On November 17, 2018, a 26-year-old American called John Allen Chau was killed on the beach of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal. It was the ultimate price for having dared to challenge the self-isolation of the single group of people anywhere who do it best.
North Sentinel is part of the Andaman archipelago. It’s about the size of Gozo, roughly square-shaped, very densely forested and surrounded on all sides by stunningly beautiful if treacherous coral reefs. It is thought that about 250 people live there, except no one knows for sure.
The reason is that the Sentinelese resist all forms of contact with the outside world, and have done so for at least several decades. They’re technically Indian, even if the idea of India, or of citizenship or a nation-state for that matter, can’t possibly mean anything to them.
Nor do cars, computers, or mobiles. You have to wonder what they make of the planes that fly low over the island as they approach the international airport at Port Blair with their daily deliveries of tourists. At this time, they must be wondering why the migration of great gliding birds has suddenly dried up.
North Sentinel is strictly out of bounds, a ban enforced partly by the Indian coastguard and also by the hails of arrows that greet anyone brave or reckless enough to approach the coralline outer defences. There have been sporadic attempts at making contact over the years, usually by fishermen and on occasion by anthropologists. As Chau was to find out, none ended very pleasantly.
Exactly why the Sentinelese uphold such an extreme and aggressive form of reclusion is not known. One idea is that self-isolation is just part of their culture, and has always been so. Another, more plausible, suggestion is that it is a defence mechanism learnt historically the hard way. Certainly the little contact they had with the British in the 19th century brought grief in the form of abductions and disease.
The second is a big issue in the Andamans. I experienced the problem at first hand 20 years ago. The main reason I was there was the lure of snorkelling on the pristine reefs (very few tourists visited back then), a charm made more potent by romantic notions of wild places and uncontacted tribes.
The first place I went to was the anthropology museum, a few minutes’ walk down the road from my hotel. Apart from a collection of rather splendid photographs, there wasn’t much to see – just some heavily varnished bows and arrows, bark body armour and canoes. The Sentinelese are only one of a number of indigenous tribes that include the Great Andamanese, the Onge and the Jarawa.
Exactly why the Sentinelese uphold such an extreme and aggressive form of reclusion is not known
Over dinner at the hotel one evening, I had a conversation with a migrant worker to the Andamans from Tamil Nadu. He told me that while the Sentinelese were well out of bounds, it was quite possible to see their cousins, the Jarawa. All I had to do was take a bus up north, through a new road that carved its way through Jarawa territory. That I did: to my regret, too, because it brought me face to face with the true cost of contact.
In hindsight, I should have known better. Take the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. We think of them as small and isolated groups of people but, as mentioned in a TLS review of the recent People of the Rainforest, Brazil had several million people when Europeans first reached it; by the mid-20th century, the indigenous population was down to 150,000.
The main reason for the catastrophic collapse was disease. The indigenous people of the Amazon had absolutely no resistance to the influenza, measles and smallpox that accompanied the Old World settlers. They died like flies. Not that they were universally missed: it was a grim lesson of history that disease could always be counted on to step where its comrade, warfare, stood. The conquistadors had learnt that to their advantage.
The bus left Port Blair at five in the morning. The three-hour trip would include a short crossing by ferry from the northern tip of South Andaman Island to a frontier settlement of sorts called Bharatang. Two hours into the journey we were stopped at a police checkpoint that marked the beginning of the wrongly-named Jarawa ‘reservation’. We were warned to stay away from, and not to make contact with, any Jarawa who approached us.
A few minutes later, I saw what I wanted to see: five Jarawa perched on top of a truck coming in the opposite direction. They wore red garlands and nothing else, and the men carried bows and arrows. There were many more (about 40 of them) at Bharatang, and it was not a happy sight. It was clear that contact had reduced them to a roadside freak-show attraction, a kind of human zoo.
I have since tried on and off to keep up with the news from the Andamans. I know that the Great Trunk Road is one of many things that have decimated the Jarawa to a shadow of what they once were. While antibiotics and vaccines help, they cannot entirely save them from the twin killer of influenza and measles.
These past couple of weeks more than ever, I’ve often found myself thinking of the Jarawa. And of the self-isolating Sentinelese, who the defences of arrows and coral have so far served so well.