Island Tribes of India: Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep

India’s mainland gets most of the attention in any discussion of tribal communities, but two island territories in opposite seas hold some of the most distinctive human stories in the country. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea are separated by thousands of kilometres, yet both are shaped entirely by their geography. Isolation, ocean currents and limited land have produced tribal groups found nowhere else on earth, some of whom remain almost completely cut off from the outside world even today.

The Andaman Islands: home to the Negrito tribes 🔗

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands form an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, lying southeast of the Indian mainland. The Andaman group is home to four indigenous tribes classified as Negrito: the Great Andamanese, the Jarawa, the Onge and the Sentinelese. Anthropologists believe these communities descend from some of the earliest human populations to reach South and Southeast Asia, with researchers estimating their ancestors arrived from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Their short stature, dark skin and tightly curled hair are the physical traits that gave the group its Negrito classification, and scholars have long noted cultural parallels with the Semang of Malaya and the Aeta of the Philippines, other isolated Negrito populations of the region.

All four Andaman tribes are today classified among the most vulnerable communities in the country. Populations are extremely small, and each group’s survival is closely tied to how much contact it has, or has not, had with outsiders. The Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island, remain the most isolated. According to the Andaman and Nicobar administration, they are possibly the world’s only surviving Paleolithic community with no sustained contact with any other group, and they continue to resist outside visitors.

A foraging way of life 🔗

Traditionally, the Great Andamanese lived as foragers. Hunting, gathering and fishing formed the backbone of their subsistence, and their diet drew heavily on the coastal ecology around them, shellfish, fish, wild pig and forest produce such as roots, honey and tubers. This lifestyle was closely tuned to the rhythms of the sea and forest, requiring detailed knowledge of tides, seasons and animal behaviour rather than any form of settled agriculture.

Contact, decline and rehabilitation 🔗

Sustained contact with settlers changed this way of life dramatically, and not for the better. Colonisation brought new diseases to which the Andamanese had no immunity, and populations collapsed as a result. The Great Andamanese, once made up of around ten distinct tribal groups, were reduced to a fraction of their original numbers within a few generations of British colonisation.

Migration to the islands added further layers of change. Settlers arrived from the Indian mainland, and the colonial administration also used the islands as a place of deportation. Groups such as the Mopla from Kerala, transported after the Malabar uprisings, and the Karen from Burma, brought in as labourers, were resettled in the Andamans, adding new communities to the islands’ demographic mix. Over time, the surviving original inhabitants were moved into designated colonies. This shift meant a move away from pure foraging toward cultivation and poultry farming, changes that were introduced largely as part of rehabilitation policy rather than organic cultural evolution.

The Nicobar Islands: Mongoloid heritage and horticulture 🔗

South of the Andamans lies the Nicobar group, a cluster of 22 islands with a very different tribal history. The two communities here, the Nicobarese and the Shompen, belong to the Mongoloid ethnic stock, distinct from the Negrito populations further north. Most of the inhabited Nicobar islands are home to the Nicobarese, while the Shompen live exclusively on Great Nicobar, the southernmost and largest island in the group.

The Nicobarese: coastal horticulturists 🔗

Unlike the historically foraging Andamanese, the Nicobarese have long practised horticulture. High rainfall across the islands supports the cultivation of coconut, areca nut and a range of garden crops, which form the backbone of their economy and diet. According to the Andaman and Nicobar district administration, the Nicobarese today number well over 25,000 and live in large permanent villages close to the coast, keeping pigs and poultry alongside their horticultural activities. Fishing and hunting supplement this largely plant-based economy, and communities on islands such as Chowra have historically specialised in craft production, including pottery and large seagoing canoes.

The Shompen: the reclusive forest dwellers 🔗

Great Nicobar’s interior forests are home to the Shompen, a small, semi-nomadic community that has kept its distance from both the Nicobarese coastal population and mainland settlers. Population estimates vary, but recent reporting places their numbers at only a few hundred individuals, making them one of the smallest tribal groups in the country and one recognised by the Indian government as a particularly vulnerable tribal group. The Shompen depend on a mix of hunting, gathering and limited horticulture, and their relationship with the surrounding forest remains far less documented than that of neighbouring communities, largely because sustained contact has been minimal even in recent decades.

Inter-island exchange as a survival strategy 🔗

One distinctive feature of Nicobarese society is the practice of exchange between islands. Because resources are unevenly distributed across the archipelago, with some islands better suited to particular crops or crafts than others, inter-island trade has historically allowed communities to access goods they could not produce locally. This exchange network functioned as a form of economic cooperation long before the introduction of modern markets, and it remains an important part of how anthropologists understand social organisation across the Nicobar group.

Lakshadweep: a different island story 🔗

On the opposite side of the subcontinent, in the Arabian Sea, lies Lakshadweep, India’s smallest union territory by land area but the one with the highest proportion of tribal population in the country. Unlike the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep has no original, historically isolated inhabitants. Its people migrated from the neighbouring mainland, primarily the Kerala coast, over past centuries, and the population is ethnically similar to coastal Malayalis, with a documented history of mixed Indian and Arab ancestry.

Language, religion and identity 🔗

Malayalam is spoken across nearly every inhabited island in Lakshadweep, tying the territory closely to Kerala’s linguistic and cultural sphere. The exception is Minicoy, the southernmost island, where residents speak Mahl, a dialect of Dhivehi written in a script related to that used in the Maldives. This linguistic difference reflects Minicoy’s closer geographic and historical proximity to the Maldivian archipelago compared to the rest of Lakshadweep. According to the Lakshadweep administration, the entire indigenous population of the territory has been classified as Scheduled Tribes on account of its historical economic and social backwardness, a status that shapes access to welfare schemes and reservations even today.

Fishing and coconut cultivation: the economic backbone 🔗

With very little cultivable land and a coral-based ecology unsuited to most crops, Lakshadweep’s economy rests on two pillars: fishing and coconut cultivation. Tuna fishing in particular is central to livelihoods across the islands, and coconut-based products such as copra remain a key export to the mainland. On Minicoy specifically, fishing has become the dominant source of income, supported by unusually productive waters around the island. This narrow economic base defines much of daily life in the territory, and it also makes island communities especially sensitive to changes in marine ecology and climate.

Why these island communities matter to anthropology 🔗

Taken together, the Andaman, Nicobar and Lakshadweep communities illustrate how geography alone can produce radically different tribal histories within the same country. Isolation preserved some of the oldest continuously surviving human populations in the Andamans, agricultural ecology shaped a horticultural, exchange-based society in the Nicobars, and coastal migration created a Muslim, Malayalam-speaking tribal population entirely unlike either. Studying these differences side by side is a useful reminder that “tribal India” is not one story but many, each shaped by its own environment, contact history and adaptation.

What do you think? Does isolation alone explain why some island tribes, like the Sentinelese, have resisted contact for so long, or do other factors play a bigger role? And should welfare and development policy for very small, vulnerable groups like the Shompen look different from policy designed for larger tribal populations elsewhere in India?

References

1. https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/175
2. https://northmiddle.andaman.nic.in/people-cultures/
3. https://db.and.nic.in/nicobars/Profile/People.php
4. https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/indias-plans-to-develop-great-nicobar-island-threatens-its-unique-wildlife-and-indigenous-peoples/
5. https://lakshadweep.gov.in/islands/
6. https://www.britannica.com/place/Lakshadweep