Death in a rare tribe

Now Andamanese community has only 52 people left

NEW DELHI: Kobo’s baby would have been a precious addition to the Greater Andamanese tribe, one of the world’s oldest surviving civilisations that has 60,000 years of continuous, but isolated, history. Over the past 100 years, the tribe has dwindled from over 10,000 to just 52 today.

Fate, however, had different plans for Kobo. She died of malaria in a hospital in Port Blair, where she was brought after much delay from her home in Strait Island. Her unborn child was something special, say researchers. It was conceived out of her marriage to another Greater Andamanese, at a time when most of the new children being born in that community are from mixed blood-fathers.

Experts who study this tribe are outraged, and blame the Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration’s inept handling of tribal welfare for her untimely death. “We have not heard of anyone dying of malaria in recent times,” says Professor Anvita Abbi of the Centre for Linguistics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, who is leading a team of researchers to record the threatened Greater Andamanese language.  

“Why was she not shifted to Port Blair in time to save her life, and the life of her child? The babudom there is very corrupt,” she says.

The island administration is primarily responsible for the preservation of Greater Andamanese, Jarawas, Onges, Sentinelese and Shompens — among world’s oldest and most primitive tribes that the world looks at to understand the evolution of human history. Their isolated DNA provides evidence for the ‘out-of-Africa’ theory, which says the humans originated in Africa and migrated out to the rest of the world. They are also a marker for the evolution of languages.

Narayan Kumar Choudhary, a doctorate candidate in JNU who has spent several days with the Greater Andamanese, says Kobo was also a great link for the researchers to the tribe. She spoke Hindi, and facilitated their communication with the locals.

Complex bureaucracy and a lack of clear vision have resulted in much damage to the five surviving tribes, and Kobo’s death is the most recent example of it, agree academics and even some officials. “We can’t revive them, but at we can try and save what is left of the culture,” says the academic, talking about the government’s inability to put in place a comprehensive strategy to protect the tribes.

A government official involved in tribal affairs says that Kobo’s death is reflective of several ‘lacunae’ in the policy of government towards rare tribals. “There has been some confusion as to what we must do to preserve them. The debate is whether we should keep them in isolation or help them assimilate,” he admits.
The biggest threat to Greater Andamanese all these years have been diseases from outside. But there are clear lacunae in the way the government handles their affairs, and controls their movements. “Intellectuals have to go through so many hardships to just meet these people, even while they are being sexually and otherwise exploited by outsiders,” says Professor Abbi.