Colour TV works black magic on a threatened tribe

The ancient Jarawa people, who have lived on India's Andaman Islands territory for nearly 40,000 years, are threatened with extinction. Fifty of their 300-odd surviving members - 20 per cent of the tribe - contracted measles and pneumonia recently, following exposure to "civilisation".

The Andaman Islands lie in the Bay of Bengal, closer to Burma than to the Indian mainland. The nomadic Jarawas live in the islands' tropical forest. They have contracted these illnesses, to which they have no immunity, following persistent efforts by the local administration to "befriend" them by exposing them to "modernity". Little is known of the ancient Jarawas, who wear no clothes, preserve fire by carrying embers with them on endless journey through the forests and hunt - and even fish - with bows and arrows. They allow no one into their preserve, scaring off the curious by firing warning shots over their heads. Anthropologists believe their closest relatives are the Pygmy people of central Africa.

Activists in the islands' capital, Port Blair - where around 40 Jarawas are in hospital - are concerned that others may be similarly afflicted. They have no reliable way of finding out: isolation and a virtually unknown language make communicating with the Jarawas very difficult. There is now a growing rift between state officials and NGOs over whether the Jarawas should be left to the seclusion of their 700 sq. km reserve, or whether efforts to "civilise" them should continue.

Activists supporting indigenous peoples, and some concerned officials, fear the Jarawas might suffer the fate of other native islanders like the Great Andamanese, the Onge and the Shompen who have been virtually wiped out following attempts to "civilise" them by the British colonial and Indian administrations. In 1977 a measles epidemic wiped out almost all the 5,000-odd Great Andamanese, of whom only 35 survive today. They are all dependent on state subsidies, their skills of living off the land long forgotten. Similarly, the Onges have been reduced to around 110, and the Shompen to around 100. Both tribes are today forced to barter their traditional food, such as honey and freshwater prawn, for chewing tobacco, to which they have become addicted.

"We cannot experiment with Jarawa lives," the head of the Anthropological Survey of India at Port Blair, Kanchan Mukhopadhya, told me. He said no change should be thrust upon them as they cannot jump centuries of development in a year or two without suffering physical and psychological harm. The director of health services in the territory, Dr Namita Lai, disagrees. "The Jarawas must be brought into the national mainstream," she argues, and should not be left to fend for themselves. But Samir Acharya, head of SANE, an NGO which has worked to preserve the Jarawa way of life for over three decades, replies: "Whenever an ancient tribe has come into contact with civilisation too swiftly it has perished".

Other conservationists said the problem facing the Jarawas was paradoxical. Reversing the modernisation process by restoring them to their original habitat might prove difficult, if not impossible. Over the past year, they have started leaving their preserve to visit nearby towns and villages begging for novel items like biscuits, bread and spicy food.

But the Jarawas' real "coming out " began after En May, a Jarawa teenager, fractured his leg while raiding a village for food. The police took him to a Port Blair hospital where he was treated like a celebrity by the nurses and curious locals, fussed over, fed sweets and cakes, dressed in fine clothes and exposed to colour television.

After recovering, the teenager was returned to the Jarawa reserve and within two months, impressed by his tales of the developed world, a group emerged for the first time ever at a police post in October. They pointed to their bellies and were given bananas and coconuts.

There was no stopping them after that. Villagers, and tourists attracted by the novelty of the Jarawas, provided them with food and clothing, which they wore without washing. On one of their raids, the Jarawa made off with a colour television.

The Jarawas "wished to verify En May's statements that the world is full of delicious food, and enchanting boxes in which pictures move and sing," said Samir Acharya. They were reportedly enraged when pictures did not flow out from its mute screen and smashed it. They wish to see a world where touching a button brings light and breeze and turning a knob brings water, he says.

"But sadly, we have led them to believe that all these things come free." He said swift action must be taken to prevent yet another aboriginal tribe from becoming extinct. Cosmetic measures will not preserve tribes which anthropologists feel may offer a key to better understanding man's evolution, he added.