Why Were The Andaman Islands So "Remote"?
The Andamans were situated between major Indian Ocean trade routes
The Andaman Islands have received quite a lot of attention lately. One of the Andamans, North Sentinel Island, recently gained some fame as the home of an uncontacted tribe that an American missionary (illegally) tried to contact and convert to Christianity; the missionary was subsequently killed by the islanders. My interest in the islands was heightened after reading a newly-released book last week by one Adam Goodheart called The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth. The book gives a good overview of the British colonization of the Andamans, attempts to contact native peoples, and the reasons as to how North Sentinel Island remained isolated.
What interests me more is how the Andaman Islands in general remained detached from cultural and trade patterns throughout the Indian Ocean for so long, despite being right in the middle of heavily frequented trade routes from ancient times onward.
As one can see in a map of the Indian Ocean, the Andaman Islands are an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal between India, Myanmar, and Indonesia. The Andamans are one of the two main island groups in the Indian union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The main part of the archipelago is Great Andaman, which contains seven major islands close to each other. Great Andaman (100 miles) is about as long as Long Island, New York (120 miles).
Prior to the British colonization of India and Myanmar, the Andaman Islands had little to do with mainland Asia; they were not settled by mainlanders, they did not practice agriculture, and they did not trade. The native inhabitants of the Andaman Islands are not closely related to any surviving group; their languages are distinct and form an independent language family; physiologically, the Andamanese resemble the natives of Australia more than neighboring Southeast Asians. The Andamanese diverged from other human groups and have lived in near isolation for over 30,000 years.
While, today, only the natives of North Sentinel island remain uncontacted and continue to live as hunter-gatherers, the entire archipelago used to also be isolated. Ultimately, Great Andaman was too big and too prominently located to be totally left alone and the British colonized it. Groups in the Andamans that are related to the North Sentinelese include the Jarawa and Onge, who are now contacted and live with the aegis of the Indian state.
(As an aside, most non-African human populations bifurcated into two groups, West and East Eurasians around 45,000 years ago. West Eurasian populations include Europeans, Middle Easterners, and North Africans, while East Eurasian populations include East and Southeast Asians, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and the Andaman Islanders. The people of the Andamans, Australia, and East Asia trifurcated very soon after East Eurasians as a whole split from West Eurasians. One of the groups that is ancestral to the modern people of India is labeled by geneticists as Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI), who are related to the Andaman natives. There are no full-blooded AASI people anymore, and the present-day Indian/South Asian population can be modeled as a “mixed” population derived from three prior populations in different proportions in different regions and among different castes: AASI, Indus-periphery, and Steppe. Indus-periphery people were a farming group from the Indus valley of the northwestern subcontinent, related to Neolithic farmers from Iran and Iraq, while the Steppe component derives from the Indo-European steppe peoples who originated from the present-day Ukrainian and Russian steppe. This study maps out some of these ancestral components in present-day Indian populations. According to it, the community I originate from is 21% Steppe, 56% Indus-adjacent, and 23% Andaman Hunter Gatherer, which is being used as a proxy for AASI.)
So why were the Andamans so isolated? The islands were certainly known; they are mentioned in Tamil-inscriptions from the Chola Empire from around 1000 CE, and Marco Polo knew of them. In the first few centuries of the Common Era, seaborne trade was already common along the whole length of the Indian Ocean, Hinduism and Buddhism spread along with traders, monks, and others from India into Southeast Asia. Polities in present-day Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines all developed “Indianized” kingdoms, and modern genetic studies demonstrate some gene flow from India to these areas. Subsequently, after several centuries, traders from the Middle East also began to visit Southeast Asia, and eventually Islam spread throughout the Malay archipelago. Goods, spices, crops, technology, and literature all spread and were exchanged throughout the Indian Ocean littoral. Even many small islands without noticeably large quantities of luxury goods were drawn into the culture and trade of mainland Asia, such as the Maldives, Lakshadweep, Socotra, Bali, and so on. By the 16th century, Islam had reached Mozambique and western New Guinea.
In this context, the continued isolation of the Andaman Islands is truly puzzling. Even the neighboring Nicobar Islands were settled by Austro-Asiatic speaking farmers (a language family that includes Vietnamese and Khmer) from Southeast Asia. Even if the Andamans were not settled or colonized from mainland Asia, they lay on major trade routes, and their people could have capitalized on this. But they chose not to, and indeed most accounts of the islands describe the islanders as being very hostile.
The islands off of the western coast of Southeast Asia, including the Andaman Islands, the Nicobar Islands, and the various islands of the western coast of Sumatra—like Simeulue, Nias, and Siberut—were skirted by traders and empires and, as a result, remained in relative isolation from the mainland cultures of Asia. The Nicobar Islands and the Barrier Islands off of the coast of Sumatra remained relatively isolated and were not influenced by Hinduism or Islam. The most plausible explanation is that due to the flukes of trade and the winds, ships sailing between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia bypassed these islands, either sailing along the coasts of Bengal, Burma, and Thailand into the Strait of Malacca, or from Sri Lanka east to the northern tip of Sumatra (Aceh) and then into the Strait of Malacca. This was certainly what a lot of ships did because of the direction of the monsoon winds but some winds and trade routes also passed by the Nicobar Islands, or sailed down the western coast of Sumatra to reach Java. It really cannot be said that any of these islands was in complete isolation.
Infrequent visitation and native hostility combined to keep the Andaman Islands out of the cultural and trade exchanges taking place around the rest of the Indian Ocean. It does seem like a bit of a fluke that they remained uninfluenced by culture, trade, and technology from mainland Asia, but not, say the Maldives. It may well have been that the Andamans did not have any valuable spices or resources worth trading or conquering, nor good enough agricultural land that made settlement there worth it, especially in the face of hostile tribes. The nature of the monsoon—while allows a ship to sail almost directly from India/Sri Lanka to Malaysia in about 15-20 days upon swift winds also disincentivized ships from stopping on islands along the way for no reason. Ultimately, the answer to the question of the Andaman Islands’ isolation can be found somewhere in the vicinity of a combination of these factors: lack of resources, hostile tribes, and the nature of the monsoon winds.