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'When Turquoise Waters turned Dark': Andaman's history lost in imagery
Summary
Keshav Chandra's new coffee table book attempts to illuminate the great Andaman story but falls short of a well researched historical accountWhat is this book really about? This is perhaps a strange thing to ask at the beginning of a book review. This, however, is exactly the question I was left with after reading Keshav Chandra’s When Turquoise Waters turned Dark, which the cover describes as An Illustrated History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
This is a large-format coffee-table book richly illustrated and lavishly produced, but little to no thought seems to have been given to the purpose of the book, who the readers could be or even why certain photographs were chosen. The inside flap copy explains: “Crafted with stunning photography and presented with a meticulously researched narrative, this book is an immersive exploration of the islands’ past". Compare this with Chandra’s own lines in the Author’s Note: “I came here almost a year and a half ago. As anyone visiting these islands would be, I was deeply struck by their beauty. Gratefully, I decided to cobble up a few interesting anecdotes from its history and put them next to amazing landscapes of the island."
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Interesting facts cobbled together quickly surely don’t make for a meticulous historical account. This, in fact, is just the book you would give to a student as an exemplar of how a history should not be written—virtually no references or citations, incorrect dates, facts and interpretations, mobilising concepts at a time they did not exist (eg. Sanskritisation that was made popular in the 1950s by Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas but the book mentions this in the context of convicts living in the island a century earlier), contradictory claims, and last but not the least, poorly written. The photographs are beautiful but are poorly credited or not credited at all. In the Author’s Note, Chandra thanks “the Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS) for the photos of tribals", but we don’t know which pictures actually are from AAJVS or the names of the individuals who took them on behalf of AAJVS. The captions lack detail, or worse, a deeply problematic colonial gaze comes shining through when describing the tribal people, the original inhabitants of the islands. They become mere objects with almost no identity leave alone agency. The book seeks to censure colonialist and imperialist tendencies to amass territory by erasing the rights of the original inhabitants even as it does exactly the same thing.
For instance, the double spread on pages 176-177 has a photograph of three bare-bodied men wearing shorts with the caption, “Great Andamanese Dance (mostly forgotten now)". There are no details of the individuals dancing the forgotten dance, just as there is no date, no location and no name of the photographer. There is no explanation of what is meant by “forgotten". Forgotten by whom? Maybe we forgot, and not the men in the picture, but then we don’t know who they are.
On another double spread, pages 184-185, is the caption “An onge lady ready to welcome guests". It is astonishing that the author and the publisher are able to claim that she is “ready to welcome guests". I would just as well interpret the look on the unnamed Onge woman’s face as disgust at seeing these “guests" in her home. And again, it is missing the photographer’s name, location or date.
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The author of the book, Keshav Chandra, is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and was the chief secretary of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands from August 2022 to October 2024. His position of privilege gives him access to places and information that others would not have. An illustration of this untrammeled access is the photograph (pages 144-145) of the lighthouse at Indira Point, the southernmost tip of India. This is an iconic landmark, access to which is difficult for a common Indian citizen. Chandra’s photograph is taken from the air and he gets an unprecedented vantage point and the luxury to frame the subject with a symmetry that is perfect.
There is also a larger context here, and a little chronology is very much in place.
Chandra joined the island administration as chief secretary in mid-2022 and has overseen what is without doubt the largest colonisation plan for these islands in post-colonial India, the Great Nicobar Island Development Project, which was launched in 2021. This is a ₹81,000 crore mega-infrastructure project for the island, the centrepiece of which is a trans-shipment port at Galathea Bay, one of the northern Indian Ocean’s more important nesting sites of the Giant Leatherback sea turtle, a creature that has been around since the time of the dinosaurs.
Other components of the project include a power plant, an airport complex and a greenfield township and tourism project. Put together, the project threatens to wipe out 160 sq. km of the most pristine and biodiversity-rich tropical forests we have in India.
Importantly, it will seriously threaten the two tribal communities for whom the island is home—the Great Nicobarese and the Shompen, the latter a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG), with an estimated population of only about 250 individuals. This plan seeks to bring 350,000 people to this island from the outside in the next 30 years, an ingress that will sound the cultural and physical death knell for these indigenous communities.
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This is the dark story of contemporary colonisation, capture of the land and resources of indigenous communities, and of complete disregard for human/tribal rights, biodiversity and ecology unfolding even as we speak. It’s all very well to write about the British as colonisers but can we turn the gaze and ask some questions about ourselves as well?
The book does not have any discussion on what has happened to the islands’ forests and its indigenous peoples in post-colonial India. It also does not address the criticism from environmentalists and anthropologists that the Great Nicobar Island Development Project will be deeply detrimental to biodiversity as well as indigenous people’s rights. Remember that, as reported in The Hindustan Times in May 2023 by Jayashree Nandi, common citizens were being denied access to Great Nicobar unofficially and illegally—even as the administration was facilitating the project.
This book is done and Chandra was transferred to Delhi in December 2024. He might, however, want to come back 20 years later, around the time he retires, and write another account of the period in the islands that he oversaw. He might want to do another book on a Great Nicobar Island that will then be nothing like it is today; for one the view from above will be a drastically different one. That sequel could well have the same title, When Turquoise Waters turned Dark. Only there will be no European coloniser to put the blame on then.
Pankaj Sekhsaria is author/editor of five books on the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, the latest being The Great Nicobar Betrayal published in 2024.
