Historical Significance of Andaman Nicobar Islands

By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

As the plane descends to land in Port Blair the picturesque islands effectively hide the depths of the black holes in Indian history for the tourist. But the Andaman and Nicobar Islands holds a whole repertoire of historical significance to remind the casual tourist of modern day that our forefathers have indeed paid a very heavy price for our freedom today.

Rediscovery of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and further exploitation of the islands were undertaken by the British expressly for the purpose of establishing a penal colony. Lieutenant Archibald Blair was assigned to survey the hydrography of the islands and explore and suggest sites for the penal colony in 1788. “But his indefatigable energy was also at any rate responsible for the closure of this settlement. All the while that the settlement was growing, Blair was keeping himself busy with a hydrographic survey and in April 1790 he drew the attention of Calcutta to the harbour north east of Andamans as another worthy of attention. Commodore Cornwallis, brother of Governor General was so enthused that he forthwith recommended to his brother the shifting of the settlement from the south east to the north east harbour and the establishment of a naval arsenal there. Blair was put in readiness for such an eventuality in September 1791, whereupon further orders for the move were issued, Blair being put in charge till Captain Kyd could come in to take command”. The earlier Port Cornwallis shorn of its name became the old Harbour and remained so unglorified till in its next occupation it was dignified, most fittingly with the name Port Blair.

In 1796 the idea of a penal settlement in the islands was abandoned because they were forced to surrender to natural forces, death, pestilence and grief overcoming the spirits of the sturdiest of the settlers. The convicts were shifted to Penang and the settlers were shifted to Calcutta. In the next 60 years the indigenous Andamanese recovered to their splendid isolation undisturbed, distrusting the outsiders after all the rude interventions in their social fabric that was visited upon by the invading colonisers.

With the British occupation of southern India, Burma and Singapore, traffic in the Bay of Bengal assumed unparalleled proportions. The initial intent of facilitating the ports in times of distress and war took further shape after development of the colony and the inevitable interactions with the sailors only exposed the indigenous tribes to dangers such as Gonorrhoea, Syphilis, and a whole host of sexually transmitted diseases, bringing in its wake colonising vectors such as viruses for malaria Filaria etc.

Reports of ships drowning and related cataclysms imposed on the colonial power the need to re-establish their penal colony. While convict labour was being facilitated for the governance of the penal colony, the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 gave ample fillip to the colonial power to house all its traitors. Deportation and transportation to the Andamans became synonymous with life imprisonment and a suspension of all democratic rights to the prisoners.

Captain J. P. Walker who was placed in command of the convicts was notorious for his woeful lack of restraint in his management of the people placed under his control. Immediately on his arrival in Port Blair he wrote to the Home Department suggesting that the penal colony should be optimally utilised and that it should house atleast 10,000 convicts in 1858, and for the next five years after the mutiny. But within three months of this recommendation being implemented the hospital was flooded with consternation:

While total number of inmates received was 773, 61 of them died in hospital and a whole 140 of the prisoners escaped and were presumed dead in the silence of Kalapani…. The placid waters on the rocky outcrops of the islands came to be known by the euphemistic expression Kalapani and it did serve the effective deterrence it was meant to be. Another 1 person committed suicide and whole 87 persons were hung for attempting to escape. In Viper Island there was a jail meant only for execution while there was another jail for men and one more only for women convicts. It was perhaps only in the Cellular jail that convicts were expected to bring their wives along for incarceration! In the Cellular jail there was the execution chamber meant for simultaneous execution of three convicts, all in the presence and full view of the other convicts. The Cellular Jail is celebrated as the greatest monument to liberty in Indian history and today the families and descendants of convicts whether freedom fighters or not, enjoy the highest status in Andaman society.

The most famous of all the heroic prisoners of the day was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who got the title Veer Savarkar for his courageous fight against the colonial power. In 1911 he was sentenced to two life terms in solitary confinement in the dreaded Cellular Jail and actually served the sentence for 20 years after which he was released in 1931. The cellular Jail was disbanded in the year 1936. The jail gets its epithet because of the small cells in which the traitors or convicts were lodged: 13 feet by 7 feet holes with one 2 feet by 1 ½ feet window shaded by zinc sheets. Even an electric saw today cannot saw off the west facing gates and grills made of wrought iron.

Cruelty and barbarous crimes meted out to the prisoners included physical torture and exploitation. Exploitation manifested in the form of labour camps and starvation. Inadequate food supplies once caused arbitrary execution of prisoners. Prisoners were selected randomly for drowning in the vast expanse of the oceans surrounding the forlorn volcanic islands. Reliving the horrific experiences of the day in the well conceived light and sound show of the Cellular Jail is a must do for the visitors to the Andamans. Six prisoners were once drowned in the deep waters off the Island of South Andaman. The monument to liberty – the dreaded Cellular Jail stands as a mute witness to the barbaric atrocities and human rights violations that were committed by the colonial yoke.

Each new prisoner brought with him the flaming passions of the civil disobedience movement and it was not long before the inmates unified under the stewardship of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (who was sentenced to fifty years of imprisonment) to launch a hunger strike against the barbaric atrocities committed by the jail warden David Barry. Four prisoners – who were on the verge of dehydration were force fed by the prison authorities. During the force feeding the prisoners on hunger strike were apparently made to lie down on their backs with hands tied and another co prisoner was made to sit on his chest. Jailor Barry supervised the force-feeding and the hunger strikers were fed rice wine through his nostrils because the hunger striker would not open his mouth. The stress of the bizarre ritual took the life of the inmate even as he choked. The panicky jailor then ordered that the corpse be disposed off in secrecy at night fall in the Kalapani off the coast, barely a stone throw away behind the Cellular Jail.

About 130 political agitators were shipped between 1910 and 1916 to a penal system unprepared to handle anyone but the worst criminal; consequently managing elite politically astute prisoners became such a liability for the colonial masters that it fell upon the Brits to impose solitary confinement and denial of access to newspapers and any other means of communication, as also any kind of communication with the outside world. The political prisoners were also subjected to the same rigorous tasks that were given to all other convicts: namely extraction of coconut oil, pounding of rice and cleaning the sanitation. Whereas disobedience or relapse into criminal behaviour brought on punishment of withdrawal of liberties for others, in their case recalcitrance had to be dealt with by punishments that broke their spirits and exhausted their capacity to rebel. “It would appear”, says Kiran Dhingra in the OUP book Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Twentieth Century, a Gazetteer “from all accounts that their lot was worsened by a degree of vindictiveness and at times of sadism at least at the hands of the dreaded Head Overseer David Barry”.

Labour exploitation of various hues is still etched as scars in many nooks and crevices of the notorious prison. Jailor David Barry was particularly notorious for his ruthless governance in the jail. He was known for supervising the extraction of 50 to 80 pounds of coconut oil within 8 man-hours. If the prisoners could not comply with this kind of unrealistic deadlines they were flogged rather mercilessly. Most of the inmates of the prison were freedom fighters of the day, and not surprisingly they were inspired by the flames of rebellion touched off by the civil disobedience movement on the mainland.

Finally in 1937 the notorious Cellular Jail was shut down only with the intervention of Mahatma Gandhi himself. But another chapter of the island’s dark history was looming on the war ravaged horizons. The outbreak of the IInd World war in September 1939 dramatised the theatre of the war on the Eastern horizons. Barely 4 days after the Pearl Harbour devastation, the Japanese attacked and invaded Burma on the 11^th of December 1941. The British promptly evacuated Rangoon three months later. That evacuation decided the fate of the Andaman Islands also. The first Japanese air raid on Port Blair occurred on 16^th February 1942 and hostilities by air and sea intensified thereafter. The British moved back to Calcutta evacuating the islands by March 1942. The Japanese moved in on 23^rd March 1942 quite unopposed snaking their way in a three column pincer formation to the centre of town to surround the tight knot of officers and policemen gathered there in grim faced surrender. The only figures of authority left on the island were chief commissioner Sir C.E. Waterfall and his assistant Major A.J. Bird who had opted to stay behind. With them were about 6000 convicts some in the Cellular jail, and about 12000 of the local born population. “Not a shot was fired; and in the uneasy silence the blast of the telegraph office being blown apart by the brave telegraphist according to plan was, especially loud and defiant” says Kiran Dhingra in the Gazetteer.

The Japanese left none in doubt that they were a conquering army. One of their first acts to terrorize the islanders was to behead Major Bird on the charge of attempting wireless contact with the enemy. The act of brutality was so fierce … beating and kicking him and breaking his ankles and shoulders with bare hands before cutting off his head with a sword in full public view … the incident left the islanders in a state of shock and disrepair and mellowed their attitude towards the British. Shortly thereafter the Japanese perpetrated reprisals against the Indians. Unable to gather intelligence against the pro British activists of the islands, the Japanese resorted to indiscriminate arrests and brutal interrogations of the local civilian population. When a British submarine appeared off Ross Island and attacked installations in Port Blair the Japanese rounded up 60 odd persons for interrogation and threw them in Cellular Jail. By 1943 the Japanese had incarcerated 600 prisoners at the Cellular Jail. By all accounts, suspects were tortured so brutally to get them to confess that most signed whatever they were asked to and the few who resisted were tortured till they died anyway. One Diwan Singh who was tortured in October 1943 succumbed to his injuries in January 1944.

Even today the mention of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands instills fears and notions of the dreaded Kalapani. The islands bore witness to the darkest annals of human history. The islanders still suffer in their collective psyche the trauma witnessed by a generation ago. Traditions of suppression and penal abandon are still visible in the worldviews of some island families. It’s the legacy borne by history. George Trevelyan once said “those who forget history are condemned to repeat it”.

Reference: Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Twentieth Century, a Gazetteer OUP, by Kiran Dhingra IAS.

This was the script of a radio talk delivered by Malini Shankar for Gyanvani FM Radio in Bangalore and was broadcast in 2007.

Impressionistic piece on visit to Cellular Jail, and Light and Sound Show, Port Blair.

As the airplane starts its dissent at Port Blair, the capital of the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the emerald green waters off the rocky coasts leave you entirely enamoured, with rapturous wonder, and breathless with excitement. It’s a descent into the black holes of Indian history, but guaranteed to replenish your soul with a gratitude for the freedom we enjoy today… The seductive coasts is a far cry from the Kalapani, the dreaded fear instilled in freedom fighters of the colonial era who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause – forfeit in the most non violent methods possible - the colonial masters’ right to establish a penal colony in the midst of an ocean far away from any landmass.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, being a chain of volcanic islands, is cut off from the mainland by a distance of around 1250 kilometres. Its tourism interest revolves as much around its historical significance as its geographical, and after the Tsunami, its geological interest. The historical significance of the islands will touch the visitor and remind one of the price for liberty. The Cellular Jail is celebrated as the greatest monument to liberty in Indian history and today the families and descendants of convicts whether freedom fighters or not, enjoy the highest status in Andaman society.

Initially conceptualized by the colonial power as a penal colony in the year 1789 it was later abandoned in 1796 because of the sheer inaccessibility of the remote islands. However by 1857 Frederic Mouat recommended to the Government of India that the Andamans is best suited for a penal colony and in the year 1906 the Cellular Jail took shape. Mouat conceived of a prison where the traitors to the colonial power could be lodged for the most heinous and grievous sentences. Sentences usually meant rigorous imprisonment and solitary confinement. Gallows in the infamous Cellular Jail were equipped for simultaneous execution of three convicts and there was a separate jail on Viper Island meant only for execution. The most famous of all the heroic prisoners of the day was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who got the title Veer Savarkar for his courageous fight against the colonial power. In 1911 he was sentenced to two life terms in solitary confinement in the dreaded Cellular Jail and actually served the sentence for 20 years after which he was released in 1931. The cellular Jail was disbanded in the year 1936. The jail gets its epithet because of the small cells in which the traitors or convicts were lodged: 13 feet by 7 feet holes with one 2 feet by 1 ½ feet window shaded by zinc sheets. Even an electric saw today cannot saw off the west facing gates and grills made of wrought iron.

Cruelty and barbarous crimes meted out to the prisoners included physical torture and exploitation. Exploitation manifested in the form of labour camps and starvation. Inadequate food supplies once caused arbitrary execution of prisoners. Prisoners were selected randomly for drowning in the vast expanse of the oceans surrounding the forlorn volcanic islands. The rock hewn emerald waters of the Bay of Bengal that surrounds the mystical islands came to be called Kala Pani. Even today the words Kala Pani evokes fear and hatred for the colonial masters on the one hand and commands respect and patriotic fervour at the same time in the visitor. Reliving the horrific experiences of the day in the well conceived light and sound show of the Cellular Jail is a must do for the visitors to the Andamans. 6 prisoners were once drowned in the deep waters off the Island of South Andaman. The monument to liberty – the dreaded Cellular Jail stands as a mute witness to the barbaric atrocities and human rights violations that were committed by the colonial yoke.

Labour exploitation of various hues is still etched as scars in many nooks and crevices of the notorious prison. Jailor David Barry was particularly notorious for his ruthless governance in the jail. He was known for supervising the extraction of 50 to 80 pounds of coconut oil within 8 man-hours. If the prisoners could not comply with this kind of unrealistic deadlines they were flogged rather mercilessly. Most of the inmates of the prison were freedom fighters of the day, and not surprisingly they were inspired by the flames of rebellion touched off by the civil disobedience movement on the mainland. Each new prisoner brought with him the flaming passions of the civil disobedience movement and it was not long before the inmates unified under the stewardship of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar to launch a hunger strike against the barbaric atrocities committed by the jail warden David Barry. One prisoner – who was on the verge of dehydration was force fed by the prison authorities. During the force feeding the prisoner on hunger strike was apparently made to lie down on his back with his hands tied and another co prisoner was made to sit on his chest. Jailor Barry supervised the force-feeding and he was fed rice wine through his nostrils because the hunger striker would not open his mouth. The stress of the bizarre ritual took the life of the inmate even as he choked. The panicky jailor then ordered that the corpse be disposed off in secrecy at night fall in the Kalapani off the coast, barely a stone throw away behind the Cellular Jail.

The light and sound show in the Cellular Jail encapsulates for the visitor, the hardships and sacrifices sustained by the freedom fighters. It leaves you wondering whether we, the post independence denizens of India deserve the freedom and democracy, which we’ve literally been handed down on a silver platter. The purpose of viewing the light and sound show in the Cellular Jail is achieved if the visitor feels the price of liberty, and the values of democratic heritage.