At first glance, Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, looks pretty much like any village square in Kerala — uneven terrain, lush trees, modest shops, and the ubiquitous chai and meat shop at every junction. Even the buses are painted red and pale yellow, like Kerala’s State buses. Move a little away from the central square and the differences start to emerge. For one, the sea is never far away.
The archipelago is dotted with hints of its murky past and subsequent revival — it towers over you particularly at ‘Kala Pani’ or Cellular Jail, the solitary confinement prison to which political dissenters were exiled by the British. The three-storeyed structure, shaped like a seven-spoke wheel with a watch tower in the centre, has withstood an earthquake that destroyed four wings and now, serves as a reminder of its grim past.
Once home almost exclusively to indigenous tribes, the island is today a potpourri of cultures, and has immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar, families of convicts and the armed forces, and those who migrated as part of the Indian government’s efforts to promote agriculture in the islands in the first few decades after Independence.
ADVERTISEMENT
Experience the exotic
As focus shifted from agriculture, the island too evolved, making infrastructure development and tourism its priorities. Along the way, commercial operators realised that nothing sells as much as the “experience of the exotic”, resulting in a major tussle between tour companies and human rights groups batting for the Jarawas.
The Jarawas are one of the six main tribes of indigenous people inhabiting the islands since at least the 1850s. When the British came, the Jarawas, along with the Sentinelese, refused to fraternise with them. As years passed, the Sentinelese continued to isolate themselves from others. Meanwhile, the Jarawas’ resistance to the outside world weakened, partly due to the construction of the Grand Andaman Trunk Road that connects Port Blair with Diglipur, the largest town in North Andaman, and cuts through Jarawa territory.
ADVERTISEMENT
Today, at the entrance of the Jarawa Reserve Forest checkpoint, around 60 km by road from Port Blair, there is an information board with a list of dos and don’ts, which, among others, forbids tourists from stopping their vehicles in the area. Until not so long ago, my guide tells me, “human safaris” were all too common.
The connectivity conundrum
On Havelock Island, cut off from the main island if not for the ferries that operate less than half a dozen times a day, Internet and Wi-Fi connectivity is frustrating slow. Unlike the tower-to-tower connectivity in the mainland, the islands depend on a satellite link with a limited bandwidth. “It’s like Mumbai traffic,” jokes a guide at the government help centre. “Thousands of cars on a single, narrow road.” A new project to lay submarine cables from Chennai to Port Blair is in the offing.
As I walk out of the help centre in search of a restaurant, a chalk board outside a cafe catches my eye. It says: ‘We don’t have Wi-fi. Talk to each other. Read a book. Pretend it is 1995.’ I step in and do just that.