India's forbidden island

 North Sentinel: The Forbidden Island

One day I just searched for "Most forbidden places on Earth" and surprisingly one of Andaman and Nicobar's islands, made up to the top 5 places in the list, by Business Insider, "THE SENTINEL ISLAND."  

India has around 650 distinct tribes. Konda and Yenadis from Andhra Pradesh, Boro and Dimasa from Assam, and many more tribes all over India. All these tribes enjoy the constitution of India, rights like reservation have been made to protect them. Still, there is one tribe that has never tried to make contact with the rest of the world, and according to all the cases in which people tried to interact with them, they made it very clear that they like their privacy and don't want to be disturbed by the rest of the world. Therefore, the Indian government has banned its citizens from going to the island and making contact with the tribe, it is illegal to be within 3 miles of the island. 

Due to rare contact with the tribe and language barriers nobody still knows, what do they call themselves? But they have been given the name after the island they live on. North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, hence, the tribe is recognized as "the sentinels."

 

The sentinel island made news worldwide when John Allen Chau an American Christian missionary, made an illegal attempt to reach and make contact with the sentinels, his attempt to reach the island was successful, however, making contact didn't go as planned for John. John was reportedly, killed with arrows when he reached the island by the tribe. The fisherman who took John to the island reported they saw the Sentinels drag a body along the beach to bury it. Later fisherman accompanied a team of officials to retrieve John's body. The officials struggled a lot, it took them 2-3 days to recover the body, without getting hurt themselves and without hurting the tribe people. 

The tribe has been reported to treat outsiders with enmity, in 2006 they killed two fishermen and placed their bodies on bamboo poles. The first ever contact reported with sentinels was reported by Britishers during the 1880s, when an Indian merchant ship named Nineveh, met an accident, the passengers and crew managed their way to the sentinel island, and after 3 days of peaceful survival, the sentinels decided to show up. The first encounter itself was brutal, sentinels showed up with bows, arrows, and axes. Luckily there were 80 passengers and 26 crew members, together they were able to protect themselves with sticks and stones until a rescue ship arrived to save them. 

There have been several numbers of attempts made to make contact with the Sentinels but from the first ever contact reported, and till the last one, Sentinels have made it quite clear that no one other than a Sentinel is allowed to step on the island. The same is advised by right activists and medical professionals, as the sentinels don't have immunity even against basic diseases like flu, so making contact with them can make them ill. 

The island has an approximate population of 100 to 150 people.