Tier 2 · Cultural region · Island Realms
Austroasiatic speech, pandanus and pig, round houses on stilts — an archipelago that belongs, culturally, to Southeast Asia.
Nicobar is the part of India that most clearly is not India. Its people speak languages of the same family as Khasi and Munda, live in circular houses raised on piles, keep pigs as wealth and eat pandanus as a staple — a food otherwise almost unknown on the subcontinent. Property is held by the tuhet, a joint family, not by individuals, and the coconut is the currency it holds. In the interior of Great Nicobar the Shompen live as hunter-gatherers with very limited contact, protected under the same regulation that closes the Andaman reserves. The 2004 tsunami struck these islands harder than anywhere else in India, killing and displacing a large share of the population and permanently altering the land itself; the Nicobar of today is a society rebuilding on ground that literally sank.
The Nicobars are the clearest case in India of a region that the map has put in the wrong place. The languages are Austroasiatic, related to Khasi and Munda and to Khmer beyond them. The houses are round and stand on piles. The boat is an outrigger. The staple starch is pandanus, boiled and pressed and dried, and the measure of a family’s standing is how many pigs it can kill at a mortuary feast. None of that comes from the subcontinent, and none of it is shared with the Andaman group across the Ten Degree Channel, whose indigenous languages belong to a family of their own.
Two things constrain what can honestly be written here. The first is the tsunami of December 2004, which killed and displaced a large share of the population, cut one island in two and dropped the southern tip of India by four metres; the society described here is one that has rebuilt since, not one that was left undisturbed. The second is that these islands are a closed tribal reserve, and the Shompen of the Great Nicobar interior are a community with limited contact and legal protection around them. What is set down here is what is documented. Where the record runs out, it stops.
Equatorial, wetter and less seasonal than the Andamans — Great Nicobar in particular takes very heavy rain and holds true evergreen rainforest. Temperatures sit around 23–31 °C with little annual variation. Both monsoons reach the islands, and the southern islands are close enough to the equator that the wind reverses with less force than further north.
Landforms
Rivers and waters
Through the year
| Season | Months | Typical | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drier months | January–April | 23–31 °C | The season of easiest sea passage, when the government ships keep closest to schedule. |
| South-west monsoon | May–September | 23–30 °C | Heavy rain and rough water. Car Nicobar has no harbour, so landing there in the monsoon means surf and a small boat, which is why the island's air link matters so much. |
| North-east monsoon | October–December | 23–30 °C | A second wet season, with squalls and occasional cyclonic weather crossing from the east. |
Best time to visitNot a practical question. The Nicobar group is a tribal reserve and is closed to tourism; entry requires specific permission from the administration and is granted for work, research or family reasons rather than for travel.
Nicobar needs a different treatment from a mainland region and the difference is worth saying outright. No dynasty ever ruled these islands and no king list exists to reconstruct. Authority here was distributed, not dynastic: property is held by the tuhet, the joint family, and not by individuals; decisions are taken in the village; and the office that colonial administrations dealt with was the village captain, chosen by the heads of the tuhets and issued a written warrant by an outside government rather than inheriting a chiefship. The rulers list below therefore carries offices and administrations, because that is what actually held authority. The written record is entirely external until the twentieth century - Sri Lankan chronicles, an Arabic sailing account, a Chola inscription, Marco Polo, then a Danish claim in 1756 that never became a working colony, an Austrian attempt in 1778, and a British annexation in 1869. The region's modern period therefore begins in 1869 rather than in 1757 or 1858, because that is the first year an administration was actually established over the group. Its ancient and medieval periods carry only what outsiders wrote down, and where the record stops, this stops.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The Nicobarese speak Austroasiatic languages, the family of Khasi in the Meghalaya hills and Mundari on the Chota Nagpur plateau, and their material culture - the pile-built round house, the outrigger, pandanus as a staple, the pig as wealth - points to mainland and island Southeast Asia rather than to the subcontinent. How and when that connection was made is not recoverable from documents. What the documents give is a series of sightings: the islands were a known landfall on the Bay of Bengal-Malacca route, named in four languages by people who mostly did not land.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 3rd-5th century CE | Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles refer to islands in this position under a name usually read as Naggadipa. |
| 9th century | A Persian and Arabic navigational account names the group Lanjabalus and describes islanders coming out in canoes to exchange coconuts and ambergris with passing ships. |
| c. 1050 CE | The Thanjavur inscription of Rajendra Chola I lists Ma-Nakkavaram among the places reached by his fleet on the campaign towards Srivijaya. The modern name Nicobar descends from this form. |
| late 13th century | Marco Polo's account carries the name Necuveran for the group, from report rather than from a landing. |
For seven centuries the Nicobars sat on a busy sea lane and were administered by nobody. Ships called for water, coconuts and pandanus and paid in iron, cloth and tobacco; iron was the standard of value and remained so into the nineteenth century. No mainland state established authority here, no tribute was collected and no fort was built. Internally the tuhet held the coconut palms and the pigs, feast-giving between villages carried obligation, and the pottery of Chowra circulated through the group under a monopoly the other islands accepted. The medieval record is thin and it is thin because it is somebody else's record.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 14th-17th century | Barter with passing shipping is recorded repeatedly - coconut, pandanus and ambergris exchanged for iron, cloth and tobacco, with iron as the measure of value. |
| 16th-17th century | Portuguese, Dutch, English and Danish vessels call at the Nancowry harbour for water and provisions; none establishes a post. |
| throughout | Authority remains with the tuhet and the village. No chiefship over the group, and no dynasty, is recorded by any observer of this period. |
The modern history of the Nicobars is a sequence of external claims, most of which failed. The Danish East India Company declared the group Danish property on 1 January 1756 and spent ninety years failing to hold it, chiefly to malaria; an Austrian venture in 1778 assumed the Danes had given up and was mistaken; Denmark abandoned the islands in 1848 and sold its rights to Britain in 1868. British administration from 1869 was thin and worked through village captains, and the deepest change of the period was not administrative but the mission and school work on Car Nicobar in the twentieth century, which gave the Nicobarese a written form of their own language. Then the occupation of 1942 to 1945, which is the islands' one experience of war.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| November 1754 - 1 January 1756 | Danish officials at Tranquebar resolve to colonise the group; settlers arrive in December 1755 and on 1 January 1756 the islands are declared Danish property under the name Frederiksoerne. |
| 1756-1848 | Repeated Danish settlement attempts, largely at Nancowry, fail through malaria; the islands are abandoned and reoccupied several times before final abandonment in 1848. Moravian missionaries posted there died in numbers. |
| 1778-1783 | William Bolts attempts an Austrian settlement in the Nancowry group on the assumption that Denmark had abandoned its claim. |
| 16 October 1868 | Denmark sells its rights in the Nicobars to Britain; formal British annexation follows in 1869 and the group is administered from Port Blair. |
| 1869 onward | The administration works through village captains and second captains, recognised by written warrant. A small station is maintained at Nancowry. Land, palms and pigs remain with the tuhet, and no revenue settlement of the mainland kind is attempted. |
| early 20th century | Anglican mission and school work on Car Nicobar; John Richardson, a Nicobarese catechist and later bishop, translates the New Testament into Nicobarese and establishes the island's schools, giving the language a written form. |
| 1942-1945 | Japanese occupation. An airfield is built on Car Nicobar and labour is requisitioned across the island in 1943; islanders are detained and interrogated on suspicion of signalling to Allied ships. Allied warships shell Japanese positions in 1945 and British administration returns in October. |
Rulers and commanders
The unit that actually holds property and power. Coconut palms, pigs and house-ground belong to the tuhet in common rather than to individuals, and its senior members decide its affairs and choose the village captain. This is why there is no dynasty here to list - the holding unit is a family, and it does not have a throne.
Seat: Every Nicobarese village
An office, not a chiefship. The heads of the tuhets choose a captain, and outside administrations - Danish, then British - recognised him by written warrant and dealt with him as the village's spokesman. The colonial paper did not create the authority, and the authority did not descend by blood.
Seat: Each village
The deputy office, standing in for the captain and sharing the dealings with the administration and with traders. Its existence is the clearest sign that these are working village offices rather than honorific titles.
Seat: Each village
Declared the islands Danish on 1 January 1756 and never succeeded in holding them. Ninety years of attempted settlement produced no working administration, a great deal of mortality from malaria, and a legal claim that was eventually sold.
Seat: Tranquebar, with stations attempted at Nancowry
Attempted an Austrian trading settlement in the Nancowry group in the belief that the Danish claim had lapsed. The venture collapsed and the Danish claim was reasserted.
Seat: Nancowry
From 1872 the Nicobars were administered from a town in the Andamans, five hundred kilometres north across a channel that separates two unrelated language families. That arrangement is the origin of the joint administrative name the islands still carry.
Seat: Port Blair
Held the islands for three years, built an airfield on Car Nicobar, requisitioned labour and food, and conducted espionage investigations in which islanders were detained and interrogated.
Seat: Car Nicobar and the Nancowry group
A Southeast Asian food system attached to India by administration rather than by cooking. The coconut is everything — food, drink, oil, fuel, roofing and the unit in which wealth and obligation are counted. Beside it stands pandanus, whose fruit is boiled and pressed into a paste that functions as a starch staple; this is the only place in India where pandanus is eaten as a staple rather than used as an aroma. Pigs are reared and eaten at feasts rather than routinely, and are held as much for their social use as for their meat. Fish comes off the reef. What is almost absent is the entire Indian spice apparatus — no masala tradition, very little souring, no dairy, and salt, chilli and smoke doing nearly all of the seasoning.
Primary cooking medium
Dominant sour agents
Spice register
Minimal by any mainland standard. Salt, chilli where it has been adopted, and the smoke of the house hearth. The flavour of Nicobarese food is coconut, pandanus and pig, and the fact that a cuisine inside India has almost no spice vocabulary is the single most useful thing to know about it. Rice, chilli and mainland seasonings have entered through the ration shop and through settler contact, and the everyday kitchen is now a mixture of the two.
Staple grains and carbs
Preservation methods
Signature techniques
The fruit of the pandanus is boiled, scraped and pressed to separate the edible pulp from the fibre, then cooked down and dried into cakes or blocks. It stores, it travels, and it is the reason a society with almost no cereal cultivation had a reliable starch. The Shompen of Great Nicobar rely on it particularly heavily and call it larop.
Also found in: Pacific island societies, where the same technique is used on the same plant
The fire sits inside the elevated hut, and fish and meat hang above it. The smoke cures the food, keeps insects out of the thatch, and preserves the roof — one fire doing three jobs, which is why the hearth is never allowed to go fully out.
Also found in: Naga Hills, Mizo-Kuki-Chin Hills
Crushed seeds and fruit of Barringtonia asiatica and related plants are put into a reef pool or a walled section of shallow water; the saponins stun fish, which are then collected by hand. It is documented in the ethnobotanical literature on the Nicobarese, it works only on enclosed water, and it is an old technique across island Southeast Asia.
Also found in: Naga Hills, Bastar, Island Southeast Asia
Pigs are raised in and around the village, owned by the tuhet rather than by a person, and killed for feasts — most importantly the mortuary feast. Their number is a public record of a family's standing, so the herd is a ledger as much as a food supply.
Also found in: Naga Hills, Khasi & Jaintia Hills, Siang & the Adi Country
Kernel dried to copra and pressed for oil, which is used for cooking, for the body and for light. The territory's virgin coconut oil, made in the Nicobarese manner and called Tavi-i-Ngaich, was registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.
Also found in: Lakshadweep, Malabar, Andaman Islands
The coconut spathe is bled for sap, drunk fresh or allowed to ferment. Toddy has a social function here as well as a nutritional one and appears at every gathering.
Also found in: Andaman Islands, Malabar, Tulu Nadu
Named dishes are the wrong unit here. Nicobarese food is a set of preparations rather than a repertoire of titles, and the published record of local dish names — which differ across at least six languages within the group — is thin enough that inventing them would do more harm than leaving them out. What follows is described by what it is, with local terms given only where they are attested.
Boiled and pressed pandanus pulp, eaten fresh or dried into keeping cakes. The traditional starch of the islands, and effectively unknown as a staple anywhere else in India.
Pig killed, singed and roasted or pit-cooked for a feast — most importantly the mortuary feast, at which the number of animals killed is the measure of the occasion. Pork is feast food and not everyday food.
Reef and lagoon fish hung above the hearth fire inside the raised house until dry. Because the fire burns most of the day anyway, preservation costs nothing extra.
Fish boiled or cooked with grated coconut and coconut milk, salted, sometimes with chilli. The commonest cooked dish, and the point at which Nicobarese and Andamanese settler cooking most resemble each other.
A cultivated yam, a form of Dioscorea alata, grown and stored on Car Nicobar and boiled or roasted. It is the subject of a body of documented traditional cultivation knowledge, which is unusual for a tuber crop anywhere in India.
Tender for drinking, soft-fleshed for eating, mature for milk and oil, sprouted for the spongy apple inside. The single most eaten thing in the islands, and the reason the coconut palm is counted, inherited and disputed like land.
Cooking banana, breadfruit and papaya from village groves, boiled or roasted. The garden crops that fill the gap between pandanus and rice.
Rice arrives by ship and through the public distribution system, and has become a daily staple over the last several decades. It is worth naming as a dish because its arrival changed the food system more than any single ingredient in the islands' recorded history.
Coconut sap, drunk fresh or fermented. Present at every gathering and closely tied to feast obligations.
Recorded in the older ethnography as feast and prestige food. Both are now protected species under the Wildlife Protection Act, and this entry is history rather than a menu.
Areca and leaf, chewed as widely here as anywhere in island Southeast Asia, and traded between islands alongside pigs and coconuts.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
There is no loom in the Nicobars and never has been; the islands weave mats, not cloth. Historical dress was a minimal waist covering, and most of what exists as visual record of it consists of colonial photographs taken in circumstances that make them poor evidence and worse illustration. Everyday dress today is the lungi, sarong, shirt and dress of the wider region, with woven and appliquéd items appearing for festival dance. The Shompen are not described here: they are a community with limited contact and legal protection, and their dress is not a subject for a heritage listing.
What is worn
A wrapped lower cloth worn with a shirt or blouse — the standard dress across the islands, and shared with island Southeast Asia rather than with mainland India.
Worn for: Everyday
Coconut-leaf and fibre ornament, headbands and body decoration worn for group dances, alongside modern cloth. Photographs of these performances are commonly published; photographs of daily life in the reserves are a different matter and are restricted.
Worn for: Ossuary feast, Christmas, canoe race and official festivals
Weaves and textiles
Pandanus and palm leaf split, cured and plaited into sleeping and floor mats. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. Mat plaiting rather than weaving is the islands' fibre craft, and the same skill produces the thatch and wall panels of the houses.
Jewellery
Dance
Danced in a ring, arms linked or on shoulders, with a unison jump and a sung line that carries the beat. It is performed at night and can continue for hours, and at a mortuary feast it is part of the rite rather than an entertainment attached to it.
Performed by: Village groups, men and women. Occasion: The mortuary feast, canoe races, Christmas and official festivals
Not a dance, but the same thing socially — village against village, crewed by young men, and the main public contest of the year. The hodi is the boat it is raced in.
Performed by: Village crews. Occasion: Festivals and public occasions
Music
Unaccompanied or drum-and-voice singing that carries the circle dance. Song texts belong to occasions — mortuary, launching, welcome — rather than to a concert repertoire.
The guitar is, by the administration's own account, the most widely played instrument in the islands, and Nicobarese-language hymn singing is the most widespread organised music. Both arrived with Anglican mission work in the twentieth century and both are now thoroughly local.
Theatre
Ritual, dance and feast carry the performative life of these islands. There is no recorded masked or narrative drama, and it is better to record the absence than to invent a form.
Crafts
The defining object of Nicobarese material culture, and the territory's first GI application. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.
Material: Island hardwood, cane lashing. Technique: A dugout hull worked from a single trunk, raised with strakes and balanced by a single outrigger on cross booms. Built without drawings, by eye and by inherited proportion, and finished for racing as well as for fishing and inter-island transport.
A building type found nowhere else in India, and the clearest single piece of evidence that this archipelago belongs architecturally to island Southeast Asia.
Material: Timber piles, cane, pandanus and palm thatch. Technique: A circular or domed house raised on wooden piles five to seven feet above the ground, entered by a movable ladder, with a single boarded floor and a hearth inside. The pile construction keeps the floor above flood, damp and vermin; the round plan sheds wind from any direction. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.
Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. The same plaiting skill produces the house walls and roof, so the craft and the architecture are one body of knowledge.
Material: Pandanus and palm leaf. Technique: Leaf split, cured and plaited in close diagonal work into sleeping mats, floor mats and panels.
Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. Note for the record that the virgin coconut oil GI belongs to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, not to Lakshadweep, which is a common confusion.
Material: Coconut. Technique: Cold or gentle extraction of oil from fresh kernel without refining or bleaching.
The best-known Nicobarese carving tradition, heavily collected by colonial officers and now scattered through European museums. It is a healing and protective practice, and describing it as decorative art misses what it is for.
Material: Wood, shell, boar tusk, cane, cloth. Technique: Carved and painted figures, often with mother-of-pearl set for eyes and tusks or a forked tongue added, made by a menluana — a ritual specialist — and set outside a house, particularly the house of a sick person. If the misfortune continued, the figure was held to have lost its power and was replaced.
Chowra is the pottery island. The administration's own account of the group records pot-making as Chowra's specialisation, and in the ethnographic literature the island's monopoly on it, and the ritual standing that came with it, is one of the most-discussed features of Nicobarese society — a division of labour by island rather than by caste or guild.
Material: Island clay. Technique: Hand-built, coiled and open-fired earthenware, made without a wheel.
Household craft, made for use rather than for sale, since there is no tourist market here.
Material: Cane, shell, coconut shell. Technique: Splitting, coiling, cutting and polishing into baskets, containers and ornament.
Sung through the night with the circle dance while the feast runs. The songs are part of the rite that closes a death, not a performance attached to it.
Sung at: The ossuary or pig feast.
Work and departure songs tied to the boat, which is the most valuable object a village makes and the one it competes with.
Sung at: Building, launching and racing a hodi.
Christian hymns sung in Nicobarese, often to guitar. Because the Bible was translated into Nicobarese and published in 1970, hymn singing became one of the main channels through which the language is used in a written, standardised form.
Sung at: Church, Christmas, community gatherings.
Songs of hospitality and obligation, in a society where feast-giving between villages and tuhets is the main way status is settled.
Sung at: Receiving visitors, inter-village feasts.
Nicobarese is Austroasiatic — the family of Khasi, Munda, Khmer and Vietnamese — which puts these islands in the same linguistic world as the Meghalaya hills and mainland Southeast Asia and gives them no relationship at all to the Andamanese languages across the Ten Degree Channel. Within the group there are at least six languages, and a speaker from Car Nicobar cannot simply be understood in the Nancowry group or on Great Nicobar. The Car Nicobarese language has by far the most speakers and, since the Bible translation of 1970 and the mission schools, the most written life. The Shompen language of interior Great Nicobar is Austroasiatic too but stands apart, and it is documented only lightly, because contact is limited by law and by the community's own practice.
Speech varieties
Written in Roman script through mission use, with a printed Bible and hymnals, and the variety most often meant when "Nicobarese" is used without qualification.
Speakers: The largest Nicobarese speech community, on Car Nicobar
Several closely related varieties around the Nancowry harbour. Nineteenth-century European linguistic work on Nicobarese was largely done here, because the harbour is where the ships stopped.
Distinct northern varieties. Chowra's linguistic separateness sits alongside its economic separateness as the pottery island.
The southernmost Nicobarese varieties, spoken by coastal villages on the two largest and least populous islands.
Reported to vary between bands to the point of limited mutual intelligibility. Linguistic and genetic studies exist but the material is thin, and the community's contact with outsiders is restricted by law.
Speakers: A few hundred, in the interior of Great Nicobar
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Tuhet | The joint family that is the property-holding unit of Nicobarese society. Coconut land, pigs and canoes are owned by the tuhet in common rather than by individuals, which is why inheritance disputes here are between families rather than within them. |
| Elpanam | The village's public complex — meeting house, lying-in house, mortuary and burial ground together. A single named institution combining functions that most societies keep apart. |
| Hodi | The outrigger canoe, dugout-hulled with a single float. Transport, fishing craft, racing boat and the territory's first geographical indication. |
| Kareau / hentakoi | The carved guardian figure set outside a house against illness and misfortune, made by a ritual specialist and replaced when it is judged to have stopped working. |
| Menluana | The ritual specialist and healer who carves the kareau and deals with the causes of illness. Recorded widely in the ethnographic literature on the group. |
| Larop | Pandanus paste, in Shompen usage — the staple starch of the interior of Great Nicobar. |
| Chatrai-hileuoi | The Nicobari mat, under the name in which it holds its geographical indication. |
| Chanvi Pati — Nyi hupul | The Nicobari hut, under the name in which it holds its geographical indication. The building type, not a single building. |
| Tavi-i-Ngaich | Nicobari virgin coconut oil, under its registered geographical indication name. |
| Ten Degree Channel | The 150 km strait separating Little Andaman from Car Nicobar, and with it two unrelated language families, two architectures and two economies. The most consequential piece of water in the union territory. |
A flat coral island ringed by villages, the district headquarters at Malacca, an air force station, and the centre of Nicobarese Christianity. It has no natural harbour, so everything historically came ashore through surf. The 2004 tsunami crossed much of the island and the air force station lost more than a hundred personnel and family members. Entry requires administration permission.
The deep sheltered anchorage between Camorta and Nancowry islands — the reason Danish, Austrian and British expeditions kept returning to the Nicobars from the eighteenth century onwards, and the site of a long sequence of failed European settlements defeated by malaria.
A small island whose people are the group's potters, and whose standing in the islands' inter-island exchange is out of all proportion to its size. Closed to visitors.
Cut into two by the 2004 tsunami and its population resettled. It is the plainest surviving physical record of what that wave did to the group, and it is not a visitor site.
Rainforest, mangrove and reef over much of the largest island, with Campbell Bay and Galathea National Parks inside it. Habitat of the Nicobar megapode, which incubates its eggs in a mound of sand and leaf litter, and of the giant leatherback turtle, which nests on the Galathea beaches. The island's interior is Shompen territory and is not open.
The southernmost point of India, about 150 km from Sumatra. Its lighthouse was damaged and the point itself subsided by roughly 4.25 metres in the 2004 earthquake — the coastline of the country was permanently redrawn in a few minutes.
A river mouth and bay on the south-east of Great Nicobar, a major leatherback nesting beach, and the site of the transshipment port and township project approved for the island in the 2020s. It is the central point of contention in the islands' current politics.
The main settlement on Great Nicobar, with a mixed population of Nicobarese and mainland settlers, reached by ship from Port Blair or by air. The practical base for anything on the island.
A central-group island with a plantation history and a mixed Nicobarese and settler population. It was among the most severely hit places in the 2004 tsunami.
| Festival | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| The ossuary or pig feast | Held periodically, not annually; timing set by the families concerned | The central rite of Nicobarese society. Some years after a burial the bones of the dead are exhumed, cleaned and reinterred, and a feast is held at which pigs are killed in numbers, the village and its guests dance through the night, and the obligations between families are settled. It is recorded in the literature under several names — Panuohonot is one that has been published — and the terminology varies across the group's languages. It is the occasion around which pigs are reared, coconuts are saved and standing is measured. |
| Christmas and Easter | December and spring | The largest fixed observances in the calendar of a population that is overwhelmingly Christian, with Nicobarese-language hymn singing, feasting and dance. Anglican mission work in the twentieth century, and the translation of the Bible into Nicobarese, are why. |
| Canoe race festivals | Mainly the drier months | Village crews race hodis against one another at public and official occasions. The competition is between villages, and the boats are built and maintained with that in mind. |
| Tsunami remembrance | 26 December | Observed across the islands each year. In a group that lost a large share of its population in a single morning, this is a fixture of the calendar rather than a commemoration in the ordinary sense. |
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| John Richardson | 1896–1978 | Bishop and parliamentarian | A Nicobarese from Car Nicobar who became an Anglican bishop, translated the Bible into Nicobarese — published in 1970 — and was nominated to the first Lok Sabha in 1952 to represent the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He was imprisoned and tortured under the Japanese occupation and lost two sons in it. Padma Shri in 1965, Padma Bhushan in 1975. No single person has shaped the modern Nicobarese record more. |
| The Nicobarese Tribal Councils | — | Community governance | The village and island councils through which customary land is held and represented, and the bodies that have publicly contested the Great Nicobar development project and the land consents attached to it. Listed collectively because that is how they act and how the record names them. |
| The Chowra potters | — | Craft | Named collectively because the record names them collectively. Chowra's monopoly on pot-making, and the standing it gave a small island inside the group's exchange system, is one of the most-cited features of Nicobarese social organisation in the anthropological literature. |
| Danish and Austrian expedition surgeons and naturalists | — | Early documentation | The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European attempts to settle the Nancowry harbour failed, mostly to malaria, but produced the first written vocabularies, sketches and descriptions of Nicobarese life. They are the earliest external record there is, and they were made by people whose settlements the islands outlasted. |
This section is short because the record is short, and padding it would be the worse error. There was no anti-colonial movement in the Nicobars: no Congress committee, no revolutionary group, no peasant or tribal rising against the British, and no Nicobarese participation in the mainland campaigns. The reason is structural rather than temperamental. Britain acquired these islands in 1868 by buying out a Danish claim, not by conquering anyone; the administration that followed was thin, worked through village captains already chosen by the tuhets, and attempted no revenue settlement and no land alienation of the kind that produced risings elsewhere. There was very little for a movement to attach itself to. What the twentieth century did bring here was war, and the community's documented experience of coercion is the Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945. Only one individual can be named from the record with confidence, and naming others would mean inventing them.
Risings and revolts
Denmark sold its rights in the group to Britain and Britain annexed the islands the following year. No Nicobarese party was consulted in the transaction and no Nicobarese authority signed it; the islands changed hands between two European states on paper.
Outcome: Administration from Port Blair, a station at Nancowry, and the formalisation of the village captain by written warrant. Land and palms stayed with the tuhet, which is why the annexation produced no dispossession of the kind that provoked risings on the mainland.
Japanese forces held the islands for three years, building an airfield on Car Nicobar and requisitioning labour across the island from 1943. Islanders were detained and interrogated on suspicion of signalling to Allied ships; John Richardson, the island's Anglican catechist, was among those imprisoned and tortured.
Outcome: British administration returned in October 1945. The occupation is the only period of organised violence against this population recorded in its documented history, and it came from an occupying army rather than from a colonial administration.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| John RichardsonCar Nicobar | 1896-1978 | Detained under the Japanese occupation, 1942-45 | Nicobarese catechist, teacher and later bishop. Translated the New Testament into Nicobarese and built the island's school network, giving the language a written standard it had not had. Under the occupation he was the community's principal intermediary with the Japanese command.Imprisoned and tortured during the occupation; two of his sons died in it. He survived. |
Nothing, and that is the accurate entry
The Nicobars are a tribal reserve and closed to tourism, so there is no retail or craft market aimed at visitors anywhere in the group. Village production is for use and for exchange within the islands.
Nicobari mats, hodi models and island craft, sold on the Andaman side
The place where Nicobari craft is actually available to an outsider, several hundred kilometres from where it is made — which is itself a fair description of how the two halves of this union territory relate.
Copra and coconut oil marketing
The co-operatives are the mechanism by which the coconut economy meets the cash economy, and they matter more to island livelihoods than any shop does.
By air
By rail
By road
By water
Getting around
The practical position for a visitor is that there is none, because there is no visiting. The Nicobar group is a tribal reserve; entry requires specific permission from the administration and is granted for work, research, official duty or family reasons. Foreign nationals are not admitted to the group's tribal areas at all, and the relaxations of the Restricted Area Permit that opened parts of the Andamans did not open these reserves.
Traditions that continue past an administrative line. Written once at the corridor level and referenced from every region it crosses, never duplicated.
Language family, and with it a set of deep structural features — Nicobarese sits with Khasi in the Meghalaya hills and with the Munda languages of the eastern plateau, not with anything else in the islands or on the coasts around them.
How it diverges: Khasi and Munda speakers live in hill and plateau country with rice, cattle and mainland neighbours; Nicobarese speakers live on coral and rainforest islands with coconut, pig and pandanus. The relationship is real and it is ancient, and there is no continuous chain of speakers between them.
Pile-built houses, outrigger canoes, pandanus staple food, leaf plaiting, betel, plant fish poison and pig feasting — a whole material and subsistence complex that is standard across island Southeast Asia and appears in India only here.
How it diverges: Sumatra lies about 150 km from Indira Point and is a different country with a different history of state formation, Islam and colonisation. The Nicobars kept the material culture and were administered into India, so the same house type and boat type sit on either side of a national border with no traffic between them.
Protestant mission work, a translated Bible, hymn singing, Roman-script literacy in an indigenous language, and church-based village organisation — the same sequence that reshaped the north-eastern hills, arriving here in the twentieth century.
How it diverges: In the north-east the churches became large institutions with political weight; in the Nicobars the population is small and the church's most durable product is the standardised written language itself.
Administration, ships, settlers and the ration supply. Almost nothing else. The two halves of one union territory have unrelated languages, unrelated architectures and unrelated food systems.
How it diverges: The Andaman group's indigenous languages form a family of their own and its settler culture is a hundred and fifty years old; the Nicobar group is Austroasiatic, Christian, canoe-and-pig based, and closed. Sharing a lieutenant governor has not made them one region.
Coconut and copra out; rice, fuel, cloth and building material in, on government ships from Port Blair and the mainland. It is a trade corridor rather than a cultural one, and it is the mechanism by which rice became a Nicobarese staple within living memory.
How it diverges: On the mainland these are ordinary commodity flows; here the shipping schedule sets what a household eats, and a delayed sailing is a food-security event rather than an inconvenience.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30