The Doctor Who Walked Into a Forbidden Forest & Saved This Tribe From the Brink of Extinction

In 1998, Dr. Ratan Chandra Kar stepped onto an Andaman beach where no outsider had been welcome for 150 years. The Jarawas, survivors of British hunting parties & poachers, watched from the trees with arrows drawn.

Dr Kar came bearing no weapons—just bananas, coconuts, and medicine. This is how trust began... and went on to save an entire tribe from extinction.

Two years earlier, a 15-YO Jarawa boy named Enmai had broken his leg while fleeing a jackfruit raid. When Dr. Kar found him, Enmai refused even water—until he was offered boiled fish, cooked the Jarawa way.

For five months, the doctor cared for him like family. When Enmai returned home, his stories softened his people’s fear of the outsiders.

In 1999, measles struck like wildfire. The Jarawas had no immunity—whole families burned with fever. Their population, already just 255, teetered on extinction.

Dr Kar set up a jungle medical camp, battling not just disease but deep mistrust. Some believed vaccines were black magic. Others hid their sick in the forest.

But Dr Kar didn't give up, earning the tribe's confidence through cultural respect and medical expertise. He treated over a hundred patients at the peak of the epidemic.

He also built a special ward just for them —where IV drips hung beside bundles of healing herbs. When Jarawa women came to give birth, he let them sit upright, their traditional way, rather than forcing hospital beds.

"Their methods were wiser than ours in many ways," he says, about integrating their traditional practices. Slowly, the tribe began to see modern medicine as ally, not threat.

When a panicked mother brought her child with severe pneumonia, Dr. Kar's injection saved his life. Word spread through forests like birdsong. Soon, mothers lined up at his clinic—each cured child building the fragile fabric of trust.

"We call them uncivilised but there is so much to learn from them. They know how to read nature and so not one Jarawa life was lost to the 2004 tsunami.", says Dr Kar.

Dr Kar was awarded the Padma Shri for contributing significantly to the tribe's growth from 255 individuals to over 560 today. But his legacy is more than medical records.

Dr Kar's work is a blueprint for how worlds can meet - not with force or pity, but with partnership. The Jarawas taught him what no medical school could: that healing begins when we stop seeing "other" and start seeing human.

The Doctor Who Walked Into a Forbidden Forest & Saved This Tribe From the Brink of Extinction

30 June 2025

Dr Kar set up a jungle medical camp, battling not just disease but deep mistrust. Some believed vaccines were black magic. Others hid their sick in the forest.

But Dr Kar didn't give up, earning the tribe's confidence through cultural respect and medical expertise. He treated over a hundred patients at the peak of the epidemic.

He also built a special ward just for them —where IV drips hung beside bundles of healing herbs. When Jarawa women came to give birth, he let them sit upright, their traditional way, rather than forcing hospital beds.

"Their methods were wiser than ours in many ways," he says, about integrating their traditional practices. Slowly, the tribe began to see modern medicine as ally, not threat.