Book Title: Indian Antiquary Vol 58
Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications
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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
JULY, 102
been to the Home for the Andamanese at Port Blair and had been classed as Chåriär. All they thought of the matter was that the adhibs held them to be Chariar, but that they and all the Andamanese knew better.
In regard to the Tabôs in the interior of the North Andaman, whose existence was unsuspected by the authorities until the Census, it was found that they were in the same mori. bund condition as that which characterised the Andamanege in direct contact with Europeans. As this was a remarkable fact, enquiries were instituted, and the natives' explanation of the cause of the destruction of the Tribe was that they had killed each other off in consequence of the introduction of the contagious disease amongst them by the Chåriâr and Kôra Tribes. It is primd facie difficult to believe that a Tribe, however primitive, would actually kill off the sick to such an extent as to wipe itself out in obedience to what appears to have been & custom. But instances are by no means wanting where marriage customs, for instance, have been persisted in by savages long after it must have become clear to the tribesmen whither they were being led.
It was well known at the time of the Census that the Andamanese population, even & generation earlier, had been far more numerous than it was then, and in the generation since the Census of 1901 it has again further diminished greatly. The question of the dimi. nution was carefully gone into at the Census, and the following observations made by myself at the time as to the causes thereof are pertinent to the present purpose :
I have been acquainted with the Andamanese off and on since 1875, and I was present amongst them in one of the great devastating outbreaks of infectious disease (measles introduced by convicts from Madras) in 1877, and I personally know how much more numerous they were then than now. The one sad result of the Census in 1901 was to demongtrate beyond all doubt, what most local officials suspected and some asserted, that infectious and contagious diseases, the result of contact with an advanced civilisation, are wiping out the Andamanese: at any rate the friendly sections of them. With a population so diminished in one generation and a birth-rate so inadequate as that shown by the Census enquiries, it is obviously impossible, unless the people reach that point of saturation with these diseases which is also the point of immunity and recovery from their effects, for the race to last out much longer. Excluding the Onge-Jerawas, all the other tribes now numbered at the Census, on any reasoned calculation, not more than 700, of which some 250 belonged to one tribe, the Yêre, out of an estimated total 3,500 only a generation before, while the children could not in any CABE have been much more than 25 per cent of the adults. On these figures, in two more generations, i.e., in probably less than 60 years from 1901, even if undisturbed and unmolested by the Jarawas ever-increasing in relative strength, the friendly tribes must die out. A century from then must be taken as the extreme limit of a forecast of their existence, unless of cours the law of saturation with disease to the point of immunity comes into play in the meanwhile.
It also seems not difficult to foresee that it is possible that in a short time the Great Andamen will be occupied by foreign settlement and that the Jârawas only will survive, with a chance, in the case of their becoming friendly and losing their exclusive bearing, that they too will succumb to a rapid disappearancs, through what may be called the natural action of infectious and contagious disease, not necessarily carried to them by the civilised alien,.but more probably, as past experience shows, by infected members of the remnants of the "friendly " tribes captured in collisions with them.
There would be nothing new in such a disastrous effect of infectious or contagious disease on savages when introduced among them for the first time. It seems to be a process of nature not to be seriously checked by administrative measures. From the very first instructions of the Marquess Wellesley to Archibald Blair in 1789 to the existing practice in dealing with the Andamanese, there has never been any change in the general policy maintained towards the aborigines of the islands. They have been treated uniformly with kindness and
