Unfortunate as his death is, Chau should never have been anywhere near North Sentinel Island
Humans, by nature, have since time immemorial nurtured an insatiable desire to explore. The world grew more inter-connected and communities become more settled, first pastoral and later urbanised, but our desire to explore new frontiers remained. Human curiosity not to mention greed led us to explore the habitats of inaccessible peoples in remote geographies usually at a terrible cost to those being ‘discovered’, who are sometimes dubiously referred to as ‘primitive’ and/or ‘savage’. The latest example of this desire for exotica was manifest in the ill-advised journey of John Allen Chau, an American national, who ventured illegally into the highly restricted and protected North Sentinel Island of the Andamans and Nicobar group, apparently motivated by a wish to establish contact with the Sentinelese tribe which inhabits it and has established a self-sustaining eco-system for itself bereft of any contact with the “modern” world. He paid for his misguided effort with his life as he was reportedly welcomed with bows and arrows, killed and ultimately buried in the sand on a beach. There is some talk of his being in touch with a preacher and being on a mission to proselytise. The issue now for Indian and US authorities is whether to attempt to retrieve his body. Not only will the island’s tribal inhabitants strongly resist any interference from modern humans as they have in the past, there is also the danger that any outside contact with them may cause an outbreak of diseases to which they have no immunity and might wipe them out. Even the flu bug can be fatal for the Sentinelese.
Unfortunate as his death is, Chau should never have been anywhere near North Sentinel Island. He had no business bribing local fishermen to drop him off at the island at night, exposing not only himself but those who conveyed him there and the inhabitants of the island, to danger. Even since the 1960s, any attempt to establish and/or maintain contact with the Sentinelese has been met with fierce resistance. In 2006, a similar incident had taken place when two fishermen unknowingly strayed on to the island; they too were attacked and killed. The Sentinelese, perhaps even more than the Jarawas, are an insular tribal community and have been living their lives on their own terms for at least 60,000 years. Their isolated and sustainable way of life, hunting and gathering food from the pristine forests and shores of their island, has kept them going without any unsolicited help from outsiders. The very fact that they survived the tsunami of 2004 despite being directly in its path and rejecting any form of help from the Indian authorities is further proof that they are best left alone. As it is, the Sentinelese have been hovering on the brink of extinction. Though there is no confirmed head count, their population was estimated to be 40 in 2014. Any contact with the outside world, therefore, means a threat to not only the inhabitants, but also to their fragile ecosystem and survival. Memories of the atrocities on the vulnerable Jarawas when allegedly civilised human beings made contact with them are still fresh in our minds. The withdrawal of special tourist permits from Sentinel and other islands was erroneous as certain things are best left the way nature intends them to be.