their actions with the quality of spiritpower (Pandya 1993:211–74). The initiators come together, ritually process the initiate’s body and, like spirits, send the initiate away to the other world, then bring him back into the world of humans and remind him of all the things

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that he has to remember. This ensures that the initiate remembers the norms sustaining the community, and can achieve success as a hunter without incurring the wrath of spirits. Today, when the population of the Ongee remains around hundred only, the continuation of life is no abstraction but a matter of terrible urgency. The pattern of marriage exchange is hard to maintain for lack of appropriate marriage partners, while the decline in the number of pigs, turtles and dugongs has meant that during the initiation ceremony the ritually prescribed sequence of hunting has had to be reformulated. In the “old days,” unmarried boys would be initiated every season, but now the marriage ritual often precedes male initiation, which, instead of being completed in one season, is carried over for two seasons, for it is still important to the Ongee that the full ritual be conducted. We now need to look at how this worldview has been affected by the history of confrontation with the outside world (Portman 1899). The Ongee often say that the intrusion into their living space of outsiders who tempted the Ongee to become like themselves upset the equilibrium between the spirits and themselves (Pandya 1993:6–9). Yet at one level, they appear able to continue with life despite the decline in the number of women who can reproduce (utokwobe) and the shrinking of the area of the forest that provides nourishment (elokolebe). This may be because the experiences the Ongee associate with spirits are precisely similar to their encounters with encroachers and colonial powers in the past and with settlers in the present. The enemy suddenly emerges from the forest and, in the form of either spirit or human kills people or abducts them with their belongings to other realms. Indeed, in all the upheavals they have experienced, uncertainty is the one thing that has remained constant, for this is something that persists as regards whether while hunting one will end up being hunted, and as to who might turn predator and who is chosen as prey. It is a predicament peculiar to humans to be simultaneously of the forest, and also outside and in resistance to it. Like all creatures, they are bound by its law: hunting and being hunted, killing and being killed. The fear of the surrounding forest is a fear of this fearful symmetry, of being attacked and having in turn to attack.20 In this view of the world, where relations among all living forms are ultimately subject to the iron law of retribution, there are ways to regulate, displace, or even repress its operation. These are the persuasive ways of ritual (gikonetoroka). Gekonetoroka is the Ongee term for ritual, or activity that alters the relationship between humans, plants, animals and spirits for a specified duration. Rituals, in a given space for a given time, enable humans to exercise power like that encountered in spirits in non-ritual time. So rituals endow humans with the power to act as spirits in the social domain, which are at all other times subject to spirits, animals and plants. We have touched on the fact that

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children are seen as spirits who have descended to the social world and begun residing in a woman’s womb to be born as humans, and deaths occur when spirits come down and take away Ongee from the social world. Based on this belief, the Ongee see themselves as enacting ritually the death of the novice and the birth of the initiate when sending the body to the spirits and bringing it back during the ritual of initiation (Pandya 1993). So the ritual of initiation not only makes possible the transition of novice to initiate, but also allows the initiators and the participating community to act as spirits for that duration. This assumption on the part of humans of the agency of spirits introduces an interval of time in human space that is often described in terms of altering weight from heavy to light and from light to heavy (ibid., 1993:173). During the initiation ritual the novice must fast for about two weeks, consuming only liquids. But the ritual also requires the initiate to continue hunting rapaciously as many pigs as he can, to feed them to the initiators and the community, so that the latter “put on weight.”21 Thus with the completion of the initiation, body weights have been adjusted between the one being initiated and the community. Most Ongee rituals conclude by stressing what “to remember” and what “not to forget” in the social world. So the individual undergoing the ritual is provided with mainly didactic ideas concerning actions and objects subject to taboo. The initiators in a chorus tell the initiate: Remember and never forget to tell those who are to be initiated by you that we all have come down because of the spirits! And because of them we will go up but only by remembering where the animals are to be hunted! All whom we are to give food to! What not to consume or to consume! Who are the ones who have given brides! Where to defecate! Who not to attack! The number of humans will remain heavy, happy and many.

The process of rehearsing injunctions is believed to ingrain in the novice memory that endures through the erosion effected elsewhere by winds and spirits, whose regular passage and creation of storms mark temporal shifts for the Ongee (Leach 1971, Pandya 1993). The winds (tototey) are a constant experienced by the entire island, in the same way as collective memory is shared. Therefore the term totekwata is used for historical experience, in which the Ongee include their relations with animals and spirits. Having described the importance of taboos, it is crucial to recognize the points at which their transgression becomes necessary in practice. Initiates are to hunt pigs during the period when hunting is prohibited, and they thereby sever the prescribed pattern of relations between spirits, humans and animals. The ritual context is constituted by this transgression or deliberates

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‘forgetting.’ It is in this involuted manner that rituals reinforce the relationship of the Ongee and spirits, which prevails otherwise. The relationship is based on the idea that if they ‘do not remember,’ humans will become the prey of spirits, and each Ongee who dies because of this will only add to the forces of the spirits. Islanders avoid contact with spirits in most situations, when they are bound to moral conduct. But the initiate breaks the most fearful of taboos in undertaking contact with spirits. This makes ritual acts significant not only in their immediate import, but in suspending taboos. According to a logic like that underlying sacrifice, this suspension of norms is what enables normative action within the community. This is demonstrated by the fact that the prescribed season for initiation is during the months of June and July. This is a period when the Ongee are reluctant to hunt pigs, as spirits are believed to have entered the forest to begin the pig-hunting season. But on behalf of the community the novice dares to hunt in competition with the spirits. One could argue that ritual practice affords a certain objective distance on the moral injunction to avoid contact with spirits. Thus rules are not adhered to for their own sake but for fear of the consequences of disregarding them. This is somewhat like obeying law for fear of penalty rather than for the sake of principle. But for the Ongee, who does not forget that humans are actually a form of spirit, it is essential to ‘disobey’ law ritually and face ‘punishment.’ Taboos and ritual make it possible for the humans to revert back for a spell to the position of spirits simply in order to continue as humans in the natural world. This is only a reinforcement of the primary power equation according to which spirits may hunt in the world of humans and animals, and the animals marked out by them, as human hunters must avoid prey. It is only in order to maintain this equation that rituals make humans like spirits by temporarily suspending norms. So the Ongee who still remain believe that the dramatic decrease in their numbers is caused by an increase in the number of spirits. Fewer children are born to Ongee, as spirits do not return to the social world. They also hold that those who died in the wars in history were not ritually processed to become benevolent spirits.22

RITUAL PRINCIPLES IN THE WORLD OF THE ONGEE Let us now consider how the idea of “balance” is conveyed through two ritual principles. First, depending on the contexts, contraries may attract or repel one another. Second, to maintain the harmony of the individual and the social and natural orders, these contraries must remain in balance. Taboos proscribe two or more equivalent identities from coming together in order to

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prevent either term within a binary being “overloaded,” so to speak, and upsetting the balance. For the Ongee most crucial is the balance between the spirits and the humans when they are both hunting. They occupy the same space and temporarily the same identity, but they remain contraries. Rituals and the consumption of ritualized food are thus a means to assert that humans can exist in this world as transformed spirits. The key to Ongee rituals lies in appreciating the multiplicity of relations and the conflicts occasionally arising from this, when two contraries become similar in their pursuit of identical aims. The issue of balance also enters the domain of food—the principles according to which items are recognized as constituting food and certain food items are invested with ambiguous moral values. Let us glance at earlier interpretations of the symbolism of food among the Ongee. Radcliffe-Brown’s explanation of the fact that “not all food is equally dangerous” accounts for difference in terms of degree but not kind. He uses two principles to gauge what food would be regarded as dangerous—“those foods that are difficult or dangerous to procure are considered more dangerous than others” and “the foods that are most prized are regarded as being more dangerous than those that are less prized” (1948: 269). Thus the dugong is most prized for being most difficult to obtain, which at the same time it makes it the most dangerous. Animal fat is considered dangerous because it is a delicacy. However his principles are too broad to explain all shades of classification, and are even less likely to account for the inclusion or exclusion of certain items on the basis of categorical complications. For instance, while it is true that fish and tubers, amply available throughout the year, are not tabooed, crabs and shellfish are subject to taboo despite being available throughout the year as they are caught in the ambivalent zone of the mangrove. They may be consumed only individuals who have attained social maturity. Other studies have reduced the symbolism of food to a single dimension, its “social value” (See Leach 1971: 46). According to this, food items are also differentiated by the degree to which they symbolize this social value. But objects are also defined in relation to one another and to the human subjects who consume them through the logic of qualitative differences. Yet these differences should not be understood as the varying degrees in which tangible objects manifest abstract values. Ongee rituals reinforce the idea that “society” is the product of complex relations between agential powers classified according to a system enabling a clearer sense of order than the vague conception of moral power suggested by Radcliffe-Brown, who adopts a Durkheimian approach to analyze the relations between unseen spirits and visible humans. This order that underpins relations between tangible objects

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(both human and non-human) also makes it impossible to think of humans and spirits as separate entities. For the Ongee, society hinges on the categorical dependence of the Self on the ‘Other’ together with all its implications. The logic of taboo must be located within a cosmological frame of reference, instead of reducing ideas of danger to indices of social value. And to extrapolate without taking into account how tabooed objects and their relations to other objects and to human subjects are conceived within the culture results in explanations that are both contrived and approximate. The ritual and taboo surrounding hunting and food imply a particular kind of subject. This subject is constituted by a symbolic order haunted by the unarticulated, which it has excluded in order to define itself. Rituals are prompted by the need to resist the invisible spirits who move constantly with the winds and seek out smell and whose impact on the human body is felt in the processes of ingestion, excretion, reproduction, transformation and decay. The body is experienced in its perpetual resistance to the subject’s symbolic ordering of the self. The subject’s fear of disintegration through the body is the ultimate ground of the Ongee idea of disorder. It is such a human subject that is the primary concern of taboos in the Ongee world. The subject is not a given, for it is constituted by a process moving from the pre-symbolic to the symbolic, from instability to stability and from asociality to sociality, and is constantly haunted by the possibility of its collapse. Articulating the body in relation to bodies like spirits symbolically constitutes the subject’s human body, first and foremost. The Ongee may find themselves hunted by spirits, because of which some of them die and, when dead, join the spirits to hunt other Ongee. The human subject’s separation from and return to the state of being spirit makes for an inherent difficulty in clearly distinguishing bodies that are subjects and bodies merely objects. This has important consequences for taboo, in that it limits the consumption of natural species endowed with a strongly subjective character, like honey, pigs, turtles and dugongs. To eat them, or eat them without neutralizing that subjective component, would mean undermining oneself as a subject by the intimate presence of another body. The categories applied to food, excreta and the transformation and decay of the body (both seen as being caused by spirits) establish that if subjectivity is constituted by the symbolic order, the act of ritual is concerned with the body bearing this subjectivity. Hunting is hemmed in by ritual and taboo, being an act where the integrity of the body as subject is most under threat. The classificatory system may also specify that the integrity of the subject is contingent upon the integrity of a certain external object. So rituals and taboos take into account all classes of objects with any bearing on the subject. If taboo is seen as an idiom, it is reasonable to assume that it is capable of saying many different

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things, given the many different areas comprehended by the native categories of gilemamey (things to remember) and inacekamey (things not to forget). The embodiment of subjectivity always makes itself felt one way or another in the world of the Ongee. It is by means of ritual that the subject severs its connection with all other bodies, even if it retains some connection with its own body. Or better, ritual introduces such a radical distinction between subject and object that the subject ceases to be at risk from objects. Or so the Ongee like to believe. Traditionally, like other Andaman Islanders, the Ongee would initiate each male only once in his lifetime (See Man 1899 and Radcliffe-Brown 1964). The Ongee report that they were forced to modify the performance of tanageru after many Ongee died at the time of the formation of stones and the introduction of iron (around 1870), even though they continue to abide by the tanageru’s traditional restrictions on hunting and eating and the demonstration of the initiate’s power. The first change introduced was the decision to initiate only married men.23 According to the Ongee, the decline in numbers made it imperative for both daughter-givers and daughter-takers to come together for tanageru, since there was a considerable difference of age between those men and women whom the rules allowed could marry, and marriages were negotiated very early, sometimes even before the boy was born.24 Today the initiate is expected not only to demonstrate his ability to hunt, to cut the flesh of pigs and to bind maonale, but also to distribute maonale sharpened against stone. He must also bring tejage (stone wedges) from the site of war, to be used in the camp to sharpen iron. The ritual act rehearses the mythical idea that chaos will prevail until the disappearance of the stones. The presence of kuge (which denotes war as well as stones) is explained in terms of both myth and history. Consequently tanageru goes beyond establishing the individual’s dependence on society, as was argued by RadcliffeBrown (1922), and seeks to “translate” the confusion of history into ordered activity. Apart from the fact that the initiate is made to work with stone and iron, change is registered in the very fact that the ritual has had to be adjusted to involve men who are married. Tanageru incorporates the chaos of the past as transmitted by myth and history to project a future order when their will no longer be an imbalance in population to recall the violence of history. The initiates undergoing this ritual which translates disorder in the symbols of kuge, tejage and lohayey, declare as they sharpen the iron (by grinding on stone, never hammering): I am cutting the stones . . . the more I cut stone, the more rapidly will iron and death go away from here . . . it will then be good, there will be no outsiders to cut us, just Ongee and the things in the forest and sea. . . . Outsiders are here

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always cutting the forest, never the stones . . . they are like the other foreigners intending to cut us, and leave us with nothing to cut and bind on this island. Our neighbors the Jarawa and Sentinelese are right when they try to cut apart the outsiders.25

What appear as separate realms to us—natural history, contact history, geological history and the community’s history—come together when the Ongee explain their life histories. For the Ongee see all these as interconnected in an ‘episteme’ forming the very basis of a ritual in which past and future are not separated. Ongee define the order anticipated in the future against the disorder that constitutes their present by saying, “there would be no stones, no initiation where young men would have to visit the spirits, and no more waiting for the birth of more daughters!” This vision of the future is the key to understanding how they use ritual to come to terms with chaos. The combination of ideas related to kuge is based on an understanding of geology derived from historical and mythical accounts of the chaos effected by kugebey (war) and lohayey (iron). In this code of translation, kuge and lohayey embody the effects of disorder and the maintenance of order by setting the parameters of that which can be cut, that which cannot be cut and that which can bind together past, present and future. What the ritual translates is totekwata (history) and its performance is simultaneously a recapitulation of the past and an intervention in the present. In this process of translating totekwata, correspondences with prior events are recognized—the war with the foreigners recalls the war with the spirits—in such a way as to allow the second occasion of disruption to be accommodated more easily following the strategic adjustments made after the first. This is what leads them to prefer iron to other materials for providing their maonale with a cutting edge, since the wood, bones and shells traditionally used for this purpose would at some point fall apart, and instruments made of these can neither be cut and re-sharpened for future operations nor rebound. The late Teelai, who in 1983 was the oldest man among the Ongee, once while reminiscing told me about totekwata: Today our life is different! . . . there are more men and fewer women, not enough girls to marry in accordance with our old rules. Angry spirits have caused more deaths then births . . . Since we had the kuge it has been like this! Only spirits, the winds and rain can cut the kuge; it was not easy for an Ongee to do this cutting until the kugebey with Ineney-lau gave us lohayey to cut, but also occasioned more kuge. Once all the kuge are cut away and gone, then the births will be more than deaths.

The translation enacted by the discourse of tanageru is critical because it safely incorporates the chaos of history into the Ongee cultural system. To use

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Marshall Sahlins’ formulation for interpreting historical change, what initially appears in the myth Jugey-ye Kuge as a reproduction of structures, as conflict with outsiders recalls conflict with spirits, is proved in ritual practice to be the transformation of structures. If we understand order as the culture’s “structure of practice,” then the desire to find a way forward in the face of chaos (expressed in the closing recitation of tanageru) becomes the historical “practice of structure” (Sahlins 1981). Similarly, the everyday concern of hunters and gatherers to avoid certain encounters or actions by way of avoiding danger should be understood as a habitual gesture of respect towards moral boundaries, not simply as a fear of consequences. For we know that the Ongee see their predicament as part of the human condition, not as misfortune brought upon them by contact. Taboos and rituals offer a way to deal with the mishaps continually encountered just by virtue of being hunters and gatherers.

MATERIALITY AND HISTORY VISUALIZED For the Ongee past and future are neither encountered solely in narrative nor experienced wordlessly, but form immediate and objective realities. Their reality confronts them day in and day out—like the stones around the island and the iron, which they use. It is perhaps the visual immediacy characterizing their historical, mythical and geological accounts that helps them accept the “changes” undergone, even as they continue silently to practice the rituals to re-establish order. We could say that for them history is less an incoherence that is required to be interpreted than a system of signification where the significance of one contact event is re-signified in that which follows it. The myth of the ‘song of the dugong’ provides a frame for thinking about encounter and transformation that can be adapted to the history of the arrival of outsiders. What we have been observing is a cultural consciousness that displays consistency in the face of new experiences rather than disintegrating or reinventing its terms entirely. The cognitive system is one that does not require what is seen to be subject to re-presentation; at the same time the materials that enter the immediate environment, like iron, are absorbed as part of material culture. Whereas outsiders have used the material culture of the Islanders to show them in a way that often betrays what is actually present and so demands careful unpacking as a re-presentation. The Ongee initiation ceremony reifies in the most literal sense their interpretation of the past for the novice who visits the sites of the kuge to collect tejage. The accuracy of the historical and mythical descriptions of war is supported by the fact that stones are found only in certain parts of the island

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rather than all over. Sandy coasts surround the Little Andamans except in the northwest, the Jackson Creek area and in the area of Butler Bay in the southeast, where the coastline is broken by obtrusions of shale, limestone and sandstone that extend out into the sea. In the north, the stones form a line of protrusions extending northwards towards the cluster of South Andaman Islands.26 Both Jackson Creek and Butler Bay possess historic and mythic significance as the only locations where kuge are found. According to the Ongee, these are the places where they first obtained lohayey from the wrecks of the ships Kwalangtun and Assam Valley, where the spirit-like inenylau arrived in big ships and shot at the Ongee so that many were killed, where the inenylau first gave the Ongee iron and where the Ongee launched large canoes and went to Aberdeen (the old name for Port Blair) to procure tobacco27 and tea. The distinctness of the two places containing kuge is accounted for in myths where historical memory is held in place by stones that in other words give tangible form to chaos. Thus history endures in the landscape, and landmarks signal to the novice the consequences of a specific type of conflict— greed calls forth anger, the attempt to resist which leads to death on a scale that leaves too few behind to perform the work of cutting and binding that helps maintain order, while what are left behind are the stones that, because they cannot be cut or bound, are a permanent reminder of chaos. Outsiders introduce disorder of which stones form the visible residue, but are also providers of the iron which wears away stone. Though neither stone nor iron can be cut, iron is distinguished by its power to cut all other materials without growing blunt—“It is something which can be re-sharpened to continue cutting,” say the Ongee. This quality facilitates its incorporation into a society where the act of cutting is primary for material culture. So though introduced by foreigners who cause disorder, iron represents the order maintained by the ability to cut. It is this principle that is central to tanageru. Both myth and history describe greed leading to transgression, which leads to war which leads to the formation of kuge, and both share the same status as totekwata (what is continued from the past). The fact that myth and history are not distinguished explains the efficacy of the geological formations at Jackson Creek and Butler Bay as signs. Kuge embody the consequences of confrontation, indexing the violence, disorder and death of which there is a prevailing awareness given the unprecedented demographic situation. Order is visualized as the stones disappearing, to mark the arrival of a time when novices would not have to travel to the other world and there would be brides available for all. The Ongee describe the introduction of lohayey as responsible for tabatamabey, or the disorder caused by the co-presence of two negative elements (stone and iron). Not just the myth of the kuge but also Teelai’s remarks show

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the acceptance of the idea that it was foreigners who introduced the iron that created distinctions within the community. What the early colonizers chose to offer in exchange for what they wanted established a pattern of exchange with the outside world that has continued to the present at the same time as it came to transform relations within the community. Within the Ongee culture relations were represented through material culture and relations with outsiders were improvised for the gain of material culture in new contexts. In subsequent chapters this subject will be further considered in the context of Jarawa culture. For the present it is enough to note that for the early colonizers iron was merely a material offering itself as a means to an end—though ends of potentially historic significance—while within the Ongee’s own historical discourse it assumed more far reaching resonance. It was in 1867 that the British administrators of the Islands first became aware of the Ongee of Little Andamans. Until this date, the British had been preoccupied with establishing the penal settlement at Port Blair and with keeping in check the hostility of groups from the middle and Southern Andamanese. The Little Andamans impinged on their awareness only when it came to collecting a seasonal tax and licensing fee from Burmese and Malayan collectors of ambergris and Chinese collectors of birds’ nests (Singh 1978, Tarling 1960). However, in 1867, the collectors all refused to pay on the grounds that they had been unable to collect anything from the island. They had seen numerous shipwrecks from 1863 to 1866, and particularly remembered the wrecks of the big ships Assam Valley and Kwalangtung, which had left no survivors. They were genuinely afraid of the Ongee. In addition, the Ongee had begun using the iron nails recovered from the wrecks as arrowheads while fishing and other scrap-items as cutting and scraping implements. This discovery of the uses to which they could put the metal found at the site of the wrecks of “outsiders” led to their demanding iron from collectors in exchange for allowing them to collect ambergris and birds’ nests. Moreover using iron to replace arrowheads of pointed wood made for additional weight and force, so that their weapons were a real threat to collectors who refused to provide them iron.28 These events prompted the first “exploration” of the islands of Little Andaman by the British administration, which was faced with organized attacks at Jackson Creek and Butler Bay. Over the next three years, Ongee attacks on the British led to the deaths of about 80 colonial officers as against about 285 Ongee deaths. By 1870, the British realized the value of changing strategy. If they could pacify the Ongee, they would be assured revenue from the collectors as well as the safety of survivors of shipwrecks near the island. The Ongee were particularly important to pacify, as the island was in proximity to the trade routes connecting South and Southeast Asia. Keeping in mind their

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experience with other tribes on the Islands, the British started to distribute metal, primarily scraps of iron for the Ongee to fashion arrowheads and cutting implements (Portman 1899:812), and this did succeed in pacifying them. After 1870, the Ongee referred to iron not by the Ongee term gayekwatabe (one which always cuts) but by lohaye, derived from the Hindustani term for iron (loha). Improved relations with the British ushered in a period where the Ongee would travel to Port Blair for tobacco, sugar, tea and opium, all of which the colonial administration willingly provided in exchange for peace. However, contact with residents of Port Blair exposed the Ongee to syphilis. From 1870 to 1876, two-thirds of the Ongee were infected by syphilis, which, being hereditary was a major factor in the decline in population (Cipriani 1954, Man 1885: 15, Portman 1889). The history of Ongee hostility, their desire for iron and the spread of venereal disease were all manipulated by the British to pass moral judgment that justified their policy towards the Ongee. Underlying this policy was the wish to have the Ongee dependent on the British, so that they would be remain passive in the face of domination.29 Historical change has led to a shift in the focus of the tanageru ritual. In the past cutting up the body of the hunted pig formed the core of the ritual. Now what is emphasized is the initiate’s ability to sharpen iron, for that is what enables him to cut pig. The Ongee enact history through these shifts of emphasis in ritual structure, investing the confusion of history with the order of ritual. They believe that each seasonal cycle it is imperative at least one male pass through tanageru so that he can “go up to the spirits to remind them of the tabatamabey.” The fact that there are now fewer marriageable women means that there are few married men who have not been initiated. And when observing the initiation of two boys in 1984 I was told that in the years ahead even men already initiated might have to go through the ceremony in order for the spirits to be reminded regularly. Tanageru is for the novice less an initiation into his own future as an adult than into the collective memory of the past that continues to bear on the worlds of both humans and spirits. The myth of the kuge is believed by ethnographers to refer to the series of wars between 1863 and 1867, claimed to have led to the loss of nearly 20% of the population; but these dates and figures apart, the Ongee see the deaths as the entrenchment of disorder within the community just as the stones are embedded in the landscape. For this decimated community whose very landmarks signify disruption and whose daily activities depend on material from outsiders they have every reason to distrust, the one thing that is certain is that they will not abandon the ritual whose efficacy is renewed through history. Contact history assumes objective immediacy through the presence of metal. When the metal acquired through exchange with the outside world is

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sharpened against the stones formed in the war with the outside world, the two negatives cancel out each other. The disorder recalled by both metal and stone mean that together they represent a dilemma that the Ongee ritualize even in everyday activity. The procurement of tejagey wedges to sharpen metal blades is one of the primary responsibilities of the torale (spirit communicator, see Pandya 1993:154). At one time I used to find irritating the way men were always rubbing their blades against the stones they carry. I asked them why they did this constantly—why like most of their other activities it was not restricted to a fixed duration. I was told, “So long as dugongs sing we must keep sharpening the metal blades.”30

CODA Stones mark the deaths that were a consequence of contact. In eroding these memorials of death, iron holds out the promise of breaking out of demography’s downward spiral. The act of marking time by sharpening iron against stone can be translated into two classic themes of a post-lapsarian world— playing according to the rules of a world that has changed (for the iron was also acquired after contact) or attempting to transcend mortal finitude through temporal activity. But iron is acquired by continuing the contact relations that brought about disease and death, so the more iron that is acquired to erase the memory of stones, the more stones there are to erode. Transcendence is therefore impossible, or in other words once the outside world is admitted into one’s frame of reference (the visible stones and the iron “ready to hand”31) it threatens to fill up one’s horizons. Finally iron acquires its efficacy to sustain the processes of everyday life by being whetted against the memory of death. This ambivalent relation between iron and stone and the fact that both are derived from outside recalls deconstructionist endeavors to show how the terms of a binary are unstable and mutually dependent and how the introduction of a “supplement” exposes internal deficiencies. The present study can only flag the lines on which a deconstructive reading of the Jugey-ye Kuge might develop. Derrida (1974) sees in Rousseau’s autobiography indications that culture must “supplement a deficiency in nature” arising from an “accident or deviation,” but this act is a sort of lapse or scandal characterized by the “consumption of energy without the possibility of recovery” (1974: 146, 151). The necessity of iron to Ongee material culture can be seen as such a “scandal,” and as compounded by the symbolic investment in iron. For the habitual activity of sharpening iron appears unproductive “consumption of energy” given that the future the act claims to shadow forth seems impossible within the very terms of the myth. Derrida

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describes the “economy” of the supplement as one that “exposes and protects us at the same time according to the play of forces and of the differences of forces” (1974: 155). The introduction of iron simultaneously exposes the Ongee to contact with the outside world and sustains their internal economy. Whatever points of coincidence suggest themselves, we cannot simply map the relations Derrida traces in Rousseau’s work onto the relations between iron, the outside world and the future projected in Ongee myth and ritual. For Derrida’s conclusion that “The supplement transgresses and at the same time respects the interdict” develops from his concern with the supplement as sign, the “proxy” that in procuring an “absent presence” “holds it at a distance and masters it,” as presence is “at the same time desired and feared” (ibid). The paradoxes of the Jugey-ye Kuge are theoretically simpler if their implications for lived experience are unviable. It is true iron may be described as at the same time a “supplement” to Ongee culture acquired by transgressing former boundaries and soliciting contact and the means of erasing the memory of former transgressions represented by the stones. But iron cannot be said to stand in the relation of sign to referent to the future it is supposed to realize. The constant distance at which the future remains is difficult to interpret as its “mastery.” And what is both “desired and feared” is not this (by definition inaccessible) future, but the contact with outsiders necessary to realizing it. This said, Derrida’s exploration of ethnology, which he sees as bound up with the de-centering of European culture (Derrida 1978: 278–94) raises questions on the interpretation of mythical structures and their relation to history, which do bear on the Jugey-ye Kuge. In this essay he discusses the parallel Levi-Strauss draws between technical “bricolage,” or the adaptation to one’s own ends of whatever means available (even if their origins are heterogenous and even if they have to be changed in the process) and mythical reflection. Both can attain “brilliant and unforeseen results,” for the elements of a myth constantly display “unforeseen affinities” which confound analytical endeavors to establish any more than “tendential” unity in the myth. Symbols are characterized by a surplus of meaning (e.g. the Melanesian notion of mana can be seen as substantive and verb), which Derrida attributes to the lack of a fixed point of reference within structures. But if Levi-Strauss recognized the impossibility of a totalizing interpretation, Derrida observes that in order to uncover even the structure of myth, Levi-Strauss faced the necessity of “putting history into parentheses,” failing to pose the problem of “the passage from one structure to another.” In the Jugey-ye Kuge, a myth on the origins of the technology made the means to improvise a future in the face of unprecedented events, relations of simultaneous opposition, affinity and dependence between the elements of the structure are revealed only in the recognition of the impossibility of bracketing out history.

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Suydam Cutting (1947) an American adventurer who at J.H. Hutton’s insistence visited Andaman Islands in 1932. He collected photographs and material culture for the Pitt Rivers Museum and American Natural History Museum. The picture shows Andaman Islanders with a hunted dugong that was skinned salted and packed for the museum display in America.

NOTES 1. I have translated as “sharp” the Ongee word “gacheengey,” which literally means a blade sharpened to such brightness that it dazzles. It is often used to convey the excellence of something (and is in fact used to describe pig liver, it being regarded as a delicacy and the only internal organ they consume). Further symbolic valences of sharpness will become apparent in the myths discussed in this chapter . 2. In the Andamanese worldview, the civet cat (Paguma larvata tytleri) and monitor lizard (Varanus salvatori) are distinguished by being the only ones who can move in or into water and also on land, as well as climb trees (See Pandya 1994: 63–65, Myth No: 4). Their mobility is power, as we see in this myth, the power to transform, and it is the greater owing to their solidarity. Some Ongee also regard them as the only carnivores in their forest. These exceptional creatures also evoke the chaos of war, which led to the Dugong’s crisis of identity from which it could not escape. 3. The Ongee explain the decline in their population as an unavoidable consequence of contact. Estimated at 2,400 in 1867, the Ongee population has remained at 100 since 1985. Such a decline is not unique to the Ongee. Today the Negrito hunters and gatherers, once the sole inhabitants of the Islands, constitute only 0.32% of the total population (being estimated at 450 people in the 1991 census). Their

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strategically significant position within South-east Asia has meant that since 1858 the Islands have been critical to the security of the British Empire. Since Independence there has been a steady increase in immigrants (largely from the poorer areas of southern and eastern India), who arrive attracted by the possibility of exploiting land of which 87 per cent is under forest-cover. In 1981 the total population of the island was 158,287, today the non-tribal population of Andaman Islands stands at 450,000. 4. Entextualization is a process whereby a segment of discourse is lifted out of its original context to acquire new meanings elsewhere. This process allows historical events, like contact, to be explained within the ‘frame’ of previous narratives, like the song of the dugong (see Goffman, 1974, and 1981). For studies of entextualization in folklore and linguistic anthropology, see Bauman and Briggs (1990). 5. During the recitations at tanageru, the myth of the stones forms a distinct narrative but is also embedded within a more extended account of why anger defines the relationship between spirits and humans. 6. See Portman (1899) for historical accounts of shipwrecks reported around Little Andamans. 7. For details see Radcliffe-Brown (1964: Appendix on material culture) and Man 1885 on the predominance of plant derived material for joining and binding operations. This is also discussed in Pandya (1987). 8. See AAJVS (1977) and Vidyarthi (1976). 9. See Appendix A 10. See Blackburn (1986:168) and Bakhtin (1981). 11. The myth’s imperative to restore order must have reinforced the importance of continued activity, although sharpening blades also displays a state of readiness—I have observed that many Jarawa also carry a piece of metal tied to a length of fiber along with a dry leaf pouch containing stones. (See Appendix A) I have wondered if this obligatory activity is thought actually capable of eroding the “stones” of one’s existence. 12. From all three island clusters, the tribes worst affected in terms of population decline were in 1859 lumped into a conglomerate designated the Great Andamanese. Over a period of time, these eight groups came to lose their distinct identities as they became residents of the Andaman Homes around Port Blair (homes that were midway between homes and sanitariums). After Independence the ‘Great Andamanese’ were all settled on Strait Island, near Port Blair. Today the group has intermarried with outsiders, and has a total population of about 30. They explain the decline in population as caused by the introduced of opium and liquor by the “white-outsiders.” This does not prevent them from continuing to consume liquor wherever available. 13. See Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 90, 222). 14. Winds are associated with different seasons, depending on the direction from which they blow. Storms are a central topic in classic ethnographic accounts (Radcliffe-Brown 1922:156–58, 147–49) as well as more recent studies of Andamanese culture (Leach 1971, Pandya 1993). Ongee rituals are dominated by invocations to the winds, either directly or indirectly (in relation to spirits). Ritual activities are intended either to set up a relationship with spirits or to alter the prevailing relationship be-

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tween humans and the spirits moving along the winds (See Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 152–53,162, 352–53, 362–63). 15. Contrary to the characteristic South Asian expression, “It is a matter of fortune (bhagya) or misfortune (durbhagya)!” the Ongee do not see chaos as something occurring because of chance or misfortune. 16. The mechanics of the blender is a good way to imagine this process. Formerly distinct identities are transformed as each substance is broken down in the blender, but the one operating it is concerned only with the desired outcome of fusion. The ethnographic presentation of history has often replicated the logic of the blender by trying to identify structures underlying practice, for ethnographers are obsessed with the idea of uncovering some kind of order governing the cultures they study. Within the blender there is a brief period of chaos as “things are thrown about,” but like the experience of historical flux it is this state of disorder that gives rise to the state where elements are blended in harmony. It is the non-native’s understanding of history, which interprets disorder as generating order, deriving this idea of order from the preceding confusion. From the perspective of one living through this history, there is no obvious linear development separating chaos from order. The ethnographer who denies that the people he studies have a “history” or a sense to apprehend historical process is left struggling to explain their culture by superimposing myth over history and reading ritual in terms of myth. By contrast, the Ongee discourse on history takes chaos into account, without assuming it to be something that leads to or has to give way to order. 17. An Ongee child’s education consists of learning how to cut and bind and locating the material for doing so. The male child’s education culminates in a display of his knowledge of cutting and binding during the tanageru, when he makes his own bow and arrow with the assistance of his father-in-law and his mother’s brother. After the bow and arrow are made, the initiate’s mother and her classificatory sisters bind different kind of fibers for the initiate’s body adornments, for ropes and also weave baskets and mats (all examples of binding operations). The women use only raw botanical materials that the initiate would have cut and brought from the forest. 18. As the embodiment of the principle of order and continuity, the initiate is now referred to as the naratakwangey, or the chambered nautilus shell. This is seen as the only shell that lives on after death, for it does not sink but “cuts” the water and floats, like the Ongee canoes. 19. At the close of the initiation ritual, the myth of stones is recited at the campsite and all children are encouraged to listen to it as something they must “remember not to forget.” This injunction accompanies all references to ideas and social relations which are intended to orient them to life in the forest. An explanatory frame of reference is often introduced as ‘remembered,’ or as having assumed a reality of its own in having been related and passed on. These frames allow present experience to be understood by re-signifying past experience. It is this cumulative history that may well be forgotten by the present ethnographer, who when trying to understand how the Islanders might think about contact and relations developing a history, does not always bear in mind all the various groups inhabiting the Islands, all the different people who

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have arrived there from outside, and the different periods in which these encounters took place. Although we think of the tribes as isolated bands scattered over the Islands, whose first migration lies far back in the centuries, they belong to an area part of what has been quite a busy sea route. These groups did interact despite being differentiated by dialects, and the nature of contact was an important concern. 20. On 26th February 1999, two Ongee youths were reported to have died by drowning. However the Ongee feel that politicians who did not like the Ongee raising voice against illegal forest use by the outsiders got them killed in the forest. The matter was never resolved. However the Ongee feeling that in the changed forest, today new dangers lurk, as in 2001 an Ongee was stamped to death by an elephant belonging to (with) timber operators going berserk and stray (that had gone mad and stray) in the forests of Little. Andamans. 21. Tanageru usually lasts two months and the initiates are young men who, though married, are not yet fathers of their own children or adopted children. From May to July, when the spirits are hunting and feeding on pigs in the forest, initiators begin to work on the initiate’s body, subjecting it to an increasing number of food restrictions to bring its weight down. This is so that the spirits can smell out the weak body of the initiate, and so that his light frame can be carried easily to the skies. The initiate is to maintain silence and keep aloof from his campmates. His prescribed diet consists of the blood of a pig hunted by himself, and he also drinks boiled leaves and smokes leaves brought from the forest. Important proscriptions concern the consumption of pig-meat, tea, and tobacco. As the initiate’s body weight starts to come down, he begins to go alone every alternate day to the forest to hunt pigs. During his absence he is treated as if he was dead and no one in the camp talks about him. When the initiate returns from hunting pigs, the camp women gather around the initiate in the middle of the campsite and wail as they watch him cut the hunted-pig into appropriate portions. Then the entire camp eats the meat of the pig, with the exception of the initiate, who drinks only its blood. 22. In January 2000, visiting governmental health experts tried to impress upon the Ongee the Government’s concern by assuring them, “The Government will give you more money for each new child you produce,” ignoring the Ongee notion of conception. A disgusted elder retorted, “Where are the girls for boys to marry? The forests have lost the quality to sustain our life—there are more people around the forest, and working in the forest all year around, perhaps the spirits want all of us Ongee to leave the island for good!” It was of course impossible for me to translate his whole statement to the authorities, which viewed the Andamanese as the only case where the government had shown its willingness to modify its stance towards population control. 23. This decision is part of the collective memory since it was from that time onward that wife of the hunter undergoing initiation, started weaving cane framework around the skull of each pig hunted by the young man undergoing the ritual tanageru. (Cf Radcliffe-Brown 1964:466–467) 24. To give an idea of the reorganization of social relations, here is the testimony of Teelai, who was the eldest Ongee at Dugong Creek when I recorded him in 1984:

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We stopped waiting for the boys to have hair above their lips and for the girls to have breasts because few marriages were possible! So we did what we could. If one individual was available then the marriage was solemnized regardless of the other being too young or old. For instance my mother’s second husband never had children, but when my mother died, her second husband took my sister and me with him to his second marriage. When my first wife married me with her three children my mother’s second husband had his first child with his second wife. Further changes in the performance of the tanageru ritual have been made because of both the changed marriage patterns and the decline in the birth rate caused by the difference in age of husband and wife. It is believed that after the wars, the formation of the stones, the introduction of iron and the initial decline in population, the act of cutting associated with chaos was incorporated into the tanageru ritual designed to establish order. Now setting a standard of accomplishment as a skilled cutter for the novice, the ritual has proved dynamic enough to modify the prescribed age of the initiate, its sole requirement being that the novice be married. 25. The myth of origin associates the birth of the first Ongee with branches being planted by people whose forbears came from outside, and describes the spirits descending to enjoin the Ongee women “to see to it that the men do no bad work” and to ensure that the spirits got enough to eat. The myth concludes with the spirits departing, “the Ongee alone were left” (Pandya 1993: 8–10). This suggests that the fault lines are less between insider and outsider than between those who honor these norms and those who consume to excess. 26. See Gee: 1926 Andaman Islands: Records of the Geological Survey of India, p. 55 and Tipper: 1911. 27. See Appendix B. 28. Incorporation of iron scrap into fabrication of the arrowheads had interestingly a different history in the Middle and South Andamans. The iron in form of knives and machetes was distributed among the tribesmen of the area by the British authorities, but the iron recovered from the shackles of the escaped convict and killed by the tribal in the forest provided the raw material for fashioning arrows which were seen as a major threat to gun powered guardsmen within the British settlement on the island. 29. In the annual colonial reports this attitude and policy towards Ongee is made explicit (Portman 1899: 844–845). According to Portman, “The most useful language they can learn is Hindustani and it is more important that they should learn that language than we should learn their language. The Ongee should always be shown that we are the strongest race and are to be obeyed . . . obedience must be enforced and all wrong doings be sternly punished, for the Andamanese are a forgetful race and this discipline is necessary in the interest of the shipwrecked person.” Portman, administrator, ethnographer and explorer of the islands, suggested in the notes accompanying the report that giving the Ongee iron while exploring their island would be a good step towards the goals of understanding and better administration (Home Department, Public Branch: Proceedings of 1867–1870). 30. The relation of the activity of sharpening blades to the descant of the dugong recalls the theory of “the refrain” in Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 343). Providing a

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“rough sketch” of a stable centre in the “heart of chaos,” the refrain protects the “germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do.” 31. The term used by Heidegger (1927) for whatever presents itself to awareness in a purely instrumental character (as iron would in everyday activity, whatever its significance in myth and ritual).

Chapter Three

The Documentation of the Andamanese: From Photography to Ethnography

After concluding my fieldwork on the Islands, I tried to collate all documents on the Andamanese tribes to which I had access. These included the reports of colonial administrators, journals of explorers, accounts by missionaries as well as historical and ethnographical accounts. Identifying points of coincidence and divergence between statements from disparate sources served to bring out the contours of colonial discourse on Andamanese culture—both as manifest in space and as evolving in time. These documents present history on the Islands from the perspective of the outsider, a history that as a “translation” (Cohn 1980) for the non-tribal ‘Other’ documents only what was thought worth recording for political, administrative and scientific purposes (Vansina 1965:141). The exercise was undertaken to trace changes in the perception of the Andamanese. Yet what struck one in numerous documents was their uncritical use of prior texts. This ignored the possibility that the frame of reference of the latter was open to question, besides the more obvious fact of social change among the Andamanese. Such a tendency on the part of historians and ethnographers generates the “temporal illusion” (Greimas 1976:29) wherein the reference points of the past are treated as possessing a reality transcending the discourse that produced them, and so to possess meaning even for the present. Documents on the Andamans frequently combine two communicative modes—writing and photography—whose messages are not necessarily complementary. The changing relations preoccupy many written accounts with native Islanders, whereas in photographs of the Andamanese one sees little evidence of the effects of change. There is thus a discrepancy between the realities of verbal and visual text. This does not mean that the reliability of all documents on the Andamanese is open to question, but does mean that for the historian these pictures are not worth a thousand words, in that the reality they 71

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re-present is distinct from that evoked by words and assumes value for a separate and more self-reflexive inquiry. Pictures suggest to the viewer an essential truth about the Andamanese, which verbal elaboration cannot claim to have captured without inviting skepticism. As Barthes (1987) notes, “pictures . . . are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analyzing or diluting it.” The (lack of) relation between photographs and written text derives from a historical sensibility that this chapter argues is central to British colonialism. It also provides a counterpoint to the visible signs anchoring the historical narratives recited by the Ongee (described in the previous chapter), which are landmarks not perceived to endure for all time. Some of these old photographs have come to be invested with so much representative value and used in so many documents, that they could be said to have acquired “ritual value,” past images being invoked in the present and conditioning future representations. While a written text necessarily reveals some gap between itself and the authority it cites, visual documents can be recycled in texts widely separated in time without appearing overtly anomalous. This appearance of being untouched by history lends the image of the Andamanese the character of myth. The native Islanders are permanently objectified as the savage ‘Other.’ Treating these documents not as simple evidence but as related in a semiotic system allows one to ask questions about the informing principles of historical and ethnographical studies of the Andamanese. We must then ask if shifts in these principles can be related to changes in the relations between the ethnographer or photographer and their subjects, between the colonizer who represents civilization and the quest for knowledge and the savage tribal. History and anthropology both seek to explain the actions of people rooted in one time and place to people in a different time and place. Both invest much in the facticity of documents, in which, traditionally, photography has played an important role. Johannes Fabian (1983) has looked critically at the way ethnographic knowledge is based on empirical observation and organized as tables and displays which suggest that the totality of a culture can be compassed by the outsider’s gaze, a form of appropriation where subject is absent and replaced by the lens or the frame (See Ann Salmond 1982 and James Clifford 1988). Similarly, the rich history of photography in ethnography has been the focus of studies in the last few decades (Poignant 1980 and Banta & Hinsley 1986). While this chapter is not concerned specifically with the history of anthropological photography or the value of photography for anthropology, it is interested in photographs as one among other documents through which certain aspects of a culture become “visible” and certain aspects remain “invisible.”

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In his study of prison systems, Foucault (1979) shows that from the eighteenth century there emerged a new kind of disciplinary power. Whereas prior to this period, power was “what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested,” in the penal institutions of the eighteenth century, power came to be exercised through its invisibility, even as the “compulsory visibility” it imposed on prisoners worked to maintain them in their subjection” (187). If there is a logic of classification for the Andamanese and Non-Andamanese embedded in the history of the Andamans then there is also a logic of classification created by the mind utilizing the written and the visually depicted image of the Andamanese which characterizes the very process of representing the ‘native.’ These images of the Other are purveyed by one set of outsiders (the colonial administration) to those at a further remove (the society of the metropole), exemplifying the process whereby, from the end of eighteenth century, there emerged “a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe” (Edward Said 1980:7). Together, these documents betray the desire for what Levi-Strauss (1967) has termed a “science of the concrete,” for a desire for order, which is achieved by classification. What is interesting from our point of view is how this classification is destabilized by the flux of history. The figure of the Andamanese appearing in these various reports and studies oscillates between hostile and tractable, the Other it is possible to civilize and the Other who will have nothing to do with civilization, making them examples of entities that appear “to exist objectively [but] have only a fictional reality” (Said 1980:54). Said’s thesis is that objects, places, and times are assigned roles and only then attributed meanings, and this is especially true with regard to “foreigners, mutants, or ‘abnormal’ behavior” (1980:54). This analytical sifting would present the development of discourse, through separation and recombination of elements and relating them to the relations between the Islanders and the others. Representations of Andamanese culture demands decoding to understand the logic of the very arbitrariness in the representation of culture. The study of ‘typical’ natives by Coleman (1897) bears out Cohn’s thesis that in the period with which this chapter is concerned (following the suppression of the revolt of 1857) a theory of authority came to be “codified, based on ideas and assumptions about the proper ordering of groups in Indian society, and their relationship to their British rulers” (1983:165). The same desire for codification underlies what Christopher Pinney (1989) regards as the “normalization” effected by photography, which was increasingly used as a means of recording not just military topography but, increasingly, the distinctive traits of various Indians ‘types.’ We

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must however note that it was less easy to identify types among the native Andamanese, given the tenuous relations the settlers had established with them. This can be seen in the way in which depictions of the ‘Other’ reveals a specific pattern within historical consideration. I am interested in documentation as a conscious endeavor to create an illusion by way of linguistic and visual means; that is a semiotic system (Berger 1972).

DOCUMENTING THE ANDAMANESE: A SEMIOTIC SYSTEM The ‘History’ of the Islands as documented by outsiders is necessarily concerned with the changing relations between natives and settlers. It is worth restating what had been noted in the previous chapter in relation to the Ongee, that their decimation in numbers is the most terrible sign of the nature and extent of change experienced by the Andamanese. At the time of first contact, twelve dialect groups were identified from the four major island-clusters, only four of which survive today (Zide and Pandya 1987). In 1780, the tribal population was estimated at 6,500. By 1901, the year of the first formal census, it had come down to 1,895. In 1941, it was as low as 307. By the year 2000 it had increased somewhat, to 485. Some sense of the changes that led to this tragedy can be gleaned from written texts, but not from photographs. For the latter appropriate the Andamanese native into a myth, in the sense meant by Barthes (1977) of a medium adapting an object to a certain type of consumption and social usage. Against this myth is defined the settler whose population is steadily expanding, and the form of the myth is naturally influenced by and comes to affect the relations between tribal and settler and the documents subsequently produced by the latter. It is often imagined that the photographs illustrating the points a text makes serve to authenticate it and to fill out its observations. For the semiotician, this means that the photographs cannot be understood in isolation, as the linguistic reality of the text they accompany is reasserted by the visual reality of the photographs (1977:15–16). We can observe this every day in newspapers or advertisements, where images are capable both of providing evidence for what the text states directly (denotes) and of giving concrete form for what it alludes to indirectly (connotes). A relatively unusual feature of Andamanese documents is the use of the same photograph in disparate documents. Let us elaborate on the difference between denotation and connotation. A denotative function is performed by the graffiti left by the visitors to, say, a monument. The reader of the graffiti can see who has visited the historical site and may even be inspired to add her own message. But should the same vis-

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itor stand in front of the Pyramids and have a picture taken, the picture possesses connotative value. What the graffiti had to state verbally (“I was here!”) is here affirmed by a reality evoked visually. The snapshot, like tourist souvenirs and postcards, transforms denotation into connotation, allowing people at home to know that a friend had visited this monument—to visualize how someone known to them and from their own time and place came to stand at the site of a structure they know as belonging to another period. The taking of the photograph and the purchase of the souvenir comprise individual acts of documentation, which together with the time spent at the monument provide the document form and substance. Similarly, visitors to the Islands took photographs of themselves with the natives and collected samples of material culture ranging from implements to skeletons and amulets (often curios from local gift shops). From these ‘remote’ islands, reports, descriptive accounts and collections of objects were sent to European institutes. These sought to draw further conclusions from what the reports denoted and to compare the artifacts to those from other ‘primitive’ cultures, so that placed in these new contexts, the objects and photographs expanded in connotative suggestion. Connotative and denotative messages emanate from a single object, and may not be distinguished when first registered. But as the object is transformed into a document, they are likely to be distinguished and their mutual relations articulated (e.g. why the fact of stone technology implies primitiveness). It is the task of the semiotician to unpack the theories and assumptions according to which connotations are derived from denotative messages. In the studies and travelogues by Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Cipriani (1966), Harrer (1977) and Singh (1978) photographs are placed arbitrarily in the text. The document maker is communicating not just in the linguistic medium but also additionally in a visual realm, which need not be connected. But in the ethnography of E. H. Man (1932), the selective use of photographs enables linguistic and visual realities to complement one other as they do in postcards. The complementary relationship between linguistic and visual messages makes it untenable to separate text and context. In Man’s text, each photograph seeks to reinforce an ethnographic point. Photographs work to contextualize the text, while writing textualizes the socio-cultural context represented by the photographs. It was the Royal Anthropological Institute that formalized what should be presented in a document about the Andamanese, in terms of both linguistic and visual reality. The debates among its members as well as the various scholars associated with it have been outlined by Stocking (1971). Documents on the Andamanese were to be based on the principle of showing only what was expected to be seen or should be shown. This principle was ideological, in the

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sense used by Althusser (1970). Barthes (1981:9) analyzes the photograph as an object containing three practices or intentions—what the photographer does, what the subject undergoes and what the subsequent viewer of the photographs looks at. But we also know that under colonialism there was much else that was done by the producers of the photographs and undergone by their subjects that, was never shown in photographs. Photographs thereby perpetuated an artificial schism between linguistic and visual realities (Portman 1896a). They do not necessarily convey, “what is no longer” (implying an awareness of the past in the present) but only “what has been” (suggesting a static reality). The discrepancy between linguistic and visual realities reduced photography to an evidentiary role. Photographs validated the ethnographer’s and photographer’s assertions by proving they actually “were there.” It was as if photographs possessed an irrefutable quality even if their producers knew nothing about the subjects of photography. And this also meant that individual visitors merged into a generalized group of outsiders, all of whom directed the same gaze on the Andamanese subject, defined him in the same way. The majority of documents (Man 1932, Harrer 1977, Cipriani 1966, Moyne 1936 and Singh 1978) include a photograph of the ethnographer, explorer or administrator standing with the native Islanders. The kind of composition that may be found in photographs of other “exotic” cultures, it serves to denote the presence of the document-maker on the Islands. The inclusion of such pictures encourages us to analyze a document in terms of its configuration of signifiers, rather than remain content with assessing its contribution to the discourse of social science. Two continuities in the style of composition are the emphasis on the difference in height and the use of gestures of physical contact to suggest a friendly relationship between the outsider and the native Islanders. This holds for occasional visitors like government officials and politicians from the mainland, though tourists generally herd together the ‘natives’ without including themselves in the picture. In 1983–84, I watched the Minister for Agriculture insist on dancing with the Ongee and on this being photographed by the media. For his personal record, he requested I use his own camera to photograph him. I myself, in the last months of my own fieldwork, took every opportunity to place the camera on a stand with a timer to get photographs of myself with the Ongee. Bourdieu (1990:36) would regard this tendency as an ideogram or an allegory as a sociological outcome of “intensification” of photographic practice closely linked to holidays and tourism. Holiday photographs generally remain photographs of the family on holiday. Everything becomes a source of astonishment (Bourdieu1990:35) occurring through “photographic practice” where backdrops are valued as a record of subject’s

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position in a particular actual space, usually in encounters with places of high symbolic yield. Photographs are not transparent windows onto reality, but a means of saying something about their subjects. Colonial photographs fix the Andamanese in the attitude of the hostile savage without either recording cases of British violence towards the Andamanese, or reflecting the situation the prevailed within twenty years of British occupation, when some of the Andamanese had been enticed or coerced into serving as orderlies. Thus these photographs exclude whole areas of history, but this also means that the photographs play a role in those histories. For the figure of primitive savage that appears in these photographs was what defined colonial policy towards the “natives” and inspired the visits of scholars of anthropology, ethnology, and linguistics. It is therefore unproductive from our point of view to be content with pointing out the discrepancy between image and history, for images arise as the manifestations of historical power equations that they are capable of reinforcing or indeed further complicating. The Islands first attracted the attention of geologists, botanists and zoologists. Then as the Andamanese came to be the subject of anthropological studies, even the photographs taken by those studying Earth and Life Sciences

Few photographs exist that embody standard ways to show the physical features of the Andaman Islanders. With the establishment of the colonizers on the island the signification of the Andaman Islanders changed by the introduction of backdrops as well as the means to measure the islanders.

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E.H. Man with the Andamanese. Photograph dated 1879. Note the measuring scale and the inclusion of a non-native as an implicit reference point. Radcliffe-Brown also used this plain backdrop in 1908–09 (1922: Plate I–X, XIV, and XV). The original caption (Man 1932) claims that the picture is of five Andamanese men who had collaborated with Man in writing a letter to British authorities. But the strongest impression conveyed by the picture is of Man (looking away from the camera and the others) as a collector of the “natives” demonstrating “scientific” truths about differences in height. It is hard to imagine the five natives involved in the joint ‘translation’ project of drafting a letter with Man.

From E.H. Man (1923 and 1883). Note the presence of the scale and the absence of an European body. However the scale along with the collected specimens of material culture become ways to objectify the Andamanese culture.

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showed an interest in the Islanders as a distinct Negrito population rather than as a “generic savage” (Stocking 1971). For photographs, the Andamanese were made to stand against a measuring pole placed against a standard backdrop of white cloth. A single view and measurement were not thought sufficient. Different age groups and both sexes were made to adopt various poses for variations in body measurement to be readily apparent. From 1850 to the late 1860s, scholars were concerned to identify the distinct physiological and cultural traits of the Islanders. Studies focused on their distinctive customs (Bellor 1857), their manufacture of flint tools (Haughton 1863) and the distinct shape of their skulls and dental structure (Busk 1866, Owen 1867). By the 1870s, interest in the Andamanese extended to linguistic studies (Clark 1874, 1875). By 1875, the Andamanese were acknowledged as a distinct physiological category, and therefore as subjects for independent study in physical anthropology (Davis 1875, Flower 1880, 1881, 1885 and Duckworth 1902). The development of this interest (Duncan 1897) encouraged other ethnographic projects on the Andamanese (Man 1883). There was also debate over the nature of Andamanese religion (Schmidt 1910, Lang 1909, 1910, Muller 1892, Radcliffe-Brown 1909, 1910, and Leach 1971). Over time, these case studies began to situate themselves in relation to larger enquiries, such as the wider field of linguistics (Temple 1899), and simultaneously grew better equipped to discern local variations in terms of custom and dialect, as is evident from the interest in the multiple forms of one myth in the work of Man (1882) and Radcliffe-Brown (1922). Members of the administration often acted as amateur ethnographers. Attempts to acquire Andamanese language were inspired, among other things, by the wish to give commands that would be understood (Portman 1887) and to teach them about the Christian God (Man and Temple 1878). The documentation of the culture of the Islands assumed urgency as epidemics threatened to wipe it out altogether. And the penal settlement demanded and also provided the enabling conditions for other kinds of investigation, as the prison is a case of a “total institution,” one where “a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (Goffman 1961:xiii). The prison made possible studies of the mental health (Woolley 1912a) and sexuality (Woolley 1912b) of both natives and the convicts from the mainland. These studies were obviously prompted by the concerns of the colonial settlers, such as encouraging those from the mainland to intermarry with the tribals, and their conclusions must be assessed in the light of the power equations between the investigators and their objects of study (Foucault 1980). So we bring this section to a close with the reiteration that the figure of the native Islander as it appears in these documents cannot be understood in

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isolation, but in terms of the relations between the producers of the documents and their subjects and in terms of the larger semiotic system in which all documents on Andamanese culture participate. Photographs appear to be what Peirce (1932) defines as indexical signs—where the signifier is connected physically or causally to the signified—as they are produced by the effect of light on photographic emulsion. But semioticians remind us that photographers mediate what lies before them for the viewer, through the activities of selection, composition and processing. Photographic signs are then better seen as iconic, where the signifier resembles or imitates the signified. When photographs are appropriated by another ideological agenda— say, the diversity of Indian culture—they verge on the symbolic, where the relationship between signifier and signified is purely conventional (e.g. national flags).

PHOTOGRAPHIC EVENTS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC STRUCTURES OF ANDAMANESE HISTORY It was mentioned in the Introduction that the reports of Achanese slave traders, Malay pirates and Burmese collectors of ambergris conveyed to outsiders a strong impression of the ferocity of the Andamanese (Tarling 1960 and Mathur 1985). So while occupation of the Islands was strategically important to British military interests, colonial settlers were never assured of achieving the kind of dominion over the Andamanese that would enable them to exploit the resources of the Islands freely and secure the help of the inhabitants in running the administration. When the Governor-General of India, Lord Cornwallis, ordered the first survey of the Islands in 1788, his instructions to Lt. Archibald Blair laid stress on avoiding confrontations with the natives (Portman 1899:116–120, Tarling 1960, and Mathur 1968, 1985). He directed Blair to avoid landing except if absolutely necessary, to use persuasive methods, offer gifts, and in general to attempt all conciliatory measures necessary to avoid violent encounters. Cornwallis’s noble intentions towards (in the British view) the less noble savages included getting some of them to come aboard the ships under Blair’s command, so that the British might through “easy intercourse acquire knowledge of their manners, customs and language” (Portman 1899). By the summer of 1789, Blair reported that the survey of the Islands was complete but relations with the Andamanese remained uncertain. They were obviously attracted to the small knives, mirrors, and glass beads offered by the Blair’s team, but refused to take them directly from their hands. There had also been violent encounters, in one of which seventeen crewmembers were

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killed and thirty others injured. Such incidents notwithstanding, on the basis of Blair’s report it was decided in 1790 to set up a port on the Islands.1 Blair asked for canons to be sent from Tenassarim to fortify Port Cornwallis.2 These faced the four directions and were fired every alternate day with a view to keeping attacks from Andamanese archers at bay, and though explorations of the surrounding area were initiated, there persisted considerable fear of the inhabitants of the forest. A curious economy was established where settlers gave the Andamanese gifts of metal, which they used to make arrowheads, some of which were then used in attacks on the settlers, to be countered by firepower. These early settlers reported the natives of the Islands to be not just hostile but ugly and “brutish,” which leads to amusing contrasts with subsequent accounts. R. H. Colebrook, who accompanied Blair in the 1790s, wrote: Ugly Andaman Islanders are people who would not think twice about attacking outsiders even after receiving presents. Their mode of life is degrading to human nature and like brutes their whole time is spent in search of food. (Annual Report of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1796.)

Many decades later, as Frederick J. Mouat was to note in his journal, “Andaman Islanders are most elegant perfectly formed bodies at par with any European people and exhibit smallest fear of us” (Mouat 1863). As noted in the Introduction, Mouat was visiting the Islands as Head of the Andaman Committee, that is, as representative of a colonial power vastly more formalized than it had been in the 1790s. And one of the means of securing imperial defenses was the establishment of a penal settlement on the Islands, on which work was begun in 1858 (Barker 1942, Majumdar 1975). E. H. Man was appointed executive engineer and superintendent of convicts. The first shipload of 733 convicts arrived at Port Blair in 1859. Within ten months, 87 of them were hanged for trying to escape, but of those who did manage to get out of the ten-mile square enclosure into the forest, 240 were found killed by the arrows of the natives within just the first year, while 70 others could never be traced.3 Supervised by 15 British officials and 150 guards, the convicts were made to clear 50 square miles of forest to set up a residential area, later named Aberdeen. The task was arduous not just because of the dense tropical vegetation, but because fear discouraged them from getting thatching material from the forest or catching fish at the coast. Poor diet and exposure meant that many died in the tropical rains. Though it viewed the convicts as little more than free labor, the administration did eventually decide to import expensive bamboo, wood and thatching material. They also brought in coolies from Rangoon to work on the Islands. In their red uniforms the convicts provided

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tempting targets for the tribal. The rods and shackles all convicts wore on their legs were made of iron, which was a rare prize for the Andamanese, as it was the best material for arrow-points. Before the arrival of the British the chief source of iron had been shipwrecks and the metal given them by Burmese and Malay visitors. As part of an endeavor to “pacify” and “civilize” the Andamanese, the British captured some of them and sent them to Calcutta by steamboat. From 1858 to 1863, groups of natives were transported in this fashion twice a year. Newspapers, journals and administrative reports were full of accounts of the Andamanese visitors. For both the Andamanese the people of Calcutta it must have been an overwhelming experience. At first, the Andamanese were housed at the Alipore Zoological Gardens. Indians visiting the zoo would offer them token gifts of money, and viewed them as descendants of Hanuman, the monkey hero appearing in the ancient epic Ramayana and whom later texts describe as a deity. The British were not happy about this assimilation of the Andamanese into the figure of the servant of a legendary warrior prince, suspecting as they did that such re-visions of myth might be appropriated for political ends. To prevent the belief spreading, the Andamanese were moved to the Spencer Hotel, where the British could monitor their visitors. They were still being treated as “specimens”—when a woman and her child died of pneumonia in 1862, their bodies were preserved in large glass jars and stored in the basement of the Calcutta Museum. One of the ideas behind bringing the Andamanese to Calcutta was to show them the power of the administration to improve their lives. The Viceroy arranged for special tours of rail-yards, cantonments and pig farms. It was in 1863, at the pig farms at Barrackpore, that the authorities first learned from the Andamanese that there were wild pigs on the Islands and that the Andamanese shifted camp each season to hunt these, as there were appropriate times and places for hunting pig, distinct from those for hunting turtle and dugong. In 1865, to discourage this practice of translocation, the British imported dogs from the mainland and from Burma to Port Blair. Such decisions show that the authorities were increasingly desirous of controlling the Islander. A body called the Jungle Police was recruited from the groups that had been “pacified,” whose members were to track down escaped convicts for a wage of 4 or 5 rupees. The Andamanese would spend their earnings on opium purchased from the Burmese coolies who had settled north of Aberdeen. In the meantime, between 1863 and 1866, the administration had set up institutes called Andaman Homes, where they spent large sums on distributing rum, tobacco and grain. Soliciting more money for these Homes, the local administration reported to the government that the tribals had not changed, remaining hostile and impossible to civilize. Projecting such an im-

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age justified their demand for higher salaries, on the grounds of the hardships they were undergoing. However, to forestall the charge that the Homes had made natives dependent on the British, these reports also exaggerated the involvement of natives in the Jungle Police. This self-serving representation of the tribal as uncivilized but as amenable to work in the service of colonial power was unsettled by the incident of May 14, 1859. Dudhnath Tewari, a convict condemned for mutiny, had escaped from the prison and spent a year with the tribals in the forest. In May 1859, he returned to Port Blair and warned the administration that the tribals were organizing a full-scale attack on the following full moon. The damage caused by the Battle of Aberdeen, as the “attack” was subsequently dubbed, would have been greater but for Tewari’s warning. The British succeeded in ferreting out and killing 400 tribals hiding around Port Blair. Dudhnath Tewari’s loyalty to the British was duly commended. An account of his life and exploits appeared in the London Chamber’s Journal of March 1860. There had been no first-hand account of the life of the Andamanese before that provided by Tewari. His proto-ethnographic report pointed out the inaccuracy of certain assumptions of the British with regard to Andamanese customs of marriage and adoption. Tewari had married two women living in different locations, who turned out to be mother and daughter, the latter living with her adopted parents. Once both camps knew this, his position was precarious and he had no option but to return to the prison. It had been in the hope of gaining a pardon that he told them of the impending attack and admitted to his own minor role in organizing it. Tewari was perhaps the first to discover that there were numerous dialect groups on the Islands, only some of who had visited the Andaman Home at Port Blair, which led to distinctions of status and power that made for disputes. The British administration had now to work out whether to win the trust and favor of the convicts or the natives. They also had to see how to keep the two groups separate. The administration opted for setting up five more Homes around Port Blair. In these, there would be more money spent on the natives, who would be encouraged to undertake the manufacture of ropes, cane work and baskets as “cottage industries.” Techniques of horticulture and agriculture would also be introduced. In 1868, J. N. Homfry and Major Ford recommended that convicts and tribals be encouraged to intermarry. They felt that it was preferable to have tribal women breeding from natives of the mainland rather than from the savage males of their own race.4 Some convicts had already begun to offer the tribals payment for women to marry. Other convicts, on account of their “good behavior,” were allowed to have brides brought in from mainland India. It was perhaps these interactions that led to the epidemics of measles,

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ophthalmia and syphilis and the steady rise in mortality rates in the period from 1862 to 1872. The epidemics and the spread of sexual disease justified the British paranoia about natives and savages being unhygienic and lacking notions of sanitation. In 1870, experts from Calcutta’s Institute for Tropical Disease were brought to Port Blair, the town’s layout was restructured, and a sanatorium and small hospital were built. Documents on the Islands are marked by fear and ignorance of the natives. They also betray anxieties of empire, the need to impress a sense of their power on the native and also to defend their position in Port Blair. Aimed at readers in India and England, they sought to justify the British presence on the Islands in political and economic terms. In 1858, C. Beadon became Secretary to the Government of India. He had just finished his term of association with Lord Gray, famous for the commentary The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration (1858). Beadon was captivated by the idea of “informal empire” over “uncivilized” people (Morell 1930, Mellor 1951, Koebnor & Schmidt 1964, Farwell 1972, Huttenback 1976, and McIntyre 1967). His concern was clearly not the moral authority of the empire but its defense, particularly in the Islands. Beadon believed that the empire could only be defended if the native were understood. Understanding could be attained through the reports of the administration. This was why Beadon proposed photographing the natives. His idea was that the administration would eventually transform the natives into “civilized beings,” but it was necessary to document what the natives had been and what they would undergo. In a letter to Mouat in 1858, he gave instructions to prepare 50 photographs with negative plates and to collect small and large implements and weapons used in “wars with the savage” (Portman 1899:215). Beadon’s notion of what colonial authorities could do for the savage became a trope in subsequent documents. Readers came to expect documents that recorded acts of native hostility and an idealized view of the actions of the administration working to transform the relations between officials, convicts and natives. In this period, material culture was being collected and sent to Calcutta and England, ranging from canoes to forms of arrows, botanical and zoological specimens.5 Though material culture could be gathered without expense to the administration, photographs were not taken as there were no funds budgeted for them. On the other side, in England, scholars like Max Müller, Colonel Pitt-Rivers and E. B. Tylor were developing the foundations for a tradition of anthropology at Oxford and to make it possible to store the collections to be housed there (Ward 1965, Stocking 1985). The first photographs of the Andamanese appeared in 1875 in the Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute. The photographs were taken by a zoological collector named Dobson and accompanied by a brief account. Prior

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Chief of Rutland Island, Maia Bala, and his wife photographed by Dobson in 1870–1871. Originally printed in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (England) Vol. IV, 1875. The original print, in the archives of the Museum of Mankind in London, is not scratched (Poignant 1980: 9). However the printed version was scratched to defer to prevalent moral standards. When shown the picture, the Ongee were amazed and pointed out to me that they found it funny that Outsiders always make them adopt this pose for photographs. This reminds us that a specifically European sensibility and aesthetic informs Dobson’s posing of the man and woman. The Andamanese themselves would find it most undignified to be seen sitting by themselves before a house, an arm thrown over their partner’s shoulder.

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to Dobson’s publication most papers published on the Andamans were written by administrators and visitors to the Islands.6 Though these described local aboriginal culture in great detail, there were no accompanying photographs as no one had ventured beyond the Andaman Homes at Port Blair and the natives there certainly did not resemble the “savages,” who had been described so vividly to justify demands for more funds from England (Letter No.1908, February 1, 1872, Gen. Stewart to Homfrey). In 1874, the first paper on Andamanese tribal culture untouched by political or administrative concerns was published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Submitted by Hyde Clark, the paper dealt with the Andamanese language, and showed that the different dialects belonged to a distinct linguistic family. Interest in this linguistic family and its possible connections with other languages developed further after a study of the marine wealth of the Islands by Dr. Francis Day’s study of marine life in the Andamans (Day 1879). After completing a study of fish in Bengal, Day was invited by E. H. Man to study fish in the Andamans. Day traveled with some trustworthy tribal guides collect samples of fish and visited many areas previously unexplored (Day 1870). The natives helped him both to collect fish and compile the names of each in different dialects. He found that the same species of fish had different names in each dialect, yet natives from different areas understood one another. This corroborated Dudhnath Tewari’s report. Day’s report and notes sparked E. H. Man’s interest in the languages and cultures of the Andamans, particularly the belief system that tabooed the eating of certain species of fish at fixed times of the year. The administration’s visions of converting the hunters and gatherers into docile agriculturalists and the new interest in the Andamans in the English anthropological circle created a conducive environment for E. H. Man’s project of collecting material culture. The collection was put together from 1875 to 1879, and presented to the Royal Anthropological Institute, where Man was also invited by Pitt-Rivers to speak about it in 1879 (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute Vol.11, 1882). In his capacity as trustee of the Institute and its museum,7 Sir A. Woolastan-Franks provided Man money and equipment to photograph the Islanders. Man returned to the Andamans with dry plate equipment and a copy of the Institute’s edition of Notes and Queries. This was the very first edition of Notes and Queries (1874), then published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Tylor, Müller, Darwin, Rivers and other scholars had articulated the dominant concern of the emerging discipline: how traveling scholars should deal with small, isolated, remote and therefore exotic communities. The book stressed that some tribes or people were dying out in the inevitable enactment of the law of survival of the fittest. This view may not

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have been shared by all (Stocking 1971, Urry 1972), but there was a general view that there was an urgent need to have the camera lens “capture” the Andamanese. By now, interest in Andamanese culture had overtaken fear of violence from them, and went beyond looking at the natives as objects of curiosity (or as makers of curious objects). Scholars like A. Thomson (1882) had begun to use objects in collections, like bone necklaces, to draw conclusions about tribal society.8 On his return to the Islands, E. H. Man was himself afflicted by ophthalmia and lost fifty percent of his eyesight. He had to recruit M.V. Portman to photograph the Islanders. The photographs were meant to accompany Man’s text according to an outline provided by Notes and Queries, in other words, the field study would follow guidelines prepared externally (Man 1883:Vols. VI-VII). This anthropological interest in the Andamanese, besides the fact that government documents felt the need to couch their demands in the rhetoric of civilizing the “natives,” marks a shift from the purely instrumentalist relations

Photograph produced from the Man-Portman project. Here, instead of a blank background with just a scale to indicate the coordinates of height, we seem to be viewing a diorama-like display of Andamanese life, complete with an inventory of their equipment. We should note, however, that people are shown performing quite unrelated activities in the same space, and there are other details that mislead. The Andamanese always refrain from working close to a person sleeping, and the mode of greeting shown is never enacted beneath a thatched hut. (From Man: 1932)

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hitherto prevalent between tribal and settler. The Andamanese were no longer addressed only in the contexts of giving gifts or tracking convicts, where they occupied passive or subordinate roles. No longer were they given names like Sambo, Jumbo, Kiddy, Topsy or Dick, instead, individual tribal names are found on the official payroll (Man 1883:Appendix N). We even hear of the Andamanese writing to officials with the help of the local administration (Man 1923). The administration also introduced titles like bada raja (big king) and chhota raja (little king). The Man-Portman project could not always adhere to the guidelines on photography in Notes and Queries. Afterwards, in an article for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Portman (1896a) set out the lessons he had learned “in the field.” He felt that in the process of working with the Andamanese to prepare photographs it was important to know the different dialects. And there were other things that would stand the anthropologist in good stead: Patience . . . selecting a good sitter . . . never lose temper and show the savage that you think he is stupid or on the other hand allow him to think that by playing the fool he can annoy you and put off your work, or that to stop him you will be willing to bribe him to silence . . . savages will be found to answer more freely and photograph better when the investigator and photographer places himself on the same level as the level of the savages being photographed. (76–77).

Portman was concerned that the peculiarities of the Andamanese context made necessary a departure from the standards of the Royal Institute of Anthropology. According to the Institute, photographs should show a physical type accompanied by anthropometric apparatus. There were precise directions for the correct positioning of the sitter in relation to the photographer, who was always in a standing position. A front view and profile were required and it was recommended that both views appear side by side on one plate, by using a sliding partition fitted in the back of the camera. Photographs of the Andamanese do not conform to this formula. This may have been because of the mutual fears of photographer and his subject. This is apparent in Dobson’s photographs, where the Andamanese herded together before the cameras do not appear in the least interested in being photographed. On the other hand, in the history of representations of the Islands, the ManPortman photographs offer a unique visual overview, because of their association with the Royal Anthropological Institute and because of the kind of relationship they established with the natives. Figure 1 shows that E. H. Man was actually used as a reference point for conveying an idea of the height of the Andamanese. Portman’s photographic methods clarify aspects of the ethnographic text. Man’s description of the communal hut would remain ob-

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Andamanese carrying the box containing Portman’s camera. The only known photograph that shows Portman’s equipment. We do not know the make or model of the camera, only that it was as bulky as it was heavy. (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association)

scure if not accompanied by the panoramic photograph showing the roofs overlapping to convey the impression of one large circular roof (Pandya 1993). Portman adapted his methods in order to provide the anthropological circle what it wanted to see but was not always easy for him to show, given his position vis-à-vis the Islanders. Portman’s ideas about the Andamanese he photographed have a different tenor from those of other reports. Taking a stand against prevailing images of the Andamanese, he says: Often one hears the English schoolboys described as savage and after sixteen years of experience of Andamanese, I find that in many ways they closely resemble the average lower class English country schoolboy. (Portman 1896b: 362–371).

It was in these years that study of the different dialects was attracting attention, and administrators were becoming ethnographers and photographers. With help from Francis Day, Man and Portman prepared a map of language

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South Andamanese in front of the communal hut. In contrast, these photographs taken by E.H. Man in 1886, presents to the preceding compositions that are more like a staged diorama of a museum, devoid of a natural context and scale conveyed by landscape. (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association)

distribution. By 1890, areas beyond Port Blair and South Andaman had been explored, and for the first time photographs were taken of the general landscape of the Islands. The Andamanese were now seen in relation to a natural environment gradually opening up before Man and Portman as the Andamanese helped them survey uncharted areas (Portman 1899). Thus, in the beginning, the Institute provided a blueprint for the ethnography, and the use of blank backdrops made it easier for the representations of the Andamanese to be fitted into the context created by European scholarship. If such backdrops removed all sense of the real context of the Islanders, one gets a sense that an increased awareness of this context impinged on the awareness Man and Portman as the area covered by them expanded and their photographs began to a limited degree to include details of landscape and environment besides the natives themselves. And late photographs by Portman bear captions stating if they were taken in one of the five Andaman Homes, indicating for the first time the area associated with the people photographed. This is a consequence of a better understanding of language and cultural diversity. Yet it is not

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the case that the first kind of composition is abandoned entirely, for in the ethnography of Radcliffe-Brown, conducted a couple of decade later, both kinds of photograph are used—those with blank backgrounds that leave the “natives’” context to be reconstructed in Europe and those showing the Andamanese in their own context (1922:Plates VI, VII, and VIII). The album of photographs submitted to the Institute sought to show that “primitiveness” could still be found in its pure state, even if the administration had made some headway in understanding the Islanders.9 This message was reinforced by photographs of natives of different regions who visited the Homes around Port Blair sitting on stools and benches with others standing behind in a row. The background generally represents civilization—gardens or glimpses of structures built by the British. Man’s images that show inhabitants of the different regions and distinctions of groups conveyed by the variation of body adornment. The distinct clusters of different groups staged within Andaman Home may have emerged out of Man’s early work on Andamanese language and variation of various dialects spoken (Man 1923, Man and Temple 1878). For instance the women from Southern Andamans (Jungeels of Rutland and Jarawas) wore belts around waist. In contrast Ongee women have traditionally only adorned a fibrous apron around the waist. Similarly Jarawa men’s hairstyle is not trimmed

The distinctive large ‘S’-shaped bows indicate the group to be Great Andamanese visiting the Administrative Centre from Northern Andamans. (Source: E.H. Man 1923).

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From E.H. Man 1923. Probably photographed in the Andaman Home but the context of the photograph is edited out to signify only the distinctive subjects of the colonial administration.

and cut in the middle, as among the Northern Island’s Great Andamanese. It is also possible that while residing at the Andaman Home various body adornments were copied between various distinct regional groups of Andaman Islanders. This is evident in the photographs where individuals with large “S” shaped bows and those with relatively smaller are seen in the same photograph. These photographs were an attempt to document the different subgroups of a ‘dying population.’ The use of white clay paint and bone ornaments, by many individuals in the group photographs, depicts the widely experienced state of mourning by visitors of Andaman Home. We also see a shift from photographing the Andamanese against a blank backdrop, to placing them in a natural environment, and later they are shown in a more ‘domesticated’ environment that served to play up the role of the administration. One thread of continuity linking these different styles of composition was the practice of showing the natives holding items of material culture, like baskets or bows and arrows. The Andamanese visiting the Homes were photographed as group and it was staged presenting a strong contrast. Furthermore earlier photographs established the very presence of the colonizers and the position they had in relation to the Andaman Islander’s (Edwards: 1992, Edwards and Hart: 2004, Ryan: 1997). In the available pho-

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tographic records we have very little on the natural environment and context of the Andaman Islanders. Mainly because the colonizers presence on the island was limited to Port Blair and beyond that the tribal population was hostile and resistant to the outsiders. Fear of the Andamanese in the forest restrained the colonial exploration and restricted the rate of colonial expansion and control of the Andamanese forests. As a result unlike other colonies natural context being photographed in detail and depicted did not happen significantly in the case of Andaman Islands (See Ryan 1997). E.H. Man commissioned few photographs that depict the interior landscape and two of them appear in his Dictionary of South Andamanese Language (1923). It is in Radcliffe-Brown’s account (1922: Plate VI, VII, and VIII) that we find photographs of the tribal context and idea of Andamanese residential settlements or campsites. This is mainly because Radcliffe-Brown conducted his work on the island’s from 1908 to 1910, a period in which the hostility had not declined but groups like Great Andamanese were in close and cooperative relation with colonial administration particularly through the Andaman Homes. In fact demographically a far smaller number of surviving Northern tribal groups had become identified as Great Andamanese who helped the administration to control the tribals of the middle and South Andamans. Groups of middle and South Andamans who had lesser degree of contact with the outsiders’ on the island after colonization also did not exhibit the intense decline in population due to disease spread by the presence of outsiders. Nonetheless photographs from Andamans were edited and reconstructed to signify the colonial administration that wanted to convey the role it was playing in a context like the Andaman Homes where the relatively pacified tribals visited regularly and received attention and assistance from the authorities. The negative impact on the tribal population was not prominently reported in the written accounts, but the visual record was created to convey the cultural and social aspects much inspired by Notes and Queries of Royal Anthropological Institute (Edwards 1992:108–121, Man 1932:x, 1882:69). For example in a photograph by E.H. Man (RAI GN12) we see the Great Andamanese using the “sounding board” used while dancing. Traditionally as one-person hits the piece of tree trunk, the people around rise and dance to this beat. Note the colonial edifice in the background. The person to the right, in European clothes is a Nicobarese present at the Andaman Home (Edward 1992: 112). The Photo of the dancing Andamanese is a material embodiment of what E.H. Man, a significant and sensitive administrator as well as an ethnographer saw around him (Man 1932). But on the issue of ethnographically representing the aspect of music, Man in his publication on the dictionary of Andamanese language (1923) shows the Great Andamanese dancing and using

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Great Andamanese dancing to the rhythm provided by the sounding board produced in E.H. Man (1923).

the sounding board, devoid of any evidence of what the Andaman Home was as is evident in the photograph. In 1887, using what he had learned on his excursions, Portman published a manual of the Andamanese language. It contained commands that colonial authorities could use for the “native,” and was organized under categories like hunting, camping, cleaning. One such category was “photography,” listing the commands with which the photographer could tell his subjects to pose or to keep still. There were similar projects to compile dictionaries (Man 1923, Portman 1898, Temple 1899, 1908) to communicate with the natives and to facilitate governance. The Lord’s Prayer was also translated into the Northern Andamanese dialect (Man and Temple 1877) so that residents of the Homes could pray with the chaplain of Port Blair, Reverend Corbyn, who had been brought to the Islands in 1863 to start a tribal education program (Portman 1899:378–459 and Malhotra 1986:55–124, Pandya 2005 b). As part of such efforts to learn about and communicate with the Andamanese with a view to “civilizing” them, E.H. Man instructed residents of the Homes to wear clothes. Considerable sums were spent on cloth and in 1891 the chaplain’s wife contributed her own sartorial skills to help cover the naked bodies of the savages. An idea of how the object of these attentions was perceived is conveyed by the remarks of the chaplain in 1892: “Andamanese Islanders are like British schoolboys who love freedom but hate discipline, which we have in-

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stilled up to a degree through prayers” (Annual Report of Andamans).10 So by the last decade of the nineteenth century an impression of the childlike native who could be taught discipline was at least as strong as that of the hostile savage. It remains a puzzle how little the photographs convey of how these changing relations between colonial authorities and their subjects affected the everyday texture of Andamanese life. By contrast, in mainland India, the early photographs of McCosh (McKenzie 1987:110) and Coleman (1897) do convey an idea of the changing historical and commercial context in which the colonial photographer was photographing the native. It is possible that some photographers were concerned to emphasize the hardships faced by the administrators on the Islands in order to press for an increase in their salaries, and would therefore avoid capturing on camera signs of “improvement” (Ball 1897). But the more fearful aspects of change must have been constantly visible, given that the survey of the population in 1901 showed that in the span of just a century the population had declined by nearly forty-seven percent.

NOTES 1. For details see Madras Courier December 22, 1790 and S. Karr in Calcutta Gazette (Vol. II: 283; 13 Jan 1791). 2. Letter from Blair to Governor General’s Council at Bombay dated May 31, 1793. 3. Letter No.1079, 12 July 1859, from J.P.Walker to C. Beadon, Secretary to the Government of India. 4. Report on Progress of Penal Settlement to Government of India, 1868. 5. English society was self-conscious about its imperial identity and the culture of entertainment had grown (Breckenridge 1989). Development in photography “enormously expanded the scope of the commodity trade by allowing unlimited quantities of mechanically reproduced figures, landscapes . . . [and] events to be available on the market” (Benjamin 1978: 151). The “Aura of Amusement” and special “sites of the commodity fetish” (ibid) institutionalized traditions of documentation, accumulation, display and admiration of objects whose classic manifestation was the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 (Haltern 1971, Allwood 1977). 6. Publications predating Dobson’s 1875 paper contain only line drawings of the natives made by artists who had been hired by the publishers and had never set foot on the Islands (Alexander 1826, Haughton 1861, Mouat 1863). None of these early publications appeared in journals devoted to anthropology or ethnology. 7. He had studied with Max Müller and was aware of the Andaman’s significance. 8. Clifton (1911: 87) notes that in 1839, apart from the magnificent arrangements to manage prisoners and the Andamanese through schools, churches and medical facilities, there was a small “semi-museum and semi-shop” on Ross Island where one

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could purchase “Andamanese ancestral skulls . . .disinterred through affection, that they might be worn as a charm. Bows and arrows also were there, and crude ornaments of shells and berries.” The fact that a shop was selling skull ornaments with ritual significance and magical power (Radcliffe-Brown 1922:112–113) shows how the colonizers’ curiosity led to the commoditization of ritual objects, a tendency paralleled in India at large as argued by Breckenridge (1989). 9. I am aware of only one complete set of the 15 volumes prepared by Portman in the archives of the Museum of Mankind, London (Falconer 1984). 10. See Nandy (1988:11–18) for a discussion on the psychology of colonialism in which the colonizer sees the colonized as a child.

PART II

MATERIALITY

Dugong Creek coastal camp. 1983

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Dugong Creek forest camp.1983

Chapter Four

Things in Time: Carriers of Continuity and Change

“Aesthetics is the precursor of Historiography” Alfred Bäumler (1981:15)

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the recognition that anthropologists must interpret the art of other cultures on the basis of the culture’s own aesthetic categories rather than assess it according to western criteria (Fernandez 1971, Boone 1986, and O’Hanlon 1989) has led to a number of innovative studies in the anthropology of art and aesthetics.1 Certain matters continue to be debated, such as whether all cultures accord aesthetics the space it occupies in the modern west, removed from functional or theological concerns, and whether what warrants an object being labeled “art” are the ideas it embodies or the social relations in which it participates or that it facilitates (Danto 1988 and Gell 1998). The working assumption that the apprehension of aesthetic qualities derives from habits of cognition specific to each culture (Firth 1992) has stimulated inquiry into vocabulary that registers sensuous quality and into reflections on aesthetic experience within different languages and cultural traditions. The last two decades have also seen a growing interest in the circulation of art and the representations of culture in a globalized world (e.g. Marcus 1995). All these issues are of interest to the present chapter’s study of how the Ongee see objects and ritual ornaments as possessing the power to secure the possessor against attack, against the loss of forgetting and help him retain power through time. But things are not shored up against forces of change; they act as ballast,—change through time and context. The discussion of the Ongee hermeneutic is framed by opening remarks on the changes brought about by colonialism in the design of Ongee and Jarawa ornaments and concludes by 99

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looking at Andamanese material culture within the space of the museum. It is now accepted that aesthetic production may achieve a high degree of elaboration in societies without complex bureaucracies or economies, technological sophistication or institutionalized religion. It has also been argued that aesthetic vocabulary does not need presuppose a system of literacy (leave alone treatises on aesthetics) or even actual objects (Anderson 1990 and Coote and Shelton 1992). There persists nonetheless a tendency for modern western assumptions about the privileged sphere occupied by art to influence the perception of the products of non-western societies accepted as art objects. This concern to establish that an object transcends instrumental purposes has often meant ignoring its function within a social milieu. Similarly, the preoccupation with tracing aesthetic lineages and development has led to the neglect of the other histories that bear upon the meanings and uses of objects categorized as “art.” The overriding concern is whether the culture possesses emic categories (or distinctions intrinsic to these cultures) which correspond to “aesthetic experience,” the etic category brought by the western scholar—a preoccupation that has led to speculation even about the conceptions of the makers of artifacts recovered by archaeologists (Maquet 1979). Anthropologists have explored the sense of history registered in objects made by tribal societies (Munn 1973, 1991, Stocking 1985: 3–14) but have not always acknowledged their capacity to reflect upon history in the same way as production in industrial society has been shown to do, e.g. in studies of the relationship between history and things not viewed as art (Mukerji 1983, Appadurai 1986, Weiner and Schneider 1989). The translation of emic categories in terms of “aesthetic experience” provides the anthropologist limited purchase on the experience of the ‘native.’ The latter (etic) category usually confines itself to appreciating the fabrication of an object, ignoring how the aesthetic system anthropologists seek to penetrate is elaborated in relation to specific historical moments. All they observe in everyday life constitutes the cultural realm of tribes like the Ongee, so we must place ourselves in this realm to apprehend the meanings they ascribe to ornaments and body decoration and the history implicated in their traditions of manufacture. This chapter examines the contexts in which objects are made, bear meaning and are used to show that for the Ongee their value is bound up with the foundational principle of attraction and with the work of memory. This “ethno-aesthetic” framework is therefore derived from the symbolic frame of reference within which the Ongee make sense of their history. Body ornaments mark not just changes of status (Turner, T. 1994) but also moments of transition and the recognition of the historicity of a sequence of events. Arguing that Bourdieu (1968) and Panofsky (1962) both reduce the art object to a vehicle for extraneous social and symbolic messages, Gell (1992: 42–3)

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urges the need “to retain the capacity of the aesthetic approach to illuminate the specific objective characteristics of the art object as an object.” To this I would add that the object’s role within its cultural context is only understood as history, something that does not enter Gell’s own analysis of how the Trobriand garden “adumbrates the ideal in the real world” (ibid., 62). This is why Gell’s account of art as “the idealized form of production” (ibid.) may not be the most productive approach to understanding the art of the Andaman Islands, which, as this chapter shows, is often occasioned by the recognition of contingency. Most museum displays tend to convey a powerful impression of the changelessness of the culture of the hunters and gatherers of the Andamans. The content of many cabinets appears to be frozen in the same period as the report of first contact in The Illustrated London News of 1857 (mentioned in the Introduction), registering no sense that the intervening history might demand changes in content and display. Collections, whether in storage or on display, are made up largely of organic material from forest and sea, and the bones used to form body adornments or tools. It is true that the design of many of these is interpretable in terms of traditional categories, as an allusion to the character of social organization. The practice of tying together bones (of hunters or the hunted) with material gathered from forest and coast is meant to symbolize the fact that Andamanese social organization is based on the interdependence of the Ar-yoto (forest dwellers) and the Erem-taga (coastal dwellers).2 However, when we encounter a metal arrowhead tied to a cane arrow-shaft we are faced with a different story. The history registered in such objects eludes the analytical categories recovered from studies of ritual and belief, and provokes the viewer to inquire where and how the iron was acquired. If it had been foraged from shipwrecks or driftwood, assuming such accidents left it abundantly available, it remains unanswered how scrap metal had been fashioned into the sharp blades required for tools?3 The avoidance by museum displays of any reference to such shifts in technology, or in other words the historical change implicit in the very design and form of the material culture, can be seen as a persistence of the earlier anthropological tendency to present Andamanese culture as frozen in time. Even academic studies of material culture betray this tendency. Zarine Cooper (2002:21–25, 81–83) has sought to provide a chronological description of the use of glass flakes among the Islanders from the evidence of excavations of kitchen middens. The absence of an ethno-archaeological approach to history is puzzling—she has not considered it necessary to ask the Islanders themselves about raw materials and techniques for processing them. If only she had used her study of museum collections (ibid., 168–176) to frame questions for living Andamanese! Cooper treats history

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as predominantly the history of archaeological work on the Islands, rather than as the archaeology of ideas about material production (Foucault 1970: 367–373). Any study of material culture change must bear in mind that it was Government policy to distribute freely among the coastal population of the penal settlement iron along with bottles, tobacco, pipes and matches (Man 1882: 339). The policy succeeded in its primary objective of gaining the trust of the different groups of Islanders. By 1858, there was a marked decline in the practice of the Islanders of investigating what raw material might be ‘found’ on the island as they grew more dependent on the material ‘given’ by the colonial administration.4 We are aware of the Andamanese becoming willing if involuntary recipients of the very items they sought, which transformed their way of life at one level, but we have not properly assessed what they did with the things they were given. The sections in this chapter explore the ways in which history and aesthetics are constituted as part of a lived world with particular reference to the Ongee and the Jarawa. I seek to show that the aesthetic principle implicit in the manufacture of body ornaments constitutes not just forms of ‘material culture’ or ‘art objects’ to interest museum collections (Thomson 1882) but opens up questions for the anthropologist (Radcliffe-Brown 1922. 112–113). I look at the occasions that prompt the production of these ornaments such as marriage, death and accidents. Historical narratives or “native exegeses” of the past show how techniques of production link together events as well different realms in the Andamanese worldview. The term used to denote ornaments, eneyetokabe, suggests ‘things in process,’ which should be seen as attempts to synthesize experience through time. This process of synthesis belongs to what Bourdieu (1977: 18) terms the modus operandi, which provides the organizing principle of actions according to a precise conceptual logic, even though the agent is only aware of the system of objective relations “in profiles . . . successively, in the emergency situations of everyday life.” Let us first explore the historical and political conditions for the collection of material culture for western museums. By 1860, the hunters and gatherers of the Islands were watching the devastation of the world they had known. The world beyond the thick forests of the Islands had become the arena for the violent clashes of the colonial period. The possibility of exploiting the forests commercially together with the decline in the total negrito tribal population were the chief factors attracting the interest of administrators, policy makers and collectors of all kinds. It was only in 1883 that friendly contacts were initiated with the Ongee in Little Andaman Island. Groups of Jarawa were becoming more restless and displayed their hostility to the outsiders who encroached increasingly upon the islands of Middle Andaman. Somewhat more open to negotiation were groups like the Great Andamanese, who

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Andamanese woman with her dead husbands skull made into an ornament (from Radcliffe Brown 1922)

belonged mainly to the northern regions. They had been subjected to contact with the convicts, either as sexual partners or as agents of the colonial administration who helped track down convicts who tried to escape. Over a period, most of the Great Andamanese were included in the payroll of the administration and came to be regular visitors at, if not residents of, the Andaman Homes. These Homes soon became sites to observe the “hostile, timid and childlike” native (Ball 1897), who was both romanticized and analyzed according to ever-more refined classifications of regional and linguistic variations. The simplest level of classification identified the natives who were obedient subjects, depending on the protection and assistance of the administration as they fell prey to venereal disease contracted from the prisoners. Many of them regularly brought their problems to the Andaman Homes, where the authorities could not always deal with linguistic variations (Temple 1899, Zide and Pandya 1989). These natives were contrasted to the hostile Ongee and the Jarawa, said to chop off the limbs of outsiders and throw them into the sea after boiling the flesh down to the bone (Portman 1896 and Basu 1971). Meanwhile there were some tribal groups who stood outside all that the Andaman Home represented,

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and continued to put up resistance to the outsiders passing through their parts of the Islands. Many of those visiting the Andaman Home arrived wearing ornaments of plant, shell and bone. These ornaments and amulets soon attracted the outsider’s gaze as objects of curiosity. The image of the native women escaping the lust of the prisoners was rapidly altering (Wooley 1912). What dominated was the photeme-like image of the ‘naked dark women smeared in clay paint’ wearing her dead husband’s lower mandible. The fact of the incidence of fatal disease having peaked from 1875 to 1878 is the tragic explanation of the number of people seen wearing ornaments of human bone. The early photographic and administrative records found in museum collections suggest that the Islanders carried little other than bone ornaments to mark their transition into the new context outside the forest, the Home managed by the administration (a point to be elaborated on later in this chapter). Mrs.Talbot Clifton, who visited the island with her husband in 1907 to collect orchids, noted that apart from all the magnificent organization evident in the administration of the Andaman Homes to manage the prisoners and the Andamanese through institutions such as schools, church and medical facilities, a small “semi-museum and semi-shop” had also set up on Ross Island, where one could purchase “Andamanese ancestral skulls . . .disinterred through affection, that they might be worn as a charm. Bows and arrows were also there, and crude ornaments of shells and berries (1911:87).” It would appear from Clifton’s account that adornments had become ornaments and amulets, objects of curiosity that could be purchased and taken away from the Island. Meanwhile, administrator-turned-ethnologists and linguists and scholars from various backgrounds speculated about the categories they should create when organizing the museums’ growing collections from the Andamans (See Icke-Schwalbe 1986, 1991 Safford 1901). Scholarly papers dealing with physical attributes of the negrito population (Duckworth 1902) led to the interpretation of the bones collected in form of amulets and ornaments as material culture rather than as evidence of one more physical type (See Thomson 1882, Man 1882, Fox-Lane 1878). It was mainly within the compounds of the Andaman Home that, in 1908, Radcliffe-Brown started conducting his study of the Islanders. His observations concentrated on the ritual significance and magical power attributed to the use of clay paints for body painting and ornaments of bone, shell and woven plant fiber (Radcliffe-Brown 1964 [1922]: 476–485, 112–113), which he presented as “social valuables” for ethnographic analysis.5 The appearance of a shop selling ancestral skull ornaments is a measure of the curiosity of the colonizers.6 It is possible that the natives meant to sell the ornaments made of ancestral bone in order to buy metal, opium and biscuits at the Andaman Homes.7 But it remains puzzling that ornaments bearing ritual value were sold as things sought by ethnographic collectors. Why would the Islanders

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feel the need to produce something whose market value was obscure but was sold in this “semi-museum and semi-shop”? Besides, the large number of ornaments reported in old accounts is in marked contrast to recent times where the likelihood of seeing such ‘traditional designs’ has decidedly reduced. That this is an area to which scant attention has been paid is evident from the series of monographs on Andamanese tribes published by Anthropological Survey of India in 1990 (based on the format of Notes and Queries in Anthropology8), which have little to say concerning ornament production. This raises the question as to what ‘ritual and magical value’ the ornament actually possessed for the Islanders. As Radcliffe-Brown suggests, the “ornament is a means by which the society acts upon, modifies and regulates the sense of self in the individual” (1964:315). Why then have the Islanders forgotten or discontinued this tradition of making ornaments? The answer to this lies in the way the Islanders, and in particular the Ongee, think about “things”—what the manufacture of an object entails and what its exchange makes possible. This is particularly important given that among the Ongee today, who experience much greater contact with the outside world, one finds few ornaments of the old design.9 (See Appendix C) The Jarawa, more insulated, continue these designs, though change is apparent in the choice of material. Changes in the design and material of ornaments were easily inferred from studying the ornaments and their descriptions in museum collections, and drawing comparisons during field-visits. But are these changes symptoms of historical change? This chapter seeks to show how ornaments can be seen as embodying events—of confrontation or of interaction—whereby disparate worlds come to overlap to some degree and develop ways of perceiving one other. This is as true for the present as for the past. It is this interaction between the world of the Andamanese and the non-Andamanese, I argue, that produces an entanglement of relations symbolized by the ‘things’ made by taking raw material from one context and transforming it into an ornament for another context. It is this new context that reflects the changed social relations. Let us consider how classic historical accounts delineate the process I am proposing as a framework for interpreting Andamanese history as revealed in material culture. In 1771 two women were brought on board Captain John Ritchie’s ship in order to befriend them (Ritchie 1787: 47–49). After overcoming their initial fear, the women ‘began to walk about and stare at everything in the vessel; the difference of color between the European and local crewmembers was a matter that took up much of their attention’ (quoted in Temple 1901:233). A little later two more Islanders were persuaded to join their companions on the ship and were given: Coarse cloth to wrap round them; for these people were all stark naked and when seemed desirous of going into their canoes to their friends, they were permitted

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to do so; but they no sooner got into the canoes, that they threw the piece of cloth into the old canoes that they were taken in; and leaving it behind, they pulled toward the shore with great swiftness. The old man and his comrade were still on board, nor did they seem under the least apprehension of being detained; but they laughed very heartily to see the others in such a fright. I gave them some nails, and bits of old iron, which pleased them much; and about three in the afternoon, they went into the canoe, and tried hard to pull the chain plates from the vessel’s side, and dragged strongly, and long, at the rudder chains; but these were too well fixed; and at last, they went towards the shore at an easy rate, looking at their nails, and singing all the way.

This incident occurred while Ritchie was surveying Diligent Strait, which separates the islands of Great Andaman from Ritchie’s Archipelago in the east. It is worth noting the difference of outlook between the men and women in this new environment. The women were taken with the differences of color, while the men, seeing the outsiders providing them raw material in their eagerness to establish relations, were keen on exploiting this opportunity for acquiring more iron. Not satisfied with the nails given as gifts, the Islanders wanted to collect more metal than they were being offered. Our next account concerns an event in 1861, where we see how in the intervening ninety years materials collected over various contact events had come to be used as items of adornment by the Islanders. On January 15, 1861, Captain J.C Haughton, Superintendent of the Andamans, recorded that one of the ‘natives’ was ‘captured’ and given the name Tuesday Blair (Haughton 1861). According to Haughton’s report, Tuesday was very keen to remove all the “rubbish around his neck.” The ‘rubbish’ discarded by Tuesday to put on a “dress” included “convict tickets, a Brahmins’ thread, human bones and two large rusty nails”(ibid., 261). Around Tuesday’s neck were things the ‘native’ had acquired from outsiders. Here was a situation where the markers of two kinds of outsiders, a twice-born Hindu’s sacred thread and an escaped convicts’ metal-tag for identification, had become entangled with bones and nails on the body of Tuesday Blair. The ‘rubbish’ hanging on Tuesday’s body exemplifies the continual process of re-contextualizing objects. Here is a body decorated with ornaments whose range of design and choice of material index an entire history of entangled relations. This was history as experienced by Tuesday Blair, that is, by a “native” who had been captured near Port Blair on a Tuesday. This embodiment of history in ornament is further articulated in the report that the native was eager to assume the dress of the outsider, or to incorporate the dress from a new context of capture. Radcliffe-Brown has suggested that the adornment of the body through painting and scarification and using by shells and bones attached to string are replicated in the ornamentation of objects like baskets, canoes and bows. In his analysis, the act of

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painting or ornamentation is a means to establish a “new relation” between object and society (1964: 323).10 We now turn to contact with the Jarawa in the period after 1947. The Indian administration makes contact with the natives in much the same manner as the British and though we shall be discussing how the material from these events is incorporated, it is as important to consider “contact” (or rather, interactions) within native groupings to get a sense of the ‘horizontal’ plane of transactions. To outline the situation prevailing for the last thirtyfive years, the Andaman Nicobar Administration and the governmental social welfare organization (AAJVS) have since 1970 continued the tradition of regularly seeking brief contact with the Jarawa on the west coast of Middle Andamans. Sometimes, like Tuesday Blair, Jarawa individuals have been brought in to Port Blair or the small town of Kadamtalla. These individuals were usually from the group of Jarawa who are now quite habituated to the contact team. Other Jarawa have remained to a considerable degree hostile to the settlement around—each year, on an average, there were at least four attacks on settlers and their villages leading to the loss of life and property (Awaradi 1990 and Sarkar 1990). It is important to note that the Jarawa move from place to place along the western coastline between Port Campbell and all the way up to Flat Islands. The areas that experience “Jarawa hostility” are mostly near Kadamtalla and Baratang, east of the coastline and in the interior of the forest. When one group of Jarawa arrives at the campsite of the other, they exchange the materials gathered on their way that are then included in the ornaments worn around the neck and waist. This aspect of the exchange between guest and host and its significance for ornament design Oeyetahey was very visible when the Administration established contact with the Jarawa. The Jarawa could often be seen adorned with material they had gathered in course of “hostile encounters” with neighboring settlements. Prominent among these was the metal picked up and refashioned into the blades that are highly valued by the Jarawa. During the contact-events initiated by the administration, the Jarawa would often remove anything they liked, such as eyeglasses, from the persons of members of the contact party, to put these on themselves. The clothes they took were then torn into shreds and woven together with their traditional ornaments.11 It is this process of taking something from an unfamiliar context and incorporating it into one’s own that constitutes the process of recontextualizing. This process is often represented as the “mischievous” Jarawa running away with what they can remove. Consequently the carefully selected contact team is instructed by the administration to adorn themselves with minimum articles of clothing.12 Perhaps making the contact person less attractive to the Jarawa

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but definitely agreeable to the temperament of outsiders involved in the contact with the Jarawa who should not invite any problems while contacting Jarawas. However there has developed a tradition that the contact team land with strips of red cloth tied on their bodies that the Jarawa then untie. This is a means of providing the Jarawa the raw material so desired by them without having the clothes stripped off the bodies of team members. In colonial times cloth was given as a gift to pacify the tribals. In post-independent India, a representative of the government carried strips of clothes into contact situations much as a protection from getting their own clothes torn by the Jarawas. Having strips of cloth with the contact party was seen a preventive strategy to divert Jarawas from entering into a scuffle. According to late Bhaktawar Singh who had been also part of the colonial administered police in contact with the Jarawas, “Jarawas on not getting strips of red cloth, some thing they were used to, would tear up the clothes from the body of the contact party.” This was a way to minimize the often-experienced embarrassment of the officials visiting Jarawas. Strips of red cloth became like an armor for the authority to protect themselves against Jarawas. The Jarawa frequently give away the ornaments they wear and we may regard this as an exchange meant to mark the event of contact. But these ornaments were for the most part made just before the event. When the contact party lands, the group of Jarawa is usually wearing ornaments made from the plants and flowers growing in the area they have come from, to which they have added leaves from the plants growing at the spot where the interaction is to take place. This marks the significance of place as a context for contact or the intersection of two sets of people. So we notice that acts of recontextualization are performed by the Jarawa not only when one group visits the campsite of another, but also on occasions of contact with outsiders, when they fashion new ornaments to be placed on the bodies of those visiting them.13 This act disentangles things from their prior contexts and transforms the relations that prevailed before the contact party landed. The Islanders see all things, places and characters as subject to the principle of “attraction.”14 Interestingly, the Jarawa never give up any other ornament, especially those made of shell, bone, bits of plastic and metal. These are preserved and added to the collection as things acquired during subsequent contact events. We can now think of Jarawa ornaments as not only aesthetic objects that register the histories of contact, but also as participating in a “cultural algebra.” This algebra establishes different equations, according to principles of gathering, tying and binding (in other words of combination and recombination), all of which remain asymmetrical because of the inequality of power.

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THE ANDAMANESE CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD AND THINGS Often described as using simple technology, exhibiting little social heterogeneity and no signs of agricultural practice, Andamanese tribes have been regarded as essentially isolated, small-scale societies and above all as typical examples of hunting and gathering societies. Anderson (1990:225) in fact attributes to hunters and gatherers the production of ‘art’ that is ‘portable’ to suit their nomadic lifestyle. Song, dance and oral literature are the most eminently transportable art forms and are consequently very important among nomadic groups.15 It tends to be assumed that hunters and gatherers carry with them “religious art” because it is religious rather than because it is art. Yet ethnographic accounts of Andamanese culture emphasize visual art, which is dominated by body decoration through painting and ornaments (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 315–23 and Man 1932). Ethnographic accounts and subsequent analysis of Andaman Islanders’ decoration (of either bodies or utilitarian items) argue that such decoration is always marked by the need to

Use of red clay paint. Red clay paint is applied on body to heat, sweat and release smell as a way to heal body (1983-84 Dugong Creek).

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Forms of white clay paint designs among Ongees (Dugong Creek, 1984)

flag the increased “social value” of the person or thing decorated (see Brain 1979). For instance, a young person is scarified at the ritual to mark his coming of age. Scarification is justified as making the body “strong” (RadcliffeBrown 1964: 315) Scarification and ornaments such as those made from the bones of dead relatives are seen as social insignia, displaying the status of the wearer.16 Every morning, women cover their relatives with a combination of red and white clay paint. After the application is semi-dry, the paint is scraped off with fingers or comb-like wooden implements to leave parts of skin bare or unpainted. The designs drawn on face and body are associated with clan identity and with the individual’s season of birth. On occasion, clay paints in combination with other liquids are applied as a cure for ailments or to mark a transition from states like mourning or initiation (Pandya 1993: 122–134). The Ongee classify all forms of akwaye (body painting), etakweto (scarification) and eneyetokabe (ornaments) as enguibute—things that are not just artifacts possessing social value and not just ritual objects with magical power, both dimensions being recognized simultaneously. Indeed hunters and gatherers have definite ideas about the meaning and value of art (Guenther M

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Ongees use of clay paint as body decoration for receiving the Lt. Governor Mr. Kampani (1984 Dugong Creek). The representative from the administration insisted that the Ongees perform a dance in traditional dress. Originally the Ongees were dressed up in clothes issued by the welfare agency. See also Appendix C for the forms of leaf used for ceremonial ornamentation (from the E. H. Man collection held at the Brighton Museum).

Ongees along with the ethnographer dressed up to meet the visiting government official near Dugong Creek 1984

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Chekwey, the tool used to create designs on skin after application of clay paint. Sometimes fingers are also used in place of Chekwey.

Jarawas with white clay paint designs (From Lakra Lungta and Potatang 2003). Note in photograph, hair is being trimmed with a shell.

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1991). Just as their belief-systems contain many propositions concerning ‘cosmology and ideology’ (Bird-David 1992: 30), enguibute serve as a matrix of meanings in Ongee culture. The Islanders see themselves as belonging as human beings to a larger hierarchical scheme that includes dead relatives who have become spirits, tomya and the animals. Spirits, formless, boneless and smell absorbing, inhabit different parts of the forest and sea, and are divided into two main categories. There are the spirits associated with natural phenomena and the spirits originating from dead people. Phenomena like earthquakes, thunder, rainbows, waterspouts in the sea and storms all mark the arrival and departure of spirits associated with the winds from different directions. Spirits of the dead are further classified as benevolent or malevolent. When a person dies, the body undergoes a sequence of burial rites, and the secondary burial rite transforms the dead person’s spirit into a benevolent spirit who helps the living. Persons who die and do not receive the appropriate burial rites become malevolent spirits. Notwithstanding the hierarchy of relations between spirits, human beings and animals, there is a common space through which all of them pass. The places constituting this shared space are clearly marked by seasons, wind conditions, moisture and the food resources available. In each place, spirits, humans, and animals are brought into relation by the act of hunting. The spirits hunt the Ongee and animals, the Ongee hunt animals, while both Ongee and animals try to avoid being hunted. In the act of hunting the prey becomes powerless and the hunter asserts his enakyula (“power”) when able to succeed in moving to where the animal is located and keeping his body smell from reaching the animal. The Islanders visualize this act of hunting, where the variables of movement and smell are important, as the conjunction of the trajectories of the powerless prey and the powerful hunter. The relationship between hunters and animals is transposed onto the relationship between humans and spirits. The community of spirits and the human community are engaged in a kind of game of life and death, where there is a fine balance of numbers. An increase or decrease in the numbers of one corresponds inversely to an alteration in the numbers of the other. The process plays out in the following manner. The spirits have the power to hunt and gather powerless humans. The smell released from the bodies of the humans attracts the spirits down to the island. The smell carried by the winds brings the spirits to the human body, and the spirits take away the human, resulting in the death of an individual within the community of humans. From the point of view of the spirits who cause the death of the human individual, this means the addition of another spirit to their community. For these humans who are taken away “hunted and gathered by the spirits,” become spirits themselves. Spirits do not have lower jawbones and consequently lack the capacity to masticate food. Because they prefer soft and liquid food they consume food

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by entering the food substance. Women who eat food substances in which a spirit is trapped become pregnant, as the food, once consumed, releases the spirit who becomes a foetus. So the descent of spirits to the island is associated with childbirth, an addition to the community of humans at the same time as it is a diminution of the community of spirits. This descent of the spirits on the vertical axis of movement is associated with birth and their ascent associated with death. The transformation of spirits into humans and of humans into spirits along this vertical axis reveals a continuum of identity between spirits and humans, which does not take away from the fact that the proper location of each is distinct, as are their body states and their capacities. Humans and animals are distinguished from spirits by having bones. Bones are the most condensed form of smell, hard and heavy. Depending on the degree to which it congeals, smell forms fluid, flesh and bones within the body. An increase in temperature would lead to the release of body fluids and eventually to the disintegration of bones, which causes death or nanguchumemy (“decay”) and the formation of a spirit body. So the boneless bodies of spirits absorb but do not exude smell and are soft and light. Their lightness enables spirits to move anywhere and everywhere with the winds. The possibility of smell being released from living bodies and absorbed by spirits explains the inequality of power between the Ongee and the spirits. This bears upon the movements of each, for the descent of the spirits to the island in quest of food and tools leaves the threat of death constantly posed before the Ongee. The Ongee deal with this threat by using clay paints on their bodies, keeping fire and smoke close by and by preserving the bones of dead ancestors. Their term for these various substances is gobolagnane. Gobolagnane contain the release of the smell that attracts spirits to the body. Using gobolagnane on and around individual bodies, at the campsite and while moving across places makes it possible to move safely in relation to the spirits. Each gobolagnane deals with smell in a different way. The use of white and red clay paints seeks to alter body conditions in terms of temperature. If the body experiences excessive heat, smell is released as sweat. The Ongee believe that retaining or releasing smell affects the weight of the body. Cool white and hot red paints mark the different states of an Ongee body. The application of white clay paint cools the body, confines its smell, and keeps it heavy. If a body is heavy then the spirits cannot “lift up the human body and fly off.” Conversely, the application of red clay makes the body hot and causes it to sweat, which simultaneously releases smell and decreases weight. A sweating body attracts spirits and its lightness allows the spirits to bear it away. The Ongee keep covered in small baskets ancestral bones, the hardest and most concentrated form of smell. When the Ongee wish to enlist the aid of their ancestral spirits, they uncover the bones and cause them to release smell, which then attracts the ancestral spirits.

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Believing that spirits and humans both need to hunt and gather on the island, the Ongee like the other Islanders follow a pattern of seasonal translocation which enacts the principle that humans do not hunt and gather in the forest when spirits are doing so. At such times humans must depend on the resources from and around the sea. With the change of season, spirits move to the sea and humans to the forest underlies seasonal variations in activity, The principle of avoiding the place where there are spirits distinguishes groups, of which some specialize as turtle hunters and others as pig hunters. The basic continuity of life is ensured by scrupulously avoiding mixing elements, things and activities from a prescribed place to another proximate to it. During the relatively dry season from October to February, four or more families set up a circle of simple thatched lean-to huts close to the coast. From May to September, the Islanders move from the coast to the forest where honey, fruits, and tubers are collected and pig is hunted. Violent rainstorms occur from May to September, making it impossible to hunt turtles, dugongs, and fish from canoes. The move from coast to forest is marked by a change in settlement pattern. Camps are set up in the forest as they are at the coast, but only four or five families stay in one camp. As the wet season ends, each family moves to its clan’s traditional hut, which is circular and accommodates fifteen to twenty sleeping platforms. The critical principles in this world shared by spirits, humans and animals are attraction, to places from which smell is released, and weight, which secures the body against the violation possible when it is left light by its release of smell. I will now discuss how these principles are brought into play in the fashioning of different ornaments, and indicate the accompanying relations with historical experience and with aesthetics.

MOON, SUN AND TIDES: PRINCIPLES OF ATTRACTION What we might formulate as the relations between motion and matter that drive natural processes is articulated by the Ongee as the principle of etekwagebe (attraction) between enguibute (things). Etekwagebe is also used to allude to the tradition of having the entire camp come together for singing sessions on full moon nights. Most of the songs speak of how successful the hunting of pigs and a turtle was in the past and especially about how the spirits helped in the occasional hunting of the dugong. These songs invoking past success and the power of spirits in fact enable humans to intervene as active agents in the present. For in preparation for the session the Ongee paint designs on themselves, using white clay paint on their bodies and red paint on the forehead, which release a special smell. Attracted by this smell and by the

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singing of the Ongee, the spirits of ancestors begin moving between ‘this world’ and the ‘other world,’ indicated by the shifting tides in the sea. This rise and fall of the tides makes available ‘things’ to eat from forest and sea. So if the previous section described how their smell leaves humans vulnerable to spirit attack, what this ritual reveals is that humans have the power to manipulate smell and invite the benign power of spirits (See Pandya 1993: 137). The following Ongee mythical idea of tukuree-ye-jujey (story of ordering) provides the model for Ongee notions of how things are located and subject to attraction. The Ongee version of the myth describes how two species of prime value as food in Andamanese culture, pigs and turtles, are subject to the attraction between land (the original habitat of pigs) and water (the original habitat of turtles). The myth accounts for the tidal movements that it claims gave rise to the “taxonomic moment” (Clifford 1988: 198) of natural history, whereby species identity was anchored in place. So by inducing the movement of ancestral spirits by their singing, the Ongee hunters perpetuate the availability of food as represented by pig and turtle. In facilitating the force of attraction, the Ongee succeed in placing pig and turtle within the context of forest and sea respectively for hunting. This attraction caused by the Ongee becomes an operative principle that recontextualizes the pig and turtle for hunting. Chapter Two has discussed the importance of ordering in the context of the Ongee sense of history. The recapitulation below emphasizes the themes of attraction and location: The forest and sea animals decided to have a feast at the horizon. All animals were invited except the monitor lizard and the civet cat. The cat and lizard ate red clay and went into the water. They lost their body smell and, thus disguised, went to the feast. Conflict broke out when the other animals realized what had occurred. The celebration gave way to chaos. The lizard and cat started throwing fire at the other animals. The lizard dragged some pigs from the forest to the creek and into the sea and left them there. The cat dragged some turtles from the sea to the forest and left them in the treetops. The fight became a war. Birds were thrown down from the trees into the sea and turned into fish. The crabs did not like this war. So the crabs hunted down the cat and the lizard and ended the war by biting the lizard. Then the crabs and birds wished to celebrate their feats in war and to commemorate the war. Again all the animals were invited to a feast to be held on the night of the full moon. The feast was intended to reunite with the other forest pigs the unhappy pigs who had been left stranded in the water after the lizard had thrown them there. The turtles, which had been trapped in the treetops after the cat had thrown them there, were meant at this feast to meet the turtles from the water. It would be a great moment of reunion and happiness. The pigs and turtles were covered in red clay paint for their body smell to ooze

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out and attract their relatives to their side. The pigs and turtles caused much movement between land and water and between forest and sea. Pigs from the sea were rushing toward the forest and turtles from the forest were rushing toward the coast. The land began to sink and the water to rise because of all the animals trying to meet their relatives from land and water. In all this commotion and excitement only some pigs were able to leave the sea to go to the forest and only some turtles succeeded in leaving the forest to live in the sea. Under the light of the full moon, the subsiding of the land and the rising of the water caused some pigs and turtles to be trapped at the creek and the coast. Those who were trapped between the land and the sea were those who had run to receive their relatives. Pigs from the forest who had gone to receive the pigs from the sea and turtles who had come from the sea to receive the turtles from the land were trapped and suffered pain having tried to run in the wrong direction. At daybreak the land had stopped rising. This was because the cat and lizard, which had also been celebrating, had ended their dancing. When the cat and lizard ended their dance, the turtles and pigs trapped at the creek turned into dugongs [Dugong dugon]. Since then, on every full moon night, some dugongs try to leave the creek to become turtles and some try to leave the creek to become pigs. Their movements cause the water of the creek, the coast, and the sea to rise high and fall low. Some succeed, and those who don’t continue to live as dugongs, swimming like turtles but eating like pigs.

Above, we can observe etekwagebe (attraction) in the context of the importance of things being in their designated place. The focal point is the dugong, not a mere anomaly created by accident, but an embodiment of the relation between land and sea. The sea and land that constitute the original contexts for turtle and pig come to be recontextualized in the image of the dugong caught between two forms and places. Versions of this myth have been recorded among other Andamanese groups. The narrative tells us why feasts, war and encounters with outsiders are all events marked by adorning the body with ornaments that are often remade during or after the event. Red paint is meant to release smell and attract the animals to their relatives trapped in forest and sea, just as the spirits whose arrival causes birth or death are attracted to the Ongee when they wear clay paint. The Andamanese have seen how outsiders are attracted to the Islands, and recognize that they themselves may be attracted to outsiders. Acts of bodily adornment serve to realign and reorder relationships, or to re-pair them, in the sense of reuniting what is severed. Attraction is also the principle at work in the relationship between the sun and moon, who are perceived as an ideal married couple. This is how the Ongee explains the relationship: The Sun is wife to the Moon! Both are separate, that is, never seen in the sky simultaneously by Ongee. When the sun is in the sky, making it day, the moon is

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in the sea. When the moon comes to the sky, the sun goes into the sea. They are separate but also together, they follow each other around from place to place and it is this etekwagebe, or attraction between them that makes day and night follow each other. This attraction is important since it makes it possible for all of us to have the day to hunt and gather, or otherwise it would always remain night. Long ago it was always night, cicadas sang songs and the fireflies danced constantly and the moon came down to view the sight and caused all the waters to rise and fall (tides). Some cicadas and fireflies died and the coastline and forest started to experience the formation of creeks and mangrove forests. All this attracted the sun to come out from the forest under the sea to collect the things scattered on the island by the full moon. They got married and the earth became as it is today, with the tides and day and night caused by the attraction between husband and wife who follow each other around. Sun (the female) paints the moon (the male) and their children the stars, as a wife paints her husband and the children in the house with clay paint. On the day the moon is completely painted (full-moon) the attraction is strongest, so that tides are strong and hunting and gathering is most profitable.

The Andamanese interpret their experiences within the frame of these myths that posit a world where things, places and characters are all subject to attraction. It is the act of fabricating ornaments that brings out the homology between mythical idea and historical experience. When, like the lizard, cat, sun and moon in the myths, the Ongee make ornaments or decorate themselves with paint, their songs and recitation reflect on the production of (what we would call) “art.” These occasions also bring out the special quality of art and craft in occupying “inter-categories of sensation,” the term used by Leach (1973: 224) when applying his theory of taboo to the categorically ordered worldview of Andamanese (See also Leach 1971). Historical and ethnographic accounts of the encounter of the Andamanese with outsiders show how singing, painting and adornment are deployed to attract, and so influence the course of relations and acquire raw material. Attraction is accentuated by ornaments, which are designed, like those of the tribes of the Mount Hagen region in New Guinea (Strathern and Strathern 1971 and O’Hanlon 1989), to convey precise meanings. These meanings are defined by rules concerning the objects to be used and by restrictions on design and material during its production. So we can see meaning as communicated by combining all elements to create what is characterized as “Total Art” in its manifestations in the west (Henri 1974). An idea invoked by the Futurists among others, Henri sees Total Art as having flowered in the sixties and seventies, when artists turned to environmental artwork and installation and performance art in the belief that the act of communication should not delimit itself to one form of expression but use a combination of these. In his discussion of Andamanese

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ceremonial contexts, Radcliffe-Brown also evokes a picture of total communication where objects are used to project sentiments (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 245–46). The fabrication of ornaments in relation to particular occasions helps us appreciate that context is important as process rather than as a given, as we see things being disentangled from prior contexts and reworked into in new ones. It should be apparent that the production of ornaments is a culture’s reenactment of natural processes of attraction like the tides, which locate bodies in new spatial contexts. The world of spirits, humans and animals turns on the principle of attraction, caused by the release of smell, which may be manipulated bodily adornment. Bodies possessing weight are not easily displaced or absorbed by spirits by giving off smell. Attraction is a quality inherent (“aloogeye”) within all things. By implication, all things are inherently unstable, given the possibility of being attracted in various directions as smell is dispersed and absorbed. This characteristic of things predisposes them to continual recontextualization. Each time the Ongee make enguibute things, they are rehearsing the “taxonomic moment” (Clifford 1988: 198) narrated in myth, for being designed to attract and bring together points separated in time and space, ornaments recall the mythical accounts of divisions being established or re-aligned. As said earlier, changes in the choice of material have not affected the principles underlying the production of things. Enguibute, especially ornaments, are therefore suitable for not only aesthetic or ethno-scientific analysis (Warren and Andrews 1977) but in understanding the “taxonomic moments” in the Ongee’s own history. In an influential essay, Arjun Appadurai drew attention to the invisible middle term that forms the hinge between ‘value’ and ‘exchange’: (Appadurai 1986: 3). When invoked in the context of Andamanese objects, it can be argued that these objects do not just acquire “social-lives” (ibid) of their own but recall histories whose implications are more extended. The Andamanese work at influencing contexts by using objects that exert an attractive force on them. This is exemplified by the behavior of Jarawa at contact events. They immediately take up the strips of red cloth they are given to incorporate them into their body adornments as marking the event of being offered gifts by outsiders. There are other instances when following the consumption of cooked meat, the Jarawa and the Ongee apply dabs of white clay paint on the body and face, as a substance which can contain the dispersal of the smell of meat and thereby prevent other animals from becoming aware that one of them has been hunted. In other words, white paint ensures future success in hunting by effecting the transition whereby the animal eaten is removed from its living contexts of forest or sea and recontextualized as human food (Pandya 1993: 134–135). Here the food consumed is seen as capable of

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Ongee applying toleudu after consuming of hunted animal (Dugong Creek 1984)

actively affecting interactions in the contexts of forest or sea from where pig and turtle are procured. In other words, things are not just objects, but are also subjects of a context. In producing an object the Andamanese activate its subject-hood, by making it capable of exerting an attractive force on its original context or in the place from which it derives its raw material (Mauss 1967:17–18, Radcliffe-Brown 1964:246). The production process consists of tying and binding and of adding or subtracting from the thing to affect its capacity to attract. Ornaments are constantly being made, remade and redesigned in accordance with this worldview (See Pandya 1993:70–145).17

THINGS TO KEEP AND THINGS TO DISCARD A visitor to any Andamanese campsite, occupied or unoccupied, would be struck by the extraordinary proliferation of things lying around. Empty cans, wood, odds and ends of plastic or metal, cords, broken baskets, bows, bones, half-finished carved wooden buckets or bows, pots and pans and unfinished ornaments. Frequent spoils of beachcombing are stacks of colorful magazines and empty cardboard boxes that do not appear to be put to any use. As regards a description of material culture, these hunters and gatherers appear to be real

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junk collectors, foraging for all the detritus on the Islands. Instead of being rejected as trash, this assortment of objects gathered from various places is kept deliberately on the assumption that all manner of things should be allowed to remain just in case they are needed some day. As the Ongee express it “let it stay put but do not discard it” (“Katetay ukwe, Gatuwe maa!”) It is no wonder then that many colonial accounts describe authorities finding material to collect from the campsites. The things collected by the Andamanese may not be of any obvious or defined use but what is certain is the importance invested in recovering these and stacking them carefully as “my stuff,” and not mere “junk.” For things that are actually discarded (Gatuwe) are always placed outside the circle of sleeping platforms or behind the shelter. Like houses in complex industrialized societies where things are stored in the garage, attic or basement, Andamanese hunters and gatherers too collect things and put them away in one or other part of their residences.18 The Jarawa and the Ongee show great interest in collecting things especially those manufactured or produced by the outside world. Young men and women often scour the beach in the early hours of morning and in the afternoon the senior men and women demand of them the items that please them.19 Such demands are never to be refused, and however reluctantly, the junior will let the first senior who demands take away the object he has collected. This is the explanation given by one of the junior Ongee: I have to let them have it, I got it so that the place it came from would send more to me, the place would find me attractive and the place (of the senior) it goes to would also become close to me! Both places will find me attractive and we all long for this attraction, this is what makes things attractive, not only that they have some things in them but also that they make things happen; we all have to keep tying things and places!

This explanation registers how age comes to play in social relations, but also confirms that attractive power is inherent in objects. Attraction arises from events that have occurred in different places and times and attraction can be anticipated in relation to time and place. For the Ongee the attractiveness of an object is constituted by the sum of past and potential attraction. Things are attractive to the Ongee as they evoke a historical narrative and generate a social process. What we express in terms of aesthetic discourse concerning an object the Ongee apprehend in terms of history. For example, the Ongee would never let me discard old battery cells, paper or used up refills. For them these were objects I had used to “do” something related to them.20 In their understanding of the matter I was with them for a few days to understand them, and so all the things that I was about to ‘discard’ were beautifully “attractive” in having brought me closer to completing my

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task. To the Ongee it was clear that “my things” made it possible for me to finish my work among them. The things I had to discard were “attractive” to them as they enabled me to be with them and to finish the ethnographic research that ‘brought’ me to the Islands. My attraction to the Islands and my attraction to finishing my work were seen as made possible ‘my things.’21 My own ethnographic preoccupations did help the Ongee to arrive at this idea, for often after camping in the interior forest with no success in hunting I would have to persuade them that we should return after a few days and start again as I needed to get back to our base camp as I was running low on photographic film or batteries and supplies. My presence among the Ongee led to the emergence of a new situation. After a few months of my having done research among them, some teenagers took to coming by regularly to ask for things I was going to give away after my stay among them or things I was going to discard because they had finished “doing” what they were supposed to for me. They felt having my things with them would enable them to finish their doing things as well. The dead battery cells from my flashlight were seen to embody light used up in ending darkness. Having them around various campsites appeared a means of making their traditional resin torchlight stay alight longer and more effectively. The Ongee worked out an entire classification of cells in terms of size and the appearance of different brands. Soon they reckoned that some batteries of a particular size and look were “attracting” sound into my tape recorder and images into my camera. Audio and visual recording was seen as something that involved them and they started demanding specifically cells that had completed attracting their images or attracting sounds. Some boys suggested that when they acquired the cells they would use string to tie them together as ornaments for their dogs. My spontaneous reaction that this would look nice was promptly corrected, “Hey, dogs do not have to look pretty! But they (the batteries) would cause the dogs to be attracted to sounds and images of pigs in the forest and allow the act of tracking pigs in the forest to be successfully completed.” This allows us to understand how the principle of attraction works: cells were found attractive because of what they had attracted in the past and the batteries had the capacity to complete the process of attraction. Ongee logic transposes the Frazerian idea of homeopathic magic with the Durkheimian notion of efficacy being projected onto things. But this is not in terms of things producing things, an economic principle underlying production, but an aesthetic principle based on the power of attraction to set in motion the temporal work of completing process or production in the future. We are used to saying, “this new thing (capital or tool) will help me in making something or transforming value ” but Ongee regard things grown now old as

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the means of effecting the very process it completed in the past.22 For the Ongee the meaning of a thing is constituted by its attractiveness, which is constituted by its power to attract. All aspects within the standard aesthetic discourse such as color, gloss, smoothness of form, are secondary to Ongees. The first criteria for making a thing attractive within the Ongee worldview is what a thing can attract and in this way new potential meanings are always possible. So new use can be created and new meaning made of things found by recontextualizing and placing it in a new set of historical relations. So the boys did leave their dogs to run loose in the forest for a month, wearing batteries around their necks, which were discarded after fulfilling their purpose. Iron nails and wires found along the beach and nearby settlements have now become items tied around the neck by a cord, that in some future time they can be used as arrowheads of the preferred shape to hunt fish in shallow seawater. Carved wooden arrows for fish hunting have been completely replaced. In this act of making meaning through material is embedded is the aesthetic and history of the materiality of Andamanese culture, a materiality that facilitates creating relations through things made in culture. Let me explicate this further. One fine cold morning in November 1983, young Ongee boys found a Chinese folding umbrella, colored pink with floral motifs in yellow and orange. I was called upon to explain what it was. I managed to open the umbrella after some work at repairing the, and could explain its function in relation to sunlight and rain. The first response was, “You mean the place where this came from they do not have trees to protect them from rain and sun and this thing protects the people . . . so we should put these in our family shelter in the forest so that even if the thatch leaks or when cool shade is required this thing will enhance our roof and make all the trees around more attractive for the water and sun light to fall on the trees and not my home.” Upon my inquiry as to why they found the umbrella would make the trees around attractive the explanation given was, “this thing has been like a tree, see it has flowers on it. It is dry and thin like the old tree canopy of dead leaves. This thing has been able to attract (which here implied repel) water and sunlight, it has done what it could, I will make it do this for the trees.”23 For a whole month the open umbrella remained hanging on the thatched roof of Ongee shelters in the forest, as an ornament as well as instrument, like the batteries tied round the necks of dogs and the iron nails tied round the necks of men. Within the Andamanese worldview, the principle of attraction operates as a structuring element in the design of objects related to events of marriage, death, healing and commemoration. It is to an understanding of these contexts that I will now turn.

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COMMEMORATIVE AND HEALING ORNAMENTS When someone dies, the immediate family circle is required to cover his or her own bodies with white clay paint and to maintain silence as far as possible. The body is buried in a place associated with the dead person’s clan and according to gender (by the sea for females and in the forest for males). On the following full moon night, whoever is designated chief mourner (the deceased person’s husband, son, son-in-law or classificatory brother) visits the burial site to dig out the corpse with a stick. The area is covered once more after extracting the collarbone, finger digits, lower mandible and skull. These are brought back to the camp, and it is at this point that the taboos on speech are lifted. The family washes off the clay paint and also washes the bones. The bones are then made into ornaments known as ejeme, the one made from the lower jawbone being called ejeme-ibedange.24 The manner of fabricating ejeme is related to the place where the bones were recovered. A man’s bones, recovered from the forest side of the island, are washed in the stream or creek and the shells that are strung come from fresh water snails, whereas a woman’s bones, being recovered from the seaside, are washed in seawater and shells from the seashore are usually strung. Often pieces of cloth belonging to the deceased person are wrapped around the bones and small items like fishing hooks belonging to the dead person are also tied to the string. The term ejeme in Ongee language means warm or not very cold. As mentioned earlier, the Ongee think of bone as the “hardest” form of smell. The dead relative is now in the spirit world, boneless and odorless, but the spirit’s bones and smell remain in the human world of Ongee. If the process to which the corpse is subjected marks the dissimilitude between this world and the other world, these two contexts are brought into a new relation through the ornament, for it is attributed with the power of attraction. Red clay paint is applied to ejeme to induce the gradual release of smell and make it fit for the dead relative to receive. This guarantees that the spirit will descend if there is need to assist descendants still living. Over a period, dendrobium orchids are woven in patches over the bones, to maintain a check on the rapid loss of smell. Spirits being by nature attracted to the source of their smell, the ornament in the possession of the living relatives is a means of maintaining a channel of movement for the dead person. Ejeme are thus a visible, tangible means of attracting invisible spirits from the other world. No danger is incurred, for it is always one’s own relative in the form of a benign spirit whom ejeme attract. For the Andamanese, passage through space and through transitional states is always fraught with the possibility of accident, as malevolent spirits may come and “take away” an Ongee. The presence of one’s own benevolent spirit is seen as a counter force. When an individual experiences any form of ail-

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ment, she or he applies a combination of forest plants and colored clay, but also extracts the ancestral bone ornaments from the residential shelter to aid the healing process. Again, when traveling long distances, a safe passage is assured by the ejeme and ejeme ibedange, which draws ancestors to the protection of their living descendants. So in serving as a hinge between this world and the spirit world, ejeme facilitate the passage between other contexts, whether physical locations or between sickness and wellbeing. (See Appendix C) Family history is then never really a story of individuals lost to one. The family is always seen as a unit, where all relatives, whether in spirit or human form, foregather in mutual concern and care. The bones of young children are never made into ejeme, for they are seen as individuals who had died before reaching a “ripe” age because they had not been adequately cared for by the family. The efficacy of the ornaments lies in the familial care invested in an adult. The ejeme kept in the shelter constructed in the clan’s section of the forest represent one more way in which ornaments hold in place memory and relationships. In the context of marriage however ornaments become critical in defining not merely familial but inter group relationships as they play out in the union between bride and groom.

PRINCIPLE OF ATTRACTION: ORNAMENTS FOR MARRIAGE Marriage is negotiated between two groups, pig hunters and turtle hunters. The process of designing ornaments for marriage (called enengalabeyeneyetokabe) symbolizes the fact that two groups turtle hunters and pig hunters have come together to constitute themselves as sides representing the bride and groom. The choice of material and process of fabrication exemplify once more the overriding concern with everything having a place and everything being in its place. (See Appendix C) Marriage preparations begin once the paternal relatives of the groom have successfully negotiated the “demands” of the maternal relatives of the bride. Parents of the bride and groom organize other adults within their family and form two to three groups of four or five individuals. Each group contains people sharing an identity as the descendents of turtle hunters or pig hunters. Turtle hunters from the families of both bride and the groom design kugerua enegele torawaga. This ornament is made of material primarily associated with the seaside, coral pieces, shells (nautilus, dentalium, and cowry) glass beads (ever since their introduction by outsiders) and fragments of fishing net woven of plant fiber or plastic thread. The pig hunters make ornaments known as gakuwetagebe barrota torawage, using material associated primarily with

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the forest, so that a strip of bark could become the cord stringing together beads made from boar tusks, dried flowers of daboja (Bruguiera Gymnorhiza) or the chopped segments of an arrow-shaft used to hunt pig. Whether a group uses a range of materials or just one, it is careful not to mix materials from the seaside with those from the forest. Once all ornaments are ready on both sides of the family, the second phase of preparation is initiated. The groom’s family hunts down a pig and the bride’s family hunts either a turtle or several large fish. The spoils of each group and the ornaments they have made are borne in a procession that moves in single file with bride and groom at the head. Both sides give all the kugerua engele torawage (sea ornaments) to the bride and cover her with dabs of red paint. Similarly, all the gakuwetagebe barrota torawage (forest ornaments) are given to the groom to wear, and everybody applies dabs of red clay paint on his body. While the food procured from sea and forest is placed in a pit dug for roasting, the bride and groom sit together and, removing the ornaments given to them, take elements from each and recombine them to make two identical ornaments known as gegeto-enantokwe. Gegeto-enantokwe combine elements from the sea and the forest and in making them man and woman become husband and wife. They often include things associated with the mangrove forest, like crab-claws or the seeds of chendange (a creeper of the genus Ipomoea pesceprai growing mainly in the vicinity of creeks), as the mangrove is regarded as occupying a space between the female sea and the male forest. Meanwhile the other participants in the ceremony put on ornaments made from the pandanus leaf, called owetorakabe, and begin the session of singing and dancing. The newly married couple is supposed to remain silent. They are taken to the nearest spot where fresh and salt water meet and are given a bath by the women who are the bride’s matrilineal relatives. Upon their return to the campground the wife paints her husband’s face with the traditional matrilineal design for the first time. This concludes the marriage ceremony. Cooked food is taken out from the roasting pit and by the early hours of dawn people slowly disperse to retire. The custom of making of ornaments for the marriage ceremony with materials from separate domains and having them remade by bride and groom who combine their elements in gegeto-enantokwe enacts the principle relating moon and sun—being together yet separate. The marriage ceremony recapitulates the story of the sun and moon as the wife paints of her husband’s face (as the sun paints the moon) and the singing and dancing through the night resembles the fireflies and cicadas. Once the ceremony is over, the husband and wife keep the ornament given to them in the rafters of the berale (large circular residential shelter). If they ever experience major discord, they pull out the ornaments, or undo them and cast them into the creek, where seawater and fresh water meet. Both the idea of marriage and the ornaments as-

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sociated with it concern bringing together of individuals—men associated with land and women with water—and materials associated with the different domains of forest and sea to signal the creation of a new unit and home. The termination of the marriage therefore is indexed by the dis-entanglement of the ornaments that were “recontextualized” as it were, for the attraction between bride and groom. However in due course, if the problems between husband and wife are resolved the two individuals undertake to make a new gegeto-enantokwe. Both married relations and ornaments are unstable and subject to change over a period of time. The very meaning of being married and the purpose of marriage ornaments for Ongee are explained by the idea of attraction or lack of it. In order to sustain the relationship between the married individuals, material from the forest and sea are combined for the ornament to symbolize the new married union. Material for the ornament as well as the individuals for marriage is homologous in the sense that both material and individuals come from two different contexts and are recontextualized. The attraction that the ritual of marriage and making of ornaments is meant to create to keep two sides together, is facilitated by incorporating things that are attractive not only from the world of forest or sea, but from the ‘outside world’ as well. Individuals often give the groom things procured from the outside world. While I was doing fieldwork, the Ongee would ask for my empty plastic containers of film-roll, among other purposes for making them into gegeto-enantokwe. Small things from the outside world were much in demand for making ornaments. The Ongee would save metal trinkets, folding knives and safety pins with the intention of tying them to marriage ornaments. If the history of relations between husband and wife is marked by discord and lack of attraction the marriage ornament too is untangled. The ornament kept in the shelter is untied and discarded. If the ejeme keeps the individual’s body safe and healthy, the gegeto-enantokwe sustains the attraction between husband and wife. It is interesting to note at this point that in Ongee understanding a principle of “weight” is involved in the transactions of maintaining attraction. Consequently, a couple who is divorced or temporarily separated is seen as “light in weight” and likely to attract to spirits, just as without clay paint people are seen as not “heavy enough” and liable to being “taken away by spirits.” Consequently, making ornaments and putting them on along with body paint is regarded as necessary for the body to assume the right weight conducive for the retention of smell and remaining identified with the place where the individual wishes to be. It is this quality of weight that explains the power of ornaments to alter the outcome of what everyday events as they unfold. The following section sets to delineate this observation in greater detail.

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THE PRINCIPLE OF WEIGHT: INCIDENT, ACCIDENT, AND HISTORY On the east coast of Little Andaman between Hut Bay and Dugong creek lies a wide sandy strip of beach littered with various shells and hermit crabs. Close by, a shallow and muddy stream of fresh water emerges from the forest and flows into the sea. This is a favorite location for setting up camp during the turtle-hunting season from October to December, and offers space to about ten to twelve Ongee families. On an afternoon when the high tide had not receded completely all the men were out hunting turtle in the open sea. The younger women had gone to the forest to collect firewood and crabs, but there were others who stayed back at the campsite to take charge of the young children. One of these, Nyene, struggled to control the children chasing hermit crabs, being apprehensive about the receding tide. Soon enough, a six year old boy, Chelemey, was accidentally caught in the water sweeping swiftly back to sea. Nyene swam hard for a fifteen minutes before she succeeded in rescuing the boy gasping for air in the water. Both could swim but were perhaps caught unawares by the strong currents that threatened to engulf the little boy. When Enaragey, the boy’s mother, returned from the forest, she was told about the incident in all its fearsome details. Visibly shaken, she sat quietly, surrounded by several women. These women around her brought white clay paint and covered her forehead with dabs. Enaragey’s elder sister made a small incision on the forehead with a sharp flake from a broken glass bottle and squeezed out some blood. A few drops of blood were collected in two shells. When this was done, Enaragey broke her silence with a whimper that grew into a loud cry. Then she quickly rose and, taking one of the shells, ran toward the sea, threw the blood into the water and shouted: In the past, in the past you took one of my children! Today you tried again! Today you try again! What have we done? What do you want to attain Let children grow! Let children grow! Shells float out from you, and stones thrown to you go down deep into you!

At the close of her recitation, some other women joined in, singing out the first two lines. As the first group of women started the third line, another group started with the first two lines. Once the sub-groups of chorus singers had finished singing all the lines, the second round consisted of the women sang the lament through together, to create a diapasonic structure moving from apparent cacophony to polyphony. This form of singing is called eteebabe, which means ‘tying together,’ as two strings are tied together. The sec-

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Enebuleh made for the child who was involved in the incident of drowning.

ond round of singing, when everyone starts with the same line and closes with the same line is referred to as obechanduyme, ‘tying a knot.’ Once the singing was over, Enaragey’s sister and Nyene brought a strip of cane. Other women brought some of the plastic string that floats in from sea, fibrous string covered with red clay paint and shells and pieces of coral gathered from the beach. Enaragey was now requested to rub blood on the strip of cane and to tie the shells (eteebabe) with plastic string. Other women were also involved, attaching the string with the shells to the cane strip. When the ornament, enebuleh, was ready, it was tied round the waist of Chelemey, the boy who had nearly drowned that day. Upon returning from the turtle hunt Chelemey’s father explained to me what the enebuleh was all about. He said: My wife along with other women feels that the spirit of our lost child is lonely in the sea. He went away (died) when he was quite young. So the sea wants to take his younger brother. This time is particularly suitable for the sea and spirits to do so because we have just moved camp from the forest to the coast. We have to be very cautious, apply lot of the cooling white clay paint. Enebuleh is an eneyetokabe (ornament) that will keep my child alive and, like the cowry shells on the sandy beach, capable of being cast ashore by the sea instead of sinking like a stone thrown in water. Enebuleh is like the cord and weight we tie to the canoe so that we can make it stay afloat in one place and not drift away

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when we go fishing in the open sea or in the creeks. My wife’s blood will infuse her smell in the seawater and keep our lost child company. Chelemey will continue to wear the ornament till all the things tied to the ornament fall. Then I will take what is left of the ornament, the cane strip, and bury it at the place where we buried Chelemey’s brother.

The ornament’s design is based on the principle that keeps a canoe afloat. Enebuleh is also the term for the canoe’s cord and anchor (usually a chunk of coral), for the ornament enebuleh is believed to “anchor” Chelemey to the land so that he does not drift away in the water and drown. The design is therefore explained not by notions of style but according to a poetics that enables a synchronic interpretation of events and, as the next section suggests, according to a precise historical consciousness. We sum up the temporal and spatial relations activated by the making of enebuleh and the ritual associated with it, before situating these in the larger concern of this chapter, the principle of attraction as an operating link between disparate contexts. His older brother’s death in the past, Chelemey’s recent accident and his future security all taken into account when choosing and shaping material for the ornament. Casting his mother’s blood into the sea, gathering string, shell and coral which drift ashore and eventually burying the most essential part of the ornament where the one who had drowned had been buried are all actions that reveal how the past informs the present and envisaged future. The choice of material is influenced by spatial context, so the ornament that insures the Ongee against drowning in the sea is made from shells that are from the sea but are found on the shore. The shells on the beach are seen as objects “thrown out by the sea,” in contrast to the small chunks of coral and stones that sink in the water. It is believed that things other than shells sink because they tend to be attracted to the depths of the sea. The ornament is like an anchor or weight that counters the forces of attraction which may cause a violent displacement of contexts like drowning. The final act of returning the ornament to the place where the older brother was buried acknowledges that his spirit must be kept ‘heavy’ by placing an ornament at the gravesite. This is particularly significant, for, as we recall, children’s bones are never recovered to make amulets. They are seen as mischievous spirits, but not as harmful. The preceding section had described how the needs of living descendants are communicated to ancestral spirits by the smell of the ornaments made from their bones. Here we have observed how the lonely spirit of the dead child has the presence of his mother conveyed to him when the blood bearing her smell is thrown into the sea. The making of enebuleh ties together the relationship between child, mother and all women, as does the structure according to which the song must be recited. It adjusts the forces of attraction between different contexts, to in-

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sure against such a terrible confusion of contexts as drowning. The shells on the beach and the canoes that stay afloat represent the right form of recontextualization. These are signs of the order desired by Ongee, a world where children would not drown. The ornament enebuleh provides embodiment to these ideas of order. The ritual surrounding its production enables the child and the adults to experience order and the desired relations of attraction by transferring and adjusting smell (as body fluids) and weight.

THE DISTANT PRESENT AND THE NEAR PAST: MATERIAL AND MEMORY FOR THE FUTURE The production of ejeme and enebuleh are events structured to articulate temporal relations. History consists of displacements between spatial contexts owing to forces of attraction. Placing things as desired can in time obviate the effects of such displacement. This intervention in history is achieved by tying (binding together) materials (weights) that allow things to be placed in the desired context or attain the desired state. Untoward occurrences lead to things being removed from their original contexts, among the most serious of which is the removal from the state of the living. To avert such a possibility overtaking humans, it is materials, which are re-contextualized by fabricating ornaments. These ornaments, which refer back to the past, allow the individual to continue in this world. Yet if the loss of life does occur, the Ongee describe it as “going away” from the visible world to the invisible world. And ornaments like ejeme make it possible to bring spirits back from the other world. This is identical to the way in which elements associated with sea and forests are brought together in marriage ornaments. Adorning of the body with an ornament is a process of inscribing history on the body, whereby it becomes part of the materiality of history. The body inscribed with history is enabled to participate in the subsequent event of the ongoing historical process. Crafting into ornaments materials themselves derived from the historical processes affecting the individual negotiates history, ever unstable because of attraction, disentanglement and shifts of context. The enguibute may be seen as a substitute for the individual. The object made in culture is made out of the process that the subjects in history might experience. Because of this aesthetic principle that precedes history for Andamanese culture, it creates a symbolic economy, based essentially on the circulation of smell, values where nothing is ever lost. It is only dislodged to be enmeshed in a different context, and the context itself is re-contextualized like the material used to make the ornament. Order is achieved, once more, by keeping things in place and everything having a place. Whether it is the foreign object found at the beach or the

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foreign subjects found at the beach, both demand the production of material culture in the form of ornaments, as we shall see below. One of the implications of this view of ornaments in Andamanese culture, and particularly among the Ongee is that from a historical perspective nothing is really lost.25 It is depreciation or loss not occurring that constitutes the historical consciousness of the Ongee. “Attraction” (etekwagebe) is the principle underlying the fabrication of ornaments, which embody the art of “making history” and its “consciousness speaking out” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987: 205). In his theory of art, Alfred Gell has put forward the suggestion that the Kula operator disperses his social efficacy by activating the forces of attraction in the aesthetic content of Kula valuables. This attraction extends to the one who possesses them so that Kula circulation is imaged as the working of a mind distributed over an expanded space-time through objects and the history and an anticipated future of their transactions (Gell 1998: 230–1). The notion of nothing being lost in time is expressed by totekwata, which, as discussed in Chapter Two, alludes to “old winds,” or the return of the winds that have gone by, and bears connotations similar to “old ways” or “traditions.” The winds continue and seasons are created year after year, “ . . .they are never lost, they continue to come to the island and go by. As a result past, present, the future seen and unseen, this world and the other world are all connected by the passing wind” (traditional Ongee saying). As an example, hunts that were especially thrilling are commemorated in songs for the gigabawe (singing sessions), in which the hunt is dramatized and the animal praised and thanks are given. The bones of the animal are often made into ornaments by being strung alongside harpoon segments and chunks of coral if it is a sea animal and arrow-shafts and dried flowers if it is an animal hunted in the forest. The bones of animals particularly difficult to hunt or exceptionally tasty are thought worth preserving as ornaments because of the belief that these when taken on hunting expeditions release a smell that attracts living relatives of the animal. Thus past events (human deaths or the slaying of animals) are objectified in ornaments of human or animal bone, which retain their potency to attract and so exert continued efficacy in the world of Ongee.26 During my stay with the Ongee in 1990, I once met Muroi and his wife Kunkutai on my way to the main settlement at the northeast coast. The sun was about to set, making it difficult to cross the creeks where high tides were expected in the early hours of night. So I decided to spend the night in their hut, and as we settled down we talked about all that had happened since I had last seen them. Individuals had died, children had been born, some couples were no longer getting along, encroachment on the Ongee reserve had increased and above all Muroi and Kunkutai felt that the Ongee were losing

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ground to the external world closing in on their world of the forest. Even the “old winds that had gone by” through the forest had changed. For Muroi and his wife Kunkutai, these changes were registered in shifts and tensions, and accordingly incorporating and adjustment to enguibute ‘things’ that are old and new. Under the resin light, Muroi was carefully picking out chendallu and dentalium shells, making holes in them and passing them to Kunkutai, who strung them together to make a gagngitokwe, a necklace. Muroi said: See, we are making chendallu gagngitokwe for the initiation of our nephew that is to take place. It is a thing that Ongee have always made, but now his (the nephew’s) father-in-law thinks that the outsiders’ glass beads with holes in them are just fine. To get these from the outsiders he took lot of honey to the village, from now on we will get glass beads by giving our forest’s honey. But the glass beads from the outside will also make more outsiders come for honey and give us more and more beads for more and more honey. All Ongee are doing this and it is considered all right! But we have to now collect more honey because the outsider is attracted to honey and we are attracted to beads. Enguibute (things) cause a problem in a way, they all attract more and more enguibute and lead to the production of forest things to be given to meet the increasing need for things from the outside world. After all, my nephew has to remember that things not only attract other things but also attract the outsiders who are just a nuisance. For our spirits and us to continue existing in this forest, we must remember old things such as chendallu gagngitokwe. So we decided to make something for my nephew without glass beads. I could have collected honey and then collected the glass beads in exchange, but I just wanted to collect the shells from our own place so that totekwata continues through the forest and keeps outsiders away.

Why should the Andamanese include glass beads and objects of plastic and metal, which do not belong to their world in their ornaments? Why did Muroi feel that ‘old’ and ‘new’ things procured from outsiders are both important in making ornaments? The Ongee see things from the outside as embodiments of the people who made it. Just as the ornament made from a dead person’s bones retains the power to attract spirits from the other world, ornaments made using things from the outside world make possible the attraction between the Ongee world and the outsider’s world. Eneyetokabe (ornaments) are enguibute (things) that bring together the opposition of historical events and their representations. For Muroi the ornament is used not only to signify the occasion for its production but also to convey all that is happening around him and his community. Following Boas, what Muroi was making is art.27 It bears within it a social setting and cultural content, but unlike Boas’s insistence that comprehensibility of art is form and period specific, the Andamanese art of ornament making and body decorating

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is an articulation of historical consciousness bound neither to form nor period. Muroi sees the use of beads procured from the outsiders, as opposed to shells, as providing the entry point for the outside world as well as point of entry for the Andamanese to the outsider’s world. This act is similar to that of the Jarawa removing things from the contact person’s body so that it could be made into an ornament thereby marking experienced contact as a historical event. This is a way that has continued for a long time. According to Police records of 1983 the Jarawas killed a poacher on Flat Island, cut up his fingers and strung them together as a necklace that was partially burned. On asking the Ongees why this was done, they explained that often some of the offender’s bones (especially the fingers) are cut up, but on most occasions they burned and discarded it in the sea, in order to ensure that outsiders remain out at sea and never set foot on land. This view would also see ornaments as material objects, embodiments of geographical distance and culturally constructed historical consciousness (cf. Munn 1991, Helms 1988 and Bunn 1980). This also explains why the initiate’s ornaments contain traditional shells as well as glass beads. Andamanese ornaments have become the culture’s ‘listening post to somewhere else’ (Hobson 1987:110), an Andamanese way of apprehending as well as representing a wider historical and social milieu. Muroi’s statement not only reveals a historical consciousness but acknowledges that the ornaments given to his nephew and made using raw material from different sources (the island and the outsider’s market) is the production of historical memory about the principle of attraction. Muroi’s statement is what Marcus and Fischer (1986: 94) would regard as “connected” and a culturally realized “multilocale ethnographic” reality. Through the art objects made according to the principle of attraction for specific occasions, the Ongee continue “making of history” and reflect a “consciousness speaking out” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987: 205). This consciousness is conceptualization of the situational accomplishments, which Derrida (Derrida 1978: 5) regards as “eschatological, and crepuscular,” but not an assertion of ahistoricity or a history oriented to end of time. For instance the Andamanese idea of totekwata, winds that have gone by and will return back (See Chapter 2) condenses the Andamanese notion of history devoid of mere chronology of events and facts. Andamanese history culminates in being without an end, and without the loss of any aspects of relations (Gasché 1987: 140). The defunct battery cells, Chinese umbrella, shells and glass beads are all examples of things in which there is no loss of historical relations because the aesthetic principle is either rehearsed or revived, recreated or revitalized for attraction or repulsion. It is a world in which there is no separation of or opposition between, artistic forms, historical events, the artistic ideas of form and historical representation of event and an intervention through making.

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The designs and aesthetic principles underlying the fabrication of ornaments are a process that involves specific ways of embedding past and the future in particular events when the ornaments are brought to be used within the Andamanese society. The sale or discarding of the ancestral bones made into ornaments was undertaken no other reason than the existing ornaments, or to disentangle previous attractions and ‘anchor’ weight in a different context. This is similar to the recontextualization performed when the Jarawa put on ornaments they have made just before the contact takes place, and putting it on members of the contact team after the contact. The fabrication of the ornaments is itself an event that expresses appropriateness according to the logic of a culture’s received ‘a priori concepts’ (Sahlins 1985: 145), as we see from the way ancestral bone ornaments embody the connection between visible and invisible worlds that sustains the relationship between humans and spirits. Eneyetokabe, ornaments should be read as a text of Andamanese history. Each ornament contains elements disentangled from previous encounters or experiences and interwoven with elements belonging to a new context and sought to be transferred to the other. To make an ornament is to negotiate historical events arising from the attraction between places (countered by being “anchored”) and is simultaneously a historiography of events. The Andamanese were never isolated and never will be. It is we who have failed to read or recognize the “texts” of Andamanese history inscribed on material objects, like ornaments and look for historiography and related consciousness in texts. Andamanese history comprises structured discontinuities, where facts become conceptualized and in which the essential relations are laid out, representing the outcome of history.

QUESTIONS FROM THE OTHER SIDE: COLLECTORS, COLLECTIONS AND MATERIAL CULTURE There is another dimension to the material collected by the Islanders to make body adornments and to deal with contingencies. This is what we may call the afterlife of these ornaments as material culture collected by outsiders to represent the Islanders in a particular state. Collections are assembled from objects either of personal interest to collectors or considered important to the tribals. Colonial collectors, especially military men, appear to have concentrated on the objects made and used by men, such as arrows, tools and the large Andamanese bows, which are taller than their owners and unique in shape (See Man 1932: Plate II, Radciffe-Brown 1922: Plate VI). Other objects much sought after are those used for subsistence activities, such as fishing nets, baskets, pottery and

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ceremonial goods like skulls and bones. By contrast, despite being well represented in collections, items of dress and adornment are documented only casually. Labels such as “worn occasionally by men and women when dancing” indicate the extent of the collectors’ interest in their contexts. Even in more complete studies, such as Radcliffe-Brown’s (part of the collection studied at the Chicago Field Museum), the discussion of dress and adornment tends to be in the main descriptive. In his study of the Andamans, RadcliffeBrown (1922) documented without attempting to analyze the many facets of adornment, including scarification, body paint and ornaments together with leaves and objects placed on the body during ceremonies such as death and initiation (See Radcliffe-Brown 1922: II, XIII). Can it be that what was collected from the Islanders had already been decontextualized by them before it was re-contextualized in the set schemes of Victorian science? Victorian preconceptions about the “naked savage” may be one explanation for the absence of any analysis of dress and adornment (Mouat 1863, Dobson 1875). People with uncovered genitals were considered “primitive” and devoid of a sense of shame (See Chapter 3). To the Victorian traveler, shame was intrinsically linked with the Christian God, the story of Adam and Eve and therefore with civilization (Polhemus 1988:72). “There is no sense of nakedness, no sentiment of shame. Any rudiment of a cincture relates solely to the convergence of the suspension of weapons or other portable object” (Mouat 1863:342). The scientific community only occasionally challenged these ideas. Colonel A. Lane Fox, in his presentation to the Royal Anthropological Institute (1878: 439), noted that, although the Andamanese were naked to European eyes, they were really showing their own ideal of decency and their type of clothing was appropriate for the climate and the insects.28 The collectors represented the Islanders as unchanging, frozen at a particular stage of evolution. For instance Man (1883: Part 3), when discussing the raw materials and techniques utilized by the Andaman Islanders refers to his subjects as ‘savage,’ while acknowledging the astonishing skill with which they put to use natural materials like shells and stones (ibid., 1884:156). He in fact cites the case of models of Andamanese canoes at South Kensington Museum (ibid., 147). The model of the canoe was probably collected by Man himself as an administrator (1869–1901) and as a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute who for his ethnological writings and collections would follow Notes and Queries. According to E. H. Man the canoe was an example of the distinct skill with which the Andamanese made the most of their primitive technology. On the other hand Radcliffe-Brown, who arrived in the Andamans in 1908, in his accounts has a elaborate section on material culture entitled “Techno-

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logical Culture” (ibid., 1964: 407–495) which dealt with the same items of material culture but makes it clear that he has seen the collections in the museums (ibid., 451–452) to note the discrepancies in the museum records and his own observations. However for Radcliffe-Brown it was the first attempt in Andamanese ethnography to connect the material culture with culture, particularly ceremonies and interpret society, much under the influence of Durkheimian writings (see Radcliffe-Brown 1964: chapter V). The classic example is the case of arrows as material culture (ibid., 435–439) and how arrows were used in rituals (ibid., 157, 259). In spite of the two authors having the same inventory of material culture emphasizing on things that were ‘traditional’ and existed before the ‘contact with outsiders’ Radcliffe-Brown seems to have been looking for parallels of Andamanese material culture with other isolated Asiatic Negritos.29 These collections, the accounts and notes accompanying them and the life and work of the individuals involved in their collection together compose a cultural narrative. Narrative is here defined as the subjective focalization of a sequence of events (Bal 1992). This narrative is also a historical text not only of the collection as ethnographic process but also of attempts to represent the Andamanese, an area where different discursive modes can be seen to overlap. Just as different orientations are implied by the disparity in accounts of Andamanese culture separated in time (See the works of Man 1883 and Radcliffe Brown 1922) the question to be addressed is whether different collections reflect different written accounts (in part or whole), or whether they are constituted according to quite separate criteria. We know that the collections are always preceded by some form of classification (Stewart 1993). So would each ethnographic account condition subsequent collections? It seems inevitable that collections and their accompanying documents would retain inter-textual connections with the words used earlier to describe a cultural world and to collect its objects. This can be defined as the ethnographic construction of knowledge, and what is now known in the field of museum studies as the “anthropology of the imaginary” (Karp and Lavine 1991: 378). To arrive at a calibrated understanding of the process Fabian (1983) describes as ‘how anthropology makes its object,’ one must read the collectors’ records of the material culture, their accounts of the culture as well as what the culture reads into the material. As too many studies take the first two perspectives into account without setting them off against the last, we now touch on the Ongee response to museums. The first part of this chapter discussed how for the Islanders ornaments are a means of inscribing history. We know that the same is ostensibly true of collections of material culture in museums, but as has been pointed out by Ruth Phillips (1998) among others, what museums have traditionally neglected are

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the histories subsequent to contact, though these are possible to trace in the adaptation of materials acquired from outsiders. On various occasions I have shown the Ongee illustrations of material culture from museums outside the Andamans (Schwalbe and Gunther: 1991) and once had a rare opportunity to accompany some of those visiting to Port Blair to see its Anthropological Museum. On seeing them represented in curio cabinets, the Ongee said, “All you have is what you outsiders could take! It does not show what we collect— plastic cans and ropes, nails, safety pins, glass bottles from the beach and glossy pictures and shiny metal from the shops. Why is that so?” From the Andamanese perspective the collection remained incomplete. And so one is led to wonder what it is that can really be said to complete a collection. Is it ever possible to have a total collection? We see that the assembled material culture itself constitutes a text on how cultures are represented by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ through history. It is interesting to note that after independence of India in 1954 the Anthropological Survey of India working among the Ongees of Little Andaman with a crew of workers and anthropologists waited for the Ongees to leave the shelters and the orderlies of Survey office would quickly go and dig up the spot under the sleeping platforms to recover dead ancestral bones in absence of the Ongees around (Singh 1991: 218). The Ongees of course were in return provided and paid back in form of ribbons, and soap and rations as long as the supplies lasted, but from the accounts of Edmund Kiro, a long time peon of the Survey office (Singh 1991: 218–19 [in Hindi]) it is clear that the specimens collected from Ongees were not a fact known to the Ongees themselves. The items enumerated by the Ongee would recall the suggestion by Nelson Graburn (1976: 11–12) that, given that the Inuit decorate their homes with manufactured items (plastic flowers from Hong Kong and pictures from magazines), one might argue that their version of “primitive arts”—as in objects taken out of context for aesthetic delectation—is produced by the industrialized world. Even if a total collection is by definition impossible, we come closer to discerning the gaps in any collection once we recognize that each object bears penumbral meanings beyond the immediately visible. These concern the histories indexed by the object, how they arrived there and what they were claimed to connote about the places they came from. It is the social relations forming the contours of these histories that we now explore. In trying to imagine what the Ongee would have made of the colonial obsession with collecting, the importance of the principle of attraction should be borne in mind. For even before the colonizers landed on the island, there had been collectors of bird nests and slave traders who came and claimed what they could, giving things from the outside world in exchange. The Andamanese would have always had a sense of collection as a concern that at-

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tracted outsiders to the Islands, and this may only have been accentuated during colonial rule. And there were indeed numerous collectors and ‘ethnographers’ during the British occupation of the Islands [1788–1947]. Clifton (1911), an orchid collector, reported that at the Homes where many of the Andamanese took refuge, money could be made by the ‘natives’ if they brought as souvenirs for sale things they had fabricated in their forest camps, like baskets and bone ornaments (Ball 1897, Coxon 1915). E.H. Man (1883: 216 Appendix N) indicates that from 1875 to 1882 there was a steady increase in the earnings of the Islanders connected with the Homes. According to the records available, earnings increased from Rs. 1189 to Rs. 2445. What is interesting about this doubling of earnings is that nearly 7.4% was earned by the sale of artifacts made by the Andamanese, which is one of the few categories to show a consistent increase. Furthermore, the practice of paying the Andamanese for these bows and arrows and ornaments meant that a culture of hunting and gathering was being morphed into a culture of payment for labor. The Aborigines were paid both for bringing honeycombs and for finding escaped convicts. The colonial administration would pay five rupees for each escaped prisoner brought from the forest (Man 1883:216). It is here that one locates the shift whereby ‘savage’ hunters and gatherers were inducted into a culture of contract and materialism (incidentally, today the Ongee are paid in glass beads or illegally supply of country liquor for the honey they procure for settlers). The images purveyed by early collectors, ethnographers and administrators helped to formalize a particular mode of perceiving Andamanese culture. It was seen as essentially isolated and pristine and as having secured this distance from the outside world by sustained displays of hostility (Tarling 1960, Mathur 1968, 1985, Portman 1899). Man’s early account (1883) presents the classic image of the tribal dependant on the colonial administration for most material needs, such as iron, glass and tobacco, that they were given on condition that they gathered from the forest all that the outside world might wish to collect as part of the material representation of a unique culture rapidly dying out. The “museum sensibility” and drive to collect were for the early colonial period as much part of historical awareness as the more recent roles of tourist and art collector are for the modern world (cf. Taylor 1994, Stocking 1985:167–91). So the visitors to the island purchased what was on sale at the Home, which provided the basis for future collections despite the fact that the Homes stopped functioning after 1884. The predilection for the things the Islanders made for collectors may be seen as helping to develop the “poetics” of displaying the “other” (Karp and Lavine 1991: 374–75). This is indicated by the notes to the collections in various European museums. It is significant

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that collections made by Man are held not just in England but also in Germany and Austria.30 Yet it is curious that collectors often configured identical sets of objects—arrows, bows, ornaments31 and containers of various forms. At the same time, they never included objects incorporating material from the outside world, as if they sought to deny the historical reality with which the Islanders had to deal on an everyday basis. The “ideal type” may have been set by Man (1882) whose collection, as said earlier, was guided by Notes and Queries in Anthropology put out by the Royal Anthropological Association. These collections are mostly with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Royal Anthropological Institute. Similarly, Radcliffe-Brown is likely to have been influenced by Temple’s lecture of 1904. A Cambridge graduate, Temple served as a civil servant on the Islands from 1895 to 1904. Radcliffe-Brown was doing research in the Andamans from 1906 to 1908 (the collections of Temple and Radcliffe-Brown are both held by the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). But why are Andamanese collections found in so many museums and why do they appear identical when they represent different collectors? The context for these objects finding their way out of the forests into the storage boxes of museums beyond Calcutta and Port Blair would tell us that

Representation of Andamanese material culture as collected and presented by E.H. Man (1883, 1932) Items included in this illustration became the standard for what ought to be included an ideal collection in Europe and America and what ought to be included in an ‘authentic’ representation of Andamanese culture.

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the primary impulse behind such fevered collection was what is called “salvage anthropology.”32 Colonial authorities had initially studied Andamanese culture with the objective of ensuring peaceful co-existence. But as the population rapidly fell prey to foreign diseases, the need to understand the unique status of the Islanders in the evolutionary design assumed urgency, as did the use of records and collections to retain signs of a culture about to become extinct (Edwards 1992:109). Souvenirs from these dying races came to be prized in European and North American collections. The museum was the perfect theatre for witnessing the death throes of an exotic tribe. Whether in England, North America, Germany (and other countries in Europe) or India, all collections of objects from the Islands appear to be modeled on the collection composed by E. H. Man (1882).33 Though these other collections were put together in different times, it seems as if the things collected and displayed by Man set in stone the notion of what constituted an adequate representation of the culture. This makes the process of collecting from the Andamans an act of deliberateness and reinforces idea that a collection is a representation of the thought of the collectors (Alsop 1982:70). Man’s collection however reveals complex social relations within the Andamans as constructed over a period of history within. Yet it is interesting to note that this collection was substantially different from what the Andamanese themselves were collecting to represent the material dimensions of their culture. The collection of certain object-types forms a ‘cultural set’ carrying its own value, which in the case of the Andamans was often composed of baskets, bows and arrows and ornaments. This tendency to privilege a particular ‘cultural set’ in a sense has conditioned the way museums continue to acquire material from other museums to contain, catalogue and display the Andamans.34 But do these “exchange relations” between museums seek to complete collections by ensuring they correspond to ‘cultural sets’ already given or do they ever try to extend further the possibilities of representing a culture?35 The study of the exchanges between cultures together with the culture of objects tells us much about the history and social relations of colonial encounters (see Thomas 1991). Colonial collectors share what we can call a “museum sensibility,” reflected in the fact of their placing objects in museums implicating them, as their ethnographic practice, within a particular period and set of social relations, just as the desires of the curator are implicated in the manner in which the collection is displayed (cf. Lee 1995). But the homogeneity of treatment of Andamanese material culture across museums in different countries today limits explanation in terms of individual colonial histories. To essay a different approach to objects and meanings, we may follow Baudrillard (1981:102–7), who argues that objects in consumer society

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are organized as a system of signs. A painting is only viewed as art once its sign of origin (the signature or authenticated brush-stroke of the painter) invests it with “differential value,” and locates it within the system of signs that is the oeuvre of the painter. A Van Gogh is only valuable to the extent that other Van Goghs confirm that it is a like image. Value thus inheres in neither the object nor its correspondence to a “real world,” but is produced in the relations between multiple objects. Artifacts from the Andamans in public collections do not obviously play the roles either of singular art works or of interchangeable signs. Yet the manner in which the different museum collections repeat each other without expanding an understanding of the culture they claim to re-present, recalls Baudrillard’s discussion of the reduction of culture to a system of signs, which are “self-indexing” without providing fresh purchase on reality. The above analogy must be qualified by the recognition that collections produced over a period of time through different expeditions cannot readily be consigned to a ‘signature style.’ They contain objects that have been subjected to “transvaluation and commodification” (Appadurai 1986: 3–63). Components of culture bound up with one another are separated into objectively discrete entities ready for insertion into a new chain of relations. During the entire process of being procured and exchanged and finally securing a place in the collection which brings its multiple objects into relation with the collector as with one another, objects acquire what Igor Kopytoff (1986: 68–70) describes as a “biography.” This is how it is argued that collection, as both process and as product, generates an intricate web of inter-references to other expeditions, collections and ethnographers. But is it possible to tease out lines of comparison and contrast between collection for and in museums and the materials collected by the Andamanese to fashion their own ornaments? For material culture as collected by outsiders and the materials collected within a culture do reveal very different dimensions of historical change. Relations established in the material object that make up a “biography” in context of Andamans also presents a problem. As what material culture is collected and what material culture is made by the Andamanese differ, it may be best understood by our distinction for literary texts being biographical and autobiographical. What we see in museums as Andamanese objects and images, tend to be re-presentation, it really has no autobiographical voice for it self. I would like to argue that what Andamanese objects within the museum context have is a biography that is written by collectors putting it in a collection and forming a set. In other words the autobiography of the object is lost to its attributed biography. This in a way is to insist that instead of representing just the “Andamanese” we must present the discourse of how the Andamanese present their subjectivities through objects, as opposed “our”

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representation of them as subjects through objects. Objects that are put on the body by the Andaman Islanders and subsequently removed encompass time between constitutive moments of contact that have structured the history and representation of the islanders since early colonial times to present. It is by focusing on the process that I want to point to the possibilities of a metabiography of Andamanese material culture that records the constant changing and reconfiguring of objects that are seldom brought into the museum. The anthropology of material culture in the Andamans would be enriched by the anthropology of collection. Recent scholarly works argue that undertaking an anthropological investigation of the culture as exhibited interrogates the very culture of anthropological representations (Breckenridge 1989, Clifford 1988, Stocking 1985, Pearce 1994, Price 1989, Hooper-Greenhill 1995). However, collections of Andamanese material culture in most museums are held in storage and not displayed. But can the study of collectors’ notes and museum transactions tell us something about curatorial assumptions concerning the cultures “conserved”?36 This becomes clearer if we compare the observations of Fox (1878) and Stafford (1901) on the collections of Man and Abott respectively. The two identical collections and sets of comments are treated as means of documenting the lifestyle and belief system of a people, with little substantial explanation or elaboration of ethnological understanding. This contrasts with the writings of Man (1932) and Radcliffe Brown (1922) who when collecting material culture wrote about the objects in their contexts. The Abott collection, like certain other collections, provides no such ethnological information. All we have is an account from Kloss (1903) as to his relations with Abott. This leaves unanswered questions of how the collection was compiled and what cultural assumptions underlie its structure. Reporting on the Abott collection, Stafford (1901) in fact notes that Abott himself had contact with the ethnographer and administrator E. H Man and was aware of the Andamanese as represented by outsiders as people “who do not hesitate to kill” outsiders (1902:477). Apart from the study of the collection notes of Abott himself, supported by a reading of Kloss, can the objects collected such as various forms of arrows from within the islands be mapped to understand the relations not only existing among the Islanders, but also between the various explorers and collectors in the region? Or were the material objects simply purchased from the Andamanese, and therefore already decontextualized within the Andamanese world, which facilitated their recontextualation as objects for sale and collection by the outside world? As in the preceding analysis of the production of image and text in visual ethnography, we may discern a relationship between the writings of collectors and the culture of Andamans, which demands further investigation. This would have to take into account how the Andamanese themselves think of the

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material they use in their culture. To consider the museum collection and the collection process as an ongoing historical and ethnographic process of representing a culture, brings together issues of subject, object and “other” in a polysemic field that can reveal the dynamics of how a culture and its image, its tangible objects and intangible identity come be objectified and institutionalized. This can suggest how a culture acquires an “exchange value,” in producing anthropological knowledge of a culture, which is put on display. Does this mean that the ‘completion of a collection, from the field’ is accomplished only by subsequent exchanges between public collections and auctioneers of primitive artifacts? In other words, are decisions as to which objects will be collected to represent culture going to be directed by the operations of a globalized art market? Or will the irreducible facticity of the objects collected under field conditions still condition a culture’s representation?37 Perhaps both processes have always been involved, given the fact that scholars have often commented upon both the collections and the observations on Andamanese culture (Fox 1878, Stafford 1901, Pitt-Rivers 1882). Such scholarly work created a textual discourse reflecting upon the nature of ethnographic understanding and of the ethnological collection. As a consequence the various representations effected by collections of objects cannot be regarded as “things out there,” but as cultural constructions composed of what Clifford (1988: 215–253) regards as “ethnographic collection.”

NOTES 1. See for example D’Azevedo (1958), Fischer (1961), Schneider (1966), Jopling (1971), Warren and Andrews (1977), Greenhalgh and Megaw (1978), Hatcher (1985), Coote and Shelton (1992), Gell (1998). 2. See Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 26), Man (1932:33–35). Among the Ongee, who share much with Jarawa culture, the division is between Ehansakwe, or pig hunters, and Ehambelakwe, the turtle hunters (Pandya 1993: 8, 23). 3. This point has intrigued me especially. In 1993 I observed the Sentinelese, who have remained the most isolated owing to the location of North Sentinel Island, where they are the sole residents. The iron blades attached to their adzes are exceptionally large and likewise their arrowheads are larger and heavier than those other tribes manufacture. Old photographic and museum records confirm this feature. One wonders where they acquire so much metal and how they shape it so precisely. A large cargo ship was abandoned on the coral reefs of their Island around 1991.The dealer of scrap metal commissioned to undertake the salvage operation reported that his staff and he had often observed the Sentinelese arriving on the ship which lay on its side to gather partially disassembled metal pieces that had been cut up by the welding torches of the salvage team. But how do the Sentinelese transform the material gathered into what

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we describe as forms of material culture? The case of the Jarawa is another instance of the worth of tracing the history and technology of material culture creation hitherto ignored in the case of the Andamanese. They used often to collect metal scraps from around the settlement and shape it as required, but it was only in 2001 that those who came in regular contact with outsiders picked up the technique of heating metal scraps in an open fire and beating it into the shapes desired. 4. During a survey of the Middle Strait in August 1860, the crew of the Clyde found some iron wreckage in a hut, and some of the Islanders were seen in clothing ‘though there were no other signs of shipwrecked persons’ (Portman 1899:300). When Portman visited the western coast of the Andamans in October 1883, he saw that a number of canoes ‘were going to a wreck on the west coast of Middle Andaman and that most of the Andamanese from the North Andaman had gone there to loot’ (Portman 1899:658) The ship concerned was Scottish Chieftain, which had gone ashore at Bluff Point. While the crew had managed to get away in their boats to the Coco Island, ‘everything else movable had been taken away by the Andamanese, who had cut holes in the deck to try and get at the cargo…jute and seed which had swollen and rotted’ (Portman 1899). 5. The Field Museum at Chicago has Radcliffe Brown’s collection of about 30 such ornaments, all dated as having been collected in the last three months of his stay on the island in 1910. According to the publications of Mann, The Museum of Mankind in London also has a collection of ornaments, inspired by the Royal Anthropological Society and the journal Notes and Queries. 6. Phenomena paralleled in the context of India at large as shown in the analysis of Breckenridge (1989). 7. According to Portman (1899) and Ball (1897), the Andamanese at the Home were given training and encouraged to make cane baskets and furniture and were given as payment things they wanted from the local store. 8. See Basu 1990, Chakraborty 1990, Pandit 1990, and Sarkar 1990. 9. During my 1992 fieldwork, I showed the Ongee photographs of the ornaments part of the Radcliffe-Brown collection at Chicago and they could easily recognize the traditional designs, functions and names of ornaments. 10. Curiously enough, a footnote on the same page suggests “In order to carry the analysis further it would be necessary to consider in detail the whole question of the relation of art and ceremonial, and that of the social function of art which is involved in it, and also to deal with the notion of “value” as it appears in primitive societies. The material from the Andaman Island is not suitable for the discussion of these problems.” 11. This was particularly true whenever women were included in the contact team. The Jarawa were particularly intrigued by the presence of women from the outside world, whose dress served to camouflage gender difference. Their curiosity often led to women in the contact party losing their clothes, which the establishment interpreted as an attack by the Jarawa on the chastity of Indian women. My own encounter with one such incident suggested to me that the shock and discomfort felt by the members of the contact party was not occasioned by sexual overtones from Jarawa males, for

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Jarawa women also wanted to tear off clothes to find out more about the female members. It must be mentioned that male members often felt entitled to take liberties with ‘naked’ Jarawa women. Ironically the nakedness of the ‘native’ women is perceived very differently by Indian men, even if when it comes to their own women the very attempt to remove clothing is equated with ‘rape.’ Rather as one group’s revolution is for the other rebellion (Max Gluckman 1965). 12. Orders of Andaman Nicobar Administration No. XI-3/AAJVS/91-Department of Tribal Welfare. 13. During contact missions, generally after the Jarawa are spotted on the coastline, the ship anchors about 2 to 3 km. away from the beach, and the boats are lowered to take across team members with the gifts. It takes them at least two hours after the ship has anchored to arrive ashore. 14. This resembles the power to ‘attract’ which brings individuals fame among communities linked by the Kula system of ceremonial exchange, (Malinowski 1922; Leach and Leach 1983; Munn 1986). 15. In this range of important things is included body decoration, through the use of paint and ornamentation that could be specific figurative subject as well as representational (Faris 1972: 56). Following C. S. Peirce, meaning may be called iconographic when the painted and ornamented body, an artwork, resembles what it represents (cf Munn 1973). 16. In Radcliffe-Brown’s account of the Islanders (1964) Appendix A (pp. 476–485) a good detailed account of what is regarded as “technical culture” includes sections on ornamentation, scarification, body painting, and personal ornament. 17. This is much like suspending from bracelets charms from different contexts or tattooing skin from time to time (King 1972, Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 1992). It also resembles the reluctance to remove labels or flags stuck on one’s baggage to mark places visited. Bracelets and baggage embody, on an object, which signifies the subject, the subject’s relation to different contexts. 18. It tends to be assumed that hunters and gatherers prefer to confine their belongings to a limited number of small sized items. It only appears that the Ongee keep a limited number of things because they are careful to distribute them in different places. In recent years I have observed a growing preference for storing their collection in metal trunks with locks. In 1992, the annual budget of the Administration of the Islands in fact sanctioned the distribution of a metal trunk with a lock and water resistant paint to each adult Ongee. It must be noted that Ongee collect things by constant practice of demanding them from one another within the community, which redistributes them from place to place. This perhaps excessive rapacity to collect is qualified by the fact that they lose interest in a thing over a period of time, so that it is left lying around without being either discarded or cared for. This is also the case with the ornaments they make. 19. See the discussion of demand sharing in Ingold (1999: 408) “No one put under pressure to receive what they have not asked for” conflicts with western ideal of generosity, construed negatively (Peterson 1993). 20. During my first visit to the Ongee settlement in 1983, I had to explain to them that the place I had come from was very different from theirs, and different even from

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New Delhi, which a group of them had visited to participate in Republic Day celebrations. My ethnographic research project as a graduate student was explained to them in terms of learning how to live in a forest as they did. Initially they were very skeptical. They thought that I might be recording the details of living in the forest to help others to come and settle in the forest. I assured them that after learning about living in the forest, I would write it all up, but not bring people here to live in ‘their forest.’ 21. Ongee distinguished ‘my things’ as those discarded by me after use, from things that I was using, or which remained unused and were seen by them as things they could expect to receive. However, other items that I gave them as gifts (not discards) were seen as ‘things they took from me,’ which led to some coming and complaining that “he says he took the new knife from you I also want to take one!” Implicit in this distinction is the idea that I gave something or had it taken from me because I wanted to attract them towards me, but what they took, the discards, were regarded as a means of transferring my “attracting” powers to their own activities. 22. This way of organizing ideas about things is an important way to understand the perception of what anthropologist does by the ‘natives.’ If the anthropologist introduces himself or herself as the producer of something (for instance a book) the response is very different from the response generated by saying “I am here to do research.” If local administrators are told “I do research and teach” and if your subject and topic of research appear too esoteric, one often encounters an expression that seems to say, “Are you serious? You are paid to look at this? Will you pay me for showing you all this, given that I already know what you seek to know.” However, the common individual (not necessarily an ‘appropriate informant’), on being told, “I am here to make a book (a thing) or learn about how things are done” can be expected to accord one a more positive reception. I feel that telling people exactly what one expects to produce, as a tangible object, is preferable by way of introduction to one’s project and oneself to saying something about the process involved in producing the thing. Some Ongee remembered that what previous visitors had done was to come and quickly collect “things” and the visitors specified the list of collectible things like blood samples, hair, measurements of body parts, bows and arrows and words for this and that. They would give things in return and leave. Some of the older Ongee associated this with the collector, natural historian and anthropologist Cipriani (1966). Cipriani who was on the island in 1950s was seen as an outsider collecting things like plants, birds and animals and giving in return things like knives and fishing hooks (See Pandya 1991 for more historical details). The Ongee felt that they never really got to know these researchers, because they never understood what they were going to make out of what they had found attractive to collect on the island. This point was made to me when in 1997–98 I brought some Ongees to Anthropological Museum at Port Blair where part of Cipriani’s collection was on display. Surprised to see the collection from Ongee culture the Ongee group asked what good it was to keep there in a glass box all that lies scattered, broken and discarded around campsites? 23. In 1984, when I was leaving Dugong Creek, the Ongee women asked me to bring them ‘nice’ folding umbrellas. I did take back umbrellas in 1989, and the Ongee

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were delighted with the gifts, but many were dismayed by the fact that not all umbrellas had floral prints but polka dots, small-frogs or pictures of the umbrella itself. 24. From ethnographic accounts and museum collections we know of ejeme where the whole skull with the exception of the lower jawbone is used. The Ongee are aware of the custom of using the skull for the ornament, calling it ejeme-goterange, but deny that it is practiced in Little Andaman. They claim that such ornaments were usually made by the groups living in Middle Andaman and Rutland (mainly Jarawa). 25. Among the Ongee as well as the Jarawa, it is the norm to discontinue the use of any word that happens to be the name of a dead person. If a dead person were called B, the community would create a new word to convey the meaning of word B. Even if the individual speaker forgets the new word, they say, “I remember having forgot that!” It will be understood that is a reference to a tabooed word, so listeners will suggest the names of individuals who have lost relatives in the past. They can then identify the word the speaker has “remembered to forget.” This culture of language use as a material also exemplifies the feature of no loss, as the word is declared as remember to forget. Something that is absent within the collective exchange, yet present in the collective imagination. Death that leads to the body becoming invisible is reflected in language by a word that disappears, but the absence is acknowledged in due respect to the spirit. 26. See Gell (1998: 225–7) life force product of lifetime’s activity in social world skin transactable person carving a temporally dispersed object right to reproduce land rights indexed by this visible form transacting memory as conscious public strategy memory power to shape course of world rather than mere passive registration of events undermine distinction commonly made between material and mental with respect to material culture. 27. In proposing the distinction between aesthetic and artistic Boas writes, “The song of a bird may be beautiful; we may experience pleasure in viewing the form of landscape or in viewing the movements of an animal; we may enjoy a natural taste or a smell, or a pleasant feeling; . . .all these have aesthetic values but they are not art. On the other hand, a melody, a carving, a painting, a dance, a pantomime are aesthetic productions, because they have been created by our own activities . . .Form and creation by our own activities are essentially features of art.” He makes a further useful distinction between two sources of artistic effect, “the one based on form alone, the other on ideas associated with form.” (Boas 1955: 12–13). 28. In English language the term naked is a cultural category for something natural it has no direct binary opposite to it. Perhaps it is the ultimate western sensibility of cultural construct of nature (Old Testament: Incident in the Garden of Eden), much like the notion of incest in writings of Levi-Strauss. We think of various ways to express opposite of naked by ideas of covering. In the culture of the Jarawas and Ongees the language has no term to translate the categorical idea we have of ‘naked’ but what we would say as ‘not naked’ is conveyed by term Gukwey implying some thing that is hidden. So being bare undressed or naked is not hiding in the Andamanese tribal world-view. Interestingly the term koylaboi (cloth) means skin like and kaankapoh, (stitched garments) is a word also for the molten skin of snake. On finding kaankapoh in the forest it is always buried in the ground as it is seen as a major ritual threat to life of infants.

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29. It must be noted that Radcliffe-Brown (1922:Appendix A) points out fascinating parallels between Andamanese and Asiatic material culture, like the use of plant materials and the absence of bird feathers in body ornaments. 30. Collections made by E. H. Man form ‘sets’ held in Brighton, Oxford (England) Germany (the Staatiches Museum für Völkerkunde, Dresden and the Museum für Völkerkude, Leipzig) and Austria (the Museum für Volkerkunde, Vienna) (See Carter 1996: 44–46). Furthermore, while collections in England and the United States are associated with individuals in some way directly involved with the Andamans, collections in Europe are exact replicas of the “set” created by E. H. Man, despite having been contributed to by individuals who procured Andamanese objects from the “Art Market.” We can see this in the museums in Hamburg and Berlin on ethnology. 31. Bone ornaments were an invariable part of every collection, but their presence was seldom explained beyond their role as ritual objects and trophies. For a typical example of early writing on ornaments from the Andamans (See Thomson 1882). 32. The term is associated with ethnologists like Adolf Bastian and Franz Boas, who urged anthropologists to save some artifacts of the cultures being pushed to extinction in New Guinea and North America in the 1880s and 1890s. 33. The Smithsonian, Washington D. C holds the Abott collection, the Field Museum in Chicago holds the A .R. Radcliffe-Brown collection and the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford holds the E. H. Man collection. 34. By sifting through the ethnographic and historical records we can uncover how the “discourse” formed around the ‘primitive hunters and gatherers’ works. The existing literature indicates that like the role played by guides like Notes and Queries on Anthropology (Urry 1972) in ethnographic projects within the British anthropological tradition, the material culture of the Islands was also subjected to scholarly enquiry, commentary on collecting (Thomson 1882, Safford 1902, Portman 1896a, Pitt-Rivers 1882, Man 1882, Haughton 1863, Fox 1878). This informed the distinctions made regarding other cultural features such as language as well as physical anthropology and natural history (Busk 1866, Clark 1874, Colebrooke 1795, Day 1870, 1879, Dobson 1875, 1877, Duckworth 1902, Flower 1880, 1881, 1885, Man 1901, 1923, Temple 1899, 1908, Zide and Pandya 1989). However, the changing nature of historical contact with the peoples of the islands has never been correlated with the objects collected by different ethnographic writers (Man 1882, Radcliffe-Brown 1922, Kloss 1903, Cipriani 1966). Many of the writings on the cultures on the Island may be subsumed under the genre of “expedition and observational descriptions” (Bellor 1857, Blair 1793, Haughton 1861, Mouat 1862, 1863, Temple 1930). 35. See Elsner and Cardinal 1994:13–23, Stewart 1993. 36. See Pearce 1992. 37. In summer of 2001 after a lecture at Humboldt University, Berlin Ethnological Museum was very kind to open it’s storage in the basement, and let me gaze upon about 200 objects clustered as “Material culture” from Andaman Islands. Officials with hands covered in latex gloves, very proudly pulled out a series of shelf that were labeled as “Andamanese Textiles.” I had no idea what the “Andamanese Textile” could be. I very confidently argued that the Andamanese never had so called “their” textiles. After careful re-examination with the museum official who hade taken care

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of large material culture from various parts of Asia, I convinced her that the pieces were not like “Tapa” from Pacific but were regular cut up pieces of Black dyed cotton cloth, that had been painted in red and white clay. May be I had it all wrong after years of observation, limited study of the available archival material, and what seems to me long time I had spend doing field work among the groups of Jarawas and Ongees. Gell (1998) has argued that the formal analysis of objects should start from their efficacy to create and maintain particular social relations. While agreeing that objects are in this sense vital to the social process, the effects of finished objects tell us only part of the story. The production and exchange of artifacts sets up a whole series of social relations. Yet the production process is never one-way, for, it is equally apparent that people are produced through interaction with the material world. This is particularly the case with things in the Andamanese community, where baring or wearing of objects signify both contact with outsiders and interaction among themselves. The fabricated meanings of what Berlin museum had, is not necessarily deceptive as it did serve the ocular power of distant Europeans who would be bewildered by the presence of “Savage” having fabrics. What the museum held and classified was actually samples of clay painting done by the Andaman Islanders. The collector of “Textile” had ingeniously got the subjects to objectify a cultural representation for the “outsiders” as photographic technique was not available then. What interests me is that right or wrong the “Andamanese Textile collection” represents the process of objectifying the Andamanese subjects for the museum. Further more what are textiles for within the Andamanese culture? What historical position the textile has attained really in context of Andamanese material culture?

Chapter Five

Materiality Mapped

“At the present day there is only one body of the Andamanese still persistently hostile and these are so called Jarawas of the interior of the South Andamans. These Jarawas, since about 1870 have made repeated attacks on isolated parties of convicts and forest workers and on the friendly Andamanese. Punitive expeditions have been sent against them on several occasions, and attempts to set up friendly relations with them have been made by leaving presents in the huts, and by capturing some of them and keeping them for a time at Port Blair. At present time the Jarawas are as hostile as ever” Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 10–11

The previous chapters closed with reflections on the way objects have been used in museums around the world to make the Andamanese accessible to ethnographic and historical understanding. The present chapter is interested in how the materials the Andamanese have collected from the outside world evoke the history of cultural encounters. For not only do objects recall past encounters, their adaptation can be seen as a means of internalizing change. Collecting the materials they provide and configuring these in new relations with one other and with materials used earlier accommodate ‘Outsiders.’ A look at the materials chosen to fabricate objects shows us that the apparent simplicity of the object is achieved in complex ways.1 This complexity derives from the nature of a society like that of the Jarawa, where actions are conditioned by multiple and sometimes competing influences from within and without. The history of the interactions of the last two centuries can be traced in the multi-stranded material culture that incorporates materials gifted by colonial settlers. The complexity is compounded by the Andamans having become part of the independent nation-state and the Jarawa having since 1999 151

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entered a phase of contact with the outside world, so that they are subjected with increasing regularity and intensity to the “regimes of value” (Appadurai 1986: 4, 15) specific to the circulation of objects in modernization and globalization, without necessarily sharing the cultural assumptions of their exchange partners. Objects assume heightened meaning in relation to historical encounters. The nature of relations between tribal and settler during colonialism and globalization may be gleaned from details of gift giving in archival records and also decoded from the bodies of the Jarawa today. The previous chapter discussed how eneyetokabe (Ongee ornaments) are designed to bring disparate contexts into relation—the living and the dead, human and animal, and today the worlds of settler and tribal. Concerned with objects in specifically social contexts, this chapter discusses how Jarawa ornaments make visible the relations established both with the Jarawa and by them. Ornaments signpost important conjunctures in Jarawa history, in terms of the contexts in which they are made and their materials acquired, enabling us to delineate historical “practices of structure” (Sahlins 1981). So instead of dwelling on the intentions with which objects were used by colonizers, I am concerned with the improvisational moment of their being adapted as ornament. What the Jarawa made of these encounters is inferred from their practices of “ethnographic collection” (Clifford 1988: 215–253).

RED SASHES AND NAKED BODIES The process of clearing the forests around Port Blair began in 1870, after it had been decided to set up a penal settlement on the Islands. Camps set up in the forest were usually under the supervision of an orderly, who was called a patta-wala because he was identified by a broad red sash (patta) worn diagonally across his chest. Wearing iron shackles on their ankles that they had been made to make themselves, prisoners cut away at the dense undergrowth to create a pathway. This slow, painful labor was dominated by the fear of attack from forest tribes. As is discussed more fully in Chapter Five, reports suggest the primary targets of attack were the orderlies wearing red sashes and that the tribals were quite different in their attitude towards ordinary prisoners. Yet, after removing the red cloth from the bodies of the orderlies they had killed, they killed the prisoners as well, to take the iron fetters worn by them.2 Thus the red sashes acted as a banner in the dense forest, marking the presence of the iron so desired by the tribals. In the forests yet to be mapped by the colonizers, red cloth provided a spatial reference point. Until 1878, the colonial administration feared undertaking a survey of the forest lest they

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meet the fate of the prisoners clearing the forest.3 This posed a serious problem as the land could not be surveyed and the resources of the jungle tapped until a path was cleared. So great was the fear of the tribes that thatching material for the prisoners’ dwellings was imported from Rangoon, despite being abundantly available in the forest. From the point of view of the Andamanese, however, an important discovery had been made. The iron that hitherto coastal dwellers had gathered from shipwrecks and exchanged with forest dwellers could now be got within the forest. At first red cloth signified only the availability of metal to the Andamanese, but as it came to be seen as an essential means of establishing ties between the worlds of tribal and settler, other associations were interwoven with it. Lieutenant Colebrooke observed in 1794, “they go quite naked, the women wearing only at times a kind of tassel, or fringe, round the middle, which is intended merely for ornament, as they do not betray any signs of bashfulness when seen without it.” This description would fit the Jarawa. Noticing the connection made between red cloth and iron, the colonial administration initiated practices that would structure contact with the Jarawa for over a century to come. Strips of red cloth were left at abandoned campsites along with pieces of metal, glass beads and mirrors, in the hope that such items would effect a change in the attitude of Jarawa, who, even when not overtly hostile, appeared to resent outsiders (Portman 1899: 717–719). Gifts of red cloth became integral to encounters between the tribals and colonial authorities. Indications of this appear from 1879, in the reports by Dr. F. Day, an explorer who contacted tribal groups in different parts of the Islands (Portman 1899: 571). According to Day, red cloth began to be given at contact events by way of suggesting the likelihood of subsequent gifts of metal. Though it was observed that the cloth often ended up being shredded by the Jarawa and plaited (Portman 1899: 571), it would have been recognized as a signal of the arrival of the contact party with presents. It is likely that more than one meaning was invested in the cloth. It was a means of initiating relations, but colonial authorities might have also hoped it would play a part in getting the Andamanese to adopt clothing and other ‘civilized’ practices. For the tribals, the red sash that had once signaled the availability of iron now promised a whole range of gifts. And it has continued to be used in contact events initiated by the Indian government. Traditionally, Jarawa men and women adorn themselves with headbands and neckpieces, and women always wear some kind of band around the waist. Adornments for the head and neck use twisted shreds of red cloth to form tassel-like extensions in front. These are invariably made from the cloth received during contact with outsiders, whether colonial authorities or the government of independent India. When handed over at the contact event, the red cloth is

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at once torn into strips to serve as an ornament. Over a period of time it is torn into smaller strips that are intertwined to make the tassel. At first it was the women who made the ornaments for both sexes, using plant fiber to make cords, which were covered in beeswax and red clay paint. Women wear only a thin belt of these tassels, known as onningey. As a consequence in the photographic records we find the incorporation of fabric gained from previous contact events. We can see that the use of red cloth to adorn the otherwise naked body of a Jarawa or one of the Great Andamanese plays on a host of associations with interactions of the past. Two points in time are evoked—the cloth bears a synecdochal relation to the present contact event and a metonymic relation to other encounters in history. At a simpler level, the domain of what is broadly termed body adornment shows us how a process of change continues into the present. If we compare what are classified as ornaments in collections with those we see used today, it becomes clear that colonial settlement led to changes that were visible from as early as the time these collections were being made.4 Even as the objects that adorned the Jarawa body were being collected, the Andamanese were being provided with material to adorn their bodies, including

Body coverings as recorded in 1875. Two Great Andamanese men from the north. The one on the left wears a traditional cincture decorated with shells. The other wears a piece of imported cloth with traditional strings. Cloth was procured from the Andaman Home, opened seven years after the British had some control, and very few Great Andamanese had direct contact with outsiders. (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association)

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Jarawa girl with the new strips of red cloth given by the contact party. Note all other body adornments are made of shredded plant material.

Enmey (left) and his mates at G. B. Pant Hospital in Port Blair, displaying ornaments and clothes acquired in Port Blair.

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strips of red cloth (Portman 1899: 731). But the use to which Jarawa put stitched garments was quite different from what settlers had envisaged. The latter had wished the Jarawa to wear as clothes what the Jarawa chose instead to turn into ornaments. This is because, up until 1999, adornment for the Jarawa was not about covering up the body or putting on garments (kaankapoh). The body was ‘covered’ only with clay paint and ornaments of plant fiber and shell, and the plant materials used to make coverings for the pubic area are more like veils than clothing proper. Instead, adornment was about adapting material acquired in ritualized contact events, so that cloth (koylawoie) became an increasingly important component of body adornment. Only after 1999, when they started to initiate contacts with settlers, did Jarawa appear willing to accept old or new kaankapoh (garments) as something to “put on.” The acceptance of kolawoie in the colonial period and the act of wearing kaankapoh in the present both constitute communicative practices which provide between them a measure of the change in the relations between settler and tribal. When the Jarawa started to contact those outside the forest in 1999, many were disconcerted to see them fully clothed. It was thought that this would become a major health hazard and, more surprisingly, endanger Jarawa culture. (Mukhopadhyay 2002: 18 and Andaman and Nicobar Information 2003: 16, 33). Historical records help us piece together the process by which objects were collected and distributed among the Andamanese. Such reconstruction needs to attend to the interactive process rather than the object in itself if we want to arrive at insights into the relations between the Andamanese and the outside world. Exchange is best understood as conveying something about a developing process rather than established relations, a process that continues to evolve today on the Islands. The nature and degree of adornment and clothing constitute signs whose historicity is plain, in that they are known to have resonated differently at different stages of the relations between “the naked people” and “those who are not naked,” and they accrue further meaning in being exchanged to take forward this history of relations. Colonial records mention men who misbehaved with naked Andamanese women, leading to problems of order during contact events (Symes 1800: 135). But in recent contact events it has been reported that the clothes of women in the contact party make them objects of Jarawa curiosity, particularly males. My own observations suggest there may not be anything sexual about this curiosity. Both men and women try to feel the bodies of outsiders (whether male and female) through their clothes, in order to estimate differences of gender or in size (Mukherjee 2003: 184). In contemporary contact events, the curiosity to see and touch the body, whether covered (as of outsiders) or uncovered (as of the Jarawa) eventually leads to the divestiture of clothing. The visual impact of

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naked/clothed bodies together with the material detachability of ornaments and clothes constitute the dynamic of history, as a series of contact events defined by stripping items off the body or putting them on the body. There are various approaches to understanding the changes brought about by colonialism and the encounter between cultures. The theory of acculturation sees the local culture as being taken over and submerged by the culture of the new arrivals. This may be seen as a benign change, and labeled “development,” or as less positive and as leading to cultural loss. From the second perspective, there is little change and traditions are maintained, and this formed the primary model for many anthropologists, who emphasized the ethnographic present. The most nuanced view of change stresses hybridity, and the way new cultural forms emerge from the encounter of established cultural systems (Rowlands 1998). The case of Andaman Islands and its three tribal groups, the Great Andamanese, the Ongee and the Jarawa present a peculiar case of sustained colonialism, where each perspective offers insights into a different period. After the exit of the British, the dominant group of ‘outsiders’ until 1947, the Andamanese have continued to occupy the position of the ‘Other’ in relation to the Indian administration and immigrants from the mainland. If the British administration saw them as savages who needed to be tamed and the Indian administration saw them as primitives who needed to be protected and brought into the mainstream. The increased interaction between the Jarawa and the outside world in the last seven years has led to rapid transformations in the Jarawa way of life, but they are still seen as (an albeit less threatening) Other. The Great Andamanese, the earliest to come in contact with the colonial forces have after Independence become the most acculturated and ‘developed’ group. By contrast, the Ongee entered a phase of rapid ‘cultural loss’ around the 1960s. But since 1999 the Jarawa can be seen to have exhibited signs of hybridity. So interaction with the same groups of outsiders has affected each of the tribal communities differently. The language of official policy has inevitably evolved from references to controlling the savage to discussing the preservation of primitive culture. What have remained constant are interactions where outsiders give the tribals gifts that are incorporated into their practices of adornment. This suggests that the fabrication of these ornaments marks an “iconic turn” (the establishment of a visual medium for communication) in the history of relations between the Jarawa and outsiders, whether colonial settlers, the Indian State or the tourists in the age of globalization. For it should be noted that these historical divisions hold meaning only from the perspective of the State or immigrants from the mainland. The design of Jarawa ornaments register a sense of history according to which the same pattern of relations persists across the changes in the political economy of the world outside.

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It continues to be debated among anthropologists whether colonialism was responsible for far-reaching and irrevocable changes or whether the social structures of colonized areas remained in the main undisturbed. Are the forms of sociability and ways of representing the world in the areas studied by ethnographers irreducibly different from those of the west or have they been significantly influenced by western economic practices during the last few centuries (Foster 1995, Strathern 1998, Thomas 1991)? I would argue that the way the debate tends to be framed suggests a vision of historical change and the relative agency of groups that is worth modifying. Instead of ‘history’ arriving from outside to unsettle an established way of life, it is possible for change to be negotiated by both parties. The fact that initially the needs and assumptions of each group cannot be fully translated into the discourse of the other leads interaction to assume a ritualized character (Pandya 1997). Outsiders and native Islanders establish between them a field of social relations that are perpetuated through the movement of goods, gifts, and ideas. Neither group is left untouched by the process of social and cultural change. These changes have not, however, led to either the convergence of both cultures or the assimilation of one to the other. Throughout, they have created new forms of difference. Both cultures retain a sense of their mutual distinctness, but the discursive formulation of this distinctness changes continually. Andamanese society and culture has changed in the last two centuries. Andamanese have not become more like the outsiders then they were, yet nor have they become any less like the outsiders. To emphasize a point made earlier, the relations between the Andamanese and their colonizers are similar in kind to the relations between the Andamanese and the Indian settlers. Instead of developing points of convergence, the tribal communities and the settlers have worked to maintain their mutual differences. This chapter attempts to provide a working model for change in Andamanese society which takes into account its complexity and internal contradictions.

CULTURE PERFORMED Recent studies of colonialism have discussed the extent to which the rule imposed by an alien culture is maintained through theatrical display and performance. This might have been in continuation of Cohn (1996: 128–9) quotes a report which sees the Great Durbar held in Delhi in 1911 as an occasion for Europe ‘to show the Orient that it, too, can display itself in brilliant plumage.’ It was also the case that the ‘rituals of colonial administration may have created an appearance of dominance and order’ greater than their ‘practical control’ or the extent of ‘transformation of indigenous life’ (Thomas

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1994:12). Cohn indicates that the reutualization of behavior as in case of Nizam and ceremonial regalia, walking stick marked the white sahibs’ insouciance before masses—a seditious touch (Cohn 1996:120). Here we find a reduction of complex codes to metonyms, to define India as land of rules, to save effort of understanding, any deviation punished (Cohn: 168). It follows that matters of representation were critical for the colonized subject as well (Lips 1966, Nandy 1988, Raychaudhuri 2002). Not only was it part of what was expected of them—‘controlled mimesis is an essential component of socialization and discipline (Taussig 1993:219)—it was part of what they sought for themselves. For, constantly aware of the white man’s monopoly over rights, possessions and prestige, the colonial subject would nurse fantasies of trying to ‘resemble him to the point of disappearing in him’ (Memmis 1965: 164). These virtual exchanges naturally took a form shaped by the kind of interaction established between ruler and native. As we saw in Chapter Three, after the establishment of a penal settlement on the Islands in 1858, native peoples of Andamans were occasionally enlisted to track down escaped convicts, but this “Jungle Police” was not as formalized a body as the Australian Native Police, which was also instituted in the 1850s. For the latter, as Mary Mackay has discussed, their “ambivalence of identity” and “lack of real authority” led to them to try to adopt the trappings of an identity associated with power, like the English language and elegant clothes (Creed and Hoorn 2001: 58). The native Andamanese was concerned not with these accoutrements of power, seeking to establish within what Paul Lyons describes as “a regime of fear,” a “theatre of barter to which both parties bring knowledge’s and in which both fulfill desires to some degree unintelligible to the other.” (Creed and Hoorn 2001: 135). However wary of the intentions of those giving gifts, they accepted these as it allowed them to elicit or even demand more gifts. From observations on the behavior of the Andamanese among the British we get an idea of the demands made on them, and of how far they were willing to accept these. Mrs. Talbot Clifton, an orchid collector who visited the Islands in 1907, commented on the fact that native Andamanese were expected to be dressed in the presence of settlers. She also described them as “shy” about being photographed without clothes (Clifton 1911). It seems that for the Andamanese theatre consisted not of permitting costumes to be put on their bodies like actors, but of the ‘act’ of removing these when it suited them. Stanley W. Coxon (1915), posted in the Islands in 1876, was fascinated with the possibilities of photographing the “natural Andamanese,” and his recollections of native women at a sports event organized in 1876 on Ross Island show how imposed ‘discipline’ of clothes was got round. The episode marks not just the ability of the tribals to rid themselves of what they saw as an

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artificial encumbrance, but the delight of the settlers in the spectacle of what they strove assiduously to cover up: . . . Andamanese live on the outside island in a state of absolute nature. Whenever permitted to cross over to Ross Island, it was the duty of one of the officials to see that their nakedness was covered. . . . On this particular occasion the precaution had been taken of wrapping the entrants for the ladies’ race in pieces of sacking, tied round the waist with string. The parade being over, some sixteen dusky damsels formed up abreast of the starter. The course was cleared and all eyes were on the straight-point. ‘Are you ready?’ said the starter. ‘Off!’ and off went every wrap they had on them! No stupid piece of English sackcloth was to be allowed to interfere with the chance of any of our black beauties winning the much-coveted money prizes. We were all simply in convulsions, and the laughter of the Tommies could be heard reverberating in the hills. . . . We heard afterwards that on their way to the starting-post the ladies had contrived to cut through their waist strings with their fingernails, so that they clearly engaged in the fray…with no false modesty. What a priceless snapshot this race would have made! But alas! We had no Kodaks in those days (Ibid., 50–51).

Gift giving was so central to the drama of contact between the worlds of colonizer and colonized that even representatives of the Indian government came to view contact as an event that could not be staged without the script of ‘gift giving.’ The hope may have also been nurtured that these gifts would be reciprocated or meet a kind of ‘delayed return’ in the form of the savage Jarawa transforming themselves into civilized obedient citizens, who posed no threat to the expanding community of settlers. This gift giving assumed something of the character of ‘noble expenditure’ (Mauss 1967: 66), in terms of the assumptions about the status of each party and the rules as to what might be given and in what quantity. It was always the outsiders who decided what the Jarawa should receive. In the early phase, the individual heading the contact team had the discretion to give finished products of metal and plastic (industrially manufactured) as well as cosmetics and processed food. This policy was later modified to prevent members of the contact team, whatever their status, from distributing any items other than scrap iron, plantain and coconut. But one gift that remained mandatory in all these phases was red cloth. Members of the contact party would even tie strips of red cloth on themselves, resembling the colonial labor overseers, and encourage the Jarawa to remove it from their bodies. This ritual enactment completed the adaptation of a script that had come down from the days when convicts labored to clear a path through the forest to the territory controlled by the Jarawa. The givers saw the acceptance of the gift as a step towards civilization, but for the Andamanese, contact events were occasions for admitting the outside

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Portman surrounded by residents of Andaman Home (1890). Note how some of them are dressed for the roles they played in the church. This photograph is an example of a moment of ‘performance’ in Andamanese culture, as those photographed with M. V. Portman are the group from the Andaman Home who attended the Sunday church service. Those who are fully clothed were regular participants with distinct statuses and roles assigned them, so they had to cover themselves in keeping with the customs of the outside world. The authorities regarded refusals to keep on clothing as expressions of insolence, and it is worth considering that the decision to undress on certain occasions was indeed a sign of resistance. (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association) [Original: at Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata]

world on their own terms. This performative aspect by which Andamanese appear in a particular way in relation to colonizers and later to Indians is a continuous performance. Historical process was not interpreted by them in terms of degrees of acceptance of the outside world but as their continual accommodation to situations involving outsiders. From the incoherence of history, the hunters and gatherers recover certain images to be used as a means of communication when required, with a view to allow them to continue living as hunters and gatherers. Michel de Certeau (1984: 165–76, 174) has compared readers sifting the messages of the mass media to put together their own meanings to ‘nomads poaching their way to fields they did not write.’ Readers and nomads escape ‘the law of the text … and … that of the social

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milieu.’ De Certeau observes that this is ‘a form of the bricolage that LeviStrauss analyzes as the feature of “the savage mind,” that is, an arrangement made with “the materials at hand”…which “readjusts the residues of previous construction and destruction.” De Certeau’s analogy helps us in turn perceive the semiotic aspects of the act of foraging by which the Jarawa assemble the material memorials of their history. The Jarawa exhibit signs of the change that outsiders expect, but when not visible to the latter revert to presenting themselves in keeping with their own culture. The covering up of their bodies (as before the race on Ross Island) to be undressed on command (when photographs are to be taken, as we see a little later) are from their perspective complementary processes that mediate the semiotic events of the Andamanese body being dressed and undressed. It is the accumulation of these semiotic events that brings the experience of history into discursive awareness. For the native Andamanese, the act of wearing clothes is a performance for the world of the outsider. The use of the term ‘performance’ is inspired by the ideas of Judith Butler (1993, 1977; 2004), who makes use of the definition of performative statements in speech-act theory—verbal utterances making an immediate and material difference to the state of affairs.5 Butler’s theory is that it is the association of certain gestures and styles with each gender that forms the basis for ‘knowing’ gender difference. The performance of sexed identities is different in each culture, or in Butler’s formulation, gender consists of a “personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices” (Butler 2004: 112). But that gendered identity is not innate is only realized at the point when “parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture … of [its] claim to naturalized … identities” (Ibid.,112). To adapt Butler’s theory to the subject of this study, the practice of making the Jarawa put on clothes, whether in colonial times or the present, shows us how the “historical possibilities materialized through … corporeal styles” are simply “punitively regulated cultural fictions” (Ibid., 114) of primitive and civilized. Today we see these cultural fictions unsettled by the Jarawas’ parody of what settlers would like to see them as. The performance of social relations meant both to a heightened emphasis on both the formalization of clothing and adornment but also of constant negotiation of roles and relations (Gosden and Knowles 2001). These relations show a tendency to reify cultural forms. But in the case of colonialism and contact with the Andamanese in post independent India, the Jarawa have strategically denied the outsiders any form of reification. Butler (2004) is interested in the way performance destabilizes the fixity of attributes, but it should be admitted that we shall see further on that settlers derive from the Jarawa’s performance of “civilized behavior” a false sense of recognition, of being able to anticipate the gestures and actions of an

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otherwise unknown tribal culture. This use of material signifiers has implications beyond the performance of the moment, whose radically improvisational character must be related to the fact that throughout history it has been difficult to imagine sustained social relations, based on shared meanings, between the Jarawa and settlers. The relations between these two worlds exist only in performance, in that these “ritual social dramas” are “tenuously constructed in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 2004: 114), before sinking below consciousness or memory. From the colonial period to the present it is objects that have been used by both societies to approach an agreement on meanings. Yet these objects that have concretized exchanges between those inside and those outside the forest have not been sufficiently appreciated as signifiers, as bearing meanings that are carried over into future interactions and overlaid with new meanings. It is because the outsiders’ representations could capture only aspects of the relations with the tribal populations and outsiders that the Andamanese have managed to maintain the separateness of their cultural identity in the eyes of outsiders. This culture is nonetheless equal to resisting or reinventing itself in the face of external forces, including contact initiatives that envisage the eventual assimilation of the tribal into the ‘mainstream.’ From colonial representations of the Jarawa body made ‘presentable’ to polite society, to the present when the Jarawa themselves direct performances in contact situations. This has been a historic journey. There is a long tradition of staging the event of contact. In the colonial period, ‘natives’ were made to stand in line and subject themselves to examination. The photograph taken by Dobson in 1872 is a case of visual organization suggesting something about the exchange of materials. The ‘naked’ natives are made to stand awkwardly flat against a backdrop, exemplifying Dobson’s suggestion (1874: 463–464) that even if gifts of clothing were accepted, clothing had not been adopted as a custom. The tribals would have realized that clothing was a cumbersome but necessary means of placating the Victorian sensibilities of outsiders. And yet photographers insisted that natives pose naked. An event occurring hundred years later, in 1970, offers a disconcerting parallel to Dobson’s photograph of young South Andamanese girls. Villagers in Kadamtalla captured two young Jarawa men and the authorities brought them to Port Blair and kept them under strict surveillance in the Cellular Jail (which tourists from the mainland associate only with the martyrs of the nationalist movement). They were provided with clothes and other material comforts deemed suitable to win their goodwill. Simultaneously, the requirements of (quasi) scientific documentation made the authorities place tape recorders in the room to keep a continuous record of all they said to each

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Group of young Andamanese women from South Andaman Islands. Originally Published in “On Andamans and Andamanese,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4. Plate XXXII. (Photograph by G.E. Dobson in 1872.)

other. The official photograph of the Jarawa taken at the time recalls Dobson’s composition; the youth being made to pose against the prison walls in the completely naked state the authorities had first seen him. Implicit in the event and the photograph representing Jarawa material culture—the man was shown wearing strings of beads the authorities had provided. The representation of nakedness after the encounter follows a series of commands that condenses an entire history of past contact through two simple acts. The captured men had at first been provided with clothes and materials they were suppose to put on. But before the photograph was taken with the historic Cellular Jail as backdrop, the Jarawa would have been told to remove everything on his person. It is possible he might have removed his clothes of his own will, but the beads being provided him constitute a significant act of “framing.” Whether it was at the insistence of the authorities or out of the Jarawa’s own will, the putting on of material and its removal for the photograph communicate the authorities intention and capacity to control representations… and therefore the native. If the native chose to remove the clothes but not the ornaments

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given to him, his selective acceptance of material proves him capable of “presenting” himself. The event of capture and the performance of ‘dressing’ and ‘undressing’ objectified in the photograph stand for two separate intentions. The authorities’ intention is to communicate their power to control and the eventual rewards of submission, as in the past when the Jarawa were released with munificent gifts. But what we may be observing from the point of the view of the Jarawa is a willingness to adopt material as and when required. This plurality of intention of captive and captor create an historical event where the visibility of putting on or removing material is a potent map of expressions. This map makes it possible to relate history, materials and visual representation to appreciate Andamanese culture in its status as a ‘verb’ (Street 1993: 25, Wright 1996: 83–84). This allows us to see that the history of the contact event inheres in its materiality and the possibility of seeing and showing relations. The meanings of contact events are not delimited by material and vision. Culture uses materiality and visuality to develop actively the process of making meaning. Gone are the days when Jarawa had to be captured and brought out of the forest. Since 1998, Jarawa have frequently visited the G.B. Pant Hospital at

Jarawa youth kept under observation at Port Blair in 1970 (at the Cellular Jail, a national monument). Note the strings of glass beads he wears as, ‘non traditional’ ornaments acquired after his capture. Administrative records tell us that government departments like the Anthropological Survey and the Medical Directorate examined this youth and his companion. The cost of keeping the Jarawa in Port Blair was approximately Rs. 9500.00 per day, which was perceived as ‘noble expenditure’ given the fact that after five days the boys were dropped back near Kadamtalla with loads of gifts. (Source: Late Bakhtawar Singh’s personal collection)

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Port Blair, which was able to meet their demands quickly. Those who had visited the hospital in the past would often accompany the group only to manage their movements, having partaken once of all that the world beyond the forest had to offer. They would organize roadside contacts and serve as a guide for the others. The Jarawa stayed at the special ward of the public hospital (Kadamtalla and Port Blair), where attendants looked after them, while tourists and others came by the ward to see the Jarawa, in colorful clothes and baseball hats. The Jarawa sang appositely chosen Hindi film songs, “If we are dark skinned so what? We have a loving heart yearning for you and none other!” The hospital staff had taught them the song with its accompanying hip gyrations to please the tourists. Individuals with influential connections enjoyed visiting “those short black hunters and gatherers from the forest,” and found the performance curiously flattering to themselves. Visitors commended the staff, took pictures of the Jarawa in clothes, and felt they had in some way participated in “taming the savage.”6 The providers of modern medicine thus changed the vision of the settlers and tourists. If one could no longer visit the Jarawa, the alternative became a trip to the Port Blair hospital to see visiting Jarawa. Tour operators at Port Blair introduced visits to the hospital as a new item in the tourist itinerary. People stood in the corridors staring at the Jarawa. It was as if a diorama of the primitive was on offer in the museum of the hospital. The theme of this exhibition was the role medicine plays in modernizing the primitive. It was seen as effecting a humane transformation not yet achieved by the government, the welfare agency, the AAJVS or the anthropologist. In the February of 2001, there were some twenty Jarawa at the special Jarawa ward of the hospital. Most of them were patients convalescing from ailments of varying degrees of complexity. It was fascinating to observe how, to the dismay of the hospital management. Many of the women had torn down the windows’ green curtains, removed the white bed sheets and shredded the dark red sheets using surgical blades and hospital scissors. The fabric was held between the toes and intertwined to make bands that could be worn around the head and around the neck, these ornaments known as malaley, a term recently adapted from Hindi word ‘mala’ (necklace or garland). On being asked why they were making malaley the Jarawa men explained: At different times our bodies are in different places. In order to be in a different place, like the hospital, Port Blair, coastal area or the forest, we have to take things and tie them to body. Different things and different people are found in different places. Things from different places must be tied or attached to the body so that we can go through different places and experience a different time. Just like we know how to swim through the creeks in the forest or out in the sea, but we must tie our body to something, forest wood or the “white wood of sea”

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[the Styrofoam that floats to the coast] so that we do not sink in the deep water and swim through to reach other side. The wood at the coast or the “white wood” is always at the coast and has to be gathered and the body has to hold on to it. So in the hospital the cloth around has to be tied around our body to make it possible for us to be here and go back! Also when we return to our own place we will give the ornaments from the hospital to them so that they are able to come here and to return after getting all that we have got by being here. Here a place where all have clothes on!

Ornaments must be made with materials from the place one is in, for “tying” them to the body allows one to negotiate transitions in space and time, just as tying to one’s body the wood and Styrofoam washed ashore keeps one afloat. The sequence of movements that occasions the production of the ornaments bestows on them the efficacy to facilitate further such actions. The ornaments map out movements and reify a pattern of social relations through time (Pandya 1990). We are led to wonder what the Jarawa invest in their ‘material maps’ and why they visit hospital so often these days? Enmey, a young Jarawa of about 25 years, has traveled frequently on the A.T. road to Port Blair. He was first picked up from the Kadamtalla region

Jarawa woman using the fabric in their hospital ward to make body ornaments at G. B. Pant Hospital at Port Blair. (December 2000). This is identical to what is done with the fabric acquired through contact.

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and brought to Port Blair hospital on May 15 1996 for treatment for a broken leg. On October 16 1996 he was discharged and taken back into the Jarawa territory.7 His five-month stay has earned Enmey the role of chief guide for the Jarawa in Middle Andamans whenever they ‘come out’ to Port Blair. He led the first large group (of about twenty five Jarawa) at Uttara jetty on October 31 1997. The Jarawa ‘came out’ with every intention of contact as opposed to confrontation, like the friendly contact the Indian administration had organized in the past (Pandya 1999). For all practical purposes, they were visiting the jetty to take stock of the world outside, its people, its markets and the things it had to offer. Following this contact, which proved historic, Enmey has conducted many trips where Jarawa have come to the roadside and carried on to Port Blair. Thus in the long term, Enmey’s five months at hospital can be said to have taken forward the relations between the Jarawa and the non-tribals. He learned the language of the outsider, and got a sense of the world from the perspective of the hospital and other government institutions. Conversations with Enmey provided new insights to the anthropologists at Port Blair and led to policies being reformulated by the administration. The officials improved their grasp of the language of command in the Jarawa tongue and Enmey acquired what we may term the language of demand, Hindustani. All the outside world could offer him dazzled Enmey. The new experiences and skills with which he was armed made Enmey someone who could exert a measure of influence on both the authorities and a section of the Jarawa community. I had long conversations with Enmey when he and about twenty other Jarawa were staying at the G. B. Pant Hospital. These were frequently interrupted, for though food and medications were brought at fixed times, special guests with attendants might walk in at any time. It was expected and sometimes demanded that the Jarawa would greet the visitors in a language not their own, give a military salute, sing and dance on command and either stand still while a photograph was taken or give a performance to be recorded on tape or video. Many visitors would bring small gifts, like combs, face powder, undershirts and biscuits. Noticing that the Jarawa actually enjoyed the attention, I realized that I might well be imposing on what was their recreation time at hospital. But Enmey and his friends did enjoy having an outsider like me allowed to sit with them and listen to what they felt, instead of constantly being made to oblige the staff and visitors with performances. Perhaps their past encounters made it clear to them that as an ethnographer backed by a clearance from the administration I was different from the others, having, so to speak, “learned how to learn” from my stay with the Ongee. For it is necessary to recognize that the Ongee and Jarawa have both been exposed to an-

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thropologists representing the Indian authorities who appeared always to want responses to specific questions, being often satisfied with brief responses of one or two words. Moreover Enmey had succeeded in conducting the Jarawa to the outside world where he had been attended to as a patient. He was perceived as capable of bringing the two worlds together. The events pertaining to Enmey’s treatment came in a measure to structure the history of contact for the Jarawa.8 Enmey and nineteen other Jarawa were discharged from Port Blair hospital on December 28, 2000. They were to be taken back to the roadside camp at R. K Nallah (Middle Strait between Jhirkatang and Potattang) under the supervision of the AAJVS. Only after many efforts at convincing them did the AAJVS permit me to accompany the group back to forest. I saw this as an opportunity to assess whether the malaley did map a successful movement as recontextualised materials. After each person’s weight was recorded, they were provided with farewell gifts, including clothes, iron implements, water bottles, sunglasses, oral tonics and ointments. Tearful medical staff bid farewell to the Jarawa, now colorfully dressed, while residents and tourists stood gawking and taking photographs. After a three-hour ride to R. K. Nallah, the Jarawa got off on A.T. Road and the huge bunch of plantains and coconuts given by the AAJVS was unloaded. At the drop-off point, a group of about twenty other Jarawa in traditional attire came out to receive the group, who at once distributed some of the gifts, while all food items were carried to the nearby camp ground and stored for common consumption. Those returning went to separate lean-tos around the campground and removed all their clothing. The trappings of Port Blair identity was removed and hung on the shrubs and undergrowth. Individuals made sure their new possessions were not mixed up. Newly acquired body ornaments were retained and, wearing only a waistband, the Jarawa came down to the roadside and waited for the next convoy of vehicles. It was now impossible to tell that the group had returned from Port Blair as discharged patients. Only a few still showed stains of red or yellow ointment through the bandages covering their sores. After changing out of his Port Blair clothes, Enmey was very clear that he had now entered a different state to which the other Jarawa should also revert. The roadside is not a place where they are expected to stand out as having been to Port Blair. Yet the roadside also enables the acquisition of presents from passengers and tourists. Indeed, both at the roadside and at Port Blair, the Jarawa have started practicing a new form of gathering. They are conscious of the fact that it works to their advantage to conform to the expectations of primitives or ex-primitives in different contexts. They encourage the practice of settlers of giving them goods with a view to helping them

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modernize. Some of the younger Jarawa who have often accompanied Enmey describe this transformation thus: In Port Blair we need to look like you and it works! But this is the forest and the road has brought you all near us so we should be here, in the forest, as we always are in the forest!

Jarawa dismantle their image to reassemble it whenever they wish to present themselves as primitives from the forest to those traveling by road. This changing representation today has an interesting parallel in history. From colonial times we have images of Jarawa who were dressed up while with the administrators (Portman 1899, Ball 1897, Mathur 1985), despite the great apprehension of the latter as to how to deal with fearsome and unpredictable Jarawa (Man 1883: 92). Objects are critical to transactions in such a radically performative culture as that of the Jarawa. Social statements are communicated by means of material items. Young men who visited the hospital at Port Blair also use the ATR passing through the Reserve as a place to acquire things they desire. Led by people like Enmey, the Jarawa would often insist on being given clothes

An elderly Jarawa woman looking at the group arriving from Port Blair. Note the absence of any ornaments or material reflecting contact with the outside world, except the red fabric ornament made from previous contact. (R.K. Nallah, January 2001)

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Jarawa returning from Port Blair, in their new clothes. Note the headband made at the hospital and the man in middle walking away with the ‘presents’ brought from Port Blair. (R.K. Nallah, January 2001)

and accessories like costume jewelry, baseball caps and sneakers, which were brought into play only on their visits to Port Blair. For on returning the same group would stage a diametrically opposite performance by the roadside. They would simply get off the vehicle, go to the side of the road and remove all the clothing and ornaments they had received in Port Blair so that they blended in with the others standing by the roadside and asking passers-by for gifts. The eagerness of the Jarawa to acquire a range of items of clothing is an experiment with an image of themselves encountered in a perceptual domain dominated by outsiders. Outsiders regard clothing as the mark of culture. So in Port Blair clothing works to project an image of having left behind the state of savagery. Yet this identity composed of artifacts of an alien culture is dismantled once they leave Port Blair, where they manage to recover their own identity by undressing. Roadside contacts are assimilated into the identity that is put together outside Port Blair. The Jarawa present their bodies traditionally naked and adorned to passers-by, and whatever the latter are persuaded to give them is then adapted into a piece of adornment. When the proud owner of a pair of sunglasses found them damaged after a few days, it was handed down to the younger children as a toy. In course of time it came to be used as an ornament,

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Jarawas at R.K. Nallah who received the returning group from Port Blair unloading the jeep full of coconuts and bananas (R.K. Nallah, January 2001). This image in comparison to Illustration 14 brings out the difference in the Jarawas who came to receive the returning Jarawa group.

as though when displayed on a body that is according to custom naked, it would index to passers-by the readiness of Jarawa to collect other such items from outsiders. The use of sunglasses in the context of body adornment is typical of the way other roadside contact events play out. The items acquired during one contact event leads to the acquisition of other items when adapted as body adornment. While not characterized by reciprocity, the exchange can be interpreted as what Mauss (1967) calls a “total social fact,” a phenomenon to be understood in relation to the whole social system. A total social fact is indexed by the acceptance of gifts that have been solicited by ornaments adapted from previous gifts. We have seen how the clothes received in Port Blair were tactically removed. Similarly, the gifts of food from Port Blair are not valued as a supplement to their diets, as is believed, but rather as one more factor in the way they located the outside world vis-à-vis themselves. Leftover bananas are important not for their food value but when recontextualized in the form of a headdress, a very visible sign which can be decoded to communicate what the

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Jarawa youth showing off the sunglasses newly incorporated as body adornment. Jarawas who returned with gifts from Port Blair first brought the sunglasses. (Photographed in 2002)

Jarawa expect from outsiders. Similarly, Jarawa children who receive wrapped candy from bus passengers follow their elders and treat edible materials as sartorial materials, wearing the candies round their necks to solicit more presents from passers by. To sum up, the Jarawa’s transformation of red cloth into ornaments has had historic implications for the relations between the outside world and themselves. The conversion of food items into signs that solicit further ‘gifts’ works like the classic logic of the gift formulated by Mauss, even though the transformation of materials perpetuates a process of one-way rather than reciprocal gift-giving. Radcliffe-Brown (1922: 237) refers to the ‘obligation’ among the Anadamanese to make gift exchange perpetual, but we have seen that with outsiders the Jarawa have put in place exchange relations in which they are perpetually the recipients. For the Jarawa are aware of the habits of perception according to which outsiders see them, and the way they display their bodies manipulates these “ways of seeing.”9 A visual ethnography of the way in which the Jarawa adapts materials would map out a whole system of exchange relations.

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Jarawas at the A.T. roadside near Jhirkatang, wearing an ornament made of wrapped candy received from bus passengers. (Photographed in 2001).

SUBJECTS AS OBJECTS OF PERFORMANCE FOR OUTSIDERS The discussion above shows the Jarawa to have developed a skill for manipulating materials in performances that withhold from outsiders facile conclusions about the tribe as either isolated primitives or assimilated into the mainstream. The body is central to this fine-tuned self-presentation. The ornaments and the acts of dressing and undressing bear witness to contact, encode its history with ease and even fluency without once hinting at change, let alone rupture. It had been part of the Andamanese “structure of practice” to effect a ‘makeover’ of the body by wearing new items. The same act has now become their “practice of structure”; in that the history of contact is indexed by the way the ornaments disarticulate and re-articulate the body. Here notions of nakedness as something covered with paint and ornaments are different from cultures where, because one does not “wear one’s skin,” nakedness is understood only in relation to (the absence of) clothes. The Andamanese view of objects is different. The duration of “being dressed” and the transformation effected by undressing are both a kind of play in different spaces—urban, transitional, forest—which they visualize and relate together differently from the settler. The case of Jack Andaman to which we now turn

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reveals how nakedness was seen by outsiders, as well as the ‘native’ who in his movement through different spaces (Calcutta and the Islands) was made to shed items he had been ordered to wear. The transitions from nakedness to being dressed and back were invested with especial significance in the colonial period. In 1857, Frederick Mouat accompanied a team exploring the Islands. Towards the close of the exploration it was felt that enough curios had not been collected. It was thought desirable to make some contribution to the collection of Indian antiquities belonging to Lady Canning, wife of the Governor-General. So when hundreds of natives on South Reef Island came into view as the Pluto circled Interview Island, the crew prepared two cutters for landing. Mouat claims that “fierce looking savages” shot arrows at the crew as they stood waiting with a white handkerchief and strings of beads flashing in the sun. In return, the British opened fire and the blinding glare of musket fire made some natives hide their faces so that they sank into the water. The Andamanese who were captured jumped off the canoes to try and swim back ashore, “diving every two hundred yards like ducks baited by water-spaniels” (1863: 251). The team chasing them managed to catch one alive besides recovering two corpses. Mouat (1863: 255) claims that he prevailed upon the ship’s doctor, who wanted to keep the heads of the two dead savages, to put them on a canoe that was then pushed towards the shore. The man captured alive was made to wear a sailor’s suit and named John Jack Andaman. Made a source of amusement, he was reported to be most comfortable in the company of the ship’s dog Neptune. He was taken to Calcutta chiefly with a view to providing Lady Canning diversion (Mouat 1863: 241–251, 260). The live souvenir was a hit in Calcutta: “Our friend Jack was regarded by all who had an opportunity of seeing him as an object of great interest, such as the contrast between the extreme barbarism of savage life and the highest state of civilized existence must ever excite.” It was in Calcutta that Jack saw a mirror for the first time (Mouat 1863: 279–280). One wonders which was more disconcerting, seeing “himself” for the first time or seeing himself as presented by colonial authorities. Although Jack was unwell, he was not allowed return home before being photographed as he was before his capture. A crowd gathered to see Jack, who was represented as a mannequin and placed behind a glass window for the delight of visitors, with a ventriloquist projecting a howling cry (ibid 1863: 280–83). Not only was Jack a subject signified as “savage,” he was objectified as a theatrical “prop.” When it came to photographing Jack, great efforts were made to convince him to shed his recently acquired clothing and return to “being his natural self,” notwithstanding the manifest unnaturalness of his being in Calcutta. Jack was utterly “shocked” (Mouat 1863: 284) at the thought of undressing, having become used to adornments imposed on him. It was at this

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point he openly resisted, but he eventually had to undergo being re-represented by photographers. The product was made the basis for a lithograph that managed to hide the pain inflicted by the harsh sunlight required to produce the image of a body already rearticulated by force. Jack’s image of self and the image of Jack speak of the systematic erasure effected by the acts of the clothing and unclothing the colonizers performed on Jack’s body. The lithograph became the frontispiece of Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Home Department, 1859). The image of Jack underwent another transposition in the frontispiece of Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders (1863). Here the background emphasizes his racial origins and the composition negates all reference to Calcutta where the original photograph had been taken. This confirms composition as an act of deliberate staging, or in other words of re-contextualizing. Yet another picture on the title page shows how power relations are enacted through the imposition of roles, being an intimate, almost cameo portrait of Jack in a sailor’s outfit. Which photograph this picture is based on remains unclear, betraying the ironies of representing a subject whose moorings to culture have been severed.

The representation of Jack in the Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Home Department, 1859)

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Front page of Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders (1863).The right side of the page has used Jack’s image in sailor’s suit, that was first seen in The Illustrated London News March 27, 1857.

Jack’s experience of being forced to dress and undress by colonial authorities involved him in a sequence of transformations similar to that effected by the Jarawas’ ‘acts’ of dressing and undressing before representatives of the administration today. But if Jack resisted being made the object of a performance scripted by colonial powers, our discussion of how the Jarawa exhibits themselves in Port Blair and in the Reserve suggests that today it is they who have control over the performance. The obvious difference is that Jack was forced to make the passage between cultures, whereas the Jarawa independently adopt the practice for which the history of Jack’s representations provides the structure. The previous chapter described how the Ongee see ornaments as exerting powers of attraction on the contexts from which the materials they are made of derive. We have now seen that clothes are also materials whose manipulation allows Jarawa to exercise powers of attraction specific to individual contexts. This emphasis above on Jarawa agency must be qualified by recognizing the similarity between the British commanding Jack’s return, as they had commanded his being un/dressed, and the Jarawa having to return from Port

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Blair. Mouat’s description of the imperatives surrounding Jack’s return to the Islands is worth reproducing in full because the final site of the (representational) transformation of Jack marks the starting point of a process continued by the Jarawa today: Accordingly, he was informed of our view of his case, and of our intention to send him back to his native island; but he had now fallen into such an enfeebled condition, that everything seemed to be a matter of indifference to him. He was loaded with presents of all kinds, by order of the Governor-General, and especially with many things of a useful and improving nature, the purpose of which, if he was restored to health by means of his native air, he might be able to teach his countrymen; for he was naturally quick in his perceptions, and had become very observant during the latter portion of his sojourn in Calcutta…. As he had been captured at South Reef Island, we made arrangements for putting him ashore there, as the place where he would stand the best chance of being immediately recognized by former friends and relatives. He was first conveyed ashore in the clothes he usually wore at Calcutta, but the reflection immediately occurred to those in whose charge he was, that in that condition it might not be possible for any of the natives to recognize him. He was therefore stripped with his own consent, and left naked on the shore, a condition to which he had been accustomed all his life, except during his short period of his sojourn at Calcutta, and from which, therefore, it was probable he would suffer no injury. None of his fellow-countrymen appeared to claim him while any of the men belonging to the Pluto, by which he had been carried back, remained with him on the island. It was therefore resolved to bid him farewell, leaving his clothes by his side, with the hope that when they had left, his kindred would claim him, or that he himself would be able to find them out. He took an affectionate leave of all who had accompanied him, appearing very dejected and low. After taking a last farewell, they rowed out to the ship; gradually losing sight of him, still standing silent and melancholy in the same place . . . After this sad parting nothing was ever seen or heard of our captive again. Alas poor Jack! (Mouat 1863:289–290).

The official report of the Andaman Committee confirms that Jack was accompanied by a “number of useful articles of peace, as well as with certain objects of savage finery.” (Anonymous 1859:33). Jack undergoes a series of transformations during his capture, transportation to Calcutta and his final return to the Islands. Dressing and undressing were as much in the control of colonial authorities as capture and release. At the conclusion Jack is abandoned and disappears to the gaze of the Pluto’s crew as he had first appeared, naked, to them. This is like the Jarawa arriving in a state of nakedness and later, when dropped back at the road side to disappear back in to the forest shedding the ornaments acquired in the world outside. It is no more Calcutta and colonialism or captives as it was in 1857. In 1999–2000 it was the Jarawa

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coming out of forest on their own initiative to Port Blair, seat of the Post Independent Indian administration. At the hospital the explanation given by Jarawas about the making of simple objects such as the ornaments from hospital fabrics, with all its complexity in a way was recapitulation of the disarticulation and articulation as experienced by Jack. Jarawa are dressed while they are in Port Blair, much like Jack among the crew of Pluto and among the officials in Calcutta. One senses that by the time Jack was deposited on shore, surrounded by his pile of clothes and the assortment of gifts he had received in Calcutta, he had become something of an interstitial being, and that his sense of his own body—his nakedness—and his identity had forever changed. Was it his strategy not to pick up the clothes, which he was so reluctant to remove for the purpose of photography? (Mouat 1863: 284). Or was he too ill and too dejected to move at the turn of events? This process for several Andamanese individuals has continued from 1857 to 2000 for the Jarawa. Even when they came to Port Blair on their own, Jarawa who are keen to acquire things to adorn their body with, on returning to the forest either just keep these things aside or recontextualize the newly acquired material as exemplified by the sunglasses, and wrapped candy. Both Jack and the Jarawa today are subject to a series of representational transformations that would generate traces in history as naked bodies that dress and undress to represent an assortment of structured images. In this dressing and undressing, certain aspects of Andamanese history become an interplay of their own shifting conditions of visible and invisibility. It is the interplay between what the Andamanese feel about their choosing or being forced to represent themselves in the manner that the local authorities deem fit. We have no way of knowing what Jack made of his situation. Yet I have asked Enmey, who nearly a century and a half after Jack’s capture initiated the Jarawa emergence from the forest, why he was dressed the way he was in Port Blair and why he had brought many Jarawa, hitherto hostile to contact, to meet settlers, the medical staff and the authorities in Port Blair. This was his response, spoken in a mixture of the Jarawa language and Hindi:10 By coming to Port Blair we get things at the hospital. Just as by climbing up a tree we find irritating bees but we also find honeycombs. So coming to Port Blair is good and to get good things we come to hospital.11 In Port Blair, on seeing you all, we want to be like you; you all who gather around to see us. We want to be seen in clothes, shoes, finger rings, metal chains and caps, colored handkerchiefs and bright safety pins. Just as all of you are seen by us! By doing so soon we will be left to see your place freely—when we try to be like you we find more and more new things. So it is good to come to Port Blair where we get all that you all want us to have. It is not hard work! So others want to come with

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me. People care about me—I have to go soon to meet the big authority (the President of India, on Republic day January 26th) and tell him how good the trees of Port Blair are!”12 But in the forest I cannot really climb trees or hunt if I wear shoes! Can I? Just as I cannot wear clay paints in your hospital.

OBJECTS AS PROCESS If we wish to establish that historical change can be inferred from the changing roles of clothing, objects and ornaments, we must confirm the link between the introduction of novel objects and the development of new social relations. Gell (1998) has argued that the formal analysis of objects should start from their efficacy to create and maintain particular social relations. While agreeing that objects are in this sense vital to the social process, the effects of finished objects tell us only part of the story. Combining materials found in nature or in different cultural contexts creates all artifacts. Artifacts are also exchanged between their makers and traders and consumers. The production and exchange of artifacts sets up a whole series of social relations. Yet the production process is never one-way, for, it is equally apparent that people are produced through interaction with the material world. This is particularly the case with things in the Jarawa community, where rituals of adornment and objects within the campsite signify both contact with outsiders and interaction among themselves. Ideas of Marx and Heidegger have provided the very meaning of the dominant view of technology in academic thought. Human being, together with economic relations, related to the production of objects, with no bearing on the development of persons. Person was a matter of psychology or social. The separation of the technical and existential was symptomatic of the alienation effected by capitalism and modernity, which foreclosed a holistic perception of people in the world. It failed to account for the subjective apprehension of unity during productive activity. The separation of mind and body in research and the dissolution of activity systems in scholarly investigation have often failed to provide accounts of the human relations created out of fulfillment and accomplishments. A counter view would be that people produce objects, but in the process are themselves produced as socially and physically skilled individuals, their senses tuned by the exercise of their productive faculties (Dobres 2000). Here we should add that in the discipline of Anthropology the theories of Marcel Mauss anticipated the recent growth of interest in these debates (James and Allen 1998). Mauss saw the body as much a social and technical product as any object (See Anderson: 2004). Mauss’s influential concerns with the body, expounded on the way we all carry out what he called traditionally efficacious actions, acts

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taken for granted in daily life but known to produce desired effects (Mauss 1979; Schlanger 1998). It is through learning how to affect the world physically that individuals learn how to become members of society. These habitual actions are socially learned but unconsciously deployed. In the context of what we have been studying, unconscious forms of socialization are reflected in simple activities like the way material from the outside world are received. Such acts are often sequential-dressing followed by undressing, materials adapted for body adornment. Bodily actions are not mere reflexes in response to the physical world, but through their recurrence provide the community a sense of togetherness and signify each other. Thus Andamanese technology and their techniques of the body—which include the addition, subtraction and combination of elements—represent a total social fact, in that they illuminate areas of their lives that would otherwise have remained hidden. The desire of the Andamanese for certain products is another important influence on what is produced. It is important to mention that red cloth is not all that attracts the Jarawa, as had been assumed on official contact expeditions. During a series of contact expeditions in 1992 it was decided on my suggestion to gift cloth of another color to the Jarawa, starting from the Lakra

Jarawa women at Port Campbell who had incorporated the green fabric distributed at Lakra Lungta three days before our contact party arrived (1992). This image for the first time established the degrees of inter group interaction that involved exchange of different colored fabric distributed in different locations at different times.

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Lungta region. But on visiting different locations along the Western coastline, where cloth of different colors had been distributed, I found that these had been re-distributed and incorporated into ornaments, sometimes by shredding the strips to make neck ornaments. This exchange of colored cloth demonstrated for the first time that cloth of any color is found desirable as ornament. It also revealed that Lakra Lungta was a point from where different groups of people moved north and south, and where some stayed at the same time. All groups did not move in one direction but there may have been a pattern of group movement (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 30, Man 1932: 33–35), creating visitors and hosts among the hunter and gatherers camps. As the visitors from Lakra Lungta moved north to Port Campbell, they took with them the green cloth they had been given. Three days before my visit to Lakra Lungta, they had given the green cloth to those who had received red cloth. Similarly, when Lakra Lungta was re-visited after fifteen days, some people were found to have adapted yellow cloth as adornment. Yellow cloth had been distributed only among the Jarawa north of Lakra Lungta. This meant that people from the north had visited Lakra Lungta. I

Jarawa boy from Lakra Lungta who has used yellow cloth in his neckpiece, which indicates his interactions with visitors from further north (1992). In 1992 over a series of contact expeditions organized by me in collaboration with the AAJVS I had distributed different colored fabric at different places of contact. Prior to this sequence of contact expeditions the belief was that the Jarawas only liked ‘red cloth’ and groups from different places did not come into contact among themselves.

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did not, however, find green cloth being used north of Lakra Lungta on my follow-up visit. The circulation of cloth shows how an item of material culture implies a network of social relations and obligations. This is in consonance with Radcliffe-Brown’s observations (1964: 82–83) on the exchange of material artifacts between guests and hosts. The movement of ornaments allows us to plot out maps of the contact Jarawa have made with outsiders as well as among themselves. The semiotics of ornaments gives material form to relations in time. This is not to be conflated with the notion of Marx (1974 [1867]: 667–724) that the mode of production can be derived as an articulated combination of relations and forces of production structured by the dominance of the relations of production. Sahlins (1976) has pointed out the limitations of Marxist thought in the anthropology of tribal ‘cultures’: there can be no definition or combination of the relations or forces of production independent of the mode of production and appropriation in which they are combined. Anthropology has of course benefited from the influence of Marxism, particularly with regard to a model of process based on relations of production. However the culture of Jarawa, history is not the outcome of the production process: it is the production of ornaments, which use materials that embody history. This conception derived from Jarawa ideas about body adornments invokes the conceptualization of Wechselwirkung (reciprocal effect) as in the writing of George Simmel (Wolff 1950, 1965). Simmel, who anticipated the principle of reciprocity underlying Mauss’ theory of the gift (1923), proposed that the social exists when two or more people interact with each other and the behavior of one is seen as a response to the behavior of the other. These dyadic relations provided Simmel with a notion of structural opposition which was dynamic rather than static, and where one focused as much on the individual as on society in the abstract. Encounters and contacts between the world of Jarawa and outsiders have certainly always represented a case of ‘reciprocal effect.’ A whole set of spatial and temporal dimensions are evoked in the production of any artifact, for it is likely to be used at times and places distant from the place it was produced and by people other than its makers. The head, neck and upper arms are always adorned with material from the place associated with the group’s identity. For example, Jarawa associated with the interior forest camps never use shells to make their ornaments, but may receive these from coastal dwellers as gifts when they visit one other. And from various contact events it was observed that the Jarawa visiting coastal campsites never wore ornaments of the dry, yellow fiber of coastal plants. They maintained their identity as visitors from the forest through ornaments made mainly from plants, flowers, inedible fruits and green leaves. In contrast the

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coastal identity of the Jarawa group is conveyed by the predominance of shells in the body adornments made by the Jarawa. The use of material from forest, coast and past contact event in ornaments that will be re-circulated among different groups is a practice that was observed by early ethnographers as well. What we see to day adheres to the classic division between Aryoto and Erem-taga, forest dwellers and coastal dwellers (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 26, Man 1932:33–35). Among the Ongee of Little Andaman, who have much in common with the Jarawa, we find a similar division between Ehansakwe, pig hunters, and Ehambelakwe, turtle hunters (Pandya 1993:8, 23). In the case of the Jarawa, forest dwellers make ornaments from material found in the forest (plants) and coastal dwellers make ornaments from material found at the coast (shells). But all groups represent both shared space and the common moment of contact with outside world and incorporate the colored cloth distributed among the Jarawa on the western coast. The cloth is in fact much sought after to express community sentiments concerning the contact event. The use of material for adornment depends however on what is available. The community of settlers living near the Jarawa Reserve has also provided material for the Jarawa to pick up and recontextualize. The Jarawa have taken to carrying plastic bags in the fashion of the woven basket thrown over the back.13 All Jarawa ornaments using shells are referred to as le-lelev as distinct from le-dhuya, ornaments made from things gathered in the forest. Somewhere between the two categories fall the bright yellow tender leaves

An example of forest dwellers’ ornaments that during contact events, serve to communicate their identity and association with different places.

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An example of forest dwellers ornaments that during contact events, serve to communicate their identity and association with different places.

that women shred into fine strands to make ornaments for the head and arms known as epoochiimu. The leaf with which epoochiimu are made belongs to a plant found in the creek, an area that mediates between forest and coast. Appropriately, groups in transition between coast and forest wear epoochiimu, and therefore most visible (in conjunction with le-lelev or le-dhuya) during contact expeditions conducted between October and November or between May and June, the period when camps shift location. Epoochiimu are frequently used across territorial and gender divisions. Materials gathered from the outside world through contacts on the coast and on the road are absorbed into the adornment practices across the community. They are categorized as humeeya (fabric threads), njohhaajiiya (woolen yarn) and thoopokuluga (anything heavy and metallic). We may infer that by studying the “placing” of the ornament, which makes it possible to know where the person was coming from. For to the name of the ornament is added any material gathered on the way and assimilated into it. So different names are derived from the flowers, shoots, leaves, ferns, fruits and creepers gathered from the places visited by the individual or group, and similarly the coast also provides a whole range of shells with which to make ornaments, like bleached shells, snail shells, and bivalves gathered in tide pools. The production of ornaments by the Jarawa is not a final act in a given time and space, but part of a chain of operation (Dobres 2000 and Lemonniers 1993) connected to many times and places. The adornment of the body with natural materials assumes a quality of embeddedness. Time and space, history and social relations are all embedded within the ornament. The ornament invokes past and present as well as the potential future. At a theoretical level, these chains of operation link the different locales embedded in their ethnographic contexts (Marcus 1995 Marcus and Clifford 1985).

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Typical costal dwelling Jarawa body adornments, incorporating shells found at the coast. (See also Appendix C)

Distinct white clay paint denotes a Jarawa’s ritual status. Clay paint designs mark the ritualized person’s incorporation back into the community. (Photographed in 1992)

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The great changes in what had been a relatively isolated world has brought to the fore these issues of embeddedness and the ruptures effected by change. This is probably best exemplified through recent practices of adornment among the Jarawa. Since 2000, the administration has been concerned to check the increasing contact between Jarawa and the outside world whose primary cause is the growing traffic on the ATR. The encroachers and settlers in and around the Jarawa Reserve Forest compound the problem. In 1981 the population on the island was 158287, by 2002 it had reached 450000. But the most significant factor is that mutual fear and hostility have been worn away steadily since groups of Jarawa youth began of their own volition to visit Kadamtalla and Port Blair. Initially, this led to a distinction between Jarawa who lived close to the roadside and communities located further off, as in Tirur, but by 2001, there was contact with all groups. Welfare staff and medical attendants were provided at Jarawa camps even in the interior forest. The administration arranged for staff to visit these areas regularly and ensure that the outsiders, who had lost their fear of the Jarawa, were not exploiting or taking advantage of the Jarawa.14 The Jarawa were now accessible both to people using the road and to official staff appointed to help Jarawa in the interior. The Jarawa have set up series of camps right next to the road, mostly in the area of Jhirkatang. On the other hand, the Bush Police have set up camps closer to traditional Jarawa campsites in the area of Tirur, to protect and control the Jarawa. In each case, sustained contact and influence and the increased supply of new materials has had a very different impact on Jarawa communities. Police Post No. 4 in Harpatabad is a quarter of a kilometer away from the Jarawa campsite, deep in the interior and accessible only through mangrove forest. There have been reported cases of ‘naked’ Jarawa women being taken advantage of by the male police personnel and often even by the staff of official welfare agencies. Known as Bada Balu, this campsite used to be occupied only for the duration of one season at a time. Mainly young women now occupy it for four to five months. This is a consequence of the steady supply of rations and medical attention provided at the Police Outpost. A prominent issue is the influx of a new range of products like gowns and talcum powder, which arrive loaded with preconceptions about the image of woman. If until this point we have argued that the Jarawa believe they should present themselves like the people of Port Blair when in Port Blair, in this case we find that principle observed in its breach. With the proximity of representatives of state power and authority, body adornments in this isolated community of Jarawa women now consist of the outsize, brightly colored gowns issued by the government. Here we find a distinct shift from the principle of dressing and undressing as the occasion demands to remain

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dressed for the better part of the time. The Andamanese often use white clay paint on their bodies when undergoing a ‘rite of incorporation’ (Van Gennep 1960). During contact events up until 1999, it was observed that white clay paint marked recent ritual transitions, such as mourning or attaining puberty (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 124–125, Pandya 1993: 123–124).15 Today, however, women at the Tirur camp have replaced clay paint with white talcum powder. Does the application of face powder by Jarawa women as the police and the social welfare personnel are noticed approaching the camp mark their incorporation into the society of outsiders? Could the availability of talcum powder from outsiders mark a transitory stage for Jarawa women? Jarawa girls and women appear to apply face powder on a daily basis in order to present themselves to the outsiders who are now a constant presence in their lives. This is like the way when in Port Blair the Jarawa wish to dress like the non-tribals surrounding them. This should not be regarded as an imitation of the world outside but the ritual of incorporation acquiring a new elaboration, a new way of fixing identity. Apart from the morning ritual of face powder and the passing round of the mirror at the Tirur camp change among Jarawa is visible, but it is their explanation of the change in material and body adornments that is more significant. Very few individuals in Tirur retain ornaments that still use shells. In August 2003 the only elderly lady wearing a traditional shell ornament around her neck told me: We stay mostly at this camp where we don’t get shells, we get other things like clothes and “podereye” (talcum powder) along with malaley (necklaces of glass beads) so why use shells from the coast where we are not present! I still have this, because at Balu Dera I was born, my husband died there and my children were born there and I always want to be there! But my desire to go is a solitary desire, so I am the only person who still has shells from Balu Dera with me! All the clothes we have put on have tied us to this camp (Tirur) and I look after all the girls here, where we get the food we need. Some times Jarawa men visit us here but everyday we are visited by outsiders. Nobody has given me beads or powder, but I did get clothes. I have with me my shells and desire to return to Balu Dera with the young girls.

Standing close to the old lady were many teenaged girls who had recently returned from a visit to the Jarawa camps in Jhirkatang and Potatang. They all had headbands that had woven into them bright acrylic woolen yarn, instead of the strips of cloth one saw earlier. These teenagers from Tirur had walked four hours through the forest, carrying honey for relatives who had married and moved to Jhirkatang and Potatang. Red woolen headbands were all the rage at the Jhirkatang camps and the Tirur residents had been given some. Just

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as colored cloth acquired at contact events along the west coast was redistributed along the social networks between coast and forest camps; in recent years the material gathered from the roadside has quickly made its way into Jarawa body ornamentation. Contacts between and with Jarawa are both manifest in ornaments that not only make visible the historical signification but also have become a means to map sociality through the distribution of material. The crucial pattern of movements within this hunting and gathering culture can also be read through ornaments that represent the transfer of contact events from past to present. Earlier headbands contained strips of cloth acquired at contact events with outsiders, now they contain woolen yarn acquired by one Jarawa group from another Jarawa, via the outsiders. We can term the headband a first-order sign that has been made the platform for a new signifier (woolen yarn) with its own signified (contact with other Jarawa), so that this new signifier and signified form a new sign (Barthes 1987: 115). This is just another chain of operations in the history of the Andamanese semiological system. The proximity of outsiders—the social welfare agency and the police in Tirur—is the single most important factor of social change. Social relations among Jarawa women at Tirur have altered considerably since the days when they would adapt materials acquired at contact events. They now receive gifts regularly, and consistently project an image of a group that benefits from sustained contact with outsiders. This image is based on how they wish to appear to the Jarawas camped closer to the ATR as well as to the outsiders present among them. As a consequence, the women of this relatively

This is a Tirur camp resident with her bright woolen headband that was acquired from her cousin married and living away in the Potatang camp. (Photographed in 2003)

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The only elderly lady at the Tirur camp who still wore shells round her neck. (Photographed in 2003)

isolated camp appear to be most nearly ‘assimilated’ into the settlers’ vision of what tribal women ought to become. It is something of an anomaly that the Jarawa in the far interior of the Reserve are never seen without clothes, whereas women closer to the roadside are yet to accept the custom of wearing bright printed gowns. The latter have resisted the attempts of the authorities to encourage them to wear clothes, being willing only to adapt the material as ornament. This raises two questions. Do the Jarawa project themselves as ‘primitives’ at the roadside in order to continue profiting from

Jarawa women at Tirur camp in ‘Makchee’ issued by the administration (Photographed in 2004)

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Jarawa women in Tirur region using talcum powder and clothes issued by the authorities. Every morning before the all—male team of officials or staff come to visit them women get ready, checking their appearance in the only piece of broken mirror they have. Note the flower garlands around the neck and the bangles that the policemen in their individual capacities would have bought as gifts for them from small rural shops. It is reported that the glass bangles, clothes and cosmetics are often exchanged for sexual favors from Jarawa women. (Photographed in 2003)

roadside contact? And have the authorities have underplayed their own ability to transform the Jarawa to avoid charges of forced acculturation, as seen in the Jarawas’ use of material products? We can deduce from Jarawa remarks on what it is to be in Port Blair or to be in Tirur that their choice of material signifiers forms part of a strategy. They show only that which they are willing to have seen, in order to maximize their gains while ‘gathering’ from those outside the forest. For them it is not an issue, as it is for the outsiders, that ‘naked natives live in the forest! And they should change.’ Whether in Port Blair, the Tirur camp or near the roadside, the Jarawa follow the principle of aligning themselves with the historical relations unfolding in that particular space-time. By appropriating material from a range of contexts and contacts, the Jarawa create a symbolic surplus that sustains an imposed discourse of historical change. This is not a history that moves through clearly demarcated stages, from ‘naked’ to ‘dressed,’ from ‘primitive’ to ‘modern.’ The Jarawa creates relations with history by their capacity to switch between being dressed and undressed. For them, history occurs in the duration between contact initiated and contact terminated. Not the change signified by the ornaments but the interval between the presence and absence of the outsiders is what reveals Jarawa culture to be a process. This is to say that it is through their use of materials that the Jarawa create a historical discourse in which they are present simultaneously with the outsiders. This is in contrast to the outsiders’ history of Jarawa, which has place only for themselves and the place that they assign the Jarawa. This latter history is a self-confirming discourse, which conveys the outsiders’ notion of Jarawa culture as something in itself unchanging, but necessary to change from outside.16 We have seen how Tirur offers another example of how the Jarawa present their bodies in a way that takes into account the desires of outsiders to

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re-present them, in the cause of protection or incorporation into the ‘modern’ world. But one must remember this is a new response historically, a break with a sustained period of hostility on the part of the Jarawa. Earlier, the Jarawa sought neither to mirror nor to incorporate the ‘Other.’ One must reiterate the fact that the self-articulation of the Andamanese, in multiple times and places through history, has taken the form of incorporating materials into body adornment. In 1857, Jack had gazed for the first time into a full-length mirror and was amazed at the image he saw—an image of himself, but as dressed by his captors. This marks the genesis of a trope that persists today, in independent India, among the Jarawa women of Tirur. Just as Jack had been forced to remove his clothes for the photograph and was finally made to give up all he was wearing, and just as Enmey and his friends decide when to dress and undress, could the women of Tirur be skilled manipulators of the semiological system that encodes change in the Islands? These eighteen women of different age groups experience one moment of great sharing everyday, when the piece of mirror is taken out in the late morning, before the authorities are expected to arrive. Each person carefully reviews her appearance, adjusting it to the image of the ‘primitive’ to be assimilated into the mainstream. Proximity to the outside world being no longer a matter of the occasional contact event, the broken mirror is carefully tucked into the rafters for the next day’s visit from the authorities. In Potatang and Jhirkatang, camps have been set up close to the ATR.17 This is in sharp contrast to Tirur, where camps mostly continue to be set up within the forest but are easily accessible to officials.18 The Jarawa at the roadside camps can be said to fall under the panoptical gaze (Foucault 1977) of outsiders using the road and the staff of social welfare agencies who from time to time visit roadside camps to ensure the Jarawa are not being exploited and to attend to their needs. At these roadside camps, “nakedness” does not have to be covered up. In 2003, the year of my visit to Tirur, I found among

Jarawa woman returning from the forest to her roadside camp in Potatang. This is also the location where Enmey had returned from hospital in 2000. Note that she has put on a fresh garland of flowers gathered in the forest after failing to find tubers. She still wears around her waist the tassels associated with the Jarawa since colonial times. (Photographed in 2003)

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Jarawa girls with woolen headbands at Potatang. Photographed in 2003

the Jarawa at Jhirkatang a complete absence of the gaudy and impractical gowns that those at Tirur were wearing. Another unexpected thing was that in spite of being constantly subject to the outside world’s insistence that the ‘savage and wild’ had to transform, the Jarawa here appeared much more relaxed in their presentation of self, as they have for some years been accustomed to ‘representing’ themselves. At Potatang and Jhirkatang, the only visible sign of the outside world on Jarawa body adornment was the colorful woolen yarn used in headbands or to string glass beads together. The only evidence of new material being adapted as ornament at Potatang and Jhirkatang is the synthetic wool, which the women make into red headbands. The welfare agency and police offer an abundant supply of this yarn with a view to keeping the Jarawa happy. This means that residents of the camp are often busy making ornaments, so as to have a ready supply stored to give Jarawa who visit them bringing items from the interior forest. Today, the exchange of ornaments among Jarawa connects points in time and space.19 The exchange of headbands at Potatang with honey brought from Tirur is a classic example. We are mapping more than the exchange between

Jarawa woman at Potatang making the headband with woolen yarn to add to a stock of headbands kept for visitors from parts of the Reserve Forest where woolen yarn is not available.

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two groups of Jarawa, for this exchange is made possible by the previous exchange with outsiders (at the roadside camp) and also conditions what can later be acquired from outsiders at Tirur. The material substance and portability of the ornaments has traditionally facilitated the redistribution of materials associated with coast, forest, or the outside world, to evoke these different points in time and space in new contexts. This use of Jarawa ornaments has been well documented by early ethnographers, who found that groups would adorn themselves for visits and that disputes often arose if the expected items were not forthcoming (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 42–43,82–83 and Man 1932: 119–120,169). In my observations I have considered how material culture is reinvented and used to signify the location of bodies in time and space, by an active re-presentation (in the sense of both presenting bodies and recycling presents) of exchanges past. In my observations I have tried to consider the blend of reconceptualizing material culture and how Jarawa strategically uses it to show or mark (something visually) the location of their body in time and space. This fact of the body being representable in multiple times and multiple places for Jarawa is not just history but the very practice of material history expressed through the materiality of body adornments.

CONCLUSION What we have seen happening at Potatang is arguably homologous to what happened at the hospital at Port Blair, where Jarawa patients sliced up blankets, bed sheets and curtains to make ornaments. The same chain of operations is enacted upon objects gathered at the roadside during 2000, like sunglasses, and material acquired at the contact expeditions observed in 1992. Material specific to a place is made into an ornament, a durable embodiment of the contact event, which is carried until the next interaction where it can be shared with other Jarawa. Ornaments act as anchors in the world of overlapping times and places the Jarawa have inhabited for the last two hundred years. Given the communication between Jarawa camps, why is there no uniformity of practice when it comes to not wearing clothes? This may tell us something about their relation to objects. Objects acquire new sets of contexts and new effects through history. To produce an object is an effort not only of labor but also of skill and care in selecting material. The ornaments made by the Jarawa thus represent successive historical encounters and transactions. The Jarawa subject incorporates these into the object in a consistent manner. This of course presents a puzzle to the administration as to why ‘modern’ materials are not simply adopted by the Jarawa rather than adapted by them? Why, unlike the women in Tirur, do

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women in Jhirkatang choose not to wear gowns? Practices of dress and ornament are not then simple by-products of contact that can be predicted, and kept in mind during future exchanges intended to bring tribal and settler culture closer together. Objects for the Jarawa evoke a whole body of experience associated with the history of contact and with subsequent transactions. Both the British and the present government have acted on the assumption that dressing the Jarawa is a step towards civilizing them and bringing them into the mainstream. It was accordingly assumed that on returning from Port Blair Enmey would be responsible for the transformation of the other Jarawa. But on getting off the bus at the roadside, he gave up the objects acquired in Port Blair and continues living with his family in the forest of Lakra Lungta. One could say that Enmey has understood how to exist in plural locales, and stands out among many other Jarawa who are also learning how to move in and out of the world of the forest. The fact is that the exchange of objects is a process interpreted differently by outsiders and by the Jarawa. Outsiders read the acceptance of material as heralding a process of change. Whereas for the Jarawa, ornaments represent a process in themselves, whether these are artifacts they have made or objects they have acquired. So the ornaments made from the fabric in the hospital are “tied to the body” like plant fiber and the material recovered at the coast, and like the way clay paint and talcum powder are applied to mark moments of transition. The Jarawa see ornaments in terms of relations, which means they play a critical role in a history that has, for the Jarawa, always included the outsider. But when outsiders making contact with the Jarawa take ornaments and clothing practices to signify their own role as civilizers of the primitive, they, ironically, behave as if object and subject may be conflated and as if they themselves are the sole agents of history. Again, contacts with Jarawa may be seen as a series of experiments on the part of the administration, no two of which have produced the same results. On the other hand, for the Jarawa, the improvisation and exchange of ornaments is evidence of the flexibility of a tradition at work in other interactions as well, the process of making objects and the associations of their raw material having always been invested with significance in Andamanese culture. Many models have been developed in studies of the culture of objects. Some of these propose that things have biographies of their own (Kopytoff 1986, Gosden and Marshall 1999) or help to elicit the biographies of people (Hoskins 1998). Gell argues that in certain social conjunctures objects appear as agents as much as persons (Gell 1998: 19). Strathern has drawn our attention to the fact that in a gift economy objects cannot be disposed of by people without enchaining them in social relations with others, and that therefore the distinction of object from subject is too specific to the West to further our

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understanding of other cultures (Strathern 1988: 161). Have we yet devised quite the right language to express the how people and things are mutually implicated? On the one hand, as Gell himself concedes, we are wary of granting “things” agency on the grounds that they are not agents in their own right, as the material world is only assumes force and significance through human activity. On the other hand, things are not passive registers of human action. We are all socialized within particular material settings, which to varying degrees determine our sense of physical possibility. We can see this in the way the Jarawa choose to process the raw materials outsiders provide. The deep mutual involvement of people and things means that the ends of social life are in large measure achieved through the qualities of objects used or adapted to use. Outsiders in the Islands, whether colonial authorities or representatives of the independent State, have seen their own social values as central and so arrogated to themselves the right to dress the naked. The Jarawa, on the other hand, by shredding gifts of cloth to weave into headbands, and by strategically divesting themselves of clothing or adornment, register far greater awareness of the efficacy and the affective powers of objects.

NOTES 1. “Objects are simple but in complex ways” (Gosden and Knowles 2001:24). 2. Records of Home Department, Judicial Branch, OC No.32, 29th July, 1859, National Archives of India, New Delhi and Portman (1899 Vol. 1: 277–278; Vol. II: 715–716). 3. This was one of the reasons that most early survey reports of the Andaman Islands were carried out from the coastal approach alone. 4. In his preface to the section on the Andamans in the Census of India, Temple (1903:50) provides a short list of the differences between North and South Andamans and the Ongee and Jarawa regarding styles of dress and adornment. Despite broad similarities, the culture of dress and adornment is not uniform throughout the Islands. General differences can be outlined between the tribes in the three main areas, Great Andaman (in North and South groupings), Little Andamans (the Ongee) and Middle Andamans (the Jarawa). Most early studies were done in the area of Port Blair, on South Andaman Island. In the late nineteenth century, as the net of colonial authority spread, members of tribal groups from north and south came to live in the Andaman Homes. This would mean that only those from the south did not necessarily wear objects collected in the south. Written accounts also indicate that with increased interaction in the late nineteenth century, distinctions between tribal styles rapidly blurred. The Andamanese in the Homes were taught “modesty” and made to wear loincloths, sarongs, shorts and other western or Indian clothing when they interacted with Europeans. With this disappeared the chance of detailed information on distinctions between tribal groups and on the way body adornment marked group identity. Some in-

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formation is available from photographic records and from variations in hairstyle (there are also variations in the way plant materials are used to make coverings for the pubic region). Upper northern groups wear ornaments identical to southern groups but the northern groups always had their hair matted. Southern groups also trimmed their hair, but the Ongee and Jarawa always cropped their hair closely in straight lines over the forehead and sides (Temple 1903: 50), and were also alike in that they never practiced body scarification. 5. For example, in saying, “I pronounce you man and wife,” a vicar unites single people in marriage and brings about a new state of affairs (Austin 1975). 6. In 1999, one of the senior nurses conducting a group of visitors described how hard it had been the previous year, when the Jarawa would not follow anything, not even instructions for simple toilet use, though now they had learned everything and would even ask for soap. Promptly the next day one of the visitors returned with a box of soap to distribute among them. 7. The doctors claim that Enmey was driven out because his leg fracture made him a liability to his group, so that he took to modern medicine as his last refuge. His return with his motor abilities fully restored gained him influence among the Jarawa, one of the consequences of which was their coming out to the hospital for medical treatment. Enmey himself tells a different story depending on his audience. According to him he had had to leave the forest after he killed his prospective father–in-law for permitting Enmey’s fiancé to seek another husband from the Tirur region. 8. One must remember that the idea of Jarawa being captured or allowed to “visit” that would change the course of history goes back to early colonial experiences. From 1789, British colonial ships that; on sighting the Jarawa would send boats with ‘gift items’ ashore so that the islands could be explored. A description by C.H. Cornwallis dated 19 December 1788 (Cited in Temple 1990) outlines the course that after loading the Jarawa with ‘presents and other allurements’ be allowed to return so that it ‘may remove the apprehensions of the inhabitants in general, and promote an easy intercourse’ in the future. These attempts to make friendly contact with ‘the natives’ were generally unsuccessful, and were soon replaced by a pattern of gift giving and receiving which involved mostly food and implements. Over a period, this led to the Jarawa being brought aboard the ships. Lieutenant Colonel Albert Fytche (1861) notes that in order to make proper observations and learn about the Andamanese, the captured natives were taken to Rangoon, but this was not very successful. This lack of success was, due to the fact that the captives mostly imitated the captors’ language and, in order to learn the language of the tribal, it was important to observe them as a larger group interacting among themselves. 9. Popularized by Berger (Berger 1972, Berger and Mohr 1989), the phrase “ways of seeing” here alludes to the implicit orientation of ethnographers towards their field, a particular way of looking at the culture and accordingly of writing about it (Edwards 1990, 1992, Stocking 1985, Urry 1972, Young 1998). The crisis of ocularcentrism within anthropology, which can be seen as a belated modernist turn within the discipline, was initiated in the 1980s when Fabian (1983) drew attention to the limitations of the “visualism” of classical anthropology. In discussing the “varieties of sensory experience,” Howes (1991) further developed a critique of the discipline’s ‘visualist

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bias.’ Observation, identified as a dominant trope in modern anthropology, was seen as allowing the fieldworker to adopt a stance of detached contemplation. Fabian argued that such an approach accrues knowledge organized according a series of visual metaphors that have the ultimate effect of objectifying and dehumanizing the ethnographic subjects and denying them not only coevality with the observer but any history of their own (See also Banks and Morphy 1997, Clifford 1988, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Jackson 1981, Stoller 1989 and Taylor 1994) 10. Enmey was brought to the Hospital to be treated for compound fractures in his leg. During his stay of six months, he was shown many things, like airplanes and video footage of the Jarawa, and acquired a good grasp of Hindi, the lingua franca of the Islands after Independence. 11. Enmey’s analogy between the rewards of moving on the road (through horizontal space) and climbing the tree (through vertical space) conforms to RadcliffeBrown’s (1964: 176, 186, 301) theory that it is by integrating vertical and horizontal movement that the medicine man (Okojumu or Okopaid) gains power. A similar logic would explain the power of ancestors and Torale in Ongee culture (Pandya 1990, 1993). 12. Enmey’s understanding was that he was going to New Delhi to participate in the Republic Day ceremony. Enmey has in the past been introduced to other politicians and authorities visiting the islands as a ‘leader’ of the Jarawa (The Week, December 1999, Vol. 18 no.1, pp 60–61). The notion of a leader is of course an anomaly in the tribal culture of Andamans. We can, however, accept that Enmey exerts a degree of ‘influence’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1964:45), especially among the young Jarawa who often visit Port Blair and Kadamtalla and exploit the possibilities of contact with passers-by on the ATR as well as with the AAJVS. 13. It may be argued that basket and bag cannot be categorized as ornaments. But it is as unlikely to see an Andamanese without ornaments as without a basket into which to put things she or he has gathered. I have often found that if the Ongee or Jarawa lack a fine hand woven basket, in about thirty minutes they contrive to assemble a cane framework, which serves as a basket in which to gather things outside their campsite. The Ongee now carry a cloth bag across their chests and the Jarawa keep a folded plastic bag tucked into the waistband. The Jarawa living closer to the ATR regularly provide plastic bags to the Jarawa of Tirur. 14. However well meant by AAJVS, this measure has also had adverse effects. Some individuals who were responsible for protecting Jarawa became sexual exploiters. The official enquiry in this matter was still being conducted in July 2003 15. I have never observed or heard of Jarawa being covered in red clay paint at sites of contact. This makes sense, because red clay paint is used to signify rites of transition during which the individual is subject to various taboos (Leach 1971). However, in some Jarawa camps I have seen individuals covered in red paint and during contact events Jarawa have been spotted wearing ornaments made of the bones of dead relatives, their bodies covered in white clay paint. This proves that the contact event is one in which all members of society can participate. 16. The outcry at the judicial level and from international humanitarian bodies over the neglect of the Jarawas marks a failure on the part of the outside world to see

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Jarawa culture as a process. What these patronizing concerns ignore is the capacity of the Jarawa to make meaning for them selves. 17. A parallel to this is the way Australian Aborigines moved their encampments closer to the stations of white settlers in order to collect rations of wheat flour and sugar (Clarke 1996, Elkin 1951). See also Connolly and Anderson (1987), O’ Hanlon (1989) and Schieffelin (1996). 18. Around 1985 the Administration had even asked the Forest Department to set up permanent structures where food supplies could be stored close to areas where the Jarawa were known to set up camp. This was part of long term measures to contain the hostility of Jarawa, who had in Tirur taken to attacking villages when hungry. These structures still exist, and some of them are now police outposts. 19. See Nancy Munn (1986: 121–214) who has developed this notion in relation to Massim culture.

Part III

HISTORY

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Jarawa from Lakra Lungta (1998)

Chapter Six

Signifying Practices: The “Violent” Other

The reflections offered in this chapter on conflict between the native Islanders and settlers from the mainland refers to archival records and field studies on perceptions of conflict, but inevitably also draws more generally on encounters from over two decades of association with the Islands. What information we have on the ‘hostile’ and ‘isolated’ Jarawa comes partly from historical accounts (Portman 1899: 11–51, 70–67, 116; Man 1932: 135–36; Ritchie 1771: 61; Colebrooke 1807: 385; Earl 1850: 9, Anon 1850: 13–14; Topping 1791: 44; Mouat 1863: 21–22) and administrative policy directives (Portman 1899, Awaradi 1990, Das and Rath 1991: 101–120, Mukhopadhyay et al 2002), but is predominantly based on what official documents describe as “contact expeditions” (Sarkar 1990, Pandit 1990). My first experience of such expeditions was in 1993. It was only then, after having worked in the Islands for a decade, that I was permitted by the local administration to take part in a series of contact expeditions in the west coast. Though bound by a number of official constraints, I could visit the Reserve forest and also had many opportunities to talk to nontribal people living in the vicinity of the ‘hostile’ tribals. I will be discussing my encounters both during this expedition and during the visit with which I followed it up, to the eastern border of Jarawa territory. This enquiry undertaken by this chapter is twofold. First, contact expeditions to the west coast are placed in historical context, by looking at contact events from the colonial period. This permits us to trace the links the ‘myth’ of the hostile Jarawa bears to the general history of the Islands. But we fully appreciate some of the concerns giving rise to these expeditions—as well as the failure of the expeditions to address them—only if we study the relations between the Jarawa and settlers on the eastern, forested side of the 203

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Jarawa Reserve. The ‘friendly contact’ we hear of, as having occurred on the west coast is usually limited to formal contact events. The idea of friendly contact becomes hard to sustain on the eastern side, where the encounters occurring when the Jarawa leave their Reserve and enter settler villages are termed ‘hostile’ by the administration. Second, the issue of “Violence and the Other” frames this chapter’s investigation of conflict and how each group culturally codes it. Settlers to signify their irreducible “otherness” invoke Jarawa acts of violence. But what we shall also find is that these acts construed as outré by outsiders are for the Jarawa an essential means of marking their “Others.” We shall be looking at how the Jarawa and the settlers ‘signify’ one another, whether through the selective cognizance of casualties in official reports or through disfiguring the body of the outsider. We shall also discuss how the two groups contest the meanings of “boundaries” and of “hostile acts.” Given that it is tricky to move between these two areas of enquiry—the history of conflict and its representation—by way of a prelude we go over Barthes’ elaboration of the connection between “a mythical schema” and “general history.” While the number of stories in circulation on the violence of the native Islander suggests that “the store of mythical signifiers is inexhaustible” (Barthes 1987: 127), what becomes increasingly attenuated as these myths are recycled is the connection of these signifiers with the actual exigencies faced by the Jarawa from colonial times to the present. Tirur village school students asked to make replicas of Jarawa arrows as craft project (See. below) are producing signifiers that, like the characters of an ideographic system of writing, derive from a concept, which they are far from representing adequately. Barthes has noted that there are three ways in which myths can be viewed. Myths are manipulated when signifiers are chosen with the intention of triggering—unthinking—associations in the minds of readers; myths are demystified by readers who see through the signifier to what it seeks to convey; but it is only when the signifier is focused on an “inextricable whole of meaning and form,” that one apprehends the relations a mythical schema bears to general history—as a story “at once true and unreal.” “Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection” (Barthes 1987: 129). If the principle of myth, according to Barthes, is to transform “history into nature this chapter seeks to recover that history by showing the lineages of contemporary conflict to lie partly in the discourse of violence in colonial times. Similarly, even if popular perceptions of the behavior of “savages” appear to be confirmed by official reports of casualties, both must still be sifted bearing in mind that a primary characteristic of myth is that it is “speech justified in excess.”

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Arrows made by school children displayed on the wall. It is interesting to note how the ‘Jarawa arrows’ the image of a nationalist leader Subhash Bose, and his famous appeal “You give me blood and I will give you freedom!” are combined.

THE PLACELESS PLACE ON THE HISTORICAL LANDSCAPE The Introduction and part I sketched the history of the colonial settlement of the Islands, starting from 1788 when Blair and Colebrooke undertook the survey that led to the decision to set up (what was subsequently named) Port Blair. As the surrounding area was occupied by various tribes, the port was properly established only after nine years of fierce territorial clashes with the Aka-bea da and the Jarawa. After 1858, when the establishment of the penal settlement entailed an expansion of the administrative infrastructure around Port Blair, there was increased contact between the British and convicts from the mainland with the tribes who controlled the surrounding forests. In the hope of cementing friendly ties with these tribes and extending the scope of their authority, the administration set up several ‘Andaman Homes’ for the tribals between 1863 and 1866. As the Andamanese began in varying degrees to experience increased dependence on the British, many groups did become residents of these Homes. By 1877, the Homes had become the primary site of encounter between the Andamanese and the British, from where the former were recruited and trained as labor, and sometimes enlisted to help the British

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establish contact with the Jarawa, who continued to resist the very presence of outsiders, not to mention their expansionist designs. And the Homes were also spaces where large numbers contracted the diseases of measles and syphilis which led to the decimation of the population. For several decades, the administration tried with mixed success to use other tribes to establish contact with the Jarawa, but were never able to learn much about them, unlike other tribes who could be observed at the Homes. After the Islands became a Union Territory of independent India, the forest inhabited by the Jarawa was declared protected territory in 1958. It remained an area about which the surrounding settler population, to whom the Jarawa were still hostile, had little real knowledge but many myths, and the only visitors permitted to enter the Jarawa Reserve were government parties bringing gifts, in continuation of colonial practice. A look at history shows us that the ends of contact initiatives have changed over time. And when we compare contact events—formal and spontaneous, hostile and otherwise—what also emerges is the contingency of territorial and cultural boundaries. Most would agree that we are in a better position to understand what marks a contact event as friendly or hostile if we do not align ourselves at the outset with individual parties. But we should ask ourselves a further question—contact events are defined by boundaries, but do these boundaries possess reality for both parties? It is the contention of this chapter that the Jarawa Reserve forest occupies a ‘placeless place’ in the landscape of the Islands, which is another way of saying that conflict, should be viewed in its virtual as well as actual dimensions. For reading early accounts and then listening to the reports of witnesses at friendly and hostile contact events makes for an experience like sitting in a barber’s chair, where the mirrors in front and behind reflect one another endlessly, so as to collapse the distinction between realms real and reflected. Do formal contact events invest the notion of boundaries with a reality they would not otherwise possess? Are boundaries recreated in spontaneous contact events, making those previously established redundant? If the Jarawa are really hostile, making it necessary to ensure they have minimum contact with settlers, can we hope to understand what it is that underlies this hostility? Is there really a great gulf fixed between their worlds and that of their settler neighbors, as the latter maintain? We do know that there is a considerable tradition of using anthropological categories to understand the Jarawa (Portman 1899: 674–76; RadcliffeBrown 1922: vii–ix, 85; Man 1932: 195), and their behavior might indeed suggest speculations with more general anthropological resonance. Studies of cultural encounters elsewhere have shown that most linguistic categories remain untranslated and misunderstood (Todorov 1984, Tomas 1996) but this chapter seeks to show that the behavior of the actors and the way these are

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mediated in reports constitute the space where contact relations are ‘culturally translated.’

THE MEANINGS OF BOUNDARIES Thus it was in 1858 that this cluster of 306 islands in the Bay of Bengal assumed significance in political–historical terms, being strategically placed to defend British imperial interests in South and Southeast Asia. Beyond the administrative seat in Port Blair lay forest that was gradually cleared for cultivation and to set up small establishments. Since Independence in 1947, the prospect of exploiting this land has attracted an increasing number of people to the Islands, mainly from the poorer parts of southern and eastern India. These migrants often encroach illegally, taking advantage of the loopholes in regulations—loopholes for which political uncertainties are responsible. Can this influx be controlled? Should it be stopped? These are some of the issues debated by those living on the Islands. Lost amid the multiplicity of opinions voiced are the compound problems faced by the tribes. They who have lived in the forests far longer than those who arrived as colonial settlers, prisoners or immigrants from the mainland are today reduced to mere 0.3% of the total population of the Islands (Census Report of India 1991 and Saldanha 1989: 11–12, 31–48). The Jarawa are one of the last remaining groups to have continued to live in the forest without—at least until 1999—having been to any degree assimilated to the neighboring society. After Independence, an area of 765 square kilometers was set-aside for them in South and Middle Andaman. Though meant as a protectionist measure, this demarcation of territory established a boundary that the Jarawa may not have viewed positively as a means of assuring them security of livelihood. From their point of view, they have experienced increasing pressure since early colonial times to confine their movements to a bounded space, as have the Great Andamanese and the Ongee. As an ethnographer of Andamanese culture, I have often wondered how the Jarawa apprehend the fact of a boundary between their part of the forest and the surrounding area that outsiders are steadily taking over. Do these territorial divisions mean anything to them? Or do the boundaries that have reconfigured the landscape remain obscure, providing no explanation for why they are expected to give up the practice traditional to hunting and gathering societies of relocating according to the seasonal availability of resources? (See Appendix D for maps showing areas associated with different tribal groups on Andaman Islands) Ethnographical and historical accounts indicate that the classic division between coastal and forest dwellers was a feature that characterized most tribal

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groups. With the change of season, coastal groups moved into the forest and forest dwellers moved to the coast. This meant that forest dwellers were guests of those in the coastal area from approximately September to November, while coastal dwellers were guests of forest dwellers from April to June. Apart from this movement along the east–west axis of the Islands, there were also groups moving from south to north, and situations of confrontation often occurred during the migration between east and west. However, first the colonial settlement in Port Blair and after 1947 what was termed “planning for urban growth and development” disrupted the traditional pattern of movement entirely. The barriers and new vectors of movement that appeared in the vestibule between coast and forest interrupted the continuity of landscape. The disparity in numbers between the tribal and immigrant population led to the Jarawa being pushed into a more restricted area and access to the coast and forest became increasingly precarious with the appearance of roads and settlements in the middle of their territory—territory traditionally defined not by permanent limits but by this oscillatory movement between east and west. We saw in Chapter Four that the distinction between the two resource bases grounds many Ongee cultural practices; similarly for the Jarawa the movement between them had formed the basis both of livelihood and of relations of social exchange between different bands. As the administration would see it, the Jarawa have been assigned an area that allows them access to the seashore, the eastern side of one of the islands and the evergreen tropical forest extending longitudinally down the Tirur hill tracts before blending into the small farms of the surrounding settlements. The authorities see this Reserve as the area to which Jarawa movements should be restricted and also as a place where they may be observed, though only authorized persons may enter. Thus the imposition of territorial fixity on the Jarawa forms part of a discourse of power and authority to which the nontribal population is also subject. We should remember however that both tribal and non-tribals continue to move across the boundaries. These transgressions occur not just because of the inability of the Jarawa to understand the boundaries on the eastern side, for there is also the illegal exploitation of natural resources by fishermen and hunters crossing the coastline on the west. The signboards placed to mark the beginning of Jarawa territory constitute the most visible irony of communication, in their assumption that the Jarawa will understand the boundaries of their territory by reading words painted on boards, when there are no grounds for assuming that they will understand even that the signboard is intended to communicate something. As written words mean nothing to either the Jarawa or the settlers, the signs only foster further misunderstanding. It should be added that in the Master Plan (Awaradi 1990) it is proposed that figures of tribal and non-tribal be painted on the

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boards, to convey more effectively the significance of the existing boundary markers. It is the police (earlier known as the Bush Police) who try actively to enforce the message of these signboards, having set up a series of outposts to ensure the protection of inhabitants on either side of the boundary. They attempt to keep the two worlds apart, but the line between them is regularly breached from both sides. These acts of transgression further attenuate the notion of separation, supported by no more than a signboard in the first place. Its purpose of restricting movement not accomplished, the boundary is just an idea the administration has failed to impose on the tribal and non-tribal communities. Not only is the boundary denied, a counter-discourse is established that reflects upon the way the authority imposing the boundary sought to represent itself to both the Jarawa and the villagers. A boundary comes into being when a place is set off from the continuum of the surrounding landscape by borders. Looking at the history of contact events, we will argue that, in interrupting the continuity of the landscape, the boundary imposed on Jarawa territory creates a historically unprecedented form of interaction often marked by disharmony. Repeated movements across these boundaries scramble their meaning, so that they effectively mark a

Signboard at the entrance to the Jarawa Reserve, near Phooltalla, 1995. Note the sign on extreme right, which warns that no horn should be used by the road users, as it would disturb the Jarawas hunting in the nearby forest.

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‘non-place,’ a site of misunderstood messages, broken rules and conflicted emotions. What we are now concerned to show is that if divisions and distinctions confine movement and meaning, the breach of boundaries engenders new meanings. It situates the tribes in a place that possesses unstable presence but is nonetheless vividly apprehended, like the area between facing mirrors, whose spatial limits dissolve as it is reflected to infinity. It is the kind of site Foucault terms a “heterotopia,” where all the “real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (1986: 22). Borders and boundaries have been viewed by some social scientists as operating on a principle of exclusion which grounds power relations at a given location in history. This perspective focuses on the restriction of movement across boundaries, emphasizing the consciousness of ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ An alternative perspective is that boundaries mark zones of overlap and generate a feeling of ‘between-ness’ and ‘transition.’ Between A and B there emerges a unique place containing something of both A and B but in the end distinct from either. This gray area has its own temporality, for it is in their ritual passage through it that subjects undergo transformation. This is a conception of boundaries as ambiguous, emphasizing the new possibilities created by liminal domains (Douglas 1966, Turner 1966, Van Gennep 1960).

Police camp inside Jarawa territory near Tirur. (Photographed in 1998)

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Mapping this theoretical model onto the ethnographic field with which we are concerned, it is when contact events bring together the Jarawa, settlers and government officials that the meanings of boundaries are reinvented as something active and processual rather than as given. During these contact events, areas of jurisdiction may be reasserted by officials or challenged by the Jarawa; zones of shared meaning may expand; divisions may dissolve. It is because their meaning is contested that border-zones are charged with such potential, for they become by implication sites where identity is contested. The landscape becomes a field of power where history, politics, social relations and cultural perceptions become issues of “high tension” (Inglis 1977). This fluidity of meaning in contact events need not be seen as positive. In his analysis of contact between Europeans and the Andamanese, Tomas (1996:5) conceives of the Islands as a nonrepresentable “mirage,” where boundaries define a “transcultural space” whose territoriality is unstable and transient. This “mirage” is created by a series of events in spaces that lie “between cultures” in a “momentary social vacuum” (1996:35). The contact events that Tomas compares to accounts of other ethnographic encounters (Denning 1980, Sahlins 1985 and Schieffelin et al 1991) all belong to the past. But contact between the ‘hostile’ Jarawa and other Indians continues today in Middle and South Andamans, and plays out in a way that need not be viewed as giving rise to the misrepresentation and misinterpretation emphasized by Tomas. They can be seen instead as a cumulative series of reinterpretations that put in question the space defined by the boundaries. To develop the implications of this, we are aware that groups may treat certain characteristics as “iconic,” or essential to the identity of another group, when these are merely historical or conventional (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37). This can give rise to a phenomenon Irvine and Gal term “fractal recursivity” (Ibid., 38), where the oppositions used to distinguish groups from each another are found within groups as well, so that the differences that create an identity for a group may also further divide it. We can describe the space of contact events as characterized by such fractal recursivity, as the line defining the Jarawa as “Other” is complicated by the fact that settlers themselves do not honor the boundaries laid down by the state. Having argued that borders are potentially sites for the creation of new meanings, what does this mean for the natural continuum they segment as cultural territory? There are no simple answers, for it is not as if landscape lies inert prior to the imposition of borders. Tribal and settler communities experience it according to different codes of perception and in different contexts of traversal, and encounters over the years led to the accumulation of lore about areas associated with the Other. Boundaries cannot define this landscape; only make visible the mutual incoherence of the meanings the two groups invest in it. This is why exchange during contact resembles that

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between concave mirrors, in that it distorts the identities and intentions of participants. There may be doubt as to the immediate relevance of the processual character of landscape for the Jarawa, given that even if they can be said to inhabit a ‘placeless place,’ its gradual enclosure by settlements leaves the fact of material change incontestable. How the Jarawa have learned to navigate the changing contours of the landscape is one of the themes addressed in Chapter Seven, where we see how they use the road cutting through their Reserve as a means of directing encounters on their own terms. For the present, we are concerned to define a placeless place as one where multiple fragmentary impressions find purchase but knowledge is unlikely to take root. Yet the very provisionality of all impressions leads those reiterated to congeal quickly into the appearance of certainties—a case of what Barthes explains as “speech justified in excess” (Barthes 1987). A process of ‘congealment’ characterizes what is enacted at these sites as much as the beliefs centered around them. The ritualization of contact events is seen as a means of containing the terrible consequences that encounters have had historically; it is simultaneously a formal enactment of state authority that makes visible assumptions about the Jarawa and their relation to the state. Similarly, unfocused fears of the Other never encountered assume the coherence of narrative, whose images, as we see below, are anchored in more authentic memories. Pointing to the hills overlooking Tirur, students studying at a village school close to the Jarawa Reserve said that they knew Jarawa sometimes emerged from the forest, and described how in July 1991 they had killed an eight-year old boy playing on the fringe of the fields while his sister minded the cattle. When asked what they thought Jarawa were, the children told the story of the trained elephant which had been abandoned by timber contractors when lumber operations were adversely affected by the Second World War, and that grew wild living in the forest: Jarawa are like the elephants left behind in the forest. Jarawa came from some kingdom across the sea and were stranded in the forest here, and over a period they forgot all their civilization and sociality and grew wild.

Chapters three and five had referred to the fact that the British employed prisoners from the mainland to clear the forests, while natives of the Islands were employed as guides (Majumdar 1975, Singh 1978, Sen 2000). This division of labor was to the advantage of the British, for the convicts were made the targets of the frequent attacks by the Jarawa on people they saw as invading their territory (Haughton 1861). The British responded to these attacks by ordering ‘punitive expeditions’ on the Jarawa, that were conducted by other Andamanese and Burmese forest workers and soldiers (See accounts of 1910 in

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Appendix H, Census of India 1921: 31–9.) Vacant Jarawa campsites in the interior forests were invaded and ransacked, and sometimes set on fire. Reports suggest that face-to-face interaction led to fatalities on both sides, and to the capture of Jarawa women and children. However, the coastal area around the forests inhabited by the Jarawa (on the west side of the Middle Andamans) underwent, by and large, a very different historical experience (Man 1885: 263; Mouat 1863: 77–8.). From 1789, British colonial ships would on sighting the Jarawa send ashore boats to explore the islands. A description by C.H. Cornwallis from1788 conveys the extent and the character of the contact events: With respect to the best method of opening an intercourse with the people in the rude state in which they have hitherto been described to be, much may be collected from the attempts made by modern navigators on discovery; and it would appear from their regulations that it would be most advisable for you at first to refrain from landing (unless in the case of positive necessity) except at such places on the coast as you may judge from their appearance will successfully answer the objects of your survey . . . and in an attempt to offer them a social communication, which shall afford them the comforts and advantages of more civilised life, the dictates of humanity no less than of policy require that this should be effected as much as possible by conciliatory means, certainly without bloodshed. It is therefore recommended to you to endeavor by persuasion, presents and other allurements (but not by force or deceit) to prevail on some of the natives to come on board your vessels where kind and attentive treatment of them may remove the apprehensions of the inhabitants in general, and promote an easy intercourse, while at the same time a useful object may be gained in acquiring a knowledge of their manners and customs, and such words and expressions in their language as would facilitate the communication between us. (Temple 1990: 103–6)

Such attempts to make friendly contact with ‘the natives’ proving in general unsuccessful, they were soon replaced by an asymmetrical pattern of gift–giving, where the gifts were mostly food and implements. Over a period, there developed the practice of bringing the Jarawas aboard the ships. The ship’s deck provided a new site of contact, beyond the border created by the seashore (Denning 1980: 18,124–129 and 1992). From the Jarawa perspective, they were being taken as captives across familiar boundaries in boats which opened up to them a space where the world of the colonizers could be seen at first-hand. In 1861, Lieutenant Colonel Fytche refers to captured natives being taken to Rangoon in order to study them properly, and that this was not very successful, owing to the captives imitating the language of their captors. In order to learn the language of the tribal it was necessary to observe

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them interacting among themselves. We have a report of another contact event from M. Symes (1800: 131–32): Two young women, allured by the temptation of fish, were secured, and brought on board a ship at anchor in the harbor: the captain treated them with great humanity; they soon got rid of all fear of violence, except what might be offered to their chastity, which they guarded with unremitting vigilance: although they had a small apartment allotted to themselves, and had no real cause for apprehension, one always watched whilst the other slept; they suffered clothes to be put on, but took them off again as soon as opportunity offered, and threw them away as useless in cumbrances. When their fears were over they became cheerful, chattered with freedom, and were inexpressibly diverted at the sight of their own persons in a mirror; they were fond of singing, sometimes in melancholy recitative, at others in a lively key; and often danced about the deck with great agility, slapping their posteriors with the back of their heel. Wine and spirituous liquors were disagreeable to them; no food seemed so palatable as fish, rice, and sugar. In a few weeks, having recovered strength and become fat from the more than half famished state in which they were brought on board, they began to think confinement irksome, and longed to regain their native freedom. In the middle of the night, when all but the watch man were asleep, they passed in silence through the captain’s cabin, jumped out of the stern windows into the sea, and swam to an island half a mile distant, where it was in vain to pursue them, had there been any such intention; but the object was to retain them by kindness, not by compulsion, an attempt that has failed on every trial. Hunger may induce them to put themselves in the power of strangers; but the moment that want is satisfied, nothing short of coercion can prevent them from returning to a way of life, more congenial to their savage nature.

The ship’s deck thus assumed significance as a ‘heterotopia,’ occupied simultaneously by the ‘unknown savages’ and the colonial explorers whose worlds had hitherto been separated by the boundary of the coastline (Ritchie 1771: 47–9). The Jarawa were brought aboard by naval troops of Indian and Burmese descent accompanied by Andamanese sharpshooters. Once on board it was possible for the Jarawa to inspect the clothed British naval officers with the same curiosity as the non-tribal observed their own nakedness. Reports of this interaction describe the outsiders as trying not to laugh when giving gifts to the Jarawas and the Jarawas as childishly amused, running around wildly. They were often thrown overboard to swim back to the coast (Ritchie 1771: 47–9), which can be read as a gesture of dismissing the ‘savage’ from the space representing power, that reaffirmed the defining character of the border between the worlds of the ‘native’ and those exploring the coastline. As each group made meaning for the other and from the other, the apprehension as well as the laughter evoked by the unfamiliar, and the attempt to maintain old

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rules in the face of what seemed inassimilable, made coast and deck sites of distorted reflections, of deflected messages. Even if the shore assumed a new significance after the arrival of the ships, as a border negotiated through the exchange of gifts, it remained a place for Jarawa and outsider to encounter one another rather than to coexist. The power of the colonial explorers to command movement between their world and that of the ‘native’ could not remove the fears that persisted before the unknown represented by the other. The Jarawa would band into large groups in order to swim up to the ships and try and scale the deck, while on the other hand, nervous sepoys were made to drop to the coastline and locate Jarawa camps, often in order to ambush and capture the Jarawa as a ‘lesson’ for any injuries inflicted on settlers on the forested side of their territory. But how these boundaries were construed by each group never became clear to the other, just as for neither side did the passage of time bring any clarity as to the other’s objectives. On the western side of the island, explorations mutated into punitive expeditions, while on the eastern side the Jarawa continued their attacks on the increasing numbers of outsiders. These conflicts never led to a negotiated settlement of boundary-lines that would contain occasions for conflict rather than exacerbate differences.

SITES OF ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER: CONTACT EVENTS ON THE WESTERN SIDE Though varied in tone, the descriptions of the Jarawa by colonial settlers demonstrate the failure to establish lines of communication. Symes reported in 1795: Coconut . . . is not to be found here; they (the Jarawa) are extremely fond of it; whenever a nut was left in their way by the settlers, it was immediately carried off with much apparent satisfaction. Captain Stokes, who constantly resided on the island, disappointed in his attempts to establish a social intercourse, endeavored to alleviate their wants by sending, as often as circumstances would admit, small supplies of victuals to their huts, which were always abandoned on the approach of his people, but restored to again when they had withdrawn. (Symes 1800:135)

A much later account from the colonial period, by E.H. Man, gives a different picture of how the Jarawa presented themselves in contact events: It has been remarked with regret by all interested in the race, that intercourse with the alien population has, generally speaking prejudicially affected their

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morals. . . . Though there are some grounds for the opinion hitherto held regarding their fearlessness, our more recent relations with them prove that the surprising courage and apparent utter recklessness of life which they manifested in their early encounters with us were due rather to their ignorance of, and disbelief in any foe more powerful than themselves, or with means of destruction more deadly than their own. . . . All is regarded as fair in war, and cunning and treachery are considered worthy of commendation; in short the high type of courage common among most civilized, and a few savage nations appears to be totally lacking among the Andamanese; nevertheless, those who evince courage are much admired. . . . When appraised of the existence of danger, they usually evince extreme caution, and only venture upon an attack when well assured that by their superior numbers, they can put the enemy to flight, or will be able, by stratagem, to surprise and overpower him. At the same time certain traits that have been noticeable in their dealings with us would give colour to the belief that they are not altogether lacking in the sense of honour, and have some faint idea of the meaning of justice. (Man 1885: 92)

The continuing sense that they could not anticipate the moves of the Jarawa meant that contact parties always approached the boundary cautiously. At the same time they made no real attempt to communicate with the Jarawa. The boundary effectively worked to maintain the distance between the groups claimed to be establishing contact. The west coast became a landscape striated by a series of boundaries whose meanings bled into one another— forests, coastline, beach, sea negotiated by boat, sea negotiated by ship— across all of which there continued incursions and excursions and the flow of friendliness and hostility. These patterns of interaction have continued subsequent to the colonial period, across boundaries where the meaning of contact is constituted by the unceasing efforts of non-tribals to ‘move in’ and the Jarawas to ‘move out.’ These boundaries have remained after Independence, but have assumed especial significance as sites where ‘gifts’ may be left for Jarawa. The Indian government continued the practice of sending ships, boats and gifts to the west coast to pacify the Jarawa and to make possible the delineation of Jarawa territory. This was seen as continuing a policy of contact meant to evoke the trust and friendship of the Jarawa. The belief was that once the Jarawa were pacified they could be brought into ‘the mainstream,’ just as other Andamanese tribes who had initially resisted the arrival of outsiders had eventually joined the Andaman Homes (Portman 1899, Ball 1897: 170–74, Mathur 1984, Man 1885: 262). Many analysts describe the demographic decline experienced by the Great Andamanese and the Ongee when they were forced to join the mainstream as amounting to genocide (Cooper 1990, Danda 1987, Myka 1993, Venkateswar 2004). In the case of the Jarawa,

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Jarawa acknowledging the contact party approaching the west coast where gifts are handed over. (1994)

Commotion created by the arrival of the contact party, as Jarawa scramble to unload their gifts of coconuts. (1994)

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Jarawa children and mother sorting gifts of coconut, bananas and stack of metal utensils provided as gifts by the contact party on the west coast. (1995)

however, such claims are not at issue, for the establishment of contact remained incomplete, and it is this failure that is often seen to underlie the continuing conflict. After the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation (ANPATR) 1956 declared the Jarawa forest a protected area, armed guards often left gunny bags containing gifts of coconut, plantain, puffed rice, utensils and scrap metal on the west coast. From the safe distance of the ship they have observed the Jarawa coming ashore and collecting the bags. The border between the two worlds was to some extent maintained, and served to demarcate space in such a way that tribal and the non-tribal are never present in one place simultaneously. It is the outsiders’ acknowledgement of a boundary they have felt the need to create for themselves. The very imposition of this boundary necessitated a zone where the landscape was not thus divided and the two parties could interact—a place that belonged to nobody. Here gifts could be left for recipients who are known to exist, though they are seldom seen. The contact initiatives of the British had never reached the point when the Jarawa permitted the outsiders to land. Only as late as 1970 was an official contact party able to land on a beach where the Jarawa were gathered without encountering overt hostility. Some twenty years of gift giving,

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had apparently encouraged the Jarawa to adopt a different stance towards these new visitors. Certain features of the contact event had been carried over from colonial days, e.g. anchoring ships at a distance from the beach, and having the contact party arrive in small boats laden with gifts accompanied by armed guards (the Bush Police). But for the first time these gifts were not just left on the beach but were actually placed in the hands of the recipients. As the ritual of contact evolved, the Jarawa were allowed to pick the items they wanted from the boat. Such innovations in the culture of contact came from the growing demand from non-tribals to pacify the Jarawa. The official body for tribal welfare, AAJVS), organized a series of friendly contact events. Weather permitting around every full moon the agency organizes a team that goes by boat to the western coast via Kadamtalla. This contact team includes administrators, a doctor, an officer from the statistics department, an anthropologist from the local Anthropological Survey Office and the official photographer. As the ship approaches the coastline, it starts to sound its horn and the crew looks out for any Jarawa emerging from the forest. When they are sighted, the ship anchors, motorboats are loaded with bananas, coconuts, metal implements and pieces of red cloth, and the contact party sets off for the beach some two kilometers away. In a smaller boat, members of the Bush Police remain on alert. They are not allowed to land on the beach but are to keep an eye out for possible trouble. As the boat loaded with gifts approaches, the Jarawa come up with their woven baskets and start to clamber in, scrambling for gifts. After an initial attempt to pick and choose, they fill their baskets with whatever they light on. Each family usually deposits its spoils at a separate place, before returning to refill their baskets. On an average, the team makes contact with twenty people, though there have been times when the group was as large as fifty or sixty. Men predominate, but again, there has also been contact with groups consisting entirely of women and children. After the contact party has landed the number of Jarawas around the boat increases. Jarawas have understood that the boat is ‘subordinate’ to the ship and try to visit the ship for more gifts. They have come to expect the team on the boat to unload gifts, in a manner reminiscent of the boat’s relation to the ship in the colonial period. They sing in a repetitive chant as they run between the boat and the spot where the gifts are deposited. No Jarawa ever tries to take from the pile of another family. As the gifts are being unloaded, the contact party disembarks and moves among the Jarawa gathered on the beach. The Jarawa light a fire on the beach when the ship is sighted, where they later roast the plantains and eat it with the coconut in the presence of the contact party. Sometimes they offer the food to the contact team, and it is accepted. Once they start feasting, the contact party begins its observations. The nature of these observations depends on individual inclination and

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ranges from estimating the numbers present to noting signs of sickness or injury and the need for medical attention (the long term returns of these small interventions to win Jarawa goodwill appeared when Enmey and others chose to avail of the medical facilities at Port Blair and Kadamtalla, as described in Chapter Five). The behavior of the Jarawa is recorded on camera, tape and film. It should be understood that the oobservation is by no means a one-sided affair. The contact party is also scrutinized, the Jarawa appearing particularly interested in clothes, skin and in variations in body size and shape. Sounds made by the other group are sometimes repeated in order to ascertain meaning and understanding (Taussig 1993). On occasion, in the midst of these exchanges, some among the Jarawa gradually start gathering up their gifts and moving towards their campsites in the forest. On other occasions, the contact party wanders in with the Jarawa and has the privilege of seeing where they live. The event generally comes to a close within three to four hours, and the visitors’ wave goodbye to the Jarawa and return to the ship. The Jarawa have understood that over time, tape recorders and video cameras have supplanted the use of cameras. The Jarawa have listened to the tapes played back to them and have understood what the world looks like through the viewfinder of a camera. While those contact events have confirmed some of the observations made on early British expeditions, there are inevitable gaps in the information garnered in such short periods, in events occurring three to five times in a year. Indeed, there are no systematic records maintained of the people contacted, and only estimates even of the number of Jarawa in the region. We do not even know if the Jarawa call themselves by that name at all. Contact events serve to affirm the power relations between ‘them and us,’ between those known as the Jarawa and the outsiders who have accomplished the mission of friendly contact. The Jarawa understand the power represented by the contact party, just as they have always understood the relationship between themselves, the people who arrive by boat and the ship anchored in the harbor. For the Jarawa, those who come to the beach bring things to give, and the power lies in the ‘gifts’ being bestowed and accepted. There is a clear hierarchy of command within the contact party, some of whose members have been enjoined to go, while others participate on their own account. For some the trip is ‘fun,’ a visit to ‘natural savages’ that promises elements of risk and above all the romance of the exotic. The Jarawa have obviously noticed the increase in the number of visitors and the quantity of gifts when a state guest is aboard. These guests sometimes choose to oversee the operation, and may even come ashore for a taste of contact. Shirtless subordinates on the boat follow the instructions of the fully clothed figure of authority on the beach, and the Jarawa themselves now command shirtless team members to unload gifts for them.

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The Jarawa often demand to be given the clothes worn by the contact party and have sometimes torn these off their bodies. They have yet to be asked the reason for this. As they often remove some of their shell and leaf ornaments— the only items they wear—to give them to the contact party, it perhaps follows that they expect members of the contact party to give away what is on their bodies. Local anthropologists stationed at the Port Blair office of the Anthropological Survey of India have explained the situation thus: Contact with Jarawa is what we call ‘participant observation’—becoming one with the native. If we visit the naked Jarawa then we should be without clothes as far as possible. The administration therefore has instructions that the contact party should land with minimum clothes on—but all this is forgotten when we have some high ranking official in the contact expedition, for who is going to tell them to please have only undergarments on!

Even those who have been involved with contact events for an extended period are not agreed about their objectives. Some feel that holding such events regularly helps to foster mutual trust and would encourage the Jarawa to join the ‘mainstream.’ But there are others who feel the whole ‘drama’ does not really accomplish anything. Government policy now discourages the practice of bringing aboard Jarawa to take them to other settlements, as had sometimes been done in the past. This is a consequence of incidents such as that of March 1977, when two Jarawa men were brought to Port Blair and one was seen to have an old bullet wound. After a brief stay they were returned in the hope that they would carry a message of trust and goodwill. But soon after, on April 20, Jarawa from the same region killed five poachers. Such incidents suggest to the administration that efforts to break down barriers do not always work. They lead to uncertainty about the viability of contact and mutual goodwill, and as to how the Jarawa actually perceive otherness, inclusion, boundaries and power. There is some evidence that they recognize power relations, but not the boundaries that, from the point of view of the authorities, restrict them (Hellard 1861, Sarkar 1990, Mukhopadhyay 2002). Describing his attempt to maintain peaceful and ordered relations with the Jarawa, Haughton speaks of ‘capturing’ natives from the coast and taking them to Port Blair (or even Rangoon) to ‘learn’ about them and to ‘teach’ them about the outside world (Haughton 1861). Haughton, like the contact parties of today, takes for granted the continuity between processes, whether of teaching and learning, or of giving and receiving, without realizing that this continuity is only possible in a situation of shared meanings. The beach becomes the stage for a drama enacting the power relations between the visitors and Jarawa. The role of the Jarawa is to receive things from people who

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remain wary of them, but wish them to ‘learn’ about the outside world. Veterans of contact parties remember that in the early days the Jarawa were like mischievous boys who did not hesitate to take things from the contact party and hide them away. They would deliberately fart in front of the members of the team, and were thrilled to see them running away holding their noses. Women would squirt breast milk on the ship’s crew or urinate—all reminiscent of the colonial encounter, characterized simultaneously by order and chaos, laughter and disgust. The Jarawa would become extremely rough if pushed away, until they had been lowered into boats and taken back to the shore. More recently, some of the Jarawa have been known to demand more gifts or to ask why they did not get particular items such as nails or metal blades. When they do not get what they want, they clutch onto the person whom they feel is responsible, apparently to express their resentment. There have been incidents when the Jarawa have got into fights with the contact team and fellow Jarawa— usually women—have had to intervene and calm things down. When there are women present in the contact party, they have attracted the curiosity of Jarawa men and women, and on occasion physical scuffles have led these women to feel they are being attacked. On the other hand, many among the (largely male) contact team have at times behaved inappropriately with the naked Jarawa women, trying to take photographs. The notion that Jarawa women may be behaved with differently from those in the contact team marks a further division between the visitors and the Jarawa. A similar division is manifest in the team feeling entitled to undertake all manner of examinations of the Jarawa—medical, physical, anthropological—without being ready to subject themselves to reciprocal examination. By 1995, reports of misdemeanor and violence led to the establishment of a strict code of conduct for contact parties, forbidding any action that might put the team at risk or jeopardize relations with the Jarawa. There should be no attempt to bring Jarawa aboard or to show them the world of the contact party. Gifts are no longer unloaded by the contact team and instead are left on the beach for the Jarawa to distribute among themselves afterwards. It is imperative for the contact party to ensure that the Jarawa not only receive the gifts but also see who brings them, but they are allowed to take the gift items on their own.

SITES OF ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER: CONTACT ON THE EASTERN SIDE Our study of the spatial and historical contours of the “placeless place” where official interaction with the Jarawa has traditionally been staged has shown how borders distort sightlines between the observers and the observed. The lie of the land is different on the eastern side of the Jarawa Reserve. It is here

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that the villages and fields mostly lie, and it has historically experienced considerable commercial pressure. Yet it serves as a “distant mirror” to interactions on the western coast. The transgression of borders on the part of both the Jarawa and the settlers may be understood in relation to their perception of the gift–giving rituals enacted on the coast. The complete opening up of the ATR since 1988 has made possible commercial traffic up to Mayabunder in North Andaman. Twenty-three kilometers of the ATR passes through Jarawa territory. After entering Ferargunj district just north of the Port Blair region, the bus stops at Jhirkatang, Check post No. 2. No one usually gets off at this compulsory stop, instead there enters the armed escort the Bush Police. The driver shows his permit and enters the required information in a logbook and, after checking all windows are shut, ensures the guard is comfortably installed in the front seat. At the all-clear signal, the bus moves forward slowly and waits for the barrier to be raised. A signboard declares the entry into the Jarawa Reserve, where drivers are expected to refrain from sounding horns loudly, lest it disturb the Jarawa tracking game in the forest. Buses never travel at night or without an escort, as there have been incidents of the Jarawa trying to stop vehicles by shooting arrows at the windscreen (in some buses the glass windows in front are now reinforced with wire netting). It is assumed that the noise of gunfire will scare them away. During the construction of the ATR through the Reserve, the workers were often the targets of Jarawa hostility. Despite various committees and commissions putting forward theories as to how the road may or may not affect the Jarawa, the road continues to be in use today (Vidyarthi 1976). Settlements are pressing in on the Reserve Forest, and there are temples and markets set up near the entrance and exit which attract still more visitors. As would be expected, on the eastern side of the Reserve, relations between the Jarawa and the settlers have been greatly affected by the construction of the road, the expanding settlements and the increasing visibility of outsiders. The settlers see the Jarawa Reserve as one more area to be exploited, and there is frequent poaching and illegal extraction of resources. These small settler communities have developed legends about how they have dealt with the Jarawa—how local heroes have killed the Jarawa while the latter were hunting wild pigs, how they have succeeded in befriending Jarawa as it is claimed is done on the west coast, how they have escaped being killed by savage Jarawa while collecting materials from the forest. Some of these stories are based on fact and the injuries and reported deaths from arrows and the mutilation of bodies indicate that outsiders enter areas out of bounds (Port Blair Police Headquarters Files). Records from 1946 to 1988 report an average of seven “Jarawa hostilities” each year, in each of which four people were killed on an average (Sarkar 1990). The incidence of violence has increased in the last few decades. Figures provide an indication—altogether 15 non-Jarawa were reported killed in

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the 76 encounters registered at district headquarters from 1946 to 1961 (15 years), while 15 deaths are again reported from a total of 28 incidents over just five years, 1983–1988. In the second case, eight of the deaths were in Jarawa territory, and the same was true of the eleven people reported as killed by Jarawa between November 1993 and January 1994. The local police recovered their bodies in various stages of decomposition and bearing signs of mutilation, especially in the region of the groin. Deposits of human faeces were also evident at the sites. During the same period the local newspaper, The Daily Telegram (Port Blair November 10, 1993, pp. 1–2), reported that the bodies of five missing Wandoor fisherman were recovered at Foul Bay, their jaws broken and their bodies pierced by arrows. The report of the district police officer explained that the severe mutilation of dead bodies was intended by the Jarawa to ensure that their “souls would not roam about in the form of demons but instead would find their heavenly abode.” However, Jarawa hostility is not evinced only when outsiders enter the forest. The Jarawa also cross boundaries and attack settlements and Bush Police camps, usually on full moon nights. There are reports of Jarawa entering small settlements, carrying away metal utensils, tools and the clothes hanging

Near Tirur, a typical settler’s establishment (encroachment) inside the Jarawa Territory. The possessions of the settler are visually inviting, and from the Jarawa point of view would seem to solicit collection. (Photographed in 1995)

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outside, picking off fruit from the trees and destroying fences and thatching. On occasion they use their arrows to kill dogs and livestock. Sometimes settlers have been wakened and have tried to chase away the Jarawa in the dark or have been shot at by Jarawa. But by and large, over the decades, it has been the case that few deaths occur during these incidents (Mann 1973). The formal license to cross boundaries for purposes of confrontation (the sepoys of the British) or conciliation (the contact teams visiting the coast) has on the eastern side of the Reserve been given to the Bush Police for the purpose of containing conflict between the Jarawa and the settlers. In effect, this has meant that they are the prime exploiters of the forest and it has also led to their occasionally becoming targets of Jarawa ambush. Their camps were originally set up between 1965 and 1985 to protect the Jarawa, but over the last ten years their role has increasingly been seen as to protect the settlers. On 20 October 1991, the Jarawa attacked the camp at Jhirkatang and killed one policeman, and the police fired 300 rounds in the air, reportedly in selfdefense and in accordance with regulations, though the story of local people is that the policeman killed had been poaching pig in Jarawa territory. Concerned at the scale and intensity of firing and the possibility of Jarawa being injured, the authorities gave orders for the Bush Police to be issued only blanks, but this order was revoked as early as the following year, when the Jarawa carried out an early morning attack on a camp near Tirur. The settlers around the Jarawa Reserve are now to some degree accustomed to Jarawa raids, and report any that occur in order to claim compensation. It is the thought of being shot at by Jarawa archers that inspires most dread. It is believed that the Jarawa target those they have spotted hunting or extracting forest products in the Reserve (which settlers are by law forbidden to enter). Though it is clear that the Jarawa resent outsiders exploiting their forest, and raid mostly settlements close to the forest, this popular notion of personal revenge is based on the questionable assumption that the Jarawa look for individual offenders and are aware of the boundaries formally separating the settlers and themselves. Attacks by the Jarawa are registered as crimes under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code if they lead to death, and under Section 307 if the victim survives. Jarawa arrows are submitted as evidence, but the case is abandoned if the police report that they cannot trace the accused, though Rs. 20,000 is paid to the next-of-kin. And the other side of the story is silence— there have never through the decades been files containing reports from the Jarawa concerning damage or loss of life among themselves. It may be a matter of pride for settlers to retell among themselves stories of having killed or wounded “wild natives,” but there are no official records of such incidents in their illegal incursions into the Reserve. Nor have the Jarawa

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ever left behind an injured person or a dead body as evidence, which may be explained by the importance attached to burying the dead among the native Andamanese, to ensure their passage into the world of benevolent ancestral spirits (Pandya 1993: 80–1).

THE TWO SITES OF CONTACT COMPARED It is the contention of this chapter that the Jarawa ritual of raiding settlements to the east should be seen in relation to the ritual of bringing the Jarawa gift loads of fruit and metal scraps on the western side of the Reserve. This connection is articulated by the settlers in their own way, when they draw attention to the fact that contact parties visit the Jarawa around the time of the full moon only if the sea is calm, and the fact that the Jarawa attack settlements on full moon nights when the weather is rough. “Jarawa get angry when no gifts are given to them!” The authorities may see a great distinction between giving things to Jarawa and things being taken by Jarawa, but from the Jarawa perspective the fact that they are expected to take things on the western border of the Reserve should mean a similar entitlement on the eastern border. The Jarawa do not, after all, perceive the borders dividing the landscape into territories in which the power relations and understanding operational are different (Man 1932: 120–121). It is those outside the forest who understand them to express goodwill when they accept gifts on the coast, but perceive them as hostile when they conduct raids on the villages on the other border. In the absence of shared meanings, the way a group negotiates the boundary separating it from the other requires translation. The excursions of the Jarawa from the Reserve are attempts to negotiate relations with the outside world hemming them in. So if the administration crosses the western border of the Reserve with gifts to which individuals and families are to help themselves, the Jarawa cross the eastern border to take what they can from the homes of villagers. But the parallels between their actions on the eastern border and the behavior expected of them on the west are not apparent to settlers, to whom the Reserve appears as a fearful backdrop rather than a besieged society. Conversely, since Jarawa on the western border are recipients of ‘gifts,’ settlers on the eastern border express little guilt about poaching in the Reserve. While there are those (mainly in Port Blair) who, familiar with the fashionable rhetoric of ‘environmental heritage,’ put the case that contact only destroys the natural, healthy autonomy of the hunters and gatherers, the contrary view is expressed by villagers in Kadamtalla, Tirur and Ferargunj, who demand more vigorous efforts to induct the Jarawa into civilization. “Giving little gifts here and there is not achieving anything. It is just a slow and corrupt

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way of skimming off money in the name of tribal welfare! In fact, it is making the Jarawa learn to depend on assistance being given by outsiders.” Whatever these charges of corruption and pampering, settlers do know how to turn the practice to their own advantage. There are reports of tour operators charging a substantial sum for taking tourists from Wandoor (on the outskirts of Port Blair) to see “naked savages in their natural setting.” These illegal excursions follow the pattern of official contact expeditions, in that a motorboat goes ahead with ‘gift items’ which are left on the beach so that the tourists can watch the Jarawa come out to collect them. As the settlers see it, the elaborate ritual of gift–giving is justified if it establishes certain rules within the space delimited by the boundary. The entry of authorities into Jarawa territory is seen to reaffirm the boundary and the code of behavior expected, while Jarawa excursions into the settlements closing in on the Reserve are seen as provocations to conflict. Contact on the west is seen as diametrically opposed to contact on the east because the meaning of contact is understood to hinge on the way in which things are taken. The settlers are contrasting actions that would appear complementary to the Jarawa, for whom contact is constituted by acts of taking, which they do not distinguish from “being given to” (Man 1932: 120,172, Pandya 1993: 18,111, 276, Radcliffe-Brown 1964:43, 83). For them, contact on both borders carries one meaning that has remained constant over time—acquiring things. Trying to decide if the Jarawa see themselves as friendly or hostile would not take us very far, for these terms assume stable meaning only in the context of mutually understood behavior. Is the solution to leave the Jarawa alone, ensuring that the prohibitions against entering the Reserve are enforced? But would the administration be prepared to extend such restrictions to the use of the road through the Reserve? If not, how might its use be controlled? And coming to the primary question, how can we be sure that what the Jarawa see as threatening (on their part or on the part of the settlers) they do not at the same time accept as part of contact, contact that is at one level desirable, even inevitable? The possibility of preserving tribal society in a ‘human zoo’ continues to be debated with those who want to bring tribes into mainstream India (Elwin 1973: 8–20), so those on the Islands who believe the Jarawa should continue to be treated as a people with their own territory are at odds with those who feel they should be brought out and made to join the ‘democratic and progressive mainstream.’ Acts of friendliness and hostility, and the interpretation of these by observers official and unofficial have reinforced the boundaries defining the world of tribal and non-tribal as separate, but we have seen that the movement across these boundaries has worn away their meaning. The most likely future may well be a repetition of the past, and the Jarawa will eventually lose their territory, like the Ongee and the Great Andamanese

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who have been resettled in areas assigned by the authorities (Basu 1990, Chakraborty 1990). Just as the image of Andamanese tribes as isolated has always said less about their actual state than about the knowledge Europeans and mainland Indians have of them (Warren 1981, Colebrooke 1807: 385), outsiders’ representation of the Jarawa as ‘friendly’ or hostile’ bases itself on little more than the manner in which the Jarawa acknowledge the boundaries imposed on them, and on episodic contact. The assumed binary between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘museumizing’ is false, for periodic intrusions and attempts to establish settlements in the forest have meant that that outside world has impinged on Jarawa society for many decades. These intrusions have sometimes led to violence (Portman 1899, Temple 1990: 109, 113). While the behavior of the Jarawa during these encounters has been construed in different ways, what is sometimes forgotten is that they too have been assembling their ‘anthropological knowledge’ of the outsider (See Fabian 1983, Clastres 1987, Taussig 1993). For almost two centuries, ‘friendly contact’ has been limited to nonverbal communication, anchored in gifts of food, nails or bits of glass, and in a more formal ‘exchange’ of gifts (AAJVS 1994: Records of the Jarawa Contacts 1980–1991, Secretariat, Port Blair; Ritchie 1771: 48–52; Temple 1990: 109). There has been no attempt to expand the scope of formal contact events or to develop greater understanding as to what contact might mean to the Jarawa. In the continuation of these ceremonies, what remain unexplored are the relations between successive contact events and subtle perceptual transformations. Yet if on the coast the significance of contact has changed little in the main, the ‘hostile’ encounters on the east have prompted the production of new theories about relations with the Jarawa. The study of contact over time provides an idea of the possibilities and limitations of non-verbal communication between groups with different constellations of customs, manners and language. Far from bringing the Jarawa and the settlers together in a shared discourse, contact events have multiplied misunderstandings. This is true at least for the settlers, for whom it is ‘common sense’ that the meanings of actions, including contact, are defined by bounded areas. For the Jarawa the meanings of contact or of actions of taking/being-given-to are derived from territorial divisions. Space to them is “unbounded” (See Casimir and Rao 1992, Ingold 1986). The act of taking what they want from settlements and leaving, that to outsiders appears anarchic, has always been part of the itinerant way of life of hunters and gatherers. Episodes of contact through history limn the unique space termed the border between cultures. In other words, historical time forms the contours of the space of interaction on the Islands. This space, once terrain contested between the East India Company and multiple Andamanese tribes, is today terrain contested between the In-

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dian government and the Jarawa. It is ‘translated space,’ where the endeavor to achieve communication forces into juxtaposition displaced components of culture—which might be human bodies as much as material artifacts—on the stage of the ship, the beach or the settlement.

VIOLENCE: ITS SEMIOTICS AND ITS NARRATIVES Classic accounts (Man 1883, Portman 1899 and Radcliffe-Brown 1964) describe the Islands as a cluster covering 8,297 square kilometers, inhabited by twelve groups of hunters and gatherers, Negritos with similar languages and customs, whose population was estimated at 1,317 in 1911. Today, of the 485 who survive, 280 are Jarawa. The hunters and gatherers comprise less than 0.32 percent of the population, and are surrounded by settlers whose numbers continue to increase, while their own population remains static. In the early years, settlers worked largely as small farmers and extractors of forest resources, but there is now a substantial proportion in the industrial and service sectors in towns. From their point of view, the “tribal” population, protected and provided for by the government, presents an insoluble problem. Tribals continue to be seen as irreducibly different from themselves. According to one: They (Jarawa) are distinctively different since they do not stay in one place and the only thing that is predictable about them is that they take lives. They kill animals to survive, historically they have been and some continue to be wild and violent, even towards outsiders. They would kill us without a second thought. We on the other hand are not wild. We kill only animals occasionally!

The killing of settlers is seen as an act of violence that carries a long history and as the mark that defines the savage tribesmen against civilized outsiders. The view of tribesmen as “junglee” (wild, untamed, uncivilized) is applied to both the Ongee, who used to kill outsiders and were regarded as cannibals (Portman 1899), and to the Jarawa, who, despite many efforts at friendly contact, displayed violence towards outsiders till as late as 1998. Descriptions of the mutilated corpses of those who dared to penetrate their forests dominated arguments for the unbridgeable difference between the ‘junglee’ tribal and settlers. The settlers do not see their killing forest animals as having any bearing on their being killed by tribesmen in the forest. Killing animals is routine for both tribal and non-tribal people, whereas the taking of human life interpreted as “violence.” There is no sense that the Jarawa may think it “justice” to kill non-tribals who kill animals, though some might be willing to explain Jarawa

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raids in terms of a conflict of interests. That settlers are intruding into Jarawa territory, laying claim to forest resources and occasionally killing tribals is not admitted to be an offense. Conversations with settlers who had had direct or indirect relations with the Jarawa and the Ongee revealed the bare facts of violence to be less significant than what (as collective memory is mobilized) the act is invariably interpreted as conveying about the Other. Violence is conceived as something to which a very different ‘Other’ subjects the bodies of settlers, whereas the killing of a Jarawa is always represented as an act of self-defense. The discourse of violence has sustained the division between settlers and tribal people, positing “our bodies” against “other bodies.” The identification of the body with the collective has long been a concern of anthropologists, indeed, for Durkheim (1968) it is transformations of the body that bear lasting witness to the consubstantiation between the social and the individual. Placing distinctive marks on the body serve to mark it as other than the self, in the sense of being part of a group, and similarly, the pain undergone by the body during ritual initiation marks it as a participant in the moral life of a collective greater than the individual. Initiation generates sentiments centered on social values to instill the notion of dependence on society (Radcliffe-Brown 1964). By the same principle, the body can become the site of articulating otherness. So, abandoning the moral paradigm wherein violent acts are assessed in terms of whether the degree of pain inflicted is justified, we need to understand that ‘violence’ is also the means through which the tribal marks settlers as ‘Other.’ The violent act is a means of articulating this perception of otherness upon the body of the ‘Other.’Anthropological investigations of how groups perceive the ‘Other’ becomes something of a self-reflexive exercise for a discipline that emerged as a study of societies ‘other’ to the west, a circumstance whose implications have in recent decades prompted critical reflection on the politics of knowledge and the denial of the object of study as coeval (Fabian 1973 and 1983: 154). To quote James Clifford, “Anthropology no longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves (‘primitive,’ ‘pre-literate,’ ‘without history’)” (Clifford 1986: 10). Clifford sees this as having led to a “conceptual shift,” whereby there is “no Archimedean point from which to represent the world. . . . one cannot occupy, unambiguously, a bounded cultural world from which to journey out and analyze other cultures. Human ways of life increasingly influence, dominate, parody, translate, and subvert one another” (1986: 22). What we should remember is that societies under the anthropological gaze might feel an equal need to shore up positions from which to observe their others, but these become increasingly untenable as their spaces are encroached on by ‘outsiders,’ the same who lay down the

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boundaries separating them. The threat represented by encroachment leads to violent encounters, memories of which configure the landscape of the Islands and lay the ground for further conflict. The reduction of human subjects into objects is an appropriation of power and an act of violence is something anthropologists are aware of at the level of theory, though theory with more immediate implications for anthropology than for other disciplines. It is its obverse that bears strongly upon social relations on the Islands, where acts of violence are means of transforming subjects into objects. The violent encounter is the lens through which each group comes into focus for the other. Violence becomes a process of mutual reflection, the act being an assertion of the victim as Other, while the subsequent representation of the act is used to reaffirm the Otherness of the perpetrator. If violence is seen as a system for signifying otherness that takes distinct forms in each culture, is the notion of violence as significant as its enactment, and what are the relations between the two? Questions such as these help one avoid the pitfalls of sensationalism and exoticization encountered by popular accounts of Jarawa violence, encumbered as these are with the baggage of values and politics (Haas 1990, Nagengast 1994, Riches 1986 and Roscoe 1997). The perception of violence as the inevitable conflict of identities has its lineages in colonial discourse, where institutionalized violence was simultaneously defined against and buttressed by extra-institutional violence. The decision to make the Islands the location for a penal settlement was justified by Captain John Campbell thus: “Convicts cannot be prevented from escaping when working on the mainland, but they will here in Andamans escape to the jungles and cannot get away from the Andamans, as the savages are far too hostile to allow one to escape” (Portman 1899, vol.1: 265). And, in point of fact, within ten months of the arrival of the first shipload of convicts, 240 were found killed by Jarawa arrows and another 70 disappeared without trace (J.P Walker to C. Beadon, Secretary to Government of India, Letter No. 1079, 12 July, 1859). At the time of first contact between mainlanders and native Islanders, then, a mutual sense of difference was taken as given and was assumed to entail conflict. Hundred and fifty years of settlement appear only to have added the ‘given’ of history. Settlers today treat their relations with the tribal as determined by the past, expecting violent resistance to themselves as outsiders at the same time as they view its manifestations as proof of the essential otherness of the tribal. What this has led to is the neglect of attempts to understand how among tribals the perception of the ‘Other’ has changed over the decades, just as it is never sought to understand their articulation of this sense of otherness. In a study exploring such themes as the sexual violence to which women were subjected during the Partition of India, Das (1995) asks what anthropology can

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offer to victims of terror who “cannot rely on articulate and literate accounts” but “must live through terror with other kinds of languages” (1995: 22–3). “If it is the recovery of a ‘voice,’ she says, “it cannot be a disembodied voice,” any more than a lament or a nightmare can be a disembodied narration,” for otherwise it is not possible to resist the totalizing discourses of the “narratives of the state” (1995: 23). This chapter seeks to explain the violent inscriptions on the body by a group whose narratives have never entered official documents, a question standing in converse relation to that posed by Das. Yet the trajectory of her investigation bears upon our own area of enquiry, for her concern with the failure of the state after Partition to create a “public space” in which society could confront the actuality of pain (Ibid., 192) leads her to examine different contexts in which the body “mediates between individual and social levels of existence in the construction of the normal” (Ibid., 178). She draws on Clastres’ theory that the pain inflicted during initiation rituals “achieves a consubstantiation between the individual, the group, and the law of society”

Ritualized body painting. This example of wives painting husbands body among the Southern Great Andamans shows how the individual who while undergoing the ritual becomes a visual embodiment of being the ‘Other’. Photographed by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ca. 1906-1908 Original: at Pit Rivers Museum, Oxford (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association).

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(Ibid., 179). As we shall show below, Jarawa behavior during events “out of the normal course,” such as encounters with settlers poaching in their Reserve corresponds to the way everyday practices like hunting are regulated. The manner in which Jarawa kill intruders is seen as ‘inhuman,’ whereas it should be seen as a culturally specific means of dehumanizing the victim. It is useful to refer to the interpretation by Levi-Strauss (1966) of cooking as a significant act of processing, the transformation of the raw into what is consumable, making it an act of assimilating nature to culture and affirming social relations. Violence effects on bodies a similar transformation, making them objects manifestly Other not just to what they once were but, as crucially, to the perpetrator of violence.

HISTORIES OF OTHERING On September 4, 1992, I observed some 300 residents of the outskirts of Port Blair concluding a protest march at the town’s administrative headquarters. As they passed through the Aberdeen Bazaar, site of the Battle of Aberdeen, they invited me to join them, explaining that they were protesting against the decision to resettle them near the Jarawa Reserve because the airport was being expanded. They carried posters and shouted slogans like, “We will not move and get our bodies cut up by arrows.” They saw themselves as being removed by force from ‘civilization’ to a place where their lives would be threatened, as violent interchanges between tribals and outsiders were a frequent occurrence near the Reserve. They described the area as one where the “savage and wild are not far from one’s backyard. Violence happens frequently and is beyond control.” The settlers were protesting against being relocated to an area adjacent to the Jarawa Reserve, but it is worth recalling that its environs are already settled by other non-tribals, for, as mentioned earlier, the construction of the ATR has led to settler establishments coming up near the Reserve. This having been accompanied by the illegal extraction of forest resources, proximity has only entrenched further the discourse of hostility cemented by vignettes of violence. There is one group of settlers, in Harpatabad, who claim to have achieved a semblance of friendly relations with the Jarawa. They tie pieces of clothing to the trees and place scrap metal and empty cans beneath, and the Jarawa are expected to fill the cans with honey in return for being allowed to take the clothes and metal. But even this silent trade has occasionally led to encounters where no words, only blows are exchanged. These settler communities have their own lore of those who entered the forest to hunt wild pigs and in the process undertook also to kill

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Jarawa. One such hero was Ghoshaal, a 36-year-old cultivator whose story was told to me by his neighbors (who at present run a teashop in the main bazaar in Kadamtalla): Ghoshal was a brave and successful hunter, he never returned empty handed. His secret was that he took the boat to sea from Kadamtalla and entered the Jarawa forest from the beach. Often he would find women and young children in the camps along the beach and scare them by firing in the air. Sometimes he would kill them, especially the young children, by just clubbing them with his gun! This is because Jarawa parents often dig holes in the sand and place their children in the hole and fill it up to their necks. This makes them stay put until Jarawa return. One day the Jarawa must have seen him doing this when they caught him. Since September 1986 Ghoshal’s family have been waiting for his return. Now they have given up all hope. He must have died in the forest among the Jarawa!

The entire absence of compunction in the description of Ghoshal clubbing children to death on no apparent provocation is so egregious as to disable comment. Those around the Reserve area live in terror of the destruction of their homes and lives. One of the senior teachers from Harpatabad who works in Tirur observed: Over the years the Jarawa have been pushed and pushed into a corner. Now their anger is so intense that they not only come and take things from the settlement, but rightly kill people who are taking things from their forest . . . Out of their long accumulated anger and feeling of revenge they continue to mutilate dead bodies, just like we sometimes step on a small irritating bug or a snake squashing it three or four times.

Sitting in front of an office wall displaying replicas of Jarawa arrows that his students had made, the teacher added: As the evening sets people become a little cautious; every day this is a normal routine; there are certain things we don’t do; we sometimes spot fire and smoke in the forest. But look, the Jarawa also have some sense of humanity, they have never come down and set fire to the settlement.

Settlers constantly return to the threat of violence from the tribal population, while the violence inflicted by the settlers upon tribals is, when mentioned at all, described in such a manner as to convey a sense of their own ascendancy. The rhetoric of the violence invoked to bear witness to the otherness of the Jarawa draws energy from an extended tradition of dwelling on and distorting a single aspect of their culture, for though, as we see below, the scene for

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the script of violence was set during the colonial period, it has not been dismantled after Independence.

CANNIBALISM AND PUNITIVE EXPEDITIONS: THE DISCOURSE OF VIOLENCE IN COLONIAL TIMES An early European explorer, Alexander Hamilton, whose ship sailed the Bay of Bengal between 1688 and 1723, described the Andamanese as violent cannibals who captured slaves from the neighboring islands of Nicobar (1930: 36–8). The Andamanese deny having ever practiced cannibalism and most emphatically that they do so today. But they did have a reputation for killing any sailor who landed on the Islands after a shipwreck or in quest of fresh water. It was said that the tribes on Little Andamans would stand in small or large armed groups, waiting to ambush and kill those who landed. J E. Alexander presents a typical account of such an encounter (1827: 8–12). Landing on Little Andamans in quest of water, his sailors discovered an empty tribal camp, and decided to try out the bows and arrows left behind. When members of the tribe arrived, there ensued a bloody skirmish, in which Alexander and his men fired muskets and charged with bayonets, leading to the loss of life on both sides. Therefore the qualified nature of Alexander’s comments when he described the island as “a convenient watering-place, besides affording abundant material for refitting or building ships,” adding, “Under existing circumstances, a visit to this island is extremely hazardous . . .” (1827: 12). Colebrooke (1795) confirmed the hostility of the natives of the Little Andamans. Without finding evidence of the natives eating the flesh of enemies, he had observed that dead bodies were often found mangled and torn (1795: 389). The Ongee attest that members of their own society are always buried but outsiders who become victims of violent encounters would be dealt with differently (Radcliffe-Brown 1964:8 n.1, 109–10, Man 1883: 45, 78). Their bodies were dragged to the coast and cut up, first the limbs detached and then the stomach slit open, after which the dismembered body was placed on a fire and burned. This Ongee practice generated the accounts of the Little Andaman Islanders as violent cannibals. However, their processing of the bodies did not involve cannibalism, and can be explained by recapitulating the discussion in Chapter Three. Bodies are cut up and burned to release the body’s essence, including its smell, as it is believed that unless the fire destroys all the bones, they release an aroma that attracts the dead person’s spirit. Families may, however, wish to attract the spirits of their own relatives when in need of help, and the ritual of secondary burial allows them to retain their bones (Man

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1883: 73–5, Portman 1899: 495–496, Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 113, 292). According to the same principle, the skulls and jawbones of hunted animals are hung from rafters after the meat is consumed, because the release of the animal’s smell assures success in future hunts (Pandya 1993: 137–44). Only the smell is retained, for, to effect the transition from nature to culture the animal must be processed by butchering and cooking (Alexander 1827, RadcliffeBrown 1933: 184, Pandya 1993). Just as animals brought into the domain of human society must undergo processing, the natural death of a kinsperson makes her or him an alien spirit who must be re-assimilated into the community of living kinfolk by the ritual of preserving bones. The fore mentioned worldview had no place for of the arrival of outsiders whose displays of aggression effected destruction on a scale hitherto unknown. It was not sufficient to kill these outsiders; they had to be transferred to a state removed completely from the Ongee world, by cutting their bodies into pieces and burning them until the bones were destroyed. The entire process of dismembering the body and removing the inner organs before it was burned served to ‘construct’ the ‘Other’ as an alien who had to be kept at a distance and ultimately removed from their society. But the practice of mutilating the corpses of enemies was not in itself sufficient reason to label the

Goteeyrangey, skull ornament from North Andaman From the State Museum of Ethnography, Dresden, Germany. Such forms of body adornment led to the circulation of misrepresentations of the Andamanese as violent, until ethnographers clarified the roleplayed in the mourning process by ornaments made from the bones of deceased relatives.

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Ongee man wearing an ibedange ornament. Made from the jawbone of an ancestor, it is used in healing process too. (Photographed in 1984 Little Andaman Island) See also Appendix C.

Pig skulls preserved among the Ongee of Little Andamans. (Photographed in 1992)

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Preserved pig skulls from Jarawa campsite, similar to the Ongee preserved trophies. The use of large pots and pans to boil meat is not common among the Jarawas and the wild pig is mostly pit-roasted. As a result the pig skull with the skin, is dried above the smoke. Ongees however boil the skull and hang it up. (Photographed in 1995)

Ongee brutal cannibals. The myth of cannibalism sought support from other aspects of Ongee culture, like the use of the bones of deceased relatives in mourning, as well as from the hostile encounters with which the history of colonialism is replete. Early census reports (Temple 1903) contain reports of the “punitive expeditions” undertaken by the administration. These intensified the atmosphere of hostility by eliciting further violence from the inhabitants of the forest, which was used to project the image of them as aggressive. It was earlier mentioned that when the British developed Port Blair as the seat of administration, the region around was developed using prisoners from the mainland (Majumdar 1975, Singh 1978), with some tribals of the Aka-bea da and Kol groups in Northern Andaman being employed as guides while the forest was cleared. The Jarawa frequently attacked those they saw as invading their territory (Haughton 1861), two incidents being outlined below. On May 17, 1859, the Naval Guard observed a party of tribals proceeding along the shore in the early hours of morning, and tried to check them with a burst of gunfire. This, however, had no effect on a second group, which continued on towards the convict workstation and occupied it. Only the arrival of reinforcements brought to an end half an hour of plundering, during which several of the Andamanese were killed, wounded or imprisoned. This first

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large-scale attack organized by the tribes on the convicts and their British guards came to be known as the Battle of Aberdeen. Interpretations of the incident differ. Some regard it as an insignificant attack of the type the natives often undertook for the sake of plunder, except that the scale on which the assault was planned pointed to the involvement of an escaped prisoner (Pandya 1997). Reverend Corbyn, the surgeon at the settlement, termed the clash as a ludicrous skirmish, but Portman, a member of the administration, described it as a “most desperate and determined attack” undertaken with the intention of exterminating the settlers (Portman 1899, vol. 1: 279, 288, 422). A few months later, in August, about 1500 Andamanese armed with small adzes, knives, and bows and arrows, launched a sudden attack (the second that month) on 446 convicts who had been preparing a meal in the forest. The convicts retired to the coast where the boat of the naval guard was moored off the landing place, and most managed to escape under the cover of the guards firing. Ten were killed, however, and twelve others, hampered by fetters, carried away never to be found again. The tribals were reported to have vented their anger on the gangs of men, distinguished by the red cloth strips across their chests, but said to have been quite friendly with the ordinary prisoners. The latter were of particular interest to them because they wore round their ankles iron rings coveted by the Andamanese. The attackers even danced merrily with the prisoners during the two hours they assumed possession of the encampment (National Archives of India 1859). Portman (1899, Vol.1: 277–8) reports that the Andamanese told him they objected to the jungles being cleared. Andamanese and Burmese forest workers and sepoys were regularly enlisted in the retaliatory ‘punitive’ expeditions, during which vacant Jarawa campsites in the deep forest were invaded, ransacked and set on fire. Various objects were seized and removed, including metal implements, arrows, pots and baskets. This was partly to find out if any escaped convicts were living among the Jarawa, a conjecture that was never clearly proved. Reports indicate that face-to-face confrontations led to fatalities on both sides and those Jarawa women and children were captured and taken to Port Blair. Gunfire and arrows were frequently exchanged at close range, and “a great deal of blood” of the Jarawa was found after the firing ceased. However, the Jarawa themselves were seldom traced. Thirty-seven Jarawa were reported dead in an expedition in 1925, a measure of the destruction effected by punitive expeditions. On Little Andaman, there were similar violent encounters between settlers and the Ongee until 1885 (Portman 1899). Images of cannibalism and the stories of punitive expeditions are indices of the violence of Andamanese history. Bloch has analyzed violence as the product of an attempt to create the “transcendental in religion and politics,” as the subject who attains transcendence through ritual reincorporates the

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here and now through the “idiom of conquest or consumption” in a process Bloch terms “rebounding violence” (Bloch 1992: 5–7). If circumstances make expansionist aggression a real possibility, the “symbolism of the reconsumption of vitality is expanded,” whereby it legitimates outwardly directed aggression. This requires the presence of outsiders, whose vitality may be conquered by the main participants, without fear of the outsiders themselves going on to conquer (1992: 44–5). In the colonial history of the Andamans, relations of this kind were not unilinear. As native Islanders took the offensive against outsiders and imperial power mobilized against those ‘outside’ civilized society, each side would have seen the other as the aggressor. Bloch’s theory perceives a relation between the idiom underpinning ritual and acts of aggression (1992: 44) that is pertinent to our discussion of the ritual ejection of the Other, and the history of conflict on the Islands. His observation that in certain historical contexts the ritual killing of animals gives way to organized attacks on humans throws light on the colonial encounter. From the point of view of the tribes, it was the arrival of outsiders that had led to incidents of violence, and they sought actively to resist their occupation through homicidal attacks, attacks that colonial officers saw as warranting the organized killing of tribals. And this is the situation that has prevailed since 1858. ANPATR Act of 1956 defined the rights of the shrinking tribes by designating territories for them and trying to control the occupation of land by settlers. But illegal encroachment, including poaching from reserves, grew with the rise in immigration, and in Middle and South Andamans settlers continue to be attacked by the Jarawa.

THE PERPETUATION OF THE MYTH OF THE OTHER As the non-tribal tells the story, the Ongee were once wild and hostile, and their violence made them essentially different from civilized people—notions that continue to be nursed in relation to the Jarawa. The image of the Jarawa as Other is sustained also by the fact that they “don’t understand how to grow things” and that they “don’t wear clothes” (Mukherjee 2003: 138). We have touched on the fact that individual attacks either on settlers or on tribal people are seen as an attack on the entire community, given a discourse of enmity sustained by the memory of previous acts of violence and disfigurement. A popular theory among settlers is that the violence of the tribal communities derives directly from their dependence on killing animals to survive. A ‘life taking activity,’ hunting is declared less worthy than other activities like the cultivation of the soil: “As workers in fields, in small shops and offices, we nurture life for the living.” “Jarawa hunt outsiders” has become a tag used to

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sum up a whole people, not just in recollection of the colonial conflict, but because hunting is singled out as a way of life based on violence. Settlers are far from learning to unpack the idea of the Other by distinguishing different historical occasions for violence. On the contrary, the idea is rigidified by their arguments about the extreme savagery of the actions of these ‘ruthless,’ ‘habitual’ killers of animals and humans. Contemporary incidents provoke the assertion that Jarawa hunt outsiders are arguably expressions of protest against the loss of autonomy. But if popular wisdom lacks the sense of history that would entail this recognition, it is registered that these killings are to be understood in terms of Jarawa beliefs, notions that intruders must be sacrificed and territorial boundaries must be respected (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 86 and Temple 1903: 68–90). In Miletilak and Annecut, the dismembered bodies recovered from the forest are seen as sacrifices to Jarawa “jungleepan” (wildness) and their notions of revenge, a perception that leads bereaved relatives to lose sight of the transgression that led to their deaths. The disfigurations stir both awe and revulsion, as mutilation and rot are seen as exacerbating the humiliation of the victims, and they are read as a signal that any community provoking Jarawa anger will be similarly humiliated. The story of Kalimuttu Swamy, a laborer who survived a Jarawa attack in May 1987, shows us the kind of rationalization worked out by settlers. Employed by the Power and Irrigation and Public Works Department, Kalimuttu Swamy was involved in clearing a tract of land near what today is known as Jhirkatang Camp No. 7. He was once returning to camp at around 4.30 in the afternoon with two other workers, carrying an axe and machetes along with their load of cane and firewood. They found themselves face to face with eight-armed Jarawa. “We had no idea where they were hiding, they are so dark they blend into the thick forest. Since they have no clothes on you can’t see them at all and their bodies being stark naked, our dogs did not smell them and bark!” Two of his companions were killed on the spot, shot in the chest by arrows. Kalimuttu Swamy, armed only with the load of implements and an empty basket, started throwing things at the Jarawa to create confusion in their ranks. The one item he clutched onto was his machete, which he says served to inflict some serious injuries as he swirled it round and round. He was himself hit, mostly in the limbs, by some twenty arrows that the doctors in the hospital at Port Blair were able to remove. Showing me his scars proudly, he said, “These are the marks of the grace I received from the Mother goddess Mariamman!” He used the land and money he was given as compensation to build a temple to Mariamman on a small hill at Jhirkatang, and used to say that it was the goddess who protected him thereafter. Until his death in 2000, as chief priest, he performed rites to ensure the safety of those working near the forest, who often visited to ask his blessings. He would

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make amulets for his growing following, twining black and red thread with consecrated grass to protect people in their “life in the forest,” including such exigencies as childbirth, chronic illness, and above all attack from Jarawa. If we follow Bruce Lincoln’s theory that forms of sacrifice like de-breasting seek to effect a “radical asymmetry between sacrificer and sacrificed” (1991: 204), the mutilated body of Kalimuttu Swamy as sacrificer became an icon and instrument for shifting powers and identity between the bodies of hunter and hunted, killed and killer. In his own theological discourse, the hunting of animals and the hunting of humans is a sacrifice like the sacrifice of animals at his temple: If you take something from God you need to give something to God too. If you take what belongs to the Jarawa and their forest, they too will take you and your material possessions. All I do is to pray against taking the life of humans who enter to obtain wealth from the forest.

In the lines above we see at work the phenomenon of projection, whereby notions peculiar to Kalimuttu Swamy’s faith are grafted onto his explanation of Jarawa behavior, leading to a distortion of meanings. But there is another way in which the settlers’ image of the Jarawa lets us glimpse in inversion the Jarawa’s perception of them. We have been speaking of how the discourse on

Kallimuttu Swamy at his temple making amulets.

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the Jarawa is dominated by references to the violence of their way of life as “junglee Shikaree” (wild hunters). The allusions to the likelihood of being cut to pieces by Jarawa arrows if resettled in the neighborhood of the Jarawa betray the possibility that the actions cited to prove the inhumanity of the Jarawa are the Jarawa’s means of articulating the alienness of intruders. The inhabitants of the forest would see important parallels between encounters with animals while hunting and encounters with intruders in the forest. Both encounters take place outside the campsite, involve the taking of life and entail situations loaded with uncertainty and danger, because both animal and intruder are defined as outside their community. The work of Tim Ingold directs attention to the fact that hunter-gatherer societies, distinctive in subverting “the very foundations upon which the concept of society . . . in any of its modern senses” is built (1999: 399), require us to rethink our definition both of social being and of violence. Relations are constituted by the sharing of food and company rather than by formal obligations (ibid., 406), and in some cultures, a hunt consummated with a kill is seen as proof that the animal has “willingly allowed itself to be taken,” making the hunt an attempt to “establish a working basis for mutuality and coexistence” (Ingold 2000: 69). The broad lines of Ingold’s argument supports our contention that the manner in which the Jarawa take life, grotesque to outsiders, follows a prescribed sequence of actions meant to transform a being foreign to the community into something that can be incorporated into their world. Actions of cutting and bloodletting turn animals belonging to the domain of nature into meat that can be brought into the campsite and distributed as portions to be cooked within families. Similarly, strangers who are killed must be left to lie in the forest, and only transformed parts of their body may be brought into the camp. This argument is supported by the explanations the Ongee give for actions committed on the bodies of outsiders killed by them in the past. Contact between the Ongee and the Jarawa was attenuated during the growth of the colonial settlement at Port Blair, but their shared cultural ties (noted in early studies, e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 13) were confirmed during my fieldwork among the Jarawa, with whom I brought the Ongee back in contact in 1992–1994. I will therefore be comparing the two contexts of killing, animal and human, using ethnographic studies of hunting (mainly among the Ongee), and the oral histories of people involved in the recovery of the bodies of those killed in Jarawa territory. The ritual killing of animals represents a paradigm that helps us understand better the manner in which settlers are killed, including the important ways in which the latter form of violence differs from the former. But in order to understand this paradigm, we must first familiarize ourselves with the ritual symbolism through which the Andamanese articulate ideas of conflict and peace between groups, and the

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everyday metaphors through which they express the working out of anger by an individual within a group. The next two sections take up these questions.

SYMBOLISM OF BLOOD AND OF PEACE Enquiries into violence within specific social contexts range from those using the case of one culture studied ahistorically to suggest aggression is innate to humanity (Chagnon 1977) to those that seek to explain historically the display of violence by a people who at other times make a conscious and sustained choice of peace (Dentan 1968). But the first question confronted by the anthropology of violence is whether the object of enquiry is categorized as violence at all in its context. David Riches deals with this problem of definition by including under violence all acts of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses (1986: 8). Discussing how legitimacy is tied up with the demarcation of boundaries (the theme of the first part of our chapter), and with the sanction of historicity to modes of behaviour towards different constituencies (a theme we shall now investigate), he offers the model of a “triangle of violence” linking perpetrators, victims and observers, each with their own interpretive frameworks and agendas (8–10). It is evident that in the context of the Andamans, different actors at different points of time would occupy each of these positions. Riches also proposes that violence be understood not only as practical (instrumental) but also as symbolic (expressive), saying that killing, like other acts of violence and like rituals in general, is a performative act (Riches 1986: 9). The symbolism surrounding violence is critical to understanding how conflict is negotiated in Andamanese peace ceremonies, where ritual calls into play a cluster of ideas around the causes and consequences of conflict (of the transgression of boundaries, the flow of blood and hostility, of death). So if an “act of physical hurt” serves to delimit the object of inquiry, its internal dimensions are revealed by investigating how the ideas behind the physical act provide it a verbal articulation which also relates to other areas of experience like consumption, as well as to the means devised by the culture to resolve conflict. Investigations of violence in Andamanese culture are concerned not with “specialized equipment or esoteric knowledge” (Riches 1986: 10–11), but with the cultural prescriptions determining its articulation. Violence implies an exchange, the act either being reciprocated by other violent acts or prompting efforts at “peace making.” Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 134) described a peace ceremony among the tribes from the years 1906–08, without dwelling on the circumstances that occasioned it. This is in contrast to E. H. Man, who studied Andamanese culture in the period 1869–1880.

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Jarawa “peace making” ceremony. Peace making ceremonies among the groups of Jarawas are still organized. In 2005 a ceremony was held and a Koro leaf curtain for the ceremony was installed

Man does not record any peace-making ceremonies, but concentrated on describing warfare and hostility (1883:135–6) that he asserted was part of Andamanese “psychology and morals” (1883: 24–5). Such differences in ethnographic accounts may reflect the changing concerns of the colonial government as well as the changing historical experiences of the Andamanese. The early ethnographers may have been more interested in representing hostility than the negotiation of peace, though it is also possible that peace-making ceremonies were a development of the period subsequent to contact. The Andaman’s are divided into ten distinct dialect groups (Temple 1903, Zide and Pandya 1989), and Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 87) asserts that until 1875 a tribe was unlikely to know about “natives living more than twenty miles” from the area they identified as their own, which meant large-scale fights did not occur. His accounts indicate that conflict arose from breaches of territorial rights (26–7, 29), as well as from longstanding feuds or because of the inadequacy of the hospitality extended to visitors (84–5). Here we should add that boundaries between groups are in many instances permeable, e.g. the custom of welcoming visitors from another region, the fact that the practice of child adoption crosses regional boundaries, and the overlap between dialects.

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The accounts of Man and Radcliffe-Brown agree on details of the violent encounter, like the “art” of fighting without shields and the practice of taking the enemy by surprise and killing one or two before retreating (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 85). The encounter would last only a few minutes, as either the victims would flee into the forest or the attackers themselves would retreat if they faced resistance or lost one of their own party. Wounded enemies were killed if found, but the mutilation of bodies occurred only in cases of severe provocation, when everything belonging to the “vanquished . . . [that] was portable is appropriated and all else is injured or destroyed” (Man 1883:135–6). Radcliffe-Brown represents peace making as a ceremonial rather than ethical custom (1964: 88–9). Groups negotiate a day on which to perform the sequence of rituals whose symbology deconstructs the polarization of Self and Other during conflict. The ornaments for dancers and the screen for the dancing area are made by shredding the leaves of koro, the tetranthera tree, the wood of which would have been used to make the arrow shafts for killing pigs and human beings. Koro leaves also mark the ceremony of a girl’s first menstruation. Those who commit homicide are marked with shavings of koro wood, and when readmitted into the communities are adorned with koro leaves to protect them during the period of “purification” after bloodshed. Koro is thus associated with death and the flow of blood and hostility (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 290–1). Among the Ongee, the perception of menstruation and bloodshed as an offence and hostile act is the principle structuring male initiation rites (Pandya 1993: 184–9). These cultural associations of bloodshed recall Bourdieu’s idea of a rite of consecration that treats men and women differently (1991: 117–18), in that the rite establishing men as men and women as women institutes and consecrates difference. Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 133–35) has also observed that koro substances are used to mark the transgression or transcendence of boundaries that mark degrees of otherness (between humans and spirits, between the living and the dead). We can see how the arrows made from koro wood effect the transition between life and death (Pandya 1990: 786) and coverings made from koro leaves mark the transition to female maturity. These associations of koro are activated during the ceremony to mark and transform “Others” and so terminate acts of transgression, bloodshed and killing. We have seen how the “Other” is perceived as such in the context of hostility; a perception dismantled by the peace ceremony, and can infer that the sense of otherness between groups has prevailed ever since the abandonment of the ceremony. The expression of violence and the rituals surrounding the shedding of blood systematically revive the associations with boundaries, with difference, with situating the Other. The ritual construction of the Other

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through bloodshed is also mentioned in ethnographies of cultures like New Guinea (Tuzin 1980: 34–54, Berndt 1962) and South East Asia (Freeman 1979; George 1996; Hoskins 1989).

NOTIONS OF ANGER AND WEIGHT We turn now to the case of violence as the expression of individual feelings. The Ongee language does not contain an exact term for violence, but the term eranabeti (“anger”) does carry the connotation of violent acts. It alludes to anger that triggers actions that deprive substances of weight, whether by throwing objects around or shedding blood. In other words, anger is manifest by taking things apart. The trees littering the coastline following a storm are signs of the fury of the spirits which uprooted them, besides marking temporal passage, from the period before the storm to its aftermath (RadcliffeBrown 1963: 156–7, 352, Pandya 1993: 24–34 and Leach 1971). Violence produces geebeeti (broken things), a term denoting a negative other, or something that is not what it was. Geebeeti are of two kinds. Within one’s own group, anger leading to violence is erakeji (‘endo-anger’); one may break one’s own possessions but do nothing that causes a real loss of ‘weight.’ It should be understood that ‘weight’ is a concept around which important values centre for the Ongee (e.g. when greeting hosts, visitors ask if the guests are heavy and safe), for inadequate resources or security are seen as making people light, therefore liable to being borne away by malevolent spirits (Pandya 1993: 102). Anger expressed against outsiders is alebukey (‘exoanger’). Such anger does not stop at breaking things, but can make them ‘light,’ and is inflicted both on objects that do not belong to the individual or the group, as well as on people outside the group. As a consequence of this distinction between levels of anger, actions within the campsite lead the group to anticipate a certain pattern of behavior unfolding from the angry individual, and to prepare a certain response themselves. Angry individuals are liable to break their baskets, dismantle their arrowheads, remove canoe outriggers and walk off into the forest for a couple of days. The violence inflicted on objects made and owned by the person who temporarily quits the campsite in a disturbed state of mind makes him “Other” for a short period (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 48–50, Man 1883: 42). The violence must not affect others or their property. A campmate whose belongings are injured would become Other in relation to the angry individual. The person who has performed acts of destruction must remain in the forest in order to become “heavy again” (Radcliffe-Brown 1963: 133), during which time he is no longer regarded as related to those within the camp. To achieve

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resolution, the whole camp must come together and repair the things that had been broken. Baskets are retied, outriggers are reattached to the canoe and arrowheads are rebound. When the person returns from the forest, the Ongee offer him food and announce, “All that was made light and severed has been put back, the weight has been placed where it should be . . . now stay within the heaviness embodied in the campsite and in one’s own people.” The terms gatuwey (to discard or lighten) or tolakeby (to cut or break) come closest then to connoting violence and the associated emotions of anger. Things that do not belong to “others” but to oneself should remain heavy, immovable and should never be severed. Only objects belonging to or associated with outsiders are subjected to violent acts, a kind of reification of the idea of the Other. This is why when the Jarawa come upon the settlements around their Reserve they make it a point to reassert the alienness of the settlers by breaking down shelters, felling trees, killing domestic animals and removing clothes, metal implements and utensils. The Ongee behaved in a similar fashion during the early years of contact. The Ongee have translated their apprehension of anger in the experience of natural phenomena and in interpersonal relations into myth and historical narrative. They explain the violence committed by outsiders on their own island as a form of kugey (war) that occurs in one’s own territory as opposed to that of others. They aver that such bloodshed produced the “light stones” protruding along the coastline of Little Andaman Island: Many of our own people died in these events. In war we are affected adversely, dead outsiders and their ships become stones that neither sink in water nor break apart but stand in the middle of seawater.

It is the unequal nature of the confrontation during the wars with spirits and with outsiders that the Ongee understand to have produced things that are neither light nor capable of disintegration (Radcliffe Brown 1963: 198). They remain anomalous, floating stones in which there endures the memory of violent confrontations that were never resolved (Pandya 1993: 7).

HUNTING PIGS: THE INCORPORATION OF OTHERNESS For the Ongee, the violence enacted on ‘outside bodies’ entails two basic operations, laceration and evisceration. To tear into the body of a living thing removes its capacity to escape, which accounts for the image of enemies killed during war becoming stones, or motionless. Evisceration makes the body light, a crucial detail as it is believed that light bodies can be picked up by

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spirits and borne to other worlds. The violent act then simultaneously marks the Other and makes it possible to deal with the Other—an idea central to practices of pig hunting among tribes besides the Ongee (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 37). Violence and the projection of anger first establish the outsider to the culture, and then transform her or him into the Other to be appropriated through a formalized sequence of actions, for it is not the foreign subject but the object into which it is transformed that may be assimilated to the world of the camp. This recognition of the otherness of the animal to be assimilated as food make hunting strategy a twofold process, of ‘sense-making’ and ‘selfmaking,’ where formal performance becomes the medium for conceptualizing experience, or what Brenneis terms “social aesthetics” (1987: 247). Hunting can also be said to bring to the foreground a “social poetics” (Herzfeld 1985: XV), as the relation between the hunters and the hunted reflects on broader categories of relationship, between human and non-human, insider and outsider. When the wet southeast winds blow from May to September, the Ongee retreat deep into the forest, where four to ten families reside in circular camping grounds. In the centre, the slow burning campfire is surrounded by four feet of cane scaffolding, while individual families have their own cooking fires in their lean-tos. The Ongee describe this as the period when “Spirits are hunting turtles, making the sea a rough place and we humans are in the forest surrounded by ripe forest fruits that pigs feed on and they are fat and heavy! They are ready to be heard and taken (that is, ready to be hunted).” The Jarawa do not use dogs for tracking pigs, though other tribes have used them since their introduction by the British in 1858. Silence is crucial so as to hear the pig’s movements. When the pig is located, hunters surround it with loud shouts and discharge chenekwe, arrows specially designed for pig hunting by both the Jarawa and Ongee. They are distinguished by a detachable arrow shaft, which is tied with cord a meter long to a large arrowhead with prominent barbs. The shaft detaches itself from the arrowhead when the arrow implants itself in the pig’s body, but it remains connected by the cord and is dragged along by the injured pig. The shaft is often entangled in the undergrowth, and the barbs of the arrowhead are embedded further in the pig’s body. This slows down the pig’s attempt to escape, and it usually comes to a halt owing to the acute pain it suffers. The design of the arrows is bound up with the logic of inflicting violence in order to immobilize (Pandya 1990). As the Ongee say, “Arrows do not kill but anchor the pig in the forest where we are tracking it down to attack it—it becomes senseless, it stands still until we move close and put an end to its capacity to move away.” The shrieks of the terrified and bleeding pig, along with the shouts of the hunters, often attract hunters close by. The struggling pig is surrounded by

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hunters, but is turned on its back and dragged away some distance so that it can be held down properly. The pig’s head is held down and quickly twisted to break its neck and put an end to its struggles. The follows the critical step of taking a machete or an arrowhead and, in complete silence, plunging it deep into the area near the neck, and running a sharp blade down to the stomach and all the way to the region of the groin. Blood oozes out like the juice from the first incision into a watermelon. Fistfuls of it are thrown into the air, an act referred to as galujebe (offering) in the Ongee language. This is meant to disperse the pig’s smell so that the living pigs and the spirits are deceived into believing that no pigs are missing because of humans hunting (RadcliffeBrown 1964: 362). Often, with the supervision or assistance of more experienced hunters, the genitals near the groin are pulled out and thrown back to the spot where the pig was cornered. It is at this point that the hunters break the silence, declaring, “The pig is about to go.” The de-sexing of the pig and the scattering of the blood are performed in silence. These acts make the pig tambanua (sexless) and mark its end as gaukwey (nonliving/motionless pig), and its transformation into an object violently hunted down. The next step is to remove the liver, lungs and kidneys, collectively referred to as gachengey (literally “the best bits”). These are wrapped in leaves and placed on an open fire to be cooked in the forest. For the Ongee, the removal of the ‘best’ parts marks a second stage of transformation, when the pig is made light. The pig is now other than what it was when alive in the forest, outside the world of the camp. As the internal organs cook, the “light,” disemboweled body is stuffed with leaves and its four hooves (geerangey) are cut off, slit and placed at the bottom of a basket to be carried back to camp. It is only after the internal organs are consumed that the men may proceed back to camp with the body of the hunted, leaf-stuffed pig, its neck broken and its hooves split (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 116, 272). Those at the camp come to greet the returning hunters, often with leaves tied around their bows and waists, members of the hunting party declare very softly, “We have the light one but it is not yet senseless for cooking.” The central campfire is built up and the pig placed on top by the hunters. Women from the homes of the hunters place the sliced hooves on the thatched roof of their shelters. The hooves are always deposited on top of the shelters of the families traditionally associated with the particular area of the forest where the pig was hunted and killed. Members of the hunting party sit round the fire and keep turning the pig, ensuring that it is singed all over and swells up. While doing so, they start to retell their experiences of the day in the forest. This transformation of the pig is known as “spirit cooking.” It is believed that the scorching of the pig turns it into a senseless object. The ‘de-sensing’ is complete when the orifices of the eyes, nose, ears and mouth swell up in

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the heat, the skull starts to burst open and fluids ooze out. With this the transformation is accomplished. The animal is now referred to as cooked meat (gebo), whereas up until this point it is described as “senseless pig” rather than as “food.” The head is now detached completely and placed in a separate container to be boiled in water over the campfire. The hunted animal, senseless, sexless, it capacity to run away destroyed, is now carved into portions. The meat and fat are stacked up for distribution among members of the camp. The back legs are reserved for relatives associated with areas of the forest where the pig was hunted. Visitors to the campsite receive the fatty parts, the preferred portions. The head is boiled for a night and a day, then placed on the top of the fire, smoked and dried. It is then hung on the rafters of the lean-to of the hunter, who killed it; to release its smell and ensure success in future hunts (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 274, 467, Pandya 1993: 144–45). The whole process comes to an end when the pig is systematically cut, “made light” and processed as food cooked within the camp. The “taking of life” is accomplished not when the arrow strikes the pig, but through the entire sequence of cutting, disemboweling, offering the blood and consuming special parts in the forest before bringing the pig to the camp and processing it for distribution as food. The procedure transforms the pig from a forest beast into a cultural object. This is why the terms that distinguish pigs as kueangabe (female) or kuelong (male) are not used after the animal is desexed, disemboweled and the internal organs are eaten. At this point the pig is referred to as kuwe (something that is nowhere); after the carcass is singed and made light, it is referred to as galebe; and after it is cut up and distributed for the final processing of cooking, it is referred to as tambanua. We can see how the series of transformations involved in hunting and processing pig corresponds to the structure of practice relating to the control of anger in Andamanese culture, as well as the practice of structure with regard to violence towards outsiders. The idea that the pig in the forest must be subjected to a series of transformations because it lies outside the domain of human culture is further substantiated by Ongee myths. In the past, the storms and thunder that are seen as manifestations of the fury of the spirits in the Ongee world are said to have frightened the pigs, who ran into the forest, where they lost their senses, their eyes, ears and noses (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 218). According to Ongees they became galebe (senseless and motionless) . . . They would stand motionless waiting for the spirits to come down to the island and feed them. The feeding made them swell big and heavy, ‘like the full moon,’ and they would burst open allowing the toothless spirits to devour the soft juicy parts inside their bodies and bones. None of the other animals realized what the

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spirits were doing, since the pigs could not see, hear or smell. One day, during the wet season, the Ongee ancestors found two huge fat pigs, captured them, and placed them upside down on an open campfire. The pigs started to inflate and holes burst open in the skulls. Now the senseless pigs acquired eyes, nostrils and ears. They jumped up from the covering of leaves on the open fire and realized that they were going to be cooked and would die. They ran off in different directions. Now the pigs realized that they were considered food by the spirits as well as by humans, and they sought to evade capture. Their senses recovered, pigs were no longer galebe but became male and female pigs that could reproduce sexually. In summer they would grow by feeding on forest fruits, and different senses would develop. Spirits and humans agreed to divide the times for hunting pigs of the forest and pigs of the seas (transformed into turtles). In the late dry period of summer (October to March) the pigs “expand” (fatten) as they feed in the forest, and the spirits hunt and eat them. As this period gives way to the wet season (May to September) it is time for humans to enter the forest and hunt pigs.

The Ongee must make sure of a future supply of pigs by hunting them in the assigned season and seeing that the pig is cut, deseed, disemboweled, made light and senseless, then singed as prescribed. Humans are to singe the pigs as the spirits did, saving the hooves and skulls so that the odor of the animal continues to exude beyond the camp, letting the pigs outside imagine the animal killed is still among them. This deception ensures future success on hunts.

KILLING PEOPLE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF OUTSIDERS The preceding sections have discussed the multiple metonymic meanings of koro during peace ceremonies, and how the multivalent metaphor of lightness conveys anger, separation from the community and the transition from life to death. We have seen that peace ceremonies are a means of readmitting the Other into the group, that anger is classified according to whether it is directed at outsiders or insiders, and that the violence of hunting is a means of incorporating what is alien into the community. This endeavor of this concluding section is to use this understanding of metonymic, metaphoric and classificatory meaning to interpret the violent inscriptions on the bodies of intruders in the Jarawa Reserve. Are similar topologies of violence involved in hunting in the shrinking forest and the increased incidence of killings of intruders in this forest? It is our contention that Jarawa acts of violence towards human intruders correspond to as well as depart significantly from the ritual ‘appropriation’ of hunted pigs

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and their processing into food. The corpse of a human and the carcass of a hunted animal are both ‘texts’ through which cultural discourse and social collectivity become dimensions of consciousness, for the Andamanese treat bodies as multivalent signifiers of the practices which constitute natural and social relations simultaneously. In the treatment of the bodies of hunted animals and dead humans we see exemplified Durkheim’s theory of the mutually constitutive relationships between social and personal bodies, and also, as elaborated below, important implications about how the gradation of alienness complicates the binaries of animal/human and outsider/insider. The camp incorporates the animal from outside, but its smell, preserved with the bones; flows into the forest, maintaining the connection between the two domains that ensures continued success in hunting. We recall from Chapter Three how the preservation of the bones of relatives marks a similar concern with maintaining connections, in this case, that of the living and that of the (boneless) spirits. At the time of the second burial performed on the full moon night following a person’s death, her skull or lower jawbone are recovered, along with smaller bones like collarbones or the bones of fingers (Man 1883: 178; Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 112–3,126,184, 292–3). These are made into ornaments (Thomson 1882, Icke-Schwalbe 1986) and preserved inside the camp to secure the assistance of her spirit when in need of protection from danger or relief during illness. By contrast, the bones of outsiders are seldom preserved for future security (Man 1883: 178). The Ongee laid stress on the fact that in the past outsiders’ bodies were usually cut up, burned or thrown into the sea. Systematic and detailed field work among the Jarawa remains to be undertaken, but in 1992–3 I conducted field studies to find out how settlers living close to the Reserve interact with the Jarawa and articulate their perceptions and fears of their hostility. Given that prior to 1999 this hostility presented a significant barrier, Mr. Awaradi (then Additional District Magistrate) proposed I adopt what he termed the “periscopic technique” (1990: 138–39). Like the observation by Marcus (1995: 110) that the ethnographer might benefit from talking to those who know the same area from a different subject position, this meant trying to find out about the Jarawa from groups like the Bush Police whose perspective would be unique. Time spent at police outposts did provide useful insights, especially when they accompanied me to abandoned campsites. So the next few pages represent the Jarawa attacks on settlers as they appear to the outsider, but parallels with other aspects of Andamanese culture are flagged wherever they appear. During my fieldwork, I met people ranging from farmers and hunters who had entered the Reserve to recover missing bodies or to undertake illegal extraction to members of the administration and longstanding employees of the police service. Information

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from these interviews was supplemented by administrative and police reports. It is possible that some accounts sensationalized the violence, but they presented an uncannily coherent impression of what happens to individuals confronted with “savage, enraged Jarawa.” None of my sources claimed to be an ‘observer’ or ‘reader’ of Andamanese culture in the sense formulated by Geertz (1973); nonetheless, the various accounts provided a consistent picture of Jarawa actions and clues to the ways in which pigs are hunted and humans killed. Intrusions into Jarawa territory occur sometimes by accident, often by intention. Settlers living on its eastern side enter the Reserve to poach or to fell timber illegally, while those on the coast come to fish or to collect shells. Some entries occur in pursuit of cattle that have strayed into the Reserve while grazing in the adjacent fields. Official attempts to minimize intrusions are impeded by the rough terrain, the proximity of the road to the Reserve and its extent, and the expanding settlements. In any case the khaki-clad, gunbearing Bush Police appointed to patrol the areas signposted as ‘wild’ are often themselves offenders as hunters and extractors of forest produce. Outsiders who enter the forest make sure they are not wearing khaki, in the belief that it invites attack from the Jarawa, oriented as the latter are to keeping a lookout for police patrols. This concern has some basis in fact, as incidents of Jarawa attacking police camps are quite common. In late September 1994 I was staying at one of the camps when Jarawa attacked the neighboring camp in Tirur in the early hours of morning. Some 50 arrows were fired into the thatched walls, though fortunately no one was injured. It being dangerous as well as illegal to enter the Reserve, settlers mostly arrive as small hunting parties. Essential equipment includes a flashlight to shine into the eyes of wild deer and pigs, a gun wrapped in cloth, a machete and food supplies. The Jarawa are said to be able to track outsiders without the latter guessing, and always do so in numbers greater than that of the intruding party. Their stealth and the suddenness of the attack are identical to the way they track pigs. A settler in Ferrargunj reported, The very sight of a dark naked Jarawa incapacitates and freezes one in the dense forest, much like a pig or deer caught in the flashlight of the hunter. But in this case the Jarawa hunts the hunters.

Arrows are fired at close range before the intruder can react, and the situation sometimes develops into a hand-to-hand scuffle that usually ends with the outsiders being forced to lie on the ground while Jarawa slash their limbs, a practice similar to their treatment of trapped pigs. Police reports and individual accounts both refer to bodies being dragged some distance from the site

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of encounter, usually towards the coastline or towards the settlements—never further into the forest. This resembles the way a pig’s body is dragged some distance from the place it has been wounded so that it can be held down, but in this case the action signifies that the bodies of outsiders are not to be moved to Jarawa territory and incorporated into their culture. The personal belongings of the person killed are torn from the corpse and shredded. Again, though the gesture recalls the scattering of the pig’s blood, it would not in this case produce the illusion of continued life, and is more plausibly read as an example of the acts of severing used to express anger among the Ongee. Correctly asserting that the forests contain no carnivorous animals, settlers refer to how bodies are often found with their stomachs cut open and the organs and intestines removed. The implication is that this must be the work of the Jarawa. This resembles the Ongee concern with making pigs they have hunted “light.” Incidentally, disembowelment is an image that dominates descriptions of Jarawa killings, but is not often reported in police records. It is not that the cultivation of these gruesome images receives no nourishment from fact. But the Bush Police explain that they do not release to the press reports of male genitalia being slashed, lest it sensationalize a sensitive issue. This is not always the case, however. When a local newspaper, The Daily Telegram reported the recovery of the decomposed bodies of five fishermen from Wandoor at Foul Bay (November 10, 1993), it referred to their terribly mutilated condition (the lower jawbones had been severed, with arrows stuck through them like the skulls of hunted animals). The report quoted a senior police official confirming the mutilation of the bodies and explaining this was a means of ensuring their “souls would not roam about in the form of demons, but instead would find their heavenly abode.” Relatives of the fishermen could not explain why the bodies were found in Jarawa territory, but were very disturbed by the fact that the bodies returned to them still had the arrow shafts stuck between the jaws, and the victims’ clothes and parts of their genitalia had been removed. The mutilation and symbolic de-sexing of the bodies was what most distressed the bereaved relatives, and was something they formulated in images of religious difference. What the older brother of one of the victims felt most keenly was that though his father had escaped the riots at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan, his brother, a Bengali Hindu, had to die as a ‘Muslim’ at the hands of the “wild Jarawa, who are neither Hindu or Muslim, nor are they even humans” (for elaboration of how allusions to the body condense both the sense of religious difference and memories of communal violence, see Das 1995, Kakar 1995, Mehta 2000). Corpses often have arrow shafts driven through the rectum all the way to the groin, as if in symbolic denial of potency (see also Kakar 1995: 37–8). We know that pigs are also de-sexed after capture, to remove their reproductive power and

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identify them as food for the community. This is not so different from our own perception of pig as farm animals and deer as “Bambi,” before the work of a butcher’s knife turns them into pork or venison (Leach 1966: 46–50). Though women seldom enter Jarawa territory, we do know that in the 1950s a young woman’s body was found covered with identical cuts, with her breasts cut off and arrow shafts inserted into her vagina. The other incident people recall from the early 1980s is of a girl of seven being attacked and killed near Tirur, but in this case no mutilation was apparent. We may speculate that just as the bones of dead children do not qualify for being preserved as ornaments, the body of a child does not qualify for making statements about otherness, for we also know that dead children are buried beneath the family shelter, whereas adults are buried outside residential areas (RadcliffeBrown 1964: 109). In some cases limbs are hacked off and heaped into a small pile that is pushed in the direction from which the outsider came. These piles, often covered with loose dirt, indicate to the Bush Police where the body of a missing person might be found. An experienced policeman at the Annicut and Jhirkatang camp added that these mark not just the location of the corpse, but also a trail leading in the opposite direction to a Jarawa campsite. As recalled by the team sent to recover the bodies on Flat Island in July 1977, these tracks led to unoccupied campsites where the chopped-up fingers of the victims were discovered. Such maiming recalls the way the hooves of pigs are cut off to preempt their escape. But conversations with the Ongee reveal that in the period when they attacked outsiders, they too would cut off their victim’s fingers before killing them, to convey the inappropriateness of their presence in Ongee territory. Hacking off fingers was also the punishment prescribed for adultery. These facts support the idea that it is anger that subjects the bodies of intruders to the repeated slashing that effect the transformation of the living body into a corpse. Traces of fire and of human excrement near the site where the mutilated body is found have led the police to conclude that the Jarawa often spend some time near areas where individuals have been killed. The fire recalls the fires used to cook the prized kidney and liver after the pig hunt, but no part of the outsider’s body is consumed or processed into food. Instead, the excretion of undigested food near the site where the outsider was killed seems to be symbolic. Andamanese culture has devised means of controlling anger, but anger also opens onto acts of communication that enable the incorporation of persons, like the peace-making ceremony that readmits the enemy into relations of friendship. The act of taking life, whether of pigs or outsiders, is a signifying system that is simultaneously a process of transformation. The collective transformation of senseless pigs into edible meat reincorporates life through death. Aliens in the forest cannot similarly be appropriated through

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acts of violence, yet some tokens can be displayed within the community. Just as the skulls of hunted pigs are hung beneath the rafters, the body-parts of outsiders are brought within the campsite. Markers of occasions when violent statements were made about the Other, elements from the bodies of representatives of the external world are transformed into culturally meaningful objects. Fabrics and metal, for example, are often reshaped and used by the Jarawa. Cloth is shredded and woven into ornamental bands for the neck and arms, as are the gifts of cloth received during contact expeditions. In many unoccupied campsites are found metal pots and containers refashioned into blades and arrowheads (Sarkar 1990). The body of an outsider subjected to violence then becomes a source of materials from the outside world that can be adapted as tools in their own world. This is the end of the transformation effected by violence. It completes the culture’s statement of its capacity to appropriate the Other. We can thus see how the structure of the practice of hunting informs the practice of structure when confronting outsiders. Life taking is an end in itself, a means of producing the Other through systematic violence and thereby of incorporating or expelling it. Violence should then be viewed not just as a set of practices but also as an extended process of the production of a subject and disposal of an object. In his study of staging of headhunting rituals in Sulawesi (Indonesia), Kenneth George interprets the display of “signs of violence” as a “practical cultural response to the threatening power of the outsider” (George 1996: 99). He infers this from the tendency of contemporary accounts to locate the origin of head-hunting not in ritual obligation but in the history of the wider political economy (the wish to avenge enslavement), as well as his own theory that historical shifts in patterns of dominance led head-hunting to present itself as a means of subjugating and incorporating groups with whom the headhunters were involved in unequal relations of exchange (85, 88). He concludes that the contemporary emphasis on the grotesque is a reflexive commentary on the disjuncture between past politics and the socially fragmented present (George 1996: 93, 90). The subject of his study is a group whose relations with the external world have been more firmly established for much longer than is the case with the Jarawa, but we can see how the Jarawa too give their culture’s signs of violence a different inflection in order to mark the appearance of a new kind of outsider. To sum up points touched on in the course of the description, the laceration and evisceration of human bodies recalls the principle that the victim’s body must be immobilized and made ‘light.’ But the act of ‘making light’ may be an expression of anger as much as a means of marking the passage from life to death. The violence inflicted on human and on animal bodies are in many ways mutually reflective, but the signs of violence are used to reverse effect. For just as tears flow for joy as

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well as sadness, similar expressions of violence articulate different kinds of relationship. If the pig is transformed so as to be incorporated as food for the community and its blood scattered to ensure a steady supply of meat, the settler is transformed as a prelude to expulsion. Bodies are mutilated to signify an intrusion, and the placement of body parts in particular directions enacts the expulsion by applying a cultural grammar to (what would otherwise have appeared as) a series of random brutalities.

CONCLUSION Setting out the “main intellectual issue” raised by Orientalism, Edward Said (1979: 45) asks if we can really divide human reality into different cultures, societies and races and “survive the consequences humanly,” that is, avoid the hostility expressed by the division into “us” and “they.” This concluding section draws together the issues raised by our study of how one such division into “us and they” is sustained by, on the one hand, the image of the Other as inhuman, and on the other, by the perception of the humanity of the Other as something that can be neither understood nor subsumed, only violently inscribed upon and expelled. This narrative of ‘inhuman’ killings by the Jarawa started forming with the early colonial explorers’ inference of the practice of cannibalism from the mutilation of outsiders’ bodies, while the cyclicality of violence has characterized conflict since the punitive expeditions undertaken by the colonial administration. The thrust of this chapter has been to show how images sedimented over decades of interaction reveal only a distorted trace of their historical character. In the statement of a local political leader quoted below we see future relations being envisaged as a reversion to the colonial past. This impoverished sense of historical process leads to mutually contradictory statements, where hunting is projected as fundamental to Jarawa culture but its enforced discontinuation is urged, and where the suggestion that the state indulges the Jarawa is followed by an oblique admission of the encroachment on Jarawa resources. As a settler explained: All the efforts to civilize Jarawa are useless; they need to be rounded up like the British did with other tribals. . . . We need to put them in a place where they cannot hunt but cultivate! This alone will stop tribal from hunting animals and humans. It would be good for ecotourism. If settlers are not expected to hunt then why do the tribal continue to hunt? It is because tribals have a shortage of what they can hunt . . . in the forest that they attack us.

In the lines above, hunting, a traditional practice of resource-appropriation has been made the trope for the entire culture of the Jarawa and for their his-

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torical conflict with settlers. Settlers themselves hunt in the forest, but they seldom relate Jarawa attacks to what we may term their own inappropriate appropriation of forest resources. What from the outside is misapprehended as “hunting animals and humans” is the similar (not identical) treatment to which the Jarawa subject the bodies of animal and human outsiders. We have seen that for the Andamanese the idea of the ‘outsider’ takes different forms—an angry individual, a hunted animal and an intruder are all defined against the “heaviness” embodied in the community. In the case of objects being “made light” to express anger, the agent is readmitted into the community only after the latter has come together to place the “weight” of broken items back where it belongs. The act of making light the bodies of animals is an example of the “life-giving” rituals which, to use the models conceived by Hocart (1970: 3–4, 33 and 1969: 22), seek to secure life by transferring it from objects abounding in it to those deficient in it. The case of the intruder is unique in that the systematic work of making the body “light” is not preparatory to its being absorbed into the community. Impossible to incorporate into the inner and more familiar zones of everyday life, the intruder must actively be signified as the ‘Other’ before being expelled (McKinley 1976: 123). Thus Jarawa acts of violence are attempts to excise the problem of the ‘Other,’ yet for settlers these acts reaffirm the otherness of the Jarawa, which perpetuates an exchange of violence through the desire for revenge apparent in the glorification of settlers who kill Jarawa. Jarawa statements about the Other remain misunderstood in the main, inspiring only thoughts of fear and vengeance. Yet both Kalimuttu Swamy’s decree that payment must be made for what is taken from the forest and the politician’s reference to the “shortage” faced by the Jarawa indicate that deaths in the forest are seen as more than a consequence of being in the “wrong place at the wrong time.” These statements betray recognition that the killings are an indigenous critical response to the external power that confines the Jarawa to a Reserve even as the non-tribal population keeps increasing all around. The peace ceremonies of the past drew on a shared symbolic language to resolve conflict between tribes by acknowledging the Other as the self. In the present political landscape the voices of tribal and settler are radically unequal and their languages do not communicate. Here attempts to reconfigure the meaning of the boundaries imposed between self and other take the form of physically marking the outsider as Other and enacting his expulsion.

Chapter Seven

Images and Imaginations: Modernist Encounters

. . . a new role for the imagination in social life. To grasp this new role, we need to bring together; the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced images . . . the idea of the imagined community (in the Anderson’s sense); and the French idea of the imaginary, as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations . . .The image, the imagined and the imaginary these are all terms which direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes; the imagination as a social practice.1 Appadurai 1990(a): 5

Home to an ever decreasing population of tribal communities designated as “Primitive,” the Andaman Islands presents a site wherein the modernist imaginary finds its self-confirming discourse, confronted, contested and rendered ambiguous by it’s “other.” To put this in perspective I try to show how after the “coming out of the Jarawa” in 1999, the imagination of the “Primitive” moved out of the confines of official discourse and entered the realm of everyday practice for a whole range of non-tribal stakeholders in the Islands. It is this movement of the “Primitive” into the domains of both visibility and imagination and the growing challenge to the official discourse on “tribal welfare” that has reconfigured the relationship of the Jarawa with the outsider in terms that remain to be fully explored or understood. I try to draw upon theoretical reflections on the operations of the modern capitalist state to show how the workings of the “scopic regimes” of the welfare state collude with “tourist gaze” of a globalized leisure economy to sustain a range of representational practices that conceal the “Primitive’s” capacity to engage the modernist imagination on its own terms (Benedict 1983, Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, Firth1973, Foucault 1979, 1980, Urry 2002, Jay 1988, Pinney and Peterson 2005). 260

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Locating the critical site of the deployment of the imagination of the “Primitive” on the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) this chapter tries to find out how the imperatives of Island Development through the dubious tracks of tourism have led to state policies and practices caught in the contradiction of trying to both protect and modernize the “Primitive.” It also tries to show how such practices have become vulnerable to subversion both from the primitives and the outsiders. It is not the road itself but the increasing visibility it offers of the Jarawas of Middle Andaman Islands that constitutes the point of entry for this discussion. Although the subject of intense discussions in recent times, debates on the ATR remain mired in either mainstream developmental discourses or its more radical critiques (Andaman and Nicobar Administration 2003, Mukhopadhyay 2002, Sekhsaria 2006). While there is much value in the debate on the “threat” the road poses to the Jarawas, it is perhaps necessary redefine the parameters of this debate from the perspective of the Jarawas themselves. As I have tried to argue over the preceding chapters of this book, the Jarawas through their cultural practices have created a historical discourse in which they are present simultaneously with the outsiders. This is in contrast to the outsider’s history of the Jarawa, which has place only for themselves and the place, they assign for the Jarawas. The acknowledgement of the historical agency of the Jarawa I propose would withhold any facile assumptions about the them as either “primitives” on the brink of cultural extinction or “ex-primitives” ready to traverse the road to modernity. The situation on the Islands since 1999 has brought into sharp focus the ways in which the Jarawa and the non-tribal are entangled in a strained understanding of the received conception of ‘primitive’ and ‘modern.’ Recent events, as well as events from past history of the Jarawa I argue, need an analysis that takes the representations of Jarawa beyond ‘evocation’ (Tyler 1987: 199–213) and ‘figuration’ (Barthes 1975: 55–57) to comprehend the experiential field of the Jarawa; an experiential field that is enmeshed and encoded in the visions of past and future.2

THE ROAD TO DEVELOPMENT The Andaman and Nicobar Islands as one of the Union Territories of India became a part of the “developmental” and “modernization” program initiated by the Five-Year plans of the Government of India. In the first plan, ending in 1955, the emphasis was on clearing 20,000 acres of forest for 4000 families to settle. In the second plan the total number of families to be settled on the Islands was 1500 families in an area totaling 6408 square kilometers. The

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impetus at this point was given to agriculture and small-scale industries. The other distinctive mark of the modernization process was the building of roads. This drive to expand the road network in the Islands was to bring a series of major socio-economic changes. By the time of the inception of the third plan of 1960–65, the social and physical infrastructure of the Islands had undergone significant expansion. The total population of the island had reached 200000, and the total number of the Andamanese tribal population within it had decreased to less then five hundred. In the new and vigorous developmental rhetoric of “growth” and “modernization,” there was an emerging focus on Island tourism. The argument however, was that tourist enterprise and the revenue it generated had to be controlled in order to protect the natural resources, the defense installations and the tribal culture of the islands (See Ghosh 1998, and Rajval 1998). There was perhaps a touch of irony in this statement of intent to protect the tribal culture of the Islands, as the imperative of development via tourism demanded the imposition of a road infrastructure on the very territory reserved for tribal communities such as the Jarawa. The Andaman Trunk Road or the ATR as it is generally known was completed in 1978.3 Running along a stretch of two hundred and fifty kilometers the road connecting the southern point of Port Blair to northernmost point of Mayabundar was looked upon as a key signifier of the project of Island modernization.4 It was meant to facilitate movement of people and commodities and connect various small towns and villages (See Vidyarthi 1967). Significantly though, thirty-five kilometers of this road cut through the designated Jarawa Reserve forest (765 sq Km) in the region of the Middle Straits. The Jarawa Reserve Forest was created in 1956 as a way of protecting the Jarawa from the increasing the number of settlers who chose to set up homes around the traditional area occupied by them.5 Early discussions on the road amongst official circles tended to focus on the fact that what the British colonizers could not accomplish in terms of clearing the forest for pathways was now unavoidable and a road had to be made to connect Port Blair for the growing settlements in Middle and North Andaman Island. Later when the incursion of settlers in and around the Jarawa Reserve became a troubling reality the Government of India in a compensatory bid to “protect” the Jarawa from the dangers of extraneous influences, allocated a special budget in 1975 towards the establishment of the Andaman Adim Jan Jati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS) [Andaman Primitive Tribal Welfare Association] under the jurisdiction of the Island administration. The AAJVS took upon itself the task of looking after the future of the ‘primitive’ tribes of the Andamans (AAJVS 1977, Andaman and Nicobar Information 1976, and Sharma 1981).6 The ATR though open initially for bus and truck traffic later came to include a great number of private vehicles. With the growing use of the road many areas became easily

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accessible and scattered settlements expanded, and the road system in general proved to be significant revenue earner for the Island administration. In 1988–89, it was estimated that 583 km of roads in the Andamans generated revenue of approximately $ 241666. By 1990–91 the total road length had increased only marginally to 35 kilometers, but the revenue generated increased by 40%.7 The local economy was showing marks of change as the scale of operations shifted from agriculture to the growing service and market sectors. Apart from the expansion of the islands’ internal markets there was also an emerging market related to an increasing inflow of tourists. In 1986–87 a total of 25900 tourists (1856 of them foreigners) visited the island. In 1988, the islands were further opened up by a relaxation of tourist regulations for foreigners. By 1990–91 a total of 33751 tourists (5754 foreigners) visited the islands.8 The sudden increase in the number of tourists visiting the island was related to a series of preceding events. Much of this related to visits in the late eighties and early nineties of dignitaries who saw the Andaman Islands as a potential “tourist space” that could meet the demands of a new and expanding leisure economy. First among such visitors was India’s late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Mr. Gandhi is regarded as being responsible for making the administration of the Andaman Islands react to the potential of “eco-tourism” for global tourists. This thrust was helped by the visit of the internationally renowned oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau.9 Cousteau’s visit made the administration and the hospitality sector aware of the rich potential the local place offered in relation to the global tourist economy. Scuba diving was added on the list of offerings for tourists coming to Andamans. By 1998 there was a marked increase in guided tourist facilities, the expansion of diverse types of hotel infrastructure and the opening up of areas beyond Port Blair, including Mayabundar in the far north, which now became approachable by the ATR. It must be noted at this point that the opening up of the Islands and the increasing flows of tourist traffic generated what was perhaps one of the first major public debate on the developmental project on the Islands. Associations like SANE (Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology) came into the public domain as a forum involved in spreading awareness of the environmental degradation caused by the processes of modernization. Notwithstanding such responses, the Islands came to steadily acquire status as a unique tourist destination. Among the many institutions and individuals involved in the making of what could described as the “tourist gaze” (Urry: 2002) in the Islands, was the Anthropological Museum in Port Blair. The museum’s photographic collection established the “reality” of the existence of a group of “naked, short –stature primitive tribals” dwelling in the forests of Islands. Photographic images of the Jarawa in particular became a

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major pull for museum visitors who wished for the inclusion of a visit to the “primitive tribal territory” on the tourist’s itinerary.10 Where were such primitives in their natural habitats as was being shown for the visitors? Apart from photographs in what framed the “tourist gaze” on the Jarawas in the early years were often government-made documentaries premised on the subtext of a heroic ‘Search for Primitive Man,’ and illegal reprints of photographs taken by the official government photographers who accompanied the Jarawa contact parties. These visual narratives on the Jarawas were critical in not only establishing the reality of the Jarawa but also informing the visual frames through which they could be “seen.” The number of national and international tourists keen on ‘adventure tourism’ and wanting to see the fast ‘disappearing’ primitives recorded a significant rise. For the international tourist, the Andamans was a showcase of pristine ecology, for the Indian tourists it was all this and more. To be in the Andamans was to be at a revered nationalist site where the history and identity of the nation was put together in a unique combination of social, cultural and natural diversity. To be in the Andamans was like visiting past history and experiencing an unfolding future along the paths of secular development and progress. The islands were home to settlers from many parts of India practicing various religions and speaking different languages yet connected in a unified island existence.11 Within the secular-nationalist showcase the tribal communities of the Islands were accorded singular status. This was part of the ideological legacy of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Prime Minister Nehru advocated the idea of non-interference as a modality of protecting all tribal communities against the cultural consequences of modernization. The Nehruvian vision as it came to be enshrined in the Indian constitution however was clear in its formulation of the Indian state’s primary role in deciding the fate of these communities. The Constitution of India regards tribal and governmental relations as being one of parent and child. The government acknowledges that tribal have rights, but points out that the way they can achieve full equality is through planned development. Nehru stressed the need to respect tribal cultures, yet his scheme called for the integration of those societies in the larger life of the nation (See Elwin 1961: 45–46). Implicit in this vision was the assumption that tribal societies could not exist autonomously from the protection of the state, and therefore to be governed by a special judicial, administrative and executive structure that upheld the imperative of ‘protection’ and ‘provision’ was essential.12 The Andaman Islands were no exception to this rule. Since the 1950’s, government authorities protected the Jarawa and settlers from having any sort of ‘undesirable’ hostile interaction. It was based on the belief that not much was known about Jarawa and like the other tribal groups of the island (conveniently referred to as conglomerate of Great

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Andamanese constituted of about nine dialect groups) the Jarawa could be mistreated, incorporated or even exterminated by the rapid forces of modernization. A regulation for the Protection of Andamanese Aboriginal groups was thus instituted. In the post-Nehruvian era a similar policy was put into effect and a more intrusive state agency was instituted to protect these communities. The Government of India under Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi allocated a budget and formed the AAJVS within the administration of the Union territory of Andaman Islands (Sharma 1981). The main objective of AAJVS was the “welfare” of the aboriginal groups designated as “Primitives” who needed to be “protected” and especially “provided for” in terms of their welfare.13 The small size of their population (estimated at that time to be about 950) and their pursuit of hunting and foraging, made them unique in relation to whole of Indian sub-continent’s tribal culture, hence the term “Adim” (Primitive) was included as a prominent qualifier. The program for the “Primitive” was seen by Mrs. Indira Gandhi, as a special priority in the context of the process of modernization set on course by programs of economic development in the form of roads and communication together with the settlement of people who had migrated to the islands either as free settlers or as post-partition refugees. The designation of the ‘Primitive tribe’ was an important way to deal with the problems generated by the 1956 ANPATR Act. According to the 1956 act, the Chief Commissioner of the Islands could fix the extent of the reserved territory, but there were no fixed criteria for doing so. Under the pressure of modernization, the guideline was to maintain the boundaries of the tribal and non-tribal areas. Waste or unoccupied land could be allotted to a non-tribal if the administration felt that a tribal member did not need some area. What was to be seen, as waste and unoccupied land for the traditionally hunting and gathering tribes however, remained a problematic interpretation.14 The decisive role of the state in fixing the extent and sanctity of the borders of the Reserve Area in a sense marked a new starting point in the long history of troubled relations between the tribal communities and outsiders on the Andaman Islands. To cope with the possibility of imminent hostilities between the settlers and the Jarawas the state organized a series of initiatives to establish “friendly contact” with the Jarawas. Teams from the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI), medical experts, statisticians, along with other specially invited guests were allowed to visit the Jarawa territory with boatloads of gifts. This quick and often haphazard ‘contact work’ staged by diverse and at times conflicting government authorities was regarded as a step towards intending friendly relations with a potentially hostile group of people. Each contact expedition (costing about $2,500) on the western side of the reserve area was staged in the face of growing unrest among the settlers around the Jarawa Reserve territory on the eastern side.

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The unrest was due to the fact that the small settlements on the eastern borders of the reserve area complained of frequent ‘hostile Jarawa attacks/raids.’ It was reported that groups of Jarawa would come out of the forest and collect coconuts and metal utensils and destroy the gardens around settler homes. There were also incidents of physical attacks on both people and livestock. The Government responded to the increasing complaints made by the “victims” with monetary compensations and stipulated that an amount of about $700 was to be paid to the families of each individual killed by the Jarawa. Notwithstanding the veracity of settler complaints about “unprovoked” Jarawa attacks, the local the Bush Police appointed to keep the settlers and the Jarawa in their respective places, was categorical in its observation that illegal encroachers and poachers into the Jarawa territory had been on the increase. These were enough provocation for the Jarawa to spring surprise attacks on commuters traveling along the ATR (Sarkar 1990 Mukhopadhayay

Signboard on the road construction office at Mile-Tilak that shows the names of the local employees killed during the road construction. Interestingly enough, relatives (settlers) of the people killed, often visit the signboard and leave floral offerings to commemorate the tragic deaths of their loved ones. Interestingly this is a visual homology to the plaque at the Cellular Jail of Port Blair, commemorating prisoners who died in incarceration during the colonial period. Frequently, Indian tourists visit and place floral offerings at the plaque in the Cellular Jail associated mostly with political prisoners involved in the anti-colonial struggle in India. (Photographed in 1998)

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2002).15 There also remained the unresolved issue of fixing the Jarawas in a place decided by the State. The demarcation of borders and the idea of fixity from a modernist perspective were hard to translate for a people whose lives were conditioned by the imperative of “movement” (See Andaman Nicobar Information 2003). Settlers had become predictably critical of the perceived failure of the administration’s policy towards the ‘primitive’ Jarawa. They raised questions about “costs” incurred to provide gifts to the Jarawa and the organization of “pleasure trips” into Jarawa territory for sundry officials. They registered complaints against AAJVS functionaries who they argued were conducting “exotic” picnic trips in the name of “contact” expeditions. Instead of protection and restricting the “primitive” tribal, the settlers proposed that the Jarawa be “reformed.” The “reformed primitive” or “sudhrey huwe junglee” had to evolve from a forager to a productive citizen and contribute to a better use of the forest. Although now heard in far louder voices I had heard these complaints ever since 1983, when I first started my research on the Andamans. I had known since then how settlers saw institutions like the AAJVS as corrupt agencies of the state that used taxpayer’s money to keep these tribes in a state of perpetual “primitivity” and continue thereby to justify the budgets for welfare. According to a local politician of Port Blair who had a support base with South Indian settlers in the Andamans We pay taxes, we work and cast our votes—the government should work for us not protect the “Primitive” (junglee) They need to be made into productive citizens of the nation—like the other non primitive tribes they should be educated and made to clear the bush and cultivate crops!

The increasing incidents of Jarawa hostilities on settlers in the villages near the Jarawa reserve forest, invested settler grievances with greater force and legitimacy. The Island administration was under pressure to formulate a more concerted response. Like the British colonial administration the Indian government however seemingly lost interest in undertaking any sustained investigations into the cultural conditions of the Jarawa hunters and gatherers and began to regard them more as a “problem” and perhaps a nuisance in the path of progress.16 It drew its sense of alarm and frustration from the sheer statistics of Jarawa “attacks” in the years following independence despite of attempts at establishing “friendly contacts.” From 1947 to 1963 there were no less than forty-six violent encounters with the Jarawa, in which mostly non-tribal settlers were killed (See Census 1971: 121–124). It was evident that the administration had

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never fully understood the reason for the Jarawa attacks. It was felt that the only way to conciliate the Jarawa was to capture them in large numbers, tame them, and then send them back as “messengers of peace” (Census 1971: 104). Some within the administration were convinced that the Jarawa needed to be brought under a law and disciplinary code of conduct. They felt that instead of following a ‘non-interventionist’ policy it would be better to mobilize efforts towards the gradual incorporation of the Jarawa into the mainstream of society.17 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) and pro-environmentalists on the other hand were keen on imposing an overall policy of ‘no contact’ with the primitive tribes. They felt that government sponsored contact expeditions and the ritual of giving gifts had made the Jarawa vulnerable to a condition of chronic dependence on outsiders. Local settlers in fact felt that Jarawa came to settlements and destroyed the area either because they were driven by hunger or they had become addicted to commodities and food items introduced to them through contact expeditions. In 1992–93, the administration considered the idea of designating Interview Islands exclusively for future settlement of all the Jarawa.18 Although this project was never carried out it marked the administration’s growing attempts to address settler fury. Settlers and local politicians became increasingly critical of the administration for not trying to bring the Jarawa and the other primitive tribal groups in the Islands into some concerted project of modernization that addressed their primary requirements of subsistence. To counter this feeling, the administration in 1998, expedited the process of introducing fruit trees into Jarawa forests and released pigs to breed within the Reserve area and even air dropped food from time to time. Plans were made to construct ‘Jarawa contact staging posts’ where permanent structures and stores would be maintained by the AAJVS so that the Jarawa would only come to specific locations to get what they wanted instead of randomly visiting the settlements. Through the re-instituted policy of what could perhaps be described as surrogate gift giving, the Jarawa were “induced to appreciate and accept a policy of coexistence” (Pandit 1985: 123). It may be interesting at this point to see how the Jarawa responded to the new policy initiative and worked to redefine its relations with the “outsider” as it came to be played out on the ATR.

ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD The Jarawa as I will try to argue have sought to construct for them a meaningful practice out of the road, which had been viewed as a symbol only of and for the non-tribal. I wish to explore and understand how the ATR has be-

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come part of the Jarawa worldview in a way that makes our assumptions about welfare and protection both facile and dangerous. I seek to reiterate that borders once created for the protection of Jarawa and the non-tribal have become critical contact zones. It is the collapse of such boundaries and the creation of new sites of contact that have made the ATR the very location where the imagination of the “primitive” and the “ex-primitive” becomes part of an emerging social practice. The road has made the ‘Primitive’ Jarawa visible for the bus passengers and tourists. The same road has made the Jarawa the “modernized ex-primitive” visible in Port Blair. How the Jarawa existed and how they should exist, have created new terrains of imagination in which both settlers and outsiders seek out their own self-images. The road through the forest reserve and public spaces of Port Blair are now scenes of contact ritual where the distinction between “us” and “them,” the ‘Primitive’ has become ever more tenuous and contested. It is to this new contact zone and to the new ways of imagining the primitive and making claims on its destiny that I now turn. Official records of Jarawa hostility since 1979, suggest that this area around the Reserve had become a potential war zone where surprise attacks or reprisals for incidents of settler encroachment were carried out with relentless aggression. Twenty years later the record of hostilities seemed to have dramatically changed. The appearance of a young Jarawa boy, Enmey about whom we have discussed before marked the beginnings of what was deemed a radical change in the social relations between the Jarawa and the outsider. But what was it that made such a change possible? The Andaman Trunk Road as we know was made operational in 1978, but what caused the Jarawa to wait till 1999 to come out and conduct their own contact with the outside world? What went on in the duration of twenty-one years? Much of the thinking, particularly of that the Experts Committee Report (Andaman and Nicobar Administration 2003) indicates that contrary to general belief the Jarawa did not come out of the forest because of the lack of resources available to them in the forest.19 The report supports this assertion by findings of its nutritional and health surveys along with a deep stock taking of forest resources with the help of the Botanical and Zoological Surveys of India (Andaman and Nicobar Administration 2003: 137–138, 375). The veracity of these claims remains open to debate and a source of official concern to which we will later return.20 But let us turn now to the image and the imagination of the “Primitive” on the roadside. In the years after 1998, on the roadside near Kadamtalla and Baratang region, young Jarawa men could be seen wearing sunglasses and t-shirts, along with their usual accoutrements of body paints, baskets, bows and arrows.21 They adorned themselves with ornaments made from plant material of the

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forest as well as material given or discarded by the non-tribals. They would wait patiently by the road for buses and vehicles carrying tourists. As the vehicles would veer close to their shelters in the forest, they would come out from the bushes and block the traffic. When the vehicles would perforce come to a halt, they would line up before curious tourists and stretch out their hands to accept items such as food and clothing in exchange for a pose before the camera. Instead of being passive subjects in the old exclusive contact of the Jarawa by official contact parties, the Jarawa on the road were themselves contacting outsiders. Such contact events would at times be spontaneous at others directed by the other social actors on the road. As the bus passengers would wait for the interconnecting boat ride to cross the Middle Straits between South Andaman and Middle Andaman, small shopkeepers would try to attract them to their trinket and food kiosks in the area near the jetty. Many commuters would come up these shops to buy things not only for themselves but also for the Jarawa. In a curious play of gift giving, exchange, patronage and greed, food and trinkets brought from the kiosks by the commuters and tourists as gifts for the Jarawa would be returned by the Jarawa to the shopkeepers in exchange for things they wanted.22 On occasions, the Jarawa would themselves point out to passengers what they wanted from the shops and get them to pay for it. At the end of the day the same things would be sold repeatedly to different passengers.23 In order to control this unholy trading on the roadside, the AAJVS posted workers at various strategic points.24 Large signboards warned travelers on the road that they should not stop or interact in any way with the Jarawa. While some functionaries of the AAJVS took to their new policing role with much seriousness, others remained evidently cynical. Halts at the roadside however brief were inevitable, and the relations of gift and exchange on the roadside were far too entrenched to be controlled or destroyed. The gift of language had allowed the Jarawa to communicate with the outsider without any mediation by welfare workers. As buses carrying tourists and commuters would continue to pass along the ATR, young Jarawa boys would cry out in Hindi, asking the driver to “stop the car” because they were “hungry.” Such pleas at times went unheeded with tragic consequences. There were reports of at least two incidents where speeding vehicles had hit young Jarawa boys who tried to stop them. Yet in the last five years, the Jarawa have become so dependent on this new life style at the roadside that temporary shelters close to the roadside have been set up. For the traditionally translocating Jarawa, the road, and the traffic it seems had become a much more reliable resource area to gather from. As the Jarawas on the roadside came to be “seen” more frequently settler communities on the Island reacted with a sense of relief. The Jarawas it

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seemed were no longer a hostile force to reckon with and instead seemed to offer a new source of profitable engagement. The greater visibility of the Jarawa in seemingly friendly dispositions held out the possibilities of cashing in on a promising tourist trade. Settlers and tourists alike had purportedly viewed much of the contact footage that was made into documentary films with titles like ‘Man in search of Man,’ shown regularly in Port Blair along with the displays of contact photographs at the local Anthropological Museum. In a sense therefore a potential demand for “Jarawa tourism” was already in place. In 1999 some enterprising settlers near the Jarawa territory initiated a range of illegal tourist operations based on their own versions of staged contact. The Jarawa would be attracted out of their forest shelters with promises of gift items like coconut and bananas and made to pose before the eager lenses of tourists. By late 2000, a full-blown underground business had developed despite the official restrictions on such activities.25 People, who could pay, were taken privately and secretly to the locations that were marked by the administration for Jarawa contact, and offered the opportunity to photograph the ‘primitive’ Jarawa. It seemed almost as if any one who provided money for an engine boat and a load of bananas could have his or her own trip to see the ‘primitive and naked’ Jarawa. Local tour guides were promised better rates if they could “manage” such contacts with visitors on trips along the ATR. Many of them obliged such requests and prepared visitors with information that Jarawas could be made to pose for pictures if instead of bananas they would be given money, or dry chewing tobacco. Such possibilities of photographing or ‘image making’ altered the very collective imagination of the Jarawa. As “Primitives” the Jarawas were no longer seen as hostile, but rather as ‘helpless souls’ who were seen to display hostility or attack settlements only if and when they faced shortages of food and water in the Reserve. With the rapid growth of the underground tourist enterprise and visibility of Jarawas at road side, news papers and popular magazines frequently came up with accounts and images of romantic adventures in the forests of the Andamans and exhilarating encounters with the Jarawa, whose innocence and “child-like nature” were celebrated as endearing markers of its primitive condition. The Jarawa, as readers were told, were not be feared, but were instead to be looked upon with compassion. Settlers who had in the recent past criticized the government’s policies of welfare had now seemed to have realized the commercial possibilities inherent in keeping alive the image of the primitive. Some distance away in Port Blair a multitude of Jarawa images, in imagined states of primitivity circulated through a whole a range of objects, artifacts and tourist souvenirs. Local artists for instance painted images of the primitive Jarawa in warm colors and on varied surfaces and sold them as objects of art for middle class consumption. The Jarawa in other words were

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now imagined as artistic objects that could be marketed at a price. This commoditification of the Jarawa was the work of an artistic visualization of the ‘primitive’ not as hostile or fearsome but as the rapidly disappearing “Other” of the modern Indian citizen. In what seemed to be an intelligent move the “Jarawa art” market brought out a whole new range of images of Jarawa women and positioned these as the more exclusive and expensive pieces meant for the indulgences of conspicuous consumption. In the larger souvenir market the rapidly proliferating artistic depictions of the tribe was presented as part of an attempt to create a memorial for the Jarawa who were perceived to be on the brink of cultural transformation. “Jarawa art” in other words became a way of addressing a surge of middle-class nostalgia for something that was rapidly disappearing before the eye. Local artists and craftsmen produced a range of images to create and sell a new “kitsch” that acquired ready acceptance as both ‘art’ and ‘exotica.’ By 2000 Jarawa ‘art work’ found new forms of creative expression in items of everyday use too. Consider the matchbox sold in 2000, in the Islands, particularly in the Middle Andaman region. Wood for matchsticks used to be exported from the Islands, to the southern states of India to be made into match-

Jarawa Art. Example of ‘Jarawa Art’ where the Jarawa women have become “image-things” to be collected. This clay figurine was manufactured in Krishnagar, West Bengal.

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Ink drawing made by Port Blair artist, Alok Adhikary [1998] who apparently is commercially successful in Calcutta, but not in the Andamans. The interesting point to note here is that the production and consumption of the image of Jarawas in forms of art connects the Andaman Islands to the mainland India.

sticks and sent back to the Islands for sale. Interestingly enough some of the matchboxes produced during this time carried on their faces, the image of a Jarawa man with a bow and arrow, pointing at a fish, against the silhouetted backdrop of a forest and village. In order to avoid any misinterpretation the name Jarawa was prominently printed at the top of the image. It may be noted at this point that the manufacturers of the Jarawa figurine in West Bengal, much like producers of the “Jarawa matchbox” in South India, were active participants in the visual economy that set the limits on the imagination of the primitive Jarawa in both the Andaman Islands and in mainland India.26 The image on the matchbox it may be noted was based on earlier ethnographic images that were seldom seen by anybody outside official circles. That this image should have made its way into popular artistic consciousness was reflective of the both the visibility of the Jarawa in living form as well the greater availability of photographic images in the public domain. By

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Image of the Jarawa. Match box made in Tamil Nadu depicting Jarawa figure with bow and arrow, shooting at a fish. Collected from a local Baratang, Middle Andaman market in 2001.

Andamanese do hunt for fish at the coastline with their bows and arrows. However, this sight is a rarity for the non-tribal Islander.

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2003, “real” images of the Jarawa body as photographed (and not painted or sculpted) became accessible to anybody with a camera and an enterprising tour guide. The realization of the new possibilities of capturing the Jarawa body on film inaugurated a new bout of photographic practice that took away much of appeal of the image of Jarawas on prints, canvases or matchbox faces. Studios in Port Blair were seen to openly selling picture post cards with images of the naked Jarawa reproduced from photographs taken by government contact teams or private visitors to the Jarawa Reserve. The new markets in Jarawa photographs along with the markets in Jarawa tourism were evidently buoyant and expanding. This was evident in the manner in which Port Blair’s growing hospitality industry played a key role in acquiring and displaying images of naked Jarawa women in the name of promoting ‘Jarawa Art.’ Many of the images were painted replicas of photos displayed at the local Anthropology Museum. For tourists as much as for settlers the rapid circulation of, photographs of contact depicting government officials and anthropologists standing before the Jarawa with a load of bananas as gifts of friendship, worked to generate similar aspirations of contact with the “Primitive.” A sight that was only imagined (Appadurai 1997: 5–11), had with the possibility of actual experience, becomes a possible site to be visited. A simple bus ride to Kadamtalla on the ATR could offer the experience of “seeing” the imagination in living incarnation. The proliferating images in the media and the increasing number of visitors as well as settlers had become interconnected in ways that effectively created a compelling “work of the imagination” (Appadurai 1996: 3) of the primitive. This image of the “Primitive” was constantly reconstructed and mediated by the actual visibility of the Jarawa in living form. As in the case of Jack, who in 1857 was taken to Calcutta by Mouat and presented before a huge crowd that came to see him as a life size doll with a savage voice produced by an innovating ventriloquist (See Mouat 1863: 279–87), the Jarawa in the year 2000 too were being dolled and played up to the imagined image of the ‘primitive.’27 For the colonized subjects in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta the image of Jack as a “black silk doll with loud roaring voice” was the actualization of an image imagined, an image that was ironically far removed from the reality of the person who was actually present in Calcutta.28 The illicit production of “Jarawa art” and the operations of market that sustained it provoked a sharp response from the local administration. In its first drive to control the art market, it made sure that the all photo shops selling photographic images of the primitive tribes, the Jarawa in particular were pulled out. By 2003, all that went by ‘Jarawa Art’ was taken out of shops and sales counters in Port Blair. The authorities also came down heavily on photo shops still trying to sell actual photographs of the Jarawa. The new drive to

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censor the production and sale of Jarawa images was matched by a corresponding change of mode in the display galleries of the Anthropological Museum in Port Blair. In the old museum then housed in a wooden structure at Junglee Ghat, prominent displays of “Jarawa art’ in the front walls of the gallery facing the main road, along with photographs of contact in the inner galleries were common. In 2002 the painted boards of naked Jarawa women were brought down. In 2003 a new Anthropological Museum was opened near the Secretariat complex at Port Blair. On the administration’s insistence, the Anthropological Survey of India designed the new museum gallery to show not only the ‘prehistoric and racial context’ of the various tribal groups but also the history and culture of the various non-tribal communities settled on the Andaman Islands. The thrust of the new museum display was to show how the various tribes of the islands had evolved from different “racial stocks” and how they shared space with other settlers. There was however little attempts to show the tribal communities may have experienced cultural changes as a result of their coexistence with other settlers from mainland India. The inclusion of the cultures of settlers’ communities such as the Karens, Moplahs, Ranchiwallas, and Bengalis was merely to showcase the theme of “unity in diversity” on the Islands. The focus on the settlers was also a way of addressing their resentment against what was perceived to be the Indian state’s favored treatment of the primitive tribal communities. Unlike the old museum display, the new display was devoid of any photographs of the ‘naked savage’ either in isolation or in situations of contact with the staff of the Anthropological Survey. The old museum had proudly displayed the accomplishments of the Anthropological Survey of India as the sole organization that was successful in contacting the primitive tribes of the island and collecting and displaying its material culture. In the present circumstances the triumphal moods of older times were replaced by more dispassionate renditions of the cultural heritage of the islands. Displays of the material culture of hunting and gathering groups were now placed discreetly along with those of the neighboring settler communities. Photographs on display depicted tribes such as the Jarawas in clothes, receiving medical attention and evidently responding to the state’s welfare initiatives to keep them alive and well.29 Notwithstanding the new measures to control and discipline the image and imagination of the primitive in public spaces, the administration had little influence to act upon the private domains of hotel lounges where painted panels depicting typical images of naked Jarawa women or sculpted images of the “primitive with bow and arrow’ continued to remain on display. The removal of photographic images of primitive tribes from all public spaces generated a peculiar tug of war between the administration and private tourist

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market. While tour operators, hotels and souvenir shops aware of the profitability of “Jarawa tours” were to keen to sustain the “tourist gaze” on the ‘primitive’ the administration strove hard to limit and discipline the gaze it had itself ironically generated through photographic displays of its own contact events. By controlling the display of Jarawa images in public places, the administration’s intent was to systematically remove all significations of Jarawas made by people in Port Blair. People from Port Blair who were found taking pictures of Jarawas from buses on the ATR were frequently apprehended by authorities and their films duly confiscated. With the growing imposition of such constraints on the reproduction and sale of photographic images, souvenir shops in Port Blair started to make small icons of Jarawas for tourists unable to see the Jarawa either in living form or in photographic likeness. These ‘dolls’ were often crude approximations of contact photographs taken either by official agencies or illegal tour operators. As tourist traffic continued to grow despite the brakes placed on Jarawa tourism, the sale of Jarawa dolls in the markets of Port Blair registered a sharp increase. If tourists could not really see a Jarawa, or possess a photographic record of their existence,

Display of Jarawa Images. Painted image of the “Primitive Andamanese” can be seen displayed in a Port Blair hotel.

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Display of Jarawa Images. Sculpted image of the “Primitive Andamanese” can be seen displayed in a Port Blair hotel.

they could at least buy a three-dimensional miniature model of the Jarawa as a somewhat acceptable substitute. By 2004 as the visibility of the Jarawas on the roadside became a rarity and photography almost impossible, the Jarawa dolls molded in stylized forms that were often caricatures of earlier images became popular among tourists who seemed to be chronically nostalgic about a people they could no longer see. With the growth in the demand for Jarawa souvenirs, the production of dolls rapidly developed from its cottage industry beginnings to a small-scale industrial undertaking in the out skirts of Port Blair. The upshot of this growing production of dolls was a distinct change in the style of their representation. If the images of the Jarawas were to be placed on a time scale, one could note that the while the early images were more indexical and the recent ones were both symbolic and iconic. (Leach 1976: 12). In the context of the growing official restrictions placed on the production and circulation of Jarawa images, it was perhaps ironic that the Indian state in its capital city of New Delhi would display a gigantic sculpture of a ‘primitive tribal’ at the compound of Andaman Bhavan, the official guesthouse of the Union Territory. Notwithstanding the censorship on the photographic displays of “primitive tribal groups” in the Island, the placement of a sculpted

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“Jarawa dolls.” Sold in the markets of Port Blair. These images of “Jarawa dolls” on being compared to earlier images of Jarawa represented through the iconic Jarawa figurine makes it clear that the earlier “dolls” were isolated figures depicted in a degree of realistic detail. The later dolls were often part of a family of dolls representing the Jarawa as a ‘domesticated social group’ that seemed to be of great appeal to a new class of tourists. With an increase in demand, the dolls that are now being manufactured are less iconic and more symbolic.

figure of a ‘primitive’ body in the state capital was considered legitimate and politically significant. A modernizing Indian state was shown to be sensitive to the cultural rights of even the smallest groups in its territory and committed to protecting and providing for them through its agencies of welfare. In the “visual economy” (Poole: 1997) around the image of the Jarawa one could discern a disturbing consistency. The image of a Jarawa with an arrow on hand as it appeared on a matchbox was similar to the image displayed at the entrance of a private hotel in Port Blair and ironically even similar to the sculpted mascot gracing the entrance of Andaman Bhavan. The hunter-gatherer pose remains a constant trope in defining the image of the Jarawa as a primitive tribal group. In its miniaturized form the Jarawa doll to borrow a phrase from Susan Stewart (Stewart 1993: xxii) was a “metaphor for the interior space and time of the modern bourgeois subject” while in its gigantized form the figure of Jarawa stood out as a metaphor of the abstract authority of the state and collective public life. To control the perils of visibility the AAJVS made a concerted effort to control potential tourists on the ATR as well as the Jarawas who waited at the roadside to be “seen” by commuters and passersby. Large signboards were prominently put up, making clear that travelers on the road should not stop or

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Display of Jarawa Images. Front yard of the Andaman Bhavan at New Delhi. This twelve foot high sculpture is also based on the image of Andaman Islander shooting bow and arrow.

interact in any way with the Jarawa. Nothing was to be given to the Jarawa and nor allowed to be taken from them, and all form of photography was prohibited. A large part of this drive to discipline the tourist gaze came as a response to a series of legal pressures exerted on the government by both members of the judiciary as well as local and international rights activists. As mentioned earlier, in July 1999, Ms Shyamali Ganguly a lawyer, on a visit to the Andaman Islands filed a case against the administration, seeking clarification on what the administration was doing to help the Jarawa who she had seen begging on the ATR. The case, named Ganguly versus the Union of India W, P No. 48 under the Article 226 of the Constitution of India was entered in the High Court of Calcutta-Jurisdiction Circuit Bench at Port Blair, and quickly gained international attention. In due course the court ordered the formation of an expert committee. By February 2000, the Committee constituted under the court’s directive was appointed with administrators, government employed anthropologists, medical and nutritional experts. The committee had to provide findings about the current condition of the Jarawa and formulate a policy for the future in relation to three specific questions. (1) What could the reasons be for the sudden change of behavior among the Jarawas;

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Signboard at the entry point of Jarawa Reserve with instructions about what is not allowed while passing through the Reserve area. The signboard mentions that one is not to photograph Jarawas and not give or take any thing from them. (Photographed in 2003)

(2) What was the degree of availability of resources for Jarawa the particularly in relation to the reserve forest and (3) What was the health and nutritional status of Jarawas? In July 2003 a report was submitted in which none of the experts seemed to be in agreement with the both the findings and the suggested policies. In terms of methodology the committee had appointed teams comprising members form different disciplines with questionnaires in accordance with the issues raised by the court. These teams were sent into the Reserve area to obtain the relevant information. One of the findings of the survey was that there was no real “food anxiety” experienced by the Jarawas and the forest still had enough resources to sustain the then two hundred and forty odd Jarawas. The issue of nutrition was seen not as a problem and the continued provision of a health facility was reiterated. What was not asked was that if it was not for the lack of food, why were the Jarawa contacting people at the roadside outside the forest particularly after 1999, in spite of the fact that the road through the reserve forest was operational since the middle of the 1970’s? There seemed to be little interest in understanding the “changed or changing” behavior of the Jarawa in the context of the increasing traffic along the ATR, the

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growing presence of outsiders around the reserve territory and frequent contact between the tribal and non-tribal which perhaps were enough to make the Jarawas engage with the outsider on a different set of terms. Following a further set of discussions and seminars, a policy was adopted (Notification dated: 21st December 2004) which ironically didn’t have much to say about closing the ATR. The concern was not about understanding change as an ontological inevitability but of trying to locate causative factors that induced change and of keeping the Jarawas insulated from these. The court and the expert committee were convinced that a tribal group like the Jarawa should not have come out of the forest and entered into a relationship with the world outside. They were meant to have remained confined within the reserve territory. Most of the members of the expert committee in their individual submissions and deliberations presented views on what should be done to keep the Jarawas confined within a fortified and insulated Jarawa reserve territory.30 Implicit in the expert report was the notion that some day the Jarawas would be prepared to interface with the outside world but that time had not yet come. The principle idea enshrined in the new Jarawa Policy (Andaman and Nicobar Gazette. No. 210. December 21, 2004) was to keep the Jarawas in a state of “protection” vis-à-vis their cultural identity, natural habitat and health as they were a “unique human heritage.” One of the stated objectives was “to protect Jarawas from harmful effects of exposure and contact with the outside world while they are not physically, socially, and culturally prepared for such interface.”31 What followed was a policy of containing the Jarawa within the confines of the reserve by restricting their movements on the road. Between the years 2001 and 2004 Jarawas had set up residential structures along the sides of the ATR. These were never occupied by the same group for a prolonged duration but were much like transit stations, or vestibules connecting the forest and roadside, both areas that were suitable for gathering resources. Like Ongees, Jarawas while shifting residence in relation to seasons were used to setting up camps along the roadside. These roadside camps served the Jarawas to collect items of food from road users. Roadside foraging however would at times lead to tragic consequences. One such incident acquired a considerable amount of debate in the local and mainland press.32 For the administration the Jarawas and outsiders together had made these shelters problematic zones that induced and facilitated an undesirable interaction between the two. In the winter of 2004 the island administration claimed that, the Jarawas were no more fascinated by the contact with the users of ATR and as a result had abandoned roadside shelters. It was perhaps ironical that no one questioned whether the Jarawas had on their own decided to move away from the

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Residential structures made by the Jarawas between 2001 and 2003. Photographed near R. K. Nallah along the ATR.

Jarawas at their roadside residence returning back with the hunted pig.

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Note the use of metal pot for boiling meat at the roadside camp. The pot provided by the AAJVS has replaced traditional Jarawa pit roasting done in the forest interior.

By August 2004 a large shelter near R. K. Nallah (see illustration 8 and 8a) had collapsed in a peculiar manner.

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roadside shelters. No one asked why it had taken them more than two hundred years come out and why it took nearly four years for them to decide to forego their fascination for the road? It was obvious that given the administrative pressure on the AAJVS workers to control the visibility of Jarawas visà-vis tourists and commuters on the ATR, the Jarawas were compelled to abandon the shelters. Unlike the abandoned shelters inside the Jarawa forest, which are just left to wear out and collapse on their own, the interesting fact about the roadside shelters was that their supporting posts were deliberately cut down to make the thatched roofs collapse easily. The two residential shelters in other words seemed to have collapsed because the central support post was cut and the thatching set on fire. The Jarawas it may be noted have never set fire to their own or on any of the settler houses they may have “attacked” which leads to the possible and perhaps disturbing conclusion that the destruction of their shelters could have been done either by the non-tribals or by the administration itself.33 According to the Jarawas who were later questioned on the destruction of the shelters, it was members of the administration who had cut the cords of the thatching that lead to the slow and steady fall of the roadside shelters. Unwilling to comment on such claims some members of the welfare agency felt that this subtle and slow destruction of residential structure was justified as it finally compelled the Jarawas to stay off the roadside. As a further step towards controlling the visibility of the Jarawa on the roadside, the administration posted more AAJVS workers along the ATR. The structure of the state’s “optical regime” as it were was seen to harden further in relation to the growing national and international media attention on the Jarawas particularly after the tsunami of December 2004. The fact that despite the disastrous impact of the tsunami on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the primitive tribal groups had managed to survive (see Pandya 2005) generated a surge of media interest in the Andamanese. As some government officials attributed the survival of these communities to their “ancient wisdom” hordes of journalists and photographers poured into the Islands to catch a glimpse of these exotic survivors. The Bangkok Post Outlook, of February 21, 2005 for instance, carried an account by their Belgian reporter and distinguished photojournalist, Thierry Falise who while covering the tsunami had “managed” to enter the Jarawa reserve with assistance from the local poachers and tourist guides. In a boat carrying gifts for the Jarawas, just like the official contact expeditions till 1997, Falise a foreign journalist managed to interface with the Jarawas, take photographs, and even post them on the Internet. As the Jarawas became a cultural group whose survival and rights were rapidly publicized in the global media, human rights groups such as Survival International acquired (Survival 2002: 12–19) photographs of the Jarawas and circulated these through their website. It is not clear how the ‘exotic,’ and

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highly staged Jarawa photographs were procured. On the 10th of October 2006, Survival International held a candle light vigil on the streets of London and Paris to draw public attention, and support for Jarawas who according to them were in ‘danger of being wiped out.’ Visitors to their website could read and circulate rare information on the Jarawas. Picture postcards, too could be sent around by the simple click of computer mouse. Notwithstanding the humanitarian concerns and intentions of Survival International one is left to wonder how it managed to create an ensemble of images of the Jarawa and circulate these in a context where the Indian government exercised control of access into the Jarawa territory? Could this kind of visual poaching be equated with the illegality of resource poaching in the reserve forest area? While such questions remain predictably value-laden and therefore difficult to answer in adequate terms, it perhaps becomes important to understand how the bureaucratized humanitarian concerns of the Indian state and international agencies collude in the production, circulation and reproduction of images of such “Primitive” tribal groups in such a way that the rights of such groups to be visible or not is decided a priori for them, ostensibly in their own interests. As the “scopic-regime” (Jay 1988) of the Island administration, shaped and controlled the “ocular politics” of the region, it was unable to stem the rising resentment against the purported ethics of this exercise. Non-tribals of the Andamans became critical of the fact that the administration on the one hand controlled the visibility of ‘primitive’ tribal for the common man but on the other hand was subtly using the Jarawa image to market the island as an exotic tourist destination. The privately printed newsletter from Port Blair Andaman Observer dated Thursday August 26th 2004 on its front page reflected upon the dubious

Picture post card that could be mailed from the web site of Survival International. Note how the photographer has provided new strips of red cloth to Jarawas, perhaps a way to get them to pose for the photographs.

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politics of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ the ‘primitive.’ In its report on the Andaman administration’s exhibition set up in Calcutta, it angrily noted that the display of the naked tribal images was an “affront to the dignity of tribes of India in general and Andamans in particular.” It was in other words a comment on the double standards embedded in the ‘optical regime’ of the Island administration As the road continues to function, the Indian state continues to grapple with the issues of the image, imagination and the “visibility” of the “Primitive” groups within its national boundaries. While its commitment to protect and provide for the endangered “primitive” faces growing pressures from settler communities and competing ideologies of welfare and humanitarian intervention, it seems to veer towards the belief that the primitive Jarawas need not change, they cannot change, and “we” will protect them from change! (Andaman and Nicobar Administration 2003, 2004, Awaradi 1990). Yet as the emerging debate on the fate of the Jarawa grows louder, the official discourse on welfare becomes increasingly confused and vulnerable.

“PRIMITIVE” FUTURES On the 19th June 2005, an honorable Member of Parliament (MP) from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in a letter to the Lieutenant Governor of the Islands, titled, ‘Non-fulfillment of Genuine demands,’ averred that he would go on a hunger strike from the 6th July 2005, if his pleas, went unheeded. The Island administration responded generously by promising to take prompt action on his list of demands. Although many of the concerns raised in the MP’s list of demands were related to the changes that the Islands had experienced due to the tsunami, one of the primary concerns raised by the MP concerned the subsistence requirements of the Jarawa. He urged the administration to make sure that required food materials be provided to the tribal group so that, “they may not stray to the nearby settlement areas and wander on the roadside in search of food. He urged that sufficient quantity of coconut and bananas should be made available at various locations where the Jarawa tribes are residing. Secondly, drawing attention to the policy of the Government in keeping the Jarawas in “secluded isolation” he asserted, that this was like keeping them as “museum pieces.” This was according to him all the more ironical because the reality on the ground was very different. In his own words, Today we encounter Jarawas along the ATR as well as in many of the revenue villages . . .These Jarawas, as has been experienced, are very friendly, speak Hindi very fluently and regularly visit the local inhabitants for food. It has also been observed that a group of about eighty Jarawas who regularly visit the Tirur

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area are so friendly with the people that a few of the Jarawa children recently approached the local teacher for admission in the school as they had observed other children studying in the school.

The honorable Member of Parliament it was understood was seeking for the Jarawas the basic entitlement of a citizen based not on “dole” but on a “gradual self sustaining arrangement.” As an anthropologist long associated with the islands, I was appointed to inquire into the possibilities of such a development. In the winter of 2005 I was back on the ATR leading to the Jarawa Reserve. Each bump and turn on the road for me was a reminder of the jerky trajectory of the Jarawa history, the impact of various court orders, and expert committee reports that changed the very context of understanding the Jarawas. Since the Expert Committee estimates of total Jarawa population in 2003, which was 266 the Jarawa population had now increased to 305. The authorities had taken steps to extend the area of the Jarawa Reserve and some of the excess police outposts and Forest department camps within the reserved area had been withdrawn to limit interferences with Jarawa life. There had also been a perceptible degree of decline in the number of tourists visiting the Jarawas along the roadside, particularly those aided by tour operators. But with the increase in the road use, each day about hundred casual contractual laborers were allowed by the administration to continue with road repair and maintenance work within the Jarawa Reserve. To deal with the presence of the outsiders on the road within the Jarawa territory, police and staff from the AAJVS, stood at selected spots to make sure that in case a Jarawa group came to the roadside they were either quickly moved back into the forest or put onto vehicles to move them exclusively along the road, and minimize the potential interaction with the non-tribals. My conversations with local AAJVS staff that accompanied me on my way gave me some new insights into the impact of the more rigorous policing of the Jarawa reserve. Did the new policy revive the hostilities of earlier times or did it make the settlers and the Jarawa mutually respectful of their territorial rights? The stories I heard from the ground staff positioned near the villages of Kadamtalla and Uttara were a little unsettling. Some settlers I was told were refused to acknowledge the fact that the Jarawa could be aware of the fact that what belonged to them was not just the right to the territorial limits of the forest but also the right to own its resources. The refusal to acknowledge this sparked off a spate of conflicts in the area. On 16th of April 2005 a group of settlers had entered the reserve territory and destroyed containers of honey stored by the Jarawas in what could best be described as a wanton act of mischief. In retaliation the Jarawas en-

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tered the settler village (Report of Tribal Welfare Officer, AAJVS Kadamtalla dated 26th April 2005) and “looted gold ornaments, cash, watches, clothes, and utensils from seventeen houses” (Office of the Superintendent of Police, Andaman District No.R/153/05/1879 Dated 21 April 2005). The police recovered some of the stolen material from the Jarawas, (Report of Tribal Welfare Officer, AAJVS, Kadamtalla dated 26th April 2005) but refused to record the losses caused to the Jarawas by settlers. In another incident that took place on November 25th 2005, at Phooltalla, a settler was said to have instigated a group of passing Jarawas to steal bananas and coconut from his neighbor’s garden. The retaliatory action that followed on the Jarawa was testimony to the many insidious acts of abuse the Jarawas were subjected to in spite of the policing of their territory by welfare staff. Abuse came in other guises too as settlers had conceded that they entered the Jarawa forest for “hunting and gathering” on a fairly regular basis. They felt that they had to do so in situations when regular employment was not easy to come by. However it should not be construed that most settlers exploit recourses from the Jarawa reserve forest. In what was reported as a remarkable act of Jarawa resistance to these illegal visitations into their territory, settlers from the Phooltolla area have reported that the Jarawas destroyed the traps they had set up in the forest and had warned those who were spotted near them that if they tried to enter the area again their ear lobes would be cut off! The AAJVS staff accompanying me expressed the view that in these changing times the Jarawas seemed to have begun to realize that the reserve territory belonged to them and no one else. They cited two other incidents in support of this view. The most exemplary among these related to the ways in which Jarawas were frequently apprehending poachers of foreign origin and handing them over to the police camps nearby. One of the more interesting facts that the AAJVS staff brought to my notice was that Jarawa have not displayed any conscious desire to move into or live within what is perhaps perceived as the territory beyond the reserve. The case of the Kadamtalla medical facility I was told was particularly instructive. When the Jarawas were admitted to the medical facility, members of their families and bands were seen to visit them at regular intervals and constantly inquire about the possible time of the patient’s release. Unlike the case of the Great Andamanese who were evidently happy to spend time in the medical facility at Port Blair, the Jarawas were keen to return to the forest. When a Jarawa group from the coastal camp in Lakra Lungta near Kadamtalla was asked if they would some day like to stay for good in the settlement, they answered that “to live in the settlement would deny them the feel of the changing seasons and winds, and deprive them of the range of food available in the forest . . . to sit in one place like the settlers did was no good.”

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As I reached Kadamtalla a village on the fringes of the Jarawa reserve I stopped to find out if the honorable MP’s demands came from these very people whom he claimed to represent. I wanted to find out if the modernizing/ civilizing impulse reflected the MP’s desire of sending Jarawa children to school was one held by those who lived and often shared their lives in close proximity with the Jarawas. When I presented this proposal of the politician to the younger son of a settler, and a local schoolteacher in Kadamtalla, he stated, “Most kids come to school for the free lunch service and not for any other noble cause of learning. If this is the case for settlers would it not be so for Jarawa children too?” (Personal interview with Manik Pramanik Dec 11th 2005). On posing the question to the young children of settlers at Phooltalla School (Phooltalla is eight minutes drive north of Kadamtalla) how they would react to having some Jarawa children in the classroom the response I got was amazing. A nine year old boy took the lead and said, But how will they sit with us the teacher does not know Jarawa language but if they do come will they sit quietly—we may want to go with them and wander about in their forest, that is across the road after all that is what Jarawas do!

In this curious reversal of aspirations in the child’s view of the “primitive” one could perceive the inherent ironies of the modernist imagination. The discourse of welfare as it relates to the Andamanese tribal communities continues to remain locked in the debate on whether these cultures should be integrated with or protected from the modernizing influences of mainstream society (Awaradi 1990, Dhingra 2005. Andaman and Nicobar Information 2003) Part or perhaps the entire debate assumes this form as a result of the imposition on the Andamanese tribal communities, an ahistorical image of the ‘primitive.’ It is this image and imagination of the “Primitive” that drives the debate in two conflicting ideological directions. On one side is the keenness to see the presumed ontological condition of ‘primitiveness’ preserved in the forest while on the other side is the urge to modernize the ‘Primitive’ in a world outside the forest. The two views on the proposed destinies of the “Primitive Tribal Groups” either ‘out of the forest’ and ‘in the forest’ are premised upon images that have come to acquire a range of moral, political and material significations in the world outside the forest. It is these that need to be decoded and addressed if the debate on the “Primitive Tribal Groups” must include the voice of the “primitive.” Discourses of welfare and other forms of humanitarian intervention have typically focused on the Jarawas and other Primitive Tribal Groups as helpless victims ruthlessly exploited by the outside world. While there is much

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moral value in this formulation for me the question is not how these groups have finally ‘given in’ or grudgingly ‘come out’ into the mainstream, but how they have managed to remain in a situation that generates such conflicting concerns for them. To search for a possible answer to this in the case of the Jarawas, I turn to Enmey’s story once again.

ENMEY’S STORY OF THE JARAWA ON THE ROAD Despite of the fact that the expert committee on the Jarawa appointed by the directive of the courts, did not have a consensus on the adoption of the suitable policy for the Jarawa there seemed to be agreement on the factors that had a induced a dramatic change in Jarawa behavior. They referred to these as a combination of “push and pull” factors. The key player in the pull and push experience of Jarawa as perceived by the committee was the young Jarawa boy named Enmey.34 Young Enmey as we know was picked up from the outskirts of Kadamtalla groaning in pain from a multiple leg fracture. He was brought over to Port Blair and admitted to the G B Pant hospital where after a prolonged treatment he was sent home. Enmey’s five months stay at the hospital it is argued and popularly believed was significant in redefining the relations between Jarawa and the non-tribal settlers. Enmey had learned the outsider’s language, and saw the world as it was presented to him by the modernizing agency of the hospital. He went back into the forest and converted his fellowmen. This is the broad outline of the story behind the “coming out” of the Jarawas. Yet there was much in Enmey’s story that was seldom told. There were few for instance who noted that Enmey’s role, as “leader” was a trifle exaggerated. If he did manage to lead out a group of Jarawas from the forest it was seldom acknowledged that this was largely a group of young boys who were enamored of a rather adventurous senior amongst them. What was Enmey’s social standing within the larger band he came from? Why did his fellow bandsmen not come to pick him up when he lay wounded? There was enough historical evidence to suggest that such an occurrence wherein a member of a tribe was left to fend for himself when injured was indeed rare. If this was against established practice, why was Enmey left behind? In my conversations with Enmey at Port Blair, he admitted rather sheepishly that his injury was a result of a dispute between him and in-laws to be. In the course this dispute that occurred near Kadamtalla he was beaten up and forced to return to the band associated with his parents in Baratang. Unable to cope with his injuries he laid wounded on the roadside until the time he was “rescued.” It was evident that over a period of time Enmey had changed his

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story and suppressed any information suggesting an internal conflict or unrest within the Jarawa bands. To the world outside Enmey stuck with his story of having fallen off a tree.35 On revisiting Enmey’s story as he narrated it to me in Port Blair, I wondered why it could be read as Enmey’s expression of a political position within his community vis-a-vis his right to marry? Why couldn’t Enmey’s presence at the roadside with other young boys gathering things from passersby, not be seen as bearing parallels to a larger cultural practice among young teenagers? Young boys across Andamanese groups follow a cultural practice wherein they are expected to go out on hunting expeditions individually or in small groups and return with a successfully hunted game such as a mature boar. This practice is in effect a test of their ability and readiness to be initiated into the rituals of the next life-practice that of marriage. The capacity to hunt and gather in accordance with a prescribed practice marks the attainment of the eligibility for a young man to begin negotiations for marriage with the father and bandsmen of his chosen partner. This ritual sequence among the Jarawa is known as Tao-lepa and parallels the Ongee ritual sequence of Tanageru (See Pandya 1993). Was it possible that the drive among

Group of Jarawa boys seen on the ATR, waiting for the next convoy to pass by. Note that some Jarawas are dressed in clothes provided to them and some are without ‘clothes’ trying to communicate what they could get from sympathetic passerby. (Photographed in 2002)

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Jarawa boys perform ‘crab’ and ‘frog’ walk to attract attention of the travelers on the ATR. (Photographed in 2005)

Jarawas interacting with tourists on the ATR (Photographed in 2005)

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young Jarawa boys to collect things from the world outside the forest was a conscious re-enactment of the ritual of tanageru or tao-lepa in the forest? Was the young Jarawa boys’ capacity to gather things on the road a way to establish a change in his status? To think along this line would perhaps explain why in the numerous instances of the Jarawa contacting the outside world it continues to be unmarried young boys who lead the way. Elderly men and women are seldom seen to be ‘regulars’ on the roadside. The Expert Committee in its findings on the social and cultural reasons behind the Jarawa appearance on the road observed that Enmey’s return to the forest after his prolonged medical treatment had convinced the Jarawa that there was no need to fear the enen, or outsider.36 Notwithstanding the appeal of this argument, it could perhaps be asked why the long years of contact and gift-giving on the west coast of the Reserve practiced since the independence had no impact in removing Jarawa fears of the outsider? Did Enmey’s return from enen territory into the forest signal a more dramatic impact than the series of prior contacts and friendly exchanges on the west coast? Could it also be asked why the Jarawa groups in Kadamtalla (Tanmad) and Baratang (Thiodong) were first to come out, while groups in the region of Tirur (Boab) took much longer to come out in 2000? A study of the demographic profile for the Jarawa in the Expert Committee reveals an interesting fact. The report built upon three different estimates of the total number of people studied at three different time points, shows that in comparison to the other regions Tirur had relatively lesser number of teenagers in its group. Medical statistics for the period following the increasing presence of the Jarawa outside the forest too bring out a series of facts that point to the possibilities of a different set of social and cultural reasons behind the changes in Jarawa relations with the outsider.37 Between September 27th and October 15th 1999, ninety Jarawa were brought to Port Blair following an outbreak of measles, an epidemic attributed to their weak immune systems (cf. RadcliffeBrown 1964: 17). This was precisely a year after a severe outbreak of pneumonia was diagnosed among the Jarawa in September 1998. The rapid succession of these epidemic outbreaks was attributed to the road and the increasing traffic on it. Those afflicted with the disease were provided prompt medical assistance and there were very few incidents of mortality. The medical practitioners (at Port Blair and Kadamtalla) were lauded for their efforts in keeping the Jarawa alive and modern medicine acquired a critical role as cultural custodians of the primitive (See Pandya 2005a).38 It may be noted at this point that the epidemic outbreaks and the provision of medical treatment in Port Blair occurred at a significant time in the huntergatherer calendar. Jarawas who traveled to the medical facilities in large numbers were seen to be particularly eager to move out of the forest in the tradi-

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tional transitory season of September–October. Enmey himself reported most cases of illness during this time to the welfare staff. In subsequent instances of reported medical emergencies too it was Enmey who along with a small group of Jarawa youth took on the responsibility of leading out the Jarawa from the forest to the medical facility either at Port Blair or Kadamtalla. Even when the medical condition was not as serious health staff at both Kadamtalla and Port Blair seldom took chances and encouraged the Jarawa to visit them for regular check-ups. Hospital-visits in other words assumed the nature of a much-preferred practice among the Jarawa.39 It brought them to the outside world but protected them from its potentially hazardous influences. It provided them with all the desirable things that Enmey might have talked about.40 Perhaps Enmey had succeeded in conducting a kind of “Jarawa tourism” in reverse. This was the journey of Jarawa from within the forest to the world outside along the same road that tourists from Port Blair and settlers from nearby villages took to enter the world inside the forest. The structure of events around Enmey’s treatment in Port Blair constituted a new history of contact practiced by the Jarawa on their own terms. There was a clear pattern in the timing and location of these events of contact. Ever since his release from the hospital, Enmey had conducted many trips for the Jarawa on their way to Port Blair or Kadamtalla. The Jarawa for all practical purposes were visiting the Uttara Jetty at Middle Straits with greater frequency than before. Records of the Jarawa coming out near Uttara Jetty at Middle point were carefully maintained in the records of the AAJVS headquarters in Port Blair. These records were maintained, in order to pay the local administration the expenses incurred from Jarawa visits to Kadamtalla. In a group discussion with the Jarawa in December of 1999 at the hospital in Port Blair, I asked Enmey and his close associates who have spent considerable time in Port Blair and have been conducting roadside contacts, ‘what was it that attracted the Jarawa to the road and to Port Blair?’41 The replies that came forth called to question all the formulations that had hitherto explained the Jarawa fascination for the road. For the Jarawa the hospital, the road to the hospital, the trees in the forest, and all the interconnecting paths were in their essence “trees” (pepeyh) in different places. According to the Jarawa the road was a Pepeyh, as was a tree. They elaborated further: By climbing a tree one could easily locate all the places where one could find honey, fruits, and pigs. One could even sight one’s home from a tree if it seemed to be lost. Following the road is just like crawling up a tree as it leads to finding new things—like food, metal and new places like Port Blair. The hospital in Port Blair too is a tree that gives us things much like the trees in the forest that gives

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us honeycombs! . . . In Port Blair we see you and become like you. If we try to be like you then we will be left to see freely and find more things. So why not come to Port Blair where one can always get something!42

The literal and metaphorical reference to the pepeyh or tree seemed to weave together a range of places and things into a meaningful cultural practice For Enmey and his companions at the hospital, places and pathways connecting them were all like the branches and the trunk of a huge tree, the site of pleasure, possession and play.43 On seeking repeated clarification for the word pepeyh used frequently for both tree and road, Enmey explained; “by climbing on a tree different things can be seen and gained so is the road to Port Blair and hospital, a place from where we see new places, gain new things!” This notion of the tree and road as both indexical of places that lead to new kinds of possessions was further concretized in Enmey’ vision of the forest, the road and the hospital at Port Blair. At my request Enmey was able to draw and explain what and how he saw it all.

Enmey’s drawing of the forest like a huge tree with branches, including the branch with bus on it and different places with honeycombs and pig, hut and Jarawa.

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Enmey’s drawing of the Port Blair hospital with different rooms connected by different branches, some have fans and bulbs, and some have only doctors, windows and beds.

From my conversations with Enmey and his friends I was led to understand that the Jarawa had formulated a new self-image of the primitive. Enmey was once a ‘primitive’ but now he was also an ‘ex-primitive’ in a way the modern world wanted him to be—he was both exotic and accessible.44 The non-tribal seems to need the primitive as a supplement to its sense of self: in its drive to do so it has sought to construct an overdrawn version of the primitive Jarawa as violent, disruptive and hostile or as deprived, wanting and vulnerable. The question of whether that sense of self and the need to create the supplemental “other” will continue to translate an imagination into an exploitative social practice remains a disturbing thought.

NOTES 1. In order for these new forms of social practices to be comprehensible, they will have to be imagined and imaged—visualized—in ways that go beyond the “imagined community” of the nation-state or the daily life imagined by individuals in de

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Certeau’s analysis (1984). Appadurai has asserted that “The work of imagination . . . is neither purely emancipator nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of modern . . . Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imagination in the practice of their everyday lives” (Appadurai 1997: 4–5) 2. Analytically images are culturally constructed history, for Andamanese “without history” and as they are moved through a pathway of what Roland Barthes has called ‘wavy meanings,’ materiality impresses itself upon the surrounding world, that includes the outsiders who come in contact with Andaman islanders. While the images in a certain context are amenable to recoding, they can never be detached from that pathway and attached structurally with the sociological or political reality of any particular historical moment. According to Barthes most histories of objects are not histories of the object at all. He recalls narratives, supposedly of objects with titles like Memories of an Armchair, or The History of my Pipe, and argues that they are in fact stories of objects passed from hand to hand (See Roland Bathes, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye,’ appended to G, Bastille. Story of the Eye. 1987: 119). 3. Early colonial accounts from Andamans frequently record the difficulty faced in clearing the forest to make roads and create the expansion of colonial administration. Often this meant pitching the Andamanese tribal against the prison labor and the prison authorities manifesting various forms of violent encounters and its’ interpretations. For example in the early morning hours of 17, May 1859, one party of tribal Andamanese proceeding along the shore was stopped by the gunfire of the Naval Guard, but another party, in spite of gunfire, reached the convict work station and occupied it. Fresh British troops arrived and half an hour of plundering was brought to an end with several Andamanese killed and wounded, and some being taken prisoner. Rev. Corbyn, the surgeon at the Settlement, referred to the clash as a ludicrous skirmish. However, administrators like Portman attached great importance to it (Portman, M V.1899 Vol.1: 422). Far from being a ludicrous skirmish, it was a most desperate and determined attack with the intention, to exterminate the settlers (Ibid., 279, 288). In August 1859, tribal people attacked convicts clearing the forest for the second time that month. About 1500 Andamanese, armed with small adzes, knives bows and arrows suddenly attacked two divisions of convicts about 446 in number, who were cooking in the forest. They killed about ten convicts. The convicts than retired to the coast and the boat of the naval guard, moored off the landing place, and escaped under the protecting fire of the guards. Twelve convicts with fetters on were carried away by the tribesmen and were never found. It was reported that the tribal vented their wrath upon the section gangs men, the sub-division gangs men and the division gangs men (distinguished by red cloth strips across their chests) but were quite friendly to ordinary prisoners who wore iron rings around their ankles. These fetters made them particularly important for the Andamanese who desired the metal. The attacking group even merrily danced with the latter during the two hours they were in possession of the encampment. According to Portman, the Andamanese told him that they objected to the clearing of the jungles. (Records of Home Department Judicial Branch OC No.32 29 July 1859, held at National Archives of India New Delhi and Portman, M V.1899 Vol.1: 277–278). In order to deal with the clearing of the forest

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and making path through it often prisoners worked along with some North Andamanese tribal guides. These tribal were from group of the Aka Bea and Kol, associated with North Andamans. The Jarawa frequently attacked the people they saw as invading their territory (Haughton 1861, Temple 1903). In retaliation, Andamanese and Burmese forest, workers and sepoys were often ordered to make ‘Punitive Expeditions.’ In a 1925 expedition, 37 dead Jarawa were reported, which reflects the intense nature of such ‘Punitive Expeditions.’ 4. For a sound argument relating to economics and environment concerns Samir Acharya (2002) has analyzed the relative advantage of waterways over roadways on the Islands. The thrust of the analysis implies that if the road was not used it would be economical more viable and also protect the Jarawa in the reserve forest. 5. The constitutionally endorsed notion of ‘Tribal Reserve’ (Article 243, Clause 2 June 1956) guaranteed protection of a tribal culture by judiciary and administrative power in a ‘non-interference’ and ‘non imposition’ manner. However, in 1975, for the further protection of Jarawas, the central Government of India allocated a budget and formed AAJVS that translates as Andaman Primitive Tribal Welfare Association within the administration of the Union territory of the Andaman Islands. AAJVS started looking after exclusively the future of the “Primitive” tribes on the islands (AAJVS 1977, Krishnatry 1976, Sharma 1981). The small size of the Jarawa population and their pursuit of hunting and foraging made them unique compared to other tribal cultures of the Indian subcontinent, hence the term adim (primitive) was a prominent component. The then prime minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, saw this program for the ‘primitive’ as a special priority in relation to the process of modernization of the islands. The role of AAJVS was to oversee a number of measures and processes with the stated objectives of protecting, promoting, development essential for the survival and growth (Krishnatry 1976:25). Particularly for the Jarawas as ‘primitive tribe’ was seen as an important way of dealing with the problems generated by the 1956 ANPATR Act (AAJVS 1976) as the project of building ATR through the Jarawa reserve forest was finally approved. 6. It may be noted that out of the 698 Scheduled Tribes listed in the Constitution of India, seventy-five are identified as Primitive Tribal Groups (PTG’s) and are considered more backward than Scheduled Tribes. They are defined by their inclination to live in a pre-agricultural stage of economy, their very low literacy rates and their stagnant or even declining populations. According to the draft released by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs PTG’s were considered as a special category for support for the first time in 1979. The 25-lakh PTG population constitutes nearly 3.6 per cent of the tribal population and 0.3 per cent of the country’s population. To observers outside the bureaucracy the PTGs have benefited little from the developmental initiatives planned for them. They face continuous threats of eviction from their homes and lands. They live in pre-agricultural state, with food insecurity and a host of diseases like sickle cell anemia and malaria. In recognition of these lacunae in state developmental efforts of the past, the National Policy of 2004 suggested a series of corrective measures. The document formulated by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs was keen to display a degree of sensitivity and correctness not only in its policy measures but also in the social implications of its use of particularly classificatory terminologies for the

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PTGs, It had for instance inserted a key proposal which said, “To boost PTGs’ social image, their being stigmatized as ‘primitive’ shall be halted. Efforts shall be made to bring them on par with other Scheduled Tribes in a definite time frame. Developmental efforts should be tribe-specific and suit the local environment.” 7. Source: Handbook on Andaman District 1991, State Statistical Bureau, Secretariat, and Port Blair. 8. Ibid., 9. Cousteau mentions this particular point in the narrative for the internationally circulated documentary produced out of his visit to Andaman Islands. It has been the standard policy of Indian Government to restrict people, and scholars from visiting Jarawa territory for any reason. According to Levi-Strauss personal correspondence (Sep.20th 2002) he had urged personally the Prime minister of India to allow his student Lucien Bernot to conduct fieldwork in the Andaman’s but was refused. The reluctance on the part of administration to let people document the tribal situation is a very sensitive manner that has been well documented in a recent publication by M, Mukherjee (2003). What is surprising is that the administration till 1960 had allowed Italian Anthropologist Lidio Cipriani to work on Little Andamans is perhaps the only exception. However foreigners have written about their unofficial ways of making contact with the tribal and documenting it (See Goodheart 2000). In spite of all the restrictions Government authorities have had no problems accommodating there guests and relatives to visit the locations associated with primitive tribes. 10. George Weber of the Andaman Association who has responsibly managed the worthy website www.andaman.org had refused to pay $200 for an illegal trip to “shake hands with Jarawa” way back in 1995. George Weber stated this in an interview with UPI dated September 6 2002 (cited in SANE News Letter December 2003). 11. These themes are becoming more and more prominent in the administration funded and organized fairs and exhibitions on the islands. The last one that was a typical example was “Tourist Mela” (fair) held in December of 1999. The range of booths and stalls exhibited and competed for awards emphasizing the progress in agriculture, horticulture, handicrafts, small-scale industries, and social welfare scheme including programs that affect the ‘primitive tribes’ of Andamans. 12. Given the role of State represented through AAJVS among the Ongees and the State planned ATR within the Jarawas we find how the presence of outside world is present among the ‘primitivized’ and their history. What I mean by ‘primitivized’ is the Ongee and Jarawa who regularly and frequently respond to the culture that constructed them as “Primitive Tribal,” then to its putative object, which is also produced by the same non-tribal culture. This can be read into as a ‘text’ composed by the state, much like ‘text’ in the way Geertz (1973: 412–454) used it to analyze the Balinese cockfight. Many of the names given to the individuals among the Ongees and Jarawas provide the clue to how material objects via contact with State have become parts of the collective memory within the community about specific contact event and historical time. For example an Ongee child born in 1973 was named Dalda, a brand name of saturated vegetable oil that was first introduced in that year, as a ration item distributed by the welfare agency within the Ongee community. Over the following years

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the social welfare agency imparted the use of vegetable fat and wheat flour to be made into flat bread known in Indian languages as ‘roti.’ It and soon it became an Ongee name Arotee who is patrilinial cousin of “Dalda” and is about two years younger. The tradition of marking the time has been reported by Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 93, 119, 312) where the Andamanese children, particularly post puberty girls, were named after the seasonal bloom of flower that smelled at the time of child’s birth. Contemporary Jarawa children’s name reflect a similar concern, as outlined by Radcliffe-Brown as ‘calendar of scents’ (Cf. Pandya 1994 on significance of smell) in individuals named on the basis of the contact event of road opening through the reserve forest and passengers using the bus and ferry route through the Jarawa reserve forest. The very visibility of heavy traffic has been incorporated into the names of Jarawa boys and girls who attained puberty after 1996. For example girl has been named Entaneyate, meaning when the Jarawas managed to get bus rides for themselves, Eweyehatey, meaning ferry boat on which the bus can ride (Till 1996 large ferry boats were not in operation), Uhaayao the place and time where the bust stops daily. 13. The AAJVS was formed in 1975. Its role was to oversee a number of measures and processes with stated objectives as (1) protect health and prevent extinction of primitive tribal groups, (2) promote economic and social development, (3) take a comprehensive view of the problems faced by the primitives and promote selectively national programs for their developments and (4) to develop measures for the protection of their economic and social environments essential to their survival and growth. (Andaman and Nicobar Information 1976: 25) 14. For instance in 1999 Kalpavriksh of Pune, the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE) of Port Blair and the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) of Mumbai filed a case in Calcutta High Court (The writ WP No. 76/1999 was submitted to the High Court at Calcutta, Constitutional Write Jurisdiction, Appellate Side in the Circuit Bench at Port Blair in June 1999) that highlighted the problems and pressures on the Ongees and the reserved tribal forest for them on the island of Little Andaman that was being wrongly exploited by the authorities and timber operations. 15. Since the completion of the Andaman Trunk Road, it has been possible for people and commercial traffic to travel by road up to Mayabundar in North Andaman. 16. This is exemplified by the lack of any significant governmental publication till 2000 on the Jarawa culture, language or even the problem, in spite of the fact that Andaman had one of the oldest Anthropological survey offices on the island. In fact the emerging importance of the Jarawa as a management problem lead to very eschewed literature on Jarawa language (See CIIL 2000, Sekttuvan 2000, and Sreenathan 2000) completely dependent on assumptions and founded in the series of short contacts with Jarawa. More over the linguistic constructs presented are predominantly for administrators to command the Jarawa individuals such as “You all Jarawa must go back to the forest!” 17. In fact, in the middle of 1999 the Andaman administration released findings of the Banerjee commission report (Banerjee 1999). Report outlines the process of anthropologists and linguists from Central Institute of Indian Languages at Mysore

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compiling a language handbook from the Jarawa contacted, in order to facilitate the process of dealing with the Jarawa. The report concludes by stating that, We think since Jarawa are part of nature, let them remain there so long they can. We should not be hurried to bring them with the main stream of life. (ibid., 127, 14) . . .It would perhaps be appropriate if the Jarawa were allowed to grow in due course of time. The administration should not take any hasty, ill-conceived program that may be counterproductive and would have an effect on the self-reliance and culture of the primitive Jarawa (ibid., 133, v).

However the contradiction stems from the fact that the report outlines how the department of horticulture, fisheries and animal husbandry is going to introduce forms of plants and animal life in the forest so that Jarawa can gather and hunt them in future. The construction department is to build huts within the reserve territory where the government agency and Jarawa can meet. 18. In 1994 the island administration did attempt to cover Spike Island with coconut and banana saplings along with citrus fruit trees. I was personally involved in the plantation operation of 250 plants, as it provided me a chance to see the Jarawa Reserve territory. At that time the Governor of the island explained to me the relevance of the operation in terms of that if the fruit growing trees grow in Jarawa territory then some day once the plants take root and bare fruits the Jarawa would become “like us,” take care of the plantation. 19. In 1999 Ms. Shyamali Ganguly who had spotted Jarawas on the ATR, filed a PIL (WP) No 048- under article 226 of the Constitution of India, entered in the High Court of Calcutta, jurisdiction Circuit bench at Port Blair (See Pandya 2002). Ms Ganguly wanted an explanation for why the Jarawas were outside the forest, running along the ATR asking for food from tourist and commuters. The sheer visibility of Jarawas outside the forest was presented as a problem and the court on April 4th 2000 ordered an Expert Committee to look into the issue of what was deemed to be a significant change in Jarawa behavior (See Pandya 1999). As per Court orders the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, in association with the Andaman and Nicobar Administration, organized a series of public seminars inviting individuals from different fields. The intent of the seminar was to discuss the Experts Committee Reports before any policy was formulated. In accordance of this directive two seminars were organized drawing upon mainly anthropologists from government organizations, academicians, retired administrators, two NGOs and interested people at large, mainly from the Islands were invited. The two-day seminar was organized in Kolkatta in April of 2004 and then another one was organized in Port Blair in the month of May. The expert committee report and the study that went into it had a fundamental problem with the lack of conceptual distinction between the problem faced by the Jarawas and the problem of Jarawas. The thrust was to make sure if the Jarawas could be kept confined to the designated area while the outsiders continue to use the road through it. What the experts seem to be oblivious is that Jarawas “moving out” or just “moving” is a social practice that has been sustained over a period of history, recorded with starting of the very expansion of Port Blair in days of colonial administration. The Expert team reports that in three different temporal points the number of people found in the dif-

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ferent locations reflects a social process of “fission and fusion” or simply the addition and subtraction of members within a group. Unfortunately however no attempt was been made to explain why the change happens at particular campsites. Yet the ethnographic observations of Radcliffe-Brown (1964) indicate the complexities of movement and group dynamics. For example there is reference to the custom of child adoption among neighbouring bands and to the customs of peace making ceremony (Radcliffe Brown 1922 : 72, 77) between two groups to resolve conflict and sequence of violence (ibid., 134). Radcliffe-Brown also indicates that there was well defined procedure and protocol for seeking and exchanging gifts among the visitors and hosts (1922 : 42) indicating to a prevalent pattern of exchange relations that was a cultural procedure and norm and as groups traveled it was expected to enter into a ritualized gift exchange. In the Expert report however, the temporal points fixed for the study were in accordance with ‘our’ divisions of seasons that do not essentially correspond with the Jarawa division of the seasons. This factor might make the total profile created of Jarawa society questionable. It is precisely because of season and location that Jarawas have historically been encountered by the contact party on the west coast in larger numbers during September–November while the called “hostile” events use to increase in the months of summer on the east flanks of the Tirur range. Further more why did the court think that Jarawa behavior had changed? The problems in the expert Report perhaps derived from the fixity of the orientation and methodology of the research done, on their behalf by ‘missing experts.’ Rajan (2002) using the concept of the ‘missing experts,’ has argued that the lack of ethnographic expertise among those involved in the understanding of culture translates into a perpetuation of ‘missing expertise.’ What this refers to is the lack of ability to gain a contextual and grounded understanding of problematic situation and to understand people’s experiences and actions in specific bureaucratic, regulatory and development context. Rajan suggests that such expertise may be missing owing to structural divisions in society and the capturing of the legislative and executive powers by a variety of vested interests. In case of the so called Jarawa problem it is not what Rajan would regard as lack of capacity building within the broader context of political economy of state but the total detachment of the experts from the ethnographic and the local making the ‘experts’ as ‘Absentee.’ The concept of “absentee expertise” is analogous to the concept of “absentee landlord” as used in debates on agrarian change. The point I want to draw upon is not that of ownership of knowledge (which is the source of power) but that the expert is operating in a mode detached from local concerns and contexts. This has implications for the local management, national regulations and implementations of any standards guidelines. This was evident in the way the experts committee were unable to come to any agreement. No wonder that even after the Jarawa Experts Committee having for three years spent large amount of resources the government of India continues with forming various committees of experts to study the “primitive tribal situation” on the Islands. After the 2004 tsunami various committees have continued to advice the government based on quick visits to the island. The National Advisory Council and Planning Commission took up the case of Jarawa and other tribals of Andaman Islands in August of 2006. (See The Indian Express Dated: August 30, 2006 Title: Experts to Plan panel: Habitat

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loss, sexual exploitation threaten Jarawas and Pandya 2006a). It must be noted however that recently the local administration has encouraged ethnographic studies to answer the questions that have always relied upon the ‘absentee experts,’ After the tsunami of December 2004, the sole elected member of the parliament Mr. Manoranjan Bhakta from Andaman Nicobar Islands presented the administration with a list of demands. Among the list of issues on which the MP demanded action three issues were related to the Jarawas. In order to evaluate the ground reality and the validity of the welfare measures that could be taken for the Jarawas it was decided that, perhaps some kind of ‘ethnographic survey’ could be taken up among about three hundred Jarawa tribals confined to 765 sq km. Jarawa Reserve territory. The Administration promised the honorable MP that an anthropologist would look into the case of the Jarawas. I have been involved with the tribal culture of Andaman Islands since 1983, and specifically with ethnographic observations of Jarawas since 1996. The AAJVS the tribal welfare office of the island administration asked me to study and present my observations on the state of the Jarawas. I was directed to primarily to determine if the “primitive” Jarawa hunter and gatherers needed attention, and investigate if this group had experienced any change that demanded any different welfare measures. At the administrations invitation, in November of 2005 I started ethnographic field study. The basic intent of the study for me, was to investigate the point raised in the petition drawn up by the MP about the ‘changes’ in Jarawa behavior and their expressed desire to connect with mainstream society. For me the larger question however was to find out how the status of the Jarawa designated, as ‘Primitive Tribal Group’ was contrary to perceptions about them. My concern was, how others represented the Jarawas and, how the Jarawas presented themselves to others, a system of interaction that was a history embedded in a range of quotidian experiences. For me the study therefore required a dual point of entry—from that of the constituency represented by the MP and from the Jarawas themselves. This dual point of entry is necessary to acknowledge the Jarawas as agents of their own history and challenge positions that seek to objectify Jarawas as ‘Primitives.’ At the Port Blair seminar held on May 27th–28th May 2004. I was particularly struck by the image the settlers painted of themselves: that they for generations have been ‘care takers’ and ‘providers’ to the Jarawa and now the Government had to provide for them. On the subject of the ATR they argued that there was absolutely no justification to closing the road as the Island had experienced much development due to the much-awaited road connecting South Andaman to North Andaman. Implicit in the ideas that the settlers put forth at the public seminar in Port Blair was the point that Jarawa contact should be such that they are given what they need and made to settle down with education and with jobs like the rest of the Islanders. The thrust of the expert committees findings in fact has outlined steps like introducing plants of food and medicinal value in the Reserve, training Jarawas to practice hygiene so that they can be confined to the Reserve forest and not move out (Andaman and Nicobar Administration 2003). In fact the experts were split on the issue trying to say if the road itself should be sealed off or not. People who have argued for the road have in fact argued that road facilitates Jarawa movement, mainly to medical facilities and the opposite camp has argued that nothing should move through the forest. But it has never been

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questioned what is the meaning of movement for the Jarawas. In this absence of an emic meaning of ‘movement’ the Jarawa culture is constantly being removed to approximate the visions others have for the future of the few remaining “first people of Andamans.” It is imperative that the very nature and position of what ‘movement’ is in cultural and historical sense for Jarawas must be grasped in order to articulate the idea of a future. At this seminar, organized in Port Blair on May 28th 2004 representatives of the settlers articulated their community’s views about the long-standing practice of silent trade and sharing of good will with Jarawas. Individual representatives from areas near the Jarawa reserve asserted that they could get along with the Jarawas as they did in the past and would continue to do so as long as the road was not taken out of the scenario. The question raised was that the Jarawas were ‘contacted’ in order to bring them into mainstream society but now why were the so-called experts trying to push them back in the isolated state by considering stopping the road use? Was it possible to reverse the process of modernization half way? Of course this was contradictory to the earlier outcry of the settlers to control the inflow of disorderly and chaotic presence when the Jarawas entered the settlements. From the settlers point of view, the Jarawas were a problem that had to be solved by the State in terms of providing them means to shift from hunting and gathering to settled cultivation. Removing the road was a way to restrict the transformation required for the tribal community and take away the economic benefit to the community of settlers who were ultimately the voters and tax payers within the state. It is a hard choice, particularly for the government, of providing and ‘protecting’ Jarawas with what is rightfully theirs depriving the settlers the possibilities for economic betterment. Since 2004, settlers have succeeded in keeping a political pressure on the political machinery and the interpretation of the Jarawa problem in Middle Andamans. The impact of the report on the Jarawas and concerns about the Jarawa situation continues. On Monday 26th February 2007, a United Nations Committee on the elimination of racial discrimination, asked the Indian delegation to explain what measures had been implemented to protect the Jarawas. Survival International had submitted a report to the UN prior to the meeting, warning that the Jarawa tribe could be ‘wiped out’ unless the Indian government acts to protect them. The report describes the Jarawa’s future as ‘extremely precarious.’ It warns that failure to close the road running through the Jarawa’s land and failure to keep poachers out leaves the 300 Jarawa at risk from exploitation and fatal diseases that could decimate their population. The Indian delegation did not respond to the committee on the issue of the Jarawa. 20. In July of 2003 the report was submitted at an expense of Rs.1380000, but none of the experts were in agreement with the findings and policy implication. Multi disciplinary teams were created and sent into the Jarawa territory to fill up questionnaires as response to the questions posed by the court. The lack of language competency of the team was compromised by the sheer casualness of the observations made by the research workers (see Andaman and Nicobar Administration 2003 : 20–22). The qualitative data so crucial to respond to the questions that the court had asked was substituted by quantitative data. Let me substantiate this point— the team with the help of the Botanical and Zoological Survey has collected a list of Jarawa plant and animal resources, some identified in the Jarawa

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language. But in a significant list provided, reference is made to items like nutmeg (Jaiphal term in Hindi) as plants usable (Ibid., 50 Table.2). But if nutmeg is used by Jarawas what is the Jarawa word for it? Or the concern was to point out that the non-Jarawas might find it usable? Similarly in the list of animals ‘available’ to the Jarawas and available in the area, there is a reference to dugongs (Ibid., 63 Table.8) but we have no language or material-technological evidence to show that the dugong is hunted by the Jarawas. Harpoons and canoes, both of which are needed to hunt dugongs are absent in Jarawa culture. Perhaps it was an assumption derived from the Ongee culture and imposed upon the Jarawas. Similar gender specific observations were made by a woman anthropologist in the team on the basis of an oversimplified and generalized understanding of Jarawa culture. For instance, (ibid., 133) children sitting on the lap of a ritually painted woman were reported as evidence of an act of “prayers for fertility.” We have no evidence linguistic or social about the Jarawa idea about ‘prayer’ or ‘fertility.’ In fact most of the report is a play of competing stereotypes about the tribal community. While the policy to be adopted is pushed in the direction of ‘minimal intervention’ the document ironically also argues for providing traditional herbal medicine (Ayurvedic) and teaching the Jarawas practice of hygiene while they live in perfect harmony in nature. 21. In the late morning of October 31 1997 about 25 Jarawa for the first time had ‘came out’ of the forest. The Jarawas, for all practical purposes were visiting the Uttara jetty at Middle Strait to check out the scene and the people, things and market. The magnitude of the Jarawa coming out especially near Uttara Jetty at Middle Point is evident from the records kept at the AAJVS headquarters in Port Blair. These records are maintained, as the AAJVS has to pay the local administration for the expenses incurred due to Jarawa visiting the Kadamtalla region and encountering the bus passengers. In 1996, Enmey was brought as a patient in Port Blair hospital. Enmey’s five-month stay at hospital was significant in the relations between Jarawa and non-tribal. Enmey learned the outsider’s language, and saw the world as presented by the hospital and other concerned agencies. Enmey was seduced and bedazzled by all that the outside world could offer and load Enmey with. Loaded with new experience and capacity, Enmey become an individual with a degree of influence on both the non-tribal authorities and certain section of the Jarawa. Since October of 1997, Enmey conducted many trips involving other Jarawa coming to the roadside and carrying on further to Port Blair. Enmey was perceived as capable of bringing the world of non-Jarawa and Jarawa together. The administration had proposed that Enmey should be taken to capital New Delhi on India’s Republic Day to meet with the President. This plan was not pursued; instead he was made to hoist Indian national flag within the Reserve territory on January 26th 2002. In a personal interview Enmey told me that certain elders in his band had not approved of his marriage intentions and this had generated conflict and formation of factions. The younger Jarawas who rallied behind him were convinced of his capacity to establish his individual powers by demonstrating his being capable of being all alone in the world outside of forest and return back with ‘material gains.’ This explanation given by Enmey and other young Jarawas has a cultural basis in Andamanese culture. For instance the Ongee initiate through Tanageru ceremony has to demonstrate to the community his capacity to go to the forest

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and undertake boar hunting all alone (Pandya 1993). In 2005 during my stay in the region of Kadamtalla Jarawa youth confirmed that they to have initiation ceremony involving bringing back pig and forest products through a sequence of rituals known as lepa. How ever with the pressures of the increasing outsiders and poachers hunting pig is difficult to assert ones individuality as an accomplished hunter, but to go and gather from out side world is a possible alternative way to gain a wife. Apparently by 2004 winter Enmey did get married and has withdrawn from actively and regularly visiting Port Blair. Nowadays the administration makes an effort to seek out reluctant Enmey to communicate to other Jarawas, but with little success. It is seldom realized that Enmey’s gesture was not “heroic” but the practice of a structure the ritual of initiation that really brought a change in the worldview of the younger Jarawas. In a way Enmey’s structure of events pertaining to his treatment in Port Blair has constituted and structured the history of contact as practiced by Jarawa. 22. In 1983–84 I had observed a similar strategy being adopted among the Ongees of Dugong creek. Ongee men and women continued living day to day in traditional body attire that included covering the pubic area with processed plant material (atakee [for males] and boyoley [for females]) but when ever the administration authorities visited the settlement Ongees would put on stitched clothes (koylaboi) to make the point that they were now habituated to not being naked and could do with extra amount of garments. Most of the time the free clothes provided by the administration would land up in the local market of the village near the fringe of the Ongee reserve forest where the Ongees would in return collect other items of consumption that administration refused to provide free of cost, mainly country liquor. Both Ongees and Jarawas know how to transform the gift economy in relation to marketable commodity exchange economy. 23. Unlike bus passengers, most tourists wanting to just see Jarawa pay about 90 $ to gain permits to travel all the way in cars. Nevertheless, the permit to go to Kadamtalla is falsely procured to bring the tourists up to the point where Jarawa are interacting with bus passengers. After a two and half-hour ride on the rough AT road, the tourists have a quick glimpse of the Jarawa at the roadside. After the removal of the shops Jarawa now sell to the passengers of the bus quickly making a twenty-rupee deal. They wrap lumps of clay covered with crushed forest resin sprinkled on top, or mix sugar and water with bit of wild honey and sell it in empty discarded cold drink bottles. Before the passengers can realize that they have been duped the bus has to move rapidly. Money earned this way is identified by size and taken to the market in Baratang or Kadamtalla and used to get things that Jarawa would like. During a study tour in 2003 I found Jarawa camp near Phooltalla had started making candlestick from the wax of the wild honeybee combs and were planning to sell at the roadside. Making candlesticks or even using bees wax for light is quite an extraneous idea in Jarawa culture. Often the Jarawas bring to the settlers in the village items collected or hunted from the forest. This is yet another transformed level of contact that the Jarawas undertake and according to some settlers from the region of Ferrar Gunj has evolved from what is understood as “silent barter.” Settlers say that in the past they used to hang aluminum pots and pans on branches of tree and the Jarawas in return would tie packs of forest resin and wild honey to be taken away from the fixed spot. It has not

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been confirmed by Jarawas but it is possible that it might have started as an unorganized event that later became a regular pattern. I have not been able to substantiate that this relationship really existed, but it is significant that the cultivators living in areas adjacent to the Jarawa Reserve felt that such relationship did exist. Silent barter has been considered and analyzed up to a degree among hunter-gatherers in South East Asia (See Endicott 1988). It may be purely projection of the idealized relationship settlers’ wanted to establish as they were made to settle in the area as refugees since the days of India Pakistan partition and later on creation of Bangla Desh. As the roadside contact has declined considerably Jarawa contact with the settlers community around the reserve forest has grown considerably. 24. In the last ten years of my own research involvement with the Jarawas I used to feel grateful that as a researcher and anthropologist I had the privilege visiting and experiencing the primitive tribe in there ‘pristine habitat.’ But by 1999 the situation had changed and many people used to claim that they had seen the Jarawa on their own trips and that there was nothing special about it. The view was that Jarawa were practically tamed and were ready to be bought out into the society at large. In fact in 1999 a French photojournalist organized an illegal trip to west coast and succeeded in publishing a glossy and exotic color photo spread for the magazine called ‘Le Figaro.’ 25. On July 23 of 2003 a Jarawa boy called Ahu was brought to local hospital for treatment of his broken hand while taking a joy ride on a truck near PotaTang on the ATR. He refused to be photographed by the local journalist in the hospital till he was paid in the form of a small bottle of locally made liquor or a hand full of dried chewing tobacco wrapped in betel nut leaf. This incident reflects an escalation of the awareness among the Jarawa that their image is itself is a commodity that can be transacted for. Is it not like the international fashion market where the image of the body and a body part has a price tag? Why should the Jarawa be so different in the “ideascapes and mediascapes” (Appadurai 1997:33 of the globalized world. 26. Frequently matchboxes in India depict objects and visual icons that are value loaded and a visual representation that is indexical of a reality within national consciousness, for example, the lotus, the Taj Mahal, a cotton plant, a kerosene lamp, a bullock cart or playing cards. In recent years scholars interested in circulated images within the South Asian culture have looked at religious and political iconography, printed and located at the level of ‘popular culture’ (Dwyer and Pinney 2001, Davis 2007, Nayar 2006, Pinney 2004, Uberoi 2006) but images on matchbox, fire crackers and ‘road side graphics’ have remained somewhat under-studied as the focus has been more on the ‘gaze,’ static or mobile and rooted in the principles of ‘Hinduism’ as opposed to the larger issue of the circulation and super imposition of images within the history and political economy of South Asian visual culture. 27. See further discussion about Jack in the chapter on “Materiality Mapped.” 28. In 1998 I had taken a group of Ongee from Dugong Creek to Port Blair, on the way to participate in a Jarawa contact expedition. While we waited for the clearance to leave for the Jarawa territory by boat, I organized for a group of about eight Ongees to see the Anthropology Museum in Port Blair after the regular public visiting hours. This visit along with the Ongees made me realize how representations often are far removed from the reality of the culture presented. On seeing the glass cabinets filled

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with varnished and well preserved specimens of light torch, baskets, arrows and adzes the Ongees expressed wonder and debated among themselves as to, why these people had to collect all the scrap around their campsites, things that were just lying around, just trash. What about the folding umbrella, battery torchlights, and the folding pen knives that they kept inside the huts. 29. Behind the display of the Jarawas there is a history of the relations based on the material culture and power to ‘re-present’ that, which is ‘present.’ From 1947 to 1963 there were no less than forty-six violent encounters with the Jarawa, in which mostly non-tribal settlers were killed (See Census 1971:121–124). The administration felt that the only way to conciliate the Jarawa was to capture them in large numbers, tame them, and then send them back as “messengers of peace” (Census 1971:104). In a way, this policy of pacification and giving gifts to transform the Jarawa is continuity between the colonial policy (Portman 1899) and post independence administration of the island (Mathur 1968: 307, 1985). Since 1960, the practice of gift giving was stepped up, and whenever possible, the Jarawa were captured around villages of the Middle Andamans and brought over to Port Blair by the Bush Police. Jarawa individuals were provided with abundant gifts and left back where they were captured (Singh 1978: 300–301). The AAJVS and the Superintendent Anthropologist at the Port Blair Anthropological Survey office managed the operation. Through the re-instituted policy of gift giving, the Jarawa were “induced to appreciate and accept a policy of coexistence” (Pandit 1985: 123). Sounding strangely like the 19th century British administrator, S.Sarkar, an anthropologist with Anthropology Survey office at Port Blair, said “the people (Jarawa) appear very timid and it seems not unlikely that if they are approached frequently with presents, they will become friendly of their own accord” (Sarkar 1963: 672). Colonial accounts of the Jarawa vary, but show them as a tribal group that is difficult to define, describe or predict. One of the earliest accounts of how Jarawa interacted with outsiders contacting them was made in 1795 by M. Symes (1800). Individuals, especially young women, were allured by the “temptation” of gifts on board of ships in the harbor. M. Symes (1800: 135) reports that coconut, not found on the island, was a good item to supply the natives in order to “establish a social intercourse.” Jarawa were extremely cautious of being on colonial ships. It took a long time for the Jarawa to feel comfortable being with the outsiders. Over a period of time, the Jarawa started putting on weight by the acquired taste of outsider’s food and liquor. Symes reports that in spite of all the concerns and efforts, the Jarawa used to escape during the night by jumping off the ship and swimming to the island. The escaped Jarawa were never pursued because “the object was to retain them by kindness, not by compulsion, an attempt that has failed on every trial. Hunger may induce them to put themselves in the power of strangers; but the moment that want is satisfied, nothing short of coercion can prevent them from returning to a way of life, more congenial to their savage nature” (ibid 1800: 131–32). 30. The ground reality was very different. The maintenance of ATR has made it possible for South Indian Hindu laborers and Christian laborers of Ranchi origin to be present within the Reserve territory on a daily basis. The impact of the laborers along ATR is different from that during the early road construction phase. They are not attacked by the Jarawas but are seen as ‘providers.’ In recent years the construction

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workers have been planting religious ideas, with a ‘crude missionary zeal’ among the Jarawas, much like the settlers and road users giving charitable gifts to the Jarawas. The Jarawas of Poona Nallah region (along ATR) in their possession have not only chewing tobacco but also religious medallions of Hindu gods and goddesses on a metal chain given to the Jarawas by the labor at roadside (See Appendix C). Jarawas call them “bhabhachey” (aberration of Hindi term Bhagvanjee, “God”) and fold their palms while doing so. In the past, Jarawa band from the Mayabunder region have been recipients of Christian crosses, Jesus is pronounced as-‘Jesuk’ is a name introduced to them by the Karen forest labor in the region. Further more the road users also have a moral and philosophical out look towards the Jarawas on the ATR. The passengers traveling in the bus from Port Blair told me that like going to the temple to see the gods and gain the grace and blessings of divinity one must take treats to the temple. In a similar manner things must be taken for Jarawa in the forest. “It is good to take things for Jarawa so that they are happy to be among us. It will keep my relatives in the village near Kadamtalla safe” 31. The administration feels that the Jarawa curiosity about the outside world was a passing phase—and it is no more interesting for them to hang out at the roadside. With this phase over, for some administrators agree that the Jarawa future would be secure. However historically Jarawas have been seen to be both visible and reclusive in response to the community’s self-imposed decisions. This is well documented by Portman (1899) who claims that as the colonial regime expanded it effected the internal politics of the various Andaman islanders and they use to go through phases of being hostile and non-hostile towards the outsiders, reflecting the inter tribal political struggle (Cf. Census of India 1911 and 1921). The first settlement was built right in the middle of Aka-Bea territory at Port Blair. The Aka-Bea was a tribal subdivision of the Great Andamanese. The Jarawa were immediate neighbors of the Aka-Bea south of Port Blair. According to Portman “When the settlement first opened in 1858, the Jarawas occupied the interior of the South Andaman . . . and it would have been comparatively easy . . . to establish friendly relations with them for they were less hostile and ferocious than the Aka-Bea-da, and were only timid. Now their timidity has grown into bitter enmity and hostility against all comers, and they shoot every stranger they see whatever his color may be” (1899, vol. 2, p. 765). During the period of first contact, the British did not realize that there were two different groups involved and, moreover, they were enemies. The British on two offshore islands, Chatham Island and Ross Island, cleared the first forests in 1858. Both islands were exclusively within the Aka-Bea territory. The Jarawa were not concerned and this may be the reason why their attitude during this initial period was described as “friendly.” (Portman, quoted by Cipriani, 1967, p. 6.) Some time later Jarawa attacked members of an abortive so-called “contact expedition.” The British in retaliation burned down their huts. Relations with the Jarawa thereafter took a drastic turn for the worse. The Aka-Bea, on the other hand, soon came under the British umbrella. They were later misused as trackers during numerous punitive expeditions where shotguns were used against the Jarawa. The latter responded to such developments by withdrawing into remoter areas, refusing to accept any contact and by conducting guerrilla-style hit-

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and-run attacks on settlements. These increased in numbers especially during the early years of the 20th century. (Sarkar, 1987, p. 36.) Whether deliberately or not, the measures taken had set both groups at each other and the Jarawa decided for both withdrawal and resistance. In fact from 1789 till 1879 Jarawas were fairly tolerant of being contacted by the outsiders, as is evident in the reports by Colebrooke and Rev. Corbyn. It is since 1880 that Jarawas turned hostile to all outsiders. 32. In the process of stopping the traffic that is not permitted to halt, accidents happen. On February 19, 1999 the local newspaper Herald Daily reported that an eightyear-old Jarawa boy near R.K. Nallah had to be picked up and brought to Port Blair for amputation of his arm that was badly severed when he tried to stop a passing by truck. The editorial of the paper observed how strange it was that Jarawa who by their marksmanship could take life were now subject to modern medicine taking their body parts. (See also The national news paper, The New Indian Express [from Chennai] carried a three part featured coverage by Farwa Imam Ali that focused on the Jarawa situation in a critical way. The series of articles were; ‘Official kiss of death for ancient Andaman Tribe’: October 17th 1999, ‘The Road Jarawa Do Not Want to Walk on’: October 18th 1999 pp 11 and ‘Government Holds the Key to Jarawa Survival’ October 20th 1999 pp11.) 33. This claim bears out in the context of British administration reports about abandoned Jarawa campsites which categorically state that these were never burnt down by the Jarawas themselves (See Temple 1903 “Official Record of Dealings with the Jarawas”). Ironically though the post independent Indian administration’s destruction of the Jarawa shelter is analogous to the colonial administration’s tactic of destroying Jarawa settlements (See Fawcett 1912). 34. Sequences of Enmey contact events are not the first by any chance. Historical records indicate that from 1789 to 1796 Jarawas had relatively friendly encounters with the colonizers. It was only later that they withdrew into self imposed isolation and hostility towards non-tribals. Again from 1900 to 1910 records indicate that Jarawas could be seen in the areas near Port Mouat, Junglee Ghat, Dundas Point, Viper Island, all close by the present location of Port Blair. But in the post Independence phase the Jarawas were becoming only seasonally visible in Mile Tilak, Ferrarganj, Wandoor and Tirur region and since the increase in use of the ATR by private traffic these sightings also steadily shifted further to Kadamtalla the new growing urban focal point. Since 2004 the visibility of Jarawas in Middle Strait has steadily declined. 35. Medical personnel claim that Enmey, with a leg fracture, was a liability to his group so he was driven out, and he took to modern medicine as a last refuge. On his returning back with the capacity to walk he has gained influence and brought other Jarawa to get treatment. Enmey’s friends give a different story and the truth and reality of it depends on who tells and when to describes the reason for ‘coming out of the forest.’ According to Jarawas of Lakra Lungta, Enmey was ridiculed by his community because he transgressed and killed his “father in law to be” when the latter had allowed Enmey’s fiancé to seek another husband from the Jarawa community from Tirur region. Enmey had not fulfilled his requirement of hunting a mature bore to establish and demonstrate his maturity as an individual ready for marriage.

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36. In Radcliffe-Brown’s account of the Andaman Islanders (1964: 137) we find a details of the descriptive Andamanese terms for the outsiders and their associated physical and spiritual value. Such descriptions alluded to people of both Indian descent and of European origin. (Cf. Strathern 1992, Tausig 1993) 37. According to hospital records, subsequent to Enmey ’s visit to the hospital, is the period between 16thApril 1996 to 16th October 1999 a total of 125 Jarawas had visited the GB Pant hospital. Most of these individual’s, (who were predominantly less than 25 years in age) were treated for skin irritations due to fungal infections. Given the fact that the total number of Jarawas was estimated to be 266 at that time, 125 of them visiting the hospital is a significant number which establishes the fact that medicine was not a real concern for the tribals as much as the visit was and for the medical authorities it was a way to establish the role they could play in creating a relationship with the Jarawa community. The extremely high frequency of ring worms, sores caused by itching (due to ‘dirty clothing’) had for long been a problem for the medical care providers but for the AAJVS workers it became a way to convince the Jarawas that they should not agree to being photographed by the tourists as the exposure to photographic film would harm their bodies. A dermatological problem was explained as caused by photography. In spite of such warnings some among the Jarawas demanded extra money or items in exchange of being photographed without any clothes on. The experiences of Jack, during the early colonial period (Chapter Five) today have unknowingly made their way into the spirit of enterprise exhibited by the Jarawas on the ATR. It is a strange situation for the Jarawas where the medical authority wants them to be “out of dirty clothes” for protection of their bodies but the welfare workers in order to protect the Jarawa body from tourist gaze wants them “in clothes.” 38. At a local government sponsored exhibition (in the Winter of 2000), the AAJVS’s stall, displayed photographs of the Jarawas depicting them as “cared for” “primitives” in the forest. The Medical Department for instance, showed pictures of how the Jarawa were provided with the trappings of modern medical facilities at Port Blair’s general hospital. For the islanders at large, while the AAJVS and the administration come out as preservers of the ‘primitive’ at an enormous cost, the medical practitioners are seen as facilitators of the “primitive’s” transformation into reformed or “ex-primitives.” There is a belief among people that it would be the doctors who would ultimately ‘civilize’ and ‘modernize’ the Jarawa. Medical personnel themselves seem to be keen to project this self-image and historical role. This role of the medical practitioners was also acknowledged at a public seminar on “Recent Jarawa Contact” held for three days in Port Blair (Nov 2nd to Nov 4th 1999) [Archival files of AAJVS, Port Blair]. Records of this seminar show that government anthropologists and the medical practitioners though appreciative of one other, differed sharply on specific issues relating to the future for the Jarawa. For example, on the discussion of hygiene among the Jarawa medical authorities felt that within the hospital context, the Jarawa showed no sense of hygiene and had therefore to be taught toilet habits and the use of soap. The anthropologists, on the other hand, (based on their notion that the cultural habits of the ‘primitive’ need not be forcibly altered) pointed to the “ethnocentric” biases embedded in such a proposal. It is interesting to note that similar con-

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cerns were articulated when the Ongee of the Little Andaman islands were first brought into ‘settled,’ ways of existence (See Cipriani 1961). 39. It is open to conjecture whether such visits were undertaken for strictly medical reasons. In other words if all the Jarawas in the forest interiors received timely medical attention during the various outbreaks of disease, then many more Jarawa lives would have been saved. But there is enough evidence to suggest that periodic outbreaks of diseases in the forest did claim a large number of lives contrary to the statements made by the Medical Department that there were no reported deaths among the Jarawa from 1998 onwards. I came to this conclusion from my visits into Jarawa territory in 2002–3. I estimated that among three campsites with a total of about thirty children within the age group of 5–15, six young children were with foster parents, as their own parents had died in recent times. The medical department’s unfortunate practice of suppressing facts was also borne out in 2005–6 in the context of the outbreak of measles among Jarawa children in the forest. Looking beyond the medical department’s claims and counter-claims about its role in saving Jarawa lives, it may be instructive to note that historically the task of bringing the Jarawa under any regime of supervised medical attention has been extremely difficult, given the Jarawa’s resistance to such impositions. This observation is borne out by the following historical records. According to the 1911 Census reports, (ibid., 79) in the years of 1908, 1909 and 1910 large numbers of Jarawa patients were brought over from the forest to Port Blair, for treatment of tuberculosis and pneumonia. No subsequent medical crises were reported. It was in the context of an earlier outbreak of sexually transmitted disease in 1890 that Jarawas were actually captured and brought to ‘Andaman Homes’ for treatment. Treatment in the homes included the subjection of the Jarawa body to long and repeated sequences of scrutiny. Jarawas were seen to resist presenting and showing their body to the medical authorities. There was also resentment at the prospect of detention and confinement as a patient in the Andaman Homes (Fawcett 1912), a place that was neither the forest nor the settlement. Portman observed that the Andamanese “disliked restraints of the hospital so much that they preferred remaining in their homes and suffering from the disease.” (Portman 1899: Ch 16). The tribals responded by trying hard to conceal their symptoms. Often when the forces from the settlement approached the tribals to take them into medical custody, the group would simply run away. The administration justified the restraint on tribal patients in order to protect other tribals from getting infected (See Pandya 2005 a). In present times however visits to the hospital have acquired a different meaning for the Jarawa and as discussed earlier, the rationale for these trips derive from a complex understanding of the promises that the road leading to the hospital and the hospital itself holds out for them. According to AAJVS records of 1998, the total number of times the Jarawas were seen to come out of the forest on their own was 172. In the year 2005 the number came down to 16, indicating a measure of success in the AAJVS program of controlling such voluntary visitations. Much of the reported cases related to the Jarawas seeking medical attention for what they regarded as “enen ulatey” or “outsider inflicted pain.” In most cases it was no more the situation of outsiders trying to convince them to come out and seek medical attention; the willingness to do so was their own. (See Pandya 2005b)

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40. One of the senior supervising nurses, with a group of visitors at the hospital in December of 1999, reported how hard it was for her to communicate to the Jarawa only a year earlier when Jarawa would not understand anything and would not even follow instructions for simple toilet use. But now she added they had learnt everything and even asked for soap to clean themselves and describe their ailments to get proper treatment. On hearing this non-tribal visitors who came back again the next day with their cameras, also brought back soap and tooth paste for distribution among the hospitalized Jarawas. 41. These conversations and their nuances were comprehensible, as the Jarawa language shares much with the Ongee tribal language, a cultural group I had previously worked with (Pandya 1993, Zide and Pandya 1989). In 1995 I had in fact arranged for some Ongee families to meet with the Jarawa, something that used to happen more frequently in the early colonial history of the islands. However with the increase in settlements and the development of the islands the two cultural groups, lost all contacts with each other but they could mutually understand each other and exchange ideas and gifts during the particular project. 42. In Enmey’s account of the gains of moving on the road across horizontal space and climbing up the tree vertically one notes that the homology is consistent with Radcliffe-Brown’s (1964: 176, 186, 301) formulation of the medicine man (Okojumu or Okopaid) gaining power by integrating vertical and horizontal movements. Across Andamanese culture a similar logic is evident in the Ongee culture of Little Andamans for the power of ancestors and Torale (See Pandya 1990, 1993). 43. Reflecting on the term pepeyh, I was led conclude that it may have been part of a larger family of words that are used to connote the imagined bridges or links that connect the worlds of the tribals and that of their dead ancestors and spirits. According to classical ethnographic accounts in many of the tribal dialects the word for cane is penjhey that also stands for rainbow. It is believed that a large cane connects this world with world of spirits and dead ancestors stand on it to become spirits. When they are transformed, and move over to the other world the cane ‘bridge’ becomes light and visible in all its colors. 44. At a fixed time food and medications were brought over for distribution, but special guests along with the medical staff could walk in any time. It was expected or demanded that the Jarawa would greet the visitors in non-tribal language, give a military salute, or perform some song and dance act then stand still or pose and perform for a tape or video recording session. Many of the visitors would bring small gifts like combs, face powder, undershirts or biscuits. Seeing these frequent visitations and the fact that Jarawa actually enjoyed the attention, I realized that I might be an imposition on their fun time at the hospital. With the visitors coming to see the Jarawas in the hospital, often arranged by the medical staff the situation became problematic and the AAJVS appointed additional staff to make sure that Jarawa remained safe and isolated within hospital and that all their demands were met. Now the hospital room to keep the Jarawa individuals is also designated as ‘Protected Tribal Reserve Area’ to restrict people from entering ward at their will.

PART IV

CONCLUSION AND BEYOND

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Towards a Political Economy of Visualized Material

“. . . to comprehend a sort of nucleum of the strategy of values, a sort of concrete space-time, strategic moment and matrix in the process of ideology, which latter is always the production of sign value and of coded exchange. This economy of values is a political economy. It goes well beyond economic calculation and concerns all the process of the transmutation of values, all those socially produced transitions from one value to another, from one logic to another logic of value which may be noted in determinate places and institutions—and so it also concerns the connection and implication of different systems of exchange and modes of production.” Baudrillard, J. 1981: 122

In what way can the ethnographic view be positioned so as to comprehend the structure and practice that constitutes the history of relations between “primitive” Andaman Islanders and outsiders? In my attempts to answer the question I have tried to explore how this history of relations is constituted through the event and representation of “contact.” Although I have discussed this more fully over previous chapters, let me now draw upon some of the arguments in chapters two, four and five and tease out in more general terms the formation of the history of relations between the Islanders and outsiders through the interconnections between events of contact, material culture and visuality.1 As the preceding chapters have tried to show the history of relations involving the Andamanese and the non-tribal outsider is founded on a process of mutual ‘reconstruction’ that is not limited to the experience of a specific historical moment or event. The process of reconstruction has followed upon a constant and active negotiation of identity over time, which, in the case of 317

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the Andaman Islanders has involved the period of colonial rule and the successive political regimes of the modern Indian nation state. In the reconstruction process, the tribals have constantly and actively negotiated their identity in relation to the ‘modernization’ process as conceived by the colonialists as well as by Indians and Indian authorities (Cf. Rosaldo 1982 Mamdani 1996). What is interesting to note is that the structures of authority and those subject to it are seen to have mutually created a condition, wherein the Andamanese continue to live under the sign of the ‘unchanging primitive.’ This is a condition that makes the Andamanese re-presentation of themselves both visually and materially correspond to an image framed by the contingencies of both present contact and past experiences with the outsiders. I have tried to argue that these self-representations that are culturally constructed out of the experience of “contact” are used in subsequent events of contact to create a cumulative layer of images (See Debord 1983) that are strategically mobilized by both Andamanese and outsiders to deploy the sign of the “primitive” to relative mutual advantage. It is this mutuality, which though easily recognized is seldom acknowledged. As discussed earlier, events of contact involving gifts have been premised upon the possibilities of altering material culture in the expectation that in the next event of encounter the tribal would reciprocate the gesture by living up to the image imagined for him by the non-tribal outsider. The cultural assumption made by outsiders was that, ‘gifts’ would be acknowledged by gestures of hospitality rather than hostility. But records of the early phase of contacts on the Andaman Island show that these were constituted in the most by violent and bloody encounters on the coastline where Islanders faced up to the outsiders in the hope of obtaining scraps of iron, a substance needed to fulfill the mythical promise of the restoration of order in their culture. Although the early explorers and colonizers had built a civilizing imperative into the gifts of metal they carried with them, the Andamanese configured the historical moment of metal gained, within their own mythology of contact and braced themselves for appropriate action. In a way both the ‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Andaman Islanders’ were seen to live out and translate in their own way a foundation myth for each other. In order to make this point I have tried to show how the homology of “encounters creating rocks” and “encounters providing iron” (see chapter two) has served to reinforce the collective consciousness and interpretation of history by the Andamanese. By constantly rehearsing these homologies the Andamanese see the possibilities of order being re-instated in a culture that has been disturbed with the arrival of the ‘Outsider.’2 Despite the obvious asymmetries, a markedly reciprocal relationship between the non-tribals and tribals is sustained by what could be described as

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the “practice” of the contact structure and the “structure” of contact practice (Sahlins 1981: 72) generating in turn the “double vision” of the Andamanese as both “present” and as “represented” (Thomas and Losche 1999 and Thomas 1991). This “double vision” I argue is reinforced because the forms of material culture and the sites of its display reveal the ways in which the tribals make symbolic sense of the material received and non-tribals infer symbolic references embodied in the tribals’ use of the material acquired from them. It is this culturally constructed, dialectics of contact history that remains the single most important ethnographic concern in this collection of essays. The issue of understanding people’s cultural construction of events, not of determining “facts” in the physicalist sense of objective happenings is itself something historical. As Sahlins rightly reminds us (Sahlins 2000: 353) to appreciate the cultural organization of experience, there is a need to make history and anthropology “twin disciplines”—a perspective that informs the essays in this volume. Much of social scientific writing tends to focus on ‘outsiders’ who contact a cultural group. Analytical attention and the critical concerns have concentrated on how change has transformed cultures (Clarke 1996, Cooper 1990, Diamond 1988, Foster 2002, Kirsch 1997, Schieflin 1991, 1995, Smith 1997 and Todorov 1984). There has seldom been the question as to what could be ‘native’ interpretations or perspectives on the outcome of contact. Much of the writings and orientation in the understanding the Andamanese tribal cultures has involved taking “our” questions to the “field” and eliciting our desired responses to these without ever asking if our questions are also theirs (Cf. Awaradi 1990, Mukherjee 2003, Mukhopadyay 2002, Naidu 1994, Vidyarthi 1976 and Suryanarayan 1994). The Jarawa Expert Committee Report (2003) is a classic example of this orientation.3 In the course of the preceding chapters in this book I have tried to argue that from the Andaman Islanders’ experiential perspective, the history of contact and relations formed of it, are not something disjointed and segmented. Instead experiences of contact are seen to reinforce and present continuity in the day-to-day practice of historical structure. I have tried to explore and analyze why things appear to be changeless in spite of the increasing regularity of contacts. The Jarawas and Ongees I have shown, have engaged with contact events and displayed a capacity to respond in ways that replicate both the experience of past contact events and anticipate future occurrences (See Pandya 1997, Sarkar 1989, Wiesinger-Feris 1983). In attempting a critical ethnography of contact I have tried to explore how material and visual culture comes to be implicated in the mutual significations of Andamanese and Outsiders. People as agents, both who contact and those who are contacted act upon circumstances according to their own

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cultural presuppositions about socially given categories of persons and things. As Durkheim (1915) observed, the universe does not exist for people except as it is thought. On the other hand, it need not exist in the way they alone think but how people think about each other and accordingly interact to condition relations as actively engaged agents. This makes contact events worldly circumstances of human actions, patterned by visuality and materiality. Often there is an inevitable obligation to conform to the categories by which groups coming into contact perceive each other. Categories like ‘naked’ and ‘covered,’ ‘invisible’ and ‘visible’ therefore have persisted all along from contacts in colonial times as well those enacted in the post independence years. These remain signs that are potentially re-valued, affected upon, altered and put into practice again by both contacted and the contactors. It is this recursivity that compels us to approach history as a semiotic system in Andamanese culture. What had begun as representation of the Andamanese according to the “Outsiders” vision of the ‘native’ or “Primitive savage” ends up in a representation of the “Outsiders” as “Enen” or the “Other” of the ‘primitive.’ This recursivity plays out in the ambiguous manifestations of “hostility” and “friendliness” in successive contact events. The history of the Andamanese culture in a sense is structured by the recursivity and refraction of contact events. My ethnographic intervention in this history of contact as it plays out between the asymmetries of a “people with history” and a “people without history” has lead me to recover history as unfolding in a complex semiotic system. A semiotic system in which signs like clothes, body adornments, and a range of objects and images keep acquiring new material and visual values and meanings. However it is not just a meaning or value of sign in the context of a specific contact event. I try to understand how these signs acquire meaning in situations of contact in different locations and in different times. Because the objective world to which signs are applied has its own refractory characteristics and dynamics, the signs, and by derivation the people who live by them, I argue, particularly those understood as “primitive” are open to being interpreted as “once primitive,” “no more primitive” and “primitive but not hostile” in different locations, or even sometimes at the same time. Meanings and values drawn by both the tribal and the non-tribal restrict possibility of a dialectical change from one contact experienced to the next one envisioned. Repeated contacts, but lack of a shared discourse between the two parties in contact has further perpetuated the problem of Jarawas and Ongees being perceived not as agents of their own historical course but as a generic category of Primitive Tribal Groups constructed by the representational practices of the state, the settlers and all those who look upon them as objects of humanitarian concern and intervention.

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In considering a series of contacts as an active ongoing experienced process, the chapters in this book have sought to decode a “language of contact,” a semiotic system of representation, that continues to condition contacts even in relatively recent times.4 This focus on a contact event as a semiotic system provides an understanding of how the Andamanese understand historical transformations within their culture. This understanding is distinct from a mere charting of transformations of hunters and gatherers over history (Cf. Ingold 1986, 1991). One of the issues I have tried to develop through the shifting analysis of contact as event, structure, practice and as representation is that the even if the ends of contact have changed over time the notion of contact continues to assume the continuities of territorial and cultural boundaries. Our study of the spatial and historical contours of the Jarawa Reserve among others where official interaction with the Jarawa has been staged has shown how such borders distort the sightlines between the observer and the observed. Acts of friendliness and hostility and the interpretation of these by outsiders official and non-official have reinforced the boundaries defining the world of the tribal and non-tribal even when we have seen how movement across boundaries have eroded much of their meaning. Far from bringing the tribal communities, the state and settlers in a shared discourse, contact events as I have shown have multiplied misunderstandings. Episodes of contact through history, to reiterate a point I have made before, limn the unique space termed the border between cultures. In other words historical time forms the contours of the space of interaction on the Islands. This space once contested terrain between the colonial government and the multiple tribal groups is today a terrain contested between the Indian state and the Andamanese groups at large. It is an understanding of this contested space of interaction on the Islands, which offers the possibilities of situating the discourse and practice of contemporary contact in the Islands in critical reflections on the modern state. Apart from theoretical insights on the modern nation state as “imagined or discursive cultural regimes,” there is a recent interest in understanding modern states as “embodied forms” (Crary and Kwinter 1992, Linke 2006). Within the frames of this understanding, political fields and national spaces have a visual, tactile and sensuous dimension—a “corporeal grounding.” The analytic trajectory of theorizing the state from such a perspective lead to an interest in the exploration of those spaces of power or “contact zones” where the machinations of the modern state and the embodied subject collide, where states, bodies and subjectivities become entangled in contingent formations of power (Linke: 2006). Such a perspective acquires relevance in the context of the Andaman Islands where the imperative of “Welfare” drives the state to create spaces of interaction/power, (the Jarawa Reserve for instance) that are

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inherently “corporal formations” created and sustained through the deployment and regulation of bodily practices. Tribal Reserves in the Andamans in other words continue to be places where the state through its agents of welfare reach deep into the communities’ interior spaces, into the recesses of daily life and acquires what has been described as a distinct corporal habitus (Mauss 1973, 1978: 95–123). This calls into question all the assumptions of boundary sustained in discourses of contact. The state’s corporal formations as it take shapes in the quotidian presence of the welfare staff in the Reserve through the routine enactments of postures, verbal and facial expressions, gestures and movements are as Linke (2006) argues quoting Levi-Strauss (1987: 9) “seemingly protected by their insignificance.” It is the invasive presence of the state in the forest that makes it a potential political field wherein the processes of “subjectivation” from Foucault’s perspective are sustained with as much force and legitimacy as in the more well marked disciplinary institutions such as the hospital in Port Blair. The invasive presence of “welfare” is reinforced by the “optical regime” of the state, which reserves the exclusive right to both produce “optical facticity” and “ocular exposure” (Linke 2006: 210–11). As the “tribal bodies” were brought within the spaces of the Indian nation state, they were pushed into the political field of vision as objects of scrutiny and censorship. The practice and implications of the operations of the optical regimes (Jay 1988, 1993) of the Indian state on perhaps the least “seen” among the Andamanese tribal communities, the Sentinelese is an issue I take up in the following essay in this section as a closing comment on the enduring ironies of the intent and practices of tribal welfare. In the course of the discussion on the Sentinelese I argue the Islanders as political subjects of the Indian nation state operate within a circuit of a continually improvising “visual prosthetics” (Feldman: 2000)— surveillance authorities, helicopter over flights, satellite imaging. I try to understand how within the contours of this optical regime the Sentinelese articulate their subjectivities. One of the issues I raise in this final essay is how in an emerging global visual field, the “primitive tribal groups” of the Andamans, the Jarawa and to some extent the Sentinelese have become objects of concern and knowledge for the international community. I try to understand how as in the case of “targeted communities of suffering” like refugees, “endangered tribal groups” have come to be approached as mute victims rather than historical actors, whose survival remains contingent upon managed humanitarian intervention. As much as in the case of refugees as has been sensitively argued by scholars (Malkki: 1996) the visual representation of Primitive Tribal Groups have become a singularly “translatable and mobile form of knowledge.” (Ibid., 386).

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In this transnational philanthropic traffic in images, groups such as Jarawas or Sentinelese remain trapped in standardized representational practices, that reproduce an “anonymous corporeality” (Feldman 1994) that presents them as “bare humanity” or as a “merely a demographic presence” devoid of history or agency (Malkki 1996: 389–90). Clearly there is a history to these images but it is a history determined in large part by the asymmetries of a global visual economy. How then are these consequences of state welfare or international humanitarian concerns upon such endangered human groups to be addressed? Some argue that it is indeed possible to come up with something better, a proposition that this book shares with those who locate the source of this betterment in a radically “historicizing humanism” (Barthes 1987: 101) that insists not only in acknowledging human suffering or the threat to its survival but also acknowledges historical agency and the infinite capacities for defining and articulating subjectivities through acts of resistance to hegemonic structures. It is this understanding, that prompts me to argue that engaging the history and practice of contact between the Andaman Islanders and outsiders has been one way of connecting with the Primitive Tribal Groups of the Andaman Islands not as a generic category of endangered human beings but as self-conscious historical actors. I have tried to show Jarawas and Ongees themselves emerge as producers of images of their “selves,” using possible combinations of materiality and visuality to conform to the expectations of ‘primitives” and “ex-primitives” to their advantage. I have argued that it is through their use of materials that groups like the Jarawas create a historical discourse in which they are simultaneously present with the outsiders. I have shown the radically different behavior of the Jarawas in the hospital at Port Blair, on the roadside on the fringes of the Jarawa Reserve and in their dwellings in the forest. In Port Blair, the act of wearing clothes works to project an image of having left behind the state of “primitivity.” Yet this identity composed of artifacts of an alien culture is dismantled once they leave Port Blair and enter the forest where they manage to recover their identity by undressing. When it comes to performances on the road too, they demonstrate their skills in manipulating materials to align to the image imagined for them by curious tourists or wary settlers. Outsiders seldom recognize that the relations between their worlds and those of the Islanders exist only in “performance” through stylized repetition of acts (Butler 2004: 114), a point I have tried to make in the preceding chapters. The combined power of the optical regime of the state, the social imagination of the “primitive” and the standardized representational practices in the

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global image flows of the Andamanese ironically create zones of blindness that prevent us from seeing how history works its way in making Andamanese culture more “modern” without making it any less “primitive.”

NOTES 1. Events of contact and the representations of it through body ornaments were one of the ways in which Andaman Islanders signify history and its connectedness. However forms of bodily adornments that do draw upon various domains of explanation and experience, exist in a temporality that is not necessarily co-terminus with more conventional (political) temporalities. So ornaments are made to prevent future accidents for an Ongee child, and ornaments are also made for the contact encounter, both contextualized in the aesthetic and historic principles connecting to mythical experiences as well as historical experiences (See Chapter 4 and 5). Much like the making of the ornaments among the Andamanese tribals, the making of visual images of the Andaman Islanders by the non-tribals is also a practice that is not necessarily co-terminus with conventional (economic) temporalities of “the developed” and modernized “primitive.” 2. Contact events with the Andaman Islanders are not merely events that happened long time ago but are contemporary occurrences that retain most of their diachronic aspects; but the locations of contact have multiplied and extended into hospitals, roadside, settler’s villages and tribal reserves managed by the AAJVS. From the Andaman Islanders’ experiential perspective, the history of contact and relations formed of it, are not something disjointed and segmented. Instead the experiences reinforce and present continuity in the day-to-day practice of the historical structure of the Islanders. Just like the Outsiders who enter into a contact situation with their own image of the ‘primitive tribe,’ we must realize that Jarawas since 1998 came out of the forest to establish contacts with the outside world with their own image of the Outsiders. Similarly, Ongees on Little Andamans, according to Portman (1899) became pacified by 1886. Till 1950 the Ongees were pretty much the sole occupants of Little Andamans where they maintained, a largely undisturbed traditional way of life. It was only in 1958, after the settlers were brought to the island of Little Andamans that plans were drawn up for an Ongee settlement at Dugong Creek (within the tribal reserve forest) to be managed by the AAJVS. Under states’ supervision the Ongees were settled down to work in a coconut plantation while the majority of the forestland was made accessible to timber companies, palm oil production and small farmers. 3. Something that started as the response of a lawyer who passed through Jarawa Reserve territory, being disturbed at the signs of destitution amongst the Jarawa on the sides of ATR, ended with committees that were formed and re-formed, the assembling of an army of investigators pursuing a questionable methodology, and setting in motion yet another sequence of “contact” with Jarawas. The whole exercise undertaken by the expert committee (See Pandya 2002) was nothing but yet another classic example of the “absentee expertise” imagining about the future of Jarawas and never

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asking what future do the Jarawas view for themselves. The principle idea of the new Jarawa Policy (Andaman and Nicobar Gazette. No. 210. December 21, 2004) was to keep the Jarawas in a state of “protection” vis-à-vis their cultural identity, natural habitat and health as they were a “unique human heritage.” One of the stated objectives of the policy was “to protect Jarawas from the harmful effects of exposure and contact with the outside world while they are not physically, socially, and culturally prepared for such an interface.” But were the Jarawas or as a matter of fact any Andamanese tribal group ever really isolated in the so-called history of relations involving the world within the forest and the world outside it? 4. In recent years wide ranges of anthropological writings (Appadurai 1990, 1996, Bhabha 1994, Casamir and Rao 1992, Clifford 1997, Gupta and Ferguson 1997, Jackson 1998) have provided insights into the discourse that is generated in spaces where different cultures come together.

Chapter Nine

The Specter of “Hostility”: The Sentinelese between Text and Image

On January 29th 2006 the Coast Guard of India patrolling the North Andaman Sea released a press statement titled “Fishermen killed by Sentinelese.” According to the press statement a small fishing dinghy with two fishermen, from Wandoor which was reported missing since January 25th was spotted on the North Sentinel Island three days later (See Appendix D). On the 28th January 2006 a coast guard helicopter at the suggestion of other fishermen, flew over the island, (a small circular land mass of 72 sq km on the western side of the cluster of Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal) to make its first sighting of the dinghy and the bodies of the dead fishermen. With “extraordinary courage, skill and bravery the aircraft diverted the attention of the hostile Sentinelese and successfully located the dead bodies of the missing fishermen.” During subsequent sorties the Sentinelese were photographed and the press release ended by stating that the fact that the “Sentinelese by not eating the deceased had contradicted the common belief that these tribals are cannibals.” Reports of the incident generated a whole range of responses from both the national and international media as well as from scholar activists who saw in it the possibilities of a renewed debate on government policies towards this particular tribal community. It is to these responses and to the report itself that I now turn in order to make the argument that as in the case of the Ongees and Jarawas the modes of representing the Sentinelese continues to be informed by the visual signs and practices that took shape in colonial times and acquired new forms of legitimacy under the political regime of the independent Indian state. Turning to the press release made by the Coastal Guards it perhaps could be asked as to what was the statement being made about the Sentinelese by

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Sentinelese photographed in 2006. Photography released by the Coast Guard at a press conference dated January 29th 2006 at Port Blair. Aerial photograph showing the Sentinelese looking up at the helicopter with bow and arrows ready to shoot.

Sentinelese using dug out canoe. Photographed in 1998.

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utilizing the power of the “flying gaze”? On the face of it the press release sought to report on two significant observations about the incident. Firstly, that the missing individuals were dead and secondly and more importantly that their bodies were intact. They were not cut up or cooked by the tribals. The surveillance authorities through their reports sought to take on the position of ethnographic authority and assert that contrary to belief, the Sentinelese were not cannibals. The very insertion of this ethnographic point in the press report served to endow it with an appeal that went beyond its significance as mere news. The report was seen to provide an image of the Sentinelese that contradicted the common belief about the prevalence of cannibalism among them. Having said that the press release chose to make the point that in spite of the fact the Sentinelese were “not cannibals” it was difficult to argue that they were “not hostile.” By a skilful manipulation of text and image the report of the Coast Guards sought to sustain the power of the state as the exclusive and authentic ethnographic authority on the Sentinelese. As the makers of the image and the supporting text they were also seen to assert their exclusive right to contact the “hostile” Sentinelese and represent them to the outside world. By the February 6th 2006 the story of the two fishermen dead on North Sentinel Island acquired a new twist. The incident, which became embroiled in, the local politics of the island came under the scrutiny of international interest groups, associated with indigenous people and their rights. Survival International, a worldwide group for tribal rights issued a Reuters press release titled “Stone Age Indian Tribe kills two fishermen.” The label “Stone Age” Indian tribe was as suggestive as it was controversial. Surprisingly however, the Chief Secretary of the Island administration, Mr. Negi, too, stated that from among the two hundred and fifty tribals, who have not “changed since the Stone Age” about “twenty tribals, naked and carrying bows and arrows were spotted surrounding the bodies buried in the sand.”1 The administration further stated in its press release that the relatives of the dead fishermen had a chance to see through binoculars the fate of the “sleeping fishermen who had drifted” towards the island and got killed. The Director of Survival International expressed concern about the serious lapse on the administration’s enforcement of the law that prohibited any body entering the North Sentinelese. A local environmentalist as reported by Reuter news agency, tried to defend the island administration’s role in the affair by stating that what was commendable was the courageous yet restrained behavior of the Coast Guard and police who refused to get on to the island to recover the dead body of the fishermen.2 In spite of the great political and public pressure for the retrieval of the dead bodies the officers refused to use any kind of force and bring back the bodies.

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Although it remains questionable if it was a matter of voluntary restraint displayed by the Coast Guards, or a matter of respecting official restrictions placed on landing on the North Sentinelese islands, both the issue of the retrieval of the bodies of the dead fishermen and the adherence to the policy of non-intervention vis-à-vis the Sentinel islanders became bound up in the larger issue of the representation of the Sentinelese themselves. The image of arrow shooting Sentinelese was utilized to justify the “no retrieval action” by the authorities. By the 8th of February 2006 the images of the hostile Sentinelese along with concerned voices about “Stone age tribe” and “killed fisherman” acquired a distinct edge. The “hostile” Sentinelese historically subjected to the telephoto gaze now became the sole points of reference in the story of the dead fishermen. The administration provided binoculars to the mourning relatives of the dead fishermen to see or perhaps gaze upon the cold bodies of their loved ones from the safety of distance. In all the complexity and political charge of this exercise what was enacted was yet another “contact event,” within what has earlier been described as the optical regime of the administration. This was a contact event informed by the rules of controlled visibility, and implemented through the technological facility of binocular lenses. The view of the dead among the hostile Sentinelese, through the binoculars from a distance was reification of all the images from the past, where the camera’s tele-lens had routinely captured the hostile Sentenelese. Historically the technology of telephoto lenses had facilitated the close gaze of the state as the sole authority empowered get close to the Sentinelese. Perhaps this would explain why no photographs of the dead bodies on the North Sentinel were ever circulated.3 The control of sight and the concomitant control of the circulation of the image are evidently strategies sustaining the power of the state’s scopic regime (Jay 1988, 1993). In a “scopic regime” as has been argued, the agendas and techniques of political visualization by the regime prescribes modes of seeing those visuals objects, which are proscribed or deemed unattainable like the “Sentinelese.” In this way the regime itself becomes the sole ensemble of practices and discourses that establish the “true typical claims and credibility of visual acts and objects that are culturally politically correct modes of seeing” (Feldman 200: 49). The incident of January 2006, the Government’s response to it and the reports released around it point to inescapable historical parallels. Sentinelese contacts have evidently become visual events expressive of historical structures of practice captured in images and textualized in reports. The image of the Sentinelese in this context acquires an “object like” value having its own “biography” (See Edwards 2001, Hoskins 1997).

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THE SIGN OF HOSTILITY It is interesting at this point to take a closer look at the historical currency of the image of the “hostile Sentinelese.” The image released by the Coast Guard in 2006 was no different from probably the earliest photographic image of Sentinelese released in 1975. For thirty-one years it seems that the Sentinelese have stood on the beaches pointing arrows at outsiders! An early photographic image presenting the Sentinelese as ‘real’ people for whom “arrows speak louder than words” was published by Raghubir Singh in National Geographic Magazine (dated July 1975 Vol 148, No1. pp 66–91).4 Notwithstanding the ascribed communicative powers of Sentinelese arrows, state anthropologists and linguists as part of their “contact” initiatives would often shout to the Sentinelese in various languages hoping they would mimic these sounds and thereby send out clues to the language known to them. On occasions the administration would take the Ongees along to communicate with Sentinelese via microphones. Much of these efforts however amounted to a futile drama (Pandit 1990: 34, cf. Portman 1899: 742,823). What was interesting however was the fact that in all these contact events carried out in the early decades of independent India, the contact parties carried with them a mental image of the Sentinelese derived unmistakably from the photograph of Raghubir Singh. The image of the arrow shooting Sentinelese informed the logistical preparations of the contact party which remained on “high alert” and was accompanied by the presence of an armed guard on special duty.5 Such contact events often remained focused on just spotting the Sentinelese with bows and arrows without any concrete ideas as to what facts or purposes such spotting could yield.6 In the 1990s however more elaborate attempts at contacting the Sentinelese by the Port Blair authorities as part of an effort at “friendship through gift giving” had some success. Here too the methods were similar to those as used among the Jarawa since 1974. What followed was repeated “gift-giving” official visits in a bid to accustom the Sentinelese to the presence of outsiders and thereby accomplish a level of physical contact not possible before. After the mid-1990s the Sentinelese had evidently mellowed and were seen to allow visitors on their beaches and accept gifts placed before them. Physical contact with the outsider however was scrupulously avoided. It was only on the 4th of January 1991, in one of the expeditions of the administration, that the great moment of actual physical contact was achieved when for the first time in place of hostile gestures7 or drawing of arrows the Sentinelese came close to the boat carrying the long time, Director of Tribal Welfare Mr. Awaradi and accepted the gift of coconuts from his hands. This was the photographic moment that marked the shift from Raghubir Singh’s

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image paradigm of the Sentinelese long sustained official imagination and reinforced perhaps by responses to previous earlier contact events when the “hostile savages” stood at a distance from the beach and used suggestive gestures to keep the team away. Once the physicality of contact was achieved the administration was led to rethink the purported hostility of the Sentinelese. The photographic moment of gift taking from the “hands” of the authority became a new visual trope through which the earlier signifying moments of hostility could be interrogated or even neutralized. But among the members of the contact party and the keeper photographic records the constitutive moment of gift-taking and physical touch image of the “hostile” Sentinelese was laden with other possibilities too. The contact party of 1991, lead by Mr. Awaradi had various representatives from diverse governmental departments who had competed to be the ‘chosen one’ to go to Sentinelese Islands. Those present in the defining moment of physical contact now wished to extract professional mileage from the fact of being actually “touched” by the Sentinelese during the gift giving exercise.8 Every participating member of the contact party wanted to take the credit of being the first to ‘touch the Sentinelese,’ as if it were a great mystical moment of transubstantiation wherein the savage hostile reciprocated a gesture of civilized friendship. Who touched and who was touched during the contact event became an emotionally charged issue within various sectors of the administration where claims and counter-claims were sought to be established with earnestness and vigor. In a bid to prove the singularity of her claim, Ms. Madhumala Chattopadhyay, then a biological anthropologist with Anthropological Survey of India at Port Blair, reported the incident (Chattopadhyay 1992a, 1992b) as marking the first occasion when a woman anthropologist had accomplished the deed of contacting and touching the Sentinelese.9 Although such claims were not false, it is interesting to note the range of political and cultural significance invested in this specific event of contact. The rapid circulation of photographs proudly capturing the moment wherein an official of the Anthropological Survey or the medical department was seen in the presence of the Sentinelese sought to draw public attention to the singularity of the event. Not surprisingly images recording the moment of physical contact became the visual point of reference for public discourse on the Sentinelese in the aftermath of 1991. The prevalent images then served to delegitimize the previously circulated images of Sentinelese with bow and arrow at the coastline. For the contact party, the “tactile” experience of contact challenged the “gaze” of the photographer and marked the resounding success of an astute administrative exercise. In what was perhaps an acknowledgment of this feat, the Anthropology Museum in Port Blair removed all earlier pictures of

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anthropologists contacting the Sentinelese, so that honors were reserved for the current team. The new post-1991 administrative photographic records indicated how “giving gifts,” and not just “dropping gifts” were transforming the hostility of the Sentinelese. A change in the meaning and documentation of contact with the hostile savage shifted the photographic gaze from tele-lenses to close up shots of the Sentinelese seen drawing up their dug out canoes to come close to the contact party and load up the sacks of coconut. The administration circulated the new images of contact with the Sentinelese by putting them out on its official web site. The new drive and insistence was to portray the mutual change of attitude between the administration and the Sentinelese. The administration in following contact exercises even attempted to plant coconut seedlings on North Sentinel Island.10 Visual records, from 1975 to 1991 up to now covering roughly a time span of about twenty five years however reveal the complex and often radical shifts in the ways in which the experience of contact with the Sentinelese was recorded and circulated While visual celebrations of physical contact with the Senitnelese marked the immediate aftermath of the 1991 event, there was a sudden and somewhat rapid shift in administrative mood soon after. Antici-

Sentinelese photographed in 1999. Administration file photographs of the Sentinelese (taken from 1999 to 2000) emphasizing the close degree of contact established in recent times at North Sentinel, where “friendly expeditions” have lead to acts of “gifting” coconuts (as opposed to just dropping coconuts). (Source: AAJVS Archival Records)

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pating concerns about the wider political and social implications of this unrestrained visual display of physical contact with the Sentinelese, the administration chose to take a cautious line. It was felt that photographs celebrating individual feats of contact would send wrong signals to outsiders keen on making illegal forays into Sentinelese territory. This prompted the Anthropology Museum to remove its “Us” contacting “Them” collection from public view and an administrative check was instituted on all public display of the images of 1991. Informed by the negative implications of contact experienced in the case of the Jarawas, the administration adopted the stringent line of non-intervention for the Sentinelese. All further contact expeditions were stopped and the territory put under a regime of aerial surveillance. The abandonment of contact expeditions and efforts at any kind of physical proximity in general together with the declining imposition of the telephoto-gaze raises the issue of the larger context within which the Sentinelese responded to the events of January 2006. How did they after so many years, perceive a helicopter flying over their heads or read the motivations behind the surreptitious intrusion of fishermen into their territory in January 2006? Could it be that they expected the fishermen to arrive in boats bearing gifts like the administration had done until 2000? We do have parallels of this possibility in the context of Jarawas where the settlers were often seen to mimic the administration’s gift giving custom to take tourists to sneak into Jarawa territory or openly gaze upon “the naked primitives” along the Andaman Trunk Road. The fishermen entering into Sentinel Islands probably had nothing to offer given the fact they had gone there on an illicit fishing expedition. Was it possible that they aroused the hostility of the Sentinelese by not offering them any gifts? A large measure of Sentinelese response to the fishermen perhaps could be explained by their experience of previous contact events with the administration. In this context it may be noted that the process of both initiating and then suddenly withdrawing the gift-carrying expeditions to the Sentinels was not influenced or informed by any acts of want or hostility by the Sentinelese. The administration had stopped its friendly gift-carrying expeditions for reasons unknown to the islanders. For the administration the decision to refrain from ‘friendly contact’ was influenced by events in the Jarawa context where it was clear that such contacts could eventually lead to negative consequences.11 The new policy was that the North Sentinelese would be under surveillance only to ensure that poachers, drug runners and other criminals did not enter the area. Expeditions into the area were to be organized occasionally to observe the Sentinelese and their numbers from a respectable distance “say about fifty meters from the shore. No gifts of any kind would be dropped. The authorized team would also assess the efficacy of the total isolation of the Sentinelese enforced by the armed

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forces. A constant surveillance by the Indian Coast Guard, Indian Navy and Police over this isolated island was to be kept so that no outsiders approached it in any way. These forces too would not be allowed to land or go very near the beach of the North Sentinelese Island” (Awaradi 1990). Given the new policy directions vis-à-vis the Sentinelese and their condition of “managed isolation,” it is perhaps not surprising that the public discourse generated around them in January 2006 invoked earlier visual and textual tropes. As images of the dead fishermen were circulated in the public domain the discourse on the hostile Sentinelese resurfaced albeit through the cautious frames of political correctness and administrative expedience. While the circulated image of the Sentinelese for instance was meant to confirm their hostility, a textual clarification about cannibalism was inserted in the press release dated Jan 29th 2006. It may be noted here that image of Sentinelese released in 2006 bore uncanny resemblance to the iconic image of 1975 from National Geographic, titled “Intruders Beware.” This image released out of the helicopters’ flight, that spotted the dead fishermen’s body served to negate and invalidate the images circulated in the aftermath of the 1991 contact. The Sentinelese captured in those images were evidently in close proximity or contact with the outsider and gave out no indications of hostility.. The erasure of such images from public memory following the new policy of “nonintervention” served to validate and resurrect the older image and discourse of hostility recorded in 1975. The discourse on the Sentinelese in other words is not only created by the sequence of contacts but by the inter-play of textual and visual practices on public memory. The inclusion of the photograph in the news report on the incident of January 2006, served to focus more attention on the Sentinelese than on the two individuals who sneaked into their territory. A regional news channel, Zee News Kolkata on February 9th 2006 carried the report with the headline, “Hostile aborigines photographed a year after tsunami.” In the light of the Coast Guard’s photograph it was reported that Sentinelese were “aboriginals, who counted among the world’s most “hostile” and who are living in absolute seclusion in the Andamans, have been photographed extensively to the delight of environmental groups” such as SANE. According to the Zee news report, Samir Acharya the founder member of SANE along with other local anthropologists of the island had expressed concerns about the very existence of the Sentinelese after the tsunami. The January photographs of the Sentinelese came to them as confirmation that the Sentinelese were still alive. The response of Acharya and his compatriots brings to light an interesting aspect of the administration’s “management” of Sentinelese isolation. In December 2004, the Sentinelese were reported to have been “illegally photographed from a helicopter” and footage televised by a private channel just after the

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tsunami. Irked by the event, local administration initiated an inquiry into how these members of the media got entry into the tribal land without permission. The Zee News report dwelt further into the story, telling viewers how SANE had protested to the Lt. Governor of the island that the television channels had “turned the aborigines into a ‘commodity’ by promoting shows that portrayed them in poor light.” The Tribal Welfare Department of the islands took a stand that though there was no law prohibiting photographing the tribals, the administration had to protect the interest of the Sentinelese by discouraging anyone to venture into their habitation under the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation, 1956. In a somewhat ironic gesture photographs of the “hostile” Sentinelese were used to discourage further photography. In the context of the incident of January 2006, for instance, state agencies like the Coast Guard used such photographs to assert Sentinelese hostility and deter media or public intervention in the event. The Coast Guards deliberately refrained from circulating any photograph of the dead fishermen’s bodies, which were partly buried by the Sentinelese, as these would neutralize the message of the previously circulated photograph depicting them in postures of “hostility.” The image of the dead bodies was only shown to one of the victim’s wife for purposes of identification. Quoting Coast Guard officials the news report (Zee News Kolkata on February 9th 2006) stated, “they (Sentinelese) are called the ‘Pathan Jarawas’ for their hostile nature and it would have been very difficult to even think of invading their territory to retrieve the bodies. We took the two families and showed them through binoculars that their dear ones had been killed and buried in the sand.” To emphasize the possibility of further disorder, the photograph of the fishermen’s boat partly destroyed by “hostile” Sentinelese was also included in the report. Samir Acharya of SANE appeared in the Zee News Kolkata report (February 9th 2006) observing, “These are highly hostile tribes. And one can’t take chances just to satisfy one’s curiosity. However, these photographs were taken by the Coast Guards in a minimally intrusive manner and were essential to chronicle the death of these two non-tribals.” It may be asked at this point what these photographs of Sentinelese hostility used routinely in administrative press releases and media reports say about the state’s capacity to deter visual or physical intrusion into Sentinelese territory? How do such photographs legitimize the discursive authority exercised upon the Sentinelese by the state, the settlers, the media or even NGOs dedicated to the protection of tribal rights? In December 2005, as the first anniversary of tsunami was celebrated, The Sunday Express, January 9, 2005 carried a series of short reports on how the various tribal groups of the Andaman and Nicobar had survived the natural

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disaster. One of the short pieces also covered the Sentinelese of the North Sentinel islands. In this piece, Samir Acharya of SANE commented: The Sentinelese are safe. I have gathered from the Defense people who flew sorties over the island that the Sentinelese shot arrows at them. Since they retain their earlier hostile and aggressive stance, we can assume that they are safe. Had tragedy befallen them, their body language would have definitely changed. They would have become much softer.

If Descartes could be paraphrased, we would be lead to believe in the context of Sentinelese, the dictum, “I’m hostile therefore I am!” It is interesting to note how the image of Sentinelese hostility is read as signs of both the physical and ontological resilience of the community. In the aftermath of the tsunami the predominant image of the Sentinelese was of them pointing arrows upwards at the helicopter. It is interesting to note how such images taken right after the tsunami of December 2004, constitute “photemes” (See Chapter Three) that have been invoked to offer an ethnographic explanation of the event of fishermen killed on the North Sentinelese Island in January 2006.

Sentinelese photographed in 2004. Lone Sentinelese photographed two days after Asian tsunami of December 2004. Photographed by Commander A. Thapliyal of Indian Coast Guard. (Source. Andaman Nicobar Press Release)

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These photographic images of Sentinelese hostility were also used by the agencies of the state to defend their responses to the incident of January 2006. The Andaman Police Chief, Mr. Dharmendra Kumar for instance stated, We are in an impossible situation. If we raided the island there would be casualties on both sides. If the tribesmen go inland we might be able to sneak back there and collect the bodies—that’s as far as this will probably go. Numbers of people—government officials, anthropologists and fishermen—have tried to get on the island before but the tribes are clearly determined to live their lives without interference. Even when rescuers in helicopters and boats approached the island after the 2004 tsunami to check on any casualties, they were met with arrows and spears, so how are we going to conduct an investigation (Observer/ Guardian February 12th 2006)

In the above statement we see the use of a past image from 2004 to make a statement about the situation in 2006. Not only are the past images seen to condition future images but are also invoked to structure the textual images validating the unchanging politics of representing the Sentinelese. Within the unchanging photographic image of the Sentinelese there exists the structural element, the ‘photeme’ that imparts character and quality to what the text has to communicate. The unchanging image and changing text together, contribute to the construction of the “hostile” and “stone age primitive.” This conception of a constant photographic image placed within changing texts satisfies the needs to communicate a language reality. Unlike phonemes whose presence or absence serves to differentiate terms and the words which themselves have significance, ‘photemes’ of Sentinelese become like mythemes (Levi-Strauss 1963: 143). Sentinelese ‘photemes’ in other words, do not signify the Sentinelese but the relationships defined by the administration between them and the outsiders who are not allowed to have any contact with the Sentenelese. This complexity of the relationship between the world of Sentinelese and the outside world, subject to the changing nature of contacts is depicted by texts in a ‘word based history.’ But the ‘image based history’ in the form of ‘photemes’ goes beyond history to structure the imagination of the reality and truth of the Sentinelese to the world outside. Reports from North Sentinel Island for instance become embodied in a ‘word based history’ entrapped in its own tensions. In this history, the image and text fail to be inter-reflexive. Instead the text image inter-relationship has a propensity to communicate a tension. Words signify more than what the image signals, and image never conveys what the word intends to communicate. This creates the problem of words and images together never mutually succeeding in conveying the historic or ethnographic reality, to the reader of the

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document (Cf. Hastrup 1992). The administrative authorities who alone can contact the Sentinelese, and the outsiders who are kept away from the Sentinelese, together condition the imagined image of the Sentinelese, using the inbuilt tension between word and image. As an outcome the ethnographic as well as historic depiction of the Sentinelese and the act of deciphering the Sentinelese remains a surreality (See Clifford 1988: 118). Those in contact and those off limits collude in the formation of an imagination that informs the imaged reality of the Sentinelese. Within the structures of this optical regime the circulated images of Sentinelese become the means of a contrived contact for those kept out. It is a contact, but not quite. It is planned for some but to most it appears spontaneous. It is real but never completely real as it is a play of showing only what one wants to show and see. The event of this contact accomplished either through the camera or the close gaze of the binocular, acquires an additional political edge in the context of a landscape that is multilocated in the collective imagination of the non-tribals. The North Sentinel Island is for all purposes an imaged location that is textually reified by bringing together a range of emotional coordinates that sustain the geography and ethnography of the ‘primitive and stone age’ in contemporary times.

A STONE AGE TRIBE? It perhaps is reasonable to argue that reports and images of the Sentinelese perpetuate a myth in the Barthesian sense (1987: 109–159) where the media composes a metalanguage that uses “contact” as a sign that signifies the Sentinelese as “hostile and savage” signifiers of the Stone Ages (See Barthes 1987: 115). The discursive authority of media reports has condemned forced the Sentinelese to remain represented as the ultimate dangerous exotic, about whom not much is known. This attribute of ‘unknown-ness’ in today’s world of rapid information flows is valorized as a critical source of imagination for the globalized media and tourist industry. The world of the Sentinelese to these globalized purveyors of information, conjures a surrealist experience that beckons engagement. Thus in spite of being routinely ignored the Sentinelese make their appearance courtesy the media, albeit suddenly and dramatically to remind us that in the Bay of Bengal a primitive “stone age people” are still present among us! It was in January 2006 that this dramatic reappearance became the occasion for a new spate of debate and discussion in the media. How long would they remain in this state? How and why are they in this unchanging condition? Should the state protect them and let them remain in a state of “nature” or should be they be mainstreamed into national

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life and political citizenship? All these concerns came together in the media’s renewed interest in the Stone Age people of the Andamans, particularly in the context of the political implications of the incident and the administration’s position as arbitrator in a dispute between unequal legal adversaries. Caught between the concern for Sentinelese and the tragedy experienced by the nontribals, the issue for the Andaman administration had become unusually vexed. While it had to concede a lapse in the protection of the reserve territory, it had also to address the grievances of the victim’s families. The media in this context became the purveyor of both administrative concern and public outcry. In a Tehelka report from Delhi dated February 9th 2006 details about the criminal past of the two fishermen who had “strayed” into the reserve territory were compiled and published. The two fishermen named Raj and Tewari were convicts who had turned into comrades in prison. Both were released in 2002. Raj was in prison for killing his first wife and Tewari was charged for petty theft. The reporter adds that the two were not particularly regarded as most acceptable characters in the local society because of one being an old settler’s son who was involved in petty crime and the other being an illegal settler who had murdered his first wife and remarried after serving time in prison. With these biographical inputs the report served to condition readers in accepting the criminal inclinations of the fishermen. On the details of the circumstances leading to their death, readers were informed that the two men had acquired a small fishing boat somewhat dubiously with money siphoned off from the tsunami compensation aid distribution system. As far as the circumstances of their death go, the report made the point that it is not clear how the fishermen were killed. They were not sure if men were pulled out of the boat and killed by the Sentinelese or they were dead on the boat itself which later drifted on to the shore.12 Such inferences remained uncorroborated as small boats frequenting the area, often remained undetectable by the radar systems. In such cases the media could only conjecture the possibilities from a range of possible causes. There were other areas of conjecture too as the media and local environmentalists tried to make sense of what was often perceived as a tragedy. According to one report, (Tehelka, Delhi, February 9th 2006) the tragedy occurred as a result of the ‘wrong people being in the wrong place.’ The report however made it clear that the Sentinelese in their responses to the dead, made it clear that they were no cannibals! In its characteristically graphic reconstruction of the events of February 9th 2006 it stated, In the first sortie, the Coast Guard found the bodies of Raj and Tiwari on the beach surrounded by armed Sentinelese, who shot arrows at the aircraft. It made

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another sortie a little later but by this time, the bodies had vanished. The helicopter went low and stayed around, slowly moving to the other side of the island. By doing so, it dragged along the furious tribals who chased the aircraft. When at the opposite beach, sources said, the helicopter made a dash back to the spot where the killings took place. As the helicopter was flying low, the suction from the rotor blades blew off the top layer of the sand on the beach. They found the bodies. The Sentinelese had buried them. This is their custom.

Following upon this report and the ethnographic insertion about Sentinelese customs on death, comments poured in from other local sources. “They believe the evil spirit of the aggressor is buried along with him,” said Samir Acharya, head of the SANE. The administration’s response however continued to remain cautious despite the growing pressure for the retrieval of the bodies for funeral rites. Raj’s wife was told that her husband was dead. She insisted on seeing the body, but was told that it would not be possible. The administration maintained the firm stand that no landing or contact was to be attempted.13 This was in spite of the fact that the incident on North Sentinel Island had created a schism between the residents of Port Blair. A section of settlers expressed unhappiness, as they perceived the death of the two fishermen as an assault on the entire settler community. As feelings of resentment and revenge against the “hostile primitive tribe,” began to surface within some groups other sections of the community began to voice slightly different opinions. The new line was similar to the one taken by the settlers in response to an attack and killing of one of their members in the Jarawa Reserve territory. In that context the effected family was paid monetary compensation for the loss of individual life but discouraged from making public statements that the Jarawas killed an intruding settler in the reserve forest.14 Some settlers saw the Sentinelese defending their territory as a response to the evergrowing intrusions of settlers on an island marked explicitly as reserve territory. Such intrusions often went undetected both because of legal loopholes and of the social solidarities among settler communities, which prevented any public acknowledgement of such incidents. According to one media report on the fate of the two victims, “there remains a great deal of empathy with the victims’ families, especially over the fact that the fishermen’s bodies may never be recovered from their crude beach graves” (McDougall 2006). The issue of recovery of the dead body was given up as it involved an event staged with guns, “poison” arrows, and the possibility of international condemnation. The settlers however felt that the laws of the land should be upheld. Murder could not be accepted. The Sentinelese, they cried had broken the most fundamental of “their” laws (McDougall 2006). The wife of one of the victims, Sundar Raj, demanded a police investigation into the murders and

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claimed she may take her case to the Indian government. She told The Observer (February 12th 2006), My husband has been murdered and nobody is left to care for my family and me. The government and police have washed their hands off this matter: nobody seems to want to offend the tribe but two men have been killed. We want the bodies to be retrieved and the police to arrest the murderers. Whether my husband was poaching or not, he didn’t deserve to be killed with an axe.

Other relatives of Sundar Raj wanted justice and compensation. But the local authorities were reluctant to pursue the matter.15 The argument was that the area was restricted and it was illegally approached by the fishermen. A diametrically opposite view was expressed by the father of the second victim, Tewari, who told the correspondent, Dan McDougall of the Observer (dated February 12th 2006) that, Believing in justice is one of the pillars of your society but for me it’s different . . . My son got his own justice. He was breaking the law, poaching and trespassing on land that wasn’t his own and he was murdered. What more is there to say. . . As far as I am concerned the Sentinelese are the victims in this, not my son. They live in constant terror of heavily armed poachers from Myanmar [Burma] and Port Blair. They were only defending themselves with bows and arrows and rocks in the only way they know how. What I do want is my son’s body back so my wife and I can cremate him; we don’t want retribution. It is an impossible case to prosecute anyway.

In the frenzied barrage of media reports of these responses from the settlers and arguments from the administration, one of assumptions that remained constant throughout was that the Sentinelese were a “Stone Age tribe,” “uncontacted,” and living in “isolation.” The implication being that the incident of January 2006 was a function and consequence of their historical condition. A news report (“Our primitive fascination,” The Guardian February 10th, 2006) for instance stated that Sentinelese have lived in isolation for “60,000 years: genetically, therefore, there is a direct line between them and their preNeolithic ancestors. Unlike real Stone Age tribes, they probably use metal salvaged from shipwrecks.” It is this appellation of the “Stone Age” as a concrete visual image that like a template has been placed over tribal cultures (See Pandit 1990: 15) that demands interrogation.16 Let me try to elaborate this case argument by taking up the case of metal use among the Sentinelese (See also Chapter Two). Shipwrecks are not frequent incidents that could provide steady supplies of metal to be shaped into arrowheads and adze blades. On the other hand it is also true that one shipwreck

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could become a source of metal supply for a reasonably long time. Historically however, the Sentinelese have always used metal to make one of the largest arrowheads and adze blades among the Andaman Islanders. So the question is from where have the Sentinelese steadily got their supply of metals? It is important to note, that in recent times two major shipwrecks have been reported in the area. In 1991 salvage operators were authorized to dismantle foreign cargo ships M.V. Rusley and M.V. Primrose that had grounded in the reef off the coast of North Sentinel Island in summer of 1977 and August of 1981 respectively. After the abandoned ships got stuck near the North Sentinel shores, the tribal people were known to have scourged the wrecks for pieces of iron. Settlers from Port Blair too were visiting the sites to recover cargo and started selling it at the Port Blair markets. In this context the Andaman and Nicobar administration’s attention was drawn to the potential economic aspects of these wreckages and the ships were auctioned away to scrap dealers. (See Awaradi 1990: 186–87). For a continuous stretch of two months laborers worked at the site of the wreckage about 400 feet away from the coast of North Sentinelese. Groups of about seven to ten men worked in shifts of one week often in close proximity to the Sentinelese who too would try to recover their share of the scrap. Even before this work started, small fishing boats from Port Blair used to undertake surreptitious trips to the wreckage site to bring back loads of cargo and scrap. These facts call into question the argument that the sight of the two fishermen at close proximity of Sentinelese coast on January 25th 2006 was a rare occasion for the “hostile and isolated” Sentinelese and therefore a reason for confrontation. The owner of the company that had the contract to clear the shipwreck further contradicts the supposed isolation and hostility of the Sentinelese. In an interview I had taken of Mr. M A. Mohammad of Bamboo Flat, Port Blair in 1993, he said: When I went with my workers to start recovering and cutting out all that could be recovered from the stuck cargo ship we were all worried! We were told that Sentinelese were far away but we still carried fire crackers, short of guns, to scare the tribals, just in case! On reaching the location it was evident that somebody had been on the deck of the partly submerged ship as we found burnt fire wood and used candle sticks and paper wrappers and bottles. These were obviously left by fishermen who came aboard to gather what they could. After two days, in the early morning when it was low tide we saw three Sentinelese canoes with about a dozen men about fifty feet away from the deck of Primrose. We were skeptical and scared and had no other solution but to bring out our supply of bananas and show it to them to attract them and minimize any chance of hostility. They took the bananas and came up on board of Primrose and were frantically looking around for smaller pieces of metal scrap, much of what our work-

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ers had cut up with torch lights. The welding torch was a major scare for them something we discovered every time they visited us. We however would oblige them with small pieces of iron rod but they preferred flat strips, which we did provide them. They visited us regularly at least twice or thrice in a month while we worked at the site for about 18 months, excluding the heavy rain season.

Given this experience of the Sentinelese and the outsiders in close proximity over a sustained period of time it is hard to imagine that the Sentinelese have ever been isolated from outsiders or fiercely “protective” of their isolated situation. The case of Primrose and the supply of metal to the Sentinelese in fact indicate the possibility of relationships they could have formed with others around the exchange of metal. The occasional shipwreck around the coastline could not have been the sole dependable source of metal needed to make adze blades and arrowheads.17 From a historical perspective, Portman (1899: 703,758,823) reports that even in the 1890’s there is much to believe that other tribal groups of the Andaman Islands visited North Sentinel Island. The Sentinelese were supposed to have interacted with these tribal groups on Rutland Island. These interactions could have led to certain degrees of conflict between the groups compelling the Sentinelese to become defensive of the island where they were the sole occupants (See Chapter Six and Eight on history of internal tribal group dynamics and conflict). Going by these accounts it could be reasonably argued that the Sentinelese, have been in contact both with other tribal groups of the Andaman Islands as well as with outsiders (Mathur 1985: 188). It would also be wrong to assume that they have remained completely “undisturbed” and isolated from the outside world after the end of colonial rule. The Indian administration that sought to follow the colonial tradition of undertaking friendly contacts with the Primitive Tribal Groups of the Islands tried once or twice to contact the Sentinelese. On few occasions the contact party on not being resisted by the ‘hostile’ tribe on the coast did get on to the island and walked in at times beyond the tree line to observe the structures and material culture around the camp ground. These lead to the formulation of some rudimentary ideas about the residential pattern and the total number of the Sentinelese on the Island. These observations, absolutely devoid of any interaction with the so-called “informant” generated some of the classic examples of the frozen picture of Sentinelese culture. In one instance, anthropologists in a contact team picked up a huge wooden board (2 feet by 3 feet) with geometrical design. This object was described as a Sentinelese board game (Pandit 1999: XVIII) never considering the fact that no other Andamanese tribal group have ever had a board game tradition and that it was possible that the “board game” could have been brought by the sea.18 Other assumptions and images about the

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Sentinelese making typical “obscene gestures” and laughing aloud after collecting “gift” items. (Note the bags full of coconuts behind the person) Photographed in 1998, in what was then regarded as “contact” expedition.

Sentinelese followed from the actual experience of official contacts. According to reports of such contacts the Sentinelese unlike the Jarawas rarely come out on sighting an outsider’s vessel at the coastline. Even after gifts had been dropped it frequently happened that the Sentinelese came out from the tree line after considerable time.19 They are quite circumspect about the visitors and often on collecting or while collecting items left as gifts (mainly coconuts and metal scrap) they would often make what authorities regarded as obscene sexual gestures using male genitalia and giggle aloud standing at the beach. On most occasions the contact party remained about 300 feet away in small boats gazing at the Sentinelese who slowly and casually would line up along the coastline. As the Sentinelese would enact the sexually charged gestures, the contact team would remain on guard in anticipation of an imminent attack in what was ultimately a “heterotopic space” where all rules were contingent. Such images have never been circulated, as it would add another awkward dimension to the “photeme” of the hostile primitive Sentinelese. The only image that seems to make perpetual sense and has been interpreted by successive contact parties is the image of the Sentinelese shooting arrows. All this is not to deny the fact that attacks by the Sentinelese on outsiders remains a possibility that can turn into reality at any point. I found this out during my first contact trip to North Sentinel Islands in the winter of 1993. On reaching close to the coastline I had filmed the Sentinelese looking at us while walking along the coastline, with a certain degree of apprehension. The boat I was in was turned around to trail the group of the Sentinelese we had spotted, and all of a sudden some of the men turned back and hurriedly tried to approach the water line pointing arrows at us. A moment for me was objectified in a “photeme” as I recalled and recorded the alleged gesture of hostility. If one

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had to put together the image of the Sentinelese giggling aloud standing on the beach and the imnage of the Sentinelese looking at us walking along the coastline in a sequence, it could be possible to argue that this alleged moment of hostility at the site carries with it the possibility of alternative readings seldom attempted. It is quite possible that the Sentinelese tried to dissuade us from photographing them or even sought to inquire if we had metal for their arrowheads or other items they had accumulated from previous outsider visits. Our imagined images of the Sentinelese have always denied the possibility of other stories that could emerge out of these photographs. Coming to other ethnographic conclusions that have been drawn from official photographs of contact parties it could pointed out that here too the inclination has been to freeze interpretations of Sentinelese culture within familiar terms of reference. Yet a close reading of the same evidence indicates the possibilities of alternative explanations. In the years after 1990 for instance, the Sentinelese on spotting the contact party were often seen to drag

Walking Passing along the coastline, a group of Sentinelese men spot an approaching boat carrying gifts. Their attitude shows that the approach of the contact party is not something that is special or much awaited. Neither is there any preparedness to attack. Photographed in 1993.

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Sentenelese individual turns back to discharge arrow at the contact party. Photographed in 1993.

out their dug-out outrigger canoes from the tree line, across the sandy strip and use a long pole to push the canoe around in the shallow waters. This was partly encouraged by the administration in order to make it easier for them to come close and collect gift from the contact party. Though the Sentinelese and Ongees are the only “canoe building” tribal cultures of the Andaman Islands, Ongees alone use oars to maneuver the canoes in deep waters. The Sentinelese use long poles instead of oars to push their canoes and are seen remain confined to the relatively shallow waters of the coral reef. Only on some occasions when the weather is relatively calm the Sentinelese have been observed to use their canoes for moving from one location to the other around the circular island.20 The point I want to emphasize is that the use of the Sentinelese canoe embodies a history of practice seldom interpreted from contact photographs. The Sentinelese unlike the Ongees may not be using canoes for hunting out in the sea but have definitely used canoes for moving along the coastline from place to place on the island. Given the dense vegetation on the island movement using the canoe is practical for reaching various resource areas spread across the island. Traditionally the Ongees too would undertake canoe journeys from one place to another by touching the coastline and then walking along the radial pathways on the circular island of Little Andaman.

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It is unfortunate that facts like these have failed to make their way into official debates on the impact of the December 2004 tsunami on the North Sentinel Island. The impact of the giant surge on this part of the islands has indeed been dramatic. The earthquake that caused the tsunami tilted a part of North Sentinelese island, drowning some reefs and pushing a large segment above the sea level. These enormous tectonic changes in the North Sentinel Island was photographed by both regular cameras (refer to Appendix D) as well as by satellite installations.21 In 2005 when I had the opportunity to visit North Sentinel Islands and see the impact of the geomorphologic changes myself I realized that the aerial photographs or the satellite images could not convey the scale of the change that had taken place. After the tsunami a large extent of the coastline even at high tide confronts the presence of a new landmass about three to four feet high. This land mass formed of decayed coral now presents the Sentinelese with an obstruction over which they need to strenuously negotiate before they can reach the water. This has significant implications when considered in the light of the fact that the protected fishing ground within the Sentinelese reefs has been severely disturbed and it remains to be seen how soon the local environment recovers and whether the hunting and gathering economy for Sentinelese undergoes any major adaptation. The obstructive land mass has implications for possible attempts at contact too. Now it is not possible for the Sentinelese to just stand on the sandy beach and have a visual contact with the contact party neither is it possible for the Sentinelese to drag their canoes onto the sandy shore line and launch it into the sea. All around the island the coral reef and sea floor has risen up forming an approximately 150 feet wide strip of exposed sea floor around the entire island. The exposed dead corals now dominate all around the island that once used to be surrounded by a ribbon of gentle sandy shores. In fact during my 2005 visit, after a long search we did spot a group of six Sentinelese standing and staring at us, waiting for the gunny bags full of coconuts to be cast towards them. It was practically impossible for them to come towards the water line as a seventy-foot wide stretch of stinking, sun dried coral ground was between them and the sea water. We too could not move closer, as we did in the past. The bags of coconuts were dropped but neither did Sentinelese managed to collect it nor could we deposit it for them.22 While there has been much media debate on the issue of labeling the Sentinelese as “Stone Age Primitives living in Isolation” in the wake of the events of January 2006, (see for instance, Stephen Corry, “Modern Times Loot of Tribal Resources Masquerades as Progress’ in The Times of India, p.13, April 10th 2006) there have been little interest in another story. The story of how the Sentinelese must be negotiating the altered geography of

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their island. The discourse of Survival International ironically ignored this crucial question of the physical survival of a people whose cause they so earnestly advocated.

THE GHOST OF CANNIBALISM The Coast Guard’s report of the incident along with its use of the image of the arrow shooting Sentinelese worked to revive yet another debate on the issue. In a show of what was deemed to be both political correctness and administrative expediency, the Coast Guard report emphasized the fact that the fishermen’s bodies were partially buried and left un-mutilated and hence was evidence that served to dismiss the long held belief that the Sentinelese were cannibals. Although the report stopped short of examining the sources of this commonly held belief, it is clear that the reference to the issue of cannibalism stems from the representations of early colonial explorers of the Islands. The representations of these explorers evidently drew upon the observations of the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy who in the 2nd century BC pointed to the “Island of Cannibals” in the general area of the Bay of Bengal.23 Whether this really did refer to the Andamans is open to debate as there is no clear and specific reference to the islands until the 7th century AD in Arab and other sources, which mention some very black men and their practices of cannibalism. (See Basu 1971, Mathur 1985: 5) Thereafter, reference to the islands in written records became more frequent and most mention the prevalence of cannibalism. The most famous early reporter was Marco Polo who seems to have passed close to the islands in around circa 1290 but never set foot on them. He wrote, from hearsay, that the inhabitants ate anybody they could catch as an outsider! (Marco Polo 1958: 258) Alexender Hamilton (1930), who navigated the Bay of Bengal between 1688 and 1723, asserted that the Andamanese were cannibals and extremely violent and used to take slaves from the neighboring islands of Nicobars (1930: 36–38). The tribal groups of the Ongee, Jarawa and Sentinelese in particular had the reputation for killing any sailor who landed on the islands, either through shipwreck or while in search of fresh water. Andaman Islanders standing in ambush and attacking by surprise was also noted by J.E Alexander as a typically experienced encounter (1827: 8–12) and pointed out that in spite of plenty of useful resources on the island the existing circumstances made landing on islands like Little Andaman and Sentinels “extremely hazardous.” Later colonial observers like Colebrooke confirmed the hostility of the natives, but categorically pointed out to the lack of evidence of the natives eating the flesh of enemies. It was however noted that the bodies of the de-

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ceased were often found mangled and torn (1795: 389). The Ongees, with whom I have worked since 1983, insist that they have never heard their ancestors ever talk about cannibalism being practiced any where on the Andaman Islands.24 Such assertions are indeed supported by ethnographic research. According to Radcliffe-Brown for instance, the Ongees have always argued that people who belonged to their own community were always buried, but outsiders who were the victims of violent encounters were dealt with in a different manner (cf. Man 1883: 45, 78 and Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 8fn.1, 109–10). Such bodies were dragged to coastal areas and then cut up and set on fire. The prevalence of such practices when observed by early explorers on the island were wrongly interpreted as signs of cannibalism.25 Returning to the Coast Guard report in the wake of the events of January 2006, it can be argued that notwithstanding the ethnographic evidence against the prevalence of cannibalism, it was ironic that the idea was invoked again. The Coast Guards in the course of their aerial survey of the North Sentinel Islands in search of the dead fishermen still looked for the possibilities of cannibalism and then pointed to the lack of evidence to substantiate it. The specter of cannibalism it can be observed continues to haunt debates on tribal groups such as the Sentinelese who remain trapped in the representational discourses of “primitivism.” 26 At another level it could be argued that if the specter of cannibalism was invoked in colonial discourse as both a historic and metaphoric description of tribal violence in the Andaman Islands it becomes imperative to remind ourselves that the colonial authorities too played a constitutive role in sustaining the structure and idiom of this imputed violence. Evidence of this comes from historical records of expeditions to various campgrounds in the forest interiors to capture tribals and present them as substitutes for escaped prisoners from Port Blair (Temple 1903). These frequent “punitive expeditions” often ended up in the ransacking of tribal camps and brutal capture of tribals particularly Jarawas. In this context it is not surprising that the tribal groups should not only construct the image of the colonial authority as the ‘violent outsider’ who needed to be confronted with equal measures of hostility. In the context of such encounters between the tribal groups and the colonial outsiders, it could be argued that the discourse of Sentinelese hostility, the cautious aerial surveys over North Sentinel territory and the abiding image of the bodies of the dead fishermen surrounded by arrow pointing men, are all refractions of violence embedded in the historical kaleidoscope through which we continue to view the configured and reconfigured images of the Sentinelese. The image of a violent person it has been argued, involves a symbolic legitimation of outwardly directed aggression (Bloch, 1992: 44–5). In Bloch’s view, killing creates an ‘inverted reproduction’

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which requires the symbolic presence, as much as the actual presence, of outsiders, who must have their vitality conquered (Bloch 1992: 44–45). Drawing upon this insight it seems possible to argue that in the context of the Sentinelese encounter with the outsider, violence or hostility are mutually constitutive. Here the experience of both the tribal and the non-tribal become conflated and collapsed in the single constitutive moment of encounter. It may be of interest to note that the Sentinelese, among many of the settlers are known by the Hindustani term, the “Pathan Jarawas,” signifying both ferocity and valor. Much like the early Jarawas, the Sentinelese are known to be robust and temperamentally fierce in resisting outsiders. Given their legendary capacity for resistance, settlers found in the Sentinelese parallels of the popular subcontinental image of the Pathan.27 The administration too with its policy of minimal intervention has contributed to keep alive this image of Sentinelese valor. Although as detailed above, several attempts were made to contact the Sentinelese through “goodwill expeditions” intended to drop gifts of coconuts, mirrors, plastic balls and glass-beads, the sight of the Sentinelese present on the shore with bows and arrows made these events difficult. Officials on most occasions would wait for the Sentinelese to retreat beyond a limit (See Pandit 1990: 31–50) and then drop the gifts or just set them adrift towards the coastline.28 Most of the contact expeditions would be events marked by uncertainty and perhaps even fear. The discontinuance of the contact expeditions and the policy of minimal intervention however have reinforced the necessity of surveillance through the institution of a rigorously controlled optical regime. In accordance with the restrictive premises of this regime the administration of the island has arrogated to itself the power to decide who can or cannot visit the islanders, how much of them could be seen and what could be written. As a “Tribal Reserve Area,” North Sentinel Island is strictly off-limits to outsiders. The Indian government had staked its definitive claim to North Sentinel in 1970, when an official surveying party landed at an isolated spot and erected—atop a disused native hearth—a stone tablet proclaiming the island part of the Republic of India. Since the Sentinelese were not, and to this day are still not aware of the existence of either writing or India, it is unlikely that this monument has made much of an impression. George Weber (1997: Chapter 8) has rightly pointed out that the practical problems surrounding North Sentinelese Island as being Indeed formidable and would test the capabilities of even the most competent government. On the supply side there are growing numbers of illegal fishing boats, coral collectors not averse to blowing up reefs with dynamite and “businessmen” ferrying sightseers around the island for a fee. On the demand side there are wellheeled tourists on yachts looking for the “last challenge,” thrill-seekers of all kinds

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plus, of course, journalists after a story. The Indian Navy’s job is to keep such visitors away from the island but it cannot patrol there around the clock.

Indian Navy helicopters and ships patrol the area with keen regularity. The islands have always attracted local fishermen who are known to make surreptitious visits to the Islands and its outlying reefs dodging the watchful eyes of the Coast Guards. In recent times the Andaman archipelago has also become safe haven for criminals and outlaws operating the underground trade routes between South and South East Asia. And of course there are the ubiquitous loggers who make illegal entries in search of hardwoods and poachers very often from Thailand who come for sharks, and sea cucumbers. There are other and perhaps more eager visitors too. Since the 1975 publication of the photographs in the National Geographic trips to the North Sentinel Islands had acquired another dimension. As the island came under administrative restriction, individuals with political clout would persuade relevant officials to organize trips for them to the islands as special favors. It has been known that senior officials in the bureaucracy would manage trips to the North Sentinel not only for themselves but also for their extended families and friends. Such visits by senior officials often set precedence for junior officials many of who took to the idea of visiting the North Sentinels as an exotic picnic spot ideal for a photographing event like a safari.29 These visits were perhaps inspired by the precedence of the 1975 contact event, when the exiled king of Belgium, on a tour of the Andamans, was brought by local dignitaries for an overnight cruise on the waters off North Sentinel. Mindful of lessons learned in the past, the administration kept the royal party out of arrow range, approaching just close enough for a Sentinelese to aim a bow menacingly at the king, who had reportedly expressed his profound satisfaction with the adventure. Contact expeditions that followed from this were organized with the explicit purpose of allowing visitor to have a visual experience of the hostile primitive, from the secure zones of administrative patronage. The selective exercise of the norms of the “optical regime” set up by the Island administration remains in a sense a powerful display of the state’s authority to define and structure the relations of the Sentinelese with the world outside.30 Both the selective exercise and often the open transgression of the structures of the administration’s optical regime have inevitably served to reinforce the representational frames through which the Sentinelese are seen, photographed or written about. What is desired to be seen either by the naked eye or the eye behind the shutter is all preconditioned for both the image-maker and the text composer. The Sentinelese landscape—including space, history and discourse generated by contact events within and across boundaries, blends political concerns with ritualized acts of photographing the hostility of “stone age people.”

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In this context even the most “politically correct” eye colludes in the reification of an image shot through with the historically asymmetrical relations of power exercised on the coast of North Sentinelese Island. Madhusree Mukherjee’s book suggestively titled The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (2003), for instance, is a journalist’s passionate account of a tortuously negotiated visit to the Sentinel islands. Bearing gifts of clothes and nails and hoping to enact a personal contact event with the Sentinelese, Mukherjee grudgingly acknowledges the ambivalent nature of this contact she organized with illegal help from local wheeler-dealers. (Ibid., 229–233). Her mission however is sought to be justified by it’s purported moral premise. Mukherjee is overwhelmed by the visual experience of a mere “glimpse” of the Sentinelese and apparently seeks no more. She justifies her contact event as an attempt to verify the condition of the tribals in the context of their exposure to outsiders. Notwithstanding these moral disclaimers, Mukherjee’s pursuit of the Sentinelese and the textual account of it for popular consumption marks the dubious success of a representational practice she ironically seeks to challenge. A similar contact event using local fishing boats was attempted even before Ms. Mukherjee by Adam Goodheart, an established writer from Washington D.C. who has edited journals and magazines like the Civilization and has written articles for the Atlantic Monthly, the and New York Times. In 2000 he published an article titled ‘The Last Island of the Savages’ in The American Scholar (Autumn 2000, 69(4): 13–44). This piece tells us about his romantic adventure of trying to visit the Sentinel Islands to see the tribals interacting with local fishermen. This illegal visit turned out to be ill fated too as bad weather forced the organizers to turn back from the shores of the island almost as soon as they reached it. It is interesting at this point to observe that Goodhart’s (2000) account much like Mukherjee’s (2003) best-seller display a textualizing impulse that even while seeking to represent the Sentinelese on their own terms betrays the very habits of “scopophilia” (Freud 1952, Mulvey 1975) sustained and legitimated by the optical regime of the state. Much like the non-tribal fishermen entering the fishing area associated with the Sentinelese, scopophiliacs in the garb of writer/activists too are known to visit the Reserve Territory to script their own visual encounters. The Reserved Territory for the Jarawas, Ongees and Sentinelese are thus constantly under pressure of non-tribals who enter to poach not forest resources, but images and texts through acts reflective of both a practiced structure and a structure of practice. Since 2000 the writings of Goodhart, Mukherjee and Tomory have established a new genre of the travelogue that unwittingly uses personalized ‘contact events’ to reinforce the objectification of tribal communities such as the Ongees, Jarawas and Senitnelese. These textual or visual

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accounts become exercises in self-projection and rarely offer any insights into the understanding of the first people of the Islands. (See MacCannell 1994). The boundaries between the tribal and non-tribal worlds as a result of such contact events have become synthetic, porous and permeable. For the tribal people the experience of contact and the ceaseless border crossings has made the Andamans a “placeless place” where meanings are allowed to transform the imaginary into actual memory, the historical into ritual, and the political into fictional, and permits many other combinations of the types of discourses that are made in a “placeless place.” Reserve tribal territories in particular have transformed into ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault 1986), which simultaneously represent the two sites of culture of the tribal and non-tribal created and structured by the exigencies of colonial and post-colonial rule. Histories of contact are replete with examples of the complex cultural codes through which selves, identities and political relations have found expression within this heterotopic space. On many an occasion in the colonial past for example, Jarawas would be brought onto colonial ships by indigenous naval lascars of Indian and Burmese descent accompanied by Andamanese sharp shooters. On board the Jarawas would observe the clothed British naval officers with the same curiosity as the non-tribals would observe their nakedness. The outsiders trying best to hold back their chuckles would give gifts in gestures of friendship, while the Jarawas according to reports would be childishly amused, after running around chaotically for no apparent reason. Some of them were often thrown overboard to swim back to the coast. These events as recorded by Portman (1899) are no different from the contact events where non–tribals land on the Sentinel Islands performing similar rituals of contact. Events of contact initiated by the administration in fact involve the silent imposition of notions of exclusion on a people whose inclinations to be inclusive has never been perceived or given a chance. Consequently, the borders and boundaries of the islands wherein such rituals of contact are played out become like a series of concave reflecting mirrors, distorting the identities, images and intentions of the people on a landscape that is given (natural) as a continuum but segmented (cultural) as a territory. This makes the event of contact at the imposed boundaries a series of reflections involving the ones who contact and the ones who are contacted. The people are both reflectors and reflected in the discourse. The landscape too in this context is not inert, for people in the same landscape give quite different meanings to it, meanings that allow boundaries to make landscapes expressive of contradictory, fragmented ideas. This landscape with particular type of borders and ideas contained in it perpetuates the image of groups like Sentinelese as being hostile and isolated. Could it be that historically the state has regulated the image of the tribal “other” to produce and sustain its own self-image? For after all the colonialist

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writing about the Jarawas as hostile and a problem, fifty-one years later they reappear in state records as being completely transformed. The political engagement with the Jarawas both textually and visually over a sustained period of time no doubt has facilitated the documentation of this transformation and the concomitant change in the representation of the Jarawas. In the case of the Sentinelese however state engagement has been historically sporadic and uneven. Even in the most representative of colonial records as those of Portman (1899) do we find the Sentinelese being discussed in any depth or detail. This trend of indifference or cautiousness in whatever terms it may be described was related to the nature of its political engagement with the North Sentinel Islands. For the colonial state’s expansionist drive in the Andaman Islands the Jarawas presented more of a “problem” than the Sentinelese by virtue of their territorial location. The Sentinelese location at a considerable distance from the Andaman Islands did not attract the same degree of political attention. In the case of the post-independence Indian administration too, the presence of the Sentinelese in official discourse has been directly proportional to the extent of political interest or engagement with it. The recent surge of writing about the Sentinelese is related to the problems generated in the wake of the increasing instances of illegal intrusion into the Islands. Textual and visual constructions of the Sentinelese in other words reflect the nature of the “problem” they represent to the Indian state. If therefore the image of the “hostile” Jarawas in colonial times was constructed in response to the political exigencies of an expansionist state, the image of the “hostile” Sentinelese is perpetuated as part of a political solution to an increasing law and order problem on the extreme borders of the Indian state.

CONCLUDING REMARKS In understanding a photograph, Bourdieu (1990) has distinguished between ‘recovering’ the meanings which a photograph ‘proclaims, that is, the explicit intentions of the photographer; it also means deciphering the surplus of meaning which it betrays by being part of the symbolism of an age, a class or an artistic group.’ (Bourdieu 1990: 7). While Bourdieu was primarily concerned with ‘amateur’ photography and especially those of the French working class, my concern has been with the photographs taken to make a report, or more specifically images invested with various kinds of “truth value.” Taking the events of January 2006 as the point of entry into a discussion of the “truths” embodied in the reports on the “hostile,” “Stone Age” people of the North Sentinel Islands, I have tried to draw attention to the politics of representation underlying the textual and visual content of such reportage. I have tried to un-

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derstand the ways in which textual and visual hegemonies have been constituted and consolidated through the often -unacknowledged collaborations between the state, the media and the non-tribal population at large. In this context it becomes clear that the construct of news from the Andamans is itself a cultural subject inviting an ethnographic/semiotic analytical focus. In the specific case of the Sentinelese it becomes clear that text (words) and image (photographs) form a specific relationship in the visual depiction of the subject as a “constant” over historical time. Using my own contact with the Sentinelese and analyzing the images I made in relation to the existing images of Sentinelese, I have sought to emphasize how cultural interpretations often remain unseen but embedded within visualized histories.31 My ethnographic concern was to outline how text and images put together in the context of a contrived ‘contact event’ worked to perpetuate the trope of the “primitive” as the ontological point of reference for the people of the North Sentinel Islands. Reports of the non-tribals killed by the Sentinelese in January 2006, when seen in relation to the reports of the tsunami of December 2004 and its impact on the North Sentinelese Islands, show how the media constructed their stories around images, history and events identical to those constructed for Ongees and Jarawas in earlier times. The practiced structure of “contact” and “representation” plays out as structured practices in case of the Sentinelese too. Reports of contacts display contrary or surplus meanings when read in a manner described by Michel de Certeau (1984: 165–76) as “poaching” where the reader surreptitiously finds meanings other than the authorized ones in the texts. The image and text together contribute for the different viewers and subjects a ‘text’ to be read, and interpreted, so as to concretize the idea that the power lacking to make meaning is real, whereby readings may diverge from the authorized interpretation they are subject to. In the case of the reports on the Sentinelese “poaching” becomes imperative because the text and image composers are powerfully differentiated from their recipients/reader by virtue of their exclusively experienced event of contact with Sentinelese. This raises the question, as to what really is new or exceptional about news if a series of images are imposed over one another in order to perpetuate a standardized interpretation of culture? How does news become news in a context where each report is crafted in such a way that the recipient of the text and image becomes conditioned to “cross the conceptual wires” (Geertz 1973: 447) in a familiar pattern of engagement? It becomes necessary at this point to recognize the structures of this created discourse wherein the story of the Sentinelese unfolds between the lines and among the images (See Clifford 1988: 118). It also becomes important to understand how each story takes the form of a “surrealist creation” where fragments of the unexpected and expected outcomes of contacts are juxtaposed (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2004: 14)

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through various combinations of text and image. Such reports are peculiarly designed to provoke the manifestations of extraordinary realities drawn from the purported domains of ‘exotic savage’ and ‘hostile primitive.’ This coupling of realities, often irreconcilable in appearance to the outside world, forms an integral part of the intended strategies for the projection of Sentinelese culture. Consequently photographs are not just photographic moments nor are they simple evidence, they are themselves historical; embodying the complexities of the contexts wherein the perception of ‘reality’ takes shape and is recorded. This has made the series of images of the Sentinelese “cultural circumscriptions” of what is determined and validated by the photographic moment asserting in other words, what is ‘photographable’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 6). Central to the nature of the narrative and photographic images in the discourse on the Sentinelese is an intense dislocation of time and space. This discourse preserves a fragment of the past that is transposed in apparent entirety to the present—the ‘there-then’ becomes the ‘here-now’ (Barthes 1977:44). In his extended discussions on the photograph, Barthes (1981: 4) observed, that what the photograph reproduces to infinity had occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the case of the images and related texts on the Sentinelese what we find is the repetition of images not to arrest time but to powerfully persuade the viewer/reader to stop lingering, imagining or analyzing in a way that is possible by the natural flow of time (Cf Sontag 1978: 81). It could be argued that images contribute to the text to perpetuate the past in an insidious fashion by denying time or presenting a timeless vision, an ‘ethnographic present and thereby generate what Fabian (1983) regards an “atemporal discourse.” It is that atemporality of the discourse on the Sentinelese that needs interrogation. Ever since the events of January 2006, news reports on the Sentinelese have evidently decreased and would perhaps ultimately cease—but contact events with them continue. The Port Blair authorities have found themselves confronted with the problem of how to leave the aboriginal population alone as well as find a convincing answer to the question as to whether they can really be left alone. For there is little doubt in the assertion that while all the Andamanese groups seem to have survived the tsunami of 26th December 2004 remarkably well—much better than the Indian settlers, their long-term survival remains far from assured. NOTES 1. Interesting parallel to this is the account of the fact that the Sentinelese had killed the domesticated living pigs left on the coasts of North Sentinelese as “gifts” by the administrations ‘contact party’ (Pandit 1990: 25). The living pig was speared and buried under sand by the Sentinelese. This sequence of life taking of an extrane-

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ous animal is homologous to the reported process by which the bodies of the fishermen are dealt with (See Chapter Six). 2. The Telegraph London dated February 9th 2006 and Sydney Morning Herald (February 8th 2006) reporter Peter Foster (from New Delhi) added the dimension of really not knowing if the Sentinelese killed the fishermen or they drifted in to the island’s coast already drunk dead in a small fishing boat whose simple anchor had snapped in the night while they slept. As the mourning relatives had demanded to see the dead bodies that could not be recovered, the Island’s Police chief did reconsider mounting an operation to recover the bodies. Strangely the dead bodies were identified under the sand mounds as the down draught from chopper rotors had exposed the buried fishermen. SANE, the local environmental activist group had rightly urged the authorities to leave the dead bodies and respect the “five kilometer exclusion zone” thrown around the island. 3. See George (1996) on how photography gains a circulation value within the context of legal regulation of head hunting in South East Asia. Pinney (1998, 2003) also makes a similar point that the photographs of the dead person are circulated within the family to sustain the memory of the dead relative (Cf. Chatterjee 2003). 4. According to late Bakhtawar Singh, in an interview given to me in 1989, North Sentinel was visited by the first film crew in the spring of 1974 to shoot a documentary titled Man in Search of Man. Along with a few anthropologists and, some armed policemen, Raghubir Singh had joined this team as a photographer for National Geographic. This was one of the earliest projects in free India where the administration’s planned to establish friendship with the Andamanese tribal groups through “gestures and plenty of gifts” was initiated. As the team’s motorized dinghy made its way through the reefs toward shore, some natives emerged from the woods. In spite of the “friendly” gesture made, the Sentinelese responded with a hail of arrows. The dinghy proceeded to a landing-spot out of arrow range, where the policemen, dressed in padded armor, disembarked and laid gifts on the sand: a miniature plastic automobile, some coconuts, a tethered live pig, a child’s doll, and some aluminum cookware. Then they returned to the dinghy and waited to observe the natives’ reaction to the gifts. The natives’ reaction was to fire more arrows, one of which hit the film director in the left thigh. As Bakhtawar Singh remembered, the Sentinelese man who had shot the film director was observed “laughing proudly and walking toward the shade of a tree, where he sat down to rest after his gallant accomplishment.” Other Sentinelese were observed spearing the pig and the doll and burying them in the sand. They did, however, take the cooking pots and the coconuts with evident delight. At the time of the incident Bakhtawar Singh served as the head of the Bush Police force in the Island administration. Bush police force was created specially for the Andamanese Tribal groups 5. See Incident of 11th February 1987 in Pandit 1990: 44–46. 6. Incidents of violent breakouts have been documented and suppressed (Pandit 1990: 45) however each spot of contact is commemorated with the name of the administrative officials and their acts of ‘bravery and courage’ like Seneri Point where a top official Mr. Seneri was attacked in the mid 1980’s when he had insisted to get off the boat as no tribals were visible and “feel the unexplored soil of North Sentinel.”

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7. I have experience of visiting the North sentinel Islands twice before once in 1999 and then again in 2005 after the tsunami. In my previous two visits where we only had ‘visual contact’ it was significant that from a distance of about 100 feet one could observe the Sentinelese men making what we would regard as “obscene sexual gestures” by holding up their penises. It is not clear what the implications are but I have observed similar farcical acts done by Jarawas during the contact events when they would even come aboard the main ship’s deck. If one had to assume that the beach, much like the ship is a form of heterotoppia (Foucault 1986) then the Sentinelese may be resisting outsiders not only by gestures of outright hostility but also by deliberately farcical sexual gestures that may have had the effect of unsettling the outsiders gaze in a space that at the specific moment belonged neither to the Sentinelese nor to the administrative authorities. 8. On January 8th 1991 the following front-page headline appeared in Port Blair’s government-owned newspaper, The Daily Telegrams: “First friendly contact with Sentinelese.” The report below stated: 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 trying 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. As usual, the Sentinelese rushed down to grab it. But for the first time ever, the aborigines 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 apart 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 aborigines 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 him. After he had gone through five bags of coconuts, he climbed into the dinghy, headed back to the Tarmugli administration’s ship, and returned to Port Blair to spread word of his triumph.

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.

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9. See Venkateswar 2001 for an analysis of the issue of gender in contact expeditions both for the perspective of the contactor and contacted. Basing her analysis on post-modernist position on the location of the ethnographer, where the position of ‘I’ and voice of ‘I’ Venkateswar (2001) attempts a self-reflective take on ‘her ethnographic position in the field’ and the impact it had on the, interpretation of the culture under study. Such self-reflexivity though welcome might perhaps have been better served if equal measures of reflection were expended on the subjects themselves. 10. This was the practice also among the Jarawas. In fact I was also asked to personally plant coconut and banana plants in the Lakra Lungta region in 1992. Albeit reluctantly had to do this task in order to be permitted to enter the Jarawa territory and do work on behalf of AAJVS as it was not acceptable for a ‘scholar from overseas’ to enter Jarawa territory just to do ethnographic work. 11. The official policy of the government was first stated in the document titled “Master Plan1991–2021 for Welfare of Primitive Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar Islands” by S.A. Awaradi (former Assistant Commissioner of the Nicobars and Director of Tribal Welfare in the Port Blair administration). Originally published in January 1990 it stated that Though there is a specified contact team consisting of the Secretary of Tribal Welfare, Superintendent of Police (Bush Police) Deputy Director of Anthropological Survey of India, Port Blair, Medical Officer, Executive Secretary and the Senior Social Worker of AAJVS, in practice, as in the case of the Jarawas, the special visitors/VIP also accompany the team, creating similar situations as discussed in paragraphs 19.21 and 19.24. The gifts of coconut, machetes are dropped on the beach of the island. This new item of food may cause complication in digestive and other systems of the Sentinelese. There is the possibility of the danger due to consumption of spoiled coconuts. At times the “adventurous” members of the contact team may cause the mishap like the one that happened a decade ago when the Sentinelese shot the arrows at the “daring” member and the latter had to fire in self defense, and escaped narrowly and fortunately he opened fire in the air that time (paragraph 20.4). Therefore, the basic question is why at all these contact expeditions? The Sentinelese do not require the benevolence of the modern civilization and if at all they require any thing, it is the non-interference, The continuation of the practice of organizing the regular contact expedition to the Sentinelese would raise certain fundamental questions like for instance, what right does the modern man have got to interfere in the totally isolated tribal life of the Sentinelese? What right does he have to decide unilaterally to impose his “friendship” on the Sentinelese who has been vehemently resisting it? Is it not their fundamental community right to live their own way, which they have been enjoying time immemorial? What is the logic in, meddling with their independent and the perfect eco-cultural equilibrium (may be unwittingly) first, and then attempt to run to destabilize the equilibrium?

In contrast to all the administrative concerns, none of the administration records have any reliable data on the total number of Sentinelese, mainly because it has never been the concern to even make any kind of survey estimate. It is strange that the island has been subject to aerial survey but never for estimating the population count. The difficulty or lack of effort to collect demographic data is reflected in the compilation of

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the Sentinelese population in colonial accounts. For instance note the jumps in the estimate of the Sentinelese population (Source Dhingra 2006): Year-Population 1911–117 1921–117 1931–50 1951–50 1961–500 1971–100 1981–100 1991–80

Given the old observations recorded in the administration quarters and from what I have observed it is also my guess that the total population today may not be more then forty. 12. Interestingly The Times from London on February 9th 2006 reported the same news, “Stone Age killers keep law away from bodies” and stated, “Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari were killed by poison arrows after their boat beached on the desert island home of the Sentinelese. We have no real evidence that Sentinelese use poison arrows. The report further goes on to perpetuate a general stereotype by referring to Marco Polo. Marco Polo “coming across the natives of the Andaman Islands in 1296, wrote that they kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon. Members of the tribe wear the jawbones of dead relatives around their necks.” Such conjectural reporting in conjunction with the images circulated seldom instills any awareness about cultures like the Sentinelese but only adds a ‘spin’ to prevalent stereotypes. According to the report published by The Observer (London) a report by Dan McDougall titled “Survival Comes First for the Last Stone Age Tribe in the World” (dated February 12th 2006): stated, “Other fishermen, who witnessed the attack from the water, described how the pair, believed to be drunk on palm wine, died after they were attacked by near-naked axe-wielding tribal warriors when their craft beached on the island.” It is amazing how in the span of about fifteen days various perspectives on the death of the fishermen were generated to align with the imagined image of the Sentinelese. By 2007, the story began to make appearances in various blogspots on the internet and some bloggers it seemed were particularly taken in by the heroism of a little known indigenous community holding out against the ‘civilized world’ by the simple use of the use of bow and arrow! Tyson Yunkaporta (June 2007) an Australian aboriginal in an article titled “Andaman Tribe Strikes Back,” wrote, “the Sentinelese are an inspiration—heroes not only of he Andamans but the entire indigenous world.” 13. According to the 9th February edition of Times from London and the Sydney Morning Herald, the Andaman Islands Police Chief, Dharmendra Kumar, felt that an “operation might be mounted later. Right now, there will be casualties on both sides. The tribesmen are out in large numbers. We shall let things cool down and once these tribals move to the island’s other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies.”

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14. In the course of my field work among the settler community particularly during 2005–2006 on numerous occasions he settlers have expressed that the tribal communities like Jarawas and Sentinelese “must be tamed and made to settle down in a specified part of the forest so that they learn to cultivate and work hard like settlers so that the uncultivated and the unexplored sections of land could be put to better use.” 15. According to the Andaman police chief, Dharmendra Kumar, nothing really could be done in spite of the witnesses, as they were all illegal poachers who would not testify because they could be imprisoned. The other problem faced by the administration was that there was a language barrier; nobody spoke the Sentinelese language, which would be needed in the process of identifying the culprits and compiling forensic evidence. This was identical to the situation that developed in the context of the Jarawas killing the settlers within the reserve territory and when the legal authorities not knowing the language would refuse to arrest the entire tribe. What is important is that the non-tribal complaints are specific individuals but the alleged accused is always the entire tribal group. Much like the difference between the two expressions, “US bombed Hanoi,” in contrast to formulation, “Nixon bombed Hanoi.” A degree of cultural ignorance reduces all the islanders of North Sentinel to be uniformly forever hostile. 16. I will rely on my observations of the Sentinelese since 1992 based on three contact trips, to North Sentinel Islands (1993, 1999, 2005). These trips were undertaken with the administration. I will also draw upon other accounts of the contact and photographic records of a different type that are suppressed or not circulated, in order to keep the idea of “isolated, hostile, and stone age” alive. 17. Unlike the Ongees and Jarawas who had historically much more frequent and steady contact with outside world, had a relatively regular supply of metal but made much smaller arrowheads and adze blades. But contrary to the logic of the supply economy the Sentinelese have produced some of the largest and heaviest metal arrow heads and adze blades, making us wonder why they chose to design and produce some thing that is based on a raw material that was apparently difficult to obtain. One also wonders what is so “Stone Age” about them as depicted in texts. 18. Pandit however has reformulated his understanding in what he stated to Mukherjee (2003: 227) 19. Apart from my three separate experiences of visiting the Sentinelese and the published records of Pandit (1990: 31–50) the Appendix includes reports of twelve accounts ranging from 1970 to 1988 which establish the point that there is a common pattern in the lapses of time before the Sentinelese come out. 20. We do not have evidence of the Sentinelese using the canoes for hunting turtles out in the sea, as Ongees do with harpoons and the Great Andamanese did with nets (Radcliffe-Brown 1964: 439–443). Jarawas who have never made any kind of canoes cross water by swimming often with the assistance of a float or by assembling a raft to move children and other materials. As the Jarawas do not have canoes they rely on catching turtles on the coast during the breeding time alone. 21. Three days after the tsunami, a press release assured the safety of the Sentinelese particularly because of the photograph. Mr.Ghoshal an administrative officer

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with the AAJVS, that looks after the welfare of the ‘primitive tribes of Andaman Islands’ announced, “We dispatched a team to the Sentinel Islands headed by the secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor Uddipta Ray on December 30. They counted 32 Sentinelese in three places, but didn’t spot any dead bodies. We assume that they are safe.” The team did spot a change, however, in the geography of the island. Following the earthquake, small islands situated near the Sentinelese Island appear to have merged together. ‘‘North Sentinel Island, therefore, has become bigger,’’ reasoned Ghoshal 22. A proposal to stay close to the shore for a long duration and make observation on how and where the Sentinelese would come out to the sea water and how they would launch the canoes was turned down as it would involve too extensive a time frame for a prolonged time duration for dedicated and structured observation. My report that the Sentinelese would experience difficulty in negotiating certain situations was informally counter argued with the proposition that over time attempts would be made to air drop coconut seedlings that would grow and soon become substitute food source for the islanders. Interestingly, in 1880 Portman brought back from Port Blair a number of captured Sentinelese to their home with gifts and proposed to transform the Sentinel Islands by planting coconuts (Administration reports of the Andaman Nicobar Islands 1880–81: 50–52). Fortunately this proposal has always met practical problems, and we still have no idea how the Sentinelese have adapted to the new geographical conditions. Officials have made a series of visits after the tsunami to see not the Sentinelese but to examine the altered landscape. But there has been no qualitative or quantitative increase in our knowledge of the Sentinelese. 23. Strangely enough the specter of “cannibalism” and “Stone Age primitivism,” has informed conditioned even the recent writings on the Andaman islands. These however are mostly in the genre of travel writing. A classic example of this is David Tomory (2003: 42–43) who in his book titled Cannibal Isles, where he is oriented to look for the stereotypical construct of the primitive tribal group on the Andaman Islands. A similar orientation with a distinct political flavor however can be traced in autoethnographic writing of Madhushree Mukherjee The Land of the Naked People. (2003: 223–233). For a discussion of ‘cannibalism’ as visualized in the context of the Jarawas and Ongees see Chapter Six. 24. Ongees have strong cultural affinity with Sentinelese. From the type of their body decorations to forms of material culture, the Sentinelese have an undoubted relation with the Ongees and Jarawas. However, the Ongees who had been brought to North Sentinel Island around 1980 could not understand the Sentineli language, (Pandit 1990: 34) indicating a long time of separate development (Portman 1889: 758,823). The traditional name for the North Sentinel Island in Ongee language is Chia daaKwokweyeh. Apart from this obvious indication of cultural relatedness or familiarity there are similarities in the design of the carved canoes that Ongees and Sentinelese alone make. Interestingly enough the Sentinelese use their canoes with only long poles and not paddles making their movements limited to the protective coral reef surrounding their island. But the Ongees use paddles and are known to have traveled beyond Little Andaman Island. The Jarawa who live in Middle and South Andaman jungles and do not make canoes probably never had contacts with the Sen-

The Specter of “Hostility”: The Sentinelese between Text and Image

363

tinelese. A comparison of the languages could perhaps answer this question but Sentinelese language still remaining inaccessible, there is little to compare. We do know the overlaps between the Ongee and Jarawa language, which help in the fact of establishing an old connection between the two groups. What can be speculated with a reasonable degree of certainty is that Sentinelese came—as a result of a deliberate migration or as the result of a group drifting off-course—from Little Andaman. 25. From early accounts of Portman we find how the image of the Sentinelese was constructed and perpetuated by contact events. In 1771, an East India Company hydrographical survey vessel, the Diligent, passed by the North Sentinel during the night and sighted “a multitude of lights . . . upon the shore.” This is the first recorded mention of the island. The surveying party however did not stop to investigate. In those days, bonfires still beckoned from hundreds of coasts, all over the world. In 1867, toward the end of the summer monsoon season, an Indian merchant ship, the Nineveh, was wrecked on the reef off North Sentinel. Eighty-six passengers and twenty crewmen got safely to the beach in the ship’s boat. On the morning of the third day, as these survivors sat down to a makeshift breakfast, they were suddenly attacked. “The savages were perfectly naked, with short hair and red painted noses, their arrows appeared to be tipped with iron,” the Nineveh’s captain later reported. He had fled at the first shower of arrows and escaped in the ship’s boat, to be picked up several days later by a boat bound for Moulmein. The Andaman Islands were now officially part of the British Empire—they’d been settled as a penal colony—so a Royal Navy rescue party was dispatched by steamer to the site of the wreck. It arrived to find that the Nineveh’s passengers had managed to fend off their attackers with sticks and stones, and the savages had not been seen since (Portman 1899). In 1896, a Hindu convict escaped on a makeshift raft from the main penal settlement on Great Andaman Island. He drifted across thirty miles or so of Open Ocean and landed on the beach of North Sentinel. A search party found his body there some days later, pierced in several places by arrows and with its throat cut. No natives were sighted. After this, the island was left alone for nearly a century (Portman 1899). 26. For the social and historical details underlying the treatment of bodies (killed and hunted) among the Andaman Islanders and the cultural logic of it (See Chapter 6). 27. Portman (1899) mentions that the Sentinelese were also known as “Jurrahwalla” in 1887 (ibid., 710–711) and were regarded as a group that would come to Rutland but should be avoided because of their temper. Portman further indicates that in 1885 Sentinelese were not visible on the Sentinel Island (ibid., 740) and in December 1890, and 1895 survey of the Sentinel Island Portman describes the islander’s as “timid” and frightened (ibid., 749, 758). 28. Dropping or giving gifts to tribal groups like the Sentinelese and Jarawas was a standard practice that had its origin in the days of British colonial administration and had been continued by the post-colonial Indian administration. Contact expeditions to the Sentinel Islands were undertaken with the objective of neutralizing their hostility and making them dependent on the administration. Contact expeditions however were discontinued and a stand against it was adopted in 1999–2000 (See Awaradi 2002: 186).

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29. Since such officials, in the Indian Administrative Service, were generally sent out from the mainland on a two or three-year posting to Port Blair, they were often keen to take the opportunity of a short visit to the Sentinel Islands. Also what was conducive was the fact that since 1981, the Island administration regularly dispatched contact expeditions to North Sentinel every month or two during fair weather, bearing gifts intended to propitiate the fractious aborigines. I am thankful to Late Bakhtawar Singh of Andaman Nicobar Police Service who shared many of his experiences with me in a series of interviews taken with him till 2004. He was one of the significant core founders of what used to be regarded as the Andaman Bush Police. See also Harrer (1977) for a description of how the Ongees were contacted by the foreign dignitaries including royalty, all sponsored and organized by the administration. 30. David Tomory in his book Cannibal Isles (2003) has reported about the efforts he made to create contact events, all of them against the rules of the administration vis-à-vis the Ongees of Dugong creek (ibid., 140–49). 31. Well-intentioned but often ethnocentric accounts of journalists also provide commentary for images that come from thousands of miles from North Sentinel Island, across both time and space. In contrast, anthropologists’ knowledge of cultural specificities offers counter interpretations (cf. Edwards 2001) and added meanings to both local and globalized images produced within the mass media.

Appendix A

Tools As Part of Culture and History

These are some of the maonaley I have collected over the years from the Ongee and Jarawa community. The non-metal arrowheads, and cutting blades were recovered from old campsites or were in the possession of elder individuals. The Ongees made some of the maonaley on request. In some cases the individuals agreed to exchange old pieces for new raw material.

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Appendix A

Essential Jarawa tool kit. Till 1999, many Jarawas would prize this as an essential kit to carry around. Scrap piece of metal would be shaped into a cutting blade or a broken arrowhead would be tied with dried leaves to provide the grip. The stone on which the metal would be sharpened would often be carried around the neck or waist in a woven pouch lined with dried leaves. The handy ‘knife and the sharpening stone would be frequently found as part of the personal belonging of adult males. I have never observed women handling the stone either among the Ongees or the Jarawas.

Tools As Part of Culture and History

Wooden Arrows. Typical arrowhead made out of carved stem of the Areca tree. The fresh wood after it is dried is treated on fire to impart hardness. Arrowhead according to individual needs be carved by shells or glass flakes. These arrowheads were often attached onto a straightened piece of cane and tied up. Wooden arrows applied with red clay paint are still made for ritual and ceremonial occasions.

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Appendix A

Forms and material used for arrowheads. Arrowheads collected from the Ongees at Dugong Creek. Starting from left are scraps of metal that used to be shaped by grinding on stones into required shape. (See Chapter 2. for the relationship of metal and stones in the mythical narrative on war and stones; Jugey-ye-Kuge for its implication on production of the material culture of arrowheads) As it was much harder work and not easy to find metal, Ongees frequently used the tailbone of a stingray tied on to arrow shafts. According to Ongees with the increase in the availability of metal that was exchanged at Rutland in colonial times, the shape of arrowheads changed and often-reshaped forms were brought over to Little Andamans. Probably the ‘refined design’ (extreme right) is the influence of the Great Andamanese who interacted with the forest labor force that came from Burma and Ranchi. This particular form of arrowhead has continued over a period of time.

Tools As Part of Culture and History

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Non-Metallic Cutting Blades. Typical shell used to cut and scrape with and prized as cutting blade. This form of cutting blade is seldom used among the Ongees and is on the decline among the Jarawas.

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Appendix A

Iron cutting blades. Crude knife made from scrap iron with a cane handle made by the Ongees till late 1980’s. This particular form of cutting blade replaced the small shells that were often flaked to use the edges for shaping soft wood and to make incisions on various surfaces including the skin. Glass collected from the beach was also frequently used as a cutting tool. Ongees point out that like the glossy white of the shell’s interior metal also should be rubbed so as to bring out its luster and other qualities.

Tools As Part of Culture and History

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Adze Toneyagey (in Ongee and Jarawa language) is one of the oldest and most common tools found among the Andaman Islanders and is the prime form of maonale. The tied metal part is a used or discarded piece of metal file or iron strip. Among the Sentinelese, the blade of the adze till this day remains the largest and is a very valued tool that serves multiple functions. Among the Ongees and Jarawas however standard machetes known as lehey or daa have replaced it. However the inclination to sharpen blades with chunks of sedimentary rocks is still prevalent (See Chapter 2. for the relationship of metal and stones in the mythical narrative on war and stones; Jugey-ye-Kuge for its implication on production of the material culture of arrowheads).

Appendix B

Smoking Pipes As Part of Contact History and Culture

These are some of the smoking pipes Tambagero that I had collected in 1983–84 from the Ongee of Little Andaman Island. They illustrate the introduction of tobacco in Ongee culture and the arrival of the outsiders on Little Andaman Island as indicated in the myth of Jugey-ye-Kuge (See Chapter 2.) The crab claw Gakuwego was the traditional smoking pipe that was used for consuming tobacco. Until 1990 when “outside” tobacco was not available, Ongee women used to smoke leaves of a creeper known as Tukwegalako that had a distinctly minty aroma. Ongees inspired by the colonial administrators using smoking tobacco made the other carved wooden pipes. With the introduction of chewing tobacco in post independent India, smoking tobacco has declined among the Ongees and it is seldom practiced. Much of it is also a result of the health warnings spread around by the welfare authorities.

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Appendix B

Ongee woman using crab claw, Gakuwego for smoking tobacco. Women are proscribed from smoking in any other form of pipe. Men devoid of moustaches are also proscribed from using Gakuwego.

Smoking Pipes As Part of Contact History and Culture

375

Forms of Chandankeyabe. Smoking pipes made by assembling sections of cane or bamboo by Ongees. This design is the influence of Burmese forest workers who worked in the Andamanese forests during colonial times. Some of the Burmese settled down on the Island and had married into Great Andamanese community.

376

Appendix B

Forms of Tambagero. Carved wooden smoking pipes made by the Ongees, replicating the colonizers smoking pipes.

Appendix C

Body Adornments As Markers of Contact Relations and Culture

These are some of the body ornaments collected from the Ongees of Little Andaman and Jarawas from Kadamtalla and Tirur area. Most of the items collected from 1984 to 2004 were items that were in use and few were made on request for the collection of remembered ‘traditional designs’.

Marriage ornaments made by the Ongees. Groom’s ornament made of the shaft of an arrow for hunting pigs and mangrove tree blooms.

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Appendix C

Marriage ornaments made by the Ongees. Bride’s ornament made of coastal coral pieces.

After marriage ceremony ornaments shared by the husband and wife integrating prime forest products, which include on the male side, pig tusk and on the female side prime sea products like shells and mangrove bloom.

Body Adornments As Markers of Contact Relations and Culture

379

Ornament made by folding palm leaves, probably influenced by old Burmese coolies or later South Indian settler.

Glass beads are highly preferred by Ongees and Jarawas to make ceremonial ornaments. They have become substitute for seashells (particularly Tusk Shells) that are difficult to get. Glass beads are often on demand and are provided by the welfare agency workers who bring it from Port Blair.

380

Appendix C

Ongee bone ornament Ejeme. Collarbone amulet collected in 1983 from Little Andaman. Note the use of red cloth covered in clay paint to maintain the heat and smell releasing capacity of the amulet. In order to check the rapid release of the smell, which has the healing quality derived from the dead relative’s spirit, an yellowish orchid stem skin, a cooling and “smell restricting” substance is tied on the two ends of the bone. The shells on the cord indicate that the bone used is of a female relative.

Body Adornments As Markers of Contact Relations and Culture

381

Shell ornaments made by the Great Andamanese at Strait Island settlement. Traditional shell ornaments used as waistbands used at time of ceremonial dancing and to mark the end of the initiation ceremony. It is the maternal relatives of the individuals participating in any ceremony who always make them. This particular form of use of shells is common among all the Andaman Islanders. These ornaments are made particularly from shells that are not bleached and that retain their natural ‘fresh’ colors. It is proscribed to use any other stringing material but pandanus leaves to tie them together. As these ornaments take relatively more time to make, often they are covered in pig or turtle fat and retained within the family, for the next ceremonial occasion. With increasing and frequent contact of the Ongees particularly with the administrative officials Ongees adorn themselves on command to perform “welcome dance”. On such occasions only the pandanus leaves and tender shoots of palm tree are used. The whitish and yellowish color of these leaves is regarded as a way to protect Ongee body from being vulnerable to outside visitors.

382

Traditional string and glass bead ornaments that are made for the Ongee initiate at the completion of initiation ceremony Tanageru (photographed in 1984). The fiber used in making the ornament is identical to that made by the Jarawas out of red fabric gained from contact events. According to Ongees, they and Jarawas made identical ornaments out of fiber, derived from the hibiscus plant and colored in red clay paint. (To compare with similar string ornaments in Jarawa culture see Chapter 5.)

Appendix C

Body Adornments As Markers of Contact Relations and Culture

Jarawa body adornments. The coastal bands of the Jarawas make armbands and neck ornaments by tying together bleached shells found along the coastline. Traditionally plant fiber was used to tie together the shells that used to be strung together (as seen in the photographs of the ornament from Brighton Museum Collection). In recent times the plastic fishing line that washes up on the beach is used for stringing together the shells. Thick iron nails acquired through contact events are used to make precise holes through the shell for stringing these together in proper alignment.

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Appendix C

Jarawa body ornaments. Jarawa forest residents and within the interior forest camps predominantly use plant fiber to make head bands and neck adornments, but never use shells associated with the costal dwellers and camp-sites.

Body Adornments As Markers of Contact Relations and Culture

385

Ornament in the collection of Brighton Museum, England, showing the distinct use of forest material for making ornaments to decorate body with.

386

Appendix C

Jarawas from interior forest make head bands from plant material and are visible with the distinct identity at the coast for contact events. In last decade plastic strings from discarded fishing nets that wash up on the beach are incorporated in the making of ornaments.

Around the settlements and along the ATR Jarawas have been introduced Hindu religious images by non-tribals. Religious conversion has not happened for the Jarawas but the religious material gained from contact has been incorporated as part of Jarawa body adornment. Such use of the material culture of the outside world makes the Jarawa and outside contact acquire a new relational dimension.

Appendix D

Maps

Andaman Islands with specific locations as identified by the administration. In recent years there has been some opinions expressed about changing the place names that would reflect independent India’s history and replace the names derived from colonial surveys and contacts. Place names that originate from Burmese and Great Andamanese dialects, who were involved in early colonial explorations, are losing significance to names given by the later settlers.

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Appendix D

Early colonial map showing areas historically associated with different tribes identified as dialect divisions and not necessarily corresponding to the political territories within the Andaman Islanders. This map originally made in 1888 and released along with the Portman publication of 1899 has most of the explored areas bearing Andamanese and Burmese names that have today been replaced or forgotten. Maps (form of a visual culture) and land itself becomes the material embodiment of history of contact events and relations.

Maps

389

Map showing historically areas associated with different tribes during late colonial period derived mainly from accounts of E. H. Man and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown.

390

Appendix D

Map of designated ‘tribal reserve areas’ and ‘tribal settlements’ as identified by the post independence Indian administration.

Maps

391

Map showing the ATR road cutting through Jarawa Reserve Territory and areas associated with the settlers since 2000.

392

Appendix D

Maps depicting changes in the areas associated with Jarawa community, based on historical accounts and records. (Reprinted with permission from the Andaman Association)

Maps

393

Outline map of the North Sentinel Island.

Sentinel Island photographed from the South Point (photographed in 1999).

394

Satellite image of the Sentinel Island taken after the December 2004 tsunami. The white band around the island is the altered coastline of the island.

Appendix D

Abbreviations

AAJVS ANPATR ATR PTG SANE

Andaman Adim Jan Jati Vikas Samiti [Andaman Primitive Tribal Welfare association] Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation Act 1956 Andaman Trunk Road Primitive Tribal Groups Society for Andaman Nicobar Ecology

395

Glossary

Aberdeen. Present day Port Blair. akwaye. Body painting. Ar-yoto. Forest dwellers. chekwey. Clay painting design implement. Eahansekwe. Pig hunters (group identity). Eahmbelakwe. Turtle hunters (group identity). ejeme. Body ornaments made from bones. enakyula. Power. enen. Outsiders. eneyetokabe. Ornaments. enguibute. Things that posses value and power. entaaley. Outsiders with authority, government officials. epoochiimu. Head and arm bands made from the leaves of plants found at the creek. etakweto. Scarification. Erem-taga. Coastal dwellers. etekwagebe. Attraction. gayekwatabe. Ongee term for iron (before colonization of the Islands). gilemamey. Things to remember. gitehkabey. Cutting. gobolagnane. Things that control smell. goteeyrangey. Ornament/amulets made from human skulls. humeeya. Ornaments made from fabric and thread. ienen. Outsider. inachekamey. Things not to forget. jugey. Mythical narratives. kaankapoh. Garments. 397

398

Glossary

koylawoie. Cloth. kuge. Stones/rocks. kugebe. War. lau. Spirits of non Andamanese origin. le-dhuya. Ornaments made from things gathered in the forest. le-lelev. Ornaments made from things gathered at the coast. lohaye. Iron (from Hindustani). maonale. Tools, implements and weapons. njohhaajiiya. Ornament made from woolen yarn. pepeyh. Tree. ulokwobey. Binding. tabatamabey. Disorder. tanageru. Ongee ritual of male initiation. tao-lepa. Jarawa boy’s initiation for entering in to marriage. tejage. Stone wedges used for sharpening metal. thoopokuluga. Ornaments those are heavy and metallic. tomya. Spirits of Andamanese origin. torawage. Marriage ornaments. totekwata. Winds that have gone by and will come back, the idea of “history.”

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Index

AAJVS, 262, 265–80, 285, 288–89; functions of, 263, 299n5; clothing, 312n37; Jarawa contacts, 219, 285–84, 304n20, 306n21, 309n29; Jarawas at roadside, 166–69; Kadamtalla, 289, 295; medicine, 312n38, 313n39; Ongees and, 324n2; Sentinelese and, 363n28; settlers perception of, 267; setting up, 107; state and, 265, 300n12 acculturation, 157 Acharya, S., 334–36, 340 administration colonial, 73–93, 103–4, 152–53, 238–39 administration Indian, 8, 13, 61, 107, 168, 179, 187, 194–95, 204–9, 225–27, 253, 262–87, 303–7, 328–33, 353 aesthetics, 99–100, 115, 249 anchor, 116 Andaman Home, 82, 92, 103, 118, 196n4, 205–6 Andaman Trunk Road (ATR), 8, 223, 262, 269, 282 Andamanese in Calcutta, 82 anger: Jarawa notion of, 234, 256–57, 251; Ongee notion of, 245–49, 255–59; of spirits, 35, 38–39

Anthropological Survey of India, 105, 138, 221, 265, 276, 276, 331 Appadurai, A., 275 art, 17, 99–102, 132–36, 246; and aesthetics, 99–100, 115, 249; and history, 26n12, 134; anthropology of, 99; Boas, F., 148n27; collection, 141–42; hunter-gatherers, 109–10; interpretation of, 17, 99–102, 118, 133, 145n10; Jarawa art, 271–72, 276; ornaments, 132; total art, 118 assimilation, 190 asymmetry, 318, 323, 352 attraction, 115, 177; design principle, 130; marriage, 127; implication for movement, 108, 116–19, 135; object, 121–24, 131, 177; Ongee meaning of, 100, 118, 127, 134–35; ornaments, 127, 130–31, 133; recontextualizing, 116, 122–23; smell, 115, 119; subject object implication, 108, 118; sun and moon, 115, 119 Awaradi, S., 253, 330–31 balance, 54–55; humans and spirits, 51, 55, 113; of food, 55; of order and disorder, 46, 67n16; in rituals, 54, 57

421

422

Index

Barthes, R., 16, 24, 72, 204, 212 battery cells, 121–23 battle of Aberdeen, 83 Baudrillard, J., 171 Beadon, C., 84 Bloch, M., 239–40 Boas, F., 133 body adornments, 12, 21, 23, 91, 106, 117–18; at the Andaman Homes, 104; use of cloth as, 154–57, 182–87; history of, 106, 131; Jarawas, 180–81, 193, 196; as markers of occasion, 107–8, 117; in museums, 136; Radcliffe-Brown, A., 106; at roadside, 171–73; variations of, 91 body painting 21, 104, 156, 180, 269, 363; Berlin Ethnology Museum, 149–150n37; classification of, 110; marking body, 106–7, 188, 194–95; marking movement, 104, 198n15; in marriage ritual, 126–29; myth, 32–33; naked, 156, 174; photographic records, 91–92; process, 110–12; Radcliffe-Brown, A., 104, 109–10; relation to smell, 114–19, 124–28; talcum powder, 187–88 bone, 21, 48, 58, 67, 92, 251; collection, 101, 104, 106, 138–39; jawbone, 36, 173, 255–56; markers, 105, 110, 235, 237–38; objects, 87, 101, 103–4, 106, 108, 120, 198n13, 253, 256; ornaments, 101, 124–25, 130–36, 138, 124–25, 135–36; photographic record, 92, 103; as raw material, 41; Sentinelese, 360; and smell, 41, 114, 132–33, 235–36, 253; spirits, 113–14 boundary, 22, 207, 322; coastline, 203, 214; contact event, 206–9, 211, 214–16; cultural construct, 215, 226–27, 353; imposition of, 209, 216, 218; Jarawa perception of, 207, 213; Sentinelese, 351–53; transgression of, 64, 204, 206; tribal Reserve, 322 Bourdieu, P., 16, 102, 354–55

cannibalism, 235–38, 326, 348–49 change, 30–31, 46, 71, 132–33, 229 chaos, 33–34, 40–43, 57–60, 116, 222 civilizing, 17, 87, 94, 195, 290, 318 Clifford, J., 230 clothes, 7–9, 26, 105–9, 153–57, 162–65, 169–84, 298; history, 12–13, 15; colonial, policy and attitude, 94, 105–6, 136, 156, 160–62, 176–79, 196n4; contact in relation to, 107–98, 145n11, 153, 156, 217–21, 240, 255, 257, 274, 276, 352; Jarawa, 148n, 156, 165–67, 169–71, 188, 190; marker of, 5, 7–8, 174–75, 182–83, 323; materiality of, 2, 21, 177, 240; Ongees, 30, 307n22; textile collection, 149n37. See also red cloth circulation, 183, 189, 190 contact, 220–21, 257; Jarawas, 156, 159, 188, 195, 284, 241; Ongee, 30 Cohn, B., 71, 73, 158–59 Colebrook, R., 5–6, 81 Collection: Abott, 143; historical relations, 138–39; colonial, 135–37, 141; complete, 138; junk, 120–21; museum, 139–41; narrative, 137 colonialism, 41, 83–84, 93–96, 157–63, 215, 231, 240–41, 245; acculturation, 157–58; early accounts, 5–6, 69n29, 197n8; expansion, 90–95, 102–3, 139, 354; collection, 139–41; continuation of, 20–21, 23, 162–63, 317–18, 326, 353; material culture, 151–54; narratives, 3–5, 15–17, 45–47, 79; Ongees, 40–43, 52, 61–62; photographs and texts, 72–72, 76–77; ritual, 158–60; Sentinelese, 346–49; settlement, 205–8; violence, 234–35, 240–42, 298n3 constitutive: moment of history, 143; of photographic moment, 331; of social relations through violence, 253, 349–50, 143, 253, 331, 349–50 contact event, 34, 211, 216, 219, 265–67, 319–20; history, 62; Jarawa

Index

and settler meanings, 228; meaning, 22; outsiders, 157; power, 220–22; roadside, 270–71; self-representation, 318; Sentinelese, 330–31, 352 contact expedition, 203, 220–21, 349–51 context: connotative and denotative, 75, 78; historical, 4, 61, 65n3 101; interpretation, 22, 24; recontextualization, 105–8, 176–81, 184–85, 243–44; ritual, 50, 53–54, 116; signification of, 18–19; textual and visual, 75, 88–95; making of material culture, 105, 108, 119–20, 123–27, 191, 194, 208; material culture collection, 136–44; myth, 46, 116–17; ornaments, 130–31, 135, 152, 171–72 Cooper, Z., 101 corporal formation, 322 critical ethnography, 319 cultural algebra, 108 cultural construction, 319; reconstruction, 317 cutting and binding, 41–48, 57 Das, V., 231–32 de Certeau, M., 161–62, 355 denotative, 73 Derrida, J., 63, 134 discourse, 321; atemporal, 356 disentangle, 108, 119, 131, 135 document, 71–76, 79–84, 137, 143, 163, 332, 353–57, 359 dressing: as history, 179; as a trope, 192; and undressing, 165, 171, 174–78, 181, 187, 323 drowning, 130–31 dugong: legend, 32–33, 49; singing, 42 efficacy: of isolation and surveillance, 333–34; of metal and stones, 40, 60–62; of objects, 122, 125, 132, 150, 167, 180, 196; of photographs, 19

423

encounter, 15–20, 42, 151–54; implications, 35–37, 59, 80, 164–65, 168, 211–16; Jarawas, 107, 204–6, 221–22, 318; objects in relation to, 135, 151–58; Ongee cultural constructs of, 45–48, 117–18; spirits, 51–52; violence, 224–32, 243, 267–68, 298, 347–48 Enmey, 167–69, 291–92, 295–97 epidemics, 42, 79, 83–84, 294 Errington, S., 10, 23 ethnography; 1, 19, 72, 75, 90–91, 157, 173, 338; authority, 328; critical, 319 event, 3–5, 16–18; interpretation of, 211–21, 330–31; gift giving, 160–62; performative aspect, 18–24, 162–65; recollection of, 34–45, 58–59; signifier, 23–24; structuring relations, 107–8, 130–35, 153–58, 318–20, 324n2; violent, 16, 326–31, 338 exchange, 12, 61–62; Jarawa, 190–95, 214; material culture, 139–47, 183, 193–95; museum collection, 139–44; perpetual receiving, 173; perpetual violence, 259; semiotics of exchange, 19–23, 31, 211–12 experiential field, 261 Expert Committee, 269, 280–82, 294 exploration, 15–16, 61, 81, 93, 175, 215, 321 fear, 7, 63–64; of Andamanese, 84, 88, 152–53, 170, 214–16; of change, 95, 271–72; of the forest, 52, 81, 84, 226; of forgetting, 54–59; of Jarawas, 187, 253, 271–72; of Others, 212–13, 215, 259, 294; of rituals and taboos, 56–59; of spirits, 54–56 foreigners, 38, 48, 58, 60–61, 73, 263 Foucault, M., 73, 210 fractal recursivity, 211 Ganguly, S., 280 Gaze: photographic, 332; state, 329; tactile, 331; tourist, 279–80

424

Index

Geertz, C., 31 Gell, A., 101, 180 Gellner, E., 5 gift, 160, 318; giving, 213, 222; giving and taking, 226; Sentinelese, 330–31 Greenblatt, S., 13 healing, 123, 125 heterotopia, 210, 214, 344 historical consciousness, 4, 59, 130, 132, 134–35, 253, 318 historical experience, 3, 20–21, 47, 53, 67n, 115, 118, 213, 245 historiography, 99, 135 history, 3, 11, 18, 134; actors, 323; anthropology, 72; art, 134; construct of, 20; contact, 62, 320; identity, 10; landscape, 60; myth, 34; Ongee idea, 44, 58; raw, 18; relations, 317; semiotics, 12–16, 24; taxonomic, 21; visual and textual, 329 hostility and boundaries, 216–18, 227, 321; in relation to hospitality, 318; Sentineese, 331–32, 336 Hunting: commemoration, 132; of dugongs and history, 42–43; images, 273–79; Jarawa initiation, 292; pigs as a process, 249–53; prescriptions, 118–19; relations of smell and power, 113, 236; rituals and regulations, 52–57, 68n21; ritual relation, 48–49; seasons, 115; by settlers, 223–26, 233–34, 251–57; and wildness, 240–43, 258 iconic turn, 157 identity, 54, 171; and balance, 55; jungleey, 229; life taking, 240–41, 251; negotiated, 318; pig and turtle hunters, 36, 115, 125, 184 Illustrated London News, 14, 22, 101 image, 15, 23, 170, 189; and contact, 23; hostile Sentinelese, 330, 337; Jarawas, 271–72, 275–78, 285; represented, 18, 20

imagination: of changing primitive, 260–63, 265, 271, 323–44; conditioned by photemes, 337–38; ironies of, 290; seeing the, 271–76, 287; of Sentinelese, 331; social relations created by, 23, 148n25 Ingold, T., 243 inscribing, 131, 137 Ineny-lau, 7, 47, 58 iron, 61–63, 106, 152; and stones, 36–37, 40–45, 60; prize, 82; Sentinelese, 341–43 Isolated: as an assumption, 3, 11–12, 19, 67n19, 174–175, 182, 190, 228, 305, 314n41; maintenance of, 334, 342–43; in relation to material culture, 135, 137, 139, 144n3 Jack Andamans., 15, 26, 174–79, 192, 275 Jarawa: art, 272–74; and settlers, 288–89; attacks, 225, 238–39, 266–67; change, 287, 289, 291; commodification, 272; concept of road, 295; epidemics, 294; hospital, 166; hostility, 223–25; hunting and gathering, 292–94; mainstreaming of, 227–28, 290–91; marriage, 292; reserve forest, 249n, 262; seasonal movement, 294–95; settlers perception, 267, 288–89 jugey, 32, 34, 46; jugey-ye-kuge, 35–39; tukuree-ye-jugey, 116 killing, 22, 37, 42, 52, 229, 230, 235, 240–41, 243–44, 246, 252, 255–56, 258, 339–40, 348–49 landscape, 60, 351, 208 language: primitive identity, 10–11; colonial study of, 86, 89–91, 93–94, 197n8, 213; aspects of contact, 20, 22–22, 69n29, 79–80, 157–59, 188, 270, 300n12, 301n16; language reality, 337; metalanguage, 338;

Index

Ongee, 124, 148n25, 148n28, 314n41, 362n24; Sentinelese, 330, 361n15 Levi-Strauss, C., 4, 17, 64, 73, 233, 300n9 Man, E., 136, 139, 215–16 maonale, 41, 49, 57 map, 18, 89, 152–53, 165, 167, 173, 183, 189 marriage: as embodied in the object, 125–27, 137; Jarawa, 292–94, 306, 311n35; myth and history among Ongees, 32–43, 51–57, 62, 69 material culture, 12, 15–16; as signifiers, 19–20, 23–24, 181, 191; change, 101–2, 105; collecting, 84–86, 101–2, 137; contacts, 107; display, 276; exchange, 61; fabrication, 151; for representation, 46, 59, 194; history, 105, 151; meaning, 123, 167; Radcliffe-Brown, 136–37; re-contextualize, 122, 131, 144; relations, 183; spatial and temporal dimensions, 183–85 Mauss, M., 175–77, 180, 183 medicine, 166, 294 memory: as aesthetic principle, 100; collective, 62–64, 300n12; historical, 46–47, 50, 53, 60, 134, 148n25; in material culture, 125; public, 334; transformation of, 353; of violence, 230, 240, 248 modernization: Five Year Plans, 261–62; museum, 276; of Jarawas, 268, 290; primitive and modern, 261–79 Mouat, F., 6, 15, 81–84, 175–79, 275 Movement: seasonal, 185, 205, 282; Jarawa, 182, 294–95 museum, 263–64, 276, 331, 333 myth, 204 naked: contact events, 94, 104–5, 145n11, 153–157, 187, 221–22, 320,

425

333, 363n25; images, 13, 19, 22–23, 136, 148n28, 160, 163–64, 191–92, 227, 271–76, 287, 351; in museum, 263, 276; outsider’s on, 174–79, 196, 241, 254; at roadside, 171–72, 178–79, 187 narrative: historical, 3–5, 20, 66n4, 102, 121, 248; historical and ethnographic, 137; mythical and historical, 34–39, 41–42, 46; ritual, 48–49, 59; of violence, 212, 232, 248, 258; visual, 264, 356 Nehru, J., 264–65 Notes and Queries in Anthropology, 86–88, 93, 105, 136, 140 object, 121, 194–96; biography, 142, 329; embodiment, 134; history, 119–20 ocular politics, 286 Ongee: artifacts, 110; hunting, 113; on museum, 138; perception of Jarawas, 43; pig hunting, 249–52; space, 113, 117; spirits, 113 order, 48–49, 116 ornament: as anchor, 139; and singing, 128, 130; as text, 135; bone, 124, 236; design, 135, 157; efficacy, 125, 132; history, 106, 131; identity among Jarawas, 183; Jarawa, 152, 167, 183; marriage, 126–27; production, 183; recontextualized, 131; weight, 127 ‘Other,’ 1, 5, 13, 56, 71–74, 157, 192, 204, 211–12, 230–33, 236, 240–41, 246–49, 252, 257–59, 272, 320 outsider, 7, 11, 20–24; and Jarawas, 153–63, 175–79, 188, 191–96, 215, 223–36, 240–48, 318–26; and Ongees, 30–35, 37–45, 57–64, 117–19, 133–35; and Sentineles, 344, 349–50 peace-making ceremony, 244–45 Peirce, C., 80

426

Index

penal settlement, 6, 61, 73, 79, 81, 102, 152, 159, 205, 231 performance, 42, 46, 58, 69, 158, 161–62, 249; at road, 323; as wearing clothes, 162–68, 177 photemes, 20, 104, 336–37, 344 photograph, 19, 72, 76; and text, 74; and writing, 71; colonial, 77; Jarawa, 164; Portman M., 88 police, 21, 82, 108, 187–89, 193, 224–25, 253–56, 288–89, 328, 340–41 policy: colonial, 62, 69n29 ,77, 102, 213; contact, 203; development, 13, 265; gift giving, 157; Indian government, 160, 216, 221, 280–82, 287–88, 299n5, 302n19, 309, 359n11, 324n3; predicament and dilemmas, 11, 267–68, 287, 291; of protection, 11; towards Sentinelese, 329–30, 334, 350 political economy, 2, 157, 257, 303, 420 Portman, M., 22, 87–90, 94, 239, 353–35 power, 55, 99, 108, 116, 159, 176, 220–22, primitive, 10, 11, 17, 77, 91, 136, 260–61, 290; and art, 138, 144; and settlers, 265–67, 290; display, 166, 170, 190–96, 276–78, 286–87; exprimitive, 169, 261, 269, 297; image, 274–75, 285–88; Indian Government, 157, 262, 265–68, 320; tourism, 263–64, 271, 277 production, 180, 183 punitive expedition, 212–15, 238–39, 258, 349 Radcliffe-Brown, A., 7, 55, 57, 91, 93, 104–6, 119, 136–37, 140, 143, 173, 183, 244–46, 349 reading, 11, 31, 39, 67, 135, 216, 345, 365; poached, 355

reality, 9, 12–13, 16, 24, 39–40, 59,71, 337–38, 355–54; visual, 72–76, 77, 275; visual and linguistic, 72, 74–76 re-contextualized, 106–8, 172, 184, 243–44 red cloth, 12, 108, 119, 152–54, 173, 181, 219, 239, 298; and iron, 152–53; as gift, 153 regime: of fear, 159; optical, 257, 285, 287, 322, 323, 351; scopic, 260–61, 286, 329; of values, 152 representation: in anthropology and history, 72–73, 75; colonialism, 158–59; in collection culture, 136–41; contact, 188–96; in material culture, 129–39; of native, 17–18; non-representability, 205–15; by outsiders, 163–70; and present, 142–44, 318–22; of self, 18, 20, 25, 178–79, 318; and reality, 13; visual, 18, 88–90, 175–78 resolution, 42 Ritchie, J., 105 Ritual: initiation Ongee, 48, 52–57; initiation Jarawas, 293; Jarawa marriage, 292 Royal Anthropological Institute, 75, 84–88, 90, 136 sacrifice, 241–42 Sahlins, M., 59, 319 Said, E., 73, 258 scopophiliacs, 352 self-reflexive, 230 semiotics, 5, 12, 16, 72, 74–75, 80, 162, 183, 189, 320–21, 355 Sentinelese: Isolation of, 343; power over, 328; stone age, 328 shame, 14, 136 shy, 159 silent trade, 233 Simmel, G., 183 singing, 42, 44, 115, 126, 128, 132, 166, 214

Index

smell: as ordering principle, 32–36, 41–48; of stones, 37–38; in social relations, 51–56, 68, 113–14, 235–36; rle in transformation of pigs, 250–53 souvenirs, 141 space: contested, 228, 321; humanized, 7, 51; of power, 321; placeless place, 222, 353 spirits, 32, 33, 36–40, 113–19, 124–25, 127, 135, 246–53 Spivak, G., 4 structure and practice, 174, 317, 319, 355 subject, 57, 59 sun and moon, 117–18 surveillance, 163, 322, 328, 333–34, 350 Survival International, 285–86, 328 Symes, M., 214–15 taboo, 33, 54, 56 taxonomic, 21, 116, 119 Temple, R., 140 Tewari, Dudhnath, 83 Text: and context, 15–19, 75; culture as, 31; dead body as, 253; entextualization, 34–35, 42, 66n4; intertextuality, 137; manipulation of, 328–30; material culture as, 135, 138, 143–44; primitive as, 300n12; sub-text, 264; verbal and visual, 71–75, 334–38, 351–56 tides, 34, 43–45, 51, 115–19 tobacco, 38 total communication, 117–18 totekwata, 44, 53, 58 tourism, 263, 271, 295; tourist gaze, 279–80 transformation, 251–52, 354 transgression, 53

427

translation, 318, 322 tsunami, 285, 334–35, 347 umbrella, 123 undressing, 165, 171, 174–75, 177–79, 181, 187, 323 urbanization, 208 value: archaeology of, 25; Baudrillard, J., 317; of ethno aesthetics, 100, 119, 122–23, 198n13; photographic value, 72–76, 329, 354–56; RadcliffeBrown, A., 55–56, 104–5, 109–10; re-valued in history as a semiotic system, 320; in symbolic economy, 131 violence: body, 232, 248, 254–58; body symbolism of, 256; defining feature of, 229; encounter, 240–41; exchange of, 244; headhunting, 257; institutionalized, 231; life taking, 240–41, 251;other, 230–31; settler’s narrative on, 324 visibility, 273, 285, 287; through binoculars, 329; through tele-lens, 329 visual material, 12, 18–19 visual, 16, 19; and textual, 329, 354–56; imagination, 19 war, 35, 39; and marriage, 36 Weber, G., 350 weight, 53, 114–15, 119, 127–30, 247–48 winds: as representation of past, 44–45, 47–48, 53, 58, 132–34; in relation to seasons, 249, 289; in relation to spirits, 10, 32, 35, 38–39, 51 worldview: Ongee, 40, 46, 51–52, 123; in relation to ornaments, 102, 120; in relation to dead body, 235–36