Indian tribal expert looks back with joy, regret
NEW DELHI — At 82, anthropologist T.N. Pandit passes his days in the gentle occupations of old age: poetry, a Buddhist study circle, a daily walk in the park. It is rare for anyone to ask him about the years he spent with the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Andaman Islands. Only with difficulty can he locate a single copy of the slender book he wrote about that time.
Somewhere in a drawer, though, there are photos, capturing Pandit as he contacted some of the world’s most isolated people.
In these photographs, faded and curled with age, his face wears an expression of more or less pure joy.
Pandit, the pale-skinned son of a Kashmiri professor, reaches to pass a coconut to a group of naked, dark-skinned young men who have waded waist-deep in water to greet him. He sits companionably beside a dark-skinned young woman, whose hand rests casually on his thigh. Film shot in 1974 shows him — a reserved Brahmin — dancing exuberantly with a bare-breasted Jarawa woman.
It took Pandit and his colleagues more than two decades to persuade the tribes known as the Jarawa and Sentinelese to lay down their bows and arrows and mingle peacefully with the Indian settlers who surrounded them. The process was grindingly slow, involving trips into remote jungle areas to leave gifts for people who would not show themselves. In each case, though, there was an exhilarating breakthrough.
In India’s Andaman Islands, these encounters occurred two centuries after indigenous populations in the United States and Australia had been devastated by disease and addiction, leaving no doubt of the dangers of unregulated contact. Pandit found himself entrusted with the future of tiny groups believed to have migrated from Africa around 50,000 years ago, described by a team of geneticists as “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet.” India would do it better, he promised himself.
But when he looks back on his life’s great achievement, it’s with an unmistakable sadness.
Pandit arrived in Port Blair, capital of the island chain, in 1966. Anthropology was such a new field in India that when he was offered a spot to study it at Delhi University he had to look the word up in the dictionary.
Posted to the remote Andaman Islands, he learned there was a group of tribes that lived alone on a 50-square-kilometre island called North Sentinel and had barely been seen at all. Another group, known as the Jarawa, were fearsome archers, known for hiding in the treetops and neatly impaling outsiders who encroached. Government policy toward the Jarawa fell to the bush police, who were armed with rifles and kept careful records of casualties on both sides.
Pandit was contemptuous of this martial approach, which dated back to the British Raj. In 1967, he joined a“gift-dropping” expedition to North Sentinel Island, where the police dropped off coconuts and bananas while the members of the tribe, known as the Sentinelese, hid in the forest.
“They were watching us carefully, and they must not have been happy, because they picked up their bows and arrows,” he said.
In 1968, Pandit had a stroke of luck. Three Jarawa teenagers, captured raiding a village, were kept in prison for a month, so Pandit had a chance to study them at close range. He showed them airplanes and cars. He scribbled down words in their language. After a month, the three young men, loaded down with gifts, were released back to the forest.
There was a silence. Then, six years later, for reasons Pandit could never explain, a group of Jarawa greeted him on the beach with song and dance. He visited, after that, every two weeks or so. They would strip off his clothes, poke fingers in his eyes, pocket his spectacles.
He recalls these days, even now, with a kind of reverence and delight.
Pandit’s campaign worked. By the1990s, the Jarawa were so at ease with outsiders that they began to roam the neighbouring settlements, where they found food that required neither hunting nor gathering.
It is difficult to identify the precise moment when contact with the Jarawa came to be viewed as a problem. They began to fish and weave baskets in exchange for money. Sometimes they snatched food from market stalls. Video clips show Indian tourists tossing food to Jarawa on the roadside, crudely ordering the women to dance. Babies fathered by Indian settlers were born to Jarawa women.
But the process of integration, once begun, was impossible to stop, said Samir Acharya, a local environmental activist.
“Now they have gotten infected,” he said. “They have been exposed to a modern way of life they cannot sustain. They have learned to eat rice and sugar. We have turned a free people into beggars.”
In the end, Pandit agrees that the Jarawa were hurt by putting down their bows and arrows.
“The negative impact of close contact is inescapable, but it is sad,” he said. “What an amazing community, but it has been diluted in its outlook, its self-confidence, its sense of purpose, its sense of survival.”
This was not a surprise. He understood that his work would expose the tribes to the outside, with its dazzling technology, and that they would submit avidly. His aim, he said, was to control the process, to slow it so they understood the value of what they were leaving behind.
Pandit last travelled to Jarawa territory in 2014, on a visit to a daughter in Port Blair. Since then, he has become more physically fragile and doubts he will make the journey again.
“I see them sometimes in my dreams,” he said.
“Just being with them and spending a little time . . . Just once in a while.” And on those mornings, he said, he wakes up happy.
“What an amazing community, but it has been diluted in its outlook, its self-confidence, its sense of purpose, its sense of survival.” T.N. PANDIT ANTHROPOLOGIST