I have never seen a Jarawa, even though I lived in the Andaman and Nicobar islands for four years, back in the 70s. Those days, tales of these fearsome tribals attacking outlying settlements with bows and arrows and making off with anything metallic regularly filtered back to us. We had seen black and white pictures of Jarawas fishing with bows and arrows. It looked cool. The last time I went to Andaman and Nicobar islands, two years ago, I saw a video on a mobile phone of someone I met, of the Jarawas singing and dancing for tourists along the 333 km Andaman Trunk Road (ATR), as it snakes its way from Port Blair to Diglipur. If you look up the books, Jarawas are listed as hunter-gatherers, live in dense forests, go boar hunting all day long and return to their settlement in the evening and eat wild boar roasted over fire. They are the most famous of the Negrito tribals of Andamans. When the British first anchored there in the 18th century, and turned it into a penal colony, there were apparently around 5,000 Negrito tribals: Great Andamanese, Jarawas, Onges, and Sentinelese, spread over many islands. Now there are down to a tenth of that: about 500; of which approximately 200 are Jarawas.
This is anecdotal: If you travel on the ATR, once you enter the Jhirkatang Jarawa reserve territory, in the northern tip of South Andamans just short of Baratang, the ATR cuts through their biosphere. Vehicles move in a convoy, between six in the morning and four in the evening, with an armed police escort who is there to make sure that no vehicle stops in the 30 km where Jarawas live. The Jarawas wait for the convoys. Photography is said to be prohibited. For an hour, the convoy moves slowly, thick forests rising on both sides of the road. Many of my friends who have made the trip to either Mayabunder or Diglipur, say Jarawas are fast runners, and strong. They will snatch anything they can, if the vehicle slows down or there is a window open. Someone had a rosary, dangling from the rearview mirror in a jeep, snatched. Being curious, watches, gold jewellery, anything, fascinate them. They clamber on to the roof of the bus to hitch a ride to Middle Strait jetty where vehicles move to a vehicle ferry to Nilambur jetty in Baratang island. They get into lorries that carry commodities up the ATR. Jarawas also sometimes get into the boat along with you to go to Baratang.
Once, when a couple of my friends spent the night at the forest guest house at Baratang, the guard told them the previous night Jarawas had put poison tipped arrows through a couple of fishermen who had strayed into their territory. The next day when the search and rescue team arrived, they found Jarawas sitting by the bodies and shooed them away. Luring the Jarawas, I am told, is no longer a difficult proposition. Alcohol and tobacco have done the trick. People I know have seen Jarawas begging for tobacco, singing Hindi film songs, and being filmed in exchange for a few bananas and potato wafers or biscuits and small change. Once the ATR came, such civilising traits became a given. Some Jarawa women now even wear nighties in the daytime. Everybody says the Jarawas must have been happier before civilisation came along. But that’s speculation, isn’t it?
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com