6. A TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

6.8 Social life

The daily routine in the succession of temporary camps that was traditional Andamanese life was dominated by the women. The men were too often away on hunting trips during the day to play an active part in camp life. The weather had to be inclement indeed to keep them from going out to hunt and in really bad weather not much could be done around the camp anyway. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Andamanese male traditionally shirked work in camp.

Visiting friends in other local groups was a major source of pleasure for traditional Andamanese. Visits by a single person or a whole family could take place at any time of the year but tended to concentrate on the months of the year between December and May when the weather was calm and stable. Married couples naturally wished to visit the local group in which one partner was born but in which they had chosen not to live. Parents of children adopted away also were keen to pay a visit and to see how their children were getting on. Hospitality towards friends was an important duty so that such visitors were sure to receive an enthusiastic welcome and the best food available.

More formal social gatherings, called jeg, were organized by influential individuals who decided on a time and place and who sent out the invitations by messenger. The host group was responsible for housing and feeding the guests. For the first few hours after their arrival, all would feel a little shy and awkward, a feeling not unknown at similar gatherings in more advanced civilizations. Visitors and guests then exchanged gifts such as clay for body painting, bows and arrows, baskets etc. This was a delicate moment when the diplomatic abilities of the presiding chief could be tested to their limits. If a quarrel broke out it would diminish respect for the man in charge if he could not quietly and discreetly defuse the situation. With the highly excitable Andamanese temperament and a tendency to take offence at the slightest provocation, any gathering was potentially explosive. Larger meetings often were called to put the official seal on the reconciliation after an old quarrel had been settled. A chief could gain much additional influence and respect from running a successful meeting but he could also ruin his position if something went seriously wrong. Some meetings of reconciliation ended as the starting point of a new feud.

The grip of tradition was tight in the Andamans but it was their own tradition, they were happy with it. Everybody was left with a considerable margin of individual freedom and the work that had to be done was done communally and was rarely arduous. There was no harsh compulsion, just the gentle if insistent tug of tradition. The hunt was as much pleasure, the gathering as much social event as they were work and necessity. Many well-meaning outside officials working with the Andamanese pitied the "poor creatures" and patronized them in their "wretched and miserable condition." They felt duty-bound to improve them, by force if necessary, thereby involuntarily hastening the extinction of the race. For their own part, the Andamanese tried to avoid being drawn into alien ways of life. All those groups who did not or could not keep their distance are now either extinct or heading that way. The traditional Andamanese, embedded in their largely undisturbed society, did not see their condition as wretched. It is hard to blame the Andamanese when they refused a life, however civilized, of paid drudgery in fields, plantations or factories. Even worse, in many ways, was the option of receiving free government handouts with nothing left to do. The Andamanese were (and the Jarawa and Sentineli certainly still are today even if we cannot ask them) quite satisfied with the lifestyle that had been good enough for their ancestors for untold millennia. It was not paradise but it was home. Only with the onslaught of epidemics and the disintegration of their society did the word "wretched" begin to fit reality.

One sad and revealing Indian photograph dated to around 1980 shows a number of Onge plantation workers sitting on felled logs during a break in their work. No less sad and revealing is a British description of the Andamanese playing the amusing fools at a social event of fashionable colonial society at Port Blair 1885:

The British, military men and colonial administrators to whom a strictly hierarchical regime was second nature, understandably took a dim view of this unfamiliar, formless, almost democratic non-government. After looking in vain for chiefs with the sort of authority a chief was expected to have over his subjects, they solved their administrative problem by creating a system of chieftainships and by appointing intelligent and trustworthy natives to the position of "rajas" as intermediaries between natives and colonial authorities. The Indian title of raja (king) was rather preposterous for such local appointees but it caught on. The Andamanese did not readily accept the authority of the new rajas but followed them of their own free will if they could gain their respect. Most rajas were, in fact and unsurprisingly, the traditional local headmen.

Several Andamanese lads have been taught to wait at table, and proved both useful and handy at such duties, behaving with most becoming gravity, as if, indeed, they had been to the manner born! It is a somewhat absurd sight to see these jet-black imps dressed in white, with their arms crossed and head thrown back, standing like statues behind their masters' chairs, watchful to fulfil any service required. When a dance had been given in the settlement it has been amusing to watch them in the balconies endeavouring to vie with their masters' performances in valse [waltz], polka, and gallop: I have seen them, after taking note of the step, select their partners (all boys) and set to work, thinking evidently that it is part of the sport for each couple to cannon against another!

The same author then closes his book about the Andamanese with the following observation:

“But though the Andamanese can thus in a measure enter into and enjoy civilised employments and amusements, the instincts of savage life, with its unrestrained freedom of action, generally prove in the end too strong for them, and they are carried, by an apparently irresistible impulse, back to their jungle homes, where they resume their aboriginal customs and habits”.

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6.9 Leadership

We have seen that the Andamanese were individualists and not inclined to take orders from a person they did not respect. No one commanded and no one obeyed. It all had to be voluntary or required by tradition, there being nothing like a structure of government. Chiefs existed but had no power to enforce their will on anyone; they were only men of influence. A chief reached his position through strength of character; heredity played no role whatever. A headman had to rely exclusively on respect and reputation to keep his followers in line and loyal. Decisions were taken by all grown-up older men with the older women given a considerable voice as well. Younger people were expected to show respect towards their elders and their opinions counted for less but they were free to voice them and were listened to. The final decision was taken by general consent among the older members of the group. It was the headman alone, however, who directed the movements of hunting parties and who made all decisions that had to be taken quickly on the spot. He was also in charge of the meetings and festivities. Some headmen, again exclusively by strength of character, rose to be heads of a whole sept and even of a group of septs. None could acquire headship over an entire tribe, however, if that tribe was split into Aryoto and Eremtaga sections since none of these groups would accept a headman from the other section. The power a high-level headman could yield was limited by his personality as much as it had been at a lower level. Tradition prevented women from becoming chiefs, however strong their character but the wife of a headman enjoyed the same position relative to the women that her husband had with the men.

The Andamanese system of social ranking was based very strongly on age. Old people, men and women, had to be shown respect. They received the best pieces of any hunting success of younger men and they made all the important decision affecting the group. It was also they who made and unmade chiefs. Old men took the most beautiful of the younger women as wives as we have already seen - with entirely predictable effects on the birth rate. In many way traditional Andamanese society functioned as a gerontocracy. Considering the relatively heavy burden that the old put on the young, it is surprising how little grumbling there was among the victims of the system even when traditional society was disintegrating in the second half of the 19th century. We know nothing about the thoughts of young people during the old days but we can safely assume that they took it for granted, consoling themselves with the thought that in the fullness of time they would reach the same privileged position. The duty that one person owed another was not so much governed by the degree of relatedness or marriage as by relative age. What duties a child owed to his parents or a man and woman to his or her older siblings differed little from what the same persons owed to any other person of comparable relative age. Relationships between child and parents had, of course, a somewhat different quality from other relationships but the peculiar system of adoptions shows that this difference at least from age six upwards should not be over-estimated. Most societies, primitive or advanced, have high respect for the old but few have carried the principle to such lengths.

While social status was very closely connected with age, there were other ways to gain a better position in society. Hunting prowess was high on the list for men but generosity and kindness towards members of the local group and other friends (but never to outsiders) was also highly esteemed in both sexes. A person with a violent temper, on the other hand, was feared but not respected. A chief bursting out in a fit of bad temper would make everyone run for cover - but he diminished his own authority which he would later find difficult to re-establish.