# Nicobar Islands

> 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.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/nicobar
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Island Realms
- Tier 2 cultural region: Nicobar Islands
- Indigenous scope: The chain south of the Ten Degree Channel — around twenty-two islands running down towards Sumatra, of which twelve are inhabited. The northern islands, Car Nicobar and Chowra, are low, flat and coral-fringed with open grassy ground behind the coconut belt; the central Nancowry group encloses one of the finest natural harbours in the Bay of Bengal; and Little and Great Nicobar in the south are hilly and covered in dense evergreen rainforest, rising to Mount Thullier and drained by short, fast rivers into Galathea Bay. The speech boundary is the sharpest fact about the region. Nicobarese belongs to the Austroasiatic family — the family of Khasi in the Meghalaya hills and Mundari on the Chota Nagpur plateau — and has no relation whatever to the Andamanese languages a hundred and fifty kilometres north across the channel. Inside the region there are at least six Nicobarese languages, several of them not mutually intelligible, and in the interior of Great Nicobar the Shompen speak something distinct again.
- Overlapping administrative units: Andaman & Nicobar
- Tier 3 micro-regions: Car Nicobar (Flat coral island, coconut savanna, no natural harbour); Nancowry Group (Hilly islands around a deep sheltered harbour); Great Nicobar (Rainforest island, rivers, mangrove, southernmost point of India)
- Languages: Nicobarese languages (Car, Chowra, Teressa, Central, Southern), Shompen, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali

## Terrain and eco-zones

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:** Flat coral platforms in the north — Car Nicobar and Chowra, with no natural harbour and a surf landing, The Nancowry harbour, a deep sheltered anchorage between Camorta and Nancowry islands, Hill and rainforest on Little and Great Nicobar, rising to Mount Thullier at around 640 m, Mangrove and estuary at Galathea Bay and along Great Nicobar's coast, Indira Point, the southernmost point of India, which subsided by around 4.25 m in the 2004 earthquake, Fringing coral reef, much of it uplifted or drowned by the 2004 tectonic movement depending on the island

**Rivers and waters:** Galathea, Alexandra, Dagmar and Amrit Kaur on Great Nicobar — short, fast rainforest rivers, unusual in an island chain otherwise without surface water, The northern islands have effectively none; water there comes from wells and rain

- **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 visit:** Not 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.

## History

## Foodways

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:** Coconut, in every form — fresh, milk, oil, Pork fat, at feasts

**Dominant sour agents:** Lime and wild citrus, Souring is not a marked feature of this kitchen — there is no equivalent of tamarind, kokum or kudampuli in everyday use, and saying so is more accurate than supplying one

**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:** Rice, mostly supplied rather than grown, Pandanus paste and yam function as the traditional starch staple in place of any grain — Nicobari aloo, a cultivated form of Dioscorea alata, is grown and stored on Car Nicobar

**Preservation:** Pandanus pulp boiled, pressed and dried into cakes that keep for months, Fish smoked on racks above the house hearth, which is inside the raised hut and burning most of the day, Copra dried in the sun, the islands' one export commodity, Coconut oil, pressed and stored, Live pigs, which are the most durable form of stored wealth on an island with no bank

### Pandanus paste
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

### Hearth smoking in the raised house
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

### Plant fish poison
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

### Pig rearing for feast
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

### Coconut oil pressing
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

### Toddy tapping
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

## Dishes

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.

### Pandanus paste (larop (Shompen))
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.

### Roast pig
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.

### Smoked fish
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 with coconut
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.

### Nicobari aloo
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.

### Coconut, at every stage of ripeness
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.

### Boiled banana and breadfruit
Cooking banana, breadfruit and papaya from village groves, boiled or roasted. The garden crops that fill the gap between pandanus and rice.

### Rice from the ration
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.

### Toddy
Coconut sap, drunk fresh or fermented. Present at every gathering and closely tied to feast obligations.

### Turtle and dugong
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.

### Betel quid
Areca and leaf, chewed as widely here as anywhere in island Southeast Asia, and traded between islands alongside pigs and coconuts.

**Staples:** Coconut, Pandanus pulp, Fish, Yam, banana and breadfruit, Rice, supplied

**Sweets:** No developed sweet course is recorded. Sweetness comes from ripe fruit, from coconut and from toddy rather than from a confectionery tradition.

**Street food:** None. There is no market-street food culture in the Nicobars; food is produced, cooked and shared within the village and the tuhet.

**Drinks:** Tender coconut water, Toddy, fresh and fermented, Tea and coffee, introduced

## Dress and textiles

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.

### Sarong and lungi
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 by: Men and women
Worn for: Everyday

### Festival dance dress
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 by: Village dance groups
Worn for: Ossuary feast, Christmas, canoe race and official festivals

### Nicobari mat (Chatrai-hileuoi) (GI tag)
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:** Shell and coconut-shell ornament, Boar tusk, historically, as an ornament and a marker of feast-giving, Imported glass bead and metal ornament, traded in for centuries

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Nicobarese circle dance — folk
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.

### Canoe racing — folk
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.

### Nicobarese song
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.

### Guitar and hymn
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.

### No documented theatre tradition
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.

### Hodi — the Nicobari outrigger canoe (GI registered)
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.

### Nicobari hut (Chanvi Pati — Nyi hupul) (GI registered)
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.

### Nicobari mat (Chatrai-hileuoi) (GI registered)
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.

### Tavi-i-Ngaich — Nicobari virgin coconut oil (GI registered)
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.

### Kareau and hentakoi — carved guardian figures (GI-worthy)
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 pottery (GI-worthy)
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.

### Cane, shell and coconut work
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.

## Folk songs

### Mortuary feast songs (Nicobarese)
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

### Canoe and launching songs (Nicobarese)
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

### Nicobarese hymnody (Nicobarese)
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

### Welcome and feast-giving songs (Nicobarese)
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

## Dialect and oral traditions

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.

### Car Nicobarese — Austroasiatic, Nicobaric
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.

### Central group languages — Camorta, Nancowry, Katchal, Trinket — Austroasiatic, Nicobaric
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.

### Chowra and Teressa — Austroasiatic, Nicobaric
Distinct northern varieties. Chowra's linguistic separateness sits alongside its economic separateness as the pottery island.

### Southern group — Great and Little Nicobar — Austroasiatic, Nicobaric
The southernmost Nicobarese varieties, spoken by coastal villages on the two largest and least populous islands.

### Shompen — Austroasiatic; internal position debated
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.

#### Indigenous terminology

- **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.

## Places

### Car Nicobar, Nicobar
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.

### Nancowry Harbour, Nicobar
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.

### Chowra, Nicobar
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.

### Trinket Island, Nicobar
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.

### Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, Nicobar
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.

### Indira Point, Nicobar
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.

### Galathea Bay, Nicobar
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.

### Campbell Bay, Nicobar
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.

### Katchal, Nicobar
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.

## Festivals

- **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.

## People

- **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.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **None on the islands**, Nicobar district: 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.
- **Sagarika Government Emporium**, Port Blair: 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.
- **Village and island co-operative societies**, Car Nicobar and the Nancowry group: 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.

## How to reach

**By air:** Car Nicobar (INS Baaz and the air force station); Veer Savarkar International Airport, Port Blair (IXZ)

**By rail:** None

**By road:** Roads exist on Car Nicobar, in the Nancowry group and along part of Great Nicobar's east coast, including the road running south from Campbell Bay towards Indira Point

**By water:** Government ships from Port Blair to Car Nicobar, the Nancowry group and Campbell Bay, Inter-island boats and hodis within the group, Landing on Car Nicobar is through surf, since the island has no natural harbour; Nancowry has one of the best anchorages in the Bay of Bengal

**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.

## The small things

### An Austroasiatic archipelago
Nicobarese belongs to the same language family as Khasi in Meghalaya, Mundari on the Chota Nagpur plateau, Khmer and Vietnamese. It is not related to the Andamanese languages 150 km north, and it is not related to Malay or the Austronesian languages of the islands immediately south. The nearest relatives of the speech of these islands are on the Asian mainland.

### A house built round for a reason
The Nicobari hut is circular and raised on piles five to seven feet up, entered by a ladder that can be pulled in. The height keeps the floor above damp, flood and vermin; the round plan presents no flat face to a wind from any direction; the hearth inside cures the thatch and the fish at once. The type holds a geographical indication and exists nowhere else in India.

### Pandanus as a staple
Across most of India pandanus is an aroma — kewra water, a leaf in the rice pot. Here the fruit is boiled, pressed and dried into cakes and eaten as the starch of the meal. It is the single clearest sign that this food system belongs with the Pacific and island Southeast Asia rather than with the subcontinent.

### Wealth that walks and wealth that grows
A tuhet's standing is measured in pigs and coconut palms, both owned jointly by the family rather than by individuals. Neither can be quietly liquidated: the pigs are counted at feasts and the palms are planted where everyone can see them. It is a property system with public accounting built into it.

### One island makes the pots
Chowra, a small island in the central group, is the Nicobars' potter. The administration's own account of the islands lists pottery as Chowra's occupation, and the ethnographic literature treats its monopoly on the craft — and the standing that came with it — as a defining feature of the group's inter-island exchange.

### The morning the coast moved
The earthquake of 26 December 2004 and the tsunami that followed hit the Nicobars harder than anywhere else in India. Official figures for the union territory record about 1,310 dead and around 5,600 missing, with the Nicobar group taking the greatest share. Trinket Island was cut in two, Indira Point subsided by roughly 4.25 metres, and the Car Nicobar air force station lost more than a hundred personnel and family members. The islands did not simply lose people; they changed shape.

### A bishop in the Lok Sabha
John Richardson of Car Nicobar was nominated to the first Lok Sabha in 1952 and later became an Anglican bishop — the only Anglican bishop to have sat in the lower house of a national parliament. He also produced the Nicobarese Bible, published in 1970, which gave the language its main body of standardised written text.

### Feasts that end a death
The mortuary or ossuary feast, held some years after a burial, involves exhuming and cleaning the bones, reinterring them, killing pigs and dancing through the night. The number of pigs is the measure of the occasion, and the whole rearing economy of a village is oriented towards being able to hold one. This is the fixed point of Nicobarese social life; almost everything else can be read off it.

### A figure that stops working
A kareau or hentakoi is carved by a menluana and set outside a house against illness. If the illness or misfortune continues, the figure is judged to have lost its power and is replaced. It is an object with an expiry condition rather than a permanent idol, which is why so many were available to be collected and are now in European museums.

### The Shompen, and what is not written here
Around two hundred to three hundred Shompen live in the interior of Great Nicobar, hunting, gathering, fishing and gardening, in bands whose speech varies enough that mutual intelligibility is limited. They are listed as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group and protected under the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation, 1956; entry into the reserve and photography of the community are prohibited. Beyond this, published knowledge is genuinely limited, and this entry stops where the evidence does.

### A port at a turtle beach
The Great Nicobar development project approved in the 2020s would put a transshipment port, an airport, a power plant and a township on and around Galathea Bay — a leatherback turtle nesting beach, inside a biosphere reserve, on an island whose interior is Shompen territory. Tribal councils, scientists and parliamentarians have contested the land consents and clearances attached to it, and the argument is live.

### The islands that outlasted their colonists
Denmark, Austria and Britain all tried to settle the Nancowry harbour between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; malaria defeated every attempt. The main thing those expeditions left behind is the earliest written record of Nicobarese language and life — documentation produced by settlements that failed.

## Cross-border corridors

### The Austroasiatic Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, Meghalaya, Jharkhand, Odisha

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Island Southeast Asia Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, ID, Myanmar

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Mission Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya

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.

Divergence: 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.

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

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.

Divergence: 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.

### The Copra and Ration Corridor
Spans: Andaman & Nicobar, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal

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.

Divergence: 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.

## Sources

- [District Administration, Nicobar](https://nicobars.andaman.nic.in/)
- [Andaman and Nicobar Administration — Nicobars, land and people](https://db.and.nic.in/nicobars/Profile/People.php)
- [Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 — text](https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/19311)
- [Geographical Indications Registry, India — registered GI list](https://ipindia.gov.in/registered-gls.htm)
- [Directorate of Disaster Management, Andaman and Nicobar — earthquake and tsunami record](https://ddm.andamannicobar.gov.in/earthquake)
- [Census of India — union territory and language tables](https://censusindia.gov.in/)
- [Zoological Survey of India — Andaman and Nicobar regional centre](https://zsi.gov.in/)
- [Great Nicobar Island Development Project — overview and the objections to it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Nicobar_Island_Development_Project)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._