Nicobarese Ossuary Feast

Genuinely indigenous and pre-colonial, and the largest ceremonial event in Nicobarese life. It is not a tourist occasion and cannot be treated as one.

It honours the spirits of the dead, above all the departed head of the household. The Nicobarese are animists and practise a form of double burial, and this feast completes the passage.

Mass slaughter of pigs and communal feasting, toddy drinking, and nightlong singing and circular dancing under the coconut palms, dancers in coconut-frond dress following a song leader.

Exhumation and reburial rites for the household dead, pig sacrifice, and the ossuary feast that closes the sequence.

The dead remain part of the household until the feast completes their passage.

An animist mortuary tradition of the Nicobar islands, documented by ethnographers from the colonial period onward and continuing within the tribal reserve.