Eight hundred islands, thirty-one lived-in, between three seas
India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory, whose capital Port Blair lies about 1,190 kilometres from Chennai, counts 836 islands, only thirty-one inhabited, split by the 150-kilometre Ten Degree Channel. About 8,249 square kilometres hold some 380,581 people near maritime borders with Indonesia, Myanmar, and Thailand.
Genetic work suggests Indigenous Andamanese isolation since the Middle Paleolithic more than 30,000 years ago, with archaeological traces around 2,200 years old and eleventh-century Chola contacts. The islands host India’s only tri-service Andaman and Nicobar Command. Hindi and English are official; Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu are widely spoken beside Indigenous languages.
The Andaman name may echo Handuman/Hanuman via Malay slave-trade usage; Ptolemy knew a similar form in the second century CE.
Nicobar lay on the sea lane from South India to South East Asia. In the eleventh century Rajendra Chola I used it as a staging base for raids there, and Chola inscriptions from Thanjavur dated 1050 call it Ma-Nakkavaram, great open land. Danish East India Company settlers landed on 12 December 1755 and proclaimed a colony called New Denmark, run from Tranquebar. Britain opened a penal colony on Chatham Island in 1794, and in 1858 another on Ross Island for prisoners from the rebellion of 1857.
Japan seized Port Blair on 23 March 1942 and later passed nominal control to Subhash Chandra Bose's Azad Hind. About 2,000 people in Port Blair were reportedly killed during the occupation, including 44 civilians shot at Homfreyganj in January 1944 on suspicion of spying. On 26 December 2004 waves ten metres high struck after an undersea earthquake, killing more than 2,000, yet many indigenous islanders escaped by climbing to high ground as their oral traditions taught. Indira Point on Great Nicobar is India's southernmost tip.
Source: Andaman and Nicobar Islands
