Cranes dug mass graves and men heaped wood for cremations at makeshift funeral grounds along the coastline devastated by 10 meter (30 foot) tidal waves that raced inland with terrifying force, killing around 5,280 people.

"Mother, what's happened? I saw you yesterday and now you're here. You're not dead, you've gone to another village. Please come back," implored one woman at a mass grave in hard-hit Tamil Nadu state.

In the coastal village of Cuddalore, men and women brought a constant stream of bodies, many young children, in their arms.

Some mourners rolled on the ground howling as the corpses were laid in graves or placed on funeral pyres from which smoke streaked into the sky.

Many families lost more than one member. One woman sat wailing at the site of an open grave waiting for the bodies of her three daughters aged 10, six and seven years to be brought by ambulance from a local morgue.

A number of the dead were fishermen who had set out to sea early Sunday and their families whose flimsy shacks were engulfed by the tsunami triggered by a powerful underground earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Another woman stood at a grave, calling out to her mother who had been buried, saying, "I want to come with you."

The stench of death could be smelt up to a kilometer away (more than half a mile) from beaches where rescue workers toiled for a second day to fish the dead from the seas, laying them out in neat rows.

One man, in Cuddalore, spotting the corpse of his eight-year-old son, collapsed on the sand, wailing inconsolably. The boy's mother rolled on the ground screaming and beating her chest.

Another man sat on the sand cradling his elderly mother's body.

"The beach was crowded yesterday because it was a Sunday and most of the people had come to play cricket which is a local passion," said a policeman surveying the scene.

Beaches were littered with mangled cars, bicycles and boats, some of which were hurled 1.5 kilometers (nearly a mile) from their normal berths, testifying to the ferocity of the waves that swept victims out to sea, tearing children from their parents' arms.

Police sought to herd away from the beach relatives desperately scouring for loved ones back amid warnings by weather authorities of more high waves.

Fresh tremors Monday shook India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, near the quake's epicentre, where tidal waves were estimated to have killed some 2,000 people.

In the coastal town of Machilapatnam in Andhra Pradesh state which was also battered by the high waves, Syed Waziruddin said he watched in horror as the raging waters carried children out to sea.

"We'd gone to the beach when the wave hit us. All the children were scattered. It was very difficult to save the children. They were separated from us," said Waziruddin. "We felt as if we ourselves had died."