The Jarawa, one of the oldest tribes of human beings in the world, may go extinct because of a road that runs through pristine forests in the Indian-administered Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, and no one seems to care. Tourists take the road each day to try and get selfies with the tribespeople, who came from what is now Botswana over 60,000 years ago. Proud of their independence, the Jarawa are nonetheless tempted with biscuits, as if they were exotic animals in a human safari park. In this astonishing book, Jonathan Lawley returns to what was once a penal colony built by the British to house Indian mutineers.
He asks what responsibility colonial administrators like his grandfather may have had for the plight of these palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and what the Indian government should now be doing to protect this last link with our most distant ancestors. Sumptuously illustrated with the author’s never-before-seen archive photographs.