In a fortnight of earthshaking news, one fascinating story became a sideshow. In the Brazilian Amazon, close to the border of Peru, a group from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation and the rights group Survival International took a flight over the forest. From their low-flying plane they took video footage, the first ever images of a tribe of Panoan Indians hitherto unknown to the world.
There are still uncontacted tribes on Earth, perhaps as many as 100. Some we know of but stay away from, like the Sentinelese of the Andamans. This is usually because the tribe itself wants nothing to do with us.
Other tribes we don’t know of, like the Indians just discovered in Brazil. Every few years another such tribe is found, whether by chance or after a deliberate search.
We don’t, however, stay away from forest tribes when their land holds an economically valuable resource. The Brazilians went looking for tribes to prove that there were people there. If they had found no one, according to law the logging companies would have found it easier to go to work.
The story is rich in beauty and tragedy. All the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and probably long before that, humans have thought and dreamed of an equivalent of the Semitic Garden of Eden, a place before civilisation, when the world was freshly made and clean. There are versions of Eden and Shangri-La in all sorts of books and other “cultural products” like movies.
But before all this, Nanda Devi came to mind. There are books and books about this 7,816 metre mountain, partly because as the “bliss-giving goddess” she is the chief deity of Uttarakhand, which in turn may be because she is beautiful. Most important, she is very difficult to reach, guarded as she is by two rings of peaks which enclose an outer and an inner sanctuary.
Until the 1930s no human was known to have entered the Inner Sanctuary. Several big expeditions had tried; at last a tiny team of two Britons, Eric Shipton and H W Tilman, and three Sherpas found their way in, in a celebrated feat of mountaineering.
In fits and starts, the exploration of the interior began. Until the 1960s, and again between 1974 and 1983, big, clumsy expeditions roared in. They left garbage, tore up brush and chopped down trees for firewood. Behind them came villagers’ goats to graze. The damage was tremendous, although the summit fees they were charged were enormous. In 1983 the government closed the Inner Sanctuary and declared it a national park.
The travel writer Bill Aitken has written what must be the finest recent book on the pull of the goddess: The Nanda Devi Affair, 1994. He loves the mountain, but spiritually, not as a sporting mountaineer. He entered the sanctuary before it was closed. Of that once-pristine area, he writes: “Yugoslavian biscuit wrappers lay alongside British sardine tins and Coca-Cola cans from America shared space with jettisoned medical supplies from Indian military sources. The mess was an affront to the Goddess and the illusion that the people who could do this to the most beautiful of Himalayan wildernesses qualified as sportsmen never stood more exposed.” After Shipton, he writes, “the sanctuary had been violated by the greed for fame and the mindless urge to keep up with the record books.”
Lost tribe, golden age or violated sanctuary, one step is all it takes to break the spell for all time — even if it is taken by good people, for a good reason.
