Two Days on the Trunk Road

My last post on New Guinea made me think about an experience I had in India's Andaman Islands. Ten years ago I wrote an account of a trip to the Andaman Islands during which my brother and a friend and I saw some of the Jarawa, a very small group of Negroid people living in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Since not much was known about the Jarawa, we took careful notes and photos, thinking we needed to share what we saw. However, nothing came of my writing, perhaps in part because we had ambivalent feelings about paying what turned out to be bribes in order to travel through the Jarawa Reserve and take photos of the Jarawa. Time has passed and a blog seems like a good place to finally share our story. I do not know the state of the Jarawa now, but here, for what it is worth, is what we saw and wrote in 2001:

IN JANUARY OF 2001 I traveled with my brother and a friend to the Andaman Islands in India and encountered the Jarawa people on the Great Andaman Trunk Road. Our knowledge of the Jarawa came primarily from two sources: an article in the Autumn 2000 American Scholar entitled “The Last Island of the Savages” by Adam Goodheart and a November 2000 London Sunday Times Magazine article entitled “The Road to Oblivion” by Scott Athorne and Charlie Sebastian. Later we found more information on the aboriginal peoples of the Andamans in The Rough Guide to India (1999), the India Lonely Planet Guide (1999), as well as the official Andamans website. Although our visit to the islands was brief, we noticed immediately that none of what we read described the whole of our experiences there, and some of it was simply wrong. Therefore, we are writing this account of our trip in an effort to update and clarify information on the Jarawa.

Our first day in the Andamans started in the morning of January 18, 2001. Our hotel sent a man named Salim to pick us up at the Port Blair airport in his minivan. During the drive he handed us his card advertising a variety of touring possibilities, and, for lack of an alternative, we agreed to talk with him in more detail after we freshened up. When we spoke later in the hotel, he began planning a typical tourist’s itinerary for us, which consisted of short jaunts around Port Blair. We stopped him and said we wanted to go snorkeling and drive the Great Andaman Trunk Road. The Trunk Road extends north from Port Blair through farmland and villages into the thick forest which covers the large islands of the Andaman archipelago (South, Middle, and North Andaman). Port Blair and most of the Jarawa Reserve are on South Andaman, and the Trunk Road forms part of the eastern boundary of the reserve. Traveling up the Trunk Road seemed like a safe way to have an interesting adventure as well as an opportunity to get a sense of the overall island terrain, flora, and fauna. Also, the London Times article reported that the Jarawa were now begging along the Trunk Road, and we were curious to see these unique people.

Salim warned us that if you are not an Indian national, permits are required for travel through the Jarawa Reserve, but he also told us that he could get the permits for us. The cost of the bribes required for these permits (1,300 rupees) was simply added to the total cost or our tour, as if success acquiring them was assumed. It immediately became clear that Indian state security around the Jarawa was easily breached. Also, to our surprise, Salim assured us that would certainly see the Jarawa if we traveled the Trunk Road; they would beg, he said, and we would throw them food from the windows of our moving car. Throwing food to people sounded repulsive, but Salim implied that not providing the Jarawa with food would provoke their unpredictable anger. In addition, Salim was not disrespectful when speaking of the Jarawa, so our consciences were eased.

Since the day was already getting too late to plan a long trip, we stayed around Port Blair and went snorkeling at Cinque Island the next day.

At 7:00 am of our third day, Salim, permits in hand, met us at our hotel to begin our trip up the Trunk Road. Because of the length and roughness of the trip, Salim was not taking his usual vehicle; instead, we were to ride in an antique-looking Indian Ambassador car driven by a man familiar with the route. Before getting on the road, we had to buy food in Port Blair to give the Jarawa. Salim directed us to buy the cheaper, “low-quality” bananas, since, he said, the Jarawa wouldn’t know the difference. This was one of the few times Salim seemed condescending towards the Jarawa.

The trip out of Port Blair to the Jarawa Reserve is a gradual transition from a ragged urban environment to an impressive jungle. Just outside of Port Blair we passed the airport, the scene of much construction as the runway is being lengthened to accommodate more frequent flights. Laborers — including women in bright saris — toiled along the road, breaking stones and digging ditches by hand. As we entered the countryside, we passed hilly farmland worked by water buffalo and dotted with peaked haystacks. In addition, we passed single houses, churches, farm shelters, stores, and the occasional village of a dozen or so buildings. As we went farther north the houses became simpler and just south of the reserve they were roofed in thatch, not tin. We took photos from the car as we passed valleys beautifully bordered with tall trees on the hilltops. Once we met a car loudly broadcasting polio vaccination information from a speaker. We reached the gate to the Jarawa Reserve around 11:30 am.

The gate itself was merely a long pole across the road with a heavy piece of metal weighing down one end and a lock holding down the other. On a hill above the end with the lock was a single-story concrete building about the size of a local house, from which the police control passage through the gate. Inside the gate on the other side of the road was a line of tea stalls where travelers could pass the time while waiting for the gate to open, grabbing a quick snack before the long trip up the road. Only the police were allowed to stop along the Trunk Road, so bathrooms next to the police station also provided relief for travelers coming out of the reserve, many of whom also visited the tea stalls for refreshments and conversation. Salim stressed to us that the prohibition against stopping in the reserve was meant to protect travelers from the Jarawa. Though the Jarawa are recently more friendly, the official rules and behavior of locals indicate that they consider it quite probable that the Jarawa will return to their former belligerence. According to Salim, this danger is one reason why the Andaman government will soon forbid entry by all non-Indians. Salim said that this new policy would take effect in two months, which would mean that it is in place as we are writing this.

An important rule about travel through the reserve — and one that greatly complicated the arrangements Salim made for us — was that tourists must have a valid destination beyond the reserve, and they must spend at least one night north of the reserve. That is, the police no longer allow non-Indians to make a trip through the reserve to the end of South Andaman and back on the same day. This rule was reportedly made because of the willfulness of a foreign botanist. Allegedly, a few months before our visit, a botanist entered the reserve by the Trunk Road about ten times, each time saying that he was only driving through the reserve to the northern end of South Andaman and returning the same day. Instead, he was having his driver stop in the reserve so that he could collect samples, and on his last trip he went so far into the forest that he got lost. The police had to search for him and they removed him from the reserve under arrest. To get our permit, Salim had claimed that we were traveling to Rongat in Middle Andaman to visit a beach, which he said was plausible given that tourists have a strange attraction to beaches. Actually, we were going to spend the night in a government hostel on the small island between South and Middle Andaman called Bharatang.

The gate was scheduled to open at 12:30 so we had an hour to kill. Salim spoke to the police and we courageously ate food from the nearest tea stall. Near 12:30 we sat in the car and took quick photos of the two-meter-tall sign listing the rules of conduct with the reserve as well as of a curious cow with blue-painted horns that came looking for food. Several buses from the north pulled up on the other side of the gate, and passengers and police descended from them to use the toilets and buy snacks. At 12:30 the gate opened and we entered only to stop and wait for our police escort. It came as a surprise to us that the escort meant to ride with us in our car. At 1:30 the policeman came, and as we walked to the car Salim discreetly made it clear that we would not be able to take photos in the reserve. Oddly, the bags of bananas we carried were apparently not a problem, although the rules also clearly forbid giving anything to the Jarawa. We were asked to roll our rear windows up to within about three inches from the top and leave them there. The soldier, holding a handmade-looking rifle and leaning his arm out the window, sat in the front seat with Salim and the driver. They started talking and, finally, we left.

The Trunk Road through the reserve is no longer a lonely road where Indians fear leaving their vehicles. Inside the gate uniformed schoolchildren walked along the road, possibly to the thatched Indian houses we passed a little farther along. Several buses and trucks passed us. Because cars can’t stop, the Andaman government keeps the road well maintained, and we saw three crews of men, women, and boys working around barrels of hot tar. At times the jungle landscape along the road was cut by deep gullies. After thirty minutes on the road, Salim alerted us that were approaching a spot where Jarawa often begged. We were on a high, straight stretch of road, bordered by unusually open woods. Beside the road were two irregular, low, thatched shelters, about 25 feet in circumference. Around the one on the west side was a group of about ten children and a woman, and they became very excited at the sight of our car. Children ran into the road and shouted and waved their arms, having great fun trying to stop us. The group immediately surrounded the car and hung on to the half-open windows and pounded on the sides of the car, even though the driver, shouting back at them, lawfully kept the car moving. From the back seat, we threw the bananas out the windows as quickly as possible. Salim had already separated the hands of bananas into units of two that the Jarawa wouldn’t fight over a few bunches, and he said that we should throw the fruit away from the car so that we could keep moving. It was all over in less than five frantic minutes and as we sped off and looked back a little boy happily threw a stone at us.

Stunned, we spent the next few miles reviewed the encounter. The London Times article gave the impression that the Jarawa were sullenly begging for junk food, reduced from noble self-sufficiency to servile dependency. (The article reports that Charlie Sebastian “found the Jarawa begging by the roadside, huddled beneath trees, and spending their days waiting for vehicles,” and Sebastian says that “their eyes were scared and miserable… they didn’t laugh.”) The children we saw were undeniably happy and irreverent, laughing at us and enjoying the sport of extracting food through the car windows. Their smiles were startlingly bright white and they acted healthy and agile. Salim had warned us to hide red things, since they might demand we give them anything in their favorite color, which was the color of headbands almost all the children wore. They wore little else, besides some mud facial decoration and sometimes strings around their waists, although the woman in the group, who stayed in the shelter, wore a dirty sari. Although they were technically begging, the children's zeal made their ambush more sport and play than a desperate plea for food.

After about twenty minutes a tanker track passed us, and sitting on top of it were about eight Jarawa children wearing red headbands and laughing. We were told that they like to hitch rides on trucks. We drove on, and after ten minutes we came upon another group of Jarawa at a hillock topped with a hut overlooking the road. This group was made up of about five children, including a little girl and an adult woman shorter than our Ambassador. She wore only a string around her waist, which held a hand-sized piece of fabric over her crotch, and a red headband. One child was in a dirty dress. When we slowed down, the woman leaned into the front passenger window and spoke to the soldier and over to the driver. She held a crudely-made knife. Again, we tossed out bananas while not stopping, and some of the children chased us for quite a while. One child about seven years old stood apart from the others in the middle of the road with his legs planted apart and his arms out, commanding us to stop, but the driver kept going and the boy moved.

This meeting with the Jarawa was our last of the day.

A little farther along (and still inside the reserve), we passed a clearing that held some thatched buildings larger than the Jarawa huts and we were told they are used for housing the reserve guards. As we neared the tip of South Andaman, the last signs of the Jarawa were two more of their huts. Positioned high on banks on either side of the road, these thatched huts were larger than the earlier ones, and much more crudely-made than the ones which housed the guards. They were irregularly shaped, with eaves sloping to only a foot or two above the ground, and one roof peaked off center. As we neared the end of the island, our driver sped down the hill to the water, trying to catch the ferry that was just pulling out. The ferry returned for us and a bus, and we made the crossing to Bharatang.

That night over dinner at a three-table restaurant near the ferry we questioned Salim about the Jarawa. He estimated their number at four to five hundred. During the summer when food is scarce, up to one hundred are seen on the shores or swimming between islands, looking for food and begging. Sometimes the Jarawa wait to meet the Bharatang ferry on the South Andaman side and the boat always spends the night on the Bharatang side to protect it from the Jarawa. Intriguingly, Salim said there is a group of taller, rarer Jarawa called “Patan” who live separately from the other Jarawa. We have not read anything confirming the existence of such a group.

Salim went on to tell us something about the Jarawa which makes one wonder about the accuracy of his information. He said the Jarawa shoot people with arrows poisoned with their saliva, which is poisonous because the Jarawa don’t eat salt. He demonstrated how the Jarawa lick their arrows before shooting them, and it is easy to imagine that something which may be a symbolic act by the Jarawa has become an apocryphal story spread by Indians. Also, Salim stated that the Jarawa were once headhunters, a story that has been around since the British first saw the Great Andamanese wear jawbones of deceased relatives around their necks, and one that is firmly denied by the Indian government. Salim also told us that although the Jarawa do not usually enter settlements, about two months before our visit about one hundred Jarawa raided the maintenance area for the buses that run on the Trunk Road. Indian police had to capture them and take them back to the reserve. South of the reserve we had passed the maintenance area, a compound surrounded by a high fence enclosing buildings and buses. Salim’s explanation for why the Jarawa are sometimes mean is that Indian boys and tourists “make mischief” with the Jarawa. Tourists tease them with food and gifts and people raid their huts while the Jarawa are away, stealing their possessions. He also said that the reason we see only women and children begging is that travelers are afraid of the men, so they stay hidden in the trees.

One of the more interesting of Salim's stories was his explanation for why the Jarawa are now friendly after being hostile to outsiders for their entire history of contact with Europeans and Indians. Salim said the Jarawa became friendlier after a Jarawa boy fell out of a tree and had his broken leg fixed in a Port Blair hospital. The military found the boy by the side of the road, and, after spending several weeks in the hospital, he was returned to the forest. Soon thereafter, groups of friendly Jarawa started coming out of the forest. This story is repeated in the Lonely Planet Guide, which added more detail (the boy was supposedly sixteen and the year was 1996). However, the story is mysteriously absent from other accounts. Goodheart says that in 1997 Burmese poachers were killed and mutilated but soon thereafter the Jarawa became completely friendly while the London Times article merely said that in 1998 the Jarawa came out of the reserve and stopped attacking vehicles.

Surprised at the amount we were learning about the Jarawa, we decided to keep better notes the next day as we traveled back through the reserve. We also decided to take some photos and wrapped a disposable camera in newspaper that had a small hole cut out over the lens, and folded a towel around the larger camera. Following is an itinerary of our trip south:

8:00 am: Our ferry landed back on South Andaman. When we boarded the ferry, Salim said that we could photograph, since he would probably know the military escort and/or the escort would not notice us taking photos out of the back window. However, we were joined by a soldier whom Salim did not know.

8:40: We passed a busy road maintenance crew.

8:45: We passed a commuter bus broken down along the road, with people underneath it working and its passengers milling around.

A wild pig ran across the road and a little later we also saw a spotted deer. According to Salim, the Jarawa don’t hunt the deer, but rather play with them. On some parts of the road pink flowers resembling powder puffs littered the road.

Anticipating the banana throwing, we wiped our hands with a disinfecting handwipe because we feared spreading diseases to the Jarawa.

8:47: We came upon a group of about ten Jarawa women and children at the same camp at the hill crest where we had met some the day before. One of the boys was wearing a headband made of the puffy pink flowers. We threw bananas and took photos. One of the flashes went off accidentally. The soldier in front casually turned around and looked at us with suspicion. The soldier and Salim talked extensively after the encounter but neither looked at or motioned to us. A short time later Salim turned around and told us we could take photos when we saw the next group.

8:55: We passed the guard settlement.

9:00: We passed a small, new hut on the west side of the road. We weren’t sure if this had been there the day before.

9:10: Another road crew, this one consisting mostly of women.

9:15: Another small Jarawa hut, built across the road from a larger Indian building.

9:16: On a straight stretch of road, a lone Jarawa boy in shorts and a red headband stood in the road ahead, saluting the car. Salim told us again we could take photos and we got out our cameras. As the car slowed down, the boy moved aside and, to our surprise, the soldier spoke to him. We handed out bananas and took photos openly. We saved one last banana in case we met more Jarawa, and the boy saw it. He pointed to it, held on to the window, and ran along with the car, talking.

9:17: We came upon the huts along the road where we met the first group of Jarawa the day before. When we spied a truck full of soldiers, Salim waved us to put away our cameras andthe food. All we could do was look at the group of soldiers who seemed to be mingling with the Jarawa women and children. One of the women was wearing a garland of the pink flowers.

As we rode on Salim interpreted things the soldier escort was telling us. The soldier had come to know Jarawa individuals and some of the Jarawa know a few Hindi words, like the word for banana. The boy we met at 9:16 had told the soldier that if we didn’t give him food he would hurt us with his knife. Information that we read about the Jarawa said that only a few anthropologists and the military are learning a little Jarawa language. Salim added to this, saying that Indian soldiers are given a manual as part of their training in dealing with the Jarawa, and that this manual teaches some basic Jarawa language. Soldiers working in the reserve get to know some Jarawa individuals, often learning their names. As we drove along a part of the road with particularly steep sides, the soldier told us that he was once in a vehicle that went off the road into one of the ravines. Of the three passengers, he was the only one to survive, doing so by jumping out as the vehicle crashed down. With their unlimited access to the Jarawa and their many years of experience, the reserve soldiers are a rich source of information on the Jarawa. Moreover, Salim told us that many Indian settlers who live just south of the reserve have regular interactions with the Jarawa and also know some of the language. Indeed, soldiers in the reserve are often recruited from the local Indian population.