10. CLOTHS, CLAY AND BEAUTYCARE
The Sentinelis have not recently been observed with body paint - but then, they are rarely seen and then only from afar and never in formal situations. They may well practice body painting out of sight. During the 19th century Sentinelis have been observed using a yellowish (probably the common gray-white) clay. Ochre has never been reported and does not occur on North Sentinel island.
It should be noted that this list of uses for body paint is far from complete. Our knowledge especially of traditional funeral rites is so fragmentary that additional uses for body painting in this and other ceremonies and circumstances are likely.
Body painting has practical advantages besides. It added a certain amount of protection against ticks and insects, against direct sunlight and cold drafts but these do not appear to have been of major importance since the paint was not usually worn on hunting or gathering expeditions when added protection was most likely to have been useful; perhaps paint was not then worn because any rainshower or the permanently dripping forest would soon have washed it off. The Onge regarded the unpainted body as open to all sorts of dangers and painted newborn babies immediately after birth with red ochre, partly no doubt in mere observance of tradition but also partly as conscious protection against mosquitoes and flies.
In 1863 the superintendent of the convict settlement forbade the Greater Andamanese at Port Blair body painting on the grounds that it was "degrading and barbarous." Others protested against this, feeling that the Andamanese (who were not convicts, after all) should not be interfered with and claiming body paint as a substitute for clothes without which the natives would be exposed to chills. The silly order was never enforced.
Mostly of practical use with only a slight whiff of the religious and a slightly stronger one of the decorative motive was the shaving of the head-hair that the Andamanese practiced. This was originally done with splinters of quartz (one of the few uses of stone tools known in traditional society) but later with shards of glass. Men and women alike shaved their heads every few weeks. The women traditionally left only two narrow parallel bars from forehead to neck where the hair was allowed to grow longer than 3 mm (one eighth of an inch). The men left a circular patch on top of the head, not more than 20 cm (8 inches) diameter, while shaving everything around the central patch. Sometimes, the eyebrows were also cut but never the eyelashes. Older people often shaved their entire head while infants were shaved by their mothers within a few hours after birth. After 1858 the traditional hairstyles mentioned above were replaced by a variety of other styles. Which way hair was cut did not depend on the customer but on the whim of the woman who was doing the cutting. Haircutting was exclusively women's work: the lords of creation shaved each other only if there was no female personnel around and then it had to be the younger men and boys shaving the older ones.
The Andamanese did not and still do not deform or mutilate themselves. There was no circumcision, no filing of teeth, no flattening of skulls, no binding up of feet, no cutting of fingers. Skulls of Andamanese women were earlier thought to have been deliberately deformed but this is now known to have been an incidental side-effect of the way the women, from a very early age, carried babies and other weights in a sling around their head. Archaeological investigation has also shown that mutilating practices as far as they are reflected in skeletal evidence have been unknown in the Andamans at least for as far back as
The closest the Andamanese came to mutilation was the scarification (often and wrongly called tattooing) widely practiced by the Greater Andamanese but not by the Onge-Jarawa group nor by other Negritos. According to the Andamanese themselves, scarifying was done purely for beautification and to make the children stronger. Nevertheless, an original religious significance is likely. Every boy and girl had to undergo scarification as a matter of course. The first cut was made at an early age and new cuts were added at intervals over the years until the child had grown up. Only women did the scarifying work and it was they who decided what design the scars were to follow. Normal cuts healed leaving a slight scar visible only from close up while infected wounds left the raised welts easily seen on many old photographs. Among the southern tribes on Greater Andaman, the cuts were made with splinters of quartz or glass and were short and not deep. The lines were arranged in geometric pattern of straight lines or zig-zag, running down the body and the limbs, quite similar to the geometric pattern of body painting. The northerners also cut lightly but had a second type of scarification in which long and deep cuts were made with pig arrows and the pattern arranged rather differently. Scarification was also used for medical purposes and was then again administered only by women: small, slight cuts on the site of the pain were supposed to help.
Clothing, decoration, body painting, shaving, scarification, they all show the same mix of religious, ceremonial, decorative, practical and social functions. To the Andamanese the analytical splitting of beautycare methods and functions would not have made sense. They just dressed, painted, shaved and scarified themselves and each other because tradition decreed that this was what made them look good and feel right.
