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Book review: Sujit Saraf's ‘Island’ ponders questions of civilization and its discontents
Summary
Sujit Saraf’s gripping new novel, ‘Island’, gives a fictional twist to a shocking incident that took place in the Andamans in 2018
Sujit Saraf’s new novel, Island, takes its cue from a macabre tragedy that shook the world in 2018. In November that year, a 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau sailed over to North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal to convert the Sentinelese, a voluntarily isolated and mostly uncontactable tribe living in the Andamans for thousands of years. Defying Indian laws that protect these ancient people from outside incursions, he made multiple attempts to reach them, before being killed by an arrow shot by a member of the tribe.
Saraf gives a fictitious twist to this incident, layering it with research and audacious imagination. “The absurdity of the situation was too rich to pass up," says the Indian-born, US-based writer, playwright and techie, when we meet at a Delhi bookshop. “It’s exciting to reimagine ‘what if’ scenarios in fiction—in this case, what if Chau had succeeded in his mission?"
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In his earlier novels, notably in the award-winning Harilal & Sons (2017) and The Confession of Sultana Daku (2009), Saraf used recorded history and lores with powerful effect to retell stories that delve into questions of identity, belonging and contested legacies. In Island, he returns to a similar terrain and packs in a punch: a literary novel brimming with ideas that also moves at the pace of a detective thriller.
In Island, Chau’s stand-in is Steven Li, an American evangelist who is “part, Irish, part African, part Chinese, Southeast Asian and Choctow, Native American." Li seeks out Nirmal Chandra Mattoo, a disgraced anthropologist living in the Andamans estranged from his Kashmiri family, who makes a living by peddling fake junk as authentic Jarawa relics to gullible tourists who come to gawp at the tribals, as though they are on a wildlife safari. Mattoo, Saraf informs me, is thinly based on the real Kashmiri anthropologist, Triloknath Pandit, who, unlike his fictional counterpart, had an unblemished career.
Li manages to coax an unscrupulous busybody, Subhash, and a few local fishermen to take him to his coveted, but legally forbidden, destination in exchange for a few hundred US dollars. But he is convinced his mission can’t be successful without Mattoo, who shot to fame 13 years ago, when he made an unforeseen friendly contact with the Sentinelese—an event that proved to be the pinnacle of his success as well as downfall.
As part of a team from the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) studying the aftermath of the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean region in 2004, Mattoo had, through sheer luck, spent a few hours studying a Sentinelese woman from close quarters. Their encounter, at first hailed as a historic milestone, resulted in a serious backlash a year later, leaving Mattoo without his job or any prospect of completing his PhD on a grammar of the Jarawa language.
Although shattered by his fall from eminence, Mattoo remains steeped in the ideals of his hero, the British-born Indian anthropologist and tribal activist Verrier Elwin (1902-64). He believes it is his duty to protect the tribals from the vested interests of the “civilized" world—evangelical missionaries, prurient tourists, rapacious entrepreneurs or Hindu nationalists who want to rename the Andamans after Lord Hanuman. And yet, when Li comes begging his assistance, Mattoo is unable to say no, due to reasons, he later realizes, he hasn’t even acknowledged to himself.
“Apart from Elwin’s legacy, I looked at the work of anthropologists like Maurice Vidal Portman and Horace Man, both of whom were controversial for their own reasons," Saraf says. “I referred to the work of Christian organizations like All Nations International and Joshua Project as well, especially their focus on the 10/40 corridor." Also known as The Resistant Belt, this modest stretch of land—covering parts of North Africa, Asia and the Middle East—has historically resisted attempts at conversion. To this day, this stubbornly unconquerable area remains the height of aspiration for missionaries like Li, who put themselves through a gruelling regime of physical and psychological training to take the message of Jesus to these heathen lands.
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Li’s delusional confidence, even as his life is endangered by the hostile Sentinelese, is captured with the perfect mix of bathos and irony by Saraf. As the young man approaches the tribe with Bibles and crucifixes, he makes an impassioned appeal to them to surrender to Christ’s love—first in English, then, funnily enough, in Xhosa. But the Sentinelese remain uncomprehending of his intentions. The 21st-century reader is jolted into a bizarre moment of reckoning, where centuries-old legacies of colonial encroachment suddenly coalesce with the entrenched hegemonies of the present.
In spite of its suspenseful pace, Island abounds with such epiphanies. The epistemological triumphs of the European Enlightenment, going back to a few centuries, feels clinically inert compared to the vast, unknowable wisdoms the early Homo sapiens. In Mattoo’s character, the reader glimpses the full force with which such conundrums play out. He is caught between being a protector to ancient tribes and complicit in the neo-colonial project of inducting them into the mainstream.
“Who asked this American boy to come here? You." Subhash lashes at him when Mattoo protests against Li’s plan to take Bibles and crosses to the tribals. “If your type had not written fat books about the tribals, who would even tell his boy about some tribals in the Andamans?" Subhash continues. “The tribal are your food and water, your job, your career."
As Li’s death thickens the plot, Mattoo continues to wrestle with his inner demons. At a hush-hush meeting in Delhi with the sitting MP from Andaman, he is made privy to a conspiracy to transform the islands into the Hawaii of India. Even more disturbingly, his former AnSI colleague, Nandini Mitra, is aligned with the State’s proposal to turn Andaman into a global tourist hub, aiming to bring in millions in visitors as well as revenue every year. This “Masterplan," as the MP calls it, is in already well under way.
“What about the tribals mark them out for special treatment among the many unfortunate people of India?" Mitra retorts, when Mattoo criticizes the Masterplan. “If a civilization be so defenceless that a mere handshake might kill it off with deadly disease … does it have a right to exist?"
Like many questions in Island, this one doesn’t have a black-and-white answer. “I don’t want to put the tribals in a formaldehyde jar," Saraf says, “My interest in them is born out of humanism. But I’m also not a big votary of keeping them as they are. They must be allowed to find their own equilibrium."
Island ends with Mattoo bursting into bitter laugher at monstrous problems that beset the Global South, all creations of the bloody hand of colonialism. As Saraf puts it, “The Sentinelese do not need Jesus any more than they need modern India."
Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.
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