9. OF MATTERS SEXUAL
The Andamanese enjoyed what the early writers delicately called "Elizabethan topics," i.e. they laughed a dirty jokes and freely discussed sexual subjects. As late as the 1950s an exchange of obscenities as well as erotic dances were unfailing sources of amusement to the Onge. They helped to break the ice between locals and visitors and made subsequent negotiations and dealings easier. The parallel to modern businessmen taking clients to night-clubs in the hope of clinching the big deal is quite inescapable. Kissing was almost unknown among adult Andamanese of all tribes. Only children were kissed. Instead, as part of sexual foreplay as well as a sign of general sympathy, nose-rubbing was indulged in.
It is still debated whether homosexual urges are genetically predetermined, environmentally acquired or both. Since homosexual men are known to have occurred spontaneously in all human societies investigated, even in those that punished discovery with immediate and usually horrible death, it is likely that at least some cases have genetic roots. If this is so, then even the most traditional Andamanese society would occasionally have had a case of homosexuality in its midst. Unfortunately, we do not have the slightest idea what their attitude would have been during the old days. Apart from some cases among the Onge, homosexual activity (exclusively of the male variety) is reported only between aboriginals and outsiders. But then, internal aboriginal affairs would not usually have come to the attention of the authorities or would have interested them. For the Onge there is a controversial observation of the 1950s that they, especially when separated from their wives for prolonged periods, showed "homosexual tendencies," whatever this formulation may mean, exactly. Nothing is known of homosexual behavior among traditional Great Andamanese groups, just as we know almost nothing about sexual practices among them during the period of cultural disintegration following 1858. Even more than male-female sexual relations, the subject of male homosexuality deeply embarrassed Victorian writers. Female homosexuality for them just did not exist. When male homosexuality is mentioned at all, then only in a cloud of vague euphemisms. In the early sources there are merely occasional hints of "vices" learnt by the Andamanese from Indian convicts. The vice complained of could have been anything the Victorian officials regarded with disapproval: idleness, gossip, tobacco, alcoholic drink, adultery, homosexual behavior.
We have an unambiguous report on an attempted rape of an Andamanese boy serving as a waiter in the mess at Ross island by a male convict in 1882. In this case the boy seems to have been an unwilling victim and a scandal ensued. In another, better documented case of 1892, two Andamanese boys, Bira and Wologa, seem to have been male prostitutes. The two were taken into service by the Anglican vicar on Ross island after they had to leave the Andamanese Home where they had committed "unnatural crimes" over a long period. The reaction of the authorities to homosexual acts uncovered could be savage: an Indian convict involved, Phulla, was given 18 lashes and sentenced to 2 years in a chain gang for an "unnatural vice" with Bira. Both boys were then taken into Portman's home to be looked after.
The penal colony around Port Blair destroyed traditional Great Andamanese society within three generations. Imported diseases were the first agency of destruction, cultural influences the second. Penal colonies by their very nature are uncivilized, highly disagreeable places. Most of the early convicts were mutinous soldiers of the Great Indian Mutiny 1857 as well as common murderers and rapists. Only after 1900 do educated political prisoners appear at Port Blair. The vast majority of the convicts throughout the existence of the penal colony was not only rough and uncouth but also male. In 1906 among convicts there were 12,981 males against only 715 females, a ratio of nearly 20 to 1. In the same year, the free population including guards, the military and others, the situation was hardly happier: 2089 free males as against only 779 free females.
This grotesque and permanent imbalance between the sexes inevitably led to a great deal of human misery, tension, frustration, aggression, murder, a prevalence of "unnatural vices" and widespread prostitution. While the situation remained acute within the penal colony, its effects inevitably swapped over into surrounding aboriginal societies whose social fabric was corroded physically by syphilis and gonorrhea and psychologically by rape and sexual brutality.
We know of a few rapes of Andamanese women by outsiders only because they led to murder and mayhem and could not be hushed up. The most dramatic case involved the remarkable woman Hina (Topsy), her husband Tura (Jumbo) and the naval brigademan Pratt. We have met Hina already. The case is unusually well-documented because it involved the central authorities of British India and turned into a case celèbre of Andamanese jurisprudence. We shall return to it again in a later chapter. What interests us here are the sexual aspects of the case. Characteristically, the details of the rape are not reported in official papers. All we know is that a boat-load of British sailors went to an Aka-Bea camp on instructions of the colonel in charge of the islands, Tytler. They were sent to establish friendly relations with the Andamanese but failed spectacularly in their mission when one, Pratt, attempted to rape Hina as soon as the boat had been beached. In the following altercation Tura and some other Andamanese men shot and killed Pratt with arrows. The other sailors rallied, fired into the milling crowd and then retreated. Tura was later arrested for murder and kept in irons for some months before the true facts came out and he was released. That the sailors could immediately identify the chief assailant, Tura, by name struck some British observers as an indication of considerable intimacy between the sailors and the Andamanese. It strikes us today the same way. Colonel Tytler received a withering official rebuke for his inept handling of the affair and for assuming Andamanese guilt without prior investigation.
Hina's case was unique in its repercussions. The number of unrecorded rapes and murders committed by convicts and other outsiders on Andamanese must have been considerable, not to mention the number of less violent hetero- and homosexual dalliances and commercial transactions. Even genuine love is reported a few times to have blossomed between races in the human cesspool of the penal colony.
Along with the accelerating breakdown of traditional Great Andamanese society came a much increased mobility. People who in the old days would never have left the area of their sept, now wandered all over the islands, spreading venereal and other diseases among tribes that had never even seen a convict or a British soldier yet. Syphilis was discovered in 1876 and the following investigation brought to light that the Andamanese had been aware of the disease for at least six years previously but had not sought help from the authorities from fear of being locked up in hospital. The convicts who had given them the disease also terrorized their Andamanese victims into silence while being themselves terrified of the punishment that would follow discovery. Before 1881 syphilis was widespread throughout the Great Andamans, so much so that in 1885 it was said that scarcely a person was free from it. A visitor to the northeastern Great Andamans reported the following distressing scene:
... the whole of the east coast of the Islands was visited and I spent some days at the Table Islands. All the aborigines were friendly but their numbers were much reduced, and I brought in many cases of syphilis. Some of these poor people were in a shocking condition, being covered all over with sores like smallpox pustules, and the smell from their bodies was so offensive that they could not be allowed on board the steamer, but were towed in a boat some distance astern.
It was quite beyond the medicine of 1885 to slow down, let alone halt or cure, the disease. Among the cases brought to light by the investigation was the case of a syphilitic Andamanese woman with a 3-year-old child from a convict father. Apparently the authorities had, at least officially, been quite unaware of all this. The poor innocents.
How even an educated person with an unusually sympathetic interest in the Andamanese could stumble over his own moral prejudices is illustrated by Man's final sentence in the following quotation, reported by Portman. The question mark in parentheses signals Portman's dismay at the statement:
I have no doubt that a good deterrent effect has been produced on the many who have witnessed the lamentable suffering and mortality which have occurred among the unfortunate patients, and that such immorality, as is believed to have formerly to some extent prevailed in their midst, has received a wholesome check (?).
Whether syphilis ever reached the Onge on Little Andaman is less clear. In 1894 hereditary syphilis was diagnosed with the relief of the authorities palpable when they concluded that the disease must have been introduced at an early time so that, as they put it, in this instance at least they had nothing with which to reproach themselves. Oddly enough, blood samples from Onge taken in 1953 showed no trace of syphilis nor did the Onge display any symptoms. Whether the earlier disease had been misdiagnosed or whether it had somehow disappeared from the Onge population remains an open question.
