Neil Island

Neil Island is named after James Neill, a British brigadier general of the 1857 rebellion, a name given when the Andamans were administered from Port Blair, and it had no permanent settlement when the penal colony was founded in 1858. Ritchie's Archipelago, the chain of islands east of South Andaman to which Neil belongs, was charted by British surveyors in the nineteenth century, and the islands were left largely to forest.

The island was uninhabited until settlers arrived in the late 1960s, most of them Bengali refugees from East Pakistan. They cleared forest for paddy and vegetables and founded villages that they named after figures from the Ramayana — Bharatpur, Laxmanpur, Sitapur and Ramnagar. The flat, fertile ground suited farming better than most of the archipelago, and the island became known as a supplier of vegetables to Port Blair.

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami struck the Andamans hard; the Nicobars suffered worst, but the disaster reshaped stretches of coast and disrupted shipping across the territory. Tourism arrived slowly, well after Havelock, and for years Neil was visited mainly by travellers looking for somewhere quieter. Ferry services improved, guesthouses and a few resorts opened, and visitor numbers rose through the 2010s. In 2018 the island was officially renamed Shaheed Dweep, in tribute to Subhas Chandra Bose, though both names remain in use. Farming still shares the island with tourism.

The culture of Neil is Bengali village culture transplanted to the Bay of Bengal. Bengali is spoken in most homes, with Hindi used in shops and offices and Tamil and Telugu heard in some families, and English in the tourist trade. Durga Puja and Kali Puja are the festivals that matter most, marked with pandals and community meals, and Saraswati Puja is kept in the schools; Diwali, Holi and the Bengali new year are all observed, and small temples stand in each village.

Farming shapes daily manners and the calendar as much as the sea does. Households keep cattle and goats, grow paddy, bananas and vegetables, and fish from small boats, and the island's name as the vegetable garden of the Andamans is a source of local pride. Tourism, which arrived within living memory, is a second occupation rather than the whole economy, and many families let rooms or drive autorickshaws alongside the fields.

Visitors are expected to behave as they would in any Indian village: cover up away from the beach, remove shoes at temples and in homes, ask before photographing people, and keep noise down after dark, when much of the island is asleep. Conservation rules are taken seriously, including protections on coral, shells and turtle nesting beaches, and the territory-wide laws forbidding contact with indigenous communities apply here as elsewhere.

Around three thousand people live on Neil, spread between five villages on an island of about fourteen square kilometres — small enough to cross by bicycle in under an hour. Neil Kendra, beside the jetty, holds the market, the school, the health centre and the shops; the rest is farmland, coconut groves and patches of forest running down to the sea.

Life runs on farming, fishing and tourism in roughly that order of age. The flat ground produces vegetables, paddy, bananas and coconuts, much of it shipped to Port Blair; fishermen work the shallow waters around the island; and guesthouses, restaurants, scooter hire, snorkelling boats and dive schools employ a growing share of younger residents. Work is strongly seasonal, and many businesses close in the monsoon when boats are unreliable and visitors stay away.

The day starts before dawn, with fields worked in the cool hours and the market busy early. Ferries arriving in the morning and midday set the rhythm of the village, bringing supplies, post and guests, and the island quietens by early evening when people gather on the west-coast sand for the sunset. Electricity and water supply are less dependable than on the mainland, mobile coverage is patchy, and freshwater shortages in the dry months, waste disposal and reef damage are the issues residents raise most often, along with the effect of rising visitor numbers on a very small place.

Neil eats what it grows and what it catches. Fish is the centre of the table — landed by small boats and cooked either in the Bengali manner, in mustard oil with mustard seed, turmeric and green chilli, or grilled with masala and lime at the places that cater to visitors. Squid, prawns and, on occasion, crab appear as well, always with rice, which is also grown on the island.

The vegetables that give the island its reputation fill out every meal: gourds, aubergine, okra, pumpkin, beans and leafy greens, cooked as simple curries and fries and served with dal. A village thali of rice, dal, a vegetable, a fried item and fish is the standard midday meal, and it is what most small restaurants serve. Coconut is everywhere, drunk green from the shell, grated into chutneys and pressed for the oil used in cooking, and bananas, papaya and jackfruit grow in the groves between the villages.

Breakfasts follow the mainland traditions the settlers brought: idli, dosa and vada in some kitchens, parathas and eggs in others, with strong sweet milky tea at any hour. Bengali sweets such as rasgulla turn up in the village shops, and the beach cafés add pancakes, fruit plates and fresh lime soda for visitors. Anything imported — packaged food, bottled drinks, alcohol, which is sold only in a few licensed places — depends on the boats from Port Blair, so choice narrows in bad weather and through the monsoon.