The Gift and Not the Gun Ruined Them: The Cultural History of Aboriginal Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar Islands

Abstract

While battles battering the battered the most or worst, is a run-of-the-mill story, the gift and not the gun destroying them is rather a rare tale in the human civilization when it comes to the modern history of all six isolated aboriginal ethnic tribes of Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, the Indian islands in Bay of Bengal. However, it is no less good save in the biocultural survival of one of those ethnic communities, the fiercely hostile Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island, by way of 'rescripting' its cultural story through the instrumentality of the Government's decision initiated and pushed through by the author, -who had befriended this truculent tribe in 1991, -to terminate the practice of hankering to placate and cultivate the animus natives by gift giving through contact expeditions. Consequently, enabling the Sentinelese, before it is too late, to revert to their age-old ferocity towards outsiders, since that being the most efficacious self-protective cover, and thus averting its decimation / fall from the Golden Age.