From Extermination to Containment: Mapping the history of Ang/Jarawa Survival in the Andaman Islands (1925-1956)

Seminar presented by Uditi Sen (Nottingham) as part of the SOAS History Seminar Series.

Abstract

The Ang tribe of the Andaman Islands (misnamed as the Jarawa, meaning strangers in the language of Great Andamanese tribes) are the only indigenous Andamanese tribe to have largely retained their traditional livelihood as hunter-gatherers. Infamous for their ‘hostility’, the Ang used their bows and arrows to kill encroachers into their forested habitats, as well as villagers and workers in neighbouring settled areas until 1998.

While the colonial British Government sent out repeated punitive missions in response to Ang hostility, the post-colonial Indian government sought to break this pattern by offering ‘protection’ to the Ang within a designated Jarawa Tribal Reserve, created in 1956 through the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation. In this paper, I argue that this apparent rupture in patterns of tribal governance in the Andaman Islands across the historical watershed of 1947 conceals broader continuities.

Analysing hitherto unused archival records, I demonstrate how the thirty-year period, between 1925 and 1956, was crucial to Ang survival. Official response to their ‘hostility’ shifted from a genocidal impulse to ‘exterminate’ the Ang in the 1920s, to new strategies designed to ‘contain’ them within a specific zone in the thirties. This shift was prompted by the failure of a planned genocide in 1925-1926. 

Reading across the grain of a settler-colonial archive of violence, this paper reveals how the Ang’s agency played an active role in co-authoring these policy shifts, first, by surviving a planned genocide in the 1920s, and second, by asserting their presence over new territories during the 1930s, thus re-drawing the map of the ‘Jarawa Country’. 

By the time a national Indian government inherited the governance of the Andaman Islands, the impetus of policy had already moved away from punishing the Ang to containing the Ang. The disruption of World War II, along with chronic shortages of labour and potential settlers had prevented the successful implementation of plans to contain the Ang. 

However, as the dislocation of partition unleashed a new and reliable source of settlers for the Andaman Islands – Bengali refugee families – the local administration finally had the necessary demographic clout to impose stable frontiers upon the ‘Jarawa Country’, thus bringing to fruition a colonial vision of solving the ‘Jarawa problem’.

Speaker

Uditi Sen (Nottingham)

Organiser

School of History, Religion and Philosophies, SOAS History Seminar Series.

Image: The Fighting Clans of our Indian Empire," from The Graphic, Sept. 21, 1918