Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean

Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders

Satadru Sen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135183066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book examines the social, political and ideological dimensions of the encounter between the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman islands, British colonizers and Indian settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British-Indian penal settlements in the Andaman Islands – beginning tentatively in 1789 and renewed on a larger scale in 1858 – represent an extensive, complex experiment in the management of populations through colonial discourses of race, criminality, civilization, and savagery. Focussing on the ubiquitous characterization of the Andaman islanders as 'savages', this study explores the particular relationship between savagery and the practice of colonialism.

Satadru Sen examines savagery and the savage as dynamic components of colonialism in South Asia: not intellectual abstractions with clear and fixed meanings, but politically 'alive' and fiercely contested products of the colony. Illuminating and historicizing the processes by which the discourse of savagery goes through multiple and fundamental shifts between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, he shows the links and breaks between these shifts and changing ideas of race, adulthood and masculinity in the Andamans, British India, Britain and in the wider empire. He also highlights the implications of these changes for the 'savages' themselves. At the broadest level, this book re-examines the relationship between the modern and the primitive in a colonial world.

1
Racializing the Andamanese

Their knowledge even of themselves is imperfect. They have no… notion of their own origin.

Mouat, 1863

In August 1858, just months into the second settlement, a series of clashes between colonial troops and the Andamanese provoked the ire of the Government of India. The Home Department felt that J. P. Walker, a veteran jailor and the first full-fledged superintendent of the penal colony,¹ had been unnecessarily aggressive in his approach to the aborigines. Walker was told:

The President in Council fully appreciates the difficulties of your position. But the aborigines of the Andamans are apparently unable to conceive the possibility of the two races co-existing on the islands, except on terms of internecine hostility. This idea is assuredly strengthened by every attack we make upon them, and can only be driven out of their minds by a course of persistent conciliation and forbearance on our part. Every effort must be made to teach them that we desire to cultivate friendly relations, and have no intention of attacking them or doing them any injury, unless they compel us to act in self-defence.²

Penned by Home Secretary Cecil Beadon, the letter is revealing beyond its author’s intentions. First, the notion that the Andamanese could not tolerate the co-existence of ‘two races’ in the islands rendered the Indian convicts marginal in a penal colony created for them. The colony could be eclipsed by the clearing; apparently, in some contexts, colonialism in the Andamans was more about the management of savages than of criminals. Second, Beadon displaced on to the Andamanese his own anxieties about race and co-existence in the empire. The concerns and vocabularies were not new in 1858, but they were renewed and reshaped by the creation of the penal colony, and continued to be massively influential for the duration of the century.

As an entity that condensed in European colonialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is to be expected that the Andamanese savage would also be a creature of race, shaped by the narratives of travelers invested in historical and taxonomic coherence.³ Race, after all, was emerging as the primary grid for the organization of power, possession and knowledge at precisely this time.⁴ As Wilson has pointed out, the new understanding of race was strongly influenced by theories of human migration and its linguistic evidence.⁵ Moreover, by the time of the founding of the second settlement, race had become a ‘core element’ of colonial rule in India, given an unavoidable and seemingly unshakeable solidity by the war still underway on the mainland.⁶ To order a colony in the second half of the nineteenth century was to insist upon that solidity: its substance, its truth, its history and its normative hierarchies, permissions and restrictions.

When Britons encountered the indigenous population of the Andamans in 1789, the latter constituted an unformed racial enigma. Nearly a century later, the ‘race’ of the Andamanese was still an ongoing topic of discussion among administrators and anthropologists. This long and often bitter conversation raises questions that go to the heart of the colonial savage encounter, and more specifically to the production of savagery in the islands. How is the savage racialized, and how is this process related to the practice of colonial governance? What are the links – and the gaps – between the content of race and that of savagery? If whiteness is manufactured in the colony as Ann Stoler has suggested, how and why does it modulate its distance from the multiple blacknesses, savage as well as civilized, which are its intimates and enemies?⁷

At one level, race derived from, reflected and informed the colonizer’s experience of power and vulnerability in the savage encounter. Edmonds has argued that the eighteenth-century European imagination of Pacific Islanders reflected an attempt to bring the intimidating vastness of the ocean into a temporal grid of civilizations.⁸ In the Andamans, Britons confronted not the infinite horizon but the sightless jungle, which was itself lost at sea. Race provided a chart that flowed not from rumors, myths and hearsay, but from the prosaic coercion of colonial governance; yet it supplied the ideological and imaginative means for nurturing the Romantic within the prosaic. It stamped and bound the Andamanese with the authorities of science and history, perpetuating the moment of Discovery beyond any crude notion of a ‘first encounter,’ generating new mysteries of bodies, cultures and geographies, and rendering novelty familiar but not vulgar. At another level, race provided a language for the identification of the Andamanese, their organization as a colonial population with compartments and specificities, and their location not only in a normative hierarchy but also on an imperial-historical map of races that made them real and recognizable.

When British administrators attempted to re-create ‘India’ in the penal colony in the Andamans they also re-created caste with its normalizing boundaries and histories.⁹ The aboriginal population, however, could not be accommodated within this scheme: they were external to the imaginary of a carceral India where convicts might become peasants and workers. Indeed, their status as ‘aborigines’ was itself (partially) a consequence of this externality. As Elizabeth Elbourne has pointed out, there is nothing automatic about the identification of a population as ‘aboriginal’; that determination is based on the politics of a particular colonial situation.¹⁰ Aboriginal status located the Andamanese within the language of race rather than caste, religion or penology. Their legitimate connections were not to Indian convicts but to other savages, discoveries and experiments in governance.

Nevertheless, it could hardly be denied that the Andamanese were present in the Andamans, and that they interacted with Indians and Britons. They were, in that sense, misfits in their own islands. A racial identity had to be improvised for them, first, as a way of engineering a ‘fit’ for aborigines in the penal colony. This location also offered administrators guidelines in a jungle/archipelago of incomprehensible languages, vanishing insurgents and naked black bodies, because a wider imperial world could now be referenced for clues as to what they might expect of – and for – their un-Indian subjects and counter-players. Race in the Andamans facilitated the wonder of the savage encounter by generating the discovery of the familiar in an unfamiliar place. It allowed for the gradual encapsulation of wonder within a powerfully competitive language of science, but left open a window of pleasurable uncertainty, prompting Temple to write in 1909 that ‘No connexion with any other group has yet been traced.’¹¹

Not surprisingly, the racialization of the aboriginal population of the islands manifested itself in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. It underlay the scrutinizing and recording of Andamanese bodies in the period between the fanciful visions of early narrators and the elaborate measurements of Portman, and shaped the trajectory of Andamanese names as these moved from ‘Friday’ to ‘Mebul.’ It informed also a rhetorical movement that began with an ‘Andamanese race’ but that became increasingly concerned with articulating a location for the Andamanese within broader and recognizably modern racial categories (Negro, Negrito) defined by biology as well as by history, including biological histories of migration, evolution, disease and extinction.

This was not a complete movement by any means. Culture as a racial signifier not only continued to thrive in the later period; it acquired new disciplinary bases in anthropology and museology, and roots and reflections in the acculturated body. The idea of an ‘Andamanese race’ survived into the latter part of the nineteenth century, but it survived as a cluster of natural peculiarities that existed in conversation with the histories and destinies of affiliated ‘races’ thrown up by colonialism. Furthermore, at the time of the second settlement, a reference to ‘the Andamanese race’ was not an ‘innocent’ imprecision with language; it was politically different from the use of phrases like ‘the French race.’ As colonized savages, the Andamanese were chained to race in a manner that nineteenth-century Europeans were not. Whereas the latter also had nationhood, individuality and history, i.e., the stuff of subjectivity, savages had only external assessments of culture and biology: the status of racial objects. The colonial usage of the word ‘race’ itself marked the Andamanese as savage.

Race, science and the renewal of wonder

The major challenge of anthropological work among the Andamanese, Radcliffe-Brown wrote, was confronting the discovery that these were ‘direct descendants… of the original Negro race.’¹² The racializing of the Andamanese was central to their transformation from dog-headed beasts to humans of an inferior grade. This change is not self-evidently appealing within a colonial project heavily invested in the discovery of wonders; it is, in a sense, a loss that must be compensated beyond the acquisition of a strategic asset and a place to put large numbers of convicts. The wonder of the mythical savage must be preserved even as that savage dies, and it must be renewed through the articulation of new mysteries – and their solutions – that are grounded in historical maps and scientific bodies. What was discovered, then discovered to be false, had to be re-immersed in an ongoing process of discovery connected not only to the pleasurable fantasy-life of whiteness in the jungle, but also the practicalities of colonial governance and the expert’s need to assert his special authority over the clearing.

Attempts to distill an Andamanese ‘race’ that was both scientific and wonderful go back to the eighteenth century, when writers like Hamilton, Symes and Ritchie began to supply narratives of the islands that make the transition from the mythical to the historical mode.¹³ Hamilton distinguished explicitly between the Andamanese and the Nicobarese even as he wrote uncertainly about a long-ago ‘war’ between the two groups.¹⁴ Colebrooke’s 1795 account is vague about just what – and who – the author had discovered; the Andamanese remain mysterious, but this is nevertheless a prosaic narrative of an encounter with unfamiliar humans.¹⁵ Savagery is rooted not only in a nature signified by a perverse body and its appetites, but also in history: enslavement, war and resistance. Colebrooke is explicit that the historical impulse to savagery (including cannibalism) is itself ‘natural.’¹⁶ ‘Natural’ does not indicate a ‘state of nature’: whereas the latter produces distance, the former closes a gap, especially in the context of the late eighteenth-century interest in natural/universal political propensities. The dual movement foreshadows the nineteenth-century discourse of the Andamanese, but it retains a naïve wonder at the savage body. With his inefficient accommodation of ‘time as a mode of succession to the past and time as mode of transformative practice for the future,’¹⁷ Colebrooke inhabits a transitional stage of the narrated savage encounter, drifting between Mandeville and Mouat. The inter-settlement period is, in that sense, marked by a vagueness in which the wonder of mythical beasts and lost kingdoms had largely passed but had not been adequately replaced.

A century after Colebrooke, Portman seized upon that vagueness, fleshing it out in his commentary, establishing Andamanese identity as a package of races, tribes and knowledge, and his own identity as an anthropologist based in the clearing. He is not unappreciative of Colebrooke, but his compliments are typically back-handed:

The ‘long bows’ mentioned may be the very long and clumsy bows of the Jarawa tribes, or the peculiarly shaped Aka-Bea-da bow. Colebrooke probably saw both. What Colebrooke (and many others) takes for a ‘shield’ is the ‘dancing board’ of the South Andaman Group of Tribes. The Jarawas have not got this. I propose, when analyzing the Vocabularies compiled during the first six years of the present penal Settlement, to show how ludicrously misleading some of these misunderstandings are. Colebrooke evidently obtained his information at secondhand. And the persons from whom he obtained it could not have been long enough on friendly terms with the aborigines of any one tribe to have compiled a trustworthy vocabulary. The remarkable point about Colebrooke’s paper is that it should contain so much that is reliable and correct.¹⁸

Portman found new uses for the old myths that Colebrooke, Symes and Kyd had marginalized, and which endowed the Andamanese with an antiquity that was immensely attractive within the museological colonialism of his time.¹⁹ For Portman, who was deeply invested in a pristine savage that he might (re)discover and recuperate, it was gratifying to imagine the Andamanese not only as a ‘lost’ race that had protected its purity by eschewing ‘intermarriage’ with outsiders, but also as a relic that was primitive by virtue of its presence in a primitive narrative tradition.²⁰

Retelling stories about mythical savages who inhabited a landscape of lakes that turned ordinary metals into gold placed Portman on the strategic margin of a familiar, albeit unreliable tradition of European narratives of discovery. He expected his readers, like Mandeville’s readers, to recognize the dog-headed cannibals and the magic lakes; this recognition was an important part of his credibility as well as their pleasure. At the same time, his open skepticism about the stories distanced him from the likes of Marco Polo and Nicolo Conti. Seeking to establish himself as the major possessor and mediator of the savage in the Andamans, Portman cannibalized the older narratives to assert an exclusive claim to knowledge that was accurate, scientific and firsthand, i.e., born out of an intimate experience of power. The savage born from this knowledge contained a ‘memory’ of the Mandevillean, but was otherwise a creature of manipulated, measured and photographed bodies with identifiable links to other bodies on what McClintock has described as the ‘family tree’ of race in the Darwinian era.²¹

The drawing of racial and ethnic lines in the second settlement was inseparable from administrative priorities geared towards clear divisions of identity, function and status.²² In this setting, the contours of an Andamanese race were informed by the desire of officials in Port Blair to utilize, prese...

Table of contents

• Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Racializing the Andamanese
• 2 Counterinsurgency and the jungle
• 3 Clearings of the kidnapped
• 4 The dying savage
• 5 Another jungle
• 6 Savage pleasures
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index