‘Island’: Novel about an uncontacted tribe asks profound questions on what it means to share a world

A quick look at the course of human history, and the idea of relating to a place as being a part of our world without laying claim to it seems almost impossible. The insinuation is scary, but what is scarier is that it might be the story of our moment too. In November 2018, an American missionary was killed on a remote island in India, inviting dangerous attention back to its resident uncontacted tribe. Using this incident as a loose anchor, Island sees Sujit Saraf weave a startling tale that implicates its characters – in wants and desires, but also the anxieties of contact and the conflicting impulses of nationhood.

A fatal expedition

In the slim novel, when American missionary James lands in Port Blair, determined to bring God to the godless Sentinelese, he is aware of the protected status of the islands, but is happy to pay his way in. Before you recognise its fanaticism, you can almost find something romantic about his conviction: he is determined to bring god to the Sentinelese, at the cost of his own life.

Nirmal Chandra Mattoo, disgraced anthropologist and owner of one Mattoo Tribal Arts, is manipulated into accompanying the missionary on the expedition. His knowledge of the island and his experience of establishing contact with the Sentinelese in the past is considered an asset by Subhash, an unscrupulous Bengali businessman and the supplier of the craft items Mattoo’s shop sells, deeply interested in the handsome money the American is willing to offer. A party is put together: four fishermen, a ship pilot, Subhash, Mattoo, and the messenger of God. In a matter of days, catastrophe strikes; it is a credit to Saraf’s abundant imagination and firm control over the story that the novel demands to be read in one sitting.

The North Sentinel Island, said to be the abode of the last uncontacted people on earth, lies off the east coast of India in the Bay of Bengal, its five-mile radius patrolled by the Indian Navy, and requires a Restricted Area Permit to visit. No more than 65 square kilometres in area, the best historical and anthropological guesses place its hundred or so inhabitants – the North Sentinelese – as having arrived on the island about ten thousand years ago, when they lost touch with the rest of the human race. The relative remoteness of the island and lack of geopolitical utility have preserved it from the fate of many other uncontacted peoples in parts of the world, but the clock has started ticking.

While a few Indian missions in the 20th century tried to establish friendly contact, the idea was soon abandoned – the Sentinelese turned hostile, and the expert consensus on resolving the tension was to leave them alone for their own good.

Preserving lives

In Island, Mattoo’s past and the island’s future are intertwined, but they do not know this when the evangelical mission sets sail. For both Mattoo and the Indian state, the moment of first contact with the North Sentinelese – decades ago when the book starts – was intoxicating. They wanted to see, to hear, to touch, but temptation rarely has an end this simple.

Mattoo, like anyone who has bothered to observe the fast-changing picture in the groups of islands that make up Andaman and Nicobar, knows that there is only one way that this story goes.

Now that the Andaman Trunk Road runs through the protected Jarawa Reserve, for example, the area has effectively been converted into a human safari – from the closed vehicles that can only pass through in an entourage, tourists throw fruits and candies at the Jarawa children that follow them, and sighting a tribal means a successful trip. The Greater Andamanese tribes, having taken the route of assimilation, have not had any better a fate: their communities ravaged by tobacco and alcohol, and their ways of life upended by an extractivist economy, almost all of them live in conditions of abject poverty. The Onge are numbered; others, like the Jangil, are now extinct – quite literally not having survived the touch of the outside world.

Now tricked into accompanying the missionary, Mattoo tells himself the same story he did all those years ago, before the scandal that ended his career in anthropology broke: he actually cares about the Sentinelese, about preserving their way of life. The first contact missions had been a bid to understand – a culture, a people frozen thousands of years ago in time, the fact of their present being concurrent with ours almost too incredible to believe. But this desire to understand soon begins to be rivalled by a sinister, more powerful one: the desire to be understood. When teams of anthropologists and government officials arrived at their shores, they wanted to know these mysterious, uncontacted people, but now, they also want to be known: they are emissaries of India, of civilisation, of the future – won’t the Sentinelese like a part of this pie?

As Mattoo gets further entangled in the mess of the mission, clarity begins to emerge. The nationalist fever that grips the mainland has found its way to the islands too: Bose and Hanuman are invoked, the sweet tune of foreign investment teased. Bureaucrats, politicians, local settlers – the coalition that seems to be forming against the protected status of these tribes mimics with alarming similarity the logic of colonialism, all the while discarding it as a dirty word.

All manner of realist argumentation is deployed: if a people’s isolation is eternally contingent on the protection that the Indian state provides them, do they deserve their isolation? In fact, if these islands are national territory, why should the nation not benefit from the resources of its forests, the tourist attraction of its beaches, the productivity of its people? Besides, the chorus says in a tone that sounds almost aggrieved, not proud: which one of us got the chance to opt into this nation of ours? Crisis beckons.

In this review, I have been deliberate in not revealing too much of the plot; the twists are compelling and Saraf’s precision in crafting it poses troubling, profound questions of what it means to share a world; and I am certain readers will feel the cold fear that I felt creep in as the novel progressed. Island is wonderful for its ability to wrestle with an idea – what is lost when our primary idea of belonging is based on reciprocity? – but is a triumph for the emotional volume it packs.

Island, Sujit Saraf, Speaking Tiger Books.