One sweltering summer time morning in 2014, an outdated dinghy ferried me and my Nicobarese associates to the forested fringe of Kamorta Island within the central Nicobar archipelago. From there, we trekked a protracted serpentine path that wound by way of the dense wilderness, every step pulling us deeper into the guts of the island, the place the fashionable world felt distant and forgotten.
The in any other case sleepy village of Daring bustled with exercise that day. Males plucked and stacked tender coconuts, their chatter mixing with the rhythmic clatter of ladies descaling buckets of freshly caught fish. Close by, two aged villagers sat sipping toddy, their expert palms reworking a heap of tender banana leaves into intricate fum (garlands) .
Francis, the village “captain,” welcomed us with a heat smile and guided us right into a dimly lit hut. Inside, amidst an interesting assortment of kareau (ancestral statues) and henta-koi (carved ritual figures), sat Tinfus, the esteemed minluana (spirit healer) of the Nicobar. Villagers circled him, their faces a mix of curiosity and heat.
After exchanging handshakes and pleasantries, we have been garlanded with fum. One of many villagers provided us paan, whereas one other gently rubbed a paste made from coconut oil, grated coconut and fowl’s blood onto our pores and skin. Smiling, we embraced these rituals integral to the Nicobarese ceremonies of therapeutic, celebration, and heartfelt welcome.
The hyperlink snaps
To a first-time customer, the Nicobar seems like one other world, frozen in time. Within the Nicobarese cosmology, all residing and non-living entities are intricately woven right into a singular, non secular, ethical, and regenerative system. On the coronary heart of this perception system stands the paranormal minluana, a revered determine who acts because the bridge between the realms of the residing and the lifeless.
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Tinfus, his voice mushy and tremulous with emotion, started recounting how the kareau and henta-koi had lengthy stood as guardians, shielding the Nicobarese from malevolent spirits. Every phrase emerged slowly, deliberate and measured, with pauses that carried deep, unstated that means. Tinfus revealed a sorrowful reality: after the 2004 tsunami, his individuals had begun to lose religion of their ancestral knowledge. And with that loss, the very soul of Nicobar was fading into historical past. All of a sudden, his voice faltered. Tears welled up and streamed down his weathered face. We sat in deep, silent reverence because the outdated minluana wept, mourning the gradual loss of life of a centuries-old indigenous tradition.
Faultlines emerge
The Nicobar archipelago, situated within the japanese Indian Ocean, is house to the indigenous Nicobarese, who migrated to those islands round 5,000 years in the past and share a powerful genetic and cultural affinity with the Austroasiatic populations of South-east Asia. Whereas united by a shared historical past, the Nicobarese are removed from a homogeneous individuals. They’re broadly divided into 4 distinct cultural teams, every inhabiting totally different islands throughout the archipelago, with distinctive traditions and methods of life that mirror their deep connection to each the land and the ocean.
For a lot of their historical past, the Nicobarese lived in isolation, sustaining themselves by way of looking, gathering, fishing, and the rearing of pigs and poultry, moreover cultivating coconuts and areca nuts. Nevertheless, they weren’t completely proof against outdoors influences. The Nicobarese bartered native items with passing ships, bringing overseas commodities to their shores. Over the centuries, the Nicobar islands have been colonised by the Danish, Austrians, British, and Japanese earlier than changing into a part of impartial India in 1947.
The Nicobarese imagine in peaceable coexistence and egalitarianism.
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By Particular Association
In 1956, the Union authorities enacted the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Safety of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation (ANPATR, 1956), designating the complete Nicobar area (with a couple of exceptions) as a tribal reserve. This laws strictly restricts outsiders’ entry to the islands, serving to protect the indigenous cosmovision and cultural heritage.
On December 26, 2004, the Nicobarese confronted an unprecedented disaster because the Indian Ocean tsunami, triggered by the huge 9.1-9.3 Mw Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, ravaged their islands. The rupture alongside the fault line unleashed waves towering over 15 metres, and the Nicobar Islands, perilously near the epicentre, bore the total power of the catastrophe. Inside minutes, complete coastal villages have been swept away, and 1000’s of lives—together with livestock, coconut bushes, and irreplaceable cultural artefacts—have been misplaced to the ocean. Official data reported 3,449 individuals lacking or lifeless, however impartial researchers estimated the true toll to be as excessive as 10,000—practically one-third of the Nicobarese inhabitants.
Stripped of company
The federal government responded swiftly, launching large rescue, aid, and rehabilitation operations within the Nicobar. Six of the 12 inhabited islands—Trinket, Chowra, Bompoka, Little Nicobar, Kondul, and Pulomilo—have been evacuated. Practically 29,000 survivors, each Nicobarese (roughly 20,000) and non-Nicobarese, have been relocated to 118 aid camps throughout Automotive Nicobar, Nancowry, Kamorta, Katchal, Teressa, and Nice Nicobar. By mid-2005, non permanent tin shelters have been erected for the displaced Nicobarese, the place they acquired fundamental facilities, rations, aid provides, and monetary help.
After the tsunami, the Nicobarese have been desperate to return to their islands to rebuild their huts and restore their coconut plantations and kitchen gardens. Their requests for support have been modest—instruments and boats, each misplaced to the tsunami. Nevertheless, authorities officers persuaded them to remain in non permanent shelters, providing guarantees of complete aid and rehabilitation. This created confusion and ambivalence among the many Nicobarese, progressively eroding their resilience.
Whereas the federal government sought the group’s opinion on choose issues, its strategy remained predominantly top-down, diminishing the authority of tribal councils, the bedrock of Nicobarese self-governance. Elders, the custodians of conventional data and key figures inside these councils, have been sidelined in favour of youthful, much less skilled people who might talk in Hindi or English. These youthful people have been usually appointed as village captains by the native administration, however a lot of them struggled to characterize their communities successfully, and have been regularly decreased to yes-men in entrance of presidency officers.
The focus of energy within the palms of the officers stripped the Nicobarese of any actual company in shaping coverage choices. Inside just some years, this top-down support set in movement adjustments that dismantled a as soon as self-reliant, resilient, and egalitarian society, leaving it fragmented, dependent, and extra weak than ever.
A second catastrophe
The federal government provided substantial financial compensation to the Nicobarese for his or her losses. In a standard society the place cash was not often used and communal life revolved round shared assets, putting a financial worth on human lives, land, livestock, and plantations disrupted longstanding cultural norms and created new challenges.
The compensation was deposited into newly opened financial institution accounts, with the nuclear household as the premise for distribution, and males designated as family heads and first recipients. This strategy undermined the joint household system, marginalising girls who had historically loved important social and financial rights. The outcome: confusion over property possession and entitlement to compensation, sparking conflicts.
The indigenes passing by way of the forest on a dinghy. After the tsunami, giant parts of land have been completely inundated within the Nicobar.
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Ajay Saini
The sudden inflow of cash right into a largely cashless society reworked the Nicobarese into impulsive shoppers, fuelling a spree of purchases: televisions, cell phones, fridges, motorbikes, and different trendy items. Reflecting on this wave of senseless consumerism, the spokesperson for the Nancowry Tribal Council remarked:“The compensation cash turned a supply of greed and strife. To my individuals, it [money] felt like a satan, tearing aside the concord of our society. Everybody scrambled to spend it as shortly as they might, as if attempting to rid themselves of its curse.”
Earlier than the tsunami, standing within the Nicobarese society was assessed by the variety of pigs, coconut plantations, cultural artefacts, or beneficiant contributions to communal feasts. After the catastrophe, nevertheless, it shifted to the possession of shopper items. These with probably the most electronics and trendy commodities have been now seen because the wealthiest, triggering a rush of hasty, pointless, and extreme purchases that shortly depleted a lot of the compensation cash. The youthful technology, particularly, turned captivated by this profligate behaviour, rising more and more apathetic towards their group’s subsistence financial system and conventional livelihoods.
Mockingly, it was outsiders—the settlers and the encroachers—who profited most from the financial compensation given to the Nicobarese. Many had lengthy established themselves within the Nicobar and have been fast to use the group’s newfound wealth. Some took benefit by promoting items and alcohol to the Nicobarese at exorbitant costs, whereas others resorted to outright fraud. Noah, a resident of Teressa Island, recalled how a “non-tribal” man promised villagers motorbikes, jeeps, boats, and different items from Port Blair. “Nearly all of the inhabitants of Teressa trusted him and handed over enormous sums of cash,” he stated. “However the rogue robbed the villages and vanished.”
In levels, 7,001 everlasting homes, often called tsunami shelters, have been constructed throughout the Nicobar Islands for the “homeless” survivors. Contractors introduced in giant variety of labourers on short-term tribal passes for infrastructure tasks. Nevertheless, many of those employees stayed on after their passes expired, progressively encroaching upon the Nicobarese land. In 2007, alarmed by what it termed the “colonisation of the Nicobars by outsiders,” the Nancowry Tribal Council urged the native administration to halt all improvement actions within the area for a 12 months and redirect assets to fight encroachment and shield the Nicobarese land and tradition. But, twenty years after the tsunami, land encroachment stays an unresolved challenge in these islands.
The housing mission was not accomplished till 2011. In the meantime, the Nicobarese, confined to non permanent tin shelters with little alternative for livelihood, battled idleness and a rising sense of purposelessness. Along with hefty financial compensation, they acquired free rations for 5 years. The trauma attributable to the tsunami, mixed with the abrupt disruption of their conventional lifestyle, inactivity, and adjustments in meals habits, left many grappling with melancholy.
Looking for consolation, a number of turned to Indian-Made Overseas Liquor (IMFL), which, regardless of its prohibition underneath the ANPATR, turned extensively accessible by way of non-indigenous settlers, encroachers, and a complicit native administration. The surge in alcohol consumption additional debilitated the Nicobarese group by draining funds, eroding well being, and fuelling conflicts. When IMFL turned unaffordable, many addicts turned to junglee, a hazardous hooch launched to them by non-tribal labourers. This poisonous brew shortly gained recognition throughout the islands, deepening the group’s well being disaster.
The tsunami shelters, constructed at an infinite price, turned out to be an ill-conceived, culturally-insensitive housing resolution. Earlier than the tsunami, the Nicobarese villages have been sometimes situated alongside the coastlines, with beehive-shaped huts on stilts, ingeniously crafted from native supplies to swimsuit the tropical local weather. These elevated buildings protected inhabitants from reptiles, bugs, and monsoon water, whereas partitions and flooring made from break up bamboo ensured pure air flow. With thatched roofs and a seaward orientation, these idyllic huts have been far more than easy shelters: they have been a mirrored image of the Nicobarese lifestyle, harmoniously related to the land, the forest, the ocean, and their non secular beliefs.
Destruction in Hadoos port in Andaman Island after it was hit by the 2004 tsunami.
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PTI
The tsunami shelters, nevertheless, have been constructed at greater altitudes, removed from the coasts. Constructed with imported supplies—prefabricated buildings, concrete blocks, iron pillars, metal columns, and corrugated galvanised iron sheets—these shelters consisted of two rooms with an connected kitchen. Organized in a dense, colony-style structure, the shelters severed the group’s deep connection to the ocean and made it difficult to maintain important practices, like pig domestication, which have been important to their weight loss program and competition celebrations. Furthermore, the Nicobarese discovered themselves unable to restore or preserve these shelters with out exterior help.
In a poorly conceived transfer, the federal government dismantled the Nicobarese joint households, dispersing them into a number of households, every assigned a shelter of its personal. This fragmentation of the joint household system—the taproot of the Nicobarese social and financial life—triggered the collapse of indigenous social establishments. The group’s close-knit assist networks, which had lengthy offered power and safety, have been shattered, leaving the indigenes remoted and weak when solidarity was most wanted. A resident of Makachua village echoed this sentiment thus: “As of late, it seems like nobody cares about anybody else. After the tsunami, every little thing modified—individuals’s hearts turned to stone, and their minds grew detached.”
As self-sufficiency gave solution to dependency, the once-vibrant Nicobarese tradition—central to their id—started to wither underneath the forces of modernisation, market pressures, unchecked consumerism, and exterior management. Communal practices that had lengthy sure the group collectively—rituals, feasts, festivals, labour-intensive livelihoods, and their distinctive cosmovision—shortly light into obscurity. With their traditions and cultural anchors eroding, the Nicobarese grew more and more estranged from their group and from the land, forests, and sea that had sustained them for millennia.
With their compensation cash lengthy gone and restricted prospects for work in Nicobar, many indigenous individuals migrated to Port Blair. There, they now work as building employees, wage labourers, helpers, and safety guards—and sometimes undergo exploitation, racial discrimination, and violence by the hands of the dominant non-indigenous communities.
Crammed into tsunami shelters
Tinfus, the revered minluana who handed away in September 2018 on the age of 80, had prophesied that the tsunami support would spoil generations of the Nicobarese. Whereas the culturally-insensitive, top-down strategy to assist impacted all of the islanders, some have borne its penalties much more severely.
Communities from Trinket, Bompoka, Kondul, and Pilomilo suffered devastating losses when their islands have been declared uninhabitable, forcing them to relocate to different islands the place everlasting tsunami shelters have been constructed. Nevertheless, it was the Payuh, the Nicobarese of southern Nicobar who endured the worst. Most of their villages have been completely uprooted, and their ancestral lands, regardless of their objections, have been later appropriated for large-scale improvement and conservation tasks.
Round 1,200 Nicobarese at present reside on Nice Nicobar (Patai Takaru) and Little Nicobar (Patai t-bhi) islands, with the previous additionally house to the Shompen, a very weak tribal group whose inhabitants stood at 245 in 2022. Earlier than the tsunami, the Nicobarese inhabited over 30 villages scattered throughout southern Nicobar. Nevertheless, following the catastrophe, the federal government relocated the Nicobarese of Nice Nicobar to aid camps and non permanent shelters at New Chinghen and Rajiv Nagar (Campbell Bay, Nice Nicobar). In 2011, towards their will, they have been resettled in everlasting tsunami shelters at these websites, rendering them internally displaced peoples (IDPs). Over the previous twenty years, stricken by restricted livelihood alternatives and alien illnesses, these indigenes have made repeated however futile appeals to the federal government to return to their ancestral lands.
“Earlier than the tsunami, standing within the Nicobarese society was assessed by the variety of pigs, coconut plantations, cultural artefacts, or beneficiant contributions to communal feasts. After the catastrophe, nevertheless, it shifted to the possession of shopper items.”
In 2020, the federal government introduced a Rs.72,000-crore mega-project on Nice Nicobar, an island spanning roughly 910 sq. km, with round 850 sq. km designated as a tribal reserve. The mission, which features a port, airport, energy plant, and township, plans to cowl 244 sq. km (166.10 sq. km in Section 1)—and is promoted as important for “holistic improvement.” Nevertheless, the mega-project has confronted robust opposition from the island’s indigenous communities, who view it as a land seize disguised as improvement, threatening their well-being and really existence.
In January 2021, the federal government denotified the Galathea Bay and Megapode Wildlife Sanctuaries to pave the best way for the mission. By October 2022, the Andaman and Nicobar administration issued notifications designating the complete Meroë Island (2.73 sq. km, together with its surrounding marine space) and Menchal Island (1.29 sq. km), together with a 13.75 sq. km space (together with 6.67 sq. km of water space inside the baseline system) on Little Nicobar (140 sq. km), as coral, megapode, and leatherback turtle sanctuaries, respectively. This was performed with out consulting the Little and Nice Nicobar Tribal Council or addressing the considerations raised within the council’s letter dated August 2022.
Unravelling a world
Meroë (Piruii) and Menchal (Pingaeyak)—formally categorised as “uninhabited” in authorities data—are essential to the Nicobarese’s sustenance and non secular well-being. Each islands are sacred to the Nicobarese: Menchal is believed to be underneath the non secular realm of Pingaeyak (a spirit stated to inhabit the island), whereas Meroë is considered the house of a legendary islander group. By way of their non secular beliefs, stewardship practices, and established norms and taboos round visitation and useful resource utilization, the group has safeguarded these islands for millennia.
A Nicobarese girl from Little Nicobar stated, her voice heavy with sorrow: “Our customized dictates that when kids flip ten, they’re taken to Menchal Island and launched to the spirit (Pingaeyak) by way of prayers and rituals. My youngster has simply turned ten, and I’m but to introduce her to the spirit.” However now, with the island designated as a megapode sanctuary and entry restricted “within the nationwide curiosity,” she wonders: What’s going to grow to be of this sacred custom? How can their historical customs survive when the very land that sustains them is now not accessible?
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The Nicobarese share a deep non secular and private reference to their land, one which transcends all else. For them, the lack of land is extra devastating than the loss of life of a liked one. Of their worldview, loss of life will not be an finish however a transition to the realm of spirits, the place life continues in one other kind, providing safety to their tangible world. Nevertheless, the lack of land strikes on the very core of their id, tradition, and existence. It isn’t merely the lack of territory; it’s the unravelling of their complete world—the true loss of life.
Within the aftermath of the tsunami, the Nicobarese have been resolute of their willpower to rebuild their islands, drawing on native assets, conventional data, and their very own abilities, all whereas preserving their cultural id. Nevertheless, exterior support suppliers shortly took management, sidelining this grassroots strategy to restoration. Over the course of my 15 years of analysis engagement within the islands, the Nicobarese have constantly expressed deep remorse over their dependence on tsunami support, which, ultimately, dismantled the very socio-cultural material of their society.
Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nicobarese discovered themselves as soon as once more at a crossroads. Regardless of being at their weakest, they selected to rely completely on themselves, mounting a community-driven response within the Central Nicobar, grounded within the power of their tradition and traditions. Remarkably, they suffered no casualties, whereas the remainder of India and the world endured unimaginable horrors throughout the devastating second wave.
As we mark the twentieth anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami the story of Nicobar presents vital classes—how top-down, culturally-insensitive tsunami support not solely failed to assist however turned a catastrophe in itself, ravaging the very communities it sought to guard.
Ajay Saini teaches on the Indian Institute of Expertise Delhi. He works with distant indigenous communities.
