कला और शिल्प परंपरा

Nicobarese circle danceलोक

Danced in a ring, arms linked or on shoulders, with a unison jump and a sung line that carries the beat. It is performed at night and can continue for hours, and at a mortuary feast it is part of the rite rather than an entertainment attached to it.

कौन करता है: Village groups, men and women. मौका: The mortuary feast, canoe races, Christmas and official festivals

Canoe racingलोक

Not a dance, but the same thing socially — village against village, crewed by young men, and the main public contest of the year. The hodi is the boat it is raced in.

कौन करता है: Village crews. मौका: Festivals and public occasions

Nicobarese song

Unaccompanied or drum-and-voice singing that carries the circle dance. Song texts belong to occasions — mortuary, launching, welcome — rather than to a concert repertoire.

Guitar and hymn

The guitar is, by the administration's own account, the most widely played instrument in the islands, and Nicobarese-language hymn singing is the most widespread organised music. Both arrived with Anglican mission work in the twentieth century and both are now thoroughly local.

No documented theatre tradition

Ritual, dance and feast carry the performative life of these islands. There is no recorded masked or narrative drama, and it is better to record the absence than to invent a form.

Hodi — the Nicobari outrigger canoe जीआई पंजीकृत Nicobar district

The defining object of Nicobarese material culture, and the territory's first GI application. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.

सामग्री: Island hardwood, cane lashing. तकनीक: A dugout hull worked from a single trunk, raised with strakes and balanced by a single outrigger on cross booms. Built without drawings, by eye and by inherited proportion, and finished for racing as well as for fishing and inter-island transport.

Nicobari hut (Chanvi Pati — Nyi hupul) जीआई पंजीकृत Nicobar district

A building type found nowhere else in India, and the clearest single piece of evidence that this archipelago belongs architecturally to island Southeast Asia.

सामग्री: Timber piles, cane, pandanus and palm thatch. तकनीक: A circular or domed house raised on wooden piles five to seven feet above the ground, entered by a movable ladder, with a single boarded floor and a hearth inside. The pile construction keeps the floor above flood, damp and vermin; the round plan sheds wind from any direction. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.

Nicobari mat (Chatrai-hileuoi) जीआई पंजीकृत Nicobar district

Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. The same plaiting skill produces the house walls and roof, so the craft and the architecture are one body of knowledge.

सामग्री: Pandanus and palm leaf. तकनीक: Leaf split, cured and plaited in close diagonal work into sleeping mats, floor mats and panels.

Tavi-i-Ngaich — Nicobari virgin coconut oil जीआई पंजीकृत Nicobar district

Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. Note for the record that the virgin coconut oil GI belongs to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, not to Lakshadweep, which is a common confusion.

सामग्री: Coconut. तकनीक: Cold or gentle extraction of oil from fresh kernel without refining or bleaching.

Kareau and hentakoi — carved guardian figures जीआई योग्य Recorded across the Nicobar group

The best-known Nicobarese carving tradition, heavily collected by colonial officers and now scattered through European museums. It is a healing and protective practice, and describing it as decorative art misses what it is for.

सामग्री: Wood, shell, boar tusk, cane, cloth. तकनीक: Carved and painted figures, often with mother-of-pearl set for eyes and tusks or a forked tongue added, made by a menluana — a ritual specialist — and set outside a house, particularly the house of a sick person. If the misfortune continued, the figure was held to have lost its power and was replaced.

Chowra pottery जीआई योग्य Chowra, Nancowry Group

Chowra is the pottery island. The administration's own account of the group records pot-making as Chowra's specialisation, and in the ethnographic literature the island's monopoly on it, and the ritual standing that came with it, is one of the most-discussed features of Nicobarese society — a division of labour by island rather than by caste or guild.

सामग्री: Island clay. तकनीक: Hand-built, coiled and open-fired earthenware, made without a wheel.

Cane, shell and coconut work Territory-wide

Household craft, made for use rather than for sale, since there is no tourist market here.

सामग्री: Cane, shell, coconut shell. तकनीक: Splitting, coiling, cutting and polishing into baskets, containers and ornament.