Lost song of the Jarawas

Lost song of the Jarawas
BOOK REVIEW
http://currentnews.in/Details.aspx?id=1418&boxid=3557328

The Jarawa Tribal Reserve Dossier

Edited by

Pankaj Sekhsaria and Vishvajit Pandya
Published by UNESCO and Kalpavriksh

Reviewed by

Madhusree Mukerjee


The Jarawa are among the most threatened people in the world. These hunter- gatherers live in great evergreen rainforests along the western coast of South and Middle Andaman, and number 365 at last count. Genetic studies indicate that they have occupied these islands for tens of millennia, being direct descendants of the first humans to colonize the territory. Throughout history the Jarawa have resisted outsiders— attacking and killing those who would fell trees or hunt and fish within their territory. In the process they have maintained their environment in a pristine condition, so that it overflows with resources such as timber, cane, fish and game that outsiders covet. Therein lies the danger.

British occupation of the Andaman Islands in 1858 led to the extinction by epidemics of most aboriginal tribes on the islands. (Having been isolated since prehistoric times, the islanders have no immunity to killer diseases such as syphilis that are common in the “civilized” world, and easily succumb.) The Jarawa were spared such decimation because of their sustained hostility to outsiders, which limited contact. But a decades- long programme of pacification by the Indian government resulted in their laying down their arms in 1998. The Jarawa immediately started falling prey to diseases such as bronchitis, measles, mumps and malaria, the effects of which have been partially contained by medical intervention. A single new germ line, such as HIV,
could still wipe them out.

The Jarawa Tribal Reserve Dossier, a compilation of documents that describe the history, geography and biology of the Jarawa homeland, is a valuable resource for researchers who seek to familiarize themselves with this obscure but fascinating terrain. Its editors are environmentalist and journalist Pankaj Sekhsaria, who runs a vitally important webgroup on the islands, and anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya.
Both have extensive experience of the Andamans. So do the contributors, especially activist Samir Acharya, who as founder of Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE) has led the struggle to protect indigenous rights and environment on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Researchers Manish Chandi and Harry Andrews acquired intimate knowledge of the islands’ flora and fauna during their tenure with the
Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team (ANET), and provide rare insights. Also featured are members of the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI), who surveyed the food resources of the Jarawa. The appendices are especially useful, containing legal documents and other materials that are hard to find elsewhere. These include a list,
compiled by Chandi, of encounters between settlers and Jarawa that goes all the way back to 1789. Another list, of the Jarawa’s forest camps, was compiled in 2002 and indicates the extent to which their privacy has been penetrated.

The most worrisome development is that ever since pacification the Jarawa reserve has been overrun with poachers. As an essay by Andrews shows, now that the Jarawa are no longer hostile their species-rich jungles, swamps, hills, streams and beaches have attracted hundreds of trespassers from villages around the reserve. The invaders no longer shoot the Jarawa, as they used to, but seek instead to manipulate them by offering gifts, or by inculcating addictions such as to tobacco and alcohol. They come in search of timber, cane, fish, boar, honey, fruit, and sex. The threat to the Jarawa, through introduced disease and loss of their resource base, is immediate and urgent.

To make matters worse, the Andaman politicians make no secret of their determination to throw open the resources of the Jarawa reserve to their constituencies.

The current MP even advocates seizing Jarawa children and raising them on the Indian mainland—actions similar to those for which the Australian government was recently forced to apologize to aboriginals. One can see the MP’s point of view: Once the Jarawa are rendered sedentary and dependent on a welfare system, as the Onge of Little Andaman have largely been, their resources can all the more easily be claimed by grateful voters. No matter that such a seizure would mean cultural genocide of the Jarawa, if not actual genocide. One hopes that the MP will come to realize that if the Jarawa forest is further degraded, its ability to retain and supply fresh water to surrounding settlements will be depleted his vote bank will then have to pack up and depart.

More than a decade of activism to defend the Jarawa, and to educate the Andaman’s settler population as to the vital role these hunter-gatherers play in maintaining the island ecology has, however, resulted at best in stalemate. The Andaman administration has failed to implement court orders regarding the protection of Jarawa territory: in particular, it has ignored a 2002 Supreme Court order closing the parts of the Andaman
Trunk Road (ATR) that run through the Jarawa reserve. As a result, the administration’s laudable new effort to create a buffer zone around the reserve has run up against complaints of inconsistency.
Predictably, the MP has threatened a bandh against the measure he has also called for further defying the Supreme Court by constructing a railway line alongside the ATR. The dossier provides an insightful survey of the past, and contains necessary information for pointing the way to the future, if the Jarawa are to have any. It would have been even more useful, however, had it contained a description, either by
Sekhsaria or Acharya, of the various efforts to protect the Jarawa, through appeals to the public, the courts, and the National Advisory Commission—and an analysis of why these endeavours have faltered. To be sure, no one had expected that the administration would ignore the Supreme Court, and the fact that it continues to do so is symptomatic of the collapse of governance across India.

Those rare battles that adivasis have won against dispossession, such as the triumph of the Dongria Kondh in Orissa, suggest that a groundswell of protest, properly publicized, can on occasion gain indigenous peoples their rights. But the Jarawa are not being given a chance to speak on their future nor, as the MP’s stand indicates, are their territorial or other rights getting much support from the mainstream population of the Andaman Islands.

As if that were not enough, a long-standing debate over whether the Jarawa should be “civilized” or not continues to rage— despite the acceptance, throughout the world, of the principle of self-determination. It is for the Jarawa alone to decide whether or not, and at what pace, to integrate.

Becoming integrated, or “civilized,” will inevitably lead to sedenterization of these nomadic people—with its attendant social and medical problems, such as depression and alcoholism—and must not be forced on them by robbing them of their resources.

In this context, it would have been useful to have the United Nations declarations on indigenous rights, which calls specifically for the protection of Jarawa territory, in the appendix. A review of how similarly fraught situations are being dealt with on other continents (perhaps by anthropologist Sita Venkateswar) would have been instructive. Creative solutions have been developed for informing semi-isolated peoples about the outside world without disrupting their culture, and these can show the way for empowering the Jarawa.

Such omissions do not, however, detract from the usefulness of this compendium, which is an essential resource for anyone who seeks to understand the plight of the Jarawa and appreciate the diversity and uniqueness of the environment they have preserved, often at the cost of their lives.

Jarawa Tribal Reserve Dossier: New Publication from the Andaman Islands

Dear Friends,
We are very happy to announce the release of a new publication on the
Jarawa Tribal Reserve of the Andaman Islands:

THE JARAWA TRIBAL RESERVE DOSSIER:
Cultural and Biological Diversities in the Andaman Islands

Edited by
PANKAJ SEKHSARIA & VISHVAJIT PANDYA

Prepared by
KALPAVRIKSH
under the
LOCAL AND INDEGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS (LINKS) PROGRAM
of
UNESCO.

No. of Pages: 212; 12 colour plates; 11 colour maps

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SYNOPSIS:

One of the most distinctive, but relatively little known features of the Andaman Islands is an entity of land and sea called the Jarawa Tribal Reserve (JTR) – a space legally notified in the name and, arguably, the interests of the Jarawa tribal community. Until recently, the Jarawa were hostile to outsiders. As a result, those who might otherwise have exploited the resources of the reserve – poachers, settlers and developers – were denied access.

However, the Jarawa have now chosen to cease hostilities, and the borders of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve have become permeable to intrusion, even though legally off limits to outsiders.

The multiple changes that have ensued have enormous ramifications for both the Jarawa people and their lands. As much of the information relating to the Jarawa and the Reserve remains scattered and difficult to access, this Dossier has undertaken to bring together within the covers
of one publication, information and views about the JTR emanating from a number of distinct disciplines.

Indeed, one cannot comprehend the complex interactions between the biological and cultural diversity of this unique people and place without adopting an interdisciplinary perspective.

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The dossier is made up of 10 original or previously published papers:

1) Colonisation and conflict resolution
Manish Chandi

2) Hostile borders on historical landscapes
Vishvajit Pandya

3) Territory and landscape around the Jarawa Reserve
Manish Chandi

4) The Jarawa Reserve: the Last Andaman forest
Manish Chandi & Harry Andrews

5)The Jarawa Tribal Reserve: an important bird area
Bombay Natural History Society

6) The Jarawas and their lands
Anthropological Survey of India

7) Impact assessment around the Jarawa Reserve
Harry Andrews

8) Andaman Trunk Road and the Jarawa situation
Samir Acharya

9) The ATR is like a public thoroughfare through one's private courtyard
Dr RK Bhattacharya

10) Only management of traffic needed on the ATR
Dr SA Awaradi

The dossier also Also contains a comprehensive set of annexures that includes the entire Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation (ANPATR) - 1956; the policy on the Jarawa tribe as approved by the Kolkata High Court, rules of the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS), medical regime for the treatment of Jarawas and a compilation of a conflict incidents involving the Jarawas.

The document also has 11 colour maps that for the first time provides detailed and comprehensive insight into the changes in the Jarawa REserve boundary, vegetation, vegetation density and land cover classification, and location of Jarawa camps within the forests of the
Jarawa Tribal Reserve.

If you are interested in receiving copies of the publication please write to me at psekhsaria@gmail.com

Jpeg versions of the dossier cover a few pages, maps, and photographs can be seen below.

The link to the dossier on UNESCO's document system is the following:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001876/187690E.pdf

thanks
Pankaj Sekhsaria
psekhsaria@gmail.com

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Contents

Animal and Plant Diversities

Annexure VII: List of conflict incidents involving the Jarawas

Map III: Changes in the Jarawa Tribal Reserve Boundary

MapVIb: Land Cover Classification

Back Cover

Vanishing Futures

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/07/26/stories/2009072650120500.htm

The Hindu, July 26, 2009

Vanishing futures

PANKAJ SEKHSARIA

It is a small consolation that the Jarawas have not been wiped out like the great Andamanese.

“Those who forget history,” it is said, “are condemned to repeat it.” What happens, however, when you forget history, but condemn someone else for it? Where does responsibility lie then and, importantly, what happens to those who are so condemned? The chilling answer can be found if we look at the history and the present of the indigenous communities of the Andaman Islands. One word: “extinction”.

Retracing roots

The fate of the Great Andamanese is a classic case in point. In the mid-19th century when the British established the penal settlement in the Andamans, it was estimated that there were at least 5,000 members of the Great Andamanese community that was divided into 10 distinct language and territorial groups. In just a century and a half, the population has come down to a little more than 50; all herded onto the small Strait Island a short distance away from Port Blair.

The damage was mainly done in British times. In his 1899 classic A History of our Relations with the Andamanese, M.V. Portman, the British officer in charge of the Andamanese, describes in a bleak, unnerving record the impact of the 1877 epidemic of measles, the worst to hit the Great Andamanese.

…All the people on Rutland (Island) and Port Campbel are dead, and very few remain in the South Andaman and the Archipelago. The children do not survive in the very few births which do occur, and the present generation may be considered as the last of the aborigines of the Great Andaman…

The story of the Onge of Little Andaman Island is very similar. From nearly 700 in the 1901 census, their number has fallen to about 100 today. While a large part of their 730 sq. km. island home is still called the ‘Onge Tribal Reserve’ the protection is only on paper. The biggest violator, tragically, has been the Indian state that ruthlessly (and illegally) logged the forest home of the Onge for nearly three decades till the Supreme Court put a stop to it in 2002.

From late 1960s onwards, thousands of people from mainland India were sent to Little Andaman Island under a Government of India programme to ‘colonise’ it. From being complete masters of their traditional forests of Little Andaman, the Onges have become outsiders in just four decades. Only the Onge lived on this island in 1965. Today, for every Onge on Little Andaman, there are at least 200 people from outside and the equation is changing even as we read this.

In one of the most bizarre incidents in the islands, eight members of the community died and 16 more were hospitalised after consuming a mysterious liquid that was washed ashore in a jerry can near their Dugong Creek settlement in December 2008. The administration says that the Onge consumed the liquid believing it to be alcohol, but doubts persist. Six months have passed but nothing is known of the liquid or the post mortem reports. Maybe the Onge made a mistake, but the authorities too have shown no urgency in getting to the bottom of the matter. The colonising enterprise has been successful and the annihilated, as we all know, tell no tales. They have no history even.

The story of the Jarawas is complex but follows the same trajectory. Thousands of settlers have been moved into the forests of the Jarawas, huge areas of their traditional forest home turned into agricultural and horticultural fields and the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) constructed through the heart of Jarawa forests. Over decades, the road became the main channel to remove precious timber from these forests and also the main vector in bringing a whole range of vices to the Jarawa: alcohol, tobacco, gutka, reportedly, even sexual exploitation.

The road has even facilitated a new kind of tourism: “Jarawa tourism” where visitors drive down the ATR hoping to ‘see’ the Jarawa, as if they were some kind of living exhibits in an open air museum. Traffic continues to ply on the road in spite of clear Supreme Court orders in 2002 to close it down. Two epidemics of measles have already hit the Jarawa in the last decade. It can only be a small consolation that they were not wiped out like the Great Andamanese a little more than a century ago.

Disappearing race

I recently heard a fascinating presentation on the language of the Great Andamanese by Dr. Anvita Abbi, Professor of Linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. It showed new ways of how the world can be perceived, of a different understanding of the universe, of an experience of life and creation, which is as fascinating as it is strikingly original. The calamity struck when the presenter informed that only four of the original Great Andamanese languages are still spoken and, tragically, only six people live who can still speak the language of their ancestors That day I also learnt something else that was new — the first thing that dies when a language dies are the songs of a people!

When the non-profit organisation Terralingua mapped the distribution of languages against a map of the world’s biodiversity, it found that the places with the highest concentration of plants and animals, such as the Amazon Basin and the island of New Guinea, were also where people spoke the most languages. There is a deeper link between culture, language and biodiversity than we seem to know. Nothing will remain if these people and their cultures are exterminated.

Extinction is not only for the plants, the animals, the birds and the bees. It is also what humans to do other humans and in what they do to themselves as well. Every extinction, be it in the world of the wild or of something human is the loss of a part of our very own.

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For related stories

Andaman's Tribal Reserves

On renaming of islands in the Andaman and Nicobar

4 Elephants From Andamans Transported to Kanha National Park

4 Elephants From Andamans Transported to Kanha National Park

http://andamanchronicle.com/ content/view/ 927/27/
May 08, 2009 at 09:27 PM

Port Blair, May 8: Four elephants of Andaman Forest Department which
were gifted to Madhya Pradesh Forest Department left Andaman by TCI ship
on 6th May 2009 for their onward journey to Kanha National Park enroute
Chennai.

Madhya Pradesh Government was in need of elephants for protection of
Kanha National Park which is famous for tigers. In this regard they
approached the A&N Administration for giving them some elephants for
this national cause.

The Administration readily agreed to gift them a total of 10 elephants.
Finally four elephants were selected by the team of forest officials
from MP who reached Andaman to take possession of these elephants.

The four elephants namely Ambika, Sharoon, Mohini & Sumitra from
different forest camps were loaded in TCI ship and which sailed for
Chennai on 6th May.

This is contribution of islands in national cause to protect the
endangered species of Tigers.
--

Ravi Sankaran - some pics from the Andamans

The time I spent with Ravi in the islands was the pre-digital era. Ravi was not too happy with his pictures being taken, but I did manage to take a few - mainly transparencies. I spent the last couple of weeks rummaging through my slide collection and discovered those pictures of Ravi, taken mainly on two trips between 2001 and 2003.
The first set of pics are when he took me along to Challis Ek, the network of edible nest swiftlet caves where he was working while the second one is from a trip we made in 2002 to Chipo, to the northern tip of North Andaman Island

Working on an alarm contraption to be used to protect the nests from thieves

Ravi and Alex (left) working on the contraption. Alex was Ravi's boatman and colleague in his work on swiftlets in Middle and North Andaman

At the campsite at Challis Ek with his field staff and wife Deepa

Entering a swiftlet cave at Challis Ek

The following pictures were taken on a trip that we made together to Chipo

Ravi (in the foreground) on the way back from Chipo to Mayabundar

Ravi and Alex

Ravi and Alex

Thailand Urged to Stop Pushing Refugees Out to Sea

Thailand Urged to Stop Pushing Refugees Out to Sea
By LAWI WENG
Thursday, January 15, 2009

http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=14933

A refugee rights organization has called on the Thai government to stop stranding Rohingya boat people from western Burma’s Arakan State at sea after apprehending them for illegally entering Thailand.

In a press release issued on Monday, Washington, DC-based Refugees International said the Thai government “should instruct its Army to desist from its new and troubling policy of pushing refugees and migrants intercepted on boats back out to sea.”

According to the group, press reports indicated that there were at least four confirmed deaths and as many as 300 people missing after a boat that had been towed out to sea by the Thai authorities capsized.


One report said that on December 18, the Thai Navy set 412 people adrift on a single boat in international waters north of the island of Koh Surin, off the coast of Thailand.

After 13 days at sea, the Indian Coast Guard rescued 107 survivors of the ordeal near the Andaman Islands.

Thai officials disputed the claim. “Thai immigration office will never send illegal immigrants back to their countries by putting them back in the boat then let them go,” said Police Lieutenant General Chatchawal Suksomjit, commander of the Thailand Immigration Office.

Chris Lewa, an expert on Rohingya issues who interviewed some of the survivors, said that they told her they were forced to get onto the boat at gunpoint and were given just four bags of rice and two tanks of water.

“It’s an outrageous situation. Thailand must stop putting them back in the middle of the sea,” she added.

One survivor from Buthidaung Township, Arakan State, told Lewa that he had left his village with eight people. “Four of my friends are now dead. Our dream was to go to Malaysia,” he said.

A rising tide of Rohingya refugees has been fleeing Burma towards countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Their numbers usually increase after November, when the seas are at their calmest. Last week, more than a hundred people who travelled by boat were arrested by Indonesian authorities in Aceh.

The Rohingya are a stateless Muslim minority who face harsh treatment by the Burmese authorities. They are prohibited from travelling outside Arakan State and are further marginalized by other discriminatory regime laws.

Last September, more than 100 Rohingyas were given six-month prison sentences after they were arrested while traveling to Rangoon in search of work.

Many seek to escape the economic hardship of their restricted lives and turn to brokers to help them find work outside Arakan State. Hundreds put to sea in leaky vessels and head for Malaysia, but many end up on Thailand beaches or drown in the stormy waters of the Andaman Sea.

According to official Thai figures, the number of Rohingyas arrested for illegally entering Thailand has increased steadily in recent years, from 1,225 in 2005-6 to 4,886 in 2007-8. There were 659 Rohingyas seized in eight separate incidents from November 26 to December 25 last year.

Dictionary in Great Andamanese

JNU don compiles dictionary in Great Andamanese
Parul Sharma
http://www.thehindu.com/2009/01/12/stories/2009011253620400.htm

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Linguist Anvita Abbi has been working with the community for the past eight years

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NEW DELHI: In an attempt to restore the endangered Great Andamanese language, a researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University has compiled a trilingual dictionary of about 4,000 words in that language, with translations in English and Hindi.

Linguist Anvita Abbi, who is the chairperson of the Centre for Linguistics at JNU, has been working with the Great Andamanese community for the past eight years.

The dictionary has phonetic representation of words and is replete with real pictures taken by Prof. Abbi herself. The dictionary will have a Hindi version and an English version as well. The author will zero in on the prospective publishers in the next couple of months.

“Great Andamanese is one of the four tribes living in the Andaman Islands. There are only 53 people in that community and only eight persons, the older ones, can speak the Great Andamanese language. It is a moribund language, as children do not converse in it,” said the JNU professor.

The dictionary has also documented different variations of the same word as used by different speakers. It also serves as an “ecological storehouse” comprising a large number of birds, trees, fish and other sea creatures.

Since the Great Andamanese has never had a script, Prof. Abbi also gave them the Devnagari scrip to use it as a medium to write the words of that language.

“Most tribal languages are only spoken and remain unwritten. No one has ever bothered to give them a script. I chose Devnagari because it is a scientific script. Also, the children go to schools in Port Blair and study Hindi. Therefore, they are familiar with this script,” she added.

The trilingual dictionary that has been compiled over three years is a part of a documentation project called “Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese”. The project is being funded by the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London under the “Endangered Language Documentation Programme”.

“We used a lot of modern technology tools to develop a highly interactive dictionary. First, we ourselves got trained in how to make a dictionary. It will also be put on the Internet by the University of London. The online dictionary will also have the recording of a native speaker to pronounce the words and sentences in the language,” said Prof. Abbi.

Most linguists, she feels, shy away from researching on the languages spoken by the tribes on the Andaman Islands.

“Living with the community and managing things on your own is not easy. The bureaucracy in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is also a discouraging factor for linguists to work on the languages.” This past year, Prof. Abbi also came out with a book of letters in the Great Andamanese language.

“That was my tribute to the community, especially the children. I did it out of love for them,” she concluded.

Also see

http://pankaj-atcrossroads.blogspot.com/2007/05/vanishing-voices-of-great-andamanese.html

http://pankaj-atcrossroads.blogspot.com/2008/02/great-andamanese-in-port-blair.html

http://pankaj-atcrossroads.blogspot.com/2007/08/punishment-for-culprit-in-nu-case.html

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Paddy fields, Wandoor, Andaman Islands, June 2008