At the university admission counter, Madhumala had enquired which department dealt with the study of tribes and was informed it was anthropology. The romance and adventure of an unknown world beckoned this young girl.Īfter completing her schooling from Bhabani Balika Vidyalaya, Shibpur, at the top of her class, Madhumala took admission in BSc (Hons) Anthropology, University of Calcutta. The rigour and the hard work of being a field anthropologist – a branch of science which studies primitive tribes – was far from her mind. This remark stuck and the little girl, Madhumala, was subsumed with the thought of becoming a researcher. Her father in order to brush off his pestering daughter remarked that only a researcher or a journalist is allowed to visit the tribes of the Andamans. Excited, the girl ran to her father, an accounts officer with the South Eastern Railway, and demanded that on their next vacation they visit the Onges’. ![]() ![]() We could not but agree.Ī twelve-year-old girl one morning in her home in Shibpur, Howrah, a suburb of Kolkata, happened to chance upon a small news item in The Telegraph newspaper, which informed of the birth of a baby amongst the almost-extinct Onge tribes of the Andamans. The tribes might be primitive in their technological achievements, but socially they are far ahead of us”. She concluded by saying, “Never ever in my six years of doing research alone with the tribes of Andamans did any man ever misbehave with me. We at met Madhumala and heard her incredible story. Her book Tribes of Car Nicobar and journal papers remain standard reference texts in universities worldwide. Madhumala does not wear her success on her sleeve, and is humble to the point of being reticent. ![]() Madhumala now works in the mid-level bureaucracy of a central government ministry in Delhi handling routine government files, an unseemly situation for a woman who built our first bridge to an unknown world. This picture is of the first ever friendly contact of Madhumala Chattopadhyay’s team with the Sentinelese tribe | Sudipto Sengupta/
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