4. QUESTIONS OF CHARACTER
4.4 Primitive does not mean stupid
Yet the Andamanese were very far from stupid or unobservant. If they wanted to, they could be very bright-eyed and flexible. The British in 1886 were amazed when a few of their Andamanese auxiliary sailors handled a new steam boat, even managing to pilot it through a difficult passage during a dark and stormy night. Within only seven years of the arrival of the British, all Great Andamanese tribes had adopted the dog and integrated it into their culture to the point of calling the period before the 1860s the "time before the dog. When the dog reached Little Andaman in 1887, the Onge did not take to the animal so quickly but it had become widely accepted and loved by the 1920s. Only the Jarawas refused to have anything to do with the dog, probably for reasons connected with their increasingly secretive way of life. The Sentinelis in their isolation were never given the opportunity to adopt dogs and they still do not have them.
Integrating the dog into traditional Andamanese society was a considerable adaptation and indicates an unexpected cultural flexibility. In 1858 Andamanese culture on Great Andaman was intact and had no tradition of keeping pets or any other sort of domestic animal. Piglets found in the jungle when their mother had been caught were occasionally kept in captivity to be fattened up for the kill but never bred. Having dogs made hunting the pig much easier. It has been estimated that the newly efficient hunting bands would have exterminated sus andamanensis and thereby destroyed their own economic basis within a few decades if the first epidemics had not reduced the number of hunters at the same time.
When asked why they did a certain thing in a certain way, the Andamanese stock answer was that their fathers had always done it this way. Sustained mental effort or lasting feelings for anyone or anything outside their immediate circle of the local group were beyond the traditional Andamanese. Capable of almost passionate love for their dogs, even to the point of the women suckling puppies at their breasts, a dead dog was nevertheless discarded unceremoniously into the jungle without a sign of regret or mourning. The bodies of strangers who died in their midst were removed in the same callous way.
4.5 Tarendsek men
Andamanese men, unlike women, were prone to blind rages, at times amounting almost to running amuck, as the following story will illustrate. In 1891 a man named Rang had taken a small basket from a woman to store his tobacco without asking her permission. The woman objected and other women of the group sup-ported her protest. They all scolded Rang who became very angry, snatched his bow and arrows, stepped out of the hut and shot the first person to cross his way. The unfortunate victim shot in the chest was Kapo, another man. In the old days, Rang would have hidden in the jungle until the fuss had died down but in 1891 British justice was active even in the Great Andamanese jungles. Rang was arrested and sentenced to six months of rigorous imprisonment. In his blind rage his only thought was to damage something or injure somebody. Violent incidents were not unusual in traditional Andamanese society and were not signs of post1858 cultural decay.
Men with a particularly short fuse and violent temper were called tarendsek among the northern tribes on Great Andaman. Such men (never women) were widely feared and disliked. In another of those unexplained Andamanese peculiarities, we can only note uncomprehendingly that the term tarendsek was also applied to the maternal uncle of the violent man.
Young Andamanese males, like most young males in most cultures, were not averse to a little scrapping. In 1884 a group of 35 Andamanese men and 2 women along with some Nicobarese was brought to Calcutta to be exhibited there in the fashion of the time. They were also shown the sights of the city so as to be duly impressed by the might of the British Empire. A visit to a jute factory left them unimpressed but they were very much interested and delighted to watch a free-for-all fight that developed in the jute factory between two Naga groups who were also shown around at the same time and who met through an administrative error. Staff at that factory must have been relieved when the various sightseeing groups finally left that day. The same group of Andamanese later had its excursions curtailed when they started to snatch the turbans off passing citizens in the bazaar.
4.6 Ike
The British, as soon as they became aware of the existence of a hostile tribe at war with their friendly Aka-Bea, spent a lot of time and effort on attempts to establish friendly relations with that tribe, the Jarawas. However, if friendship was in-deed the aim, the British went about it in a decidedly odd way. During the 1880s and 1890s many expeditions composed mostly of armed Aka-Bea trackers (the Jarawas' deadly enemies), were sent into the jungle to catch a few young Jarawa men. The prisoners would then be taught English or Hindi and used as intermediaries to the tribal folk in the jungle. In July 1888 an expedition under Portman was tracking a group of Jarawas who had earlier attacked and killed an Indian convict. After a very difficult search in rain-sodden and nearly impassable jungle, the expedition captured a Jarawa male unhurt on the southernmost coast of south Great Andaman. The man, Ike, was brought to Port Blair where he behaved well, learnt a little of the Hindi language and was very friendly with other Andamanese of various tribes. In September 1887 on instructions from Portman he was set free. The high British hopes of getting the long-sought intermediary to the elusive jungle people were soon disappointed. Ike made a most friendly farewell to his Andamanese friends, took the presents given to him and vanished into the jungle, never to return. He was only seen one more time in a Jarawa war party that was involved in a fight with what the British called "our" Andamanese. During this fight Ike is reported to have made full use of his linguistic skills to abuse his enemies in Hindi.
4.7 Weirdness and unpredictability of behaviour
The following descriptions of two episodes of much more recent contact with a more or less friendly Jarawa group shows that they have not lost any of their un-predictability in the intervening century. Despite all efforts, a full understanding of these people is still a long way off. In November 1974 an adolescent Jarawa girl climbed on board a small vessel lying off a beach on the east coast of middle Great Andaman. The boat carried a party of Indian government officials as well as foreign guests. They had the task of trying to re-establish contact with a particular group of Jarawas that had been contacted three times be-fore. The girl's approach to the boat was watched by other members of her local group who quite obviously wanted to see if harm would befall her. When they saw the girl aboard and unharmed, six more Jarawas of both sexes came aboard. They made an enormous amount of noise, embraced and jumped on the crew and other outsiders aboard like people possessed. For minutes outsiders and Jarawas formed a wild confusion of arms, legs and rumps. The Jarawas then began to investigate the boat, throwing anything they did not know overboard and appropriating anything they wanted. One very young girl climbed up a mast and started to make a shrill yet melodic noise, something halfway between a song and a scream that sounded like Gid-dig-Gid-dig-Gid-dig and sometimes, pronounced differently, like Gidigidigidigidig. Whatever else it may have meant, it was an invitation to dance and to sing and turned out to be one of the few tricks to stop the Jarawas from doing something that they should not do: whenever the outsiders imitated this sound, the whole scene changed. The Jarawas stopped whatever they were doing and started on something else. The party later moved to the beach where the outsiders soon noticed that they only kept seeing the Jarawas that had been on the boat earlier. Others were clearly holding back; also, the visitors were not shown the way to the Jarawa main camp. A certain amount of trust had been established but much distrust still lingered.
