APPENDIX A

Pioneer Biographies
of the British Period to 1947

by George Weber

 

Table of Contents   The pioneers are listed in the sequence in which they first had contact with the Andamanese A. Hamilton, ca. 1700 J. Ritchie, ca. 1770 A. Blair, 1788 R.H. Colebrooke, 1788 J.W. Helfer, 1840 F.J. Mouat, 1857 O.J.-B. Malitte, 1857 H.S. Man, 1858 J.P. Walker, 1858 J.C. Haughton, 1859 R.C. Tytler, 1862 H.F. Corbyn, 1863 B. Ford, 1864 J.N. Homfray, 1864 E.H. Man, 1869 G.E. Dobson, 1872 M.V. Portman, 1878 T. Cadell, 1878 R.C. Temple, 1880 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, 1906 E. von Eickstedt, 1926 M. Wingfield, 1944

An important role in Andamanese affairs has at no time been a secure passport to everlasting fame. Most Andamanese pioneers have faded into the mist of history and are largely forgotten. It is the hope of the author that his short outlines of the pioneers' lives will go a little way to rectify this injustice.

Many of the biographies collected here have been difficult to track down. Mr. Portman was a particularly hard nut to crack. If he had not been such a major figure in our field, the temptation to give up would have been overwhelming. Much of the material on Portman is owed to Mr. and Mrs. Kingscott of Nottingham, England, who trailed The Man through libraries, archives and the English countryside with the same stubborn persistence that Portman himself showed towards his Andamanese charges. Without their help, and the help of Dr. Elizabeth Edwards of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, John Falconer of the Oriental and India Office, British Library, London, as well as of many members of the Anthropological Survey of India at Calcutta, the following potted biographies would not only have been a great deal more potted if not downright skeletal, there would also be many fewer.

None of the pioneers up to the end of the 19th century were anthropologists. The earliest were traders and surveyors while their successors had medical training or were military officers and government officials.

The golden age of Andamanese studies during the British period began with the two major figures, E.H. Man and M.V. Portman in the 1870s and closed with the departure of Radcliffe-Brown in 1908. The time between 1908 and Indian independence 1947 was singularly unproductive. The Andamanese were neglected or in the case of the Jarawa actively hunted down in their forests while science was more interested in creating elaborate racial theories in the sky than in collecting data in the field. Only one anthropologist, the German von Eickstedt, actually visited the Andamans and he, too, chased the will-o'-the-wisp of a self-serving racial theory. It was not until the early 1950s that rational field research could recommence under Indian auspices.

Returning to the earlier British researchers, it must be understood that at their time they had to work within something much worse than an ordinary colonial administration, they worked within the rigidly disciplined and brutal hierarchy of an isolated penal colony. There was not much in such an environment to encourage human kindness, let alone intellectual curiosity. Neither British jailers nor Asian convicts saw the Andamanese as fully human; indeed, some within the prison service actually advocated their active extermination. That Man and Portman, along with a few others, should take an intelligent and sympathetic interest in the troublesome natives of the Andaman Islands under such circumstances is a mark of quite exceptional character.

Missionaries - that mixed blessing of so many technologically primitive cultures - are entirely missing in the Andamans. Individual officers, E.H. Man and the Rev. Corbyn especially, might be pious Christians but they were not missionaries. That major figure of Asian Negrito studies, Father Paul Schebesta SVD, was not allowed to visit the islands; in his 3-volume standard work Die Negrito Asiens Schebesta was reduced to filling the Andamanese gap by reprinting information published earlier by Man, Portman and Radcliffe-Brown.

Among the pioneers of the British period there is not one of Asian origin. Although the archipelago had been known to and explored by countless Asian seafarers from early times, we have virtually no knowledge of their doings. The local knowledge of these sailors must have been considerable but it was passed on by word of mouth and guarded jealously. The Indian and Burmese convicts, on the other hand, were fully occupied with the daily struggle to stay alive in hellish conditions. The absence of Asian pioneers, therefore, is a consequence of historical circumstances. They would come into their own only after the islands had come under the control of a newly independent India in 1947.

After the British annexation of the islands 1858, the authorities did not encourage visiting scientists - they might have seen more of the realities of a penal colony than the benevolent image the Raj could tolerate. Only a handful of foreign visitors received permission to visit the islands to investigate the Andamanese and none could stay long enough to produce work of more than passing interest.

During the British period, government officials were the only group with the education and time to conduct in-depth scientific research. Given the sort of people willing or ordered to work in a remote penal colony, most quite simply were not interested - which makes the few exceptions all the more remarkable. 

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