Jarawa youth on a visit to the outside world, 1998.
Photo courtesy: Madhusree Mukerjee
The Last Wave is a love story, or rather, two. One is a fairly conventional tale of growing attraction between a man and a woman, thrown together not only by circumstance – confined as they are on a dungi, a small boat, with their five-person team, exploring a pristine coastline – but also by their shared wonder and concern at all that they see and hear. The other is between a journalist and an archipelago. Pankaj Sekhsaria is in love with the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and it shows – in the occasional but compelling lyricism of his writing, and in the reverence with which his characters circumnavigate the Jarawas’ territory, probing its mysteries without quite violating its boundaries:
Riding the darkness and the silence, announcing the takeover of the advancing night, rising from somewhere deep in the surrounding dark forests, came the high-pitched, haunting yodel of the Jarawa. It wasn’t loud, but it was clear, with the mysterious quality of a very real dream. The pace was gentle to begin with, the beat unhurried. Then, in measured steps, it began to increase, picking up pace in slow notches, and rising quickly to the high-pitched crescendo of a fast, foot-tapping rhythm… [until] it died abruptly, like the sharp snapping of a delicate thread. In those few moments, the silence re-surfaced clear and crisp, a glowing, starry, spread on a sheet of night-coloured paper.
Since the 1990s, the author has devoted himself to defending all that is magical about the emerald isles, their coral-studded waters, and the ancient culture that thrives within its glorious and primeval rainforest. The novel is a first for Sekhsaria, who has several other identities – journalist, environmentalist, activist, photographer, and academic.
While most writers would use the Andamans merely as an exotic setting for a story about humans, for Sekhsaria, the exquisite but fragile archipelago is the true protagonist.
In each of these personas, however, he has served the islands and its peoples, and his turn as a novelist proves to be no exception. Sekhsaria has written magazine articles about the Andamans; campaigned to protect the Jarawa, the hunter-gatherers who live within the strip of great evergreen rainforest along the western coast of two Andaman islands; published academic articles on the archipelago’s environment, development, and strategic role in India’s defence policies; co-edited a collection of papers on the Jarawa’s encounters with outsiders; and, most recently, exhibited photographs on the archipelago’s natural wonders. He has annoyed many of the islands’ mainstream residents by advocating that the road through the Jarawa territory be closed, because it brings in pernicious influences. And yet, when the December 2004 tsunami washed away thousands, and the administration dithered, it was the Yahoo webgroup –andamanicobar – which Sekhsaria initiated and still administers, that became crucial to disbursing information and coordinating aid efforts. So, while most writers would use the Andamans merely as an exotic setting for a story about humans, for Sekhsaria, the exquisite but fragile archipelago is the true protagonist. Through the eyes and ears of the novel’s characters, we learn about the islands and its intriguing communities.
Seema is a 27-year-old “local born”, descended from the first Indians who arrived on the islands in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Her great-great-grandfather, a Muslim, had ended up in the penal colony of Port Blair, established in 1858 by the British, for beheading his sister’s rapist; her great-great-grandmother, a Hindu, was a freedom fighter. In the Andamans, such interfaith unions were common. Seema has recently returned after studies on the mainland in order to research her own people, the local borns. Harish, a mainlander, is searching for the meaning of life after a disastrous marriage by touring the islands with a reporter friend. Uncle Pame, the elderly Karen boatman, is perhaps the most remarkable character in the book: he has witnessed the Jarawa slay his parents, but nonetheless believes they have a right to defend their forests from outsiders.
For decades, Jarawas killed intruders who entered their territory, and were killed by them in turn. The Last Wave is set in 1998, when the Jarawa started emerging from the forests without arms. In his fictionalised account, based on the real-life events that led to the Jarawa being pacified, Sekhsaria describes an injured Jarawa teenager, who is treated at the hospital in Port Blair. Once he is exposed to goodies such as TV and then returned to the forest, he starts bringing his friends to a local jetty to meet outsiders. The settlers greet the naked visitors from the jungle with a mixture of fear, curiosity, titillation, and condescension, as Harish witnesses on one occasion. A young man in tight jeans brushes against a Jarawa woman’s bare bottom, till she pushes him over; a policeman’s wife dresses a Jarawa mother with bangles and sindur, Hindu markers of marriage, in an attempt to ‘civilise’ the savage; while a radio reporter, thrusting her mike into the face of a Jarawa youth, is horrified at the utterly un-broadcastable Hindi cuss-words that emerge.
Even as Harish observes the encounter, he becomes aware of an older Jarawa man standing to one side, watching all that is taking place with obvious disapproval, but holding back from intervening directly. “He was like a rubber band pulled and held taut; unpredictable, but ready to act, brimming with potential energy, but extremely vulnerable at the same time. A release now would mean an explosive outburst.” Suddenly the man looks straight back, and his gaze knocks “Harish back with an intensity more raw than a street fighter’s well-directed punch”. The book implies that the man somehow intuits that this strained bonhomie between two alien peoples, this breaching of a formerly sacrosanct boundary, could only portend evil – and that Harish knows this too.
The Jarawa are one of the few remaining indigenous peoples on the Andamans. Tens of thousands of years ago, some of the first humans on the planet had arrived on the islands, and remained almost entirely isolated until British colonisation. As a result, they had never been exposed to – and never developed immunity to – the contagious diseases that plague our densely populated society. Whereas the islands probably contained 10,000 or so inhabitants to begin with, counting all the tribes, including the Jarawa, the Great Andamanese tribes and the Onge, contact with outsiders led to epidemics that felled the natives with astonishing rapidity.
