A campaign group has given warning that tours to see the Jarawa people in the Andaman Islands are threatening the survival of the indigenous tribe, which has inhabited parts of the islands for thousands of years.
Survival International, which campaigns on behalf of tribal groups throughout the world, claims that at least eight local travel companies are continuing to offer what it describes as "human safaris".
Trips to see the Jarawa are banned under Indian law because of the risk of spreading disease among the tribe, whose 300 remaining members have little immunity to common illnesses.
There are regulations in place that prevent outsiders from interacting with or taking photographs of the Jarawa. However, Survival International claims that local operators are flouting these rules. Some package trips are advertised as "geological tours", but feature excursions to the Jarawa reserve in their itineraries.
Verrier Elwin, one of the most interesting Englishmen to have worked in India this century, came to his adopted country when he was only 25. A few years later, he moved to a tribal village in the heart of India. He lived most of the rest of his life among the tribals of India, whom he loved and worked for, and about whom he wrote beautifully, intensely and extensively.
His friend, W.G. Archer, who was in the Indian Civil Service before becoming a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, had asked about Elwin: "What makes a man change his nationality, abjure civilization, and, in the upshot, become a blend of Schweitzer in Africa and Gauguin in Tahiti?" That question cannot be answered, but it prompts curiosity about his life.
Elwin was born the son of an Anglican bishop. He graduated from Merton College, Oxford, with a first in English literature and won a scholarship to support his degree, which the family tradition directed to be in theology. A doctorate in divinity had prepared him to be ordained as a priest, but his associations and interests had turned Elwin, while at Oxford, into a mild Indophile, with his heart turned wistfully towards Tagore and Gandhi. At a Students' Christian Movement meeting, which Elwin had attended at Stanwick, he met J.C. Winslow, who had come back from India to recruit young men for his Christian mission. Winslow, a product of Eton and Balliol, had gone to India to spread the gospel, and was so awed by the astonishing richness of Hindu spiritual and cultural heritage and ideas that he thought that Jesus could "take all those elements that were of permanent value and bring them to a richer completion".
Elwin was already looking eastwards and was easily seduced into joining Winslow's Christa Seva Sangha, which drew its inspiration from the traditional ashram ideal of the Hindus, as reinterpreted and actualised by Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati, a centre of abstinent and religious life, dedicated to the service of the poor.
After a view years of living in the tradition of service to the church and in compliance with the Gandhian ascetic ideals, Elwin felt impelled to break all links with his past. He decided to work among the lively, sensuous, forest-dwelling tribals - materially the poorest of the poor in India, but blessed with a capacity to endure much and enjoy life fully.
Elwin had begun his work in India as a very unusual Christian missionary with Gandhian leanings, unacceptable both to the British Raj and to his own church in India. He soon became disenchanted with the pretentious aspects of Indian spirituality and with Gandhian puritanism and self-righteousness. India's "primitive" tribals won his heart, eventually; and he gave his brilliant mind and devoted his enormous energies, towards helping them, writing about them and defending their rights and their waysof life.
His beginnings were those of an earnest, somewhat uncertain and self-doubting but deeply religious man, and, although he later rejected all formal religions, he never could choose any other than a selfless, dedicated way of life. But the roles he took on were always nonconformist. Consequently, he had to fight powerful opposition and persecution from organized, conventional people all his life.
Although Elwin was able, in his lifetime, to have some influence on India's policies towards its tribal peoples, one fears that, with time, much of what he lived and stood for is in danger of being ignored, misunderstood or forgotten.
Courtesy: Sunil Janah on Guhas book
