Book Excerpt: What Everyone Gets Wrong About Nicobar's Indigenous Communities

These communities have engineered a sustainable way of living – perfectly suited to a tropical island.

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Patai Takaru means “the big island” in the southern Nicobarese language. Known to most of us as Great Nicobar, it is the largest among the more forgotten and marginalised islands in the Nicobar district of the Andaman Nicobar archipelago.

Of all the attributes and unique features of Great Nicobar Island, the least studied and therefore the most misunderstood are its two indigenous communities – the Shompen and the Great Nicobarese.

The Shompen are forest dwellers, said to have "first arrived in Great Nicobar more than 10,000 years ago, and the Nicobarese, who are a more plural community than the Shompen, live along the coast of the island.

Like many Adivasi people, these communities have engineered a self-sufficient and sustainable way of living, one that is perfectly suited to a tropical island.

Newer generations are guided by their traditional values, rooted in the managing and sharing of natural resources, their belief systems that transfer their knowledge of the limits to the island resources; and their social structures, built to avoid conflict over those resources.

I have been to their villages and settlements and seen them thrive. I have also seen their lives get upturned after the 2004 tsunami and worked with them to rehabilitate their new villages. I have been a witness to the slow transformations their traditions have been subjected to and the impoverishment their younger generations continue to suffer.

As I write this piece, I am aware that 10 entities have shown interest in building a commercial transshipment port at Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, and I am taken back to where it all began for me.

I am sharing memories of my visits to the islands in the hope that these recollections will fill in some of the gaps left blank in the “holistic” development proposal for Great Nicobar.

The Beginning of My Association

I arrived in the Andaman Islands mid-1995 as a conservation corps volunteer with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) India, working alongside the Andaman Nicobar Environment Team (ANET), a former division of the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust.

I visited Great Nicobar Island in 1996, to both witness the arrival of female leatherback sea turtles at Galathea Bay beach and to meet Dr Ravi Sankaran, who had been studying the Nicobar megapode.

Accompanied by my friends Sohan Shetty and Arjun Shivsundar from the Pondicherry School of Ecology, we boarded the MV Sentinel, a rusty and slow-moving ship, and she chugged away over the beautiful blue waters, stopping at every island port that had a jetty to offload cargo and passengers.

We reached Great Nicobar after a four-day journey with other passengers and some roaches for company, and the bracing sea breeze for comfort.

Having secured our Tribal Area Permit from the Assistant Commissioner’s office, we headed to the Galathea river, the last stop of the State transport bus service.

At point 41 (the number referring to the distance in km by road from Campbell Bay), there was a narrow opening into the forest towards the creek, opposite to which was a signboard that read, Galathea Wildlife Sanctuary.

A makeshift bridge made of logs, tied with old steel cable and nylon ropes, was laid across the calmly flowing river.

A marshy littoral forest took us towards a pump house adjacent to the creek, with a small well where we would bathe and wash clothes over the coming weeks.

Beyond the creek was a patch of mangroves dominated by Nypa palms and Rhizophora stands, and further ahead was the dense evergreen jungle.

The small board along the path led to the beach where the Forest Department's sea turtle monitoring camp was located. Thatched huts and one wooden building on stilts made up the camp, which was fringed by lush Barringtonia trees. The camp was in a clearing—clean, quiet and sheltered, or so it seemed (the tsunami of 2004 showed us how naive we were).

My second and one of the most memorable visits to Great Nicobar was later that same year. I took up the task of profiling the coastal vegetation of the island for a project under the United Nations Development Programme.

After the two visits to Great Nicobar in 1996, I spent the next couple of years working in the Andamans.

In 2000, I revisited Nicobar, driven this time to understand how the Nicobarese utilise resources on the island and how one island differs from another.

As I started mapping the settlements and place names used in various villages, it became apparent that there are not one but two linguistically and culturally distinct groups of Nicobarese living in Great Nicobar.

The 2004 Tsunami and Its Aftermath

On the day of the tsunami, 26 December 2004, close to 250 members of the Nicobarese tribe living along the west coast perished. Only nine survived.

Those nine people, four men and five women, survived on their own for 35 days, after which they reached and crossed the Galathea river.

A team of us who were looking for survivors found them there and got them to Campbell Bay for treatment and to begin life anew.

These surviving members of the Great Nicobarese tribe were relocated by the Andaman administration after the tsunami to “safe ground” at Campbell Bay, the headquarters of Great Nicobar Island and the Southern Nicobar administrative division.

They continue to live in two settlements in Campbell Bay—Rajiv Nagar and New Chingenh—that were supposed to be temporary since they wished to go back to their ancestral lands. But the Andaman administration wishes to keep them there permanently for its administrative convenience.

Their appeal of 18 years to be resettled in their pre-tsunami villages has been ignored and marked by unkept promises of the Andaman & Nicobar Administration.

They have lived in desperation for nearly two decades, working as manual labour to earn an income in the shanty town of Campbell Bay. In many ways, they are strangers in their own land of Patai Takaru.

Their distress and discomfort can be seen in many of them fighting alcoholism, traumatic stress from their displacement, and a lack of acceptance by the mainlander population who have no sensibilities of their island life and identify them derogatorily as "holchu" (Nicobarese word for friend) tribal.

Many in the community suffer from depression and various other ailments caused by changed diets and sources of nutrition, and an inability to perform what they see as their normal duties, which would lead to a peaceful, happy livelihood.

The despair can be seen in the cemented pathways that lead to the “shelters” built for them by the government after the tsunami. Cracked, broken, and washed away by incessant rain, there is slush and litter on the high ground and a lifestyle eked out from ration supplies and snack shop goods in Campbell Bay.

They do not own their own coconut, areca or banana plantations and are forced to be dependent on the cash economy rather than their own, which was a mixture of barter, their own labour, and sharing of natural resources as well as produce amongst kinship groups and friends. At Campbell Bay, they are indeed strangers in their own land.

What the Port Project Gets Wrong About the Tribes

My most recent visit to the island in 2018 was to prepare a report on the stakeholders’ opinion about the development project, which was commissioned by NITI Aayog.

Together with anthropologist Dr Vishwajit Pandya, film-maker Anirban Dutta Gupta, and members of the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS), we visited and interacted with members from all communities on the island.

While the Little Nicobarese were not in opposition to the development plan, they were clear that they did not want tourism as they enjoy their peace and quiet on their own terms and were not in need of income by selling their culture and vistas to outsiders.

The Great Nicobarese on the other hand were despondent. They were looking for a better life after the devastating tsunami of 2004, and hoped that despite the enormity of loss in the lives of their kin and of their traditional coastal lands and resources, they would one day return to their ancestral lands and to the sound of waves washing their shores, to grow coconuts, rear pigs and chickens, and find fresh fish from the reefs off their village coasts.

Although the administration and project proponents have assured the Great Nicobarese that they will be relocated once the roads are built, crucial information regarding the locations of the proposed projects has been withheld.

The Nicobarese still believe they will return home. Their ancestral spirits guard those lands in their absence, and they await the time when they can return and walk those sandy beaches without having to live a life that has been forced upon them.

The government should listen to and learn from the Great Nicobarese about Great Nicobar, Patai Takaru, which is more than its naturally occurring deep drafts and its proximity to a trade route. It is the last among the few places left on the planet where people are not separated from nature but are a part of it.

It is the only home of two cultures who mastered sustainable living long before it became a catchphrase for development projects. But will the voices of the payuh of Patai Takaru matter? Or will the Great Nicobar transshipment port be built over the ashes of their ancestors?

(Extracted with permission from 'The Great Nicobar Betrayal' curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria, published by Frontierline Publication. This chapter, authored by Manish Chandi, was first published in Sanctuary Asia. Chandi is an author and research scholar specialising in oceans and coasts. He currently works in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on the interface between communities and the natural environment.)