When I visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 2017, my parents took me on a guided drive through “protected” Indigenous lands of the Jarwa people. The picture on the left is from when me and my mother stepped out as the cars were all made to stand in an organized line and checked for security purposes, before we entered the protected lands. It wasn’t just us, there was a whole line of cars, moving slowly, instructed not to stare too long if we saw an Indigenous person, and strictly told not to take photos. At the time, I didn’t question it. But looking back, it feels unsettling: how everyday life for Adivasis had been turned into a spectacle, their land turned into a tourist attraction, and their privacy sacrificed for curiosity - and this started because, as a police officer that day told me, that surveillance around those forests had revealed that they get a lot of visitors who want to see how the Indigenous tribes live. Seeing an opportunity, the tourism department decided to cash on it.

That moment stayed with me. Today, India’s adoption of surveillance technologies, forest mapping, and biometric systems raises similar questions of intrusion, but this time it is done under the banner of governance, efficiency, or sustainability.

This project thus aims to investigate how indigenous communities in India interact with technology.