The
idea of enlisting a member of the Onge tribe to help him court the Sentinelese was likely not John Chau’s own contrivance. He was probably cribbing the notion from the only person known to have survived to report any sustained contact with the Sentinelese: the Canadian-born naval officer Maurice Vidal Portman. In his A History of Our Relations With the Andamanese, Portman relates his excursions to geographically and ethnographically document the Andaman Islands while he was serving as an administrator at the Port Blair Penal Colony. That colony was basically the last straw for any plausible longterm survival of the indigenous peoples of the Andamans. Measles and syphilis spread rampantly after its appearance.
The penal colony had been built in a hasty attempt to deal extempore with a problem whose nature and extent the British could only guess at: the shocking, but not totally unexpected, 1857 “insurrection” among the sepoys, or professional Indian infantrymen then serving as the garrison for the East India Company, which was functioning as the ruling power in the British Crown’s stead. The tinder of the revolution was the threat of the Brahmin sepoys’ loss of caste. It took only a rumor—that the grease on the gunpowder cartridges for the newly introduced Enfield rifle, whose paper covering had to be bit off, was made of either pork lard (unclean for Muslims) or beef tallow (sinful for Hindus)—to spark an uprising.
It was suggested that this was an East India Company ploy to ruin the sepoys’ caste, disrupt the local order, and bring about their conversion to Christianity. The Company tried to assuage the sepoys’ concerns and said that they need not use the new cartridges at all, but this open acknowledgement of the problem only seemed to confirm suspicions. Mangal Pandey, an aggravated sepoy of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry in Barrackpore, called for an uprising and attacked an adjutant of his company. He was captured and executed, but the discontent quickly spread throughout northern India, and within months, the massive Meerut garrison of the East India Company was in complete revolt—and much of the general populace with it.
Even now, venerable British sources still call those events a “mutiny”; in India they are known as the First War of Independence. In his report on the revolt, Sir Herbert Benjamin Edwardes, then serving as Commissioner of Peshawar, noted that the officers on the ground did not yet see the events of 1857 as a mutiny at all:
“It is matter of history that when this mutiny began in the Bengal army, the European officers did not believe in it. Whatever may have been the feelings of the sepoys to their officers, the feelings of the officers to the sepoys were unquestionably those of kindness, confidence, and sympathy even to the verge of mutiny. We have seen how the generous Colonel Spottiswoode persuaded himself that the 55th Native Infantry in the fort of Murdan was only under a panic.”
Looking back, it does seem the source of the distrust that precipitated the revolt was polarization and trafficking in conspiracy theories—panic indeed. Edwardes himself was not one to nurture a flexible view of the matter, however. (In fact, it has been argued that his own taste for Christian proselytizing might have helped provoke the sepoys’ suspicions in the first place.)
From his perspective, if you believe you’re dealing with disloyal subjects who have unjustly murdered their rightful superiors, then those subjects are insurrectionists who disregard the rule of law and must be unflinchingly subdued. And that was exactly how the British dealt with the agitators: The Crown dissolved the East India Company in 1858 and took direct control of its possessions and military, thereby founding the British Raj. Many of the dissident sepoys were summarily executed—either hanged, beheaded, bayoneted, or blown to pieces while tied to the mouth of a cannon—and others were sentenced to imprisonment.
If
the sepoys were drawing false inferences about the East India Company’s intentions before the 1857 revolution, the policy of the Raj after the revolution decidedly was social exclusion and disruption of caste. The incarceration of agitators led to prison overpopulation, and thus a policy idea long-since under consideration but always written off as untenable became a reality: The convicts would be exiled to a penal colony in Port Blair on South Andaman and on the smaller islands surrounding it. The former field marshal Sir Robert Napier, examining the expansion of the prison to Viper Island in 1864, explained in a letter that the displacement of prisoners to the Andamans was not merely intended to clear out the prisons on the mainland but to exact a punishment tailored specifically to Hindu men of a higher caste, for traveling overseas was considered a sin—a hazard to one’s character. By removing the dissidents from their homes, Napier wrote, “their punishment is in a great measure achieved”:
“Transportation beyond sea is, to the Hindoos particularly, and in a less degree to the Hindooised mahomedans, so terrible a punishment, – a separation for ever from every tie and relation, and possession which men hold to in life, – that it places them in a far different positions [sic] from the European who is transported to a Penal Settlement.”
The fear of displacement was not conjectural on Napier’s part. A proscription against making voyages by sea was included in the rules of dharma—the duty to properly observe customs and laws—laid out in the Baudhayana Dharma Sutra between the sixth and eighth centuries BCE. The reasoning behind the ban was that crossing the sea meant committing the sin of mleccha samparka, or cavorting with foreigners. Mleccha, irreligious heathens, would distract one from religious truth, it was reasoned; and mleccha are most likely found beyond the “black waters”—the kalapani.
The movement toward independence gathered momentum throughout the nineteenth century, and in 1906, the penal colony expanded into a notorious prison, the Cellular Jail, that housed hundreds of dissidents and criminals and bore witness to severe atrocities. The jail’s nickname among the residents: kalapani. It bears pointing out that the caste system the British Raj exploited was not a set of classes essential to Indian society for thousands of years. The anthropologist Susan Bayly has vociferously made the case that the notion of Indian “caste” is an admixture of Varna (idealized moral archetypes that are ancient in origin) and jati (smaller and more-recently conceived birth groups), which only began to be conflated after the fall of the Islamic Mughal empire in the 18th century. In their desire for comprehension and control, the British Raj embraced this conflation of fluid categories, culminating in the 1881 decennial census, which tabulated and classified people according to caste. The process set in motion the social frenzy for codifying how members could move between castes and has entrenched pernicious systemic inequalities to this day.
Before
the independence movement had truly reached its tipping point, however, the British were still grappling with the fog of uncertainty following the 1857 uprising. The man assigned with deploying the mutineers’ imprisonment at Port Blair was the Indian Medical Service Surgeon-General James Pattison Walker. He eventually oversaw the displacement of thousands of political inmates, but, as he wrote in a correspondence from April 6, 1858, Walker departed from Kolkata
“on the 4th March, with 200 Convicts, a Native Overseer and two Native Doctors, [and] reached Port Blair on the 10th [March], without any occurrence worthy of note having occurred, and lauded the Convicts.”
According to the journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy’s recounting, as steam frigates and transport ships from far-flung places like what is now Mawlamyine, Chennai, Kolkata and Karachi arrived, each with hundreds more convicts, Walker “frightened his charges by reading to them from Marco Polo's journals an account of the indigenous tribes . . . .” Polo describes the inhabitants of “the Island of Angamanain” as “in the face . . . all just like big mastiff dogs! They . . . are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race.” In Scott-Clark and Levy’s portrayal, Walker was impressing upon the prisoners the full import of their banishment across the black waters, and the Andaman islanders were the mleccha.
The convicts were split between Chatham and Ross Islands and were compelled to begin the construction of the settlement they were to live in. The labor was oppressive, and there was nearly no relief from the elements. “The magnitude of the task of clearing the primeval jungles of the Andaman Islands,” wrote Walker,
“can only be appreciated by those who have witnessed the nature of the vegetation and the difficulty of effecting a clearance. The jungle is so dense, and its entanglement by gigantic creepers so complete, as to render it impassable except along the few pathways used by the aborigines.”
Four days after Walker’s arrival with the first set of prisoners, Convict 61, Narain, attempted to incite his fellow prisoners to rebel, and failing in that goal, tried to swim from Chatham Island to the main archipelago. He was quickly caught,
“at once brought to trial, convicted of sedition and escaping, sentenced to suffer death, and executed.”
On the same day, Convict 46, Naringung Sing, snuck off to a secluded spot on Ross Island and hanged himself from a tree. Over the next two weeks, 32 other convicts escaped. When one of them (whose name has not come down to us) returned, injured, malnourished, dehydrated, and covered in leeches
“that infested even his ears and eyelids, adhering so firmly that he could not remove them[,]”
he explained that the group he’d been with had suffered terribly while trying to traverse the southernmost part of the Andaman archipelago and were then ambushed by Great Andamanese tribespeople. The convicts dispersed in desperation. Walker writes that there was
“little chance of their escaping death, either by hunger or by the hands of savage aborigines, whose hostility to all strangers is most unrelenting, and who at present must be considered unamenable to conciliation.”
The convict hid and watched helplessly as fellow fugitives were brutally massacred, then cautiously made his way back over three days to surrender at the colony. “His account of the privations he suffered,” Walker noted in April,
“has had a good effect upon the other Convicts, none of whom have since tried to escape.”
The
effect was short-lived. In a letter dated June 16, Walker included a list of prisoners who had arrived, then a list of casualties. It cites one suicide and 87 “Executed.” Later the same month, the escape attempts had resumed in earnest. One contingent of 86 men attempted to flee and, after being attacked by an indigene tribe, returned in desperation to the colony. The 87 executed prisoners in Walker’s list were Narain and those 86 men, who were summarily hanged in one day.
Hundreds of prisoners escaped in total in that short span. On April 23, a gang of 90 prisoners fled under the guidance of a convict named Aga, who claimed to know the area and was under the mistaken impression that the Andamans connected with present-day Myanmar to the north. They wandered aimlessly for 13 days before being attacked by indigenes (probably Jarawa) and mostly killed while pleading for their lives. One escapee, a former sepoy convicted of mutiny named Dudhnath Tewari, who recounted the story, fled but was hunted down and shot with an arrow in the wrist and hip while pleading for mercy. Facing certain death, he implored the attackers again and inexplicably gained their pity. He was allowed to convalesce among the tribespeople, and he claimed to have then lived among them, assimilating completely, even marrying two of the women.
Tewari traveled with a large band of Jarawa who were apparently bent on catching the penal colony off guard and destroying it, and he aided them in devising a plan. Reportedly having run afoul of some traditions among the Jarawa, Tewari’s safety became unsure, so he decided he’d better cast his lot with the penal colony. He made his way ahead of the group and warned Walker, who was then prepared for the invasion. The Jarawa were militarily outmatched and annihilated. Shortly thereafter, Walker was relieved of his post because the government thought his treatment of the prisoners and the native population was too severe.
That is exactly the paradigm of Walker that obtains to this day. He is portrayed as the very model of an imperial jackboot. But you cannot read his correspondence without a sense of dissonance, for many a passage stands out for its humanity and magnanimity. In the same letter in which he related Narain’s fate, Walker wrote,
“By far the most important point in the organization of this Settlement is that of Family Emigration; in fact its success will mainly depend upon inducing a large number of convicts to send for their families to settle here. Convicts with families here are the only men who could be depended upon in time of need, as they would be the only ones who would have a real interest in the colony.”
And it should be noted that those convicts who had formerly been political dissidents actually sided with Walker and defended the colony from the attack by the Jarawa assailants.
It’s tempting to embrace a categorical vilification of Walker, but of course the matter is not so clear cut. The historian and author Aparna Vaidik devotes a chapter of her book Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History to complicating our understanding of the situation. She contends that Walker, in devising his plan for the colony, availed his own understanding of the subtleties of Indian culture and values with the intent not to enact punishment but rather offer penance. Much as Sir Robert Napier had written, the very act of transportation was privation enough: “According to this view,” Vaidik writes,
“the waters were the actual kalapani—the creative and the redemptive locale. The traversing of the waters was the proverbial point of catharsis, the ‘space’ where the convict was believed to have purged himself of the penalty for his crime.”
And the character of Walker’s relationship with the convicts certainly doesn’t jibe with my priors. I would expect a man who promptly executes recaptured escapees en masse to be a brutal despot. Vaidik paints a wholly different picture:
“Walker administered the Settlement as he would his demesne and also shared a relationship with the convicts which was closer to a patron-client relation of a landlord and peasants in a village than a formal and impersonalized one between the Superintendent of a jail and its inmates. The observers who came from the outside also commented on this aspect of personalized ties of consanguinity between Walker and ‘his convicts’. For instance, J.W. McPherson, who visited the Islands in November 1858, made an observation in his Memorandum of the Present State of the Settlement in Port Blair: ‘They came freely to him with all their wants and grievances, and he certainly possesses their entire confidence. Indeed if I had not known the penal character of the Settlement I should have supposed myself going round with a zemindar among his villagers’.”
Indeed, by Vaidik’s lights, it was the failure of the colonial administrators’ moral imagination that this, all things considered, charitable approach gave way to the bureaucratic cruelty of the Cellular Jail. For their part, the Governor-General’s Council, in rejecting Walker’s approach, thought they were taking a more liberal stance—particularly with regard to the native Andamans. Administrators were determined to reject violent suppression in favor of paternal guidance of the “childlike” and “amoral” tribal people. It was under the aegis of this policy that Maurice Vidal Portman served as Officer in Charge of the Andamanese.
Out
of context, many a statement by Portman about the tribes of the Andamans would be readily embraced by the wokest members of the Twitterati. He concludes The History of Our Relations With the Andamanese, for example, with a condemnation of British and Indian exploitation that had led to the demise of Andaman culture:
“It was found necessary, on our occupation of the Islands in 1858 to prevent the Andamanese from opposing the development of the Settlement, from murdering the convicts, and, later on, from plundering. . . . So long as they were left to themselves and not in any way interfered with by outside influences, or their customs, food, etc., altered, they would continue to live; but when we came amongst them and admitted the air of the outside world, with consequent changes, to suit our necessities, not theirs, they lost their vitality, which was wholly dependent on being untouched, and the end of the race came.”
And yet the History is peppered with passages in which he relates flogging Andaman tribespeople for misbehavior, having a man hanged, and in one case admits in a chillingly matter-of-fact manner to eradicating an entire village:
“I found that the Andamanese living there had sheltered the others who had murdered Habib, and had refused to give them up when I sent men up for them, so I burnt down the village as a punishment.”
Portman was a contemporary of Francis Galton, and he aspired to a class-forming, racialist science along similar lines to Galton. Both men valued the pursuit of empirical data as ruggedly rational; and in the documentation of the syntax and morphology of Andaman languages, Portman exhibited some of the same genius Galton displayed in statistical analysis. From neither man, however, came much in the way of the self-reflection that might have acknowledged that preconceptions skewed their interpretations. Portman shared Galton’s biologically essentialist model of human populations, and this explains the coolness with which he pursued his zoologist-like stewardship of the Andaman tribespeople. (Though, as Satadru Sen has argued, Portman’s biometrics seemed less aimed at verifying the hereditary basis for intelligence or morality and more at establishing the erotic purity and beauty of supposedly uncorrupted “savage” men.)
It was in the name of empirical research that Portman set off on an expedition in January 1880 to North Sentinel Island to document his encounter with the previously secluded North Sentinelese. Having inspected the interior of the island and observed tools and abandoned villages, Portman concluded that the Sentinelese were closely akin, culturally, to the Onge. He and his crew eventually came across a mother with four children, all of whom they kidnapped and kept for some days before releasing the mother with one of her children back to their village bearing gifts in the hopes of enticing the tribe. Some days later they encountered an older Sentinelese man and woman with one child. The man attacked Portman’s party with a bow and arrow, but he was quickly overpowered, and the three of them were also kidnapped and brought to Portman’s quarters in Port Blair. All six tribespeople became severely ill, and the two adults quickly died. So the children were sent back, once again bearing gifts of appeasement.
“This expedition was not a success,” Portman wrote. Having misjudged the ferocity of the Sentinelese,
“they were met in a less conciliatory manner than was desirable, and we cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers. It would have been better to have left the Islanders alone, until the Onges of the Little Andaman were tamed, and then to have approached them with the assistance of the latter.”
In Part 3: Why did John Chau do what he did? . . .