Tribal Truths and Manufactured Myths
Chasing Authenticity In Staged Spaces
Along with other vanishings – of biospecies, languages, cultures – modernity ushers an erasure of authenticity. Tourism, originally fashioned for aristocratic young men from Europe, has morphed into a global ritual that has seeped across classes. One of the drivers of modern tourism might be a paradoxical search for authenticity, though the very presence of the tourist engenders a contrived enactment of culture.
In a paper titled “Staged Authenticity”, the sociologist Dean MacCannell had discussed, as far back as 1973, how tourists often try to gain a backdoor entry into the space/people they happen to be visiting. To find offbeat paths that would guide them to the ‘originals’ living in their ‘natural’ environments, performing their ‘authentic’ lives.
Selling Culture, Losing Oneself
The protagonist in Sujit Saraf’s Island, Nirmal Chandra Mattoo carries an aching awareness of all this, while also being reduced to a role he once loathed: a salesperson at a tourist shop, selling fake tribal artefacts. He’s compelled to run such an outlet at Port Blair, after being ignominiously ousted from the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) where he once held a research fellowship to construct a grammar of the Jarawa language, spoken by the Jarawas, a tribe that inhabits a reserve in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
This is also a work that interrogates different ways of seeing: of ways in which realities are reconstructed by tourists, anthropologists and salespersons.
Tribes for Sale
As an astute seller, Mattoo sizes up his clients. With the canniness of a dealer’s eye. As he displays a fake Jarawa bow, he categorizes the customer before him: “Not American, he thinks, but European – less money but greater interest.” The objects in his shop are not made by tribals, but are fashioned at Midnapore in West Bengal and delivered to him by a scheming middleman, Subhash. While most foreign tourists would rather glimpse real tribals, sequestered inside off-limit reserves, Indian tourists on LTC travel are indifferent to “people they consider black-skinned savages.”
Every now and then, Subhash ropes Mattoo in to concoct a “tribal experience”, compelling the squirmy ex-anthropologist to guide phirangs into reserves, and spot “real-life Jarawa, real-life Onge.” Like elusive wildlife, the tribals seem to skirt curious visitors and most trips to reserves do not serve up sightings.
Jostling Coconuts and Contradictions
In the past, Mattoo had arrived at the islands with an idealistic zeal. To understand the tribals – their customs, their languages, their beliefs – to protect their land and resource rights, or to preserve their way of life from encroaching developers. Mattoo idolizes Verrier Elwin, the European priest turned anthropologist, who fought to preserve tribal ways. Who also, problematically or otherwise, married a Kosi woman, whom he later divorced. Like Elwin, Mattoo romanticizes tribal ways, treating his encounters with them as an animal lover would with glimpses of exotic species.
On his voyage to Port Blair, Mattoo meets Nandini Mitra, a fellow anthropologist, to whom he is slightly attracted. Saraf evokes the loneliness that besets such postings, an isolation that had struck Elwin in 1932 at the Gond village of Karanjia: “desolation swept over him as he contemplated the lack of friends or allies, or the companionship he had enjoyed at Oxford.”
A month later, Mattoo and Mitra are part of a “contact mission”, dispatched to North Sentinel. They offer the Sentinelese (tribals who inhabit the North Sentinel) coconuts, a friend-making gesture to bond with the naked forest dwellers. The latter are unarmed and this is considered the first ever friendly contact in their history.
Nandini hands over a coconut to a tribal woman, an act of bravery or foolhardiness, as tribals are known to be unpredictable. Later, Mattoo too hands over a coconut, and a picture is snapped up. From thereon, he’s known as an expert on the Sentinelese.
Exiled from the Wilds
Mattoo is always ambivalent about the impact of such contacts. If the Sentinelese accede to assimilation, he knows what will unfold next. “[To] be civilized, diluted and beggared, to discover the comforts of easy food, drink and tobacco, to enter an unfamiliar world where they could not but be dependent on the state and sink into indolence, drunkenness and eventual destruction.”
Fortunately, someone at the top shares his sentiments, and further contacts are forbidden. However, he continues to escort a few VIPs, who wish to sight the Sentinelese.
After the 2004 tsunami, they fly a helicopter over the North Sentinelese. The chopper is shot at by a tribal, and that photograph too is captured by Mattoo. Later, a Sentinelese woman voluntarily climbs aboard their dinghy and Mattoo spends four hours with her, to document her language. He names her Suman, and omits to ask her what she calls herself.
When they attempt a ‘re-contact’ mission despite Mattoo’s forebodings, a group of Sentinelese emerge from the forest, squat on the beach, show their butts and defecate. It’s an “unwelcome” like no other. A lone woman with a gash on her breast faces the boat. It’s “Suman”, glaringly pregnant. The Director concludes that Mattoo did something to her in those four hours. Next day, the national reporters write accusatory articles. Folks even accuse him of rape.
He’s fired by the AnSI, his payments are revoked. His family ostracizes him. In a few weeks, he loses everything: his job, his income, his family, his reputation. Soon, however, the world moves on and Mattoo is forced to become the person he despises: a shopkeeper selling fakes.
Island is a novel that lingers. As Mattoo slides from his impassioned academic position into a more cynical pragmatic, the book forces us to adopt discomfiting perspectives. That trigger questions about the colonial roots of ethnography, the mummification of tribals, the heft of nature versus nurture, theoretical knowledge versus sensual knowing. Like the fake artifacts Mattoo peddles, perhaps his fervor to uncover tribal truths and preserve old ways had always been illusory. Verrier’s comments about the Muria tribals will ring in readers’ ears. Of how he might have “helped by my very presence to destroy what I so admired.”
References
Sujit Saraf, Island, Speaking Tiger, 2024