An Indian Ocean Archipelago in Fiction and Real Life

The Andaman Islands lie in an expanse of water in the northeastern Indian Ocean 80 miles away from the coast of Myanmar. I’ve never been, although I grew up knowing they were out there—a far-flung Indian territory. A notorious penal colony was initially established there by the British. It held exiled Indian soldiers who took part in the 1857 rebellion, the same event that resulted in the British Crown taking the governance of India out of the hands of one of the world’s first multinational companies.

What I didn't know then was that among the people of the subcontinent who wanted to throw the British out were the indigenous Jarawa people of the Andamans, a tribe who still call the islands home, and have deep knowledge of the forests they have lived in for over 50,000 years. In a confrontation oddly called the Battle of Aberdeen (for a place in the archipelago, rather than in Scotland), Jarawa warriors attacked a British settlement with bows and arrows, facing down the musket fire with which they were met, many of them dying in the encounter.

From accounts of this battle, it turns out, came the villainous character Tonga in The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which I, as a young reader, pored over for its delicious shivers, ignorant of Tonga’s origins and completely oblivious to the underlying history. A Shima Journal article by Arup K. Chatterjee expounds on this interesting history and on the role of the “savage” Tonga in the Sherlock Holmes oevre.

Tonga is killed by Watson and Holmes as soon as we see him, but not before the two escape his poisoned dart, and their death, by a hair’s breadth. That Tonga’s bones remain buried in the Thames keeps alive the theme of atavism encoded in the novel as the savage is offered the chance of a Shakespearean metamorphosis. At the bottom of the river, his bones will become corals, and his eyes will turn into pearls.

The islands show up in a cautionary tale by H. G. Wells in which an exotic orchid from the Andamans turns out to have unexpectedly nasty properties.

In more recent literature for young readers, we find the Andamans in two middle grade novels, Andamans Boy by Zai Whitaker (1998) and Island’s End by Padma Venkatraman (2011).

The first is the story of a young urban runaway, Arif, an outsider in many ways, who finds himself on a boat headed to Port Blair, the capital of the Andamans. When he meets a Jarawa boy, Eetha Aleho, he’s gobsmacked by the kid’s knowledge, his survival skills, and the threats to his people’s land and life. Arif’s own school learning falls into perspective as readers are made to ask questions about land and justice, ownership and property. While the ultimate resolution feels overly optimistic in light of what we know today—climate change, rampant resource exploitation and more—and the Burmese character Aung Thwin’s pidgin English feels a bit thickly layered, much of this book strikes resoundingly home.

In Island’s End, too, we find a clash between modernization and traditional lifeways. The protagonist is a girl, Uido, supported by a prophecy of darker times to come, and with her own longing to seek spirit paths not typically shared with women. Development is tied to the colonization of a place by people not from it, while the indigenous perspective struggles stubbornly to assert itself, as the Jarawa asserted themselves with courageous futility, arrows against muskets, during the British Raj. The sea is a constant presence.

In the other narrative we call reality, indigenous rights and the future of a little-known Andamanese rainforest collide in a massive infrastructure plan advanced and promoted by the Indian government.

The Hindu’s In Focus podcast interviewed Dr. Pankaj Sekhsaria, Associate Professor, Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas, IIT Bombay, who has written a book titled The Great Nicobar Betrayal, a compilation of articles by experts across academic fields and publications. It examines the proposed project from multiple perspectives—environmental, geological, impact on local communities, law, due process, and ecology. These pieces together shed light on the magnitude of the impact on this complex, fragile ecosystem if the project goes through.

As yet another Earth Day finds the planet’s ecosystems in crisis, all this begs the question—what price must humans pay for this thing we call progress and who gets to pay it? And if development of massive infrastructure projects gets touted as the building of monuments to the future, whose future is that, exactly?