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Updated: Dec 04, 2018 07:25 IST

Today, Madhumala Chattopadhyay, who is in her early fifties, has a desk job at the ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in New Delhi. But nearly 30 years ago, Chattopadhay, an anthropologist, was one of the first people to make ‘friendly’ contact with the North Sentinelese tribespeople. In 1989, she received a fellowship from the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) to conduct research in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Chattopadhyay, who lived there till 1996, has published a book and written papers on most of the six tribes, who have lived on the islands for thousands of years.

Currently, all six tribes—the Great Andamanese, Onges, Jarawas and Sentinelese on Andaman, and Shompen and Nicobarese on Nicobar—live on reserved land, and no one can visit them without permission from the authorities. The 50-odd km sq North Sentinel island is home to an estimated 80 to 150 people, according to last census figures.

The first ‘friendly contact’ of the administration with the Sentinelese happened on 4 January, 1991—although there are accounts of a salvage team making ‘friendly’ contact with the Sentinelese after the MV Primrose ran aground near the island in 1981.

“The concept should be clear. The trips [to make friendly contact] were organised by the Andaman and Nicobar administration. They would take a research team, with one senior and one junior researcher,” explains Chattopadhyay.

The team was led by SA Awaradi, the then director of Tribal Welfare Department, and it hoped to gift coconuts to the tribespeople. “When we set out, we didn’t know that we would make friendly contact with the Sentinelese. From British times, attempts have been made, but no one had succeeded. Other kinds of ‘contact’ like gift-dropping and observation from a distance was happening,” says Chattopadhyay, talking about previous efforts by the island administration and ASI.

Also read: Why the Sentinelese, the Andaman tribe that killed US man, want to be left alone

Just six months prior to this, she says, a contact team was greeted by a hail of arrows by the tribe. So on January 4, when Awaradi and team docked their ship and waited for some tribespeople to visit the shore, no one could have guessed that the Sentinelese would wade into the water to take coconuts. The team reached early and anchored some distance away. As dawn broke, smoke began to rise over parts of the canopy. Some crew members took boats to the shore to drop off sacks of coconuts. “They were watching us,” she said. “After some time, some Sentinelese came and took the coconuts.”

The rest of the team, including Chattopadhyay, was on boats by now, and began floating coconuts towards the shore. Gradually, some Sentinelese began to swim towards them. “Some of them touched our boat playfully. Some collected the coconuts and waded out.” This interaction went on for hours.

As Chattopadhyay recounts her first meeting with the Sentinelese, she speaks of how she may have appeared to them: a lone woman in the team, speaking the Onge tongue, with thin skin and flat hair. One also sees her gaze: the tribal person as ‘playful’, ‘intelligent’, ‘fierce’. She recalls a Sentinelese woman directing a young man to aim his arrow towards the sand, she recalls beckoning to them saying, “Nariyala, jaba jaba’ (A lot of coconuts), using the Onge tongue. The team was apprehensive, she remembers, but relieved because no arrows were fired.

The second ‘friendly contact’ took place a month later. Trilok Nath Pandit, a senior researcher with ASI, who made his first foray into the island in 1967 (he didn’t meet any Sentinelese then) and was part of several subsequent gift-dropping contact missions, accompanied them. Several leading papers at the time documented these ‘friendly’ encounters, lauding the administration’s efforts at bridging the gap between civilization and the world’s least known inhabitants. However, the administration eventually ended such contact missions to the island. “Maybe they thought if they keep going, then other people will also do that,” Chattopadhyay guesses.

In the light of American missionary John Allen Chau’s death after transgressing into the North Sentinel Island in November, it is useful to examine the terms used to describe these encounters. A ‘friendly contact’, as the phrase suggests, is when the administration is able to meet members of the tribe without any hostility displayed by either party. There are other kinds of ‘contact’, like gift-dropping or reconnaissance from a distance. While it is clear that Chau’s contact was not friendly, it also throws light on the presumption that any contact with the tribes is welcome, to begin with.

The colonial history of Andaman and Nicobar islands is replete with captured and displaced tribespeople, violent excursions into their territories, exposure to illness, attempts to civilize them in ‘homes’, and offer employment to some as working class persons in the houses of white colonial masters. Post-Independence, the state changed its tactics. All six tribes living in the islands were declared protected tribes, and their territory was declared a Reserved Territory. Intermittent gift giving operations were started.

In 1974, the government-commissioned Man in Search of Man documentary film showed footage of the different tribes—the Jarawas danced with the film crew; the Sentinelese aimed arrows and hurt a member. At one point, the narrator refers to the tribespeople as “primitive”, a phrase that echoes Chau’s question in his journal, “Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?”

Chattopadhyay wasn’t clear by what we meant when we asked her whether anyone spoke of the risks of exposure such contact missions posed to the tribespeople. The big concern, she says, was non-tribe people making videos and “sell(ing) them as blue films” in the West. “They misrepresented the community.”

Her studying the tribes was for her, a way of dispelling myths about them. It was sanctioned by law: “I had to take permission from the administration if we wanted to go and meet the non-hostile tribes such as Car Nicobarese, Shompen, or Onges.” But her view of her own anthropological work is non-critical. “If you ask me, if there is any natural calamity or epidemic breakout, then administration [can go]. You can go for knowledge’s sake, but [it must be done] with discipline.”

Also read: ‘Don’t be angry if I get killed’: American tourist killed by Andaman tribe wrote to family