Echoes from Isolation: Imagining the Anti-Colonial Silence of the Sentinelese in the Age of Ruination

Abstract (English)

While the world watches Gaza, Congo, and Sudan burn under the ongoing violences of neocolonial extractivism, this paper turns to one of the quietest, most defiant sites of resistance: North Sentinel Island. The Sentinelese, an uncontacted Indigenous community in the Indian Ocean, have long resisted all external engagement. In this refusal lies a radical epistemic stance—an anti-colonial silence that disrupts the logics of developmentalism, human mastery, and extractive modernity. This paper offers a speculative, ethically grounded exploration of what their resistance might mean for how we understand ruination, modernity, and environmental collapse in the Global South.

Drawing on Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence, the study reads the Sentinelese not as passive subjects outside of history, but as active participants in a longer refusal of settler colonialism, surveillance, and the racial-capitalist order. Engaging with Cicero’s On Duties, it reflects on what responsibilities the modern world bears toward communities who reject its terms entirely. By imagining what the Sentinelese might say about us—those who arrive bearing maps, guns, or aid—this paper reorients the anthropological gaze, centring a silence that speaks volumes about resistance, survival, and ecological autonomy.

In so doing, the paper advocates for a decolonised anthropology that respects unknowability, honours withdrawal, and refrains from epistemic conquest. It argues that in the ruins of neocolonialism, radical non-participation may be the clearest cry for justice.