Kala-Pani or Primitive Paradise?Romila Thapar THE ANDAMAN STORY By N. Iqbal Singh Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1978, pp. xv 32l, Rs. 75.00 VOLUME III NUMBER 4 January/February 1979 The Andaman and Nicobar islands for
all their remoteness have nevertheless been the subject of a number of books.
Among the classics in ethnography is the study of the tribes of the islands by
Radcliffe Brown and as ethnographical studies go it has yet to be replaced. The
history of the islands, recorded essentially from the early nineteenth century
onwards, tends to be marginal to the history of the subcontinent, yet, because
of the function of one of the islands as a penal settlement the perspective on
the history of the Indian subcontinent has a certain uniqueness. It remains
something of an accident that the islands came under British rule, when in fact
their physical proximity is greater to South-East Asia. This was not however
entirely a quirk of colonial enterprise since their location in the Indian
Ocean made of them an area of great strategic importance in the maritime
control over the ocean and with the expansion of commercial links with South-East
Asia and China by the mid-nineteenth century, such a location was bound to be
of considerable significance.
Prior to
their inclusion in the European colonial circuit the islands, which number many
hundred, were characterized by cultures conforming to food-gathering and
primitive horticulture seen as among the survivals of early human social and
economic organization. Burial rites involving primary and secondary burial and
communal ossuaries are suggestive of early megalithic practices and one may
hope that serious archaeological work will be started soon in these areas. A
distinction was also made between the coastal tribes and those of the jungles
of the interior but the dependence of both on the environment was similar. A
further distinction separated the friendlier tribes such as the Onges of the
Little Andamans from the Jarawas of the Great Andamans, the latter renowned for
their fierce hostility to outsiders.
The
remoteness of the islands made them an ideal place for a penal settlement and
it was with this in view that they were cursorily surveyed in the eighteenth
century but the idea was not developed until a century later. Eventually it
was as a penal settlement that the islands serviced the British Empire in
India. There were many natural advantages as seen by the inhuman penal system
of the last century. Remoteness from civilization coupled with the hostility of
the indigenous population made of the ... Table of Contents >> |