Disciplining the other

Abstract

The Indian Ocean tsunami (2004) devastated the Nicobar archipelago, a remote tribal reserve in the Indian Ocean, which the Nicobarese indigenes have traditionally inhabited. The catastrophe attracted a massive humanitarian response from the Government of India (GoI), leading to a sociocultural crisis among the Nicobarese that is inextricably linked to the post-tsunami humanitarian government in the Nicobar, which undermined what was once a self-sustaining community. Using Michel Foucault’s analytic of governmentality, this article elucidates how the humanitarian government in the southern Nicobar, motivated by a raison d’état of national security, attempted to discipline the traditional Nicobarese by developing new forms of subjectivities among them.