Andaman Islands · Island Realms
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.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Andaman Islands, from classical forms to village traditions. (13)