The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  The next morning, during another storm, I sent a message by hand to the governor of the Andaman Islands, Dr. Ramchandra Apse, couched in formal terms and asking if he could grant me a personal interview. I said I was a “researcher” and that I would like to explore the islands a bit. I knew that police permits were required to go “up island,” which meant northward along the Andaman Trunk Road. The ATR, as it is called, cuts through four different islands, which are connected either by ferries or bridges. In some places it also cuts through the Jarawa tribal reserves, which was where the legal problems arose. For the Jarawa were strictly out-of-bounds to foreigners, and mostly to Indians as well. The government had long ago decided that in the interest of preserving their fragile culture they should be isolated from the outside world as far as was possible. They could not be met or even photographed, not even from a moving car.

  It rained all day and I went for a wretched walk around the Aberdeen Bazaar, buying things like toilet paper, bottled water, and oranges. I had found a tour company that could hire me a driver, and he appeared at the hotel toward the end of the afternoon, a dashing youth called Vinod armed with a cell phone that took pictures. There was also a return note waiting for me from the governor’s office. The great man, no doubt intrigued by my insolence, would see me that night. Would I come round for an interview—and tea?

  Dr. Ramchandra Apse lived in a large white compound on the crest of a hill. It was obviously the former residence of the top British official, and slothful soldiers with ancient-looking Enfields loafed about at the entrance, which was guarded by two gold toy cannons. A secretary appeared and asked me to wait for a while.

  Upstairs, on the first floor, a plump little satrap was waiting on a long navy sofa surrounded by ornamental elephants, fish tanks, and some portraits of Nehru and Gandhi hung high on the walls. Dr. Apse, professor of economics, former member of Parliament for Mumbai, was wearing a pale blue pajama suit and was talking with subdued ardor into a cell phone. It was hot and he looked a little sleepy. Suddenly he laughed and looked up: a pair of cunning, merry eyes shaded by owlish glasses. “I’ll call you right back.” He did not stand; his flip-flops remained as they were, but a woman in a pink sari, hovering indecisively behind a screen, gestured at a uniformed servant who suddenly sprang into motion. The phone rang again as I sat. “Hello?” the governor rasped, shaking the phone as if it was full of water. “Hello?” He looked at me: “See how it is in this place?” his eyes said.

  The room was filled with model ships in glass cases. Moreover, there was an old British telescope, a giant conch shell, and a large picture of a tiger. The governor shook my hand and asked me, with charming care, whether I had enjoyed the flight from Calcutta.

  “We are surprised to see you. After the tsunami, the tourists have dried up. May I ask which university you went to?”

  The reply was apparently satisfactory, for he hunched his shoulders for a second and snorted. The governor dipped a biscuit in his tea, in the British way. He then dryly observed that at least the giant wave had put them on the map. The outside world had finally heard of the Andaman Islands by now. Or had they?

  “I read the newspapers,” I said.

  “You read about the Jarawa. Everyone is writing about the Jarawa. It is the Hindu Times, sir. The Hindu Times is having a go at us. It is not the whole picture.”

  The Hindu Times?

  “How we are having a problem with the Jarawa!”

  Whereas, he continued, the Four Seasons chain had just bought an island here for themselves near Port Blair, and it was possible—likely, even—that the Andamans would be the next Maldives, the next Seychelles. “The Four Seasons,” he suddenly cried, holding up his wet biscuit. “It is going to save the people!”

  From what?

  “From being poor. From having fishing for a living. Have you seen the fishing boats?” He got quite excited. “The Four Seasons is going to save them. And we will be the next Seychelles.”

  Who would want to be the next Seychelles? I thought dismally.

  “Before being made governor,” Dr. Apse went on, rather like a steamroller, “I came here as a tourist. I saw the potential at once. The beautiful sea, for example”—he searched for words, snapping his fingers as if the secretary might help him find them—“the different colors. Yes, the different colors. Many colors we are having in the sea. Very pretty.”

  The servants advanced again with their plates of fairy cake and tea glasses. The governor was now in an excellent mood. Perhaps it was the cake and biscuits.

  Poverty. The pretty colors. They were grand themes, but what about the tribal peoples?

  The governor let out an equally grand sigh. “Well, we cannot let tourists near them. Do not misunderstand me. We are all friends now. There have been difficulties in the past. But”—he shook his head, as if with superficial regret—“the Jarawa and tourism, they cannot mix.”

  But then I thought back to the Jarawa kitsch in the hotel. It was surely the other way round: the tourism industry was flogging the natives for all they were worth. The mood was now rather jolly, however. The fans cranked at full speed, the jokes flew thick and fast. He explained that in the Jarawa areas vehicles must travel in a scheduled convoy with armed guards. It was, I had been told, for one’s own safety. The Jarawa were not especially friendly.

  What he didn’t explain was that poachers sometimes crossed over from Burma on contraband speedboats, seeking wild pigs, honey, and timber in the Jarawa’s opulent forests. Their bodies were occasionally found in the jungle, nonchalantly slaughtered, though just as often the poachers simply disappeared and were never seen again. They meted out much the same treatment to Indian loggers intruding into their woods. In 1996, a party of armed loggers were ambushed by a large Jarawa war party—guns versus arrows. Two loggers were killed and three forest wardens were captured. The Jarawa later released them after cutting off their hands with an ax. In the last fifteen years there have been almost two hundred attacks on forestry and police personnel. In 1998, five Bengali settlers poaching in Jarawa forests were murdered. The Jarawa word for outsider, eenen, is often amended to eenen piti piti: “bad people.”

  The governor warmed to this chilling theme. “On no account can you stop and greet them. And on no account can you take a photograph of them. That, I am telling you, will land you in jail—”

  Lightning suddenly flashed through the windows.

  “Is it true,” I asked, “that they cut off your hands if they find you in their forest?”

  “Ah, many things have happened. You would be better off not stopping. I will tell your driver myself.”

  A slight irritability warned me that the subject should soon be changed. The Indians are very sensitive to accusations that they are bulldozing the natives into oblivion, as a colonial power would have done.

  He changed the subject by asking what I was doing there.

  “Researching,” I said vaguely. “For a travel book.”

  “I am not sure what a travel book is. Surely you are not interested in the Jarawa? It would be better to write about the Fortune Resort.”

  The governor made a gesture of amused disdain. For how pointless it was to charge around the planet taking notes and putting oneself into all kinds of uncomfortable situations.

  And where was I going afterward?

  “Bangkok? A most fun city.” Many colleagues went there for the fine Sikh tailoring and the most accommodating ladies. And then?

  “Never heard of it,” he murmured when I said Papua New Guinea. At least, not very concretely. Who were the Papuans?

  “They are a little like the Jarawa,” I had to say.

  Dr. Apse’s face tensed a little. “Then why are you going there?” He laughed.

  “They have the last wild forests in the world. I want to see them before they vanish forever.”

  “We also have the last wild forests in the world. And desert islands.”

  There was a subtle colonial whiff to our interaction
that I couldn’t put my finger on. A jostling of some kind, a mutual taunting. It was obvious he considered my rationalizations for traveling little more than an idle Westerner’s pretext for loafing about in balmy climes. And he was not, in fact, entirely wrong.

  “But first,” he said at last, “you simply must see our ruins in Ross Island. As a Britisher, you will appreciate them. Ross Island was the Britisher headquarters in the colonial time.”

  For a moment the governor looked like an old Polynesian king welcoming a seedy English captain to his shores. But there was a steel glitter in at least one of the eyes. Perhaps he was more like a British colonel, after all—a colonial bureaucrat serving out his time in some far-flung, godforsaken posting.

  Downstairs, the guards snapped to attention and I was told that the brooding silhouette on the horizon was Ross, long abandoned and uninhabited, except of course by ghosts. Indians take their ghosts very seriously. It was better, they said, to go in the morning.

  The morning boat to Ross takes a half hour. A mere two miles long and barely a mile wide, Ross is one of those many places once known as the “Paris of the East.” Photographs from the 1880s, though, show not so much a miniature Paris as a bizarre re-creation of English suburban life at the heart of the penal colony—a kind of transplanted Tunbridge Wells with ficus trees.

  From the jetty, you walk up through a palm grove toward a printing press standing like the ruins of a medieval monastery by the sea. Wild chital suddenly stop to watch you pass by. The ficus trees have multiple boles like massive barrel organs and inside the press their roots have exploded into a lattice that strangles the walls. Next to the press stands the Mineral Water Plant, its oxidized tanks filled with spiders, like futuristic cannons that have been mislaid. A path rises up the island’s single hill toward a Jane Eyre church, tropical Gothic again.

  It struck me that Ross is exactly what the ruins of our own megaresorts will look like in a hundred years’ time. Ross had been a fantasy island, just as a Four Seasons island would be—the same exclusivity, the same illusion of tropical splendor carefully manicured and arranged. And, like a twentieth-century tourist resort, it had been utopian, a wild place rebuilt as a mini-England. There had been a barracks modeled on Windsor Castle, tennis courts next to which native bands played on Sunday mornings, a Christian cemetery, a grandiose bakery, officers’ messes, ballrooms, and promenades.

  But there is more to it than that. The British had built their empire around a string of naval bases, many of them islands. Is it any accident, then, that the British invented the romance of the “desert island”? Islands, that is, that are usually covered with dense greenery and bear no resemblance to deserts whatsoever. Islands “desert” in the old, appealing sense that they were largely uninhabited. They could easily be reworked into miniature paradises in the British image. Inadvertently, the British Empire had invented an extraordinary tourist concept: the self-contained tropical Western home-from-home, an island paradise sealed off from obstreperous natives. The British had accordingly turned this little island into what Robinson Crusoe would have made if he had lived in the nineteenth century—a commuter suburb to nowhere.

  The British are easily seduced by islands. Think of our literature, in which islands are used again and again to demonstrate dramas of ideas: The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, The Coral Island, Huxley’s Island, Lord of the Flies, etc. For us, the island is a source of wondrous dread—it has a psychology all its own.

  Crusoe. Who can make sense of the figure of Crusoe? No one forgets the scene on the island beach where Crusoe first sees the human footprint. The horror of cannibals. And it was an island just like Ross, in its way, with the Jarawa playing cannibal just across the straits. It was Robinson Crusoe who transformed the imperial frontier into a tourist idea, because Crusoe turned the island into an adventure story, a microcosm of Europe and a place that could be remade—all at once.

  At the Fortune Resort they had a small library with a number of enraged ecological texts, a few badly printed local guides, and some “boys’ literature,” including Crusoe and The Coral Island. Since there was nothing else to do between cocktail hour and dawn the following day, I got drunk on the terrace next to the Jarawa warrior and read the two books. They made for surprising reading. Defoe’s book is startlingly earnest and grim, for there is nothing romantic about either Crusoe or his island. It was published in 1704, before the tropics had become desirable. But Crusoe has all the traits I see in myself: the longing to get naked, the fastidious disdain bordering on arrogance, the need to”get organized,” the utopian desire to transcend the real world. He is a hedonist and a prig at the same time. He likes the vibe of coconut palms and beaches, but there is always a tension between the white man and the blacks who are never there. A psychoanalyst would probably delve into the Christian implications of all this, for the Christian template is burned into every Western secularist. But what of the “cannibals”? Crusoe’s tale is all about them. A Christian must have his pagan.

  When Ross was at its height, every Englishman knew the Scottish writer R. M. Ballantyne’s adventure story The Coral Island. Published in 1857, The Coral Island tells the tale of three plucky English schoolboys, Ralph Rover, Jack, and Peterkin, shipwrecked on a South Seas island paradise. They immediately claim it as a microcosmic tropical kingdom that they subdue with all the imperial force that British children once had at their fingertips. The dialogues are robustly imperial, in the jolliest way:

  “We’ve got an island all to ourselves. We’ll take possession in the name of the king; we’ll go and enter the service of its black inhabitants. Of course we’ll rise, naturally, to the top of affairs. White men always do in savage countries. You shall be king, Jack; Ralph, prime minister, and I shall be—”

  “But suppose there are no natives?”

  “Then we’ll build a charming villa, and plant a lovely garden round it, stuck all full of the most splendiferous tropical flowers, and we’ll farm the land, plant, sow, reap, eat, sleep, and be merry.”

  Then the “savages” arrive. The chapter headings become feverish. “Intercourse with the savages—Cannibalism prevented” and such like. The cannibals arrive by canoe, just as they do in Robinson Crusoe. Here is the chief of the anthropophagi:

  He was tattooed from head to foot; and his face, besides being tattooed, was besmeared with red paint, and streaked with white. Altogether, with his yellow turban-like hair, his Herculean black frame, his glittering eyes and white teeth, he seemed the most terrible monster I ever beheld.

  I put the book down and watched the same Englishman on his cell phone at the other end of the restaurant, still hunched, still babbling about percentages. The “boys” stood around as they had in a thousand and one colonial bars, arms crossed, subtly sardonic but friendly. I searched their faces for any sign of Jarawa or Onge inheritance, but they were all Indian. This whole place was a descendant of the “charming villa” the British had built on Ross, but the black men who were not there were the invisible shadows that ringed it. The Calibans of Ballantyne’s indescribably trite book stretched all the way from British India to British Australia, from Borneo to Papua, from the Andamans to Tahiti. They were the Lost World, not the undesert islands they so inconveniently inhabited.

  Vinod arrived at five a.m. in a dented Japanese minivan. By now I relished the constant dawn downpour, the compressed scent of datura and mud that hung in the air. We had coffee together on the terrace and discussed our route. His boss had given him all his instructions, including Dr. Apse’s police permits for the roadblocks, and had impressed upon him the imperative need to not stop on the ATR even for a second. Needless to say, I was determined to sabotage this directive if I could, but for the time being I agreed to it. Vinod was a bit of a player—his cell phone reverberated to constant feminine demands—and he was not really looking forward to this jaunt through the Jarawa lands. Most tourists went to Havelock Island, which was a quick four-hour ferry ride from Port Blair. Why all this driving up to
the remote frontier town of Diglipur?

  “Nothing to see there.” He sighed, as if hoping I would change my mind and take us both to a fine air-conditioned resort on Havelock where there would be plenty of Calcutta girls.

  It was a slow ride through the tsunami-wrecked suburbs of Port Blair. The clay road churned in the rain, set between farms submerged like paddies. Road crews assembled in the half-light, rock cutters with puny hammers setting to on piles of boulders. The rain made them dark as iron.

  On the far side of the capital, the rain forest begins at once. Before you know it you are winding through thimbok trees tall as apartment blocks, feathery with mist, and black chuglums alive with ants. The jungle is webbed with creepers, like a thick spider’s web. After an hour, we approached the first checkpoint. Here were cultivated fields rammed against the edge of the forest, a few shacks and a chai stall piled with fresh chapatis and cans of condensed milk. The soldiers cowered from the rain, sipping at tiny glass cups. A large black sign instructed us what to do if we met a Jarawa. DO NOT GIVE ANY ITEM EATABLE, CLOTHES ETC TO JARAWAS. DO NOT LET THE JARAWA GET INTO YOUR VEHICLE. SOLITARY DRIVING RISKS YOUR LIFE AND PROPERTY.

  We went to see the policeman with our permit. There was a “Reporting Room” with a view over the kiwi-green fields. Yet more bored soldiers sat under the wet palms, watching the day’s first convoy assemble: two buses and us. The papers were stamped and processed through a 1940s typewriter, the policeman giving us a cool stare. The buses were occupied by “settlers” making their way to Diglipur and Ariel Bay, the two northernmost villages of the archipelago. Over the whole operation lay an atmosphere of lackadaisical anxiety, of prosaic hysteria in the face of the blacks who were not there. The officer cracked a few jokes about the Jarawa to rattle us, then looked over the governor’s permit. Not a single outsider had been through here in months, and dozens of faces peered in through the window at the white man with his florid permit and his small cigar. When it was over I went down to the chai stall and got a milky cup to drink in the rain. It was an anachronistic scene all round, something out of the ’30s, from the travel books I had grown up on like Road to Oxiana and Journey Without Maps, but without the trains of porters, servants, and diplomatic contacts.