The Jail That Built the Colony

The usual way to tell this story is to start with the jail and treat the islands as its setting. The order is the other way round. The islands were taken because they were far away, and the first thing built on them was a place to put people who could not be kept anywhere else. Everything else — the jetty, the roads, the clearings, the bazaar that served them — was built by those people.

That is why the jail and the settlement cannot be separated. A penal colony is not a prison with a town attached; it is a labour regime that happens to be organised as a punishment, and the infrastructure it produces is the colony.

Why here

After 1857 the colonial government needed somewhere to send men it did not want to hang and did not want to keep. The Andamans offered the two properties that mattered: distance, and no land border. There was no route out, no sympathetic population within reach, and no legal machinery through which a release could be argued. The sea was the wall.

Transportation had a second purpose, which was stated openly at the time. A settlement in the Bay of Bengal needed labour, and convicts were labour that could not leave. The islands were surveyed, a harbour was chosen at Port Blair, and the first gangs were set to clearing forest before there was anywhere to house them.

What the convicts built

The list is the colony's inventory: the jetty at Port Blair, the roads that connect the first settlements, the embankments, the saw mill, the barracks, the hospital, the church. Forest was cleared for agriculture that mostly failed, because the soil and the rainfall were not what the planners had assumed, and each failure produced another work party and another set of records.

This is the part that later histories tend to soften. The islands' charming infrastructure — the harbour front, the roads cut through forest, the bungalows on the ridge — was not built by settlers who arrived to a prepared landscape. It was built by people who were there against their will, under a regime whose death rates were high enough that the colonial administration itself kept inquiring into them.

The jail as a machine

The Cellular Jail, begun in 1896 and completed in 1906, is a design argument rather than a building. Seven wings radiate from a central tower, each wing a row of single cells with a high wall between each, so that a prisoner could not see or speak to another. The guard in the tower sees every gallery; the prisoner sees a wall.

The theory was that isolation breaks the political prisoner — no shared labour, no conversation, no collective. It was applied to a category that the administration treated as the most dangerous: revolutionaries transported after the early twentieth-century conspiracies. The hunger strikes of the 1930s, and the deaths that followed them, are the record of what the design produced instead.

Who lives here now

The population is not a mainland population that moved to an island. It is the descendants of transported convicts, of convicts who stayed after their terms, and of free settlers recruited in successive waves from Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Punjab — each wave recruited for a specific purpose, agricultural or industrial, and settled in a specific place.

That history is legible in the islands' languages, in the names of villages, and in the local category of the "local born" — a person whose claim to the islands is generational rather than residential. It matters administratively, because land and permits in the islands have often been restricted to people with that claim.

An island governed as a garrison

After 1947 the islands stopped being a penal colony and became something else: a territory that sits astride a sea route, several hundred kilometres from any mainland coast, with a population that had to be supplied by ship. That geography produced the administrative form the islands still have — a chief commissioner's territory, a large public payroll, and the habit of treating infrastructure as a defence requirement as well as a service.

The consequence is visible in the budget. A settlement of a few thousand people needs a hospital, a school, a police station, a jetty and a power plant, because there is no neighbouring district to share any of them with. The cost per head is high, the standard of the service is set by what a ship can carry, and the largest employer is the administration itself. An island economy like this does not have a private sector so much as a private sector that serves the public one.

The jail itself has had three lives. It was a colonial prison until the islands were occupied during the Second World War, when it was used by the occupying administration; after 1945 it held prisoners again, and after independence it was left to decay until it was declared a national memorial and turned into a museum. Two of its wings were demolished in the 1950s, which is why the plan today is a fragment of the plan that was argued about.

The other population

Before any of this there were the islands' own communities: the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese in the Andamans, and the Nicobarese and Shompen in the Nicobar group. Their history after 1858 is a history of displacement, disease and, in some cases, deliberate isolation.

Some areas are reserved and entry is restricted; the main road through the islands passes along the edge of one such reserve, and traffic on it moves in regulated convoys. That arrangement is contested by people who live on both sides of the question, and this piece does not adjudicate it. What is not contested is the arithmetic: a settlement built to hold people, on islands that already held people, could not avoid encountering them.

The economy that exists now is a government economy with a fishing sector and a tourist season attached. The payroll is large because a territory this remote needs administrators, teachers, doctors and police in every settlement, however small. The jail is a memorial and a museum. The jetty it was built to serve is still the reason the islands have a town.