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Jarawas: Tribal Peoples Under Grave Threat from Civilization and Tourism by Palash R Ghosh

The recent shocking video showing naked Jarawa tribeswomen being forced to dance for food by tourists may highlight the risks of isolated, indigenous peoples of the world having contact with the modern world.

The Jarawas of India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands are only one of several reclusive tribes around the world that are now facing extinction.

While the government of India and tribal affairs officials have tried to protect people like the Jarawa from excessive contact, the growth of tourism and infrastructure development has made that impossible. The establishment of a major road and a resort hotel in the Andamans present a grave threat to the Jarawas, who live in an adjacent forest preserve.

Moreover, in recent years, several hundred thousand Indians have settled on the islands, drastically outnumbering the indigenous tribes.

While it is officially illegal to photograph or contact the Jarawas, the police cannot enforce the laws with so many tourists pouring into the islands every year.

The director general of police on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, Shamsher Bahadur Deol, recently told reporters that over the past five years 1,000 tourists and others have been arrested for seeking to contact the Jarawas.

"But it's impossible for them to catch everyone," he said.

Miriam Ross of Survival International (SI) told the BBC: “A number of illicit tour operators take tourists through the area every day only with the purpose of seeing the Jarawas. The authorities have ignored a 2002 Supreme Court ruling to close the [main island] road. It brings poachers, tourists and other outsiders into daily contact with the Jarawas, putting them at serious risk of disease.”

Indeed, in 1997 and 2006, dozens of Jarawas were afflicted with an outbreak of measles – a particularly dangerous disease for isolated peoples.

SI has warned that the “the principal threat to the Jarawas’ existence comes from encroachment onto their land, which was sparked by the building of a highway through their forest in the 1970s. The road brings settlers, poachers and loggers into the heart of their land.”

SI added: “This encroachment risks exposing the Jarawa to diseases to which they have no immunity, and creating a dependency on outsiders. Poachers steal the game the Jarawa rely on, and there are reports of sexual exploitation of Jarawa women.”

There are now only about 320 Jarawas left, according to BBC.

Reportedly, some Jarawas have turned to begging for food from tourists and have even picked up some Hindi words. Some younger ones even wear jeans and T-shirts rather than roam the jungles naked as their elders do.

Scholars and scientists believe that the Jarawas, a hunting-gathering tribe, arrived in the Andaman archipelago from Africa 60,000 years ago. It is unclear how they migrated to these islands in the Bay of Bengal from Africa.
Physically, they resemble African bushmen and they survive primarily by eating wild boar on the island.

However, now after having contact with outsiders, they have developed a taste for some foods they had never known before – and often steal to get them.

Govind Raju, editor of The Light of Andamans newspaper, told western media: "Till as late as the 1980s, the Jarawas would kill people if challenged or threatened. But in the 1090s, they started to come out of the [forest] reserve and now they have developed a taste for cooked rice and sugar.”

Raju added: "Tribals [like the Jarawas] don't believe in property rights. From their point of view, there is nothing wrong in taking food from the villagers. They don't think they are committing any crime.”

To protect the Jarawas, tribal rights activists believe the government should take steps to isolate them completely from other human beings and ban all commercial activity and tourism on their near their habitat.

Raju thinks it might be too late.

"We did not intervene when we should have," he said. "The dilemma now is - should they be brought into modern-day reality? Or should they be pushed back in time?"