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News: India Lost Tribe accuse of Drowning Boy cause of Light Skin
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Member Since: 1/6/2010
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India Lost Tribe accuse of Drowning Boy cause of Light Skin
Baby’s Killing Tests India’s Protection of an Aboriginal Culture
A Jarawa man fashioned an arrowhead by shaping a piece of foraged metal in 2002. The Jarawas are one of India’s last intact Paleolithic tribes.
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The police on South Andaman Island know what to do when members of the isolated Jarawa tribe venture into the villages that surround them, hoping to snatch rice and other prized goods, like cookies, bananas or, for some reason, red garments.
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The policy is to send the Jarawas back into the 300 square miles of forest that has been set aside for the tribe, where they are expected to survive by hunting and gathering, as they have for millenniums. Inspector Rizwan Hassan, whose precinct includes a “buffer zone” beside the tribe’s reserve, is under clear orders: to interfere as little as possible in the traditional life of the tribe, which India prizes as the last remnant of a Paleolithic-era civilization.
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This did not prepare him for the criminal complaint that was registered at his station in November. A 5-month-old baby was dead, and witnesses came forward willingly, leaving the police, for the first time in history, confronting the prospect of arresting a Jarawa on suspicion of murder.
The Jarawas, who number about 400 and whom one geneticist described as “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet,” are believed to have migrated from Africa around 50,000 years ago. They are very dark-skinned, small in stature and until 1998 lived in complete cultural isolation, shooting outsiders with steel-tipped arrows if they came too near.
After the tribe made peace with its neighbors, India took steps to minimize contact between the Jarawas and the world that surrounds them, hoping to avoid the catastrophes that befell aboriginal people in other countries, like the United States and Australia, when settlers passed on germs and alcohol.
It is as a result of such an encounter, the police believe, that a baby boy with a lighter skin color than usual was born to an unmarried Jarawa woman last spring, evidence that alien genes had found their way into an undiluted pool.
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Among the first to be alerted about the birth of a mixed-race baby was M. Janagi Savuriyammal, a 24-year-old tribal welfare officer whose office sits beside a crocodile-infested creek at the edge of the tribe’s reserve.
It is no secret that the tribe has, in the past, carried out ritual killings of infants born to widows or — much rarer — fathered by outsiders. Dr. Ratan Chandra Kar, a government physician who wrote a memoir about his work with the Jarawas, described a tradition in which newborn babies were breast-fed by each of the tribe’s lactating women before being strangled by one of the tribal elders, so as to maintain “the so-called purity and sanctity of the society.”
Ms. Savuriyammal took a different view. When she learned that some members of the tribe “did not want the baby to grow up,” as she put it, she and her staff began a campaign of persuasion, presenting arguments against killing the child and, at one point, posting a social worker near the Jarawa camp to watch over him.
She was not the only one who felt the child was in danger. Rooby Thomas, who oversees care of Jarawa patients at a hospital near the reserve, saw the baby when his mother brought him in for a checkup and was so alarmed when she saw his skin tone that she set up a screen to hide him.
“I isolated that baby from the other Jarawa,” she said. “I heard they usually kill non-Jarawas.”
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Five months had passed when Ms. Savuriyammal received an alarmed call from a member of her agency’s field staff. She rushed to the camp to find the baby missing and his mother crying silently.
Two witnesses, both women, told the police that on the previous night they had seen a Jarawa man, Tatehane, drinking liquor with an outsider who had entered the reserve illegally.
Tatehane then slipped into the mother’s hut and took the baby from her side before she awoke, a local newspaper reported, citing the two witnesses. The witnesses later found the baby’s body on the sand, drowned.
Ms. Savuriyammal filed a criminal complaint with the police, but they were in unknown territory: In 200 years of fatal clashes between tribesmen and British and Indian settlers, no member of the tribe had ever been named as a suspect in a crime.
The authorities arrested the two nontribal men identified in the criminal complaint: a 25-year-old believed to have fathered the child, who was accused of rape, and a man who gave Tatehane liquor and was accused of abetting murder and interfering with aboriginal tribes.
But they did not arrest the Jarawa man, Tatehane, even though he was accused of murder in the complaint, instead appealing for guidance from the department of tribal welfare, said Atul Kumar Thakur, the South Andaman police superintendent, who is overseeing the investigation. Inspector Hassan was not authorized to speak about the case.
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The killing wrenches the issue into painful new territory. Few islanders like the idea of seeing a Jarawa man handcuffed, let alone imprisoned.
Others go further, saying the state has no business interfering in the tribe’s tradition of killing children of mixed blood.
Ms. Thomas drew her breath when she learned from a reporter that the boy, whom she had treated as a newborn, had been killed. She wondered if she could have saved his life if she had kept him in the clinic.
That thought had fluttered through her mind at the time, but after a few days the child’s mother seemed restless and confined within the hospital’s walls, and a male relative who accompanied them was insistent on leaving and broke a window. So Ms. Thomas submitted the necessary paperwork, waited for a government vehicle and sent the child back into the forest.
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Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/14/wo...rder.html?_r=0
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Member Since: 3/25/2012
Posts: 10,673
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Mess gorl you better bold some of that text wall. You know ATRL can't read. 
It sounds like they're coming more from a place of "no outsiders" so if the baby was born from someone considered an outsider to the tribe, it's a no-go. It's still sad they kill them though. Why not just exile or something? Like if it's against their beliefs, they could at least send the baby and parents away. 
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Member Since: 5/19/2011
Posts: 34,328
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Perched for 'it's their culture. Leave them alone'.
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 1/6/2010
Posts: 4,761
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Originally posted by cloudinthesky
Mess gorl you better bold some of that text wall. You know ATRL can't read.
It sounds like they're coming more from a place of "no outsiders" so if the baby was born from someone considered an outsider to the tribe, it's a no-go. It's still sad they kill them though. Why not just exile or something? Like if it's against their beliefs, they could at least send the baby and parents away. |
Done I think. 
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 1/6/2010
Posts: 4,761
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Originally posted by cloudinthesky
Mess gorl you better bold some of that text wall. You know ATRL can't read.
It sounds like they're coming more from a place of "no outsiders" so if the baby was born from someone considered an outsider to the tribe, it's a no-go. It's still sad they kill them though. Why not just exile or something? Like if it's against their beliefs, they could at least send the baby and parents away. |
 It is time to intervene and change some of their culture. I mean killing babies? 
It is going to be interested what happens next. I hope there is justice here for that baby.
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 23,375
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Somebody better be going to jail for this ********.
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Member Since: 4/23/2011
Posts: 16,377
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They're not under the Indian government and Indians aren't allowed to interfere with them so I doubt there's anything they can do.
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Originally posted by Outlaws
Perched for 'it's their culture. Leave them alone'.
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Stop trolling.
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Member Since: 12/3/2010
Posts: 19,759
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They should be left alone.
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Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 9,846
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Member Since: 7/23/2010
Posts: 6,705
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It is one of the most isolated tribes in the world which has preserved the hunter-gatherer tradition for up to 60,000 years.
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This is one of few extant prehistoric societies whose culture has failed to evolve and remains detached from modern civilization.
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Member Since: 12/14/2006
Posts: 6,181
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Originally posted by fabbriche
This is one of few extant prehistoric societies whose culture has failed to evolve and remains detached from modern civilization.
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Im wondering your motive for coming in here to state the obvious 
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Member Since: 7/23/2010
Posts: 6,705
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Originally posted by xclusivestylesz
Im wondering your motive for coming in here to state the obvious |
These people deserve to be part of the world, to be with larger society. Contact is unavoidable and globalization is inevitable. Isolating them just to "preserve their culture" isn't moral imo and poses greater danger to them in the long run than integrating them to modern civilization. There are many indigenous tribes in my country that have successfully integrated into modern society and still managed to preserve the harmless parts of their culture and leave the harmful ones behind. It's just my opinion, though.
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Member Since: 8/24/2008
Posts: 35,091
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My question for all these untouched tribes is will they die out once they come in contact with more modern people. I mean Native Americans were wiped out in the Caribbean completely and their numbers dwindled in North and South America just from meeting Europeans and Africans.
Just imagine, these people could die from the common cold.
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Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 3,460
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It's just crazy with more than 1.2 billion people there, they still have tribes that are unattached to the outside world?
In this case I think they should leave them alone.
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Member Since: 3/5/2011
Posts: 15,589
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Originally posted by Aviana
It's just crazy with more than 1.2 billion people there, they still have tribes that are unattached to the outside world?
In this case I think they should leave them alone.
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I agree 100%
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Member Since: 1/7/2010
Posts: 4,967
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They need to intervene and arrest. Is just not morally right to kill a baby like that
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Member Since: 7/23/2010
Posts: 6,705
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Quote:
Originally posted by Aviana
It's just crazy with more than 1.2 billion people there, they still have tribes that are unattached to the outside world?
In this case I think they should leave them alone.
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These tribes are on remote islands off the coast of Myanmar, not in Indian mainland.
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