HUT BAY, India (Reuters) - When the earth shook and the waters began receding from the creek near their settlement, the Onge of India's Little Andaman island knew nature was telling them something.
The primitive hunter-gatherers did not wait to pick up their possessions or their passports but instinctively made for higher ground. All of the 100 or so Onge left in the world seem to have survived the tsunami's deadly power.
Two months on, the tsunami offers the chance for a fresh start for the Onge, a tribe whose roots stretch back to man's earliest ancestors but whose contact with the outside world over the past century-and-a-half has brought them close to extinction.
Their homes in two government-built settlements damaged or destroyed, the Onge are back, for the time being at least, in the forests of Little Andaman, an environment many anthropologists is where they belong.
"The Onge have expressed a desire to resume their hunter-gatherer and semi-nomadic way of life," s`id Samir Acharya of the Society of Andaman and Nicobar Ecology. "If they are permitted to go back into the forest, they would probably acquire more vitality, culturally, traditionally and health-wise."
The Onge are one of four negrito tribes on India's remote Andaman islands who some experts now trace back to "the first people," man's earliest ancestors who made their way out of Africa and into Asia.
Reuters ran into a group of seven Onge men just outside Hut Bay recently, sheltering under a tarpaulin, lying on raised beds made of sticks and on their way to find out what had happened to their homes at South Bay.
Listless and wary of outsiders, the group's leaders said they had no desire to become "modern" but would prefer to retain their traditional way of life.
"If the government gives us new houses we will live there, but if not, we are planning to go back to the jungle again," said Oroti, speaking broken Hindi and dressed in a red T-shirt and shorts.
His only apparent possessions -- a machete, a plastic bucket carried with a strap over his forehead, and the dogs that roamed around the camp.
Anthropologist Dr Vishvajit Pandya has recommended to a government panel the Onge be encouraged to move back into the forest. Acharya says the publicity generated by the tsunami gives a great chance to push that kind of idea through a slow-moving bureaucracy on the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
"Earlier, officials would have put up all sorts of obstacles. But now the whole country has its eyes and ears open. The Andaman islands have come onto the world map, and their sense of complacency has gone," he said.
For tens of thousands of years the Onge lived in Stone-Age isolation, hunting wild boar and collecting honey in the forests, chasing dugong and shooting fish with bows and arrows in the sea.
Their sad history of contact with the outside world began in the 1880s, when the British sent several "punitive missions" to pacify them and bring the island under their control.
"Friendly relations" were established, and some Onge even taken to Calcutta to impress upon them that Britain was "the strongest race and must be obeyed," according to former British administrator M.V. Portman.
Disease inevitably followed, and the Onge's numbers fell from 672 in 1901 to just 250 in 1931.
Worse was to come in the late 1960s, when the Indian government decided to develop Little Andaman island and settle thousands of refugees from former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
The Onge's traditional territory was eaten away, and the last unhappy, remnants of the tribe resettled in new homes in Dugong Creek and South Bay.
The Onge were offered healthcare and food rations, and even paid monthly allowances in an attempt to bring them closer to the Indian mainstream.
Government anthropologist Anstice Justin says the hand-outs have made the Onge welfare-dependent. Ironically, experts say, food aid has also left them malnourished -- rice and lentils no substitute for their high-protein diet of fish, clams and pork.
It has also left them at the mercy of unsupervised officials, says Madhusree Mukherjee, author of "The Land of Naked People," a hard-hitting account of the history of the islands' tribes.
"Social workers and other government employees placed in remote outposts with no training and absolutely no supervision are using their powers to exploit the aboriginals," she said. "The fact is that welfare has been more harmful than helpful."
As a result of alcohol introduced by welfare workers, many Onge are now heavy drinkers. The best chance for the tribe might be to coax them away from the state's corrupting grip, she says.
"This is a chance to encourage them to move back into the forest and become le3s dependent on welfare," she said. "It may be that returning to the forest would remove some of their depression."
But Mukherjee says the battle will be a tough one. Many Onge, especially the younger ones, may be reluctant to give up the easy life in the government settlements, the handouts, the electric light and the alcohol.
Their forests may also come under further pressure on an island where 10,000 settlers lost their homes to the sea.
"It depends on how well their forest is protected," she said by telephone from Calcutta. "Because the settlers suffered so much, they lost their rice fields; they might be seeking new ground which wasn't affected by the waves."
K.C. Ghoshal of the government's tribal welfare department agreed the tribes fared better in isolation, but said Mukherjee's accusations of abuse were not worthy of comment.
|
"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |