Nicobar Islands · Island Realms

The small things

An Austroasiatic archipelagoNicobarese 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 reasonThe 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 stapleAcross 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 growsA 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 potsChowra, 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 movedThe 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 SabhaJohn 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 deathThe 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 workingA 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 hereAround 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 beachThe 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 colonistsDenmark, 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.

Small local details of Nicobar Islands — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)