Tier 2 · Cultural region · Island Realms
A penal colony that became a society — and, beside it, four peoples whose ancestors were here tens of thousands of years before the first ship.
The Andamans hold two histories that must not be run together. One belongs to the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, whose languages form a family unrelated to any other and who have lived on these islands far longer than any written record; their communities are protected by law, their reserves are closed, and photographing or approaching them is a criminal offence. The other belongs to everybody else — a population descended from convicts transported to the Cellular Jail, from Bengali refugees settled after Partition, from Tamil and Telugu families brought in on the same colonisation schemes, from Chota Nagpur Adivasi labourers recruited through Ranchi, and from Karen villagers brought from Burma in the 1920s. That second population had to build a culture from nothing on arrival, and did: a creole Hindi, a fish-and-coconut kitchen with Bengali mustard and Tamil tamarind in it, and a calendar that runs Durga Puja, Pongal, Sarhul and Christmas in the same small towns.
The Andamans are two regions occupying the same map. One of them is very old: the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese speak languages that have no established relatives anywhere, and their communities are protected by a law that closes their reserves, bars approach and makes photographing them an offence. The correct posture towards that half of the islands is distance. What can be said accurately is that these are living communities with a legal shield around them, and that most of what has been written about them was produced by people who should not have been there.
The other region is a hundred and fifty years old and knows it. It was assembled out of convicts sent to the Cellular Jail, refugees from East Bengal, Tamil and Telugu families brought on colonisation schemes, Oraon and Munda labourers recruited through Ranchi, and Karen villagers moved from Burma in the 1920s. None of them chose these islands. What they built is a genuinely new culture — a creole Hindi with an ISO code, a coconut-and-fish kitchen with mustard on one side and tamarind on the other, and a town where Durga Puja, Pongal, Sarhul and Christmas all fall inside the same year and the same few streets.
Tropical and wet, with roughly 3,000 mm of rain in a normal year and no dry season worth the name. The temperature barely moves — about 23–31 °C all year — and humidity stays high. Two monsoons land here rather than one: the south-west from about May to September and the north-east from November into December, which is why the islands have twice the rainfall of the Indian west coast at the same latitude.
Landforms
Rivers and waters
Through the year
| Season | Months | Typical | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dry season | December–April | 23–31 °C | The season everything happens in — calm crossings, clear water, the ferries running to schedule and the diving at its best. February and March are the driest weeks. |
| South-west monsoon | May–September | 23–30 °C | Heavy, sustained rain and a rough sea. Inter-island ferries are cancelled at short notice and the small boats stop. Paddy goes in at the start of it in North and Middle Andaman. |
| North-east monsoon | November–December | 23–30 °C | A second wet spell, shorter and squallier, sometimes with cyclonic weather crossing from the Bay of Bengal. |
Best time to visitMid-December to early April. Note that this is also when accommodation and ferry seats are hardest to get, so book the crossings before the hotels.
This region needs a different treatment from a mainland one, and the difference should be stated rather than smoothed over. There is no dynastic history here and none should be constructed. Two records exist and they are not the same kind of record. The Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese have lived on these islands for a very long time - archaeology and genetics both indicate many millennia - and their languages form a family with no demonstrated relative anywhere. But they kept no written record, they were never organised as kingdoms, and what has been written about them was produced almost entirely by outsiders, some of it under conditions the people described did not control. So no chronology of chiefs, reigns or dynasties is offered for them here, because there is none to offer; what is set down is only what is documented, and where the record is an outsider's record that is said. The second history is short and precisely dated. It begins on 10 March 1858 with a penal settlement, and everything the islands' settler society is - its creole Hindi, its towns, its mixed calendar - descends from that. The rulers list below therefore carries offices and administrators, because offices and administrators are what actually governed this place.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
Human occupation of these islands is very old and the internal chronology of it is not recoverable from written sources, because there are none. What exists from outside is a thin line of sailing references: Arab, Chinese and later European pilots knew there were islands here, knew ships had difficulty landing on them, and passed on. Those references tell us where the islands were on somebody else's map. They tell us almost nothing reliable about the people living on them, and the few descriptive claims they carry are hearsay collected at sea. Shell middens and stone material on the coasts are the local evidence, and it is archaeological rather than documentary.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 851 CE | An Arabic account of the sea route to China describes islands in this position whose inhabitants do not trade with passing ships - the earliest external notice of the group. |
| c. 1050 CE | The Thanjavur inscription of Rajendra Chola I names Nakkavaram, the Nicobars to the south, among the places reached by his fleet. These islands are not named; no mainland Indian state administered them. |
| late 13th century | Marco Polo's account carries the name Angamanain for the group, again from report rather than from landing. |
| throughout | Archaeological shell middens on the coasts indicate long, continuous occupation. No dated internal chronology can be reconstructed from them, and none is asserted here. |
For five centuries the islands stayed outside every state that surrounded them. They appear in sailing directions as a hazard and a place to give a wide berth, and in the eighteenth century they begin to appear in survey work as a possible harbour on the Bay of Bengal route. The Danish claim of 1756 covered the Nicobars to the south and not these islands. This is a genuinely thin period in the record, and it is thin because nothing was written down, not because nothing happened.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 15th-17th century | Arab, Chinese and European rutters and sailing directions name the group as a landfall to be avoided; no settlement is attempted. |
| 1756 | The Danish claim from Tranquebar covers the Nicobar group south of the Ten Degree Channel and does not extend to these islands. |
| 1771 | John Ritchie of the Bombay Marine surveys parts of the archipelago, the first systematic charting of its harbours. |
The modern history of the Andamans is the history of a prison that turned into a society. A first attempt at settlement in 1789 failed to disease within seven years. The second, in 1858, was made to hold men convicted after the revolt of the previous year, and it did not fail: it grew into Port Blair, took in successive waves of transported prisoners, built the Cellular Jail between 1896 and 1906, and by the 1930s had generated a settled local population of descendants, released convicts and their families with a creole language of its own. It also, from its first decade, pressed on the people who were already here, with consequences that the census returns record plainly. The Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945 is the only period in which the islands were held by a power other than Britain since the settlement began.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1789-1796 | Lieutenant Archibald Blair of the Bombay Marine establishes a settlement at Chatham Island in the harbour later named for him; it is moved to Port Cornwallis in 1792 and abandoned in 1796 after heavy mortality from disease. |
| 10 March 1858 | A penal settlement is re-established at Port Blair under the superintendence of Dr James Pattison Walker, with two hundred convicts transported after the revolt of 1857. Viper Island is the first site. |
| 17 May 1859 | An armed encounter at Aberdeen, near Port Blair, between Great Andamanese and the settlement's garrison - a defence of ground against a settlement, not part of any mainland movement. |
| 1863 onward | An Andaman Home is opened for Great Andamanese brought into contact with the settlement. Introduced disease follows. The Great Andamanese population, estimated in the thousands at the settlement's founding, is returned at 625 in the 1901 census, 455 in 1911, 207 in 1921 and 90 in 1931. |
| 1868 | A mass escape from the settlement ends in recapture and executions; the figures usually given are 238 escapees and 87 hanged, and they come from the settlement's own returns. |
| 8 February 1872 | Sher Ali Afridi, a convict, kills the Viceroy Lord Mayo during an inspection visit at Hope Town - the only Viceroy of India killed in office. He is tried and hanged. In the same year the Andaman and Nicobar islands are placed under a single Chief Commissioner at Port Blair. |
| 1896-1906 | The Cellular Jail is built at Port Blair: seven three-storey wings radiating from a central watchtower, 696 cells, each 4.5 by 2.7 metres, designed so that no cell faces another. |
| May 1933 | A hunger strike by political prisoners in the Cellular Jail. Mahavir Singh, Mohan Kishore Namadas and Mohit Moitra die during forcible feeding. |
| 1937-1939 | After a sustained public campaign on the mainland, political prisoners are repatriated to mainland jails and the Cellular Jail ceases to hold them. |
| 23 March 1942 - 7 October 1945 | Japanese occupation. Political control is transferred to the Provisional Government of Azad Hind on 29 December 1943, when Subhas Chandra Bose visits Port Blair and raises the flag, though practical authority remains with the Japanese command. On 30 January 1944 forty-four civilians are shot at Homfreyganj on suspicion of espionage. British forces reoccupy Port Blair on 7 October 1945. |
Rulers and commanders
Entered here to say plainly what is not entered. The Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese were not organised as kingdoms, chiefdoms or headships of the sort a rulers list is built for, and the ethnographic record does not support naming individuals as rulers over them. No such names are given here. Their reserves are closed by law and approach and photography are offences.
Surveyed the harbour and established the first British settlement in the islands in 1789. The settlement was moved north in 1792 and abandoned in 1796; the harbour kept his name.
Seat: Chatham Island, later Port Blair
The settlement had no ruler. It had a superintendent reporting to the Government of India, with authority over convicts, guards and the settlement's works. The first was Dr James Pattison Walker, who landed with two hundred convicts on 10 March 1858.
Seat: Port Blair
From 1872 both archipelagos were placed under one officer at Port Blair, an arrangement that governed the Nicobars from an Andaman town and set the administrative geography the islands still carry.
Seat: Port Blair
Administered the Andaman Homes and compiled a large photographic and anthropometric record of the Great Andamanese. It is the source of most published images of them, and it was made by an official of the settlement over people who were not in a position to refuse - which is a fact about the record and should be read with it.
Seat: Port Blair and Ross Island
Held the islands from 23 March 1942. Requisitioned labour and food, built defence works, and conducted espionage trials; the shootings at Homfreyganj on 30 January 1944 took place under its authority. It surrendered the islands in October 1945.
Seat: Port Blair
Political control of the islands was formally transferred to the Provisional Government of Azad Hind on 29 December 1943 and the islands were renamed Shaheed and Swaraj. Practical authority over supply, defence and policing remained with the Japanese command throughout.
Seat: Port Blair
This is one of the few genuinely new cuisines in India, and it can be dated. Nothing here descends from a local court or a settled peasantry — everything arrived with someone in the last hundred and fifty years and was then rebuilt around what the islands actually have, which is fish, coconut, rice and very little else. A Bengali household cooks mustard and panch phoron onto reef fish it had never seen; a Tamil household puts tamarind and curry leaf on the same fish; a Chota Nagpur household cooks with less oil and more leaf-wrapping than either. Coconut is the common denominator that all three ended up adopting, because it grows and mustard oil has to be shipped in.
Primary cooking medium
Dominant sour agents
Spice register
There is no single one, which is the point. Panch phoron, mustard paste and green chilli mark the Bengali strand; curry leaf, tamarind, black pepper and mustard seed mark the Tamil and Telugu strand; a plainer salt, turmeric and chilli treatment with more emphasis on the ingredient marks the Chota Nagpur and Karen kitchens. What is missing is as informative as what is present — almost no dry-roasted garam masala tradition, very little wheat bread, and no dairy culture at all, because there is no grazing land.
Staple grains and carbs
Preservation methods
Signature techniques
Reef and pelagic fish simmered in thin coconut milk with turmeric, chilli and a souring agent, the thick milk added last off the heat. Every community on the islands ended up cooking a version of this, whatever they arrived cooking, because coconut is the one fat that is local.
Also found in: Malabar, Lakshadweep, Nicobar Islands
Ground mustard seed, green chilli and mustard oil steamed or braised over fish — the Bengali shorshe method applied to snapper, grouper, kingfish and reef species it was never designed for. The mustard's sharpness does the work that river-fish oiliness used to do.
Also found in: Bengal Delta, Sundarbans
Fish split, salted and laid out on racks or roofs until hard. The Bengali settler households make and eat it as shutki; because the Andaman monsoon is long and sunless, a good deal of it is finished over smoke rather than in the sun, which is a local adaptation rather than an inherited step.
Also found in: Bengal Delta, Barak Valley
Fish and meat wrapped in leaf or packed into a bamboo section and set in embers. Brought by Chota Nagpur Adivasi settlers and by the Karen, and adopted more widely because it needs no oil and no vessel.
Also found in: Chota Nagpur, Naga Hills, Tripura Hills
The Karen villages around Mayabunder keep Burmese preparations — fermented fish seasoning, bamboo shoot, pounded chilli relishes and a heavier use of pork than anywhere else in the islands. The published documentation of this kitchen is thin, and what is set down here is deliberately limited to what is reliably reported.
Also found in: Myanmar
Areca is grown on the islands, the leaf is grown alongside it, and the folded quid is the near-universal after-meal habit across every community here. Andaman areca is a cash crop as well as a habit, and the trees are a marker of settler cultivation in the forest belt.
Also found in: Bengal Delta, Tulu Nadu, Chota Nagpur
Ask what "Andaman food" is and you will be told, correctly, that it is fish. What is more interesting is that the same fish is cooked four ways within one bazaar, and that the households doing the cooking can usually tell you which boat their grandparents came on. The restaurant version — grilled lobster, tandoori fish, chilli crab — is a tourist-era layer sitting on top of that, and it is worth separating the two.
Snapper, grouper, kingfish or tuna in coconut milk with chilli, turmeric and tamarind or lime. The islands' common dish, arrived at independently by households from three different mainland traditions.
Fish in a ground-mustard and green-chilli paste, cooked in mustard oil. The technique is East Bengal's; the fish is whatever the Junglighat jetty landed that morning, which is a saltwater fish the technique was not written for.
The Tamil tamarind fish curry — curry leaf, mustard seed, tamarind, plenty of chilli — cooked in settler households of Tamil and Telugu origin. Set beside the Bengali dish it makes the islands' two-strand kitchen immediately legible.
Mud crab from the mangrove creeks, cooked either in coconut milk or in a thick chilli-and-tomato masala. The creeks are the crab's habitat and the reason the dish belongs here rather than being borrowed.
Steaks or whole fish rubbed with turmeric, chilli and salt and shallow-fried. What most households actually eat most nights, and the format in which unfamiliar reef species get used up.
Coconut-milk prawn curries, dry-fried squid with onion and chilli. Squid is a relatively recent commercial catch here and has moved into the home kitchen from the market rather than the other way round.
Salted and dried fish pounded with chilli, onion and mustard oil, or cooked with vegetables. A Bengali settler staple, monsoon insurance, and the strongest-smelling thing in any island kitchen.
Cooked in the Karen villages around Mayabunder and in Chota Nagpur Adivasi settlements — pork slow-cooked with fermented or fresh bamboo shoot and chilli. It is the clearest culinary marker of the islands' Burmese and Adivasi populations.
Rice-flour dumplings and leaf-wrapped steamed items made in Chota Nagpur Adivasi households, kept up as festival and household food since the community arrived from the Ranchi region a century ago.
The Tamil breakfast, which is what Port Blair actually eats in the morning. It arrived with the colonisation-scheme families and became the town's default breakfast rather than one community's.
Where to try: Aberdeen Bazaar and the streets around it, Port Blair.
The tourist-era dish, cooked at the beach shacks of Swaraj Dweep and the Port Blair restaurants. Honest to name as such — it is thirty years old, not a hundred and fifty, and it is very good.
Sold everywhere and drunk constantly. On an island where the water supply is rain-dependent this is a practical drink as much as a pleasant one.
A rice landrace grown by the Karen community, registered as a geographical indication in December 2024 — the first formal recognition of anything the islands' settler agriculture produced.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
Settler dress here is mainland dress worn in a wet, hot climate — cotton saree and blouse, salwar kameez, lungi, shirt and trousers, with a great deal of synthetic fabric because cotton never dries. There is no island garment and no island loom outside the Karen villages, and pretending otherwise would be inventing something. The dress of the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese is not described here: their communities are legally protected from intrusion, photography of them is an offence, and a heritage listing is not the place to catalogue what they wear.
What is worn
The working dress of fishermen, farmers and jetty labour across every settler community, common to Bengali, Tamil and Adivasi households alike.
Worn for: Everyday
Both draping styles are visible in the same street in Port Blair, and the drape is usually a reliable guide to which colonisation scheme a family came in on.
Worn for: Everyday and formal
A wrapped lower cloth and a woven tunic in the Karen manner, made on a backstrap loom. This is the only handwoven garment tradition anywhere in the Andaman group, and it came from Burma in the 1920s.
Worn for: Everyday and church
White cotton with a red or coloured border, worn for the community's spring and monsoon festivals — the dress of the Jharkhand plateau, kept up on an island a thousand kilometres from it.
Worn for: Sarhul and Karma
Weaves and textiles
Narrow-width cotton woven on a body-tensioned loom and sewn into tunics and wraps, in a Burmese Karen idiom. Practised by a community of a few thousand and not commercially produced at any scale.
Jewellery
Dance
Circle dances to the mandar drum, danced around a branch of the karam tree at the Karma festival. The repertoire came from the Ranchi plateau with the labour recruitment of the early twentieth century and has been kept up in island villages ever since.
Performed by: Chota Nagpur Adivasi settler communities. Occasion: Karma and Sarhul
The Nicobarese form, performed away from its own islands. Its home context belongs to the Nicobar region; what happens at Port Blair is a diaspora and stage performance, and is worth naming as that rather than as Andaman tradition.
Performed by: Nicobarese resettled or resident in the Andaman group. Occasion: Island Tourism Festival and official occasions
Kirtan and dhunuchi dancing at the pujas, kolattam and temple processions in the Tamil settlements. All transplanted whole, and all now several generations old on the islands.
Performed by: Settler communities. Occasion: Durga Puja, Pongal, temple festivals
Music
The common musical culture of the islands is Hindi film music, which is unsurprising and also revealing — it is the shared repertoire of a population with four mother tongues and one lingua franca.
Four-part Baptist hymn singing in Karen, brought from Burma with the community and its missionaries, and still the strongest musical tradition in the Mayabunder area.
Baul and kirtan among Bengali households, Carnatic devotional singing in Tamil ones, mandar-and-flute music in Adivasi villages. Each remains within its community rather than blending, which is the honest state of the islands' music.
Theatre
Bengali jatra troupes perform at settlement melas in North and Middle Andaman, and Tamil sabha-style drama appears at temple festivals. Both are amateur, seasonal and unrecorded.
Crafts
The islands' best-known craft product — bowls, furniture and carved panels in a timber that grows nowhere else. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024, in the first batch of GI tags the territory ever received.
Material: Andaman padauk (Pterocarpus dalbergioides). Technique: Turning, carving and joinery of a dense, deep-red island hardwood, worked green and finished with oil rather than lacquer so the grain stays visible.
Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. The listing matters less for the coconut than for what it signals — a territory whose products had no formal protection until the 2020s.
Material: Coconut. Technique: Cultivation and processing on island soils.
A large tourist trade with a real legal problem inside it: several of the showiest shells and all corals are protected under the Wildlife Protection Act, and buying them is an offence. Government emporia sell only permitted material.
Material: Marine shell. Technique: Cutting, grinding and polishing of shell into ornament and inlay.
Settler-village craft using island material, taught through the administration's rural industries programmes rather than through any inherited island lineage.
Material: Cane, bamboo, palm leaf. Technique: Split-cane weaving and coiling into baskets, furniture and mats.
The Karen came to the Andamans as forest workers and boatmen, and their villages have supplied small-boat builders and crews to the islands ever since.
Material: Island hardwood. Technique: Plank-on-frame construction of small fishing and transport boats, built by eye.
The by-product craft of a coconut economy, made everywhere coconut is processed.
Material: Coconut shell. Technique: Cutting, filing and polishing of the shell into utensils and ornament.
Sung around a karam branch planted in the village ground, by Chota Nagpur Adivasi settler communities. The songs came with the labour recruitment of a century ago and are still sung in island villages.
Sung at: The Karma festival, in the monsoon.
Baptist hymnody in four parts, sung in Karen at Webi and the neighbouring villages. The community's strongest surviving oral tradition, and the one that carried its language forward.
Sung at: Church and community gatherings.
Boatmen's songs carried from East Bengal by refugee settlers, sung in a country where the boats now go out onto open sea rather than up a river.
Sung at: On the water and at settlement gatherings.
Harvest and devotional songs kept up by Tamil settler families, largely unchanged from the mainland forms.
Sung at: Pongal and temple festivals.
Songs of the Great Andamanese have been recorded by linguists working with the community's remaining speakers, and archived material exists in academic collections. It is documented here as existing rather than described, because its contexts belong to a small living community and not to a visitor's itinerary.
Sung at: Not for public listing.
Three linguistic layers with nothing between them. The oldest is the Andamanese family — Great Andamanese in the north, and Ongan, comprising Jarawa and Onge, in the south — which has no established relationship to any other family in the world, including Nicobarese a hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. The Sentinelese language is undocumented and no outsider knows what it is related to. Layered over that is the mainland inheritance of the settlers: Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sadri, Kurukh, Malayalam, Karen. And produced on the islands themselves is Andaman Creole Hindi, an ISO-recognised language built from Hindi, Bengali and Tamil in the penal-colony period, which is what people actually speak to each other when their households do not share a mother tongue.
Speech varieties
Grew out of the penal settlement after 1858, when convicts, guards and officials had no common language; reinforced after 1947 and again after 1971 by Bengali and Tamil resettlement. It has its own ISO code, hca, and is one of very few Indian languages whose formation can be dated to a specific institution.
Speakers: Widely spoken across the settler population; native speakers concentrated around Port Blair
Ten distinct languages were recorded in the nineteenth century — among them Bo, Jeru, Kora, Cari, Pucikwar and Bea. What survives now is a mixed variety drawing mainly on the northern languages, spoken alongside Hindi. Boa Sr, the last fluent speaker of Bo, died in 2010, and Bo went with her.
Speakers: A very small number of elderly speakers
Two related languages of the southern Andamans, both still spoken by their communities. Both are documented only to the extent that limited, permitted contact has allowed, and the Jarawa reserve is closed.
Not documented. No sustained contact exists and none is lawful. What is known is that the few recorded encounters gave no sign that the language was intelligible to Onge speakers.
The settler mother tongues. Bengali is the largest by number; Karen, spoken by a few thousand around Mayabunder, is the only Sino-Tibetan language in the territory and the only one that arrived from Burma.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Kala Pani काला पानी | "The black water" — transportation across the sea, and by extension the Cellular Jail itself. For caste Hindus the crossing carried its own penalty of ritual loss, which is exactly why the British chose it. |
| Local-born | A person descended from the pre-independence convict and settler population, born on the islands. A live social category, distinct from the post-1947 refugee settlers and from mainland transferees. |
| Ranchi | The islands' name for the Chota Nagpur Adivasi community — Oraon, Munda and others — recruited through the Ranchi labour depot from around 1918. The community is named after a recruitment office, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it got here. |
| ATR | The Andaman Trunk Road, which runs north from Port Blair through the Jarawa reserve. Traffic on it moves in escorted convoys; stopping, interacting and photographing are prohibited. |
| Dweep | Island. The 2018 renaming replaced the British names of the harbour and ferry islands with Hindi ones — Swaraj Dweep, Shaheed Dweep, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep — and both sets of names are used in practice. |
| Chatham and Junglighat | The sawmill island and the fish landing jetty at Port Blair. Between them they name the two industries the settler economy was built on. |
| Bush police | The historical force raised to patrol the boundary between the settlements and the tribal reserves. The term survives in island usage and marks how long that boundary has been policed. |
| PVTG | Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, the administrative category under which the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, Sentinelese and Shompen are listed, and the basis for much of the protective regulation. |
Built between 1896 and 1906 as seven wings radiating from a central tower, on Bentham's panopticon principle — each wing faced the back of the next, so no prisoner could see or signal another. It held 696 single cells, each about 4.5 by 2.7 metres with a ventilator set three metres up. Three wings and the tower survive; the rest were demolished after independence. It became a national memorial in 1979.
Best time: Year round; the evening sound-and-light show runs in the dry season.
The administrative headquarters of the penal settlement — church, ballroom, bakery, tennis court — abandoned after the 1941 earthquake and the Japanese occupation, and now held together by the roots of the banyans growing through it. A twenty-minute boat ride from Port Blair.
The islands' tourism centre, and the beach most often named the best in India. Also the base for the diving industry, which is where much of the local reef monitoring data actually comes from.
Getting there: Government and private ferries from Port Blair, about 1.5 to 2.5 hours.
Smaller and flatter than Swaraj Dweep, with a natural rock bridge at low tide and a working agricultural population — one of the few tourist islands that still grows vegetables for Port Blair.
Cold grey cones a metre or two high, where gas pushes liquid clay to the surface, and a limestone cave system reached by creek boat through mangrove. The land route from Port Blair runs through the Jarawa reserve on the Andaman Trunk Road, in convoy, and the Supreme Court's 2013 interim order on tourist traffic through that reserve is the reason the rules on the road are what they are.
Getting there: Convoy on the Andaman Trunk Road from Port Blair, then boat through the creek.
The highest point in South Andaman, with a national park on it. Renamed Mount Manipur in October 2021 for the Manipuri king and courtiers exiled here after the Anglo-Manipur war of 1891. It is also where Sher Ali Afridi, a convict, killed the Viceroy Lord Mayo in 1872 — the only assassination of a serving Viceroy of India.
The southern tip of South Andaman, forest running down to the sea, and the standard birding site on the islands — Andaman endemics including the Andaman woodpecker and the Andaman serpent eagle are seen here.
Best time: Early morning, December–March.
A protected group of islands and reefs west of Port Blair, with glass-bottom boat access to Jolly Buoy and Red Skin, which are opened alternately by season so the reef gets a rest.
India's only active volcano, about 135 km north-east of Port Blair — a three-kilometre island that is entirely a cone. Its first recorded eruption was in 1787; it was quiet for most of the twentieth century and became active again in 1991, with lava reaching the sea. Uninhabited, and visited only by boat, without landing.
The territory's highest point at 732 metres, in evergreen rainforest, with a climbable trail from Kalipur. Nearby Ross and Smith Islands are joined by a sand bar at low tide, and the Kalipur beaches are turtle nesting grounds where four species come ashore.
Best time: December–March; turtle nesting December–February.
Villages settled by Karen families brought from Burma in the 1920s as forest workers, still Karen-speaking and largely Baptist. The only community in the Andamans whose ancestry is Southeast Asian rather than Indian.
A flat forested island reached by ship from Port Blair, with waterfalls, a surf coast and an oil-palm plantation history. Much of the island is the Onge reserve and closed; the settled part is not a tourist circuit and access is limited.
Home of the Sentinelese, who have had no sustained contact with the outside world. The island and the waters around it are closed under law, approach is prohibited, and this entry exists to say so. It cannot be visited and should not be attempted; people have died trying.
| Festival | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Island Tourism Festival | Usually around December–January | The territory's official cultural festival at Port Blair, with performances from every community on the islands. It is a state event rather than a folk one, and it is where most visitors will see Nicobarese and Adivasi dance performed. |
| Durga Puja | Ashwin, September–October | Observed on a scale that surprises first-time visitors, with pandals through Port Blair and the Bengali settlements of North and Middle Andaman. The single clearest annual expression of the islands' East Bengal ancestry. |
| Pongal | Mid-January | Kept by the Tamil settler communities across South Andaman, with the harvest observance transferred to an island where the harvest is somebody else's. |
| Sarhul and Karma | Chaitra, March–April; Bhadra, August–September | The spring and monsoon festivals of the Chota Nagpur Adivasi settlements — the sal blossom offering at Sarhul and the karam branch at Karma, with mandar drumming and circle dance. Carried here a century ago and unbroken since. |
| Christmas and the Karen New Year | December and January | The Karen villages around Mayabunder are largely Baptist, and Christmas is their central festival; the community also keeps a New Year observance in the Karen calendar. |
| Subhas Chandra Bose flag-hoisting anniversary | 30 December | Marks the day in 1943 when Bose raised the flag at Port Blair during the Japanese occupation and named the islands Shaheed and Swaraj — the names now attached to Neil and Havelock. |
| Eid, Diwali and Vishu | Lunar and solar calendars | A working reminder that the settler population is not one community. All are public occasions in Port Blair, where four or five calendars run simultaneously in a town of a hundred thousand. |
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boa Sr | c. 1925–2010 | Language | The last fluent speaker of Bo, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages. Her recorded speech and songs, documented in the field by linguists, are effectively the whole surviving corpus of the language, and it ended when she died. |
| Anvita Abbi | b. 1949 | Linguistics | Documented the Great Andamanese languages over years of fieldwork, produced the dictionary and grammar that now stand as the primary record, and argued on the evidence that Great Andamanese constitutes a sixth independent language family in India. Padma Shri, 2013. |
| Vinayak Damodar Savarkar | 1883–1966 | Revolutionary and writer | Transported to the Cellular Jail in 1911 and held for about ten years. His imprisonment, and the petitions he wrote from it, remain among the most argued-over episodes in the Indian nationalist record. |
| Sher Ali Afridi | d. 1873 | Convict | A convict at the settlement who killed the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, at Hopetown in February 1872 — the only assassination of a serving Indian Viceroy — and was hanged the following year. |
| Diwan Singh Kalepani | 1897–1944 | Doctor and Punjabi poet | An army doctor posted to the islands who organised civilian resistance during the Japanese occupation, was arrested, tortured and died in the Cellular Jail in 1944. He wrote in Punjabi and takes his pen name from the place that killed him. |
| Subhas Chandra Bose | 1897–1945 | Politics | Visited Port Blair in December 1943 under the Japanese occupation, raised the flag and renamed the islands Shaheed and Swaraj. What his administration could actually control there, and what the occupation did to the islands' civilians, are separate and much harder questions. |
| Maurice Vidal Portman | 1860–1935 | Colonial officer and photographer | Officer in charge of the Andamanese from 1879, and the maker of the large photographic and anthropometric record of the Great Andamanese held in London. The archive is invaluable and was produced by methods that would now be indefensible, which is the ordinary condition of colonial ethnography here. |
| A. R. Radcliffe-Brown | 1881–1955 | Anthropology | His fieldwork of 1906–08 produced The Andaman Islanders, a founding text of British social anthropology. It is read now as much for what it reveals about the discipline as for what it records about the islands. |
The Andamans' place in the freedom struggle is that of a destination rather than a source. No movement was organised here; people were sent here, and the sentence itself - kala pani, transportation across the water - was the punishment. From 1858 the settlement received men convicted after the revolt of 1857; from 1909 it received the revolutionaries convicted in the conspiracy cases on the mainland, and from 1921 the men convicted after the disturbances in Malabar. The list below is therefore a list of prisoners. Two things are deliberately kept out of it. The armed encounter at Aberdeen in 1859 was a defence of ground by the Great Andamanese against a settlement, and it is recorded as its own event rather than annexed to a national narrative it had nothing to do with. And the killing of Lord Mayo in 1872 is recorded in the history section as a dated event, because the record describes it as an act of private revenge by a convict and not as part of any movement.
Risings and revolts
From 10 March 1858 men convicted after the revolt of the previous year were transported to Port Blair; a further 733 arrived from Karachi in April 1868. The settlement's first population was formed almost entirely from them, and the creole Hindi still spoken in the islands grew out of a barracks where convicts, guards and officials had no common language.
Outcome: The settlement became permanent. Most of those transported were never repatriated, and their descendants form part of the islands' present population.
An armed encounter between Great Andamanese and the garrison of the penal settlement at Aberdeen, near Port Blair, as the settlement expanded onto ground the community used.
Outcome: The settlement held and continued to expand. Contact from this decade onward brought introduced disease, and the census returns from 1901 record the consequence.
Political prisoners in the Cellular Jail struck over rations, work and their classification as ordinary convicts. Thirty-three took part in the strike of May 1933; three men died during forcible feeding. Further strikes followed in 1937.
Outcome: With a campaign on the mainland pressing the same demand, political prisoners were repatriated to mainland jails between 1937 and 1939 and the Cellular Jail ceased to hold them.
The islands were held by Japanese forces for three and a half years. Labour and food were requisitioned, espionage trials were held, and forty-four civilians were shot at Homfreyganj on 30 January 1944. Political control was transferred to the Provisional Government of Azad Hind on 29 December 1943, when Subhas Chandra Bose raised the flag at Port Blair, but supply, defence and policing stayed with the Japanese command.
Outcome: British forces reoccupied Port Blair on 7 October 1945. The occupation is the only period since 1858 in which the islands were held by a power other than Britain.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fazl-e-Haq KhairabadiKhairabad, Awadh; transported to Port Blair | 1797-1861 | 1857 | Scholar and logician, tried for his part in the events of 1857 at Delhi and sentenced to transportation for life.Died at Port Blair in 1861. |
| Barindra Kumar GhoshBengal; transported to the Cellular Jail | 1880-1959 | Revolutionary - Alipore conspiracy case | Convicted in the Alipore conspiracy case and sentenced to transportation for life; sent to the Cellular Jail in 1909.Released under the general amnesty of 1920. |
| Ullaskar DuttaBengal; transported to the Cellular Jail | 1885-1965 | Revolutionary - Alipore conspiracy case | Convicted in the Alipore conspiracy case and transported in 1909; his own account of the jail is one of the few written from inside it.Released in 1920 after a period in a mental asylum during his sentence. |
| Vinayak Damodar SavarkarMaharashtra; transported to the Cellular Jail | 1883-1966 | Revolutionary - Nasik conspiracy case | Arrested in London on 13 March 1910, tried at Bombay and sentenced to transportation for life. Sent to Port Blair in July 1911 and held in the Cellular Jail for close to ten years.Moved to a mainland jail on 2 May 1921 and released on 6 January 1924 under restrictions confining him to Ratnagiri district; the restrictions were lifted in 1937. |
| Ganesh Damodar SavarkarMaharashtra; transported to the Cellular Jail | 1879-1945 | Revolutionary - Nasik conspiracy case | Sentenced to transportation for life in 1909 and held in the Cellular Jail, where he preceded his younger brother by two years.Moved to a mainland jail on 2 May 1921 and released in 1922. |
| Bhai ParmanandPunjab; transported to the Cellular Jail | 1876-1947 | Revolutionary - Lahore conspiracy case, 1915 | Sentenced to death in the first Lahore conspiracy case of 1915; the sentence was commuted to transportation for life and he was sent to Port Blair.Released in 1920. |
| Mahavir SinghUttar Pradesh; transported to the Cellular Jail | 1904-1933 | Revolutionary - Lahore conspiracy case, 1929 | Convicted in the second Lahore conspiracy case and transported; took part in the hunger strike of May 1933 over the treatment and classification of political prisoners.Died on 17 May 1933 during forcible feeding, with Mohan Kishore Namadas and Mohit Moitra. |
| Diwan Singh KalepaniPunjab; settled at Port Blair | 1897-1944 | Detained under the Japanese occupation | Army doctor who settled at Port Blair, practised there, wrote poetry in Punjabi, and ran a literary and social circle in the town; the name Kalepani by which he is known is the word for transportation itself.Arrested during the occupation, held in the Cellular Jail and died there in January 1944. |
Padauk wood craft, shell and coconut-shell items, island produce
The administration's own emporium, and the sensible place to buy shell work — the government stock is restricted to legally permitted material, which the roadside stalls are not.
The islands' main market — fish, produce, cloth, everyday goods
The one place where all of Port Blair's communities shop in the same street, and the best short lesson in what the settler population actually is.
The morning fish landing
Not a shop, but where the day's catch arrives and where the fish in every restaurant and household kitchen comes from. Go early.
Cane, bamboo and coir products from the settlement villages
Run under the administration's rural industries schemes. Quality is uneven and the pricing is honest, which is the reverse of the tourist strip.
By air
By rail
By road
By water
Getting around
Buses, autos, hired scooters and taxis on the settled islands. Foreign nationals must present passports on arrival and separate approvals are required for reserved forests, wildlife sanctuaries and tribal reserves; citizens of some countries still require a Restricted Area Permit, and the rules have changed more than once in the past decade, so check the current position before booking.
Traditions that continue past an administrative line. Written once at the corridor level and referenced from every region it crosses, never duplicated.
Language, Durga Puja, mustard-and-panch-phoron cooking, dried fish, jatra and bhatiali — carried by refugee families settled in North and Middle Andaman from 1949 onwards under government colonisation schemes.
How it diverges: Bengal's fish is riverine and its rice is its own; the Andamans' fish is a saltwater one and much of its rice is shipped. The technique survived the substitution intact, which is why island shorshe maach is made with snapper.
Oraon and Munda families recruited from around 1918 through the Ranchi depot, bringing Sadri and Kurukh speech, Sarhul and Karma, mandar drumming, and leaf-and-bamboo cooking.
How it diverges: On the plateau these festivals are tied to sal forest and to a specific agrarian year; in the Andamans the same rites are performed in a rainforest with no sal and no plateau seasons, which has made the community calendar more a marker of identity than of agriculture.
Tamil and Telugu speech, Pongal, temple festival forms, tamarind-and-curry-leaf fish cooking, and the idli and filter coffee that became Port Blair's default breakfast.
How it diverges: On the mainland these are majority traditions; here they are one strand among four, and the food strand crossed over into other communities' kitchens far more thoroughly than the ritual one did.
A Karen-speaking Baptist community brought from Burma in the 1920s as forest workers, with backstrap weaving, hymnody, boat building, pork-and-bamboo-shoot cooking and a rice landrace that now holds a GI.
How it diverges: The Andaman Karen became Indian citizens and their language has no institutional support here; in Myanmar the Karen are a large national community with their own script and political history. The island community is a few thousand people holding a Southeast Asian identity inside India.
People, sentenced and shipped. Convicts came from across British India from 1858 onwards, and their descendants are the islands' local-born population. The route also carried the vocabulary of Kala Pani into every north Indian language as a synonym for exile.
How it diverges: On the mainland the Cellular Jail is a memorial and a political argument; on the islands it is family history, and the descendants of the convicted are the settled population of the place.
Almost nothing, which is the finding. The Andaman and Nicobar groups sit within one union territory but their indigenous populations speak languages from unrelated families, build differently, eat differently and have no shared tradition. Administrative and settler links run across the channel; cultural ones essentially do not.
How it diverges: Nicobarese is Austroasiatic and its speakers keep pigs, carve figures and build round elevated huts; Andamanese is a family of its own and its communities have none of those. The channel is 150 km of open sea and it separates two worlds.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30