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Andaman Islands · Island Realms
छोटी-छोटी बातें
- A language family with no relativesThe Andamanese languages are not related to Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan or Austroasiatic. They are not related to Nicobarese either, which is spoken a hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. On the current evidence they constitute an independent family, which makes these islands one of the very few places in Asia holding a linguistic lineage of its own.
- The day Bo endedBoa Sr, the last fluent speaker of Bo, died in early 2010. She had outlived everyone she could speak her own language with by years, and the recordings made with her are now the language's entire remaining corpus.
- North Sentinel is closed, and that is the lawThe Sentinelese have no sustained contact with anyone. Under the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation, 1956, tribal reserves are closed to entry and photographing or filming members of these communities is an offence. An exclusion zone is maintained around the island. This is not a recommendation about how to travel respectfully; it is a criminal prohibition.
- A road through a reserveThe Andaman Trunk Road was cut north through the Jarawa reserve, and by the 2000s tour operators were running what were openly called human safaris along it. The Supreme Court ordered an interim ban on tourist traffic through the reserve in January 2013; the arrangement that followed moves all traffic in escorted convoys with stopping, interaction and photography prohibited. The road remains the argument it has always been.
- A jail built as a diagramThe Cellular Jail's seven wings radiated from one tower so that each wing faced the backs of the next — a prisoner could see no other prisoner from his cell. Every cell held one man, which was the innovation the name records. Of the seven wings, three survive.
- The only Indian territory Japan heldJapanese forces occupied the Andamans from March 1942 until 1945 — the only part of pre-independence India held by them. The occupation was severe for the islands' civilian population, and the Cellular Jail was used as a prisoner and interrogation centre during it.
- A community named after a labour officeThe islands' Chota Nagpur Adivasi population — Oraon, Munda and others — is universally called Ranchi, after the depot through which the first batches were recruited from around 1918 for forest and construction work. A hundred years later the name still carries, and the community's villages are strung along the forest settlements of Middle and North Andaman.
- A language that can be datedAndaman Creole Hindi exists because a penal colony assembled convicts, guards and officials with no shared tongue after 1858, and because Bengali and Tamil resettlement after 1947 and 1971 kept feeding it. It has an ISO code of its own. Most languages cannot be traced to an institution and a decade; this one can.
- India's only active volcano is not on the mainlandBarren Island, 135 km north-east of Port Blair, first erupted on record in 1787, went quiet for most of the twentieth century and resumed in 1991. It is the only historically active volcano on the arc that runs from Sumatra to Myanmar, and it is uninhabited — the feral goats on it are the whole population.
- Islands renamed twiceBose renamed the islands Shaheed and Swaraj in 1943 under Japanese occupation. The names did not stick then. In 2018 the government applied them to Neil and Havelock, so a 1943 gesture became 2018 signage — and both old and new names remain in daily use, including on ferry tickets.
- Rain twice a year, water for half of itThe islands take both monsoons and get around 3,000 mm of rain, and still ration water in the dry months, because there is almost no surface storage and only one river. Rainfall and water supply are two different problems here.
- The first GI tags arrived in 2024Until December 2024 no product of these islands held a geographical indication. Seven were registered at once, among them padauk wood craft and Andaman Karen Musley rice — a rice landrace kept by a community that came from Burma in the 1920s.
Andaman Islands की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (12)