09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 71
Andamans. Despite half a century of effort
by anthropologists and conservationists, the
extinction of the Andamanese remains an
ever present threat. The Jangil disappeared
a century ago. The Great Andamanese now
number 54, the Onge 101, and the Jarawa
510, while the Sentinelese number between
50 and 200. All four tribes are sequestered
into their own small reserves where all but
the Sentinelese are, to varying degrees,
welfare dependent and in danger of losing
their culture. The last speaker of any of the
ten original Great Andamanese languages
died in 2010, at age 85. The best hope for the
Onge at Dugong Creek seems to be a hand-
out-dependent stasis. As for the Jarawa, after
two decades of contact with outsiders, a Port
Blair anthropologist who has watched their
dress, food, and language change predicts
that they are also doomed.
Against that record, how long can the
Sentinelese expect to last on an island 30
miles west of a city of 140,000 people, in an
archipelago earmarked by tourism develop-
ers as the new Thai islands? Not long, says
the anthropologist. “What we are doing
with the Sentinelese, we have already done
with other tribes,” he says. “Only the Nico-
barese escaped, and only because of the
missionaries.” In other words, to those who
know the tribes best, John’s mission did not
spell the end of the Sentinelese. To them, he
represented a possible means of survival.
PART THREE
My pursuit of the Andamanese had a
resolution of sorts. Over time, I narrowed
my obsession to an interview with En-mei,
the one Jarawa tribesman who spoke Hindi.
He had picked up the language during the six
months he spent in a Port Blair hospital being
treated for a broken leg. Vishvajit Pandya,
the anthropologist who first told me about
the Andamans, described En-mei as the
only person alive to have lived as both a tribal
hunter-gatherer and a modern man. I had
been trying to meet him when I was ushered
from the islands. Before I left, I scribbled
down four pages of questions and handed
them to Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman
Chronicle. Eight months later, Giles e-mailed
to say that En-mei had emerged from the
forest to take one of his children to a medical
clinic, and Giles had gone to meet him with
my sheets of questions. Giles attached a
transcript of En-mei’s replies, the first
interview with a Jarawa tribesman.
En-mei’s initial answers were predictable,
if eloquent. He hadn’t liked the hospital in
Port Blair because “I did not see my people.”
The Jarawas fought intruders because “no
one should come to our house. [Jarawas] fall
sick. They die. We cry a lot and we are an-
noyed. Earlier there were a lot of them. Now
they are limited in number.” At other times,
En-mei’s replies were more unexpected. He
enjoyed outsider innovations like buses and
jeeps. He appreciated modern medicine. He
liked logging. “Cutting trees is good,” he
said. “It cleans the place.” Still, he preferred
the forest. “There is a nice breeze,” he said.
When I met Pandya again, I told him howthe interview seemed to offer a glimpse of a
nuanced, complicated man. Pandya said he
had also discovered that there was more to
En-mei’s story. En-mei had not broken his
leg by accident, as Pandya once thought, but
had been beaten half to death by the father
of a girl he fancied. His long convalescence
was also no happenstance but a strategy
by Indian officials who hoped that by fill-
ing En-mei’s mind with wonders like curry,
Bollywood, and even a meeting with the In-
dian president (which they arranged), then
releasing him back into the forest, he would
persuade his fellow Jarawa to lay down their
bows. The plan worked for a while. The Ja-
rawa stopped attacking Indian settlers. They
began climbing on buses and taking tours of
Port Blair. But after a couple of years, con-
tact fizzled and En-mei disappeared. The
authorities were mystified. Pandya said he
had now worked out what had happened.
Initially when En-mei failed to return from
the forest, Pandya said the Jarawas assumed
he was dead. Six months later, when he came
back from the grave with stories of worldly
adventure, he became such a celebrity that
he was able to marry not the girl he originally
desired but the most desirable Jarawa girl of
all. Once the match was sealed, En-mei and
his wife retreated deep into the forest andstarted a family. Apparently equally tired of
the bright lights of Port Blair, other Jarawas
also returned to their previous existence.
Pandya related the story as a revelation.
The Jarawa had moved effortlessly between
two worlds. More than that, they were am-
bivalent about ours. En-mei, in particular,
had shown an interest in the outside world
only as long as it served his central aim,
which was marriage. To achieve that, he
had manipulated everyone, from his fellow
Jarawas to officials at the highest
levels of the Indian state. Pandya’s
conclusion was that En-mei was
an intelligent, ambitious, selfish
schemer. In other words: one of us.
Pandya said En-mei had forced
him to reexamine his entire pro-
fessional life. “It’s not the dif-
ferences that are so remarkable,”
Pandya said, “it’s the similarities.”
I realized I needed to do some in-
trospection of my own. The exotic
Stone Age warrior and rainfor-
est romantic I had pursued was
a phantom. En-mei was a 21st-
century husband and father mak-
ing his way in the same world, and
in the same messy human manner,
as the rest of us. After speaking to
Pandya, I remember wondering
what I was doing with my life.
John had been presented with
a similar opportunity to rethink. He had
journeyed to the edge of the world to find a
tribe whose existence was almost beyond
belief, only to discover a terrifying world
beyond comprehension. All the study that
had brought him to this point turned out to
be meaningless when confronted by a real-
ity that obeyed none of the rules and shared
none of beliefs that had shaped his life. John
had traveled to see another world. He had
ended up seeing his own from the outside,
perhaps for the first time.
My experience suggested that the moment
your presumptions were exposed as igno-
rance—the moment you admitted you were
lost—was the instant you passed through
the kala pani veil and the real learning could
begin. In his journal, however, John confessed
to no second thoughts. He had nearly died,
but the Christian way of looking at it was that
he had been saved. (Isaiah 65:1–2, the verses
that stopped the arrow, read: “I revealed my-
self to those who did not ask for me; I was
found by those who did not seek me. To a na-
tion that did not call on my name, I said, ‘Here
am I, here am I.’ All day long I have held out
my hands to an obstinate people, who walk
in ways not good, pursuing their own imagi-
nations.”) Nor did John regard the decision
of whether to go on or pull out—of whetherJOHN MIDDLETON RAMSEY, WHO
MET JOHN IN 2015, CONCEDES
THAT WHETHER YOU BUY JOHN’S
REASONING COMES DOWN TO
WHETHER YOU SHARE HIS
FAITH: “IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE,
THEN WHAT HE DID SEEMS
LUDICROUS.” IN A MISSIONARY
CONTEXT, HOWEVER, RAMSEY
INSISTS THAT JOHN’S PLANS
WERE MORE RAD THAN CRAZY.