- published: 29 May 2014
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The Nicobar Islands are an archipelagic island chain in the eastern Indian Ocean. They are located in Southeast Asia, 150 km north of Aceh on Sumatra, and separated from Thailand to the east by the Andaman Sea. Located 1,300 km southeast of the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal, they form part of the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India.
Northern Group:
Central Group:
Southern Group (Sambelong):
Indira Point (6°45’10″N and 93°49’36″E) is the southernmost point of the Great Nicobar Island and India itself, about 150 km north of Sumatra, Indonesia.
The Nicobar Islands are part of a great island arc created by the collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with Eurasia. The collision lifted the Himalayas and most of the Indonesian islands, and created a long arc of highlands and islands, which includes the Arakan Yoma range of Burma, the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and the islands off the west coast of Sumatra, including the Banyak Islands and Mentawai Islands.
The climate is warm and tropical, with temperatures ranging from 22 to 30°C. Rainfall is heavy due to annual monsoons and measures around 3000 to 3800 mm each year. The vegetation of the Nicobars is typically divided into the coastal mangrove forests and the interior evergreen and deciduous Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests. Additionally, several islands contain extensive inland grasslands, though these are thought to result from human intervention.
The Shompen or Shom Pen are the indigenous people of the interior of Great Nicobar Island, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
"Shompen" is possibly an English mispronunciation of "Shamhap", the Nicobarese name for the tribe. The Shompens living on the western side of the island call themselves Kalay, and those on the eastern side Keyet, with both groups referring to each other as Buavela. A suggestion from 1886 that the Shompen call themselves Shab Daw'a has not been confirmed by modern research.
The Shompen people were known to Ptolemy and Arab geographers[citation needed], but there was no reliable information before the 19th century. Danish Admiral Steen Bille was the first to contact them in 1846 and Frederik Adolph de Roepstorff, a British officer who had already published works on the languages of Nicobar and Andaman, collected ethnographic and linguistic data in 1876. Since then very little has been added to the stock of reliable information on the Shompen, mainly because access to the Nicobar Islands has been restricted for foreign researchers since Indian independence.