Cotton lungi and shirtMen
The working dress of fishermen, farmers and jetty labour across every settler community, common to Bengali, Tamil and Adivasi households alike.
Worn for: Everyday
Andaman Islands · Island Realms
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.
What is worn
Saree, worn Bengali and Tamil fashionWomen
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
Karen woven clothKaren men and women, Mayabunder area
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
Sadri and Adivasi festival dressChota Nagpur Adivasi settler communities
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
Karen backstrap weavingWebi and the Karen villages near Mayabunder
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 communityShell and coral ornament made for the visitor market, much of it from protected species and best avoided
Traditional dress of Andaman Islands — garments, handloom weaves, GI-tagged textiles and jewellery. (5)