Digital Archives and Indigenous Silence: Reimagining the Jarawa through Pankaj Sekhsaria’s The Last Wave

This paper explores the intersection of indigenous representation, ecological ethics, and digital preservation through a close reading of Pankaj Sekhsaria's The Last Wave: An Island Novel (2014). Set in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the novel subtly engages with the lives of the Jarawa tribe, an indigenous community historically marginalized in state archives and media narratives. Rather than fictionalizing the Jarawa's voice, Sekhsaria foregrounds their presence through silence, gesture, and ecological attunement, modeling a form of ethical narrative restraint. This literary silence mirrors a broader archival erasure, where indigenous voices are excluded or distorted by colonial and postcolonial documentation systems. Drawing on theories from Digital Humanities, postcolonial thought, and critical archival studies, the paper argues that Digital Humanities can offer transformative tools to counteract these silences, if they are applied with decolonial ethics. It proposes the idea of a decolonial digital archive that centers indigenous agency, respects orality and refusal, and resists extractive knowledge practices. The paper suggests that annotated editions of The Last Wave, combined with GIS-based cultural mapping and audio/visual platforms, could serve as ethical gateways to indigenous knowledge, without appropriating or essentializing it.