The Sentinelese have refused the outside world for centuries, and India protects that choice
On a small, reef-ringed island in the Bay of Bengal live the Sentinelese, one of the most isolated peoples on Earth. They hunt with bows, push canoes with poles, and have met nearly every approaching boat with arrows. India bars anyone from coming within about 5 kilometres, and armed patrols enforce the rule.
North Sentinel Island lies roughly 64 kilometres west of Port Blair and covers about 60 square kilometres of beach, coastal woods and dense evergreen forest. Its people are hunter-gatherers who spear land animals, gather mud crabs and shellfish, and build small huts on four poles with sloping leaf roofs. They are not known to farm. Their only known metalworking is cold forging for tools and weapons, and their arrowheads are larger than those of neighbouring tribes. Their language is unclassified, and neighbouring Jarawa speakers cannot understand it.
Nobody knows how many there are. Census figures have swung wildly, partly because counts are made from boats offshore, and a 2016 government handbook estimated 100 to 150. Researchers circling the island in 2014 saw 16 people and described them as very muscular, with no sign of obesity.
The first recorded glimpse came in 1771, when a survey ship saw many lights on shore. In 1867 the wrecked merchant ship Nineveh put its crew on the beach, where islanders attacked them until a Royal Navy party arrived. In 1880 colonial officer Maurice Portman seized six islanders; the two adults soon died of disease and the children were hurriedly returned with gifts. A 1967 expedition found a wooden board of 64 squares studded with stones and shells, of uncertain origin.
Peaceful contact finally came on 4 January 1991, through anthropologist Triloknath Pandit's team, and Madhumala Chattopadhyay made later contact, but Indian visits stopped in 1997. The islanders accepted aluminium pots left by National Geographic in 1974, yet they remain firmly apart, and in 2018 they killed an American missionary who landed illegally.
Source: Sentinelese
