SUMMARY

The Jarawa, perhaps the oldest tribe 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.

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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.

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Once proud of their independence, the Jarawa are now tempted with biscuits and trinkets, as if they were exotic animals in a human safari park. They can’t survive like this.

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In this astonishing book, Jonathan Lawley returns to what was once a penal colony built by the British to house Indian mutineers.

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He asks what responsibility colonial administrators like his grandfather may have had for the sad plight of these palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and what the Indian government should now be doing to protect them.

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Sumptuously illustrated with the author’s never-before-seen archive photographs.

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