This section is short because the record is short, and padding it would be the worse error. There was no anti-colonial movement in the Nicobars: no Congress committee, no revolutionary group, no peasant or tribal rising against the British, and no Nicobarese participation in the mainland campaigns. The reason is structural rather than temperamental. Britain acquired these islands in 1868 by buying out a Danish claim, not by conquering anyone; the administration that followed was thin, worked through village captains already chosen by the tuhets, and attempted no revenue settlement and no land alienation of the kind that produced risings elsewhere. There was very little for a movement to attach itself to. What the twentieth century did bring here was war, and the community's documented experience of coercion is the Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945. Only one individual can be named from the record with confidence, and naming others would mean inventing them.
The transfer of 1868 and the annexation of 186916 October 1868 - 1869
Denmark sold its rights in the group to Britain and Britain annexed the islands the following year. No Nicobarese party was consulted in the transaction and no Nicobarese authority signed it; the islands changed hands between two European states on paper.
परिणाम: Administration from Port Blair, a station at Nancowry, and the formalisation of the village captain by written warrant. Land and palms stayed with the tuhet, which is why the annexation produced no dispossession of the kind that provoked risings on the mainland.
The Japanese occupation1942-1945
Japanese forces held the islands for three years, building an airfield on Car Nicobar and requisitioning labour across the island from 1943. Islanders were detained and interrogated on suspicion of signalling to Allied ships; John Richardson, the island's Anglican catechist, was among those imprisoned and tortured.
परिणाम: British administration returned in October 1945. The occupation is the only period of organised violence against this population recorded in its documented history, and it came from an occupying army rather than from a colonial administration.