Learning From the Jarawas

"YOUR blood stress is just too excessive, and your nerves are a destroy. Take a experience to a tropical island and loosen up!" If you're keyed up under the tensions and pressures of contemporary civilization, this might be simply the advice you want. Even if no longer for medical motives, who can resist this sort of tempting idea? So why no longer get away from it all with the aid of visiting the Andaman Islands, home of the Jarawas? Andaman Islands? Jarawas? Don't be embarrassed if you have by no means heard of them, for they're a ways off the overwhelmed tune of worldwide tourism. If you take a look at a map, you will find the Andaman Islands within the Bay of Bengal, among India and Myanmar (previously Burma). This archipelago, made from some three hundred islands, is now the land's end of the Republic of India. An Uncivilized People? The islands are the house of four Negrito tribes the Great Andamanese, the Jarawas, the Sentinelese, and the Onges. The Negritos, that means "little negroes," are concept to be remnants of an historical, darkish-skinned, pygmy race that when inhabited maximum of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Because of their isolation, they have been called the purest remnants of "Stone Age man," or, as Lieutenant Colebrook of the British Army, which once managed the islands, positioned it, "the least civilised in the global." In 1858 when the British established a penal colony there, the Great Andamanese numbered in the thousands. Soon, the outsiders' diseases measles, syphilis, and others in conjunction with opium dependancy and alcoholism, devastated the tribesmen. Now just a few of them, all of combined blood, stay on tiny Strait Island. The Onges suffered a comparable fate. For years the Jarawas and the Sentinelese resisted touch with, and exploitation by way of, outsiders. Their hostility succeeded in maintaining them in isolation but additionally earned them the popularity of being uncivilized and bloodthirsty cannibals. Only a particularly few years in the past, while officers of the anthropological department in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands, tried to touch one of the tribal agencies on North Sentinel Island, their release was met with a shower of arrows, one piercing the leg of a photographer. What made them so opposed? M. V. Portman, a British officer administering the islands on the quit of the final century, remarked: "On our arrival the Jarawas were quiet and inoffensive towards us, nor did they ever disturb us, until we took to constantly molesting them by inciting the coastal Andamanese towards them. After some years of this disturbance, the existence of the Jarawas became very hard and in retaliation they commenced to attack us. It changed into our fault if the Jarawas have become antagonistic." The Jarawa Way of Life The Jarawas are seminomadic. They stay in agencies of approximately 30, and a number of neighboring corporations make up a tribe. Each group actions approximately within a nicely-described boundary and does now not trespass the territory of other corporations. Living in a lush, tropical surroundings, they don't have any agriculture and hold no domestic animals. Their livelihood depends on their bows, arrows, and spears looking and fishing. It is a part of their way of existence that food is shared in commonplace. So if someone inside the group catches a turtle, absolutely everyone has turtle. If one catches a pig, all of us has pig. In their social order, there aren't any magnificence differences with haves and have-nots. "The Jarawas should never be considered bad," said one of the anthropological officials. "They have all their need in abundance." An unusual issue approximately the Jarawas is that they're a number of the few peoples around the arena who do not understand the way to start a hearth. They get their fire from burning forests ignited by lightning throughout the frequent thunderstorms. And they protect their fires carefully, maintaining them burning and even sporting them along once they pass. A bane of contemporary civilization is the breakdown in ethical values. "Among the Jarawas, there's no premarital intercourse," stated the officer quoted above. "Adultery could be very rare. A responsible one would face robust social disapproval. He could feel so terrible he would leave the community for some duration of time earlier than he would feel like returning." Do humans dwelling for your "civilized" network have any such eager feel of morality? Modern civilization is synonymous with excessive blood stress, coronary heart sickness, cancer, and the like. The Jarawas aren't plagued with such ailments. Though small in stature the men being not over five ft [1.5 m] tall and the girls even shorter they were known as "the maximum perfectly shaped little beings in existence." In their very own environment, they seldom fall sick. Though faith is not outstanding in their lives, the Jarawas do have sure rituals concerning the useless. When someone dies, the frame is buried, and the hut formerly occupied by using the deceased is deserted. After a few months, the frame is exhumed. The skull, or greater regularly the decrease jaw, is then worn with the aid of the subsequent of kin. After a while, different household put on it in flip. This exercise is taken into consideration a mark of appreciate for the useless one and is definitely related with their thoughts approximately the useless. The Jarawas consider that there may be a soul, a provider of existence, that lives on in every other global. They also accept as true with that the soul nevertheless takes an hobby in them, so they'll no longer do whatever that could annoy it. A Home of Plenty The Jarawas enjoy a home richly endowed. Among the many lovely flowers dressing the islands are the wonderful orchids, a number of them determined simplest in these islands. In 1880, according to regional botanist Dr. N. P. Balakrishnan, some sorts of those orchids "like uncommon diamonds" were fetching "fantastic fees in England." Recently observed on Sentinel Island by means of a German scientist, at the cost of a finger, is the robber crab. The Government Fisheries Department Exhibition at Port Blair, Andaman Islands, has had a show board description of the robber crab that claims: 'Dangerous to coconut plantations. Climbs coconut trees. Plucks ripe fruit. Breaks open the shell with its ambitious claws. Drinks the sweet water and eats the coconut flesh.' Others, however, have puzzled that this crab absolutely does all of this. While acknowledging that the crab climbs timber, critics say it most effective opens and eats damaged coconuts already on the floor. What the Future Holds Under the have an effect on of present day civilization, will the Jarawas cross the way of the Great Andamanese and the Onges sluggish decline and perhaps eventual extinction? Only time will inform. But for hundreds of years earlier than outsiders came, they had been taking care of their God-given home and making use of the provisions in an unselfish way. Theirs became, indeed, a easy, non violent way of life. Can we learn something from the Jarawas?