APPENDIX B

Pioneer Biographies
of the Indian Period from 1947

Vishvajit Pandya (*1956)

Vishvajit Pandya was born in New Delhi on 24th January 1956 to parents who strongly encouraged their only child to learn by exploring and though adventures.

The young Pandya began his higher education by studies in fine arts and design but soon changed this in favor of the social sciences where he developed an unusual interest in anthropological theory. He did not want to study and record the reality and details of life in an Indian village, but preferred instead to investigate an entirely alien culture and its connections to the history of anthropological ideas and theory.

The Andamanese Onge had attracted Pandya's attention because, as he found to his surprise, no serious original research had been done on the Andamanese since Radcliffe-Brown's expedition 1906-08 and the publication of its results in 1922. This odd scientific lapse of half a century, combined with the availability of dusty yet "romantic" colonial records, the Onge's distance (in every sense of the word) from modern India and the world along with their remarkable alienness as well as Radcliffe-Brown's records at Chicago (where he had worked in the early 1930s and left an indelible impression), all combined to rouse the young scholar's interest and to draw him to the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago.

Vishavjit Pandya received his first academic degree in 1977 in the form of a BA (Honors) in sociology from Delhi University. An MA in sociology followed in 1979 from Delhi School of Economics and an MPhil in 1981 from the the School of Social Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1987. By that time he had attracted overseas attention and received support grants from US institutions in the 1980s. In 1987 he moved to the USA to crown his academic education with a PhD from the Department of Anthropology, the University of Chicago. Throughout the 1990s research grants from US and New Zealand institutions helped fund his research work.

The first teaching appointment as assistant professor of anthropology came along in 1987 at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Westminster College, in the USA where he stayed until 1992. In 1993 he was appointed Lecturer and today is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University, New Zealand. As visiting faculty member and research associate at the National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad, Gujarat, he remained very much in touch with his homeland.

A list of Dr. Pandya's field research shows that while the Andamanese are his major scientific interest, he does not suffer from "one-track mind":

1978: ethnographic study of the Koraput District, Orissa; the study dealt with the impact of an aeronautics factory on the slash and burn, and hunting and gathering economies of the Gadba, Dora and Bonda tribes.

1979: study of iconography, myths, and ritual performances of mother goddess temples located on the border between Gujarat and Rajasthan

1980: field research for MPhil thesis; participant observation and fieldwork conducted at burial grounds in Delhi; the study of burial practices and ossuary feasts formed the background to textual accounts of Hindu prescriptions and proscriptions pertaining to cooking and death

1983-84: field research among the Onges in the Andaman Islands; the research involved language studies and participant observation, the collection of ideas of space and time, descriptions of rituals with special attention to Onge cosmology and maps of translocatory patterns; and social organisation as well as classificatory systems

1988: Ross Island (Andaman Islands) - a study of the prison system and its connection to the Andamanese tribal population

1990: ethnoarcheology and ethnohistory research in the USA

1992-93: field research among the Jarawa and Onge in the Andaman Islands; the research focused primarily on connections between rituals, history and hostility

1993-94: field research among the Jarawa and Onge in the Andaman Islands

1995-97: member of a research group working on youth culture in New Zealand

1995-96: field research among the nomadic groups in the desert of Kutch

1997-98: field research in Malaysia, the Rathwas of Southern Gujarat, Kutch and the Andaman Islands

His research goes deeper into the theoretical foundations of his subject than anyone else concerned with the Andamanese before. Too many anthropological researchers, past and present, fail to mention how they communicated with the people that are the subject of their studies. Often complex detail is acquired through layers of dubious translators - and the garbled results published as fact. Andamanese studies have suffered badly from this in the past, especially during the British period. Dr. Pandya has taken the trouble to acquire a "fairly good" (as he himself says) knowledge of the Onge language. This is no mean feat itself since the Onge language is very complex and still contains many open linguistic questions. Needless to say for such a language, the student is largely on his own and there are few qualified teachers.

Interest in Andamanese linguistics is not simply a matter of acquiring a superficial working knowledge of the Onge language to be used as a tool in non-linguistic research to Dr. Pandya. His interest goes deeper as is confirmed by the co-authorship of a valuable "Bibliographic Introduction to Andamanese Linguistics". Dr. Pandya's own list of publications to date contains an ever growing number of titles, most of which deal with matters directly or indirectly connected to the Andamanese and Nicobarese.

Dr. Pandya is as much a researcher as he is a teacher. His investigations into Onge beliefs and ritual are a landmark not only in Andamanese studies but in religious studies generally. They should be read by anyone interested in comparative religion, the origins and history of religion as well as by prehistorians and archaeologists. Dr. Pandya published his results in 1993 under the title "Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoanemology, Cosmology and the Power of Ritual." It is the first (and so far the only) in-depth study on the religion of the Andamanese Negrito. The intimidating sub-title of the book hints at it: the work is not light bedside reading and requires some considerable effort from its non-specialist readers. Earlier British attempts of the 19th and early 20th century to describe the beliefs of the Great Andamanese (Man, Portman, Radcliffe-Brown, and others) had suffered from a certain in-built Christian bias, serious linguistic barriers, inexperience or a lack of professional training. All early British figures conscientiously tried to set aside their own beliefs but did not always succeed. What one hopes to find, one tends to find. The early researchers came up with disconnected pieces of what must have been a much larger, much more complex picture. Their evidence often originated from reluctant individuals who may have resented the intrusion into their private beliefs - and the suspicion remains that some took their revenge by making fools of the earnest researchers by passing on inventive lies.

Against his British forerunners, Dr. Pandya has the advantage of a century's extra anthropological experience, a greatly reduced language barrier and direct access to a population more used to and less suspicious of outsiders. Among the Onge he found a complex and coherent belief system with few parallels to the disconnected pieces of Great Andamanese beliefs of a century ago. How far the Great Andamanese and Onge belief systems are related remains an open question and will be a challenge for the future.

As he himself describes his research

I was interested in symbolic systems in culture and the Andamans was a perfect case to undertake "salvage ethnography." My major thrust in the representation of Andamanese culture and society has been to present them not simply as primitive, history-less Negritos. Instead I show the philosophical sophistication and historical complexity of the Andamanese as a culture in the social sciences and humanities. I do not use the culture as an example of the "primitive odd" but attempt the explanation of the culture in its own terms.

As his research work and the list of his publications make abundantly clear, Dr. Pandya is indeed a pioneer of Andamanese studies. Happily, his academic career is far from finished and many more contributions to Andamanese studies can be expected from him. He is also in a prime position as a major authority on the Onge - and the only one working outside India - to motivate a new generation of international scientists to take up what he has made into his very own subject.

was far more worried about the Bush police than the elephants. 

 

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