Dividing the Nicobarese

The permanent shelters, although very neat, are designed for the wrong people. A thing for nuclear families and busy office goers, the shelters are currently being used as store rooms, as even the front doors and matchbox bedrooms don’t allow for the King-size Nicobari lifestyle.

It’s cultural that when you ask a Nicobari child to list out his family, he’ll start with his great grand mother, who is currently the head of the family by mere virtue of the fact that she’s still alive, and then move down to his great grand aunts via his uncles and aunts and finally end with his two adopted brothers followed closely by his three pigs and two dogs.
Their culture entails living together, eating together, sleeping together, even washing their hands together in the same washbowl. When a Nicobari boy from one village marries a girl from another village, it’s not just the two of them getting married – it’s a marriage of the two villages. There are two-three hour long debates amongst the village heads on whether the boy should go to the girl’s village or whether the girl should go to the boy’s, depending on the number of their family members and their ages. Sometimes, the marriage is not permitted, because the boy’s village won’t let go of their son and the girl’s village won’t let go of their daughter.
As for their living space, the floor of a Nicobari home is a bamboo machaan, which doubles up as one big bed for everyone in the family to sleep together on. There are usually 8-15 such family members. They will not fit into the crampy 7X6ft wooden-floored permanent shelter bedrooms in Car Nicobar. In fact, one Nicobari kitchen is the size of the current twin-unit (for two families) permanent shelter. It has also been established, that they will not even be able to get their Dekchies (cooking vessels) through the front doors because of their size, leave alone finding space to store them in the 4X6ft kitchens.
Their trunks take up majority of the space in the living room of the unit and only their cupboards fit in their bedrooms. In some of their homes lie 10ft-long replicas of their 100-seater racing canoes with two feet high trophies decorating it, false ceilings used as attics to store the boating equipment and spacings in their stilted bamboo floors to allow for the cool air from below to fill the house.
“We don’t use these units to live, we’ll build our own homes slowly as and when we can. We will only use these as store-rooms because they are so hot and small. It looks very nice, but not for us,” says a village captain, refusing to be named.
But the good news, is that for the first time in history and after three years of bungling things up, our seemingly dictatorial administration has permitted for Nicobari representation the right to inspect the shelters and pass on their views – On April 8, 2008, the Tribal Council was allowed to be part of the permanent shelter inspection team to represent the people of Car Nicobar and their grievances.