India Has Dozens of Inhabited Islands Most People Cannot Name. This Is Their Story.
Say the word island in India and two names arrive immediately, reliably, and almost exclusively. Andaman. Lakshadweep. The tourism brochures have done their work well. But India’s relationship with its islands is far older, far stranger, and far more quietly human than any brochure has ever managed to capture. Spread across the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and tucked into the estuarine deltas of Bengal and Odisha, there are dozens of inhabited islands that do not have airports, do not have Instagram hashtags with a meaningful number of posts, and do not have a single resort with a infinity pool pointed at the horizon.
What they do have is something considerably harder to find. They have communities that have built entire civilisations around the logic of water. People who measure distance not in kilometres but in tidal windows. Children who learn to read currents before they learn to read text. And a quality of daily life so fundamentally shaped by the sea that spending even a few days among them recalibrates something in the way a landlocked mind understands the word home.
This is not adventure tourism. This is not glamping on a forgotten shore. This is something quieter and more unsettling, in the best possible sense. This is what India looks like when the road ends and the water begins.
The Sundarbans Islands, West Bengal
Most people know the Sundarbans as a tiger reserve. Far fewer know that it is also one of the most densely populated delta regions on earth, home to over four million people living across dozens of islands threaded together by tidal rivers in the districts of South 24 Parganas. Islands like Gosaba, Sagar, Mousuni, Satjelia, and Patharpratima are not remote in the way that word usually implies. They are remote in a more complicated way. They are close to Kolkata in distance and worlds away from it in infrastructure.
Sagar Island, or Gangasagar, is the largest and most visited among them, drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every January for the Gangasagar Mela, considered the second largest human gathering in the world after the Kumbh Mela. The confluence of the Ganges with the Bay of Bengal at its southern tip is sacred to Hindus, and the Kapil Muni Temple here draws devotion on a scale that is genuinely staggering. Yet for the roughly 200,000 people who live on Sagar Island through the rest of the year, the rhythm of life is defined not by pilgrimage but by the twice-daily logic of the tide. Ferry schedules, fishing runs, the transport of vegetables and medicine and school children, all of it is negotiated around water.
Mousuni Island sits further south and has in recent years become quietly known among a small community of responsible travellers for its raw and beautiful vulnerability. It is sinking. Roughly a third of Mousuni has already been claimed by the sea over the past two decades due to erosion and rising sea levels. The families who remain have rebuilt their homes multiple times, moving incrementally inland with each loss. Staying in one of the handful of basic homestays here, waking to the sound of the Bay of Bengal at a distance that feels slightly too close for comfort, is one of the more quietly profound travel experiences available within five hours of a major Indian city.
Majuli, Assam
Majuli is the world’s largest river island, sitting in the Brahmaputra river in Assam, and it has a Geographical Indication tag to prove the distinction. At its peak in the early 20th century, Majuli measured over 1,200 square kilometres. Today, due to erosion and flooding, it covers approximately 350 square kilometres, and that number continues to shrink. It was recognised as a district headquarters of Assam in 2016, which brought a degree of administrative attention, but the fundamental reality of life here remains tied entirely to the river.
Getting to Majuli requires a ferry crossing from Jorhat, a journey that takes between one and two hours depending on the season and the state of the Brahmaputra. During monsoon months the crossing can be rough and is sometimes suspended entirely. That unpredictability is not a travel inconvenience. It is the point. Majuli runs on its own time, and the river decides when you arrive and when you leave.
Divar Island, Goa
Most visitors to Goa will not have heard of Divar Island, which sits in the Mandovi river about fifteen minutes by ferry from the Ribandar jetty near Panaji. It is not a secret in the conspiratorial sense but rather in the way that anything quiet becomes a secret in a loud place. Divar is old Goa made entirely of laterite and memory. Its villages of Piedade, Malar, and Sao Mathias are lined with Portuguese-era houses in various states of dignified decay, their facades painted in faded yellows and greens, their balcaos, the traditional verandah seating structures of Goan houses, still occupied by elderly residents in the evenings.
The island has no resort, no beach, and no particular commercial infrastructure aimed at tourists. What it has is the Church of Our Lady of Compassion, built in 1613 on the site of a Hindu temple that was demolished during the Inquisition, and the memory of a more complex religious history than Goa’s tourism narrative typically allows.
Bet Dwarka, Gujarat
Off the northwestern coast of the Saurashtra peninsula in Gujarat, connected to the mainland town of Okha by a short ferry ride, lies Bet Dwarka, also written as Beyt Dwarka. For Hindu pilgrims it is one of the most sacred sites on the Gujarat coast, believed to be the actual residential island of Lord Krishna while the mainland Dwarka served as his capital. The Harsiddhi Mata Temple and the Shankhodhar Temple here draw considerable devotional footfall, and the ferry crossing from Okha is perpetually busy with pilgrims, vendors, and fishing families navigating the same narrow channel.
What makes Bet Dwarka interesting beyond its religious significance is its archaeological depth. The waters surrounding it are the site of one of India’s most remarkable and still inadequately publicised underwater discoveries. In 2000, the National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting exploration in the Gulf of Khambhat detected structures at a depth of about 40 metres that some researchers have argued could represent submerged settlements of extraordinary antiquity.
The Chilika Lake Islands, Odisha
Chilika Lake on the Odisha coast is the largest coastal lagoon in India and the second largest in the world, spanning approximately 1,100 square kilometres across the districts of Puri, Khurda, and Ganjam. Within it sit several islands that are inhabited by fishing communities whose lives are almost entirely oriented around the lake. Kalijai Island, the most visited, is home to the Kalijai Temple, a shrine to a goddess whose origin story is local, specific, and deeply rooted in the ecology of the lake itself. According to tradition, a young bride drowned in the lagoon on her way to her husband’s home, and the grief of the community transformed her into a deity. Every year during Makar Sankranti, thousands of devotees cross the lake by boat to offer prayers.
Breakfast Island, known locally as Nalabana, is a bird sanctuary within the lake that hosts flamingos, grey pelicans, jacanas, and over 160 migratory species between November and February. The fishing communities on the lake’s islands navigate their small wooden boats around the sanctuary boundaries with the kind of instinctive spatial knowledge that comes only from generational familiarity.
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