Learning From the Jarawas

"YOUR blood pressure is just too high, and your nerves are a destroy. Take a experience to a tropical island and relax!" If you're keyed up below the tensions and pressures of cutting-edge civilization, this might be simply the recommendation you need. Even if no longer for medical reasons, who can resist this type of tempting proposal? So why now not escape from it all by way of traveling the Andaman Islands, home of the Jarawas? Andaman Islands? Jarawas? Don't be embarrassed when you have by no means heard of them, for they're a long way off the overwhelmed song of world tourism. If you have a look at a map, you may discover the Andaman Islands inside the Bay of Bengal, between India and Myanmar (formerly Burma). This archipelago, made up of some three hundred islands, is now the land's quit 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, meaning "little negroes," are concept to be remnants of an historical, darkish-skinned, pygmy race that when inhabited maximum of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Because in their isolation, they were called the purest remnants of "Stone Age man," or, as Lieutenant Colebrook of the British Army, which as soon as managed the islands, placed it, "the least civilised in the global." In 1858 whilst the British installed a penal colony there, the Great Andamanese numbered in the heaps. Soon, the outsiders' sicknesses measles, syphilis, and others along side opium addiction and alcoholism, devastated the tribesmen. Now only some of them, all of blended blood, continue to be 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 enormously few years in the past, whilst officials of the anthropological department in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands, tried to touch one of the tribal groups on North Sentinel Island, their release was met with a shower of arrows, one piercing the leg of a photographer. What made them so antagonistic? M. V. Portman, a British officer administering the islands on the stop of the remaining century, remarked: "On our arrival the Jarawas had been quiet and inoffensive in the direction of us, nor did they ever disturb us, till we took to constantly molesting them with the aid of inciting the coastal Andamanese towards them. After a few years of this disturbance, the existence of the Jarawas have become very difficult and in retaliation they started to assault us. It become our fault if the Jarawas have become adversarial." The Jarawa Way of Life The Jarawas are seminomadic. They live in agencies of about 30, and a number of neighboring organizations make up a tribe. Each group moves about within a nicely-described boundary and does now not trespass the territory of different groups. Living in a lush, tropical environment, they don't have any agriculture and maintain no home animals. Their livelihood depends on their bows, arrows, and spears searching and fishing. It is a part of their manner of existence that food is shared in commonplace. So if someone inside the organization catches a turtle, all and sundry has turtle. If one catches a pig, everyone has pig. In their social order, there aren't any magnificence distinctions with haves and have-nots. "The Jarawas may want to by no means be taken into consideration poor," said one of the anthropological officials. "They have all their need in abundance." An unusual aspect approximately the Jarawas is that they're among the few peoples round the sector who do no longer know how to begin a hearth. They get their fireplace from burning forests ignited by lightning at some point of the frequent thunderstorms. And they protect their fires cautiously, maintaining them burning or even carrying them alongside after they circulate. A bane of modern civilization is the breakdown in ethical values. "Among the Jarawas, there's no premarital intercourse," said the officer quoted above. "Adultery could be very uncommon. A responsible one would face strong social disapproval. He could experience so bad he would leave the network for a few length of time earlier than he might experience like returning." Do people residing to your "civilized" network have one of these keen experience of morality? Modern civilization is synonymous with high blood strain, coronary heart disease, cancer, and so on. The Jarawas aren't plagued with such illnesses. Though small in stature the men being no longer over 5 feet [1.5 m] tall and the girls even shorter they have been called "the most perfectly formed little beings in life." In their very own environment, they seldom fall ill. Though faith isn't always distinguished in their lives, the Jarawas do have positive rituals regarding the useless. When someone dies, the body is buried, and the hut previously occupied via the deceased is abandoned. After some months, the body is exhumed. The cranium, or greater frequently the lower jaw, is then worn through the next of family members. After a while, different relatives put on it in flip. This practice is taken into consideration a mark of respect for the dead one and is clearly linked with their thoughts about the dead. The Jarawas trust that there is a soul, a provider of existence, that lives on in every other world. They additionally agree with that the soul nevertheless takes an interest in them, so they may no longer do anything that can annoy it. A Home of Plenty The Jarawas enjoy a domestic richly endowed. Among the numerous beautiful flowers dressing the islands are the superb orchids, some of them observed best in those islands. In 1880, in keeping with regional botanist Dr. N. P. Balakrishnan, some kinds of those orchids "like uncommon diamonds" had been fetching "gorgeous fees in England." Recently discovered on Sentinel Island by using a German scientist, at the value of a finger, is the robber crab. The Government Fisheries Department Exhibition at Port Blair, Andaman Islands, has had a display board description of the robber crab that claims: 'Dangerous to coconut plantations. Climbs coconut bushes. Plucks ripe fruit. Breaks open the shell with its ambitious claws. Drinks the candy water and eats the coconut flesh.' Others, however, have puzzled that this crab simply does all of this. While acknowledging that the crab climbs bushes, critics say it simplest opens and eats damaged coconuts already on the ground. What the Future Holds Under the affect of current civilization, will the Jarawas move the manner of the Great Andamanese and the Onges slow decline and perhaps eventual extinction? Only time will inform. But for hundreds of years before outsiders came, they were taking care of their God-given domestic and using the provisions in an unselfish way. Theirs changed into, indeed, a easy, non violent way of lifestyles. Can we research some thing from the Jarawas?