HistoriCity: The Great Nicobar’s Past and Present

For India, the geostrategic importance of Nicobar is high as it straddles important shipping routes and is close to the Malacca Strait. Both Andaman and Nicobar were created due to a historical geological development that took place more than 100 million years ago. They are sea mountains that rose out of the ocean floor when the Indian plate collided with the Burma minor plate, which is a part of th Eurasian plate in the Cretaceous age. And this event continues to define the two archipelagos. Andaman has three hundred odd islands, some of the endangered tribes living in a few of these such as the Jarawas, the Sentinelese are categorised as having Negrito stock. Only a couple of dozen of Nicobar’s two hundred odd islands are inhabited and its Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group -the Shompen or Shamhap (Shompen is a British mispronunciation), and the Nicobarese have been studied to be of Mongoloid stock.

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The Nicobarese, is a collective name for all non-Shamhap tribes living on various islands such as Car Nicobar, Bhompuka,Teressa, and Nancowry. The Shamhap live in the interior of the Great Nicobar islands, which is why they were protected from the 2004 Tsunami which caused havoc in both Andaman and Nicobar. The Shamhap are hunter gatherers and their population is below hundred according to the 2011 Census estimates. They may have arrived from the Sumatran islands more than 30,000 years ago and settled in the Great Nicobar, the largest island covering more than 900 square kilometres of dense rain forest and a UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserve. It is in this island that the proposed container transshipment port, an airport, a 450 MVA power plant and a township are set to be built over an estimated 166 square kilometres of land. As compensation, afforestation is proposed to take place in the north Indian state of Haryana, which is at least 3,000 kilometres far.

History of the Shamhap

Being a hunter-gatherer subsistence tribe that protects its privacy fiercely little is known about them except a few crucial details such as they carry a bow and arrows, spears, hatchet in their loin-band made of tree bark, and carry a fire-drill. Hunters of pigs and other wild animals, they live in huts, use canoes, stay naked, and wear ear plugs, not unlike a few tribes in India’s remote north-east. For ornamentation the Shamhap wear bead necklaces and armbands.

The first hard evidence of the existence of the Shamhaps comes to us through a Chola inscription at Thanjavur. Dated to the early 11th century it is a record of their conquests, and in that while mentioning ‘taken’ places as a part of their subjugation of the Thallasocratic Sri Vijaya empire says, “Rajendra having despatched many ships in the midst of the rolling sea …captured…Srivijaya, with the jewelled wicket-gate adorned with the great splendor and the gate of large jewels… the great Nakkavaram , in whose extensive gardens of honey was collecting…”.

The Europeans arrive in Nicobar

The Galathea Bay at which the container port is going to be built and is likely to destroy the pristine coral reefs and a marine ecosystem that has survived for millions of years is named after a Danish survey vessel which was looking for minerals in the mid-19th century. The Danish had arrived a 100 years earlier in 1755, and the strategically located Great Nicbar island was renamed to New Denmark, while the entire archipelago was called Frederikoerne. Administered from their headquarter Tranquebar on the eastern coast of India in Tamil Nadu, the doggedness of the Danish gave up due to repeated Malarial outbreaks and they sold the territory to the British along with other Indian assets in 1868.

While the Shamhaps speak their own language, their near-total isolation has meant that the rest of the world knows little about them other than their existence and a few settlements. The first effort to study them dates to 1846. Writing about it F A Roepstorff, the British incharge of the Nicobar islands wrote in ‘The Geographical Magazine’ in 1875, “In 1846, the Danish corvette ‘Galathea’ visited the Nicobar Islands, on her voyage round the world, and among the parts explored was the river (or creek) that opens out into the Galathea Harbour, in Great Nicobar.”

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Just like present times, Roepstorf, observant and inquisitive, found that the coast-dwelling Nicobarese and the inland-preferring Shamhaps didn’t mingle much. He wrote after his visit in the 1860s, “it was quite apparent that these two peoples, although living on the same island, which is only 28 miles long, and 12 to 16 miles wide at its broadest part, were quite ignorant of each other, so that the coast-people spoke of the inland tribe as forest-demons, who lived in the trees, ate frogs and snakes, which they caught by supernatural means… ”.

Roepstorff was killed in 1883 by an Indian Havildar (Sergeant) who was about to be wrongly dismissed from the army.

Even as the spectre of irreversible change and extinction looms over the Shamhap and the ecology of Nicobar there are indications that this rarest of the rare tribe- a living link between the prehistoric past and present, have evolved.

From scientific explorations undertaken in the 21st century, it appears that Shamhaps themselves are not just a monolith. George van Driem writes citing studies by S C Chattopadhyay and A K Mukhopadhyay, “one Shompen population is a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer group ‘living in deep forests in the northern and the central parts of the island around the Galathia and the Alexandria rivers’. They barter jungle produce for food and also receive food and medical care through a government welfare programme. They hunt with spears and are reportedly unfamiliar with bow and arrow. The other Shompen group lives on the east coast of Great Nicobar, where they ‘are in better contact, especially with the local Nicobarese tribe’. The eastern coastal group speak some Lo’ɔŋ, i.e. coastal Great Nicobarese, and some of these Shompen also understand Hindi and frequent the government offices at Campbell Bay”.

Author Valay Singh’s HistoriCity is a column about a city in the news based on its documented history, mythology, and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.