The Andaman & Nicobar (A&N) Islands, more than 1000 kilometres east from the Indian mainland,  can be astonishingly beautiful. Swimming at sunset on Radhanagar Beach on Havelock Island, when the clear sea develops a silvery sheen and the parakeets and mynah birds screech from the high forest canopy of towering Mahua trees behind the white-sand beach, I felt that I had never been anywhere that more resembled paradise. But tourism is one of the many things that is putting increasing pressure on these beautiful islands, pressure not only on the spectacular but fragile ecology of the region from pollution, logging and over-fishing, but also on the few surviving indigenous tribal populations that have lived there for tens of thousands of years.

After the tsunami of boxing day 2004 I heard from a number of different sources the story of how in the A&N Islands many settlers from the Indian mainland, who are mainly Bengali, had been killed by the waves whereas the indigenous tribes had escaped almost completely without casualty. There were two theories put forward as to why this happened. The first is that through oral storytelling, the memory of previous tsunamis had been retained in the collective consciousness of tribal people, who anticipated what was about to happen when they saw the tide recede far further than usual. The other version states that the tribespeople observed animals running from the sea and they decided to follow them. There were other reports of animals fleeing prior to the impact of the tsunami, such as at Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, where many tourists who were on safari died but the loss of animal life was minimal.

Though the various tribal people of the A&N Islands, such as the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, may have demonstrated their resilience to natural disaster, they are not so immune from threats from other human beings. The recent history of these indigenous populations is one of persecution from outsiders, from the British in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, who plundered the forests and tortured political prisoners from the Indian mainland there, to the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, and finally the determination of the Indian government to bring all its territories under centralised control and introduce more and more settlers from the mainland.

The population of the Onge tribe on Little Andaman was recently decimated after a number of men were poisoned when they drank from bottles that had been washed up on the shore.

The Jarawa tribe, who live mainly on South Andaman island, had a road built through their land and loggers and poachers are destorying the forest that they have lived in for thousands of years. The Indian Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that this road should be closed but it remains open. Indeed, I travelled down that road in a bus when I was there and saw the Jarawas begging by the roadside while Indian tourists jeered and took their photographs. It was a bizarre and unnerving spectacle and of course I was part of the problem just by being there.

The Sentinelese, meanwhile, who live on the isolated North Sentinel Island have actively resisted all attempts at contact and in 2006 killed with bows and arrows two fishermen who were illegally fishing in their water surrounding the island.

The charity Survival International is campaigning for the rights of these tribal groups in the A&N Islands and across the world. The fact that they survived the worst natural disaster for a century alone indicates to me that modern societies may have far more to learn from them than they do from modern Indian or European society. And that does rather question whether modern civilizations are gaining more and more knowledge and becoming increasingly enlightened as is the common assumption, or whether they are, in fact, becoming collectively more and more stupid.