The anthropologist T.N.
Pandit at his home in New Delhi. In the 1960s, he began working in the
Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago.
Credit
Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times
NEW
DELHI — At 82, the 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 photographs, capturing Mr. Pandit as he
made contact with 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.
Mr.
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 Mr. 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. Mr. 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.
So it is notable that now, when he looks back on his life’s great achievement, he does so with an unmistakable sadness.
Mr.
Pandit arrived in Port Blair, the capital city 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. His first government posting came as a
disappointment: the Andaman Islands, an archipelago so remote that the
British used it as a penal colony.
He found, to his surprise, that the place suited him. His head was full of the romantic phrases of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown,
a British anthropologist who studied the tribes at the turn of the
century, describing them as “brave, valiant and very clever people.” He
was dismayed to find their descendants begging for alms, teased by the
local children.
In 1991, T.N. Pandit, far left, presented gifts of coconuts to the Sentinelese people.
But
there were other tribes, he learned, that had hardly changed since the
days of Radcliffe-Brown. One group lived alone on a 20-square-mile
island called North Sentinel and had barely been seen at all. The other
group, known as the Jarawa, were fearsome archers, known for hiding in
the treetops and neatly impaling with arrows outsiders who encroached on
their territory. Government policy toward the Jarawa fell to the Bush
Police, who were armed with rifles and kept careful records of
casualties on both sides.
Mr.
Pandit was openly contemptuous of this martial approach, which dated
back to the British Raj. In 1967, he managed to join 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. “This whole encounter
was so amazing, because here is civilized man facing primitive man in
its extreme state, living very simply.”
In
1968, Mr. Pandit had a stroke of luck. Three Jarawa teenagers, captured
raiding a village, were kept in prison for a month, so Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
“I
have seen a Jarawa girl,” he said. “I can never forget her face, though
it was many years back. She sat in the boat watching us as if she was
Queen Victoria, with such dignity and such poise. You see, then I
realized one doesn’t need clothes and ornaments and crown to make you
dignified. What comes spontaneously, your inner self, you can project
your personality that way.”
Mr.
Pandit’s campaign worked. By the 1990s, the Jarawa were so at ease with
outsiders that they began to roam the neighboring 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.
Activists concerned with the tribes increasingly described contact missions as
a kind of cultural destruction, introducing rot from within.
Governments in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia were adopting
“no-contact” policies, and India followed suit. Gift-giving expeditions
to the Sentinelese stopped in 1996, and the Indian Navy now enforces a
buffer zone to keep curiosity-seekers away.
In
2004, the central government formulated a new policy toward the Jarawa,
with the primary goal of protecting them “from harmful effects of
exposure and contact with the outside world.”
Mr. Pandit and his colleagues were able to
socialize with the isolated Jarawa tribe after a breakthrough. Here, in
an image from the 1980s, members of the tribe visited a ship anchored
off their land.
But
the process of integration, once begun, was impossible to stop, said
Samir Acharya, a local environmental activist, with a touch of
bitterness.
“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.”
A
faction of anthropologists continue to defend the practice of
controlled contact, saying that humans are by nature social animals,
longing to interact. As one put it recently, “There is nothing
particularly attractive about living in an isolated tribe on the slow
road to extinction.” But their protestations have a weary tone, as of
one losing an argument.
Mr.
Pandit has followed these developments from the hushed apartment in New
Delhi where he lives with the third of his four daughters.
It
is nearly impossible for him to discuss his work in the Andaman Islands
without thinking of his wife, Roshi, who died in 2015. Roshi would sit
with him and endlessly discuss the tribes. His loss remains so painful
that he has tried to train his mind not to dwell on it. He struggles, he
says, to come to terms with the fleeting quality of human experience.
“Nothing is permanent,” he said. “What has gone on in the past looks like having been a dream.”
In the end, Mr. 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. Now they take it easy. They beg for things.”
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
as much as possible, so that they understood the value of what they were
leaving behind.
“In the course of time, these communities will disappear,” he said. “Their cultures will be lost.”
Mr.
Pandit last traveled 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. He is left with the
photographs — square black-and-whites from the 1970s, faded color from
the 1980s — and with his thoughts.
“I
see them sometimes in my dreams,” he said. “Just being with them and
spending a little time. Not too long. Not frequently. Just once in a
while.” And on those mornings, he said, he wakes up happy.
0 comments: