Subraj, my friend calls him, but the newspapers name him Sunder Raj. They say he was a fisherman, but my friend, who spent time drinking toddy and smoking ganja cheroots with him, says Subraj wasn't quite familiar with boats. He made his living scamming bits of semi-precious sea-life that other people stole from the ocean: nautilus shells, corals, bêche-de-mer and turbo shells inlaid with swirls of mother-of-pearl. Subraj's lack of seafaring experience, said my friend, was due to his having spent years in prison for battering to death his first wife and her lover (ironic, given the Andamans' long history as a penal colony, that he'd done his time on the mainland). Upon returning to the islands he had married again. He was a charming, jolly man with a huge mutton-chop moustache. Everyone liked him. It came as quite a shock to hear that he had been eaten by the North Sentinelese.
Tales of fierce cannibal islanders have drifted for millennia on the currents of the Indian Ocean. The West first heard them from the Venetian, Marco Polo. Locked in a Genoese jail, he entertained his cellmate Rustichiello of Pisa with yarns of faraway islands whose people had protruding muzzles and jaws and teeth like mastiffs. 'They are terribly cruel,' Polo told the wide-eyed Pisan, 'and dine on every foreigner they can catch.' His information likely came from sailors' legends retold in Rialto taverns, but Rustichiello's account of Polo's travels, Il Millione, was a 14th-century bestseller. Its success ensured that the slur on the character of the Andamanese has survived to our own day.
When the British arrived in the Andamans in 1858 they were greeted by showers of arrows fired by small, black-skinned people with tight peppercorn curls who closely resembled African pygmies. How did they get there? One theory was that an Arab slave ship from the Congo must have run aground. But colonial officials were coming across 'negrito' peoples in the forests of Thailand, Malaya, the East Indies and New Guinea. We now know that these peoples are as genetically distant from Africa as it is possible to be, because they were among the first to leave it. Starting some 70,000 years ago, bands of diminutive people might have been glimpsed from time to time on beaches around the northern rim of the Indian Ocean. They carried water in nautilus shells and hunted with bows and long arrows they had not yet learned to fletch, and spears tipped with flint or hardened in fire harvested from lightning strikes. Year by year these folk ventured further, staying near the coasts, entering the forests of India and Burma and, as ice ages dropped ocean levels, moving along the forest-covered mountain range that joined Burma to Indonesia. The returning ocean submerged the mountains, leaving groups of people marooned on a far-flung necklace of islands, among them the Andamans. By the time the British arrived in 1858, the Andamanese had lived perhaps 60,000 years in almost complete isolation.
In my library, rubbing covers with such useful things as A Comparative Vocabulary of the Gondi Dialects and Colonel Kesri Singh's Hints on Tiger Shooting is an 1887 first edition of A Manual of the Andamanese Languages, by Maurice Vidal Portman, a British ICS officer who for twenty years was charged with 'civilising' the Andamanese. It was 'work of extraordinary difficulty', said his obituary, for most of them were as shy as wild animals – he would frequently have to land on their beaches, standing up in an open boat, amidst a shower of poisoned arrows. He won them by sheer personal magnetism. He doctored them; they were very rapidly dying out from venereal disease. He judged them and, if necessary, he hanged them.Surviving photos of Portman show a tall, aristocratic Englishman hemmed about by small dark-skinned folk. An adventurer in the Burton mould – secret agent, Grand Hierophant of his own mystical order – Portman claimed fluency in a dozen Indian languages and knowledge of at least four Andamanese dialects. His Manual contained every phrase an English official might need in his dealings with the natives.