Rimbaud in Andaman
The aboriginal tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar islands -- well by now I guess everyone (who may be reading this blog) knows where those islands are -- are grouped into two categories.The natives of Nicobar islands are mostly of Mongoloid descents -- Shompen,Nicobarese and others -- who have been gradually integrated into the 'mainstream', a 'mainstream' that was created,sustained and defined by the continuous influx of outsiders from British to Tamils.
The Andamanese tribes, primarily of negrito origin, have been more fortunate in preserving their identities and less fortunate in surviving. Among the four tribes living in the Andaman islands , the Great Andamanese and Onge people -- weakened by new diseases and the drastic changes in their lives brought in by the settlers -- are now almost extinct. The Jarawas, who first appeared in a typically dehumanized role in modern literature as early as nineteenth century in the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Sign of Four', were on the verge of extinction before the Supreme Court of India, in a brave and path-breaking ruling in 2002, ordered the closure of a road that ran through the Jarawa territory and removal of all settlers from that territory. The authorities, showing what must be accepted as equally unprecedented initiative, have strongly acted on the court orders leaving the Jarawas alone. Jarawas, for their part, had never underestimated the threat posed by the outsiders and their unguarded hostilities towards all attempts at assimilation were indicative of their profound knowledge about the secrets of their own survival. The remaining Andaman tribe, the Sentilese, have been more successful in maintaining their distance from the outsiders and their lives have been least contaminated.
Fortunately, in spite of having all the attributes of great tropical island tourist vacations including exciting snorkeling and diving opportunities, Andaman&Nicobar have only lately started to attract the imagination of the travellers. Because of its poor infrastructure, considerable distance from the Indian mainland, restricted access to foreigners and absence of any romanticized 'meaning-of-life' novel or movie set on the the islands (actually, absence of any written account accessible to the western populace; though Amitav Ghosh seems to be planning, going by the post-tsunami newspaper reports,to set his next novel among the Bengali refugees in Andaman, it is highly unlikely his realist prose and the keen eyes for human suffering would lure anyone into the pleasures of a tropical paradise ), Andaman and Nicobar have remained unknown even to the most adventurous and to the bravest exotic-hunters, the ones who end up in Kiribati or Tuvalu.
Then came the tsunami. A&N are now thoroughly devastated: thousands dead, some smaller islands have been obliterated from the face of earth, the survivors are weakened by disease and neglect, those unfortunate Bengalis, who after losing their home once because of the brutalities of post-partition reality were forced to come to the these islands and farmed these low-lying infertile islands (an agricultural achievement of not insignificant magnitude) and created a new home for them, are again homeless and helpless, all their lives' works destroyed . It would take forever to bring normalcy back to those islands.
At least to most of those islands. The Jarawa and the Sentilese people, surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), are more or less unharmed-- without any death count or any significant impact on their everyday existence. The acknowledged reason is that in contrast to the outside settlers, they usually live on elevated areas in their respective islands. Another reason could easily be conjectured and that is they have learnt to decipher the signals of such imminent disaster in the ground beneath their feet, in the hustle of the ocean waves, in the chirping of birds. After all they have been living in these islands for thousands of years and their collective memory of nature goes too far back into the past; the rest of us do not remember any disaster of comparable magnitude in Bay of Bengal in the last few centuries. Would it be inconceivable to imagine the Jarawas, after the tsunami, celebrating the destruction of the invading devils and worshiping the sea god for their new found liberation from the grip of foreigners? Or will that be too much of a forced acknowledgement of their humanity?
At the tender age of nineteen, after completely reinventing himself, Rimbaud joined the Dutch army and came to Java. He stayed there for a month or so before leaving on a British ship -- after this trip he would end up first in Cyprus and then in North Africa, smuggling guns among other jobs, sending money home and not writing poetry, not probably even thinking about poetry. I do not know which route that ship took, but it is not hard to imagine the ship slowly moving through the Straits of Malacca, falling into the Andaman sea and then travelling southward and then westward through Indian ocean. As this had already happened in past, at least in one of the many possible pasts, there is no harm in continuing with our imagination about the fate of his journey, an alternative past. We can easily imagine him as a ship-wreck barely managing to swim (given his weak constitution and an youth spent too eagerly) to the shore of an Andaman island, the Jarawas rescuing him and making him first a hard working slave (out of suspicion) and then a wise member in the council (because of his manifest intelligence). Would this have been the life that Rimbaud always wanted to escape to? The unsentimental clarity, the brutal tango of nature and man, the atavistic memory of which we all, mostly the poet who desired nothing but the blinding light of the absolute past, carry within us.
(Paul Schmidt's translation)
It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of sun become sea.
Oh my sentinel soul,
Let us desire
The nothing of night
And the day on fire.
The Andamanese tribes, primarily of negrito origin, have been more fortunate in preserving their identities and less fortunate in surviving. Among the four tribes living in the Andaman islands , the Great Andamanese and Onge people -- weakened by new diseases and the drastic changes in their lives brought in by the settlers -- are now almost extinct. The Jarawas, who first appeared in a typically dehumanized role in modern literature as early as nineteenth century in the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Sign of Four', were on the verge of extinction before the Supreme Court of India, in a brave and path-breaking ruling in 2002, ordered the closure of a road that ran through the Jarawa territory and removal of all settlers from that territory. The authorities, showing what must be accepted as equally unprecedented initiative, have strongly acted on the court orders leaving the Jarawas alone. Jarawas, for their part, had never underestimated the threat posed by the outsiders and their unguarded hostilities towards all attempts at assimilation were indicative of their profound knowledge about the secrets of their own survival. The remaining Andaman tribe, the Sentilese, have been more successful in maintaining their distance from the outsiders and their lives have been least contaminated.
Fortunately, in spite of having all the attributes of great tropical island tourist vacations including exciting snorkeling and diving opportunities, Andaman&Nicobar have only lately started to attract the imagination of the travellers. Because of its poor infrastructure, considerable distance from the Indian mainland, restricted access to foreigners and absence of any romanticized 'meaning-of-life' novel or movie set on the the islands (actually, absence of any written account accessible to the western populace; though Amitav Ghosh seems to be planning, going by the post-tsunami newspaper reports,to set his next novel among the Bengali refugees in Andaman, it is highly unlikely his realist prose and the keen eyes for human suffering would lure anyone into the pleasures of a tropical paradise ), Andaman and Nicobar have remained unknown even to the most adventurous and to the bravest exotic-hunters, the ones who end up in Kiribati or Tuvalu.
Then came the tsunami. A&N are now thoroughly devastated: thousands dead, some smaller islands have been obliterated from the face of earth, the survivors are weakened by disease and neglect, those unfortunate Bengalis, who after losing their home once because of the brutalities of post-partition reality were forced to come to the these islands and farmed these low-lying infertile islands (an agricultural achievement of not insignificant magnitude) and created a new home for them, are again homeless and helpless, all their lives' works destroyed . It would take forever to bring normalcy back to those islands.
At least to most of those islands. The Jarawa and the Sentilese people, surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), are more or less unharmed-- without any death count or any significant impact on their everyday existence. The acknowledged reason is that in contrast to the outside settlers, they usually live on elevated areas in their respective islands. Another reason could easily be conjectured and that is they have learnt to decipher the signals of such imminent disaster in the ground beneath their feet, in the hustle of the ocean waves, in the chirping of birds. After all they have been living in these islands for thousands of years and their collective memory of nature goes too far back into the past; the rest of us do not remember any disaster of comparable magnitude in Bay of Bengal in the last few centuries. Would it be inconceivable to imagine the Jarawas, after the tsunami, celebrating the destruction of the invading devils and worshiping the sea god for their new found liberation from the grip of foreigners? Or will that be too much of a forced acknowledgement of their humanity?
At the tender age of nineteen, after completely reinventing himself, Rimbaud joined the Dutch army and came to Java. He stayed there for a month or so before leaving on a British ship -- after this trip he would end up first in Cyprus and then in North Africa, smuggling guns among other jobs, sending money home and not writing poetry, not probably even thinking about poetry. I do not know which route that ship took, but it is not hard to imagine the ship slowly moving through the Straits of Malacca, falling into the Andaman sea and then travelling southward and then westward through Indian ocean. As this had already happened in past, at least in one of the many possible pasts, there is no harm in continuing with our imagination about the fate of his journey, an alternative past. We can easily imagine him as a ship-wreck barely managing to swim (given his weak constitution and an youth spent too eagerly) to the shore of an Andaman island, the Jarawas rescuing him and making him first a hard working slave (out of suspicion) and then a wise member in the council (because of his manifest intelligence). Would this have been the life that Rimbaud always wanted to escape to? The unsentimental clarity, the brutal tango of nature and man, the atavistic memory of which we all, mostly the poet who desired nothing but the blinding light of the absolute past, carry within us.
(Paul Schmidt's translation)
It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of sun become sea.
Oh my sentinel soul,
Let us desire
The nothing of night
And the day on fire.
posted by Atanu Neogi at 11:31 PM
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