# Andaman Islands

> 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.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/andaman
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Island Realms
- Tier 2 cultural region: Andaman Islands
- Indigenous scope: A chain of some three hundred forested islands running north to south on a drowned mountain arc that continues the Arakan Yoma of Myanmar and reappears south of the sea as Sumatra. The land is hill and evergreen rainforest — Saddle Peak reaches 732 metres — cut by tidal creeks, fringed by mangrove and, on the east, by coral. It is closer to the Ayeyarwady delta than to any Indian coast, and its terrestrial life is Southeast Asian rather than peninsular. Two speech worlds sit on it that have nothing to do with each other. The older is the Andamanese language family, an isolate group with no demonstrated relative anywhere on earth, spoken by the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese. The newer is a creolised Hindi built in the last century and a half out of Hindi, Bengali and Tamil, which is now the common tongue of everyone else on the islands. The region's southern limit is the Ten Degree Channel: south of that water the language family changes to Austroasiatic and the region becomes Nicobar.
- Overlapping administrative units: Andaman & Nicobar
- Tier 3 micro-regions: North & Middle Andaman (Evergreen and semi-evergreen rainforest, mangrove creek); South Andaman & Port Blair (Harbour, low hill forest, fringing reef); Little Andaman (Flat rainforest island, oil-palm plantation, surf coast); Protected Tribal Reserves (Closed rainforest, coast and reef)
- Languages: Andaman Creole Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Sadri and Kurukh, Karen, Great Andamanese, Jarawa and Onge

## Terrain and eco-zones

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:** A north–south hill spine of Tertiary sandstone and shale, the drowned continuation of the Arakan Yoma, Saddle Peak on North Andaman, 732 m, the highest point in the territory, Tidal creeks and mangrove forest along most of the eastern coast, navigable by boat far inland, Fringing coral reef, best developed off the east and around the offshore islands, Limestone caves and mud volcanoes on Baratang, where gas seeping through clay pushes up cold grey cones, Barren Island, an active volcano about 135 km north-east of Port Blair, uninhabited

**Rivers and waters:** Kalpong on North Andaman, the only river in the territory and the site of its only hydroelectric project, Otherwise tidal creeks rather than rivers — salt water running inland through mangrove, which is how timber and people moved before the roads

- **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 visit:** Mid-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.

## History

## Foodways

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:** Coconut oil and coconut milk, common to every community, Mustard oil, in the Bengali and Bihari kitchens, brought in by the sack, Refined vegetable oil, which is what most households now actually fry in

**Dominant sour agents:** Tamarind, in the Tamil and Telugu kitchens, Lime, universally, Green mango and green tomato, Kachcha aam and lemon in Bengali fish preparations

**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:** Rice, both shipped and locally grown in North and Middle Andaman, Andaman Karen Musley rice, a landrace grown by the Karen settlements and registered as a geographical indication in December 2024, Wheat flour, imported

**Preservation:** Sun-dried and salted fish, the Bengali shutki tradition carried to a different set of fish, Smoke-drying over a low fire during the monsoon, when nothing dries in the sun, Coconut oil pressed and stored as the household fat, Betel nut and leaf, dried and stored, chewed almost universally, Pickling in mustard oil and lime, following mainland practice

### Coconut-milk fish curry
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

### Mustard-paste fish
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 drying and salting
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

### Leaf and bamboo cooking
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

### Burmese-derived Karen cooking
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

### Betel and areca preparation
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

## Dishes

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.

### Coconut fish curry
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.

### Shorshe maach, Andaman version
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.

### Meen kuzhambu, Andaman version
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.

### Crab curry
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.

### Fried fish
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.

### Prawn and squid preparations
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.

### Shutki — dried fish
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.

### Pork with bamboo shoot
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 and leaf-wrapped preparations
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.

### Idli, dosa and filter coffee
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.

### Grilled lobster and tandoori fish
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.

### Coconut water and tender coconut
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.

### Andaman Karen Musley rice
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:** Rice, Fish, fresh and dried, Coconut and coconut milk, Mud crab, prawn and squid, Banana, papaya, tuber and jackfruit from homestead gardens

**Sweets:** Bengali milk sweets, made with imported milk powder as often as with milk, Coconut and jaggery preparations, Payasam and payesh, according to which household is cooking

**Street food:** Fish fry and fish cutlet at Aberdeen Bazaar, Idli, dosa and vada in the morning, Egg rolls and chops, from the Bengali side of the bazaar, Paan, folded to order, at almost every corner

**Drinks:** Tender coconut water, South Indian filter coffee, Strong sweet tea

## Dress and textiles

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.

### Cotton lungi and shirt
The working dress of fishermen, farmers and jetty labour across every settler community, common to Bengali, Tamil and Adivasi households alike.
Worn by: Men
Worn for: Everyday

### Saree, worn Bengali and Tamil fashion
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 by: Women
Worn for: Everyday and formal

### Karen woven cloth
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 by: Karen men and women, Mayabunder area
Worn for: Everyday and church

### Sadri and Adivasi festival dress
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 by: Chota Nagpur Adivasi settler communities
Worn for: Sarhul and Karma

### Karen backstrap weaving
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:** Gold, worn as mainland practice dictates for each community, Shell and coral ornament made for the visitor market, much of it from protected species and best avoided

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Karma and Jhumar — tribal
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.

### Nicobari dance, performed at Port Blair — folk
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.

### Bengali and Tamil devotional and festival forms — folk
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.

### Andaman Creole Hindi song and film 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.

### Karen hymnody
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.

### Community repertoires
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.

### Jatra and community drama
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.

### Padauk wood craft (GI registered)
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.

### Andaman and Nicobar coconut (GI registered)
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.

### Shell and coral craft
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.

### Cane and bamboo work
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.

### Karen boat building (GI-worthy)
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.

### Coconut shell craft
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.

## Folk songs

### Karma songs (Sadri)
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

### Karen hymns (Karen)
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

### Bhatiali and Bengali boat song (Bengali)
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

### Pongal and temple songs (Tamil)
Harvest and devotional songs kept up by Tamil settler families, largely unchanged from the mainland forms.
Sung at: Pongal and temple festivals

### Andamanese song (Great Andamanese)
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

## Dialect and oral traditions

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.

### Andaman Creole Hindi — Creole, Hindi-lexified with Bengali and Tamil input
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.

### Great Andamanese — Great Andamanese, an independent language family
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.

### Jarawa and Onge — Ongan
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.

### Sentinelese — Presumed Andamanese; unclassified
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.

### Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sadri and Karen — Indo-Aryan; Dravidian; Sino-Tibetan
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

- **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.

## Places

### Cellular Jail National Memorial, South Andaman
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

### Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep (Ross Island), South Andaman
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.

### Swaraj Dweep (Havelock) and Radhanagar Beach, South Andaman
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.

### Shaheed Dweep (Neil), South Andaman
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.

### Baratang — mud volcanoes and limestone caves, South Andaman
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.

### Mount Manipur (Mount Harriet), South Andaman
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.

### Chidiya Tapu, South Andaman
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

### Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park, Wandoor, South Andaman
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.

### Barren Island, North and Middle Andaman
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.

### Saddle Peak National Park, Diglipur, North and Middle Andaman
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

### Webi and the Karen villages, North and Middle Andaman
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.

### Little Andaman (Hut Bay), South Andaman
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.

### North Sentinel Island, South Andaman
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.

## Festivals

- **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.

## People

- **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.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **Sagarika Government Emporium**, Port Blair: 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.
- **Aberdeen Bazaar**, Port Blair: 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.
- **Junglighat fish landing jetty**, Port Blair: 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.
- **Cottage industries and rural craft outlets**, Port Blair, Rangat and Mayabunder: 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.

## How to reach

**By air:** Veer Savarkar International Airport, Port Blair (IXZ)

**By rail:** Chennai Central and Kolkata

**By road:** The Andaman Trunk Road runs north from Port Blair to Diglipur via Baratang, Rangat and Mayabunder, crossing creeks by vehicle ferry and passing through the Jarawa reserve, where traffic moves in escorted convoy and stopping, interacting or photographing is prohibited, Local road networks on each settled island, generally single-lane and slow

**By water:** Passenger ships from Chennai, Kolkata and Visakhapatnam to Port Blair, taking roughly 60 hours, Government and private ferries from Port Blair to Swaraj Dweep and Shaheed Dweep, Government ships to Little Andaman, Diglipur, Rangat and the northern settlements, Vehicle ferries across the creeks on the Andaman Trunk Road

**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.

## The small things

### A language family with no relatives
The 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 ended
Boa 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 law
The 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 reserve
The 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 diagram
The 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 held
Japanese 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 office
The 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 dated
Andaman 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 mainland
Barren 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 twice
Bose 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 it
The 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 2024
Until 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.

## Cross-border corridors

### The East Bengal Resettlement Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, West Bengal

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Ranchi Labour Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Tamil and Telugu Colonisation Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Karen Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, Myanmar

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Penal Transportation Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, West Bengal, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Ten Degree Channel
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar

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.

Divergence: 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.

## Sources

- [Andaman and Nicobar Administration — official portal](https://www.andaman.gov.in/)
- [Cellular Jail National Memorial](https://cellularjail.com/)
- [Andaman and Nicobar Police — entry rules for foreign tourists](https://police.andaman.gov.in/index.php/en/public-information/foreigners/for-foreign-tourist.html)
- [Directorate of Disaster Management, Andaman and Nicobar — earthquake and tsunami record](https://ddm.andamannicobar.gov.in/earthquake)
- [Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 — text](https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/19311)
- [Census of India — union territory and language tables](https://censusindia.gov.in/)
- [Geographical Indications Registry, India — registered GI list](https://ipindia.gov.in/registered-gls.htm)
- [Zoological Survey of India — Andaman and Nicobar regional centre](https://zsi.gov.in/)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._