Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)

Imperial Andamans Colonial Encounter and Island History

Aparna Vaidik

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series General Editors: Megan Vaughan, Kings’ College, Cambridge and Richard Drayton, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge This informative series covers the broad span of modern imperial history while also exploring the recent developments in former colonial states where residues of empire can still be found. The books provide in-depth examinations of empires as competing and complementary power structures encouraging the reader to reconsider their understanding of international and world history during recent centuries. Titles include: Sunil S. Amrith DECOLONIZING INTERNATIONAL HEALTH India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 Tony Ballantyne ORIENTALISM AND RACE Aryanism in the British Empire Robert J. Blyth THE EMPIRE OF THE RAJ Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947 Roy Bridges (editor) IMPERIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND AFRICA Studies Presented to John Hargreaves L.J. Butler COPPER EMPIRE Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c.1930–64 Hilary M. Carey (editor) EMPIRES OF RELIGION T. J. Cribb (editor) IMAGINED COMMONWEALTH Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English Michael S. Dodson ORIENTALISM, EMPIRE AND NATIONAL CULTURE India, 1770–1880 Ulrike Hillemann ASIAN EMPIRE AND BRITISH KNOWLEDGE China and the Networks of British Imperial Expansion B.D. Hopkins THE MAKING OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN Ronald Hyam BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL CENTURY, 1815–1914: A STUDY OF EMPIRE AND EXPANSION Third Edition

Robin Jeffrey POLITICS, WOMEN AND WELL-BEING How Kerala became a ‘Model’ Gerold Krozewski MONEY AND THE END OF EMPIRE British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–58 Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (editors) PSYCHIATRY AND EMPIRE Javed Majeed AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAVEL AND POST-NATIONAL IDENTITY Francine McKenzie REDEFINING THE BONDS OF COMMONWEALTH 1939–1948 The Politics of Preference Gabriel Paquette ENLIGHTENMENT, GOVERNANCE AND REFORM IN SPAIN AND ITS EMPIRE 1759–1808 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre IRISH AND INDIAN The Cosmopolitan Politics of Alfred Webb Ricardo Roque HEADHUNTING AND COLONIALISM Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 Michael Silvestri IRELAND AND INDIA Nationalism, Empire and Memory John Singleton and Paul Robertson ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALASIA 1945–1970 Aparna Vaidik IMPERIAL ANDAMANS Colonial Encounter and Island History Kim A. Wagner (editor) THUGGEE Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India Jon E. Wilson THE DOMINATION OF STRANGERS Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–91908–8 (Hardback ) 978–0–333–91909–5 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Imperial Andamans Colonial Encounter and Island History Aparna Vaidik Professor of History, Georgetown University, USA

© Aparna Vaidik 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-57605-6

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vaidik, Aparna, 1975– Imperial Andamans : colonial encounter and island history / Aparna Vaidik. p. cm. – (Cambridge imperial and post-colonial studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-57605-6 (hardback) 1. Andaman Islands (India)–History. 2. Andaman Islands (India)–Colonization. 3. Andaman Islands (India)–Geography. 4. Andaman Islands (India)–Environmental conditions. 5. Penal colonies–India–Andaman Islands–History. 6. British–India–Andaman Islands–History. 7. Great Britain–Colonies–Asia. I. Title. DS486.5.A5V34 2010 954’.8803–dc22 2009048530 10 19

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Anil Sanweria This is the first of my answers to his question ‘Asti Kashchit Wagvisheshah’

O favored isles of heaven! O lovely scene! Whose wooded heights slope down to seas as green, Save where the wave, dashed on some reef below, Lights the long base with clouds of wreathed snow, Here, Mercy tempering Justice, for a time, Britannia gathers India’s sons of crime. Not theirs to pine in dungeons or in chains Chilled in the cold, or mouldering in the rains; Here must they toil, but free, or all but free Their only prison-wall the girdling sea! Toil, but in hope; for wisdom bids them learn The sweets of honest effort, and to earn The stipend of their labor, until time Fill the full tale of years that expiate their crime, Aye, all may hope! For even whose knife Has dealt a death blow to another’s life, He whose own life were forfeit, knows that he When twenty years have rolled, shall yet be free; Seek the dear village where a boy he played, The little temple and banyan-shade, Rejoin his children grown to man’s estate And early friends still mourning his fate; Pluck the rich harvest of mangoe groves And breathe his last among the scenes he loves.*

*Saunders A. Dryers, ‘The Andaman Islands’, Calcutta Review, Vol. 116, 1903, pp. 260–291.

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Maps

xi

List of Tables

xii

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Glossary

xiv

Acknowledgements

xv

Introduction

1

1. The Island Problematic Colonial encounter and cannibalism discourse Cannibalism: within and without Narrativizing conquest

16 17 23 33

2. Colonizing the Bay The eighteenth century: island politics of the Eastern Indian Ocean The mid-nineteenth century Indian Ocean theatre Becoming a convict colony

35 36 43 50

3. Reclaiming the Wild Remote islands Dreaded tropicana Ferocious anthropophagi

61 62 75 80

4. Redemptive Space Voyage as penal sacrament Existence as punishment Dungeon for felons

88 88 92 94

5. Labour – The Grand Desideratum Organizing work and labour Engaging non-convicts Working the ‘savage’

104 104 123 127

6. Myriad Andamans Isles of torture

132 132 vii

viii Contents

A pregnable fortress A haven for illicit activities A dream-like paradise The silent isles The Andamans are my home? Muktitirth Andaman

136 138 141 145 150 156

7. Island Colony and the Penal Settlement Debating the mode of colonization Changing context – 1919–1921 The ‘quasi-penal’ settlement

161 162 173 182

Conclusion: Colonial Encounter and Island History

187

Notes

192

Bibliography

247

Index

277

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Andamanese Woman of the Aka-Bea-da tribe, South Andaman, wearing a necklace of human bones Source: AS-B22-25: AN27697001, M.V. Portman’s Album (1890s) Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London

24

Figure 1.2 Andamanese man wearing a skull on his back Source: Photo 125/2/82, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

25

Figure 2.1 Convicts on a boat landing on the Andamans Source: As-A47-8: AN624307001, Centre for Anthropology, British Library, London

56

Figure 3.1 Officers’ swimming pool, Ross Island Source: Photo 125/2/99, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

71

Figure 3.2 Ball and Dining Room, Government House, Ross Island Source: Photo 125/2/12, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

72

Figure 3.3 M.V. Portman with Andamanese, Little Andamans Source: Photo 12/2/25, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

82

Figure 3.4 Profile of an Andamanese girl of about six years standing in front of chequered grid in a studio. M.V. Portman and W. Molesworth (Indian Medical Service, 1893–94) surveyed the physical characteristics of the Andamanese and generated norms from the mass of evidence they gathered. Source: AS-B30-2: AN45000001, M.V. Portman’s Album (1890s) Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London

83

Figure 4.1 The Cellular Jail under construction Source: AS-A6-7: AN73943001, E.H. Man Album, 1900, Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London

98

Figure 4.2

A wooden model of the Cellular Jail

98

Figure 4.3

Cells of the Cellular Jail

100 ix

x List of Illustrations

Figure 4.4 Convicts at work in-between the wings of the Cellular Jail Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

100

Figure 5.1 Convict petty officers supervising prisoners at dinner on the beach Source: Photo 125/2/1, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

114

Figure 5.2 Burmese convicts on road work with wooden neck tickets Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

116

Figure 5.3 Group of convicts (including rickshaw coolies and carpenters) Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

116

Figure 5.4 Convicts working on the old terminus of the tram-line on Bamlungta Creek, Middle Andaman, showing the tram-line Source: Photo 125/2/113, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

117

Figure 5.5 Landing a big padaouk log on the timber ship Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

118

Figure 5.6 Unloading two elephants from a steamer for forest work on the Islands Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

119

Figure 6.1 Group of female convicts. The one on the right is the head woman and a Burmese Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

149

Figure 6.2 Female convicts, one on the right spinning a wheel Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

150

Figure 6.3 Children of female convicts Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

151

List of Maps 1. 2. 3. 4.

Map of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Map of the Indian Ocean Map of settlement in Port Blair, 1881 Map of settlement in Port Blair showing distribution of malarial swamps and mosquitoes, 1912 Source: S.R. Christophers, Malaria in the Andamans, Calcutta, 1912 5. Map of the Andamans showing Tribal Distribution, 1900 Source: AS-A6-1: AN73085001, E.H. Man Album, Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London

xi

xviii 42 66 78

85

List of Tables Table 2.1

Crimes committed by convicts sent to the Andamans in 1859 Table 2.2 Crimes committed by convicts sent to the Andamans (1874–1901) Table 3.1 Rates for passage of convicts in 1858 Table 3.2 Comparative table of cash receipts and expenditure in rupees (1874–1901) Table 3.3 Comparative statement of population (1874–1901) Table 3.4 Statistics for the number of dead from 10 March 1858 to 20 October 1859 Table 3.5 Percentage of convict mortality (1877–1884) Table 4.1 Mortality statistics for the period 1856 to 1861 in Indian jails Table 5.1 Marriage between convicts and between convicts and free persons Table 5.2 Religion, age and marital status of the first batch of 159 female convicts Table 5.3 Distribution of convicts according to previous occupation (in %) Table 5.4 Former occupation of the convicts (male) – 1898–99 to 1907–08 Table 5.5 Employment of the convicts (male) in the settlement of Port Blair (1898–99 to 1907–08) Table 5.6 Numerical return of convicts at the penal settlement and periods of imprisonment awarded (Jan 1860) Table 5.7 Increase in the number of convicts from the year 1862 to 1878 Table 5.8 Statistical comparison of the number of term-convicts in the early twentieth century Table 5.9 Local-born population (1881–1901) Table 5.10 Occupation of the local-born adults in 1901 Table 6.1 Example of facial description in Descriptive Rolls Table 6.2 Female marriage statistics (1901) Table 6.3 Statement showing the number of married convicts who have either left or been permitted to remain in the settlement as ex-convicts

xii

58 59 64 65 67 77 77 95 106 107 110 111 112 121 121 122 126 126 144 147 152

List of Abbreviations CA CBSNC CUL EEIC IOR

NAI NMM NMML RAI WBSA

Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London Calcutta and Burma Steam Navigation Company Cambridge University Library, Cambridge English East India Company India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London (earlier Oriental and India Office Collection) National Archives of India, New Delhi National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, New Delhi Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata, West Bengal

xiii

Glossary Amlah – Officer Apad Dharma – Duty (religious or otherwise) in time of duress Babu (or Baboo) – Native clerk Beegha (or Bigha) – Measure of land-area, varying much in different parts of India Bhungee (or Bhangi) – Sweeper or scavenger Bunneah (or Bania, Banyan) – Hindu trader or native broker attached to houses of business Chaudhari – Headman or government agent Chowkidar (or Chokidar) – Watchman, caretaker or rural policeman Dacoity – Armed robbery, murderous highway robbery Dhobi (or Dhobee) – Washer-man Faurah – Shovel or pickaxe Ganja – Cannabis Gymkhana – Social and Sporting Club Hundi (or Hoondi) – Bill of exchange Jemadar – Indian lieutenant, native officer or overseer Maistree (mistree or Mistri) – Foreman or master-workman Mufassils (or Mofussil) – Country stations, or rural localities of a district Mufti (or Mufty) – An expounder of the Muslim law. The Mufti is above the Qazi, who carries out the judgement Mulk – Country Muktitirth – National monument Munshi (or Moonshee) – Secretary, accountant, writer or native teacher of languages Munsif (or Moonsif) – Native civil judge of the lowest grade Nawab – Viceroy or Chief Governor, or a peerage-like title of rank without any office attached Panchayat – A village council of five members assembled as a court of arbiters or jury Qazi – Muslim judge Rajah – Petty chiefs, or big Zamindars or regional chiefs and princes Sadr Amin (or Sudder ameen) – Second class of native judge (above the munsif) Sepoy – A native soldier, disciplined and dressed in European style Thug – Cheat or a swindler Thuggee – The profession or crime of cheating or swindling Tindals (or Tandel or Tandail) – A native petty officer who heads a gang of labourers on public works Umedwars – Convict petty officer Zamindar – Landowner

xiv

Acknowledgements This book has journeyed with me over the last nine years across three continents and several cities and institutions. Therefore, during the course of researching and writing this book, I have incurred intellectual and personal debt of many individuals. This project was conceptualized and took shape under the guidance of Neeladri Bhattacharya. From him I learnt the most valuable lesson as a historian – to question and critique, not simply the work of other scholars but my own frameworks. This book bears his intellectual imprint. His patience and gentle mockery were invaluable in keeping me grounded. I take this opportunity to thank my teachers Madhavan Palat, Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee, Muzaffar Alam, David Baker, Upinder Singh, Tasneem Suhrawardy, C. A. Bayly, Kate Bennison, John Illife and Melissa Lane, who guided me and strengthened my resolve to pursue historical research. At various stages, discussions with Ranabir Chakravarty, Himanshu Prabha Ray, Radhika Singha, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya at my alma mater Centre for Historical Studies, JNU were extremely valuable. The project also greatly benefited from discussions with Gautam Bhadra, A.R. Venkatchalapathy, Lakshmi Subramanium, Richard Grove, Prabhu Mohapatra and Elizabeth Edwards. Further intellectual support for the project came from the different institutions at which I have worked in the past eight years. I wish to thank my colleagues and students at Miranda House, Kamla Nehru College, Motilal Nehru College (Eve.) in New Delhi, India where I worked as an ad hoc and temporary lecturer for about five years. I am also infinitely grateful to my colleagues at Georgetown University for engaging with my work and commenting on drafts of the manuscript, and to John McNeill for mentoring me. Financial support for the project in the form of handsome grants came from the Indian Council for Historical Research, New Delhi, at distressing stages. I am also grateful to Richard Alford of the Charles Wallace India Trust for funding research in libraries and archives in UK, and to the Graduate School of Georgetown University for their generous Summer & Travel grant. I wish to acknowledge the assistance extended by numerous people during the course of my fieldwork. Lt. Gov. of the Andamans and Nicobar Islands Sh. N.N. Jha, Master Kesar Das, Sh. Gauri Shankar Pandey and Mr M.A. Mustaba and his sister Ms Ume Salma of the Aberdeen Bazaar, Sh. Swapnesh Chaudhary, the Director of the National Memorial Cellular Jail, and Naw Ahmay and her husband Pradhan from the Webi Village. My thanks to Sh. Madan Mohan Singh at All India Radio, Port Blair, whose help in conducting the interviews of convict descendent families was invaluable; Sh. Purushottam Srivastava in Lucknow was a treasure trove of information on the Andamans; xv

xvi Acknowledgements

Dr T.N. Pandit, the head of the Anthropological Survey of Port Blair, deepened my understanding of the aboriginal life; and Mr. Abdul Salam, a Moplah and whose father was brought to the Andamans as a convict, for providing the copy of Thanesari’s memoir and his impeccable hospitality. I incurred a tremendous debt of gratitude to Sh. Janardhan Shukla who provided Anil and me with shelter and stood by us in our Kalapani ordeal. I thank the staff of the libraries and archives which I have consulted. Dr Jaya Ravindran, Dr Probir Roy and the staff at the National Archives of India, Central Library of the National Archives, Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, Central Library of the Archaeological Survey of India, the Central Secretariat Library, the Library of the National Memorial Cellular Jail, the State Library, Port Blair, the library of the Archaeological Survey of India (Port Blair branch) and the Forest Department Library, Port Blair, National Library Calcutta, West Bengal State Archives, Suchita Guha-Thakurta at State Archives in the Writer’s Building, and Professor Chitta Panda, the Director of the Victoria Memorial. In England, Sovati Louden-Smith and Harry Persaud at the Centre for Anthropology at the British Museum and Arkadiusz Bentkowski at the Library of the Royal Anthropological Society of Britain and Ireland helped me with their photographic collections. Other libraries I visited in England included the India Office Library and Records, London; the National Maritime Museum, London; the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, London; the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge; University Library, Cambridge; and finally the National Army Museum, Camberley, Surrey. Faizan Ahmad, a fine scholar of Urdu and Arabic at the National Archives of India, New Delhi, and Dina Hussein, graduate student at Georgetown University, helped me with the translation of Fazl-i-Haq Khairabadi’s Baaghi Hindustan. I thank my teaching assistant Toshihiro Higuchi for helping with last-minute editing and indexing. I also remain indebted to my friends and family members who shared moments of my life during this research. I am deeply indebted to late Suhash Chakravarty, a dear friend, who counselled me to combine my research with teaching, and never to treat the latter as a lesser vocation. I grieve for him. With my friends Namrita, SRM, Sabby, Radhika, Amit Ahuja, Nandini and Arup I have shared moments of joy and despair while working on this project. I thank Pratik Chakrabarti for mentoring, guiding and nurturing me. To my elder brother, S.M. Afsar, I remain obliged for diligently translating Thanesari’s book from Urdu to Hindi; to Archana Didi for being an exemplary role model and reading several chapters at different stages; to my ‘twin’ Qurratulain Haider for editing and letting me carry her bags; and to Anamta and Abbas, for providing playful distraction. I am grateful to my brother Suparn for providing his impoverished sister occasional fine dining experiences, and Devkanya, Bimlesh and Shashi Prabha Aunty for constant support. I am also grateful to my grandfather Lala Rameshwar Das Gupta who started his life as a newspaper

Acknowledgements xvii

hawker, educated my mother against all odds and made sure that he was there to witness his granddaughter’s PhD viva. This work would not have been possible without the support and patience of my parents Ved Pratap Vaidik and Vedwati Vaidik. My father, a fine thinker, and my mother, a dedicated teacher and indefatigable researcher, inspired me by example and encouraged me in moments when I almost gave up. My thanks to Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland of Palgrave Macmillan for their confidence in my project. I also thank Shirley Tan for the successful production of the book. I dedicate this book to Anil Sanweria, my muse, soul mate and underpaid research assistant. He has been threatening to write a book on the Andamans if I did not finish mine in good time. The errors and omissions in the book are as much his as mine. Aparna Vaidik

Introduction

‘Space itself was a text that had to be written before it could be interpreted’ – Paul Carter In India, the Andaman Islands – a group of islands in the Bay of Bengal – have held a particular historical fascination. The Andamans, as Kalapani, or Black Waters,1 enjoy a certain degree of notoriety for serving as a receptacle for convicts and political prisoners during the years of the British Raj. In 1858, the British set up a penal settlement on the Islands, which was the abode of mutineers, rebels, murderers, dacoits, burglars, arsonists, rapists, rioters and plunderers. In 1906, an infamous panopticon Cellular Jail was built on the Islands that housed political prisoners and ordinary convicts sentenced to transportation by the colonial rulers. The convicts were believed to lead utterly miserable and horrible lives on the Islands. Testimony to the unsavoury reputation that the Islands enjoyed as Kalapani is their representation in Arthur Conan Doyle’s murder mystery The Sign of Four (1890), where Sherlock Holmes trails an intrepid murderer, Jonathan Small, who is an escaped convict from the Andamans. Conan Doyle’s story was replete with imageries and fantasies which were part of colonial folklore regarding the Andaman Islands – the disease and morbidity on the Islands, the horrible lives led by the convicts, and the presence of cannibalistic natives armed with poison darts and blowpipes. In contrast, in India’s collective national memory the Andamans are celebrated as a muktitirth, a site of pilgrimage, where the sons of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, sacrificed their lives in the service of the nation. Bejoy Kumar Sinha’s memoir of the nine years he spent as a prisoner in the Cellular Jail, In Andamans: the Indian Bastille (1939),2 is one such account. While his memoir sketches a poignant and tragic account of the dehumanization and brutalization of the jail inmates, it also recounts stories of the bravery and valour of those who refused to bow down to imperial coercion and imprisonment. Although different in their emphasis, both the imageries 1

2 Imperial Andamans

– Kalapani and Muktitirth – are a record of historical representations of the Andamans as a penal colony. These imageries of the Andamans persist today in India in fables, parables, grandmothers’ tales, literature, cinematographic representations and nationalist writings.3 What accounts for these imageries’ potency, discursive vigour and historical resilience?

The problematic – histories of confinement More specifically, it is the Andamans’ transformation into a monument to India’s nationalist struggle which provides sustenance to these images in post-colonial India. The transportation of rebels and mutineers of the Revolt of 18574 and the imprisonment of Indian revolutionaries and political prisoners in the Cellular Jail from 1909 onwards led to the nationalist edification of the Islands.5 The armed and violent resistance of Indian revolutionaries in the 1910s were equated with the uprising of mutineers and rebels of 1857. The Andamans provided the spatial link between the two sets of rebels who lived out their sentences on these islands as a sacrifice to India’s freedom.6 The nationalist appropriation of the Andamans was part of a larger process of the ‘reconfiguration of colonial space as national space’.7 The Andamans was not the Promised Land or the remembered land of Indian nationalism; it was the redemptive space of Indian nationalism, the ‘sacred place of pilgrimage sanctified by the dust of the Martyr’s feet’. The climax of the nationalist expropriation of the Andamans came with Lord Mountbatten, Viceroy of India,8 handing over the Andamans to Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of independent India in 1947. Mountbatten did so in spite of resistance from His Majesty’s Government and British bureaucrats at Whitehall who instead of giving the Islands over to either India or Pakistan wished to ‘legislate them out of India’, i.e., claim them as a British colony, in the same way as Aden.9 Mountbatten also overrode M.A. Jinnah’s insistence on inclusion of the Islands in Pakistan’s territory.10 Mountbatten from the outset was cognizant of the view Nehru took of the Andamans. In Nehru’s perception, these Islands were a sacred symbol of India’s nationalist struggle and therefore, were to ‘naturally go with Union of India’.11 Ever since Independence, the Andamans were drawn into India’s postcolonial nation-building project. The foremost example of this is the celebration of Andaman Diwas, or Andaman Day, every year on 10 March by the Andamans’ local administration. This date commemorates the landing of the rebels of the Revolt and the inauguration of the penal settlement on the Islands’ soil. Another instance is the conversion of the Cellular Jail by the Government of India into a ‘National Memorial’ in 1969, as a result of the efforts of ‘The Ex-Andaman Political Prisoner’s Fraternity Circle’. Formed in 1967, this is a group of Indian nationalists who were interned in the Cellular Jail in the 1930s. Such celebrations and memorials are a product of and in turn generate narratives which posit a symbiotic linkage

Introduction 3

between the Revolt, the inception of a penal colony on the Islands, and the constituting of the Andamans as the redemptive space of Indian nationalism. Firmly ensconced within the nationalist frame, the history of the Andaman Islands in these narratives becomes a derivative of their compatriot Indian peninsula, validating the Islands’ incorporation into the Union of India. The desire of the convicts’ descendants, who form a sizable portion of the population in the Andamans today, for recognition as the progeny of ‘freedom fighters’ and not simply those of dacoits, felons and murderers, prompts them to participate in and invoke the metanarrative of the nation.12 Although they continue to live separated by thousands of miles of sea from the Indian subcontinent and know only the Andamans as their home, they seek an umbilical link with the ‘mainland’ society (which they call mulk, or the nation/homeland). And the only way this link is rendered sanctified and free from social or political opprobrium is by encrypting the lives of their ancestors as sacrificed in the service of the mulk. Thus, for the most part, the intermeshing of the history of the Andamans with that of nationalism, nation and nation-state accounts for the persistence of these images. The way the history of the Andamans has been written so far has also inadvertently contributed to the sustenance of these images. The historical works range from an archival documentation of the history of the penal settlement13 to specifically focusing on the Cellular Jail and the political prisoners incarcerated therein14 to examining the transportation of rebels and mutineers in the wake of the Revolt of 185715 or the colonial state’s attempts to discipline and punish the convicts.16 Satadru Sen’s writings belong in the last category.17 Through a sophisticated analysis of the history of the pre-Cellular Jail phase of the penal settlement and the strategic intervention of labour, surveillance, segregation and medicine in the administration of the Settlement he provides a corrective to the imperious presence of the Revolt of 1857 and the Cellular Jail in the history of the Andamans. However, the chronological framing of his monograph from 1858 to 1898 (1858, the year the rebels and mutineers of the Revolt arrived on the Andamans; and 1898, the year the Cellular Jail’s construction began) reinstates the centrality of the Cellular Jail to the history of the Andamans. Sen also inadvertently reinforces the nationalist assertion that the rest of the penal settlement paled in comparison to the Cellular Jail once the transportation of political prisoners began. While historians acknowledge the metaphorical presence of the Revolt of 1857 and the Cellular Jail in the history of the Andamans, they either are unable, theoretically and methodologically, to move away from them or tend to ingenuously resurrect them. Consequently, the Andamans’ history remains entrenched in some firmly rooted myths such as: the Andamans were colonized because of the popular rebellion in 1857; the Andamans were simply an extension of the judicial arm of the Empire; the experience

4 Imperial Andamans

of transportation was nothing but extremely harsh; and the Cellular Jail is the defining aspect of the Andamans’ twentieth-century history. Continual reproduction of these myths by historians, lay writers and convict descendants lent them unchallenged historical authenticity. Thus the history of the Andamans, in its different avatars, either becomes penal history, convict history, a history of the Jail, or a history of anti-colonial resistance. The net consequence is the permanence of the Kalapani and Muktitirth imageries. Underlying both the imageries is an uncontested presumption regarding the character of the Andamans as a prison. The Islands are presumed to be a natural prison. This book explores the history of the Andamans by asking some fundamental questions – what was it about the geography, ecology and climate of the Andamans which rendered it a natural choice for a prison? Was it the seas which girdled the Islands, or its forests, or the supposed cannibalistic natives, or the wet climate, or its spatial disassociation from the Indian peninsula which caused the Islands to be seen as a site of banishment? Why is the character of the Andamans as a natural prison rarely questioned? Addressing these questions can help unravel the complex history of the colonial spatio-geographical imaginations of the Islands. British colonial administrators believed that islands in general made good and natural prisons. At a distance from the mainland, bounded by seas and dense forests, and infested with imaginary cannibals, the Islands certainly appeared to be naturally suited to incarceration because their very nature lent itself well to surveillance and segregation. Indeed, what other reason could the British have for colonizing the Andamans if not to use them as a prison? In addition, convict transportation to such islands, especially tropical ones, had the benefit of bringing down the cost of developing frontier colonies. Devil’s Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, Australia, St Helena, Alcatraz and Robben Island empirically authenticate these claims. All this neat and sanitized explanation about island histories needed was generations of writers and historians to work it into conventional wisdom. The unravelling of this history of colonial spatio-geographical imaginings is also reflected in the trajectory of the research for this book. It began well within the confines of conventional wisdom. The research hypothesis initially presumed that a need for a suitable transoceanic penal colony following the Revolt of 1857 was the reason behind the colonization of the Andamans, and their geography justified the Islands’ utility as a penal base. However, searching through colonial archives stretching from the 1780s to the 1940s radically altered the hypothesis. Questioning and problematizing the confinement of the history of the Andamans within the penal framework became the central problematic of the present study. It is clear that the term ‘natural prison’ is a historical construct and a product of the geographic imagination of imperialism and that nationalist and historical writings have often, inadvertently, given permanence to these costructs. In addition, a reading of the history of the Andamans merely as a penal colony is not

Introduction 5

only reductionist but amounts to restating and reaffirming the colonialnationalist frames of reference which confined these Islands. This does not, however, imply that penal history no longer has historical relevance or that it has become unworthy of historical inquiry. The challenge is to continue engaging with penal history and locate the imprisoned history of the Andamans through this encounter.

Undoing temporal shackles In great measure, the confinement of the history of the Andamans in a penal framework is the result of the lionization of certain dates (1857, 1898 and 1947) and events (the Revolt of 1857, construction of the Cellular Jail, and Indian independence) in the hitherto dominant chronological frameworks used for writing the history of the Islands. This chronology is also ineffectual as it fails to capture the temporal dissonance in the spatial history of the Islands. The first dissonance is embodied in the process of the Andamans transforming into a wild and cannibalistic space which was set in motion centuries before the actual colonization of the Islands; the second is the process of the Islands’ transformation from a colonial space into a national space. Therefore, defying the dominant historical periodization when writing the history of spaces such as the Andamans is a methodological necessity rather than an artefact of the historian’s personal caprice. Imperial Andamans employs an alternative narration strategy which rejects and challenges the periodization of the dominant narratives. Its chapters are organized thematically but have an underlying longue durée chronological frame. Lest one is charged of ‘story plucking, leap-frogging legacies and time flattening’,18 the book’s narrative has its points of departure in the following decades – the 1780s, 1850s, 1870s and 1910s. This narration strategy is valuable as it presents the colonial discursive and material hegemony not simply as a fait accompli but as a process rooted in a particular historical context;19 and it enables the mapping of internal inconsistencies, asymmetries and contestations inherent in, and produced by, colonialism. The story of the Andamans’ colonization is set in motion in the 1780s with British surveyors entering the waters of Bay of Bengal and the annexation of the Andamans in 1789. The reports, logbooks and journals of British marine surveyors and colonial administrators from the late eighteenth century onwards embodied a particular imagery of the Andamans which drew upon the tales of ancient and medieval travellers. The pre-colonial European orientalist discourse regarding the Andamans had rendered commonsense the belief that cannibals inhabited the Islands and that its jungles emitted deadly poisonous gases. The slippage of imageries and tropes between pre-colonial and colonial narratives reveals how space was constituted before it was physically colonized. Although the colonial survey narratives were eager to discredit the myth that the Islanders were

6 Imperial Andamans

cannibals, the language of their texts is replete with phantasmal depictions of the Islands and its inhabitants. This book addresses this paradox by demonstrating how colonial imagery implicated the historically contingent spatial and societal insularity of the Andaman Islands in the discourse on cannibalism; and showing the way this representation went towards narrativization of the Andamans’ conquest as a project of ‘reform’ and ‘civilization’. Colonial episteme constituted the Islands as a space for the wild, the unincorporated and the uncivilized that required control, incorporation and civilization. In the 1850s the attention of British colonial administrators is once again drawn to the Andamans. Their fling with the Islands in the late eighteenth century was brief as they had abandoned the Andamans in 1796 because of overwhelming disease and death.20 The British interest in the Andamans stemmed from the location of the Islands in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. The Ocean, which until the sixteenth century was the domain of merchants, traders, adventurers, travellers, pirates and seamen, was a ‘gateway’ for the British conquest. Securing their control over the Ocean was a means of securing their Empire in India. Colonizing Australia,21 taking over Mauritius, capturing South East Asian littorals, and setting up a colony on the Andamans were all part of Britain’s Oceanic game. In the 1850s, the colonial state’s Oceanic concerns became more urgent than ever and thus so did the British interest in the Andamans, which resulted in their colonization in 1858. Examining the history of the Andamans in the 1780s and then again in the 1850s renders the actual dates of colonization of the Islands (1789 and 1858), although significant, incidental to the process of colonization of the Andamans; and it also helps in reevaluating the role of the Revolt of 1857 in the colonization of the Islands and the reasons for the opening of a penal settlement on them. The 1870s inaugurated the process whereby the British dissatisfaction with the colonizing project of the Andamans begins to generate the debate regarding conversion of the penal settlement on the Andamans into a ‘free’ colony. As always, the colonial administrators, both in India and the Andamans, diverged and disagreed over the reasons for conversion. Some officials quoted dissatisfaction with convict transportation as a penal device or with the conditions of the penal settlement; others focused on the conflict between the commercial and penal goals of the Settlement; and some saw it as a haven for morally profligate humans. While the colonial administrators debated the kind of settlement – penal or free – the Andamans should have, they never questioned the value of the Islands as a colony. In tracking the debate as it unfolded over nearly forty years the narrative lends weight to the thesis that the penal settlement was the mode of colonization of the Andamans and not the objective; therefore, colonial administrators considered this status alterable.

Introduction 7

The decade of the 1910s provides the temporal departure for the beginning of the transformation of the Andamans from a colonial space into a nationalist one with the transportation of Indian revolutionaries to the Andamans. The nationalists, in appropriating the Andamans for their cause, overwhelmed and smothered the various other spatial experiences of the convicts. From here the Andamans became Mukitirth, a national monument. Another trend which manifested itself in this period was the merging of penal settlement with the Island colony, i.e., the penal settlement was no longer simply a mode of colonization of the Islands but the Islands’ retention as a colony had become contingent on the continuation of the penal settlement. The process of nationalist apotheosis of the Andamans and the debate regarding the conversion of the Andamans into a free colony acquired a greater urgency in the post-World War I era with the transformations in the character of the British Empire and the growing muscle of Indian nationalism. Finally in 1921, the colonial state attempted to resolve this debate by inaugurating a quasi-penal settlement on the Andamans. The book’s narrative closes with the discussion of how this decision altered the social composition of Island society by launching an era of ‘voluntary migration’ of convicts to the Islands. In narrating the story of the Andamans, this book relies primarily on a range of archival records various government departments of British India produced between the 1780s and the 1940s. Although the colonial archives were by and for British administrators, they nevertheless proved to be a rich historical source. First, reading through colonial archives spread over a century and a half brought to light the fact that there was more to the story of the Andamans than just the history of the penal settlement. For instance, the mid-nineteenth century records on the Andamans or the files relating to the Cellular Jail, if read in isolation, conjured up an image of the Andamans as the penal fortress to which several historians have paid homage. However, if one steps back in time and sifts through the records of the late eighteenth century or moves forward into those of the twentieth century, the picture alters significantly. Second, the colonial archive is not simply a repository of facts, it is a text, often constructing new narratives and chronologies, speaking in different voices, layering over past actions with present motivations, contradicting itself, striking out admissions of failure and guilt, and revealing the colonial administration’s inner challenges, inconsistencies, fractures, ruptures and power struggles.22 Third, the archival records were extremely valuable because of their variegated nature. Along with government files and official correspondence, they contained letters, memoirs and notes written by European visitors, including journalists, travellers and the wives and daughters of European officers. They also had convict letters, newspaper clippings with narrative accounts of returnee convicts, petitions by convicts and by political prisoners interned in the Cellular Jail, and letters written by Indian nationalists or questions raised by them regarding the Andamans in the Legislative Assembly. Such nuggets appeared fleetingly but were extremely significant in filling out the story of the Andamans.

8 Imperial Andamans

The archival data was also, in most places, virgin. The magnitude of data lying untouched in vaults of the National Archives of India, New Delhi, was indeed surprising and was in itself indicative of the hidden histories of the Islands that this book seeks to trace. Besides colonial archives, Imperial Andamans makes use of a variety of other unpublished and published material from different libraries in India and England to tell the history of the Andamans. These sources include travel literature, geographical writings, archaeological data, anthropological monographs and writings, medical and sanitary reports, forest reports, private papers and diaries of colonial officials, personal correspondence of visitors and sojourners to the Andamans, native newspaper reports, convict memoirs, and the writings of nationalist leaders and convicts in Hindi, Bengali and Urdu. Together, they present multi-faceted and riveting accounts of life in the Andamans. The writing of the book also involved extensive fieldwork in the Andamans. Travelling the entire length and breadth of the Andamans (North, Middle, South, and the Little Andamans) provided an opportunity to interview a number of descendants of the convicts, and the surviving aboriginal population living in the tribal reserves. The book, however, has not fully utilized the oral data collected during the fieldwork as it pertained mostly to the post1920s social and political history of the Islands. Nevertheless, the fieldwork was significant in understanding the role nationalism and geography played in moulding the history of the Islands.

Spatial history and island studies Imperial Andamans next reckons with the discursive and captive power of ‘popular’ historical narratives in order to reclaim the history of the Andamans from its confinement within a colonialist-nationalist framework and the consequent mythicization of the Islands as a natural prison. Deconstructing and historicizing the popular narratives has been on the agenda of Indian historians since the final decade of the twentieth century. The rise of right-wing ideology and political parties in the 1990s, which drew strength from these narratives, obliged the historical profession to acknowledge the methodological limitations of their craft.23 The urgent need to widen the historians’ toolkit in order to co-opt or contain the popular was no longer disregarded. Some historians responded by producing alternative ‘verifiable and credible’ narratives which subverted the popular version,24 and some ended up creating their own metanarratives, as is evident in the case of the history of the Andamans, which in claiming to challenge the popular begins to resemble and reaffirm the popular.25 For the most part the historical profession’s failure to challenge the might of the popular narratives lies in the fact that writing history continues to suffer from what Manu Goswami calls methodological nationalism, that is, conflation of nationalist/ popular categories with those of socio-historical analysis,26 in spite of an increasing number of historians questioning the validity and adequacy of using the nation as a historical category and as an analytical tool for encoding the past.27

Introduction 9

As a corrective, this book, inspired by the works of David Harvey, Paul Carter, Henri Lefebvre and Derek Gregory, uses the lens of spatial history.28 It presents a historical narrative of the Andamans in which the islands appear both as the space, the palimpsest, where the historical plot unfolds and the space which was constituted by history, i.e., the supposedly ‘empty space’ which was converted into the space.29 It historicizes the transformation of the penal colony into the ‘space’ – physical, theoretical, and intellectual – of the Andamans’ history. In this story the historians of the Andamans do not appear merely as spectators but as actors who, in writing the history of the space, are just as complicit in creating and authoring the space as the ancient and medieval travellers and writers, colonial surveyors and administrators, and the Indian nationalists. By examining the process of the ‘production of space’ by colonialists, nationalists and historians alike it extricates the Andamans’ history from the metanarratives of the Revolt and the Jail, which have kept it imprisoned and closeted within the girders of penal history. Central to the process of the production of the Andamans as a colonial space was the way the British inscribed it into the moment of the colonial encounter. Colonial episteme did not invent the discursive vocabulary but derived it from the medieval European orientalist lexicon. It was a longstanding notion that islands existed on the peripheries of civilizations, empires and human culture. The politics of Empire not only reinforced this popular perception but also marginalized certain island spaces both in physical terms and in historical scholarship. This is especially evident in the case of the Indian Ocean and its historiography, which has had an apathetic attitude towards the study of Island histories except for the much frequented, commercially significant island spaces on the colonial chessboard, such as Mauritius, Penang, Singapore and Ceylon.30 This is also the case with works on migrant labour history, which have paid more attention to those Oceanic island colonies that were a significant commercial limb of the Empire.31 Shawkat M. Toorawa’s edited volume is the only one of its kind in recent years to pay attention to the island histories of the western Indian Ocean.32 Island spaces have received scant attention even in the spatio-geographical historiography which is increasingly documenting histories of various kinds of geographical niches and spaces in the Indian subcontinent such as water bodies, forests, ports and hills, and examining the manner in which they were profiled and spatially reorganized by the Raj.33 Alternatively, environmental studies have generally approached the history of the tropical islands by tracing the origins of Western conservation policies and the role that islands have played – as colonial peripheries – in the extension of human knowledge.34 While this has brought the islands into the historical spotlight, it has done little to rescue them from their ‘peripheral’ status. This book demonstrates how the power to shape, order and use space was one of the critical political means available to the colonial state for

10 Imperial Andamans

controlling colonial society. This is borne out by the discursive resilience of colonial spatial metaphors that were generated in the moment of colonial encounter that bolstered the force of geography, instead of minimizing it. The colonization of the Andamans spatialized them not only as geographical but also as metaphorical islands. The evidence that this book presents for the Andamans runs contrary to the view that historians such as Fernand Braudel, Eric Wolf and K.N. Chaudhuri hold regarding the relationship between islands and humans.35 Based on evidence from island societies such as Melanesia, Polynesia, Papua New Guinea and Mauritius, they argue that human intervention played a significant role in minimizing the effects of isolation, which geography at times imposed on island spaces. These studies prove that a geographical island may not always be a metaphorical island, i.e., bounded, isolated, self-sufficient and temporally distanced.36 These island societies, hitherto considered isolated, were involved in extensive networks of communication and exchange. However, this book argues that colonialism, as ‘conscious human agency’, instead of minimizing the force of geography, had the reverse impact of reinforcing the spatial metaphor whereby the geographical isolation of the Islands, instead of being broken, was reinforced, reconfigured and even enhanced, at least in the case of the Andamans. Another way Imperial Andamans reframes the history of the Andamans is by using the spatial lens to examine its penal history. The histories of the Andamans, although significant in their range and depth, have remained inattentive towards the braided character of their spatial and penal history. These histories have completely discounted the import of the ‘island character’ of the penal colony or have drawn a facile equation between island colonies and prisons. It is assumed that spatial distance between the Andamans and the Indian subcontinent and the fact that the Andamans were islands made it easy for the British to quarantine, segregate and enforce surveillance on the convicts, i.e., the Andamans are a natural prison.37 The analytical frame of the book challenges this colonial stereotype that establishes a cosy equation between island spaces and prisons. The colonial administrators at the time of colonizing the Andamans were labouring under the misconception that the Andamans’ island character – the geographical and social insularity of the Islands, their tropical jungles and climate, and the presence of ‘ferocious anthropophagi’ – rendered them a natural prison. They believed that adapting the Islands to the needs of a penal station was not a difficult task. However, the Islands’ geography was anything but naturally suited to serve as a prison and neither was it a biddable mistress. It militated against an easy adaptation of the Islands into a penal colony. What is more, the Islands’ geography came to circumscribe the administration of the colony by rendering the enforcement of customary penal devices difficult, sometimes impossible.

Introduction 11

The discordant dialectics between space and punishment further help explore the hitherto uncharted spaces of the Islands’ administrative and penal history. The sentence of transportation as a punishment was premised on the idea of spatial disassociation. That is, the punished had to be physically removed to a far-off place to live out the punishment. This spatial character of the sentence of transportation was understood differently by different colonial administrators. For some officials, the voyage, the distance that the convict traversed to arrive at the Islands, embodied penalization. For these officials it was over the oceanic waters that the punishment was enacted. For other administrators, the punishment began following the disembarkation of the convicts on solid earth. In these administrators’ opinion the Islands were a redemptive locale. And yet there were those officials for whom the Jail was the sole penal epicentre. These officials believed that only through intra-mural confinement or incarceration of transported convicts could their punishment be achieved. This spatialpenal dialectic influenced the way the colonial administrators sought to work and administer the Islands and the convicts. It reveals how, contrary to general presumptions, the Andaman system was defined less by coherent and consistent administrative decisions and policies. Internal fissures, dichotomies, divergences, contradictions and contingent responses determined the functioning of the colonial administration. This nuances the notion of a top-heavy, homogenous and internally unified colonial state and enables the penal history of the Andamans to step out of the staid confines of Foucauldian frames of reference by challenging the notion of an all-pervasive normative discipline.

Oceanic framework This book locates the myriad ways the British colonial administrators linked imagery and perceptions of nature and landscape to the methods they used to control and transform a particular space within the broader context of Imperial Oceanic history. The Ocean is posited as the new framework within which South Asian history needs to locate itself as part of the larger trend in the historical profession engendered by globalization.38 It has impacted the historical profession by pushing historians to focus on global interconnections, cross-linkages and the movements and migrations of peoples, businesses, cultures and ideas. This is discernible in the growing popularity of global, world, large, interconnected, braided, intertwined or integrated histories. Recent works on Atlantic history are also beginning to contest the regional specializations in Oceanic studies and emphasize the need to examine transoceanic borrowings and linkages.39 The argument in favour of using the Indian Ocean as a framework for historical inquiry is premised on a criticism of writings on modern South Asian history which tend to disregard the historical presence of the Indian Ocean beyond 1750 except for the works on

12 Imperial Andamans

labour and convict history, which examine the transportation of convicts, the life of Indian seamen and lascars, and the global migration of labour.40 Imperial Andamans also traverses the Indian Ocean in the period when the British held sway over the major oceanic waters of the world. However, it does so with a difference. While the book employs the Indian Ocean as a framework, it actually seeks to dispute and question the ecumenical idea of global connectivity which oceanic frameworks generally presume. This story of the Andamans is not to be mistaken as a legitimation of ‘genealogies of contemporary globalization’ or for a colonial history ‘repackaged as ocean-based “world” history’.41 The book’s intellectual concern is with the local and regional, and with the marginal and peripheral. It uses the historical frame of the Indian Ocean to demonstrate how the Andamans became located within it as a result of the colonial encounter, i.e., how the Andamans became constituted as the geographical ‘periphery’ of the Indian Ocean and the Indian subcontinent. This book, when it does make connections, does so to uncover the way global connections contributed to the historical marginalization of the Andamans. The British, by imposing their rule over the Indian Ocean, ‘globalized’ it by extending its frontiers and linking it to Pacific and Atlantic Ocean systems through trade, commerce, shipping, the transportation of men and materials and, as this book demonstrates, through the transfer of discursive metaphors, imageries and colonizing strategies. However, the British simultaneously ‘territorialized’ the Indian Ocean by attempting to snuff out, crush and devour the hitherto vigorous indigenous and traditional trading, commercial and cultural networks. While not always successful, the deployment of the discursive strategies and imageries produced in the colonial encounter in the Atlantic and Pacific (which in turn had been forged in the Mediterranean), in the Indian Ocean context in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century painted the Islands as wild. Interestingly, in comparison to the islands of the Indian Ocean, the islands of the Atlantic and Pacific have received considerable historical attention, especially in the histories of colonial encounter.42 Drawing on histories of the Atlantic and geographical studies of landscapes and spaces, particularly recent historiography on seascapes and ocean frontiers, which focus on the geographical specificity of the islands and the political role of colonization in their marginalization,43 this book refocuses the attention of Indian Ocean historical writing on its island spaces, especially ones that failed to serve or grow into flourishing agricultural colonies. Cloaked and veiled in popular beliefs, the histories of the Andamans have remained oblivious to the Islands’ location within the larger history of the Indian Ocean in general and the Bay of Bengal in particular. It was really the displacements, vicissitudes and transformations in the mid-nineteenth century Indian Ocean politics that catalyzed the historical destiny of the Andamans.

Introduction 13

Based on a reading of colonial writings and Foreign, Secret and Home Department records from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the book demonstrates that the mid-nineteenth century was not the first time that British attention was drawn to the strategic significance of the Andamans. The colonization of the Islands was part of a long-standing British strategy of controlling Indian Ocean waters dating back to the late eighteenth century. Colonization midwived the birth of the Andamans on oceanic navigational and survey maps, international trade routes, and in anthropological and ethnological monographs. It symbolically replotted the Andamans on the Imperial map, not as a segment of the Southeast Asian archipelago, but as a frontier outpost of the Empire in India. The ancient and medieval maps, charts and navigational texts had hitherto nearly always located the Andamans as a part of Southeast Asia in line with Java and Sumatra. In geographical terms as well, the Andamans were an extension of the Indonesian archipelago. Colonial map-making, however, repositioned and appropriated the territory of the Andamans into the pantheon of imperial frontier conquests.44 Instead of looking eastwards, the Andamans were now reoriented to face the Indian subcontinent. Thus began the process of disengagement of the Andamans from the Southeast Asian littorals, and its fatal fastening to the trials and travails of the history of the Indian subcontinent and to the larger interests of the British in the Indian Ocean. The Revolt of 1857, the co-optation of the Cellular Jail in Indian nationalist hagiography as a place of ‘holy pilgrimage’, and the subsequent decision of the British government to retain the Islands as a part of the Indian Union, were other cathartic moments which took forward the baton of this linkage. In resuscitating the history of the Andamans as an imperial prize, a chess piece in the imperial oceanic game, this book offers a fresh perspective on the history of British colonialism, nationalism and the creation of modern India from its geographic periphery, which was, as the symbolism of Mountbatten’s and Nehru’s transaction demonstrates, anything but marginal to Britain’s oceanic empire and to Indian nationalism.

Imperial matrix Drawing on Mrinalini Sinha’s elaboration of the idea of imperial social formation as a heuristic device this book also treats colonialism as the discursive and material structure within which the administrative history of the Andamans is located.45 The uneven nature and contradictions of the colonial configuration were mirrored in the Islands’ administrative history.46 One such contradiction was reflected in the task of settling the colony, which was also inextricably intertwined with the obligations to administer the penal settlement. Developing a colony that was covered with tropical jungles and swamps, was yet to benefit from the development of

14 Imperial Andamans

steam shipping, communication networks and telegraph lines, and required decades of hard work before it could pay dividends was the challenge which faced the British. The geographical specificity of the Islands further affected their commercial potential, the labour regime and the lives of the people who inhabited the Islands. Historians have so far acknowledged that the Settlement administration was caught between these divergent aims and that in the Andamans there was no alignment between the original crime, the nature of the sentence, the class to which the convict belonged and the labour activities assigned.47 This book takes the argument further and demonstrates that given the impossibility of using strict penal criteria at all times and in keeping with the spatial imperatives of the colony the Settlement officials never did resolve this contradiction. They experimented in vain with a variety of informal criteria, such as literacy, race, skills, gender, term of the penal sentence, marriage and domesticity, for putting the convicts to work and settling them. The administration also imported free labour, Chinese contractors, Indian traders and merchants, and contractual labour to supplement the convict labour on the Islands. In the long term, the British were neither able to transform the Andamans into a flourishing agricultural colony or commercial outpost, nor did the Islands live up to the expectations of the judicial and penal reformers as a penal colony. Imperial Andamans, however, departs from other writings on the subject by locating the failure of the colonial enterprise on the Andamans in the structural contradictions and tensions of the colonial framework which pushed and pulled the Settlement in different directions. The imperial matrix also circumscribed the lives of the convicts who were transported to the Islands. The convicts experienced the island space in numerous ways, rendering the story of the Andamans a compelling one with ample measures of human drama, pathos and tragedy. The story demonstrates how the muted convict voices which emerge out of the colonial past are chequered and multi-layered. They murmur stories of torture, escapes, suicides, murders, bootlegging, smuggling, counterfeiting, paradiselike existence, happy marriages, desertion and bereavement. Stories of lives lost and lives reclaimed. Even the silences of the colonial archives tell stories in loud whispers of women who came to the Andamans, were married or widowed, had children and started new lives. The examination of the convict subculture reveals how the convicts’ experience of the Andamans was not a monochrome reality but one painted in myriad hues. In narrating stories of lives in exile, this book captures the history of the Andamans as a lived and animate space. It does so by distancing itself from the binary framework of accommodation and resistance, which it sees as falling short of capturing the convicts’ experiences.48 In doing so, it establishes that agency and the ability to negotiate were not the prerogative of the convicts at all times. This is not to say that the convict possessed no

Introduction 15

agency at all, but it was one that was circumscribed and at times produced by factors external to the person of the convict. Imperial Andamans shows that the space for negotiation was opened up many a time simply by default, primarily because of the contradictions inherent in the structural and physical logic of an island penal colony or because of fractures within the colonial edifice or else the state itself left elbow-room for its officials to change or adjust their policies according to the realities on the ground. An additional set of people who figure in the human story of the Imperial Andamans are the native Andamanese. Inhabitants of the Islands for nearly 2,000 years, the Andamanese were of the Negrito stock, like the Semang of Malaya and the pygmies of the Philippines.49 They lived by huntinggathering and fishing, and used harpoons, nets and bows for the purpose. Caricatured as bloodthirsty cannibals, their dislike for strangers and ferocious defence of their privacy supported the wild imagery of the Islands. Where did they fit into the imperial scheme? Unable to serve the colonial enterprise as subordinate labour forces like the Maoris or West Africans, the Andamanese were of little use. Well-adapted to forest life, the huntinggathering Andamanese were also ill-fitted for the ‘civilization’ introduced by the British. The tale of the Andamanese is thus a familiar one, re-enacted in different parts of the world wherever the aborigines came into contact with a colonizing force. Within a few decades of colonial rule, the Andamanese stood decimated, struggling for survival in the face of certain extinction. The ones who survived were the ones who escaped ‘civilizational’ contact. Thus, the space the British carved out for themselves did not admit the Andamanese except as ethnographic and anthropological guinea pigs, as relics of an ancient human race. While Imperial Andamans seeks to enact justice by marking the contours of injustice, it falls short of capturing or verbalizing the aborigines’ historical experience on their terms.50 In this book the Andamanese appear in different chapters as they did in the imperial space: in Chapter 1, they are garbed as discursive cannibals; in Chapter 3, the Andamans appear as pesky natives resisting colonization; in Chapter 5, they are attired as pliant guides, trackers and anthropological specimens; and, finally, their presence in the narratives of the rest of the chapters is marked by their absence.

1 The Island Problematic

The events of history often lead to islands. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they make use of them. – Fernand Braudel1 Popular mythology portrayed the Andamans as forbidding and ominous islands that brought nothing but ruin to those who had the misfortune to step on their shores. One finds the earliest references to the Andamans in a south Indian inscription and the notes and memoirs of the pre-colonial travellers and adventurers crossing the Indian Ocean. All of them without exception characterized the Andamans as being inhabited by ferocious anthropophagi. The English East India Company2 (EEIC) was the first to venture into the hitherto uncharted waters of the Bay of Bengal to survey the Andaman Islands. The first EEIC surveyor to navigate the waters of the Andamans in 1771 was a hydrographer called Captain John Ritchie.3 He was followed by Captain Thomas Forrest, Lt. Archibald Blair of the Bombay Marine, Captain Alexander Kyd, the then Surveyor General of India and Lt. Robert H. Colebrook of the Bengal Engineers in the 1780s, as colonial surveyors.4 The surveying of the Bay, its islands and harbours was part of a larger colonial project, which the EEIC initiated after having gained access to political power by establishing its control over the revenues of Bengal.5 By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Company was in dire need of better harbour accommodation for its Bay of Bengal shipping, which was ‘practically non-existent along the east coast of India’.6 Their unfamiliarity with the geography of India had forced the British to depend on maps ‘that had been published in Venice, Holland, France, and England’ which were based ‘on tradition and on tales of mariners and travellers’.7 So in order to obtain empirically reliable data the Company began to send out surveyors. The upshot of the satisfactory reportage and surveying of the Bay of Bengal was the annexation of the Andamans to the British Indian territories in September 1789. The surveying activity in the Bay continued through the early 1790s8 until the closure of the Settlement in 1796.9 After a time lag of 16

The Island Problematic 17

nearly half a century, in 1858, F.J. Mouat, as the head of a new survey team, called the Andaman Committee, returned to survey the Islands and relied heavily on the early survey reports, especially Blair’s, for navigating around the Andaman Islands. The writings of colonial surveyors, besides being a vital source of strategic navigational and topographical information, were also repositories of colonial narratives.10 Embedded in them was an imagery of the Islands and its inhabitants that was to become a rationale for the Andamans’ conquest. This chapter deciphers this discourse, which visualized the Andamans as a wild, untamed and uncultured space existing on the margins of the civilized world, possessing a character that was antithetical to rationality and civilized life. The wild character of the Islands was proffered as the rationale for taking possession of them, and their colonization was narrativized as a reformative and civilizing mission. Through an examination of the narrative of colonization, this chapter amongst other things brings out the discursive power of spatial metaphors in the politics of empire,11 some of which were forged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.12

Colonial encounter and cannibalism discourse From Ritchie to Mouat, the writings of colonial surveyors embedded the topographical particulars of the Islands and the navigational details of its waters within an epistemological frame, which drew upon the pre-colonial travel narratives and myths, both European and non-European. The British and pre-colonial travel narratives and myths had their similarities in form and content,13 which facilitated their appropriation.14 This section shows how all of them shared a central trope – visualization of the Andamans as tropical islands infested by cannibalistic natives. Pre-colonial cannibal lore The surveyors of the EEIC were preceded by many navigators, explorers, fortune hunters and adventurers seeking material and spiritual wealth who had traversed the waters and the littorals surrounding the Andamans through the ages, without ever disembarking on the Islands. For some, however, destiny willed otherwise and they touched the shores of the Andamans, albeit only as shipwrecked, typhoon-hit, lost and hungry sailors. Most did not live to tell their tales of sorrow.15 The stories of shipwrecked sailors, along with the books of ancient geographers, medieval seafarers and navigators, and early modern European explorers had rendered the Islands and its inhabitants infamous well before the arrival of the colonial surveyors.16 An account of the Andamans by two Arab travellers of the ninth century gives a flavour of the preposterous description of the natives: The food in which they chiefly delighted was human flesh, which they tore up almost like wild beasts, and, ignorant of even the simplest forms

18 Imperial Andamans

of cookery, devoured raw. […] the natives might otherwise have lain in wait for them [i.e., voyagers] like pirates, or rather like the most ferocious beasts of prey, to supply themselves with stores of human flesh for the horrid banquet of blood in which it was their delight to indulge.17 Clouded by visions of savage and cannibalistic natives, the stories of their physical appearance also assumed fantastic proportions. For instance, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century described the Andamanese as a ‘very cruel race’, wild beasts with ‘heads like dogs’ as depicted in this book’s cover image.18 He further noted that they were a race of man-eaters, formidable not only to their enemies, but to all who approached their coast, a sort of dreaded ‘anthropophagi whose heads grew beneath their shoulders’.19 While his description of the Andamanese is no different from that of previous travellers, it is striking in view of his descriptions of the rest of the cultures he encountered or heard of. He presented a realistic assessment of the other cultures but in the case of the Andamans he slipped into phantasms. By the fourteenth century, these misanthropic descriptions of the Andamans made their way into The Book of John Mandeville (1360) which described them thus: There live here a people of evil customs, for fathers eat their sons and sons their fathers, husbands their wives and wives their husbands. […] When he is dead they take his body and cut it in little pieces, and summon all his friends, and all the musicians they can get, and make a solemn feast and eat the dead man’s body. And when they have eaten all the flesh, they collect all the bones together and bury them according to their custom with great solemnity and loud singing. […] There are many different kinds of people in these isles. In one of those isles are many manners of folk of divers, there is a race of great stature, like giants, foul and horrible to look at; they have one eye only, in the middle of their foreheads. They eat raw flesh and raw fish.20 The one-eyed giant of John Mandeville is strongly reminiscent of Homer’s Cyclops.21 Similar is the description by Caesar Frederick in his Indian Observations (1567), in which he identified the Islands as the ‘Ilands of Andemaon’ and confirmed that their people were called savage or wild because they ate one another.22 The descriptions of the natives of the Andamans were thus each more fantastic than the next.23 These tales of adventure narrated by the odd traveller, shipwrecked sailor and explorer merely paraphrased the versions of the previous travellers and writers and reconfirmed the descriptions of natives as cannibals. In most instances, the narrator had never seen the Islands.24 The history of this book’s cover image is a brilliant illustration of the nature of European engagement with the non-European world. It is a paint-

The Island Problematic 19

ing from an early 15th-century manuscript, Ms Fr 2810 (also known as Livre des Merveilles, Book of Wonders), produced right after the last Crusades at the end of fourteenth century and during a period of intense political infighting in the French aristocracy ending in the English occupation of Paris in 1420. It was commissioned by Jean sans Peur (1371–1419), Duke of Burgundy, who led the last large-scale crusade of Middle Ages, the Crusade of Nicopolis. He is known to have gifted the manuscript to Jean de Berry (1340–1416), the son of King John II of France and a famous art patron, in 1413. The manuscript is illustrated by the Boucicaut Master (1375–1400), a leading Franco-Flemish manuscript illuminator in Paris.25 The manuscript is a compilation of six European travel accounts: those of Marco Polo, Odoric de Pordenone, Jean Mandeville, Hayton, Ricold de Montcroix and a travel manuscript made at the request of Cardinal Taleran. 26 More than the text, which carries extracts from multiple translations and fantastical interpolations by the translators, Ms Fr 2810 is famous for its illuminated images.27 The images depicting the inhabitants of the Indian Ocean world conflate the islands of Sumatra, Nicobar and the Andamans; they are described as being inhabited by either cannibals or dog/wolf-headed people.28 The slippage between the Islands and the attribution of fantastical characteristics to their inhabitants reflects the medieval European spatio-geographical imagination of the East.29 According to Debra Higgs Strickland, although the images in the manuscript differed stylistically and iconographically, they nevertheless sought to accomplish the same ideological objective. They aimed at depicting the ‘traditional conceptions of the exotic East’ in order to elicit wonder and satisfy the patrons’ demand for the marvellous. Of significance is the fact that the narrative of the images often contradicted or transcended the textual narrative constraints and displayed no real desire for accuracy in portrayals of the exotic East. An instance of this is the book cover image which illustrates Marco Polo’s account of the Andamans. In Marco Polo’s text the Andamanese are merely described as wolf-headed people but the image goes beyond that description. It depicts the Andamanese as trading peppercorns (a reference to the inhabitants of Sumatra), dressed in clothes generally worn in medieval Europe, with a fortress-like building in the background. Such descriptive excesses were in consonance with medieval European representations of Jews, Arabs, Saracens, heretics, lepers, exotic easterners and monstrous races in general.30 Strickland concludes that the decisive effect of the images ‘was to encourage ambivalent attitudes towards the East that comprised a fundamental aspect of medieval Orientalism’.31 Presumably these orientalist travel writings provided the discursive framework for Arthur Conan Doyle’s and British surveyors’ imaginings.32 The surrounding mainland societies also visualized the Andamanese as their ‘uncivilized other’. While direct historical references to the Andamans in the Indian subcontinent’s literature are very few, the ones that do exist

20 Imperial Andamans

generally represent the Islands in a negative light. One example of this is an eleventh-century inscription found in the Tanjore temple, which referred to the Islands as Timaittivu, ‘Islands of impurity’, inhabited by man-eaters.33 In general on the Indian subcontinent, forest-dwellers, hunter-gatherers and marginal social groups had several ancient and medieval incarnations and in every age were treated with contempt by state systems (empires, kingdoms, republics or oligarchies) and the settled or agricultural societies. They were also generally portrayed in a negative light in the high Brahmanical tradition. Aloka Parasher-Sen in her work on the characterization of tribes and forestdwellers in early India (pre-1100 AD) quotes evidence from a variety of ancient Sanskrit and Buddhist texts such as Kautilya’a Arthasastra, Yajnavalkya’a Smriti, Brihatkalpa Bhashya, Vinay Pitaka, Apastabha Dharamsastra, and Majjhima Nikaya. In all these texts, according to Parasher-Sen, the forest-dwellers and hunter-gatherers were looked down upon as rakshasa (demon or unrighteous spirit), asura (demon), narbhakshi (man-eater), baharika (outsider), aranyacara (forest being), atavika (forest tribe) or melccha (barbarian).34 Further evidence of Indian or other Asian views of the Andamanese comes from writings of colonial officers who documented them. According to M.V. Portman, the Malays believed that the Andamanese were degraded savages who were the descendants of Hanuman (the monkey-king), a principal character in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana.35 Some colonial records argue that, from the sixteenth century onwards, the Malays, Burmese and Chinese sailors, and European privateers, who engaged in slaveraiding and a trade in sea-slugs and birds’ nests on the Islands, nourished the cannibalism parable in order to retain their trading and commercial monopoly.36 The colonial surveyors The pre-colonial writings and mythologies about the Andamans and its inhabitants thus formed the historical backdrop for the British surveyors. Captain John Ritchie arrived on the Andamans in 1771 full of preconceived notions regarding the cannibalistic natives. However, he was pleasantly surprised when he did not find the natives as fierce as he had imagined them to be. Ritchie thought them to be ‘coffrees’, the descendants of African slaves whose ship was believed to have been wrecked on the shores of the Andamans in 1682. His account of the natives ran thus: ‘It is thought that the inhabitants of these islands are horrible to strangers in general. There were, however, reasons to doubt the account … the inhabitants behaved very well and ate beef and biscuits with the sailors.’37 Although Ritchie attempted to present a fair assessment of the Andamanese in the official report, his personal journal was replete with phantasms about cannibalism that displayed a tension between ‘attraction towards the other and repulsion when faced with the other’.38 David Tomas in his study of Ritchie’s personal logs shows how cannibal-

The Island Problematic 21

istic fantasies abounded in them. These fantasies, in Tomas’s view, offered ‘comic relief or a perverse dramatic interlude in an ongoing narrative’. More than the official reports, it was the production of knowledge in this personal manner which was more telling of the cultural contact between different civilizations, i.e., the British and the Andamanese. While surveying the Islands in late 1780s, Captain Archibald Blair found ample reasons to modify the conjectures regarding the notoriety of the natives as cannibals. In Blair’s view the ‘bad qualities’ that the natives displayed were not inherent in their nature but were in great measure the result of the cruel treatment which they had experienced, particularly at the hands of the ‘malicious and vindictive’ race of Malays who used to capture them for slavery.39 Blair’s report differed substantially from all the previous accounts of the Islands since it described the inhabitants in a manner that left a much more favourable impression on the mind of the reader.40 However, Blair did let it slip in towards the end of his report that the Andamanese might be cannibals ‘out of necessity, if not from choice’. His survey highlighted that there were neither animals in the forests ‘to supply them with food’ nor a ‘wholesome and nutritious’ vegetable diet on the islands.41 Therefore, impelled by hunger and deprivation and given their limited means of subsistence, they could resort to cannibalism. Here was a paradox in Blair’s report, which otherwise sought to establish that the Islands had enough natural resources, pigs, fish and water to sustain a colony. On the one hand, in Blair’s account the Andamans appeared as a site worthy of possession, on the other, in his moral image he represented its inhabitants as abject, destitute and thus cannibalistic. Blair’s imagery also reflects an important aspect of the British discourse on cannibalism which considered it more acceptable if practised under ‘duress’ or out of ‘necessity’.42 That is, cannibalism was comprehensible as a state of material deprivation, not as one of moral degradation. This discursive fissure made it possible, as we shall see, for the repeated return to the lore of cannibalism in the Andamans as almost an inevitability given the wildness and geographical insularity of the islands, despite evidence to the contrary. This material savagery also became a rationale for colonization of the island, thereby binding the rhetoric of colonization of the Islands to its purported cannibalism. Colonel Alexander Kyd, who surveyed the Islands in 1789–90 and was appointed Superintendent of the Andamans in 1793 after Archibald Blair, was also of the opinion that nowhere on any part of the globe was the human race discovered in a more ‘degraded or savage state’ than that on the Andamans.43 Lt. Colebrook, who had accompanied Captain Blair and Colonel Kyd during their surveys of the Andamans, published an account of the lives of the Andamanese in Asiatic Researches in 1794. Colebrook’s account betrayed his doubts and conjectures concerning the ubiquity of cannibalism on the Andamans. In his report, Colebrook made an exposé of

22 Imperial Andamans

the insides of a small solitary native hut that he had chanced upon on Chatham Island44 while surveying the Islands in 1789–90: The floor was also strewed with a numerous collection of the shells of oysters, muscles, cockles, and other shellfish, on which the inhabitants had probably banqueted, for these form their principal articles of food when they can no longer procure that luxury in which they are reported to delight.45 Even though Colebrook took pains to show that the Andamanese were not man-eaters, the colourful language of his text, instead of dispelling it, reanimated the cannibalism imagery. The use of words such as ‘banqueted’ enthralled minds nursed on the classics of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. It evoked a powerful image of a grand communal Thyestean feast. The mental picture conveyed by the text belied its overall thrust, which sought to dismiss the existence of cannibalism. The ‘luxury’ that Colebrook alluded to suggested human flesh. Although Colebrook had doubts about the custom of cannibalism amongst the Andamanese, he could not quite distance himself from the received knowledge.46 Not only would admitting the non-existence of cannibalism make his essay less exciting for the British reader, it would also mean giving up cultural categories which had hitherto served to distinguish between the civilized and uncivilized worlds. Therefore, while claiming to establish the absence of any practice of cannibalism, the language and vocabulary of Colebrook’s report fuelled imagination. Following the abandonment of the Settlement in 1789, the next set of surveyors did not return to the Andamans until the late 1850s. In 1858, Frederic John Mouat, who later rose to the status of Inspector General of Jails, led the Andaman committee that surveyed the Islands before their reoccupation. Mouat was well acquainted with the works of Blair and Colebrook.47 His report, similar to those of his late eighteenth-century counterparts, took a favourable view of colonizing the Andamans for its harbours and was peppered with fanciful language and imagery.48 As a preparation for his voyage to the Andamans, Mouat personally invited a photographer, Oscar Mallitte, and some Goan musicians to accompany him. His plan was a bizarre cultural exercise: The Andamanese would no doubt be able to appreciate the melody he produced from his favorite instrument, and we anticipated wonders from the war-dance with which we intended to gratify the natives on the celebration of our fete of fraternization with that interesting race of cannibals.49 Mouat actually believed that a rendition of a melodious jig could appease the Andamanese. In his book, he resolutely debunked the characterization

The Island Problematic 23

of the Andamanese as cannibals.50 Nonetheless, Mouat leaves the reader doubtful because imageries recalling Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, such as the ‘race of cannibals’, ‘dreaded anthropophagi’ and ‘footmark on the sand’, are sprinkled all through his text. In one place, he even expressed the fear that the Andamanese would ‘chew us all up’.51 Even when the Settlement eventually took place in 1858, the Robinson Crusoe imagery continued to be strongly at work amongst British officials. The naming of two captive Andamanese who were sent to Moulmein in 1862 for linguistic experiments as ‘Crusoe’ and ‘Friday’ was one such instance. 52 The Andamanese adorned their bodies with the bones and skulls of deceased relatives (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2) which further stoked the cannibal imagery.

Cannibalism: within and without The persistent and inevitable return of the British to the cannibalism myth even while they were invalidating the earlier phantasmal depictions of the Islands and their inhabitants appears paradoxical. Even though the writings and reports of the colonial surveyors displayed scepticism regarding the authenticity of the pre-colonial accounts of the Andamanese being ferocious cannibals, why was the language of the texts replete with imageries which had come to be associated with cannibalism or its practice? What accounts for British characterization of the Andamanese as cannibals despite evidence to the contrary? What was the premise of the colonial discourse on cannibalism? The answers to these questions lie in the historically contingent spatial and social insularity of the Andamans which was implicated in the imagery of cannibalism. Spatio-geographical insularity and tropicality In works of history, geographically isolated and bounded spaces have invariably given rise to spatial metaphors of closed and excluded systems.53 The Andamans were no different. Ensconced above the ‘ten-degree channel’ in the Bay of Bengal and at a considerable distance from the Indian subcontinent, the Andamans for centuries had been ensured considerable isolation and subterfuge. Despite lying along one of the world’s most bustling trade routes connecting West Asia and India with Southeast Asia, the Andamans never appeared on the maps of international trade routes, except as a fleeting reference in the navigational charts.54 A possible explanation for why the Andamanese harbours remained unexploited by seafarers until the advent of Europeans could be that in the early historical period mariners used vessels which drew very little water for coastal and transoceanic voyages. Most of the sailing took place in good weather. In H.P. Ray’s view, ‘rudimentary shelter was enough to serve as a harbour’ and this ‘perhaps explains the rarity of harbour facilities and installations along the coastal fringe’.55 In addition, the seafaring vessels which did cut across the Bay did so either by hugging the ten-degree channel (which separates the

24 Imperial Andamans

Figure 1.1 Andamanese Woman of the Aka-Bea-da tribe, South Andaman, wearing a necklace of human bones (Source: AS-B22-25: AN27697001, M.V. Portman’s Album (1890s) Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London).

Andamans from the Nicobars (a group of twelve inhabited and seven uninhabited islands in the Bay of Bengal situated between Sumatra and the Andaman Islands) or by sailing through the straits of Malacca between the Nicobars and Sumatra. Thus the sailors who arrived on the Andamans were

The Island Problematic 25

Figure 1.2

Andamanese man wearing a skull on his back

(Source: Photo 125/2/82, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

usually the shipwrecked ones who had been blown off course by the monsoon winds while sailing through the ten-degree channel. In the Bay of Bengal, it was not the Andamans but the Nicobars which always had pride of place in maritime history and travel literature.56 The famous Arab navigators Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar57 and Al-Marwazi58 provide detailed references to the Nicobars, and in Ibn Majid’s account the Nicobars

26 Imperial Andamans

feature as a victualling depot.59 Even the Cholas (a Tamil dynasty which ruled southern India until the thirteenth century) are said to have occupied the Nicobars.60 The maritime prominence that the Nicobars enjoyed represents a stark contrast to the apparent and yet intriguing geographical insularity of the Andamans. The colonial imagery implicated in the discourse on cannibalism this historically contingent spatio-georgaphical insularity of the Andaman Islands. From the eighteenth century spatial characteristics began to be used to determine the civilizational status of different places on the world map, especially the islands that dotted the oceans.61 The Islands’ most prominent and defining spatial characteristics were their isolation and insularity. To this feature were added three other sub-characteristics: boundedness, self-sufficiency and temporal distance. Together these characteristics could be configured as either terms of appreciation, envisioning the islands as Eden, or of deprecation, identifying them as Wild and uncivilized. Peter J. Kitson discusses this convergence of spatial and civilizational characteristics to show the way the South Seas were ‘mapped, charted, described and packaged for metropolitan audiences back home’ between 1769 and 1835. Several islands such as the Tonga Islands, the New Hebrides, the Caroline Islands, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Guinea, New Zealand, Norfolk Island, Australia, the Hawaiian Islands and the Marquesas Islands were all part of this project. The colonial administrators subsequently appropriated the spatial stereotypes to vindicate conquests. Litterateurs such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift embellished the islands with their literary imagination and anthropologists and ethnologists worked these spatial imageries into acquired wisdom. By virtue of being islanders themselves, the British conceptualization of island spaces was tied in with their own national identity,62 and the spatial elements, which they considered the basis of their distinctiveness and preeminence, were inverted and seen as the reason behind the Andamans’ wild character. In the British view, the British Isles were bounded by a ‘silver sea’ which gave the British an abiding sense of security by protecting them from disease and its ‘less-happier’ continental neighbours.63 In contrast, a ‘hostile’ sea bounded the Andamans, which was treacherous or, at best, an empty space, a gaping void. Inherent in this view was the conceptualization of the liminal sea as a space that surrounded and bounded the Islands into one physical entity and one which divided the civilized realms from the uncivilized. The use of the island metaphor here reinforced the geographical distancing of the British Isles not just from continental societies but also from other island spaces, such as the Andamans, which were depicted as inhabiting the realm of the primitive and satanic.64 The British saw their own uniqueness as the result of not only spatial but also temporal distancing from other lands.65 The Andamans in this scheme were not plotted on the contemporary temporal map but on that of bygone times. They represented the islands which had missed their tryst with destiny and had failed to grow out of their

The Island Problematic 27

primitiveness. The pre-Neolithic material culture of the Andamanese testified to their having been left behind. In the British view, the spatial elements of the Andamans’ geography were not the only markers of their uncivilized status. The very nature of the Islands’ geography, i.e., their tropicality, caused their primitiveness. David Arnold in his work on discourse about the tropics shows how European thought ‘was deeply ambivalent, for a landscape of seeming natural abundance and great fertility was also paradoxically a landscape of poverty and disease’.66 The tropics therefore could be visualized on the one hand as a romantic place, picturesque and paradise-like,67 and on the other as wild and pestilential. Arnold examines a number of travel writings from the late eighteenth century which provided grist for his mill, characterizing the tropics as violent, with lethal diseases and death lurking everywhere.68 In his view, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness expressed the ‘abiding sense of alienation and repugnance’ inspired by the tropics, which became more commonplace from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.69 What is important for the discussion here is that most of these travel writings were written by colonial officials who were visiting the various tropical island colonies. For instance, Henry Marshall (Notes on the Medical Topography of the Interior of Ceylon, London, 1821), a surgeon in the British Forces, went to Ceylon, and Alexander Bryson (Report of the Climate and Principal Diseases of the African Station, London, 1847), a naval surgeon and a medical statistician, visited the island of Fernando Po off the west coast of Africa. Both had a similar opinion: that behind the sublimity and the grandeur of these islands’ tropical forests prowled death and disease.70 Thus the idea of the ‘tropic’ got tied to a particular notion of the ‘island’. The Andaman Islands appeared in the colonial picture at this very juncture of history (that is, the late eighteenth century) when the general opinion regarding tropical islands was beginning to slide. The discursive strength of this imagery was such that it persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century when the British returned to occupy the Andamans. Its ‘tropical exuberance’ came to be seen as a curse rather than a boon.71 The swamps, marshes and ‘dense matted growth of grass, shrubs and creepers’ which covered the forests of the Andamans further stoked the negative tropical imagery.72 According to miasmatic theories of disease popular in those days, the huge swamps emitted deadly gases that caused malaria and death. There are instances of writers describing the Islands as picturesque, romantic, striking and grand;73 however, their representation as ‘death-like’ and ‘disease-ridden’ was the most persistent one. The dense forests, swampy earth and impenetrable undergrowth made the Islands appear forbidding to the British surveyors. Most of them sailed along the coasts and rarely disembarked from their vessels. When they did do so, they remained on the shores. Very few of them actually went inland or penetrated the interiors of the Islands. The abandonment of the First Settlement (1789–96) because of high mortality and sickness further confirmed this

28 Imperial Andamans

particular view of the tropical climate of the Andamans as responsible for disease and death. The Islands’ deathly character was no longer a mythical notion harboured by travellers and surveyors but was now a matter of experience.74 A belief took root in the minds of British officials in India that behind their magnificence, the Islands harboured deadly miasmas and had an intemperate climate. F.J. Mouat’s survey team was one of the few which had a chance to trudge through the ruins of the First Settlement and he repeatedly commented on the ‘putrid’ and ‘pestilential nature of the mudbanks when uncovered, and to the abundance of rank, reeking, decayed vegetation in every direction’.75 As a solution, Mouat suggested the reclamation of the swamps as a way of bringing civilization to the Islands, and urged that ‘through the application of some means of modern agricultural industry the festering mass of vegetal compound could be transformed into a material with inexhaustible fertility’.76 This was a distillation of the ideas of nature, labour and civilization into an untidy concoction, which implicated the hunter-gatherers of the Andamans, and thereby fed the cannibalism imagery. The supposed selfreliance of Britain stemmed from it being a demi-paradise, a virtual Garden of Eden, symbolic of nature’s bounty, which nurtured and nourished its inhabitants with its yields. The self-sufficiency of the Andamans was seen as neither a divine boon, nor a product of the inherent goodness of the Islands and its people. It was the consequence of isolation and remoteness from civilization and, as a result, the Islands had to rely on whatever nature yielded. As the existence of nature’s bounty on the Andamans had little to do with labour, so did the existence of the Andamanese, who lived off the fruits of nature without any intervention of ‘civilization’, i.e., human labour. Instead the Andamanese pursued subsistence strategies – hunting, gathering and fishing. The British obsessively noted the fact that the Andamanese were not engaged in agriculture. One instance of this was Captain Ritchie’s remark on how his crew had offered the Andamanese boiled rice to eat, ‘but this they only turned over with their hands, and certainly, did not know what it was’.77 Later Blair and Colebrook were to attribute the Andamanese’s supposed cannibalism to hunger caused by their dependence on cockles, shells and the fruits of nature for their subsistence. There was thus an indictment of the hunter-gathering societies in the tropics as lazy and indolent, their savagery a product of the natural bounty of their islands. The application of the yardstick of agrarian ‘labour’ in determining the civilizational status of a particular people, community or space was not exclusive to the Andamans. The British had already practised and worked it out in various other contexts.78 Until the mideighteenth century, European thought lionized non-intervention in the rhythms of nature, and the idea of survival on spontaneous yields of nature.79 However, the late eighteenth century marked a shift in this view. European thought no longer cherished production from the earth

The Island Problematic 29

without the mediation of labour and industry. Labour came to be seen as ‘the mother of civilization and all progress’.80 This sentiment later found reflection in British policies towards the Andamanese whom they tried to settle in one place and convert to farmers in an unsuccessful effort to tame their wildness.81 Thus, in the British imagination, cannibalism as the most primal form of existence was the only recourse in such a godforsaken land. This reinforced the belief in the existence of cannibals as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, and the practice of cannibalism as a necessity, an unquestioned reality. However, with time even this grotesque notion of self-reliance that cannibalism hinted at proved to be illusory. Social insularity and savage violence The social insularity of the Andamanese and their indifferent, and at times violent, reaction to the British reinforced the colonial surveyors’ impression of them as savages and cannibals. The work of various linguists and archaeologists has demonstrated how the geographical insularity of the Islands affected its society. In the early 1950s Lidio Cipriani conducted an investigation of the ancient kitchen-middens (an accumulation of refuse from kitchens) of the Andamanese. Cipriani hypothesized that the Andamanese had several thousand years of uninterrupted settlement on the Andamans and that the major changes in the Andamanese material culture did not come about until the 1860s.82 The linguist Niclas Burenhult in his analysis of Andamanese languages argues that ‘the Andamanese is [sic] the sole remaining linguistic representative of pre-Neolithic Southeast Asia’; and that ‘there is no evidence of pre-colonial linguistic influence or colonization from surrounding Old World areas’, reflecting its isolated character.83 In the 1980s Zarine Cooper was the first archaeologist to conduct C14 dating of Andamanese kitchen-middens.84 Her ethnoarchaeological investigations indicate that there was a putative occurrence of ‘silent trade’ between the Andamanese and the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands. In her view, the Andamanese acquired the knowledge of pottery-making through trade or barter with the Nicobarese. Nevertheless, according to Cooper, the ‘subsistence strategies of the Andamanese were based entirely on locally available raw materials’.85 The consequence was absence of need or desire for external contact. In her words, ‘considering the overall self-sufficiency of the people concerned’, the circumstances ‘compelling them to seek contacts with other races appear to have been minimal’.86 The Andamanese therefore tended to have an indifferent, unwelcoming or violent reaction to strangers. None of the British survey reports failed to mention the ‘unprovoked attacks’ by the Andamanese on the survey team. Captain John Ritchie recounted the following encounter with some Andamanese in 1771: Canoe paddled off towards us … they soon came alongside, and were only two, an, elderly man, and a lad; the latter came in immediately, but

30 Imperial Andamans

the old fellow made some difficulty; two lascars went over to help him up, and got him upon the Bends of the vessel; but he turned short about, and caught each of the lascars by the neck, under his arms; and plunged into the Sea! they went down altogether, for about a minute of time, and then the lascars came up on each side of the old man at some distance; they said he was the devil and much stronger than 10 men.87 Blair also talked about the way he and his team ‘suffered many unprovoked insults here from the Natives and were frequently obliged to quit the shore, to avoid conflict with them’.88 He complained that ‘we were attacked at every place we visited’, and how he ‘endeavoured in vain to promote a friendly intercourse with them’.89 Colonel Alexander Kyd also made it a point to mention the conflictual nature of encounters with the Andamanese in 1795: Although we have not had any proof against it, yet many circumstances have concurred to make us imagine that it is not the case, but we have had repeated proofs that they are most hostile to all strangers, never failing to lay wait for and attack the crew of any boats that may land. […] Unfortunate crews of many vessels have perished by the savage hands.90 A late nineteenth century account of Lt. Colebrook’s visit stated: ‘The hostile attacks of the aborigines began as soon as Colebrook arrived and were stopped in each instance by a discharge of fire arms.’91 An official of the Andaman Committee in 1858 had a similar complaint: ‘From first to the last they rejected every attempt at conciliation, and either avoided or forcibly opposed all attempts to hold communion with them’,92 and every time a collision occurred ‘the aggressors were the savages’. In F.J. Mouat’s essay for the Royal Geographical Society narrating his expedition to the Andamans, he noted: ‘As the savages abounded everywhere – were silent, stealthy, and crafty in their movements – were concealed by the luxuriant vegetation invariably evinced a determined spirit of hostility, and were well provided with the means of aggression, which they never omitted.’93 Then again: ‘The men on the reef exhibited frantic signs of hostility, notwithstanding our making every attempt to conciliate them. […] All efforts to establish friendly intercourse were rejected with violence. We had scarcely proceeded a few yards after landing before a flight of arrows was discharged at us. The aggression was repelled by a volley of musketry over the heads of our assailants.’94 The violence of the Andamanese thus became a justification for the violence perpetrated by the British. The failure to conciliate the Andamanese and their use of violence strengthened the belief of the British in their savagery. In their imagination, the Andamanese resistance towards foreigners or intruders was also a resistance to civilization. A clear slippage of the idea of the ‘uncivilized

The Island Problematic 31

other’ and the ‘savage’ into a discourse of cannibalism is discernible where the apparent reality of the savage slips into the fantasy of cannibalism.95 The term ‘cannibal’ became the fundamental marker of the distinction between the civilized and the non-civilized in this context in particular. Therefore, in spite of having little evidence in its favour, there remained a prevalence of cannibalism in the British surveyors’ description of the Andamanese. Peter Hulme locates the cannibalism discourse at the centre of Europe’s encounter with the colonial other. According to him, cannibalism is a term that has no application outside the discourse of European colonialism. This is because the word itself is a derivation of ‘Carib’, the inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands, which were colonized by the Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.96 However, according to I.M. Lewis, cannibalism was located in the perennial fascination and the evocative power of the ‘intimate physical experiences common to all human beings’ such as suckling, eating or engaging in sex.97 Charles Zika locates cannibalism as a metaphor which was ‘threateningly at the centre of the European psyche’.98 He cites the liturgical practice of ‘sacrificing and eating one’s God’ in Christianity as an example. Gananath Obeyesekere in his work on Captain Cook and the Hawaiian natives locates British pre-occupation with cannibalism in a ‘childhood fantasy’; the British were ‘socialized with their nurseries’ and the belief that ‘witches and ghosts ate human flesh’, and any questions regarding cannibalism ‘provoked a terrible anxiety’ that tapped the ‘latent wish’ and ‘resurrected a childhood dread’.99 Perhaps cannibalism represented both – fears of moral disorder and destructive impulses within European society (or for that matter in any human society), and the anxieties regarding the ‘other’, in this case the non-European other. These dual anxieties with the self and the other converged to give the discourse on cannibalism its ferocity and pervasiveness. In this regard, the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries marked a juncture in the infusion of the existing ideas of cannibalism with the emergent fears of ‘loss of Christian community and identity’, particularly consequent to the European discovery of the New World. Following the European encounter with non-European peoples, the term cannibalism, Hulme points out, no longer remained a ‘neutral’ one.100 Impelled by fears of cannibalism within European society, Europeans began to project these fears onto nonEuropean societies in an attempt to distance themselves from them. With time, cannibalistic imageries began to appear in European literature. Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Friday in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe provided sustenance for the discourse and added new nuances to it. Cannibalism as it appeared in literary works was no longer merely associated with the consumption of human flesh. Instead, it involved an imagery of ferocious consumption and bloodthirsty savagery, in which the reader or the viewer could experience the horrors and the ferocity of the act of cannibalism. Consequently, cannibalism, detached from its moorings in

32 Imperial Andamans

actual practice, became ‘a collection of linguistically based practices’ deployed in the service of Europeans for the ‘production’ of the non-European world. Thus, the British conceptualization of the Andamanese as cannibals can be seen as an ‘unmistakably superior representational technology’.101 At another level, the characterization of the Andamanese as cannibals was addressing deep anxieties that the British possessed not simply regarding the other but the self as well.102 It almost appears as if they thought that cleansing the Islands of their cannibalism would cleanse the barbarity within themselves. Britain, in its fear of cannibalism, had long found a means of confronting and thereby controlling the extremities and margins of normative social interaction. What the British described as the practice of cannibalism by the natives was often a projection of fears103 roused by instances of cannibalism in Europe onto the actions of the natives. Such an innate fear of cannibalism had bounded the British. This discomfort with the self found expression in the way the British sought to distance themselves from the Andamanese and yet reclaim them. The braided and intertwined character of the processes of self-distancing and reclamation was in some ways a re-enactment of the socio-political boundaries which the British colonial state discursively invented about Indian society in their attempt to justify their rule in India. British writings on India were also marked by this peculiar phenomenon where the appropriation of Indian history and society and the self-distancing from it happened simultaneously, especially in works such as James Mill’s History of British India (1817), Mountstuart Elphinstone’s The History of India: The Hindu and the Mohametan Periods (1841) and James Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876). In the Andamans, the ‘wild’ discourse became a rationale for the disparate aims of distancing and reclaiming the debased and the deviant – a vindication of the conquest of the Islands as a ‘duty conferred upon’ the British ‘by providence’. The evidence from the Andamans regarding the British surveyors’ characterization of the Islands’ space and its inhabitants reflects the predominance of a modern European episteme. It appears that the pre-existing nonEuropean and Asian episteme, which also portrayed the Andamanese as cannibals, did not really play a role in fuelling the imagination of the British surveyors. The cannibalistic imagery as a form of colonial knowledge was not simply a product of a ‘dialogic’ process where the cognitive frames of the colonizer (the British) and the colonized (the Indians or Malays), merged.104 Neither was it a case of native informants, interlocutors or translators (dubhashs) playing an active or complicit role in the creation of colonial knowledge.105 For instance, Captain Ritchie in his survey report of 1771 noted an anecdotal account of ‘an old lascar, who had been a prisoner in Aracan, and who pretended to understand the Birmah language’ and offered his services as a translator (dubhash). This lascar ‘at his own request, was sent in the boat as a linguist. […] while he spoke to the man before him, the other

The Island Problematic 33

behind, took up a torch … and after blowing it up as much as he could, held it to the Lascar’s bare breech; the poor old fellow roared out in a horrible manner, and leaped into the sea, to cool his posteriors’.106 In recounting this incident Captain Ritchie actually highlighted the problem the surveyors continually faced in communicating with the Andamanese, a process impeded by the lack of indigenous interlocutors. F.J. Mouat had also taken some Indians on his expedition to the Andamans in 1858 but they proved of little use in facilitating linguistic translation or cross-cultural exchange. While the native interlocutors played little direct role in the creation of colonial knowledge, this did not imply that the British imagery did not find a fertile and absorbent ground in the native or indigenous imagination. There was nothing in Indian, Malay, Burmese or Chinese characterization which contested the British one. Amongst the Indians, British imagination and characterizations found validation and gullible corroboration. This is evident in the fear harboured by Indian convicts that the Andamanese were cannibals. As one account of a returnee convict stated: ‘There is, too, a wholesome dread of the man-eating natives, who are black, large, and strong, and have faces shaped like horses. They use the bow and arrow with great skill, and refrain from eating meat, fish, and no grain, but herbs and roots, their bodies do not putrify after death!’107 The cannibal imagery had come to stay. Informed by the discursive practices generated during the colonial encounter with the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands, this premeditated reterritorialization of the Andamans aimed at imposing on the Islands repressive forms of social, political and economic ideologies.108 In the years to come, the Islands amongst other things would become an anthropological laboratory with the aboriginal Andamanese serving as the guinea pigs.

Narrativizing conquest Was the colonization of the Andamans an inevitable outcome of the Islands being imagined as wild? To what degree did the wild imagery play a causative role in the colonization of the Andamans? The imagining of the Islands as a wild space was of little consequence for the actual plan of colonization which, as Chapter 2 will demonstrate, had its roots in the British desire for control over the Bay of Bengal. The significance of the colonial episteme was that it helped transfer the colonial burden on the colonized. That is, it led to narrativization of the Andamans’ conquest as a project of reform and civilization. The surveyors’ reports provided empirical data which facilitated colonization and the cannibal imagery provided the conceptual foundation. The narrative of conquest depicted the Andamans as a wild, unincorporated and uncivilized space ripe for Britain to control, incorporate and civilize – a process instituted in the name of humanity. As early as 1790, an account of the Andamans in the Calcutta Monthly Register announced that ‘these people … are probably

34 Imperial Andamans

destined by the hand of providence to come under our protection, and to participate in the blessings of civilization’.109 Seventy years later the resilient narrative continued when F.J. Mouat in 1862 argued that the existence of untamed Andamanese was a ‘standing reproach’ and a ‘great scandal to humanity’. The colonization of the Andamans, Mouat confirmed, had paved the way for ‘reclaiming of its wretched population from their present misery and degradation is brought within the reach of the Christian and the philanthropist.’110 Colonial history has shown how ‘the most egregious scandals of empire played a critical role in making empire safe for Britain’,111 the existence of cannibals on the Andamans was one such scandal which did not create the empire but rendered the empire safe. Ironically, in the long term, the colonial episteme undermined the imperial project. The survey reports contained accurate information regarding the soil types, weather conditions, location of harbours and the topography of the Islands, which facilitated annexation of the Andamans in 1789 and then again in 1858. However, as we shall see in successive chapters, the strategies of colonial representation misled and confounded the Settlement officers in their attempts to administer and settle the island colony, especially in the early years of the colony’s inception. Moreover, colonial administrators displayed considerable unwillingness to make financial sacrifices for the colonizing and reforming mission they professed. With the passage of time and greater familiarity with the geography and inhabitants of the Islands there was a watering down of the colonial imagination but there remained a tension between the Andamans as an imagined and a metaphorical space and the Andamans as a concrete geographical entity, a lived space. Imperial knowledge gathered through colonial surveys helped in the creation of the empire but less so in its continuance.

2 Colonizing the Bay

Conscience forbids a man to rob a man But frowns not when an empire proud & great By some deep subtle diplomatic plan Proceeds to steal a state1 On the morning of 22 February 1858, Colonel Horace Man2, under the reverberating sounds of a 21-gun-salute, announced the British reoccupation of the Andamans.3 Horace Man opened a settlement at the Old harbour rechristened as Port Blair in honour of Colonel Archibald Blair. The imperial adornment of the Andamans was begun with the unfurling of the Union Jack and stationing of Her Majesty’s gun vessels around the Settlement.4 As the British began their recovery of Lucknow and Kanpur in northern India in March 1858 on the other side of the peninsula, a ship with 200 fettered convicts set sail for the Andamans. This day marked the beginning of the Andamans’ history as a penal colony, which in time overshadowed all other dimensions of its history. The British gave a new form to the marginalization of the Andamans which hitherto had been the consequence of its geography. Henceforth, the Islands were stereotyped as a place fit only for the refuse of civilization – convicts and cannibals. The Andamans as a penal colony has been the ‘space’ which has so far provided the physical, theoretical and intellectual boundaries within which historical inquiry has been conducted. The central question that this chapter engages with is: How did this space come into being? The answer to this question leads us away from the Revolt of 1857 and into the political currents of the Indian Ocean. As in the late 1780s, during the 1850s the intense desire to control the maritime affairs of the Bay of Bengal and a repeated failure to stake a claim on the neighbouring Nicobar Islands were the prime motives driving the British towards the Andamans. Indian Ocean politics alternately camouflaged and spotlighted the Islands. While the Revolt of 1857 was unquestionably a significant catalyst in the history of the Andamans, it did not mid-wife the colonization of the Islands.5 35

36 Imperial Andamans

The establishment of the penal settlement on the Islands was only a mode of colonization and not the actual objective as it has come to be represented by historians.

The eighteenth century: island politics of the Eastern Indian Ocean No remarkable shifts, changes or departures distinguished the first phase of colonization of the Andamans from 1789 to 1796. It was a brief and unremarkable episode. For the present discussion, however, retelling the history of the first colonization is significant because there is a superimposition of nineteenth-century colonial concerns on this epoch. This is especially evident in that the phenomenon of penal colony establishment is projected backwards. A selection from a late nineteenth-century monograph, Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders, written by F.J. Mouat, is illustrative. The reasons that it assigns for the colonization of the Islands in 1789 are, firstly, the ‘necessity of a suitable penal settlement, to which the more heinous offenders who had been convicted by the judges, might be transported’; and, secondly, the need for a harbour of refuge.6 Even the official history of the Andaman Islands, commissioned by the government of the Republic of India and written by R.C. Majumdar, The Penal Settlement in Andamans, duplicates the above reasons for the colonization of the Islands in 1789.7 Did the English East India Company actually colonize the Andamans in 1789 to serve as a ‘suitable penal settlement’? What does the archival evidence say? The evidence from the late eighteenth-century colonial archives does not validate the idea that a need for a suitable penal station occasioned the Islands’ colonization or that the Andamans were a penal colony. The British certainly sent convicts to the Andamans but only from 1794. In 1789, at the time of the opening of the Settlement, Lt. Blair had suggested the use of Orang Laut people from the Malay coast adept at forestclearing and fishing as settlers for the Andamans.8 In the early years, the Settlement officers employed artificers from Bengal for forest-clearing.9 In 1793 the shifting of the Settlement to another site in the northeast of the Islands occasioned the introduction of convicts in response to a need for a huge amount of ‘cheap and reliable labour’. Captain A. Kyd, the then Superintendent of the Andamans, suggested employing male convicts for the ‘tedious and laborious’ task of forest-clearing.10 In 1794, GovernorGeneral Lord Cornwallis agreed to send 100 convicts under the sentence of transportation to the Andamans.11 If the Andamans were a convict settlement, they had a surprisingly small number of convicts. In 1796, when the British abandoned the Settlement, there were only 270 convicts as compared to 550 free men on the Andamans. The Settlement employed convicts as a substitute for cheap free labour and, unlike in the post-1858 era, the convicts worked under a civil

Colonizing the Bay 37

administration. There was no penal edifice, regulations or mores to structure the lives of convict workers. The British did have penal stations in the eighteenth century but they were Penang (Prince of Wales Islands), Bencoolen (Fort Marlborough), Arracan and Tennasserim, not the Andamans.12 This however leaves unanswered the question of why the East India Company colonized the Andamans in 1789. The colonization of the Andamans, as the contemporary colonial archives demonstrate, was part of the Company’s larger political game to control the waters of the Indian Ocean stretching from the east African coast to Australia. In the eighteenth century, for Europeans vying for control over the Indian subcontinent, hegemony over the Indian Ocean was crucial. In marked contrast, except for the example of the Chola Empire, there is little evidence of Indian rulers having displayed an equivalent interest in controlling the Ocean.13 According to some historians, the Indian and Asian political powers looked upon the Ocean with a sense of ‘awe, marvel and fear’ and rarely possessed a belligerent orientation within the maritime zone. The Ocean historically was the domain of merchants and mariners, not of temporal authorities.14 While the difference in the scale, perception and nature of the modern state from its historical forebears prevents positing any binary opposition between the European and the Asian perceptions of the Ocean, most historians tend to agree that the ‘territorialization’ of the Oceanic waters began with the arrival of the Europeans.15 Traversing the boundaries of various ‘oriental’ empires, the European battle to secure trading advantages occasioned immense naval and maritime warfare. The geographical spaces implicated in the process, and the ones hitherto unattended to by historians, were the islands which peppered the Indian Ocean.16 The European rivals ripped the numerous oceanic islands out of ‘oriental slumber’ and transformed them into imperial chess pieces. Imagined by the Europeans as steeped in proverbial ‘primitiveness’, these islands were refashioned and refurbished to serve as fuelling and victualling depots, naval bases, arsenals, military outposts, convict stations or simply as trading centres and entrepots. The desire to control the maximum number of island spaces was thus a crucial determinant in the fortunes of the European adversaries – British, Dutch, Danes, Portuguese and French. The Asian islands in the fray ranged from the then lesser-known ones, such as Penang, Singapore, Andamans, Siddo harbour,17 Cheduba Island,18 and the Coco Islands, to ones with historical visibility such as Socotra, Ceylon, the Nicobars, Madagascar and Mauritius. Washed of their history, scrubbed of their oriental moorings, these island spaces dressed in colonial attire became the Imperial sentinels on the extremities of the Indian empire. From the British Imperial perspective, the control of island spaces became desirable in the late eighteenth century because of the growing

38 Imperial Andamans

British interest in the affairs of the Bay of Bengal and the expansion of the China trade. The incipient and inchoate Raj, yet to find its bearings in the subcontinent, felt under continual threat from its European rivals and, in the wake of charges of corruption and misgovernance, was also embroiled in the domestic politics of England in the 1780s. While the English East India Company had secured itself in northern India, it still had to padlock its frontiers and access from the Bay. The state of affairs in the last quarter of the eighteenth century dictated that ‘guarding the Bay of Bengal … be of the utmost consequence’. The expansion of the China trade from the late eighteenth century onwards also fuelled the British hunt for a foothold in the Bay of Bengal. While the EEIC had achieved a monopoly over the internal trade of opium on the Indian subcontinent, the dominance over the seaborne trade to China, Java and other places continued to elude it.19 Owing to a dearth of oceanic bases in the east of the Bay of Bengal for the resupplying and refitting of ships, the fleets undertook immoderately and wastefully long journeys to Bombay in order to sustain naval operations.20 The repeated Anglo-French wars in southern India further injected gravity and volatility into the situation. An important fallout of the AngloFrench conflict was the Dutch refusal to allow EEIC access to Trincomalee, a port city on the northeast coast of Ceylon. The Dutch had controlled the Ceylonese littoral and the cinnamon trade since the 1660s. Until 1781, the Dutch had let Trincomalee be used as a neutral port. On several occasions the British had used it as a harbour of refuge and a victualling depot. In 1781, the Dutch, now allied with the French, refused to let the British have access to Trincomalee. Loss of access to an important port and the possibility of the French using Trincomalee as a base for attacking their positions in southern India precipitated the EEIC’s plans to capture the Dutch settlements in Ceylon from 1782 onwards.21 The EEIC also endeavoured to keep an unflagging vigil on the non-British ships making their way into the Bay and issued standing orders to destroy any French ships intercepted there.22 On the eastern side of the Bay, the EEIC began to work on securing greater elbow room in the Indonesian archipelago by edging out the Dutch East India Company from the opium trade. The Dutch were the principal European carriers in the region and enjoyed, besides commercial supremacy, considerable political advantage.23 Until the signing of the AngloDutch Treaty in 1784, which established free trade, the Dutch had luxuriated in a virtual monopoly in the Bay of Bengal and the eastern Indian Ocean.24 While on one level the British strategy was to capture as many island bases as possible to prevent them falling into the hands of other European powers, on another the central object of British desire at this time was the acquisition of a strategic harbour facilitating the EEIC’s control over passage through, access to and exit from the Bay. The harbour was to be one where fleets, on leaving the coast of Coromandel, could refit in time of war, where refreshments were available, and where the ships could take shelter

Colonizing the Bay 39

upon the approach of a stormy monsoon.25 Moreover, the harbour had to be located in a strategic place where the fleet could retire in the event of conflict. It also had to be approachable to allow the fleet to obtain a central position in the Bay from where the ships could rapidly return to the scene of action.26 It was a tall order. Initially, in the early 1770s, the British trifled with the idea of establishing a marine port at the mouth of the Ganges in Bengal. However, they abandoned the scheme in the early stages because the climate of the lower parts of Bengal was unsuitable for the rather delicate constitutions of the Company servants.27 The development of scientific topography in the following decade made feasible the collection of far more accurate information than had been hitherto possible. This encouraged the Company to venture more widely in search of ports and harbours which, fortified with ‘a small garrison’, could serve as security against attacks of an enemy navy.28 The most probable island base answering the British need for a garrison colony in the late eighteenth century was the Nicobar Islands. The strategic superiority of the Nicobar Islands, along the trade routes of India, Burma and Southeast Asia, outweighed that of other islands. A base on these Islands ensured naval hegemony over the surrounding littoral colonies and peninsulas, and furnished a harbour of refuge for China-bound fleets. The persistent endeavours since the late seventeenth century by the different European trading companies to occupy the Nicobars was a reflection of the Islands’ strategic value.29 The Danes were the first to commercially penetrate the Islands. The Nicobars had caught their attention in the early 1750s and, following a successful expedition, they opened a station in 1756 and rechristened them the Fredrick Islands.30 Unable to find a foothold in the Nicobars, the British turned their attention towards the Andaman Islands. Captain Ritchie and Thomas Forrest, who had surveyed the Andaman Islands in the early 1780s, had commented on their strategic importance.31 Ritchie had quite astutely stated that: ‘If ever the French take possession of the Andamans, we shall then see the value of it … and a Mauritius in the Bay of Bengal might become troublesome’.32 Ritchie’s report occasioned the commissioning of another survey by Captain J. Buchanan of the Andamans in 1788, followed in 1789 by Blair and Colebrook, who were to report on the practicability of building a harbour on the Islands.33 The discovery of two good harbours on the Andamans was the happy outcome of Blair’s survey. However, Lord Cornwallis, the Governor-General of India, in view of the French presence in the subcontinent, wished to keep the discovery secret until the English East India Company’s ships could occupy these harbours.34 Notwithstanding the British interest in the Bay of Bengal, the Andamans did not hold much appeal for the British as a potential garrison colony. They would have disregarded the Andamans had it not been for their failure to stake a claim over the neighbouring Nicobar Islands. Left with little choice

40 Imperial Andamans

and anxious to clinch a foothold in the Bay, the British wished to secure their claim over the Andamans. The rise in the scale of hostilities in southern India in the 1780s and fears regarding the intended attack by Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, on the Rajah of Travancore (a British ally) formed the immediate backdrop for the colonization of the Andamans in 1789.35 Once colonized, the British attempted to make the best of the Andamans’ natural harbours and strategic location in the Bay. In 1793, William Cornwallis, the Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies and the brother of Governor-General Lord Cornwallis, was taken with the idea of creating a naval arsenal on the Andamans and insisted on shifting the Settlement to a place in the northeast of the Islands.36 This area, known as Port Cornwallis, was much more accessible in terms of communication from Bengal and far more spacious for a fleet than the old settlement. Governor-General Lord Cornwallis saw Port Cornwallis as a ‘place of infinite national importance’. In his eagerness to see the Andamans develop into a ‘satisfactory base’, Lord Cornwallis conceded to the demands of his brother. He would have gone to the extent of relinquishing Penang in the Andamans’ favour had disease and death not overrun them.37 Besides the oft-quoted death and disease, the other factors that led to the abandonment of the Settlement on the Andamans in 1796 reflect the financial and geo-political concerns of the colonial state. The first was the poor commercial performance of the Andamans. Despite the proposed moneymaking projects, the Settlement did not reap the expected dividends. When Lt. Archibald Blair set out to survey the Islands, he was ordered to inspect the quality of their soil, assess its fertility, determine variations in the Islands’ atmosphere and elevations, make magnetic and tidal observations, survey the availability of limestone, timber, coral rock, minerals and sulphur and examine the existence of volcanoes.38 Amongst other considerations, Lt. Blair also hoped to find gold and tin in the Andamans along with sea-shells to burn for obtaining lime. Blair had specific orders to look for any possible deposits of sulphur, an ‘indispensable ingredient’ for manufacturing gunpowder.39 On the establishment of the settlement, Lt. Blair made haste to send back to Calcutta specimens of ‘poon-wood’ used for making masts to be compared with other timber of the same species that had to be obtained in the other ports of India.40 Another propitious commercial project was the desire to extend the cultivation of opium and indigo, and to undertake botanical experiments.41 The Government, while undeniably keen to see the development of botanical research, was quite unwilling to incur further expense in instituting it. The officers in charge of obtaining the experimental collection were cautioned to accomplish their job ‘without incurring any additional expense above that now entailed in forwarding the business of taking possession of that island’.42 During the closing years of the eighteenth century, the Company was not in a position to hold on to a base unless it paid quick dividends. In this

Colonizing the Bay 41

period, the character of the Company was rapidly metamorphosing from being a mere trading company into exercising sovereignty over a massive dominion in the Indian subcontinent, which was still to reap a rich harvest. The acquisition of the empire was a calculated risk because it also had the potential of pulverizing the Company under an economic millstone. The Anglo-French wars were already a burden on the Company’s finances,43 and it foresaw the development of costly disputes in the future with the Dutch, the Danes and the French over the various islands in the Indian Ocean. As the Settlement on the Andamans was winding down, the EEIC’s plans to capture the Dutch Settlements of Ceylon began to bear fruit. Finally, in February 1796, the EEIC completed the occupation of the western side of the Bay. Although the EEIC’s negotiations with the Kingdom of Kandy to prevent reversion of the occupied territories to the Dutch fell through, the British retained their presence on Ceylon as the rightful successor to the Dutch. Initially, Her Majesty’s Government and the EEIC jointly shared the responsibility of the administration in Ceylon, while the EEIC had a monopoly over the coveted cinnamon trade.44 The capture of Ceylon’s marine settlements secured the western Bay of Bengal for the time being and lessened the urgency for a foothold on the Andamans. The success of Penang (or Prince of Wales Island) also had an impact on the dismal fate of the settlement in the Andamans in the late eighteenth century. Situated in the Straits of Malacca and colonized around the same time as the Andamans, Penang had outstripped the former in terms of political and commercial success.45 Penang, much like the Andamans, was not self-sufficient in the first three years of its takeover nor did its trade expand immediately. It continued to depend on the neighbouring Kingdom of Keda for food supplies.46 However, by 1796 when the issue of abandoning the Andamans came up, Penang had already proved its worthiness as a strategic stronghold while the former had become a liability. The Dutch and French threats in the Straits of Malacca made this island a crucial British stronghold. The fleet stationed in Penang provided British naval security because it was sufficiently detached from the ‘war-swept mainland’ to preempt any surprise attack.47 In due course, the fleet in Penang began to remain on guard even when there was no immediate threat of war in Southeast Asian waters. For instance, in 1788 the fleet positioned in Penang was on alert because of the ‘increasing hostilities in Europe between the courts of Great Britain and France and because of the disturbed state of affairs in the United States’. Only after the conflict between France and Britain in the United States was ‘amicably’ resolved did the preparations in Penang end. The navy and garrison at Penang were once again put on alert with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 on the European continent, signifying the value of the Island as a colony.48 Penang also enjoyed noteworthy commercial success.49 The foundation of Penang was contemporaneous with a ‘new trading era’ in Southeast Asia

42 Imperial Andamans

Map of the Indian Ocean

in which the Island opened the gateway to the China trade symbolizing a shift from traditional trading practices to ‘free-wheeling enterprise’.50 Penang gave the British a grasp over the pepper trade in the Straits of Malacca51 and facilitated the China trade by furnishing a means of acquiring shipping intelligence.52 Unlike the Andamans, it also made direct economic contributions, by producing sugarcane and cotton in good measure. The British considered the cultivation of sugarcane vital because it was ‘an article by

Colonizing the Bay 43

which the Batavian have found means to drain our settlement of vast sums of resources’, and cotton was ‘an article always in demand in China and of course a good mode of remitting cash to our supercargoes at Canton’.53 Pepper and raw silk also figured on the list of important trade items in Penang. The Island also helped the British keep a check on the economic activities, deemed ‘piracy’ in colonial parlance, by private traders in the Straits of Malacca.54 By the turn of the century, Penang was elevated to the rank of a Presidency (a developed trading or port city which was the epicentre of Imperial rule in the region) and boasted a naval base and a shipbuilding yard.55 Evidently, in comparison to Penang, the colony on the Andamans fell short of the Company’s expectations. Although brief, the first colonization was significant in the history of the Andamans. Fort William’s control of the Islands occasioned a significant break in the historical location of the Islands and unlocked new possibilities for them within imperial framework. A testimony to the strategic significance of the Islands in imperial oceanic politics was the British refusal to relinquish them. Although they abandoned the Settlement, the British retained their claim by setting up a pillar and a metal plate with inscriptions on the Islands.56 It was this new-found political significance enjoyed by the Andamans which drew the British back to them in the midnineteenth century after a hiatus of half a century.

The mid-nineteenth century Indian Ocean theatre The abandonment of the Andamans in 1796 did not lessen the importance of the issues and imperatives that had played a role in their colonization. Over the next half-century, these factors acquired greater urgency, forcing the British to reconsider the option of recolonizing the Andamans. The British needed a foothold in the Bay of Bengal more than ever to serve as an oceanic sentinel for the Empire. The natural harbours of the Andamans once again drew the attention of the colonial administration which could serve the strategic, political and commercial security of the Empire. The British also suspected the inhabitants of the neighbouring Nicobars of being involved in piracy. Annexing the Andamans therefore could help the colonial administration in confronting the growing menace of ‘piracy’ in that part of the Indian Ocean. Shifting fortunes: the Andamans as the imperial outpost Two disparate yet conjoined trends in the early nineteenth century occasioned the colonial state to reconsider resettling the Andamans. These were the burgeoning dominance of the British over the Indian Ocean and the challenges that came to British hegemony because of the abolition of the EEIC’s monopoly. The British had finally ousted the French and the Danes, along with the indigenous element, in trans-oceanic trading

44 Imperial Andamans

and had established themselves as the masters of the Indian Ocean.57 There was a greater linkage of the local Indian Ocean networks with Europe, which reconfigured the hitherto equipoised relationship of the British with the local merchants in the former’s favour.58 However, mastery over the seas camouflaged the economic transformations, stresses and strains that the colonial economy was undergoing in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1813, after the abolition of the Company’s monopoly in India, there was intense wrangling between the Company and private traders over the issue of remittance of profits.59 The private traders, who had developed considerable commercial muscle in the Canton trade, began to crave greater political support from Westminster. Adding to this pressure were the vociferous demands of Manchester textile merchants subsequent to the expansion of machine-powered industry for abolishing the import of extremely competitive Indian fine textiles.60 This state of affairs led to the launching of the campaign against the Company’s monopoly over the China trade, from which the private traders emerged victorious in 1830. Until a few decades ago historians characterized the period following the abolition, 1830 to 1850, as an epoch of reform in British India. However, recent historical works have questioned the modernist pretensions of colonial rule for this period and have sought to characterize this phase as an age of ‘economic hiatus’ during which ‘none of the conditions for sustained modernization existed’.61 This was reflected, on one level, in the institution of legal innovations couched in the language of ‘reform’, which were more of an assertion of British superiority over Indian society than anything else.62 On another level, there was the transformation of India from being an exporter of manufactured goods to a supplier of primary commodities and an importer of finished consumer goods.63 Another cause of economic instability in the period was the development of India into an important component of the British international payment system.64 However, countervailing these negative changes was the remarkable continuity between the local and the international economy, which continued to nourish the Raj. C.A. Bayly confirms that the most striking feature was ‘the continuation of a sophisticated but volatile long-distance economy against the background of a poor consumer economy’.65 A catalyst in the preservation of these international linkages was the arrival of steamships. With the advent of steamships, maritime activity ‘shifted from being fair weather to all weather’.66 Steam also imparted a new force to western military success. The high professional standards of western arms, armies, military strategies and seamen were unmatched by Asian counterparts. However, these advantages, until the coming of steam, ‘had been to a large scale nullified by distance’.67 Steam eliminated these disadvantages and a clear-cut distinction between ‘European’ and ‘Asian’ maritime ability became perceptible from the nineteenth century. Steam power was harnessed in the early years for ‘reconnoitering the enemy positions, and in chasing

Colonizing the Bay 45

and capturing war-boats’, especially in the newly conquered regions of Burma and northeast India. As one contemporary writer quipped, ‘the novelty, too, of this engine of war, produced an effect analogous to that of the Spanish horses in Mexico’.68 Nonetheless, it was not until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that steam shipping received a huge international fillip.69 Although limited at the time, the impact of steam on the British Empire was significant.70 In the mid-nineteenth century, besides gradually changing the geography of the sea, the arrival of steamships changed the maritime morphology of the Indian Ocean in two ways. First, it introduced a number of private competitors, such as the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, Jardine and Matheson and Company, and the Apcar family, each of which attempted to enter specifically into the opium trade between India and China. Opium trading in the times of sailing ships, with all its tribulations, meant that the ‘investors in Britain could not expect a return on their capital for at least a year’. With the arrival of steam, the public sales of opium in the empire rose from twice a year to monthly. This happened because ‘the low volume and high value of opium made it the ideal cargo for steamships’.71 Second, steam changed the character of harbours and ports and altered the fate of certain islands. There was a greater differentiation between ports as outlets for traditional commercial commodities, as ports of call and as entrepots. The fortunes of various ports and harbours ebbed and swelled with the shifts in steam technology. It altered the character of sailing not only along the coast but also across the Indian Ocean, which in turn heightened the necessity for harbours as coaling stations. Steam consequently led to the colonization of island spaces dotting the Oceanic highways, such as Socotra in 1835 and Aden in 1838, to serve as coaling stations for the British between Egypt and India.72 At the same time, certain islands such as Mauritius, Madagascar and the Comoros, along with ports such as Cape Town, lost their earlier significance. Technology (and Europe) were thus transforming the Indian Ocean. However, one must note this change was extremely gradual and not felt equally across all parts of the Ocean. Both these changes had enormous significance for the destiny of the Andamans. The increased engagement of non-Company players in maritime affairs and the increased necessity for fuelling and naval bases impelled the British to rethink the fate of some of the beleaguered islands in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. The Andamans was one such group of islands on which the colonial gaze came to rest a second time, leading to their re-adoption as an imperial outpost. In the view of the British, little had changed on the Islands. For contemporaries, the Islands still had the capacity to instil terror in the hearts of sailors. In the Andamans, an eerie and gloomy air hung over the dark tropical forests which were liveried with vines and creepers and impenetrable undergrowth, the swamps were filled with ‘poisonous gases’, rows of mangroves

46 Imperial Andamans

hugged the coastline, and the Islands were said to be ‘infested’ by inhospitable indigenes armed with ‘poison-tipped’ arrows. Although the British viewed death and disease as lurking in every nook and crevice of the Islands, they were still willing despite being soaked to their skins in the tempestuous rains, racked by malaria and scurvy, lonely and desolate, to make a long voyage to what was, in their imagination, a god-forsaken location. It was not the drum rolls of the gospel or divine providence that led the British to the Andamans but the need to safeguard the political, strategic and commercial security of their empire in India. Although the circumstances had altered, the imperatives which compelled the British to pay attention to the Andamans at the time were the same as those in the late eighteenth century. British officialdom was also aware of this. The Commissioner of Arracan,73 who was at the forefront of the discussions in favour of occupation of the Andamans, urged in 1856: The reasons which towards the close of 1788, led the Board of Administration to seek a harbour sufficiently capacious to afford shelter to a fleet, have rather gained than lost force in 1856. We have much more to protect now than we had then, and without pretending to speculate on the march of events, I may imagine the case of our having deep cause to rue that we had left it to any power but our own to find a capacious harbour for a fleet at Andamans.74 In 1862 another official candidly stated the reasons for which the British colonized the islands: Why is it maintained? Is it for the shelter of our ships from the terrible hurricane which occasionally spread the Bay of Bengal with wrecks, or to find shelter for our disabled ships? Or is it intended that in the event of war the noble Harbours with which the islands abound shall serve as rendezvous for our naval force in the Bay of Bengal? There is not, I believe, in the whole of [the] bay a single Port well adapted to be a rendezvous for our fleets out of the Andaman and Nicobar groups. […] There is no island or groups of islands to my knowledge in the west Indies so well furnished with harbours as the Andamans Group – nor are there better harbours. […] If then it is thought worthwhile to maintain settlements for our navy’s sake in this quarter, I believe that the present one may be kept.75 The ignominious Islands had all of a sudden been transformed into a jewel in the crown. The British government had awakened to the utility of the Andamans as a port and a harbour. This was the perfect setting for staging the colonial conquest of the Islands. It was also the historical juncture when the colonial state was making its final push into the frontier areas of

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the empire, in Southeast Asia, in Punjab and Afghanistan to the northwest, and in Burma and other territories to the northeast.76 By the 1840s, the East India Company’s Court of Directors, who had first proven to be the biggest brakes on the pace of annexation, had shifted their stance and began endorsing a much more belligerent policy towards the Indian states.77 Amongst other factors, the political economy of conquest was of uppermost concern in official circles. Governor-General Dalhousie was careful to bring in territories that were good sources of revenue and raw material. The annexation of Nagpur was one such significant example. The Andamans were another. Imagining piracy: the Andamans as the sherriff of the Bay of Bengal There was another role that the British expected the Andamans to perform – the ‘imperial gendarme’. The Islands were cast as an extension of the colonial constabulary, policing the ‘nefarious’ activities of European privateers, the Malays, the Chinese and the Nicobarese.78 Following the abolition of the Company’s monopoly, the fears of ‘piracy’ utterly gripped the British imagination. From 1830 onwards, the company archives, specifically its foreign department records, begin to document greater instances of piracy by Malays, Chinese and Nicobarese in the Indian Ocean.79 They report of numerous vessels which had gone missing in the Indian Ocean in this period. The Government of India asked the officials in Bengal and those posted in the Straits Settlements to look into the matter. In 1852, one Mr W. Dicey firmly concluded that: I have no hesitation in my own mind in saying that two or more vessels have been cut off at these islands … making a fearful catalogue of vessels that have been destroyed and their crew murdered within the last ten or twelve years by these Pirates, who murder all belonging to the vessels taken, to prevent detection.80 Another foreign department report of the same year insisted: At these islands, lying in the fair way between the East Coast of India and the Straits of Malacca, piracy in its worst form is systematically carried on to a frightful extent and from the method adopted of murdering the crew and passengers, whether men, women and children, their crimes are probably in many cases undiscovered and they have hitherto remained unpunished.81 The Company saw piracy as disruptive to its commercial interests and also as an attack on its sovereignty in the region. This is reflected in a 1857 letter written by the Commissioner of Tavoy, J.C. Haughton, to the Commissioner of Tennasarim and Martaban Provinces in which he states: ‘It may be said with some appearance of truth that at present the navigation of this portion

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of the Bay of Bengal is a disgrace to the British Government, being scarcely, if at all, safer than the coast of China’.82 This state of affairs in the Bay of Bengal, which the British saw as a ‘British Sea’, became an issue to which the Government of India felt that it should immediately respond.83 As a possible solution, the Governor of Singapore suggested stationing a small, fast-moving armed steamer in the area. This vessel was to be put under the charge of ‘a young and active Commodore, manned by Malays and not encumbered with naval discipline and etiquette … such a vessel, if so employed must not be hampered with common law definition of Piracy, or with the instructions given by the admiralty to Her [M]ajesty’s ships’.84 It remains unclear whether British officialdom acted on the above suggestion but it does demonstrate the British willingness to overstep the boundaries set by their own law in order to deal with the piratical vessels. They were ready to call in a motley bunch of Malays, otherwise noted in colonial discourse as subversive and treacherous, to serve the State. There was a case of one Datoo Juan, a Malay birds’ nest breeder and an erstwhile pirate, whose services the British solicited. Local officers enthusiastically assented to his application for renewal of the licence for sending boats into the Mergui Peninsula for nest collection. The British hoped that the renewal of the licence would appease the wily Malay and prevent him from lapsing into the ‘profession of his youth and manhood – Piracy’. The British also wished to form a propitious alliance against other Malays who dared infringe upon Datoo’s and their own lucrative business.85 Besides enlisting the services of the locals, with time British officers also began making extensive use of small steam vessels, gunboat flotillas and shallow-draft vessels to patrol the Southeast Asian waters.86 Piracy, or maritime theft, had existed on the oceanic waters for centuries. A number of ancient and medieval texts attested to its existence and noted the attempts of different states to curtail it.87 However, with the advent of the Europeans in Asian waters, ‘piracy’ became more of a colonial taxonomical invention than an actuality.88 The British filtered the territorialization of the Indian Ocean through the term. In the name of making the Ocean safe for travellers and seafaring vessels by keeping in check ‘piratical’ activities, the British covertly extended their control over the Islands. The phantasms surrounding ‘piracy’ were continually reaffirmed, validated and perpetuated by the Company’s desire to eliminate all nonBritish trading and commercial interests, reflecting the maritime contestation over Asian and European rights in the use of Indian Ocean waters.89 It was more an illustration of the prevailing balance of power on the watercourses than an example of actual curtailment of ‘natural rights’. Using law, which criminalized those seafaring commercial activities and vessels that Southeast Asians had engaged in since time immemorial, the Company enforced their superior claim over the sea. The Company deemed

Colonizing the Bay 49

all commercial activities by ‘unlicensed’ natives as ‘illegal’ and any abrogation of the Company’s diktat was interpreted as ‘lawlessness’. On many occasions the colonial government, as evidenced in the case of Datoo Juan, itself licensed the alleged piratical vessels to do commerce raiding.90 The inefficacy and weakness of the Chinese navy also helped the British become the sole power conducting raids against the supposed pirates in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.91 The British imagination regarding piracy drew upon a discourse structured around representing the character of seafaring Malays and Chinese as that of ‘perfidious pirates’. The replication and reproduction of this representation by latter-day historians illustrates the tenacity of this discourse.92 However, the discourse was not completely detached from reality. The Chinese, the Malays and the Burmese had been sailing in these waters and visiting the islands dotting the Indian Ocean and extending up to the Bay of Bengal for centuries.93 There is considerable historical evidence which shows that they disrupted coastal traffic and engaged in slave raiding and poaching.94 Their main interest in the Bay of Bengal region was gathering birds’ nests, a delicacy in Southeast Asia. However, the presence of the Europeans in the Oceanic waters brought with it violence, impoverishment and loss of traditional rights on an unprecedented scale, adding a new, brutal dimension to these seafaring activities.95 With regards to the Bay of Bengal, besides the Malays and the Chinese, the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands became the focus of British ire.96 The British wished to remedy the situation. An official file of the Foreign and Political Department (dated October 1844) in which some unnamed officials put forward their suggestions demonstrates administrators’ attempts to do so. One of them suggested the destruction of the coconut trees of the Islands because the ruin of the property of the Nicobarese would make them realize the gravity of their offences. Another official disagreed with inflicting such a punishment because in his view ‘punishment hardens the heart without effecting any change upon its natural propensities’. Instead he advised that the most ‘effective stop to those daring murders’ would be through ‘civilizing the wretched natives of the Nicobar Archipelago, or in other terms teaching them Christian religion’. Christianization alone, he claimed, ‘can irresistibly root up from the heart the most barbarous and perverse propensities’.97 Irrespective of the means suggested by different officials, stemming the ‘scourge of piracy’ was one of the crucial reasons British officials put forward for occupying the islands in the Bay of Bengal. The British in particular wished to occupy the Nicobars for their supposed role in piracy.98 However, the Danish East India Company had intermittently occupied the Nicobars since the late 1760s.99 Although rumours of the Danish decision to abandon the Nicobars had been circulating since the late 1840s, the Danes continued to treat the Nicobars as their territory and this made British occupation

50 Imperial Andamans

impracticable.100 While the Nicobars continued to be crucial in the fulfilment of British ambitions in the Bay, the Government of India could not occupy them until 1868 when the Danish government finally relinquished the Islands. As an alternative, the British began to frame plans for the occupation of the Andamans. Much like the Nicobarese, the inhabitants of the Andamans had been the cause of considerable trouble for British seafarers. The Andamanese were famous for attacking unwary seafarers who washed up on their shores. There was a famous case of the Andamanese attacking the shipwrecked crew of the brig ‘Fyze Buksh’ of Moulmein (in Burma) in 1855.101 This lent greater weight to the idea of occupying the Andamans. As one official stated, ‘a harbour or harbours of refuge at a convenient part of one or more of the islands, would conduce to the security of traffic, and to the general interest of humanity’.102 Another opined: Looking on the map at the magnificent situation of these islands, their proximity to such seats of trade as Madras, Calcutta, Akyab, Rangoon, Moulmein, Penang, and Singapore, considering their extent … their many fine harbours, and … the abundant fertility of the soil, it does seem astonishing that their condition on the present day should be such as to make us wish that they could be blotted from the face of the ocean or sunk a thousand fathoms deep below its surface. That instead of offering a refuge to the miserable storm-driven vessel, they should be a snare in her path leading to utter destruction.103 Soon enough Fort William summoned experts, initiated correspondence with Whitehall, rolled out the maps, and readied its ships to set sail to the Andamans. The Islands were to be, amongst other things, in charge of law enforcement, the Sheriff of the Bay of Bengal.

Becoming a convict colony While the Company had decided in the late 1850s to set up a colony on the Andamans, the administrators continued to be divided over the best mode of colonization. Amongst the different suggestions put forward, setting up a penal colony on the Islands had some strong supporters. While the bureaucracy at Fort William was discussing the plans of colonization, however, there came the sudden outbreak of the Revolt in March 1857. This stalled the discussions on the Andamans’ occupation, which did not resume until about September 1857 when the British found themselves on firmer footing following the recapture of Delhi. Had it not been for the Revolt, the British might have colonized the Andamans, in a similar or different capacity, a year before they did. The Revolt, however, was significant in turning British officials in favour of opening a convict depot on the Andamans. In

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January 1858, Fort William decided to set up a penal settlement at Port Blair, Andamans. This decision resulted from the recommendation of a Committee set up in November 1857, which was sent out to explore the Islands and see whether they were suitable for setting up a settlement, penal or otherwise. Dr F.J. Mouat, Inspector General of Jails in Bengal, led the Andamans Committee,104 which returned with a favourable report of the Islands. By January 1858, the recommendations of the Committee won acceptance. The decision to set up a penal settlement catapulted the Islands into a momentous historical trajectory. Rather than enacting the role of an oceanic police officer, the Andamans, costumed as a dungeon, became a receptacle for dacoits, murderers, thieves and vagabonds. It was not to be just any jailhouse, it was to be the grand Indian Bastille. A perfect purgatory In February 1856, Captain Henry Hopkinson, the Commissioner of Arracan, was the first person to come up with the idea of setting up a penal colony in the Andamans for the purpose of its colonization. In his view, there was a possibility of achieving a great deal ‘by establishing of the convict settlement on the southwest part of the southern Island, which is reported to be healthy’.105 In Hopkinson’s view, setting up a convict depot was the ‘cheapest plan’ for occupation of the Islands. This was because labour was the chief source of expense in colonization. The use of convict labour could help the Government of India lower costs. In 1856, Hopkinson, in an official letter to W. Grey, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, expressed his view that convict labour was a cheap alternative because the amount spent on maintaining and guarding the convicts was the sum which the government would have spent at any rate if the convicts were incarcerated in subcontinental jails. He further suggested the use of Burmese convicts as the initial settlers for the colony. Their familiarity with the climatic and physical conditions of the Andamans made them suitable settlers. Moreover, the proximity to Rangoon and Moulmein would enable the use of a steamer, lowering the cost of transporting humans and material. The plan drawn up by Hopkinson was comprehensive and exhaustive. Although there was ambivalence in certain quarters, it mostly won immediate converts in government circles.106 J.P. Grant, a member of the Supreme Council of the Governor-General (1854–59),107 was amongst those thoroughly taken with the idea of convict settlement. He felt that even if a convict settlement had limited use, diplomatic considerations in the occupation of the Islands outweighed the limitations. Some visible sign of dominion in the Bay of Bengal had immense utility in warding off other foreign powers and the settlement could also serve as a port of call for refreshment or coaling or as a post of observation in time of war.108

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Both J.P. Grant and Hopkinson also raised the spectre of wild cannibals running amok on the islands as a justification for setting up a penal settlement. Grant argued that jails would nowhere be less costly than in a place where the convicts know that ‘if they run away they will be eaten up’.109 He characterized the Andamans as a ‘perfect purgatory’, a place for ‘the most profligate and abandoned criminals’. Not very different was the view of Captain Henry Hopkinson, who also decried the fate of the Islands unless they were colonized by the British, noting that ‘in place of engaging enterprise, and furnishing subsistence to thousands of industrious colonists they should be left in the possession of a handful of degenerate negroes, degraded in habits and intelligence to a level little above the beasts of forest with which they dwell.’110 Hopkinson and Grant’s views found resonance with those of F.J. Mouat. He saw the establishment of a penal settlement on the Islands as ‘a poetical retributive justice’, whereby ‘the crimes of an ancient race’ became the ‘means of reclaiming a fair and fertile tract of land from the neglect, the barbarity and the atrocities of a more primitive but scarcely less cruel and vindictive race, whose origin is yet involved in such a dark cloud of mystery’.111 The ‘ancient’ race in Mouat’s view were the Indians and the Andamanese were the ‘primitive’ race. He believed that the settling of the debased criminals who would cultivate and farm the lands hitherto inhabited by a diabolical and demonic race was an ideal plan that would not only punish the criminals but also reclaim the Islands and their inhabitants, who deserved no better immigrants. Thus, the British could simultaneously achieve the ‘reformation’ of the criminal and the ‘civilization’ of the barbarian through the colonization of the Islands. In this way the British inscribed the deportation of convicts, the establishment of the penal settlement, and the wish to civilize the natives into the Andamans’ history as a story of reform.112 While there was general agreement regarding the benefits of colonization, there existed internal differences in official opinion regarding the mode of colonization that the Government of India should adopt. Lord Canning, the then Governor-General (1856–1862), was one of the most vociferous critics of the idea of the penal station. He found Hopkinson’s argument regarding cutting labour costs by employing convicts unconvincing. Canning had the escalating costs faced by the Australian convict colony churning at the back of his mind. Further, he felt that Britain’s Asian Empire already had Arracan, Tennaserim and Singapore as convict depots, which sufficed for its needs. In Canning’s view, opening a convict depot in one corner of the Islands only partially fulfilled the intention of securing a naval base on the sea because it took a considerable force and fleet to strengthen a naval base that could serve the empire in time of war. In an official report of 1856 discussing the merits of colonizing of the Andamans, Canning noted:

Colonizing the Bay 53

It would not be wise to encumber ourselves with new outlying points of defence, which must either be made at considerable expense, strong enough to protect themselves, or upon the approach of danger be guarded by a force which will have more than enough to do elsewhere, or be abandoned with discredit.113 As the colonial officials were debating the issue and undertaking marine surveys of the region,114 a massive rebellion engulfed the Indian subcontinent in 1857. The Revolt began as a sepoy mutiny and within no time transformed into a popular upsurge. The Revolt mostly affected northern India but parts of southern and northeastern India also felt its tremors. Indians were rebelling against both colonial rule and the sections of Indian society believed to be collaborating with the British, specifically in the countryside. Caught unawares, the British directed all their energies into containing and quelling the rebellion. The Revolt temporarily stalled discussions on the occupation of the Andamans, leaving its fate hanging in the balance. The Revolt of 1857: exile and empire The astonishment and panic that the Revolt of 1857 evoked amongst the British has been the subject of many historical and literary works.115 In the aftermath of the Revolt, ‘the old information panics, redolent of “Thugee and Dacoite”, returned with a vengeance’.116 Adding to the British predicament of overflowing jails was the problem of controlling ‘collective crime’. Contemporary British narratives attest to the brutality of the Indians and the British soldiers, in spite of the restraining note struck by ‘Clemency’ Canning. The main form of punishment for rebels and mutineers was death – either by hanging, beheading, burning or blowing up from the mouth of cannon. Others who had their lives spared were fettered, whipped and incarcerated in provincial jails. As a result, the jails in some of the provinces were bursting at the seams with Indians suspected of desertion, rebellion and mutiny. Given this situation, the sentence of transportation received a fresh lease of life and there was no further debate over the decision to open a convict settlement on the Andamans. The officials associated with prison discipline considered the revival of the sentence of transportation through Act XXII of 1858 as ‘most wise’ and a ‘rare necessary measure’.117 Before the Governor-General decided to open a penal settlement at Port Blair, the mofussil criminal courts had instructions not to specify any locality while sentencing a person to transportation ‘beyond seas’.118 Different sets of rules applied to different provinces with regard to the sentence of transportation. For instance, Punjab courts had orders not to send rebel convicts sentenced to imprisonment for less than ten years to the Andamans, unless there was severe overcrowding in the local jails. However, the convicts sentenced to imprisonment for more

54 Imperial Andamans

than five years in the Northwest Provinces and Awadh and for more than three years in the Lower Provinces made their way to the Andamans.119 The condition of the jails in a particular province and the state of law and order in an area also determined whether rebel convicts were deported to the Andamans.120 For instance, the Inspector General of Prisons of the Northwest Province, C.B. Thornhill, while forwarding the nominal rolls of the convicts sentenced to transportation under Act XXII of 1858, reported in 1859: We had then very few Jails which had not been damaged to an extent which rendered them most insecure places for confinement, and the state of feeling throughout the country would have rendered the escape of a popular rebel a signal for fresh excitement and license. […] Any sentence beyond five years should, I think, involve transportation beyond seas – the object is most effectually obtained by sending the offender beyond the seas.121 The colonial state used penal transportation in order to create a moral order where colonial law, while continuing to punish decisively, also sought to conciliate and ingratiate the colonized populace. This was because the state not only had to deal with the problem of containing the rebellion and solving the problem of overcrowded jails but also because it had to build a new basis for its authority.122 Notwithstanding the bloodshed that accompanied the repression of the rebellion, a grant of amnesty and tolerance were the keynotes of the Queen’s proclamation in November 1858. Transportation was a penal option with the right mix of terror and mercy.123 According to contemporary colonial penology, deportation had the potential to perpetually incapacitate the criminal from committing any crime without taking away his life or without subjecting him to confinement for life, both of which were less compassionate penal alternatives. The use of transportation in lieu of a death sentence gave the Raj a merciful face, a legitimacy that it was seeking for its authoritarianism.124 Convict transportation was, therefore, not merely a penal device that helped obviate the problems of overcrowded jails. Nor did it represent a simplistic ‘retreat of public punishment’ in India.125 It was an ideological tool and a means of colonizing the Islands. This strategy of using transportation or exile as a means of empire-building was a long-standing one in European history. The Andamans, in this scheme of things, were by no means unique.126 Be it the colonization of the Americas, Australia or the island colonies in the Pacific and the Indian oceans, the transportation of convicts, felons, thieves, vagabonds and beggars was a common method employed for settling new areas. The Straits Settlements were the classic example of such a colony where several works were carried out by the convicts ‘which could not otherwise have been sanctioned from the State

Colonizing the Bay 55

funds’.127 Transportation thus served as a mode of developing colonies that would contain Asian or European populations at a later stage. Besides the ideological and political role played by the sentence of transportation in the politics of the British Empire, there was yet another factor which encouraged its use. These were changes in the pattern of international labour migration and the refusal of the Straits Settlements to receive any of the mutineer convicts. The instant the British merchants and inhabitants of Singapore found out the intentions of the colonial government, they sent a memorandum to the Government of India outlining the ‘evils likely to arise from transporting sepoy mutineers and rebels to Straits Settlements’. The Singaporeans insisted that the convicts hitherto transported were a disparate group originating from different parts of India and, therefore, not sharing with them any intimate emotional or regional bond. On the other hand, the mutineers were suspected of being ‘bound to each other in a sort of a tie of brotherhood, accustomed to act together, speaking the same language and naturally entertaining the most deadly sentiments of hatred and revenge’. The prospect of having such men in large numbers was a dreadful one as it had the potential for disrupting the life of ‘these purely commercial settlements, these large depots of trade, these quite peaceable agricultural stations’.128 The Singaporeans felt that the presence of rebel convicts would further contribute to the instability of a large portion of the lower-class Chinese population, which enjoyed a rather turbulent and volatile reputation. Singaporean opinion was thus unanimously opposed to the continued use of Singapore and Penang as penal stations.129 In the meantime, the problem of overcrowded jails in India was beginning to create immense strain on the colonial administration. F.J. Mouat, Inspector of Jails, confirmed that it was not desirable to send ‘such men to either Arracan or the Straits Settlements’. In addition, if the Government did not take speedy steps to form a convict settlement on the Andaman Islands, the best means of disposing of them would probably be to send them to the West Indies as ‘compulsory labourers’. In the West Indies, it was hoped, they would ‘be removed from all Indian association and would have no inducement in a population who have no sympathy with them to plot mischief or commit crime’.130 Even Western Australia was contemplated as a possible destination for the mutineers, since the community there was already accustomed to the presence of convicts and the relative shortness of the distance there would ‘facilitate conveyance’.131 In contrast to the attitude of the Straits was that of the various British plantation colonies dotting the Indian and the Pacific oceans. Most of these plantation colonies had been facing a labour crunch132 since the mid-1830s and following the Revolt they began bidding for imprisoned rebels awaiting transportation. 1834 saw the abolition of slavery, which had hitherto provided the main labour force for plantation colonies. The emancipated slaves had become ‘apprentices’ for a period of a few years before taking to

56 Imperial Andamans

Figure 2.1

Convicts on a boat landing on the Andamans

(Source: As-A47-8: AN624307001, Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London).

wage labour. The Apprentice System also soon ended, exacerbating the shortage of labour. Consequently, the plantation colonies became frantic in their search for alternative sources of labour. Mauritius, known to have successfully experimented with indentured labour, provided a model which other plantation colonies wished to follow. Although the West Indies had also changed over to the indentured system, it had not been able to immediately alleviate the problem of labour shortage. There was also a racial dimension to the labour problem in the West Indies. Anti-Portuguese riots in British Guiana in 1856 made the planters believe that the presence of Indians could serve as ‘buffer’ between the white and black population in the colony. There was also talk of the introduction of cotton plantations in Guiana, which would have required greater labour input. Thus, all these conditions together made the prospect of receiving ex-sepoys sentenced to transportation highly attractive.133 In October 1857, the British Guiana government requested 25,000 sepoys from the East India Company Directors.134 However, the proposal did not yield results since the Company had already made up its mind ‘that any of the mutineers who may be transported from India are to be sent to the Andaman islands’.135 The ones who had already arrived in the Straits were shipped back to the Andamans once the penal station opened there.136 Perhaps the opening of the penal settlement in the Andamans made the question of sending convicts to the West

Colonizing the Bay 57

Indies an unsound financial proposition, but this question awaits further research. Whither mutineers and rebels? The first batch of convicts was from Karachi and their ship set sail for the Andamans from Bombay in February 1858.137 Initially the British officials believed that the convicts being sent to the Andamans were mutineers and rebels, guilty of political crimes, ‘whose capital punishment was avoidable, but whom it would have been madness to set free’.138 The various headings under which rebels and mutineers were sentenced included: endeavouring to incite soldiers to sedition; rebellion; treason; aiding and assisting the rebels; plundering government money; desertion; attempt to wage a war against the Government of the East India Company; not giving information of concealed combinations against the state; use of insulting and threatening language; and use of incendiary language calculated to seduce from allegiance to the British government. In sum, the courts granted sentences of imprisonment or transportation for crimes not amounting to murder of officials or outright rebellion. So it was with ‘a humane object’ that the penal settlement was inaugurated, that is, ‘with a proper regard for human life, and without confounding men who may possess many fine qualities with the dregs of the criminal classes who form the ordinary mass of the transported convicts’.139 The then President-in-Council, J.P. Grant, in a minute of 12 June 1858, insisted that there be no cruelty or excesses of any kind based on the view that the convicts were no ordinary criminals but respectable members of society who had rebelled against the state.140 Therefore, while the colony was inaugurated as a place for receiving convicts, it was to be for political offenders from respected sections of Indian society and, therefore, not to be run on harsh penal lines. The GovernorGeneral’s Council reprimanded and condemned excesses of any kind. The Governor-General, working with the belief that the convicts were not ‘morally degraded criminals’ but ‘grievous political offenders’, instructed Captain H. Man141 that they be shown the same consideration as ‘free Emigrants to our Colonies’. For this reason he suggested that the wives and families of the prisoners should be invited to the Islands.142 Little did the Governor-General know that his notion that only rebels and mutineers reached the Andamans was a false one. Unbeknownst to the Governor-General and his Council, most of the convicts sentenced to transportation were from all over India and convicted of murder or dacoity. Ironically, the Settlement, officials knew better. For instance, the first superintendent of the Settlement, J.P. Walker (March 1858–October 1859), wrote in his report on the affairs of the Settlement in November 1858: The mixture of classes is certainly curious and makes the punishment unavoidably unequal. Among the common budmashes whom we took

58 Imperial Andamans

down were to be found the pretender to the throne of Munipore who had joined the Chittagong Sepoys […] He was a poor delicate mixture of a Bengali and an Assamese, a Zemindar of Bulundshuhar who in happier times paid a lakh of ruppees of revenue per annum to government and the Deputy Inspector of Schools of Shahjehanpore. All these men are treated absolutely in the same manner as the other convicts.143 Walker’s report was an official document recording the affairs of the Settlement. Since it was going to be read by the Governor-General and his Council, Walker let the above paragraph be printed but struck out the following paragraph from his handwritten notes before it was copied and sent ahead: Nominally only mutineers and rebels have been transported to the Port Blair. Practically the local authorities seem to have given the widest possible interpretation to the orders and have sent to Port Blair every one of any crime during the disturbances and since. I do not think that half of the 318 whom we took down were, properly speaking, either rebels or mutineers. Dacoity, rape and such crimes were the ordinary charges upon which their convictions were entered in the calendar. […] If it is intended gradually to make Port Blair a quasi free settlement and to transport thither those only guilty of political crimes, the subject requires attention, at present a goodly portion are certainly common Budmashes. […] most of them deny any complicity in the rebellion.144 It seems that even though Walker knew that quite a few convicts were not rebels or mutineers he was unsure whether the Governor-General and his Council would appreciate this if he brought this to light. Walker’s report

Table 2.1

Crimes committed by convicts sent to the Andamans in 1859145

Mutiny and Deserters Rebellion Dacoity & Highway Robbery Plunderers Murder & Wounding Burglary & Theft Jail Riot Arson Rape Poisoning Total no. of convicts European Guards

284 240 250 215 102 79 65 54 07 03 02 1,301 100

Colonizing the Bay 59

even carried a table of crimes which listed the criminals sentenced to transportation (see Table 2.1). Mutiny, desertion and rebellion accounted for only about 50 per cent of sentences. After the first two years, following the inception of the Settlement, even the higher officials in India admitted to the fact that ‘the circumstances of the Settlement are now different to what they were when Port Blair was used as a place of transportation almost exclusively for persons convicted of crimes against the State’.146 The Government of India gave formal sanction to the deportation of ordinary convicts to the Andamans in September 1859.147 It is evident from Table 2.2, which shows the statistics of crimes committed before convicts arrived in the Andamans, that murder and dacoity were the two offences that claimed the lion’s share of crimes committed by those sentenced to transportation. Table 2.2148

Crimes committed by convicts sent to the Andamans (1874–1901)

Murder

Against Person

Dacoity

Against Property

Others

1874 1881 1891 1901

5,575 7,445 7,946 7,795

107 158 308 817

1,262 2,444 1,711 2,262

325 1,012 1,337 904

298 381 416 196

Total

28,761

1,300

7,679

3,578

1,291

There were also several discrepancies in the passing of sentences and the nature of the sentences passed on people actually arriving on the Andamans.149 First, the courts used variations of Penal Acts passed in 1857 to deliver the sentence of transportation.150 Second, not all the convicts who arrived on the Andamans were under the sentence of transportation.151 Lastly, there were times when the courts simply imposed the sentence of transportation without specifying whether transportation was beyond the seas or not.152 The Queen’s proclamation of amnesty for mutineers came in October– November 1858. Several mutineers by that time were imprisoned or had been transported. All the mutineers except the ones convicted for murdering ‘British Subjects’ (interpreted as all persons of European descent) or for actively leading rebellion were to be pardoned. In theory, the Amnesty Proclamation applied to the crimes committed by most of the mutineers who had landed in the Andamans sentenced to transportation. The government realized that a revision of many of the sentences under which it had transported and imprisoned rebels was necessary. However, it delayed the decision in relation to the convicts transported to the Andamans. The government wished, first, to wait and watch the result of the pardon given to those who were still unconvicted; second, to gauge the impact of the disbandment of the disarmed regiments on society; and, lastly, to wait until

60 Imperial Andamans

the ‘disturbed districts’ had been ‘reclaimed to order’.153 Thus the convict colony in the Andamans came into being.

Conclusion In an article written in 1899, R.C. Temple, who served as the Superintendent of the Penal Settlement at Port Blair from 1894 to 1901, was amongst the few officials who gave a correct assessment of the British motivations for colonizing the Andamans. According to him, besides the political value of the Andamans’ ‘many splendid harbours and cosy inlets’ which provided safe shelter to British ships, the primary ‘cause of their inclusion in the British Empire’ was ‘the prevention of that persistent and dangerous piracy and wrecking, which has given rise to only too many terrible tales in the present and last centuries’. Even more importantly, ‘their unique value as a safe place for the deportation of heinous offenders against law and order was an afterthought, as it were’.154 The retelling of the tale of the colonization supports Temple’s claims. The history of the colonization is important as it sheds light on the way the story of the penal colony acquired preponderance in the history of the Andamans. It settles a historical imbalance by putting on record a story hitherto untold: the story of the colonization of the Andamans as part of the attempt to dominate the Indian Ocean and to padlock the access to the Indian Ocean from the Malacca Straits.

3 Reclaiming the Wild

Having annexed the Andamans to British India, the most pressing task ahead was to create a Settlement on the Islands by clearing forests, draining the swamps and erecting dwelling places for the administrators and convicts. Settling a colony such as the Andamans, the officers would soon discover, was a Herculean task. This was because, on one hand, the Andamans was a terra incognito for the British, and on the other, Fort William was minimalist in its instructions regarding the way the colony was to be administered, leaving the Settlement officials to their own devices.1 More than lack of knowledge or direction, frustrating the Settlement officers’ efforts were their presumptions regarding the ecology and the inhabitants of the Islands. Making the latter acquiesce was not as easy as the officers had supposed. The British had presumed that the Islands’ spatial and societal insularity would not be difficult to overcome and was in fact propitious for the working of the penal settlement. Instead of facilitating, the Islands’ insularity became the chief hurdle in the colonization of the Islands. Fort William did not factor-in the high costs of shipping people, food and other materials to the colony. Securing the penal settlement through the elimination of all indigenous transport and communication networks with the Islands and its resultant dependence on government-sponsored transportation became a costly affair. High mortality rates, morbidity due to disease, spiralling costs of erecting buildings and shelters, and providing for the convicts and the guards on the Islands further added to the expense. The stiff opposition put up by the Andamanese further gave lie to the confidence of the Settlement administrators. Unwilling to give up their territories they resisted the British presence on the Islands by intermittently attacking the Settlement and by helping runaway convicts. Besides finding the physical task of settling the colony difficult, the Settlement officers faced administrative complications when it came to enforcing customary penal practices.2 At the time of occupation of the Islands, they presumed that the Andamans would serve as a natural quarantine because of their distance from the Indian subcontinent, dense forests, 61

62 Imperial Andamans

ferocious natives and the ‘black’ sea surrounding it. However, from the early batches of convicts in the Settlement, about 288 convicts escaped between March and April 1858.3 Keeping the convicts working in deep forests or sleeping huddled in makeshift barracks, segregated and under surveillance at all times, was a near impossibility on the Islands. Contrary to the colonists’ presumption, the Andamans were not a natural prison. The evidence from this chapter challenges and questions this historical stereotype, which posits a cosy equation between island spaces and prisons and shows that such an equation is not tenable at all times and in every instance.

Remote islands Administering a colony that was not located on or near the international thoroughfares gave the impression of a fortunate circumstance when the colony happened to be a penal settlement. This was the view taken of the Andamans by the British when they first opened the Settlement. However, the British soon realized that the relative geographical isolation and inaccessibility of the Andamans rendered the task of colonizing the Islands a very expensive and irksome deal. Since the Andamans comprised several small and big islands, it had convict stations spread over separate islands interspersed with deep waters which made communication and transport between islands difficult. Managing such a Settlement required a welldeveloped system of internal communication, which continued to elude the colony for most of its history. Another crucial issue related to the island character of the colony was its supposed self-sufficiency. The Andaman Committee had given the verdict in favour of establishing a penal colony in the Andamans because it assumed that the Islands had enough food and natural resources to supply the needs of administrators and convicts. The Committee saw the Islands’ supposed self-sufficiency as a step towards alleviating the cost of settling such a colony. However, the Islands remained dependent on the Indian subcontinent and failed to establish their own financial viability. What follows is an account of the problems that the administration encountered due to the island character of the colony. Languid islandic isolation The opening of the Settlement in the Andamans was the culmination of the British effort carried over from the previous century to eliminate all indigenous transport and communication networks from the Bay of Bengal and to crown it as a ‘British Sea’. Hoisting the Union Jack, stationing the steamers, gun ships and guard vessels in and around the Islands was symbolic of British sovereignty over the Oceanic waters. In turn, the British stronghold over the Bay of Bengal and elimination of indigenous networks augured well for the penal colony in the Andamans because the control and security of the penal colony depended on it being unapproachable,

Reclaiming the Wild 63

except by vessels sanctioned by the government. Unwittingly this very process became a crucial factor in imposing administrative isolation on the Andamans. The geographical distance and absence of any vessels routing themselves through the waters surrounding the Andamans made the distance between Calcutta and Port Blair seem far greater than it actually was. The fact that the Andamans were under the sway of the southwest monsoons for the greater part of the year also made the colony inaccessible. Setting up a regular line of communication and transport between Calcutta and Port Blair was difficult and costly. For the first few years there was no direct steamship travelling between the two ports. Instead, a sailing ship weighing 787 tons and averaging merely eight trips in a year plied between Calcutta and Port Blair. However, a steamer did move between Moulmein and Port Blair from the early years of the Settlement.4 It was not until the turn of the century, four decades after the opening of the Settlement, that there was at least one steamer running between the Andamans, Madras, Rangoon and Calcutta.5 The Settlement officials sorely felt the inadequacy of communication and transport networks. This inadvertently made the running of the administration a constant source of anxiety. While the Andamans were now British, an adjunct of the Indian Empire, they remained geographically distanced from the centre of power. This imposed a near complete administrative isolation on the Islands. This was true for other littoral colonies of the Southeast Asian archipelago as well. Since these colonies were completely dependent on the water vessels for connection with the government in India the withdrawal of sailing ships and steamers or the absences of guard ships tended to prejudice their administration and security.6 The opening of the Settlement in Port Blair had begun to put pressure on the government-run ships in Southeast Asian waters. The same ships catered for Tavoy, Mergui, Tennasserim, Martaban and Port Blair simultaneously by running back and forth between them.7 The merchants from Moulmein wanted the government ships to make at least two trips a month and stay longer in the dock. However, the steamships were not equipped to make more than one trip per month. Another issue was that of cost, because Port Blair was completely dependent on Moulmein for supplies. The fear of rains and the climate ruining the provisions prevented their storage in bulk. This increased the number of trips needed and thereby the consumption of coal as a fuel.8 The Settlement officials achieved a partial solution in 1861 by permanently attaching a steamer to the Settlement. They used it only for the Settlement work by putting it under the direct control of the Superintendent (and not the Naval Marine).9 The presence of the gun boats and steamers was important for the security of the Settlement given the isolated position of the Andamans and the need for a swift ship for suppressing piracy.10

64 Imperial Andamans

Besides the government-owned ships, the Calcutta and Burma Steam Navigation Company (hereafter CBSNC) also had ships sailing in these waters. To ease the burden the Government of India requested that the CBSNC have its steamers stop over at Port Blair on their way to or from Tennasserim. CBSNC felt this was not only inconvenient but also lead to delays. For the favour, the Company wanted the government to provide five thousand rupees per month with an addition of fifty rupees per ton for the stores that it would carry for the Andamans (see Table 3.1).11 In the past, high costs had also beset the passage of convicts to Penang and Singapore. Instead of paying ninety rupees for each convict and his guard, the government at the time had decided to buy its own steamer to help bring down the cost of passage of convicts.12 Finally, it arranged with CBSNC for keeping up the monthly communication between Calcutta and Port Blair.13 Later Port Blair contracted with the British Indian Steam Navigation Company for issuance of supplies. It continued throughout to pay enormous freight charges on all importation.14 Table 3.1

Rates for passage of convicts in 1858

(The rate per convict included the provisions and water during voyages)15 Name of vessel

Convict per head

Guard per man

Total cost – native guards

Roman Emperor Edward

90 Rs. 95 Rs.

75 Rs. 85 Rs.

4,350 Rs. 4,420 Rs.

In view of the ships arriving with multifarious cargo – convicts, provisions, stores, guards and free labourers – elaborate voyage and port government regulations were drawn up for Port Blair. The Settlement officials feared that the convicts might use the ships for effecting escapes and that unauthorized goods such as opium and ganja could make their way into the Settlement on these ships. Thus, warrants and the descriptive rolls of the convicts had to accompany all the convicts who came on board to come to the Andamans.16 The master and the crew of the ships were to provide a list of crew and passengers, and they could not visit prohibited areas or associate with the convicts. Further, no vessel was to leave in the dark between the gunfire in the evening and the gunfire in the morning.17 The British tried to overcome the problem of communication with the Subcontinent by shifting the base of command from Calcutta to Burma. The penal settlement was, in the beginning, under the direct control of the Government of India. However, in 1864, it placed the Superintendent of the Settlement under the orders of the Chief Commissioner of British Burma. The Settlement officers were dissatisfied with this change as much time was lost in correspondence with the Home Department by rerouting

Reclaiming the Wild 65

all correspondence through the office of British Burma. As a result, in 1871 the Settlement administration reverted to the Government of India. In December 1871, the Superintendent also acquired the title of Chief Commissioner, which finally made him the administrative head as well. The new title gave powers of local government to the Superintendent, which included the power to make rules, subject to the approval of the Governor-General, which would have the force of law.18 Thus, in spite of the best British efforts to bridge the geographical distance, the Islands wallowed in administrative isolation. This was a mixed blessing for local officials, who many times took advantage of this separation but at other times fumed and chafed over the perpetual delay in exchange of letters and arrival of provisions. Besides imposing isolation, the geography of the islands also, as Table 3.2 suggests, hugely increased the financial cost of settling and developing the Islands. This cost came down only minimally as the years went by. Table 3.2

Comparative table of cash receipts and expenditure in rupees (1874–1901)19

Receipt Expenditure Net Cost of Settlement Net Cost per Convict

1874

1881

1891

1901

2,71,895 10,89,321 8,17,426 105.60

3,26,035 14,96,513 11,70,478 97.19

4,83,153 12,87,803 8,04,155 69.89

5,70,997 17,34,265 11,63,268 99.28

The administrative conundrum within The settlement pattern of the penal colony was determined by the islandic geography of the colony and this in turn created problems in application of archetypical penal techniques of surveillance and segregation. This is what the Settlement looked like (see the Settlement map overleaf). It was open, with no fences, boundary walls or ditches marking its limits. Port Blair formed the nucleus of the Settlement with the surrounding islands serving the various administrative and logistical needs of the colony. Ross Island was the headquarters of the colony with residences for the officials, drainage systems, heating systems, swimming pool, tennis courts, soldiers’ and convict barracks, and a chapel. Viper Island had a gallows and other penal structures used for keeping invalid and convalescent convicts and those who had committed crimes within the Settlement. Chatham Island, which was later to house the sawmill and become the focus of forestry works, was where the Settlement was headquartered until the areas were cleared in Port Blair for habitation. Over the next few decades, the Settlement at Port Blair grew and was divided into three districts, Eastern, Western and the Jail districts; and after 1898, it boasted the massive Cellular Jail, which was used as a clearinghouse for newcomers. There was a division of administrative

66 Imperial Andamans

work of the Settlement into a number of departments, such as police, medical, commissariat, forests and marine. The Superintendent, who was the head of the administration in the Andamans, was assisted by a deputy superintendent and about seven assistant superintendents, one medical superintendent, subdivisional and district officers, and a few overseers and subordinate officers. The modest size of British official staff on the Islands (see Table 3.3), which depended heavily on convict overseers to accomplish a day’s work, was a reflection of their shallow administrative presence. Table 3.3 shows

Reclaiming the Wild 67

that the ‘general increase in the population and convicts’ was not attended with ‘corresponding increase in establishment’. While all the Settlement officers in the Andamans had special powers over the convicts, the charge and control of convicts in barracks and at labour was completely in the hands of convict petty officers. In order to secure the Islands from external and internal threat, a minimum of one detachment of British infantry, a detachment of native infantry and a police battalion were always on the Islands (approximately 300 men).20 However, most of them were scattered about the Islands and, in a case of emergency, there was no reliable way to deploy military reinforcements.21 In the initial years, the Settlement had mainly depended on large cutters for its security. These cutters required ten to fourteen men to pull them and were inconveniently heavy for transporting troops during the southwest monsoon. What the Settlement needed was a light, swift22 boat which could be used by the Naval Guard. Table 3.3

Comparative statement of population (1874–1901)23

Year 1874 1881 1891 1901 % of increase

Administrative establishment

Conditionally released and free residents

Convicts

Total

825 1,136 1,125 1,163 41%

823 1,610 2,697 2,991 25%

7,569 11,452 11,738 11,947 74%

9,217 14,198 15,560 16,101

A probable solution to the problem of surveillance was a good system of communication and transport. However, for most of the Settlement’s existence, communication between the different island stations was through rowboats, and stores and goods were ‘conveyed in lighters towed by parties of convicts in boats’. The Settlement was completely dependent on its fleet of nearly sixty boats, which included three to eight-ton lighters, gunboats, cutters and canoes, for its functioning. The removal of night soil itself required six boats.24 In addition to this fleet of small boats, there was use of telegraph signals between the Settlements in the interior harbour and Ross Island in the Andamans.25 In the absence of a village bell or a central clock tower, six whistlers ordered time round the Settlement.26 Round the harbours, nearly ten launches fixed the time by blowing their whistles and sirens at the appointed hours. The whistlers, with their limited audible range, were scattered all over the Settlement to assist every convict station to keep time with Ross, the headquarters. This system worked well until the weather hit a rough patch. During storms, the whistlers became inaudible not only in their own areas but they also lost any possibility of being heard

68 Imperial Andamans

anywhere else. This made keeping up with Ross impossible.27 The signal lines also remained extremely vulnerable to exploitation by the convicts in the event of a breakout.28 In order to prevent the convicts from taking such advantage, after a few years police guards were appointed as signallers but this reduced the numbers available for policing. The Islands also did not have a telephone service or wireless service until 1905. In the first few decades after the opening of the Settlement, the convicts were mostly engaged in reclaiming the land for cultivation and habitation. This involved draining swamps, cutting down the forests and laying down plantations and gardens as well as erecting dwelling places. Working the convicts in this manner was fraught with administrative problems. The convicts worked in groups, scattered over a wide area reaching nearly sixty miles away from the Settlement. While the departmental officers were the employer of convict labour, the settlement officials oversaw discipline. This made surveillance and supervision of the convicts working under any of the departments a daily problem for the overseers. It was difficult for one overseer to exercise control, on an everyday basis, over 600 men scattered over various stations.29 As one official complained in a letter to Lord Mayo, the Governor-General of India, in 1871: The Godowns and Workshops are not surrounded by walls or strong fencing; at any moment the convicts could arm themselves, crush our small Force and escape, and as we have no ships or vessel of any kind, nothing would be known of it, until the Mail which comes once in six weeks (“only”) returned with the report.30 Activities deemed illegal by the State, such as opium smoking and homosexuality, became more common because of the officials’ inability to provide adequate surveillance. Many times the convict workers on far-off locations received dry rations because returning to the station for a cooked lunch was a near-impossibility. Much to the chagrin of the officials, the convicts traded these dry rations with the ‘free’ labourers for tobacco and other things.31 Elusive self-sufficiency The potential of the Islands to sustain themselves without any external support because of the unbounded fertility of their soil and availability of natural resources had been one issue on which the report of the Andaman Committee was unequivocally favourable.32 Little did they know that this ‘self-sufficiency’ would be the most elusive feature of this island colony. In fact, the maintenance costs of the Andamans were very high because of the inability of the soil and the environment generally to sustain the settlers. The Islands, teeming with malarial mosquitoes, drenched for most months of the year with torrential rains and dependent on the neighbouring penin-

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sulas for its sustenance, failed in ever becoming self-sufficient and selfsustaining. As a result, Calcutta and Rangoon had to continually foot the bill for the upkeep of the colony. Even hay and straw came from Rangoon in the first decade.33 Well into the 1900s, and, in fact, up to today, much of the Andamans’ grain and essential items were procured from the mainland.34 At the very outset, Captain Man had given out instructions to the government to send three months’ supplies, in addition to supplies for the voyage, while transporting convicts to the penal settlement.35 Feeding the convicts from rations bought from the mainland led to further unforeseen expenses. And a delay in the supply of provisions coming from Calcutta or Rangoon had the potential of creating unrest amongst the convict population.36 For instance, in 1862, the Superintendent of Port Blair reported: The alarming position which the settlement was recently placed by running short of provisions and steps taken to prevent the possibility of a like crisis in future. […] The lack of stores could make the convicts restive and could jeopardize the safety of the settlement, therefore, it was decided to ensure the supply of food and storage six months in advance.37 This situation continued throughout the history of the colony. As late as the 1890s, the Indian Jails Committee Report noted that the diet scale in Port Blair was a liberal one in terms of quantity of food given to the convicts. However, the startling fact was that although the Settlement was occupied for thirty years, not one grain of cereals issued to the labouring convicts was grown at Port Blair. While the self-supporters ate what they grew, the other convicts and the troops ate the imported grain.38 One way of offsetting the initial costs was to set up plantations as had been done in Mauritius and the West Indian colonies. Another possibility was to commercially work the forests. Undertaking developmental works was an essential aspect of the administration for the first few decades. However, in the Andamans, the commercial projects did not come to fruition easily. Although food production was not a complete failure the Islands continued to buy grain and other food supplies from outside. Amongst the various developmental plans and schemes the first was to put the convicts to clearing forests and to engage them in exploring the area around the settlement for good harbours and natural resources to exploit.39 The manufacture of tea and arrowroot yielded some success initially, which encouraged officials to undertake experimental cultivation of Liberian coffee, cardamoms, tapioca, cacao, nutmegs, ceara, rubber trees, vanilla, musa textilis, castor oil plant, moonj and aloe.40 The Settlement also engaged Chinese labourers for collecting edible birds’ nests, a monopolistic source of revenue. However, these schemes did not bear the expected fruits. Although recently

70 Imperial Andamans

reclaimed from primeval forests, the soil in the Andamans tended to get exhausted very quickly. This invariably contributed to the failure of crops and the land became dependent on constant manuring.41 It also took the British quite a few years to ascertain the value of the forests in the Andamans. Until the 1880s, the British extracted only wood-oil for medicinal purposes from the trees.42 When the officials finally realized the commercial potential of some tree species and wanted to exploit the forest for what they were worth,43 dense and impenetrable undergrowth made it extremely difficult to make effective and rapid advances.44 High freight charges also dissuaded the officials from profitably exporting timber.45 Marooned sulky sojourners Many of the Settlement officers, especially in the initial years, lived with a psychology of a people marooned on a dreary island, cut off from civilization and devoid of all social pleasures. It was if they, not the Asian convicts, were serving a sentence of transportation. In the first few years the Settlement officials were compelled to live as if jailed, on board a hulk-like vessel and braving the elements. As one official described the life on board the vessel, Sesotris, in 1859: The vessel is commodious as ships go, but it is a dreary abode for twelve months, in such a climate as India, and such a spot as the Andamans. A detachment of Naval Brigade were the inmates of the disarmed Frigate. Trying as such a mode of life must have been, when prolonged for so long a period, it was satisfactory to find the dwellers within these wooden walls healthy and cheerful, and making the best of their not very enviable position.46 Besides being closeted on a hulk, they also found it troublesome to adjust to the rough climate and arduous life of the colony. The junior officers in the Settlement who worked with Superintendent J.P. Walker once declared that if it had not been for Mrs Walker’s presence, ‘we must have gone mad’.47 The problem of weariness, isolation and inability to deal with tough circumstances cut across British administrative hierarchy. Even the short-stay European naval guard stationed on the Islands likened the posting to the Andamans to that to the war-torn region of the Crimea. As a naval guard who was stationed at night in Settlement boats in order to prevent escapes mentioned: ‘There is no doubt that the duty required from the naval guard is very trying. A petty officer attached for ten months to a land battery in the Crimea, describes the service here as more severe than there.’48 Another official took note of the misery of the naval guard and resultant administrative problem: ‘The men are well-behaved and willing but with the thought of a long stay of three years in a small

Reclaiming the Wild 71

island, […] they become listless, dissatisfied and dispirited … all this … tends to disadvantage of the Settlement’.49 There were some officers, though, who enjoyed the isolation and the natural bounty of the Islands. One such official was Reverend Thomas L.J. Warneford, Chaplain of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment, who lived on the Andamans in the mid-1860s with his daughter Maude and son Reggie. In a letter to his daughter, who had returned to England, he fondly reminisced about the time they had spent together on the Islands and informed her how he had been offered a posting to another station. He could, if he so wished, go to Lahore, Meerut or Allahbad. But he ‘refused them all’ saying that he ‘preferred to stay here’ until he went home.50 Another such official was R.H. Lowis, who was the Assistant Superintendent (1898–1922). Lowis also wrote about the Andamans in a celebratory mode and painted an idyllic and happy picture of the time that he had spent on the Islands.51 A visitor who travelled to the Andamans in the mid-1890s also noted that ‘the Europeans connected with the convict establishment’ seemed to ‘enjoy life in these out-of-the-way parts, where at times the mail arrives but once in three weeks; one man I know told me he never meant to go home again, and I believe the late Governor came home with much regret’.52 However, Britons such as Warneford and Lowis were the exceptions, with the majority despising the time they spent on the Islands. By the mid-1870s, there was much in terms of entertainment and leisure for the British and Indian officers stationed on the Islands. Prominent amongst these were cricket pitches and tennis courts, of both grass and concrete, where a band of convicts played music several times a week. There was a Sailing Club and a Volunteer Rifle Corps as well, and nearly every Saturday sporting events for a challenge cup were held. Golf, hockey and salt-water fishing also engaged the officers in their free time.53 Most of the diaries, letters and the correspondence of the British from about the mid-1870s onwards vividly describe the social and cultural life on the Islands which revolved

Figure 3.1

Officers’ swimming pool, Ross Island

(Source: Photo 125/2/99, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

72 Imperial Andamans

around the gymkhana, officers’ mess and club, the Ladies’ shooting club, hockey, rugby, golf, cricket, swimming, tennis, theatre, and last but not least the waltz, fox-trot and the Fancy Dress Dance (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Notwithstanding the improvement in their physical existence, life on the islands continued to be one of isolation. Frances Stewart Robertson, wife of Anthony William Robertson, Indian Police, Assistant Commissioner in Andamans (1923–27), paints a dramatic picture of the life of the British women on the Isles in her journal from the 1920s: We would have been criticized for growing very narrow, and, literally, very insular, but it was better that we should make the life of the islands our own than hanker after the wider and more intellectual life of which we were temporarily deprived. We had little communication with the outside world beyond the daily wireless bulletins, and the arrival every three or four weeks of the station steamer.54 The family members of the officials who came from big cities missed the delights that they had offered and found living in Port Blair monotonous

Figure 3.2

Ball and Dining Room, Government House, Ross Island

(Source: Photo 125/2/12, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

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and dreary. As Mrs Robertson noted, the days seemed endless ‘to some of the wives, especially to those who love concerts and cinemas and the life of the big cities’; however, the condition ‘for the growing sons and daughters of the Anglo-Indian jailors’ was worse because ‘beyond hockey and bathing … there was nothing for them to do’.55 The situation amplified into a state of affairs where internal gossip, scandals and backbiting began to provide some respite. Mrs Robertson candidly admitted that ‘our conversation when we met at the club on Ross Island in the evenings was of golf handicaps, the delinquencies of convict servants, the latest pranks or illnesses of our children, the latest raids by the Jarawa tribe of aborigines, the scarcity of fish … Any little scandals or quarrels among ourselves.’56 There also existed a general lack of awareness regarding the circumstances of the island colony in the administrative circles. Most arrived on the Islands having read and heard stories such as that of Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous Reginald Craddock, who visited the Islands after over forty years’ of colonization in 1913, quite honestly confessed his ignorance of the Islands and Settlement prior to his visit. He noted in his report: Until I joined the Government of India, I was in complete ignorance of the size, physical character, and capabilities of the Andamans and Nicobars, their history and geography, and my general ideas of the convict Settlement were of the vaguest. Of the judges who pass sentences of transportation I do not suppose that one in fifty has any clear idea of the kind of life that is spent by the convict. It has always been assumed that the ‘kalapani’ is a terrifying place; one heard sometimes of the ‘chain gang’, and of a cellular jail, and that officers in the Andamans employed servants who were convicts or ex-convicts.57 Mrs Frances Robertson also wrote of her initial impression of the Andamans on the eve of sailing: ‘As the time drew nearer for us to leave for the Andamans, however, we had grown less confident. Our respective mothers wrote from England, declaring that we must be quite mad to go to such an unhealthy, unheard of part of the world. Everyone we met in India looked at us with pity.’58 She further recounted that neither she and nor her husband had ‘ever met anyone who had been in the Andamans’ and nothing that they said gave them the idea of what the Andamans would be like. The dearth of information about the Islands, especially their geography, was a common phenomenon in British official circles even until the late 1920s. The isolation that the officers felt had an impact on the administration as well. A position in the Andamans was not the plum posting that the officers hankered after. Testimony to this comes in a secret letter written by the Assistant Superintendent of Port Blair in 1871, Captain B. Rogers, to the then Viceroy of India, Lord Mayo. In the letter, besides other issues, Rogers detailed

74 Imperial Andamans

the unworthiness and incompetence of the officers posted on the Andamans and the resultant lack of harmony, good feelings and sociability.59 Most European officers commissioned to the Andamans desired a greater remuneration for their services than they would in a frontier outpost. Moreover, it was a matter of belief in British official circles that special qualities were required to work in a Settlement such as Port Blair. But it was a tendency to appoint men whom it was considered desirable to ‘provide for’ and that these officials ‘had been sent to dispose of them, instead of being selected for certain qualifications’.60 Such officers, without sufficient pay and hope of advancement in their careers, hung around till they could ‘get something more to their taste elsewhere’.61 The appointment of unwilling men to Port Blair was generally understood in official circles as the reason behind considerable infighting and bickering which existed amongst the local official community. Rogers groused that the situation in the colony was one of ‘every man for himself each having his ideas eternally on how to save money and get out of the place’.62 He further complained that ‘want of communication with the rest of the world has produced apathy to an extent you cannot imagine, no one brings new suggestions or new ideas and a man lives simply for himself’.63 Several decades later the situation did not seem to have altered, as people who visited and lived on the Islands in the 1920s and 1930s also complained not only that ‘official life at Port was inclined to be monotonous’, but also that the ‘people still tended to be too much on top of one another, which led to friction, backbiting and quarrelling.64 One aggregated the state of affairs in the Andamans thus: ‘“Inefficiency” sums up the running of the Andamans. All over the islands are to be seen the monuments to that quality, & when inefficiency is combined with slackness and not immune from corruption, it is little wonder that the Andamans, which … could and should be a self-supporting, budget-balancing community, in fact run at a disastrous loss.’65 The psychological constraints of being on a remote island penal colony also created a fear psychosis amongst the administrators. For instance, Superintendent D.M. Stewart (1872–75) once stated that ‘such a settlement can never be free from considerable risk of murders and outbreak. It is not a light matter to have a several thousand criminal Asiatics collected in an isolated place like Port Blair, with no means of shutting them up as within a jail: Great vigilance and judgement is necessary on the part of the Superintendent and his officers.’66 Stewart also confirmed the unenviable status of the Superintendent: His position and that of his officers is not a very enviable one, and they deserve to meet with much encouragement at the hands of the Government, cooped up as they are at Port Blair in a climate which is relaxing and enervating, with little society; a complete convict surrounding even

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to servants, for it is most difficult to obtain, or to retain free servants; and no communication with any other place in the world save once a month.67 So while the distance from the subcontinent gave the Settlement officials considerable leeway in their functioning, it also imposed administrative and physical isolation on them. Unable to enforce the customary penal devices, the administrators lived fearful of murder and rebellion. The geography of the Islands thus forced the administration to adopt certain conciliatory strategies as a measure of expediency.

Dreaded tropicana When the British began the settlement of the Andamans in the midnineteenth century, they saw the jungles and climate of the Andamans as filthy, diseased and incompatible with their physical constitution. Mark Harrison has also shown that by the mid-nineteenth century the Indian climate was ‘generally considered incompatible with the European constitution’.68 The British saw the climate and ecology of the Andamans from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century as dreadful, diseased and enervating. Instead of seeing the island ecology and climate as a constraint upon their imperial ambitions, the Settlement officers saw it as facilitating conquest. The expectation was of ‘acclimatizing’ or adapting, not the British constitution but the climate and ecology of the Islands, i.e., making the Islands suitable for European habitation. It was the British presumption regarding the easiness of the task which became the chief constraint upon their imperial enterprise. Upon their arrival on the Andamans, the Settlement officers set about adapting the Islands for ‘human habitation’. However, what initially appeared as a simple removal of some brambles and foliage was in reality a highly labour-intensive and a time-consuming task, nothing the British could have imagined. The difficulties the Settlement officers faced in the initial years gave them ample chance to question their presumptions regarding the pliability of the island ecology. In the first month of their arrival on the Islands, the southeast monsoon set in and the entire company had to beat a hasty retreat from the Ross Islands and take shelter in Chatham Island, considered a much safer place of anchorage. In spite of the ‘healthiness’ of Chatham, a number of lives were lost to scurvy, malaria, malignant wounds and sores on feet lacerated by thorny bushes. The crew stationed on a vessel anchored on the coast would remain healthy even in the worst weather, whereas in the Settlement sickness would begin with the onset of the southwest monsoon. Also, the Islands had only four months of dry weather and cyclones caused much devastation to the Settlement on a regular basis.69 The spectre of epidemics and death that had stalked the Settlement

76 Imperial Andamans

in the late eighteenth century raised its head once again. In the first year, one-fourth of the convicts died (see Table 3.4). As one official in 1859 noted, all the convicts, irrespective of their social background and state of health, were ‘forced to take a faurah and pick-axe in hand, and fell trees, dig trenches, row boats, build jetties, or saw timber in all the states of weather, [this] was a novelty of position which could not fail to tell on the health’.70 Within a few months of opening Settlement Superintendent J.P. Walker stated the magnitude of the undertaking: The jungle is so dense, and its entanglement by gigantic creepers so complete, as to render it impossible [to walk] except along a few pathways used by the aborigines … when cut often trees can not be got to fall without great force, nor brushwood when cut removed owing to the intricate binding by creepers of great strength. There is great difficulty … during the present dry weather in getting brushwood that has been several days felled to burn, and the largest heaps are constantly extinguished at night by the very heavy dews that fall, drenching everything exposed.71 Not only did the Settlement officers find the task of clearing the forest daunting, they also dreaded the hot and wet climate of the Andamans. With time, the tropical jungles and climate of the Andamans began to be held responsible for the high mortality on the Islands and for frustrating the efforts of the Settlement officers. E.H. Man (1846–1929), who served in different capacities in the Settlement administration for several years from 1869 onwards, once commented: This extraordinary fatality was of course chiefly due to circumstances incidental to the establishment of a penal settlement in an isolated tropical region peopled by hostile savages and covered by dense jungles largely fringed with mangrove, and rendered extremely malarious by numerous salt and fresh water swamps which are found throughout the group.72 Between 1858 and 1864, nearly 8,035 convicts were received at the Settlement, of whom 35 per cent died and 612 escaped. As Table 3.5 shows, in 1880 the death rate reached nearly 50 per cent. The diseases continued their death-dance into the 1880s. And there was little change in the state of affairs at the turn of the century.73 Chronic dysentery, diarrhoea, piles, rheumatism, scurvy, debility, boils, ulcers and opthalmia resulted in an extremely high mortality rate in the Settlement. The biggest killer was ‘intermittent fever’ or malaria. The Settlement officers held the swamps or the forest undergrowth responsible for causing malaria (see the map showing distribution of malarial swamps on p. 78). Unless they cleared the Islands of their forests and undergrowth, and undertook the

Reclaiming the Wild 77 Table 3.4 Statistics for the number of dead from 10 March 1858 to 20 October 1859 (J.P. Walker’s period)74 Total no. of Convicts received Escaped Hanged or Shot Accidental Deaths Killed by Aborigines Suicide Died of Disease Total Dead Released and returned to Indian Jails Remaining on 20 Oct 1859

Table 3.5

3,697 336 91 11 06 01 1,365 1,474 50 1,837

Percentage of convict mortality (1877–1884)75

Year

Average Strength

Percentage of Deaths

1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884

9,039 9,571 10,075 10,916 11,225 11,521 11,511 11,686

34.30% 69.79% 47.54% 49.65% 48.02% 37.32% 19.63% 15.75%

draining of the swamps, no human population could survive.76 Thus their desire to make the Andamans ‘healthier’ made the Settlement officers take the task of clearing the jungles most seriously. The clearing of the forest ‘which covered every foot of land down to the water’s edge’ was commenced soon after the arrival of the first batch of convicts. The British sought to replace the ‘wild’ jungles with grass, kitchen gardens and agricultural land, to create an aestheticized and disease-free landscape which was a product of human exertions and labour. As one official stated in 1857, ‘were the Jungles set fire to in the dry season, and gradually cleared away from the beach inwards, and clearances made in the forests so as to admit the passage of light and air, it is reasonable to suppose that the unhealthiness of the Andamans would in time become a matter of [the] past’.77 Even until the 1890s it was a common belief that ‘reclamation of land for cultivation will always be an important industry in the Settlement’.78 Removal of thick undergrowth and the woods for the improvement of health and the climate had its antecedents in the colonial medical topography. Its pioneer in India, James R. Martin, had suggested the clearing of the entire forested tract of the Sunderbans (a coastal district of Bengal) in the 1830s.79

78 Imperial Andamans

Map of settlement in Port Blair showing distribution of malarial swamps and mosquitoes, 1912 (Source: S.R. Christophers, Malaria in the Andamans, Calcutta, 1912).

What the Settlement officers did not realize was that their efforts to adapt the ecology of the Islands led to the convergence of the conditions which generally give rise to malaria – changes in distribution and flow of water across land; the concentration of an exposed, susceptible and non-immune mobile population; and the presence of malarial mosquitoes.80 Historical research has shown the ‘early efforts to clear land for cultivation frequently created ecological conditions that fostered malarial transmission’; or that human activities such as warfare, mining, building of roads and railways, population

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movements and urbanization were related to malaria’s manifestation or spread.81 Much like Calcutta on its founding in the late seventeenth century, which had a ‘fearsome reputation for unhealthiness’ and had a ‘shockingly high’ death rate as a result of malaria,82 the wider social force catalyzing the appearance of malaria on the Andamans was their colonization. The movement of convicts and Settlement officers between convict depots in India, in deep forest and shores on the Andamans; and the existence of poor working and living conditions on the Settlement facilitated the spread of disease.83 Further, the officers were under the impression that living on the Islands caused frequent attacks of malaria and therefore in the initial years lived aboard ships as a preventive. In all probability, the reason ships were ‘healthier’ was because there mainly existed an exophagic species of malarial mosquito, which feed in an outdoor habitat.84 Like several other port cities such as Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi and Hong Kong, Port Blair became a ‘disease entrepot’, where appearance of epidemic diseases was also the result of oceanic exchanges and transmissions.85 The view that the Islands were pathogenic and unhealthy for European constitutions made the presence of a medical department as part of the administration indispensable86 and the Governor-General decided that surgeons from the Indian subcontinent should conduct periodic health investigations in the Settlement.87 The relationship between the civil establishment and medical department was not an easy one. Disease and the death-ridden state of the Settlement placed the medical officers, much to the chagrin of the civil officers, in a position of considerable significance. The main contest between the two was over the body of the convict (both sick and healthy). For civil officers, a sick convict meant loss of labour. For the medical men, the sick convict was a patient and his body the object of experimentation.88 The altercation between the two departments revealed itself in several conflicts, sometimes over convict clothing and over physical examination of female convicts suspected of carrying venereal diseases and, at other times, over the transfer of convicts to different stations.89 The following is an example of the quarrel between Settlement officers and medical officers. On their arrival, the convicts were quartered on Ross Island for a year or so until acclimatized, and removed to out-stations only after the recommendation of the medical officer. But once removed from Ross, they were transferred from one station to another without further reference to medical authority. And the Settlement had a number of convict stations where the convicts were worked during the day and kept in barracks at night. Some of these convict stations were believed to be more ‘disease-prone’ than others because of proximity to swamps. The medical officers felt that in order to keep down the number of sick, the amount of work given to convicts and their transfer from one station to another should

80 Imperial Andamans

also be under the guidance of the medical department.90 The Settlement officers felt this to be interference in their work of managing the convicts. A mainland official, Alexander Mackenzie, Secretary to the Government of India, who came to inspect the Settlement in 1885, also thought medical efforts could easily go too far: It was right to take steps to reduce the excessive death-rate which prevailed a few years back in the Settlement, but I think we have carried matters rather too far, and that the penal considerations have of late been duly sacrificed. There is no reason why we should insist upon reducing the risks to convict life below those of the outside population, if, to secure this, we have to wrap the prisoner as it were in cotton wool, and treat him as a precious object whom we are bound to keep alive at all costs, and not to treat with any harshness that might tend to affect his health. I strongly recommend that the Government of India … should pass no censure on the management, so long as the annual convict mortality does not rise over 50 per mille. […] When the mortality is less than that we may suspect that penal discipline is being sacrificed to sentiment.91 The interference of the medical department was for obvious reasons not looked upon very kindly by the Government of India. The high death rate not only occasioned friction between the civil and medical departments but also jeopardized the financial viability of the Settlement.

Ferocious anthropophagi At the time of the colonization, the British officials thought that the native Andamanese were cannibals although they had credible evidence to believe otherwise. The Andamanese, because of their hostility to strangers and displays of violence, seemed outside the fold of humanity. However, firm doubts regarding the veracity of the cannibal myth emerged once there was greater interaction between the Settlement officials and the Andamanese. This resulted in a definite shift in the discourse. The officials began to exhibit more uncertainty and doubt than conviction with regard to the issue of cannibalism amongst the Andamanese. Maurice Vidal Portman’s monograph, A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, compiled in the 1890s, provides an insight into this shifting discourse. Although there was a time lag between the writing of Portman’s monograph and the time when the shift in the discourse began to take place, nevertheless his work is important in documenting the changes in the early decades of British rule towards the Andamanese. Portman had put together this book at the request of Superintendent R.C. Temple (1894–1904) who ‘wanted all the records in relations to the Andamanese to be compiled in one volume’. Portman and Temple were anxious that ‘the public should know the exact truth, so far as

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it can be learnt, regarding a race which will shortly be extinct’. According to Portman: That they were cannibals has never been fully proved, although from their cruel and sanguinary disposition, great voracity and cunning modes of lying in ambush there is reason to suspect, that in attacking strangers they are frequently impelled by hunger, as they invariably put to death the unfortunate victims who fall under their hands. No positive instance, however, has been known of their eating the flesh of their enemies, although the bodies of some, who they have killed, have been found mangled and torn. It would be difficult to account for their unremitting hostility to strangers, without ascribing this as the cause.92 Portman goes on to cite several references from the writings of earlier travellers and draws on examples of the tribes inhabiting the surrounding archipelago to argue that the ascription of cannibalism to the Andamanese was the result of ‘display of unremitting hostility towards strangers’ by them, and secondly, that it was a case of mistaken identity. According to him, it was the Battas of Sumatra who were the ferocious cannibals. The hostility of the Andamanese ‘to all strangers, and the custom in certain parts of burning the bodies of their dead enemies’ resulted in them being called cannibals.93 Portman gave possible reasons for the creation and the sustenance of the cannibalism myth. However, he did not unequivocally dispel it either: They are, however, not very ready to explain these customs, or to enlighten strangers regarding their mode of life (partly from fear of ridicule); and, as I am well aware, will out of sheer love of mischief, deliberately give incorrect information, or … give abusive answers or indecent words to persons wishing to learn something of their language. […] Nothing was easier than for the earlier observers, who did not know the language, to fall into error. Even in the present day educated men have spent years in the Andamans, and have left the islands with very inaccurate ideas regarding the aborigines.94 Further: One last word as regards the cannibalism. Andamanese murderers will drink blood, and eat, with their pork, the breast flesh of their victims, but these people are regarded by the other Andamanese as more or less insane. All the tribes of the Great Andaman have the custom in a greater or less degree of burning the dead bodies of their enemies, and the neighbouring Ar-yuato tribes accuse the hostile Eremtagas of the North Andaman of eating human flesh, though I have never found a person

82 Imperial Andamans

who was an eye-witness of their having done so. The Andamanese look on the practice with horror, but it is evident that they know of it from their accusing people they dislike of doing it. Such facts, however, do not justify a sweeping charge of cannibalism against the whole race.95 Reverend Corbyn, a Christian priest at Port Blair who was in charge of the Andamanese in the initial years, also left the issue open-ended by declaring that ‘it is still a debated question whether the native[s] of these islands are cannibals.96 Thus officialdom’s shift away from the cannibalism discourse was gradual and tinged with ambiguity, and the cannibalism myth continued to thrive in the popular imagination. This discursive shift had important repercussions for the administration of the Settlement. Before the colonization of the Islands, the British officials saw the supposed cannibalistic character of the Andamanese as propitious. They had bargained on making savings by not having to make provisions for policing the convicts, as the fear of cannibals in the forests would keep the convicts secure. As a deterrent for runaway convicts the presence of the ‘cannibals’ in the forest, however, was not very effective. Instead, the presence of violent and ferocious natives in the coastal jungles began to restrict the spatial advance into the interiors of the Islands of the British for whom precisely the same real estate was the most useful and slowed down the Settlement work.

Figure 3.3

M.V. Portman with Andamanese, Little Andamans

(Source: Photo 12/2/25, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

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Figure 3.4 Profile of an Andamanese girl of about six years standing in front of chequered grid in a studio. M.V. Portman and W. Molesworth (Indian Medical Service, 1893–94) surveyed the physical characteristics of the Andamanese and generated norms from the mass of evidence they gathered. (Source: AS-B30-2: AN45000001, M.V. Portman’s Album (1890s) Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London).

84 Imperial Andamans

The purported cannibalism had also been an important moral and political alibi for conquest. Discrediting of the cannibal myth created a moral and political vacuum in the British discourse on conquest. Not only did the British have to deal with the ferocious hostility of the Andamanese but they could no longer so easily justify conquest in high civilizational and moral terms. They treated the Andamanese as an unworthy nuisance, who had to be kept beyond the pale and, if not, then shot dead. With the shift in the discourse, the British were forced to admit that the Andamanese were the ‘aborigines’ – the sons of the soil. In his correspondence Cecil Beadon, the Secretary to Home Department in 1858, quite candidly admitted that the British were ‘encroaching’ upon the Andamanese domains and that the latter ‘naturally look upon us as invaders’. These lines are from a letter written by Beadon which were struck out before being sent further.97 In February 1860 on Chatham Island, the first friendly contact with the Andamanese since the formation of the Settlement took place. Dr Gamack, the Chief Assistant Surgeon of the Settlement, and a group of convicts exchanged clothes, bottles and sugar with the Andamanese for one of their grass and twine belts.98 However, this very group of Andamanese was later to attack the reconnaissance team.99 It took the British nearly five years to establish friendly relations with the Andamanese who lived in the areas of Port Blair, Chatham Island and Ross Island. The native Andamanese did not give up their land and waters to the white man easily. As one official in 1860 stated: They are independent of us, free of all restraint and the sole possessors of the soil, with the exception of an inconsiderable portion which we have wrested from them. We can not penetrate to their retreats. They can defy us and offend against our laws with impunity. […] It is not as if we were absorbing their territories, we are making no perceptible progress in the occupation of the Andamans; the vast and ancient forests of these islands remains, as they have ever been, intact and, with the exception of a few small clearances here and there which comprise the Settlement, undiminished. […] None are better aware than the Andamanese themselves of their power and security; if we held them in durance we might successfully dictate to them, but while they are at large it is dangerous to arouse their animosity and excite their worst passions.100 While the British managed to placate one group of the Andamanese (the Aka Bea da tribe or the Great Andamanese as they came to be known later),101 the conflict with the other sets of aborigines continued. One main tribe which the British failed to reconcile were the Jarawas or the Jarrahwallah. The outer world knew little or nothing of the Jarawas. They never came near the Settlement and were not on friendly terms with the

Reclaiming the Wild 85

Map of the Andamans showing Tribal Distribution, 1900 (Source: AS-A6-1: AN73085001, E.H. Man Album, Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London).

86 Imperial Andamans

tribes known to the British. Initially the Great Andamanese believed them to be of the same race as the inhabitants of the Little Andamans.102 The Jarawas would, at regular intervals, attack the party of convicts at Port Blair employed in cutting a tract through the jungles.103 One official recalled a menacing encounter with some Jarawas in 1873: The Jarrahwallah tribe … some 40 in number, fell on the working party of convicts, and were obliged to be warded off by the free police, as their threatening gestures frightened the people. A friendly expedition was detached for the purpose, but failed to meet them, although their haltings and buildings were come across with, in which presents were left, which afterwards were recognized … on their person. I believe they came across from Rutland Island, and go back at pleasure, as they belong to the Little Andaman tribe.104 The Jarawas and other groups not only attacked and opposed the British but also those Andamanese who later become friendly with the British. Thus, violence in some form or the other routinely marked the relationship of the British with the Andamanese.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the way the British perceptions of the Andamans and their ecology impeded the imperial enterprise on the Islands. Disease, rising mortality and high costs plagued the Settlement and forced the British to question the image they had of the Islands as a ‘cheap’ prison. The Islands would not produce abundant food. The islanders would not serve as unpaid police. The climate and mosquitoes would not leave anyone alone. And so, the Andamans disappointed the colonial administrators, misled by their own assumptions. As one official candidly admitted in 1895: It cannot be too clearly laid before the governing authorities that the Settlement is not, and never can possibly be, a Jail. […] In other words, every dhobi, every sweeper, every barber, every pahrawala over a plantation, sluice-gate, godown or barrack, every driver of every dark runner, and so on ad infinitum, must have a man in charge of him. This is, and always has been, an impossibility. To carry the rule out to the letter would moreover involve the entertainment of a body of Petty Officers so large that the supply would not be forthcoming even if the money required was. What has been done is to carry out the spirit of the rule so far as circumstances have permitted.105 The British had hoped to make financial savings by opening a penal settlement on the islands but the geographical location and physical condition

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of the Andamans frustrated their hopes. Easy suppositions have also misled most historians of the Andamans, who have assumed the island character of the colony made segregation and surveillance easy.106 The challenges, frustration and difficulties in settling the Andamans were many but the British continued to hold on to the Islands. Why did they not wrap up the Settlement? What kept them on the Islands? The Andamans were not simply a penal colony but a strategic frontier outpost of the Raj. Even though the Islands were ill-suited to serve as a penal station, convict labour was the cheapest means, at least in the British view, available for settling the colony. The gains from having a foothold in the Bay of Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century outweighed the losses that the British incurred from having a Settlement on the Islands. The case of the Andamans was similar to that of Calcutta in the late seventeenth century. Notwithstanding high mortality, Calcutta was retained as headquarters of the East India Company because it enjoyed what Rhodes Murphy calls a ‘locational advantage’.107 The British desire to retain the Islands was reflected in the Settlement officials adopting certain management techniques as a measure of political and economic expediency, which ran contrary to the customary penal practices and rules as outlined in penal manuals.

4 Redemptive Space

The Superintendents had considerable latitude in interpreting the nature and meaning of punishment, and the way the island colony could provide it. A closer look at the colonial administration’s working brings to fore the clash of ideas, inconsistencies and disagreements within.1 The spatial separation involved in transportation was one fundamental issue, which the Settlement administrators interpreted in different ways. For some the voyage, the traversing of waters to reach the Andamans was the ‘space’ where the sentence of transportation worked itself out. For others, it was the physical space of the Island colony, which provided the convict’s nemesis. And yet there were still others for whom the penal epicentre was within the four walls of the Jail. Contrary to the image enshrined in national memory and misleadingly reinforced in Andamans’ historiography, the presence of internal dissensions concerning the desired character of the colony or the nature of punishment significantly impacted on and altered the system of convict management on the Andamans.2 By examining the dialectics between space and punishment this chapter demonstrates how histories of the penal settlement and elsewhere have erroneously allowed the history of penitentiaries to inform them.3 In doing so it challenges the Foucauldian idea of an all-pervasive normative discipline being at work in the penal settlement and argues that the staying capacity of colonialism in fact derived from the fraught nature of colonial power rather than from a clear-cut internally homogenous policy.4

Voyage as penal sacrament The view that a particular official took of the nature and meaning of the sentence of transportation was crucial in the way he related to the Island colony. For some officials the voyage, the distance that the convict traversed to arrive at the Islands, embodied penalization. They felt that convict’s marginalization became a reality not simply by holding him/her in captivity on the Islands but began from the time of sentencing and was entrenched in the act of transportation. To be precise, the waters, instead of being an in-between zone, transformed into the space where the ‘punishment’ enacted itself.5 According to this view, the waters were the actual 88

Redemptive Space 89

kalapani – the creative and the redemptive locale. The traversing of the waters was the proverbial point of catharsis, the ‘space’ where the convict was believed to have purged himself of the penalty for his crime. As one official stated, ‘when on the sea on board ship they could discover no mark of a road, no trees, no land, only the sky above, and the black, green, and blue waters all round’.6 Fearing the unknown, the shackled prisoners huddled for nearly five to six days, sometimes more, on the lower deck ‘bewildered by the novelty of the situation, or affected by seasickness’7 knew not where the seas were taking them, drank water from the same pump and ate food ‘sullied’ by white hands and the men of lower castes. The voyage was believed to be a purgatory space because it was presumed that it led to the loss of the convict’s caste status.8 Working with an essentialized view of the caste system, some British officials saw transportation as the worst punishment that a convicted criminal could be subjected to within his social matrix.9 Going by this view, the voyage was a sort of rite of passage, a sacrament by which the convict when he disembarked on the unholy shores of the Andamans had already atoned for his sin. He anchored on the Islands not as a fallen or base human but one redeemed. The banishment of the convict from his familiar surroundings, the severing of umbilical and social ties, and his passage to an unknown land forever was perceived as the aggregate of punishment. According to General Napier, who visited the Settlement in March 1864 to review the working of the Settlement, ‘it is necessary to remove these Indians from the scene of their social and political crimes, but in the act of removal their punishment is in a great measure achieved’.10 Napier further commented: Transportation beyond sea is, to the Hindoos particularly, and in a less degree to the Hindooised mahomedans, so terrible a punishment, – a separation for ever from every tie and relation, and possession which men hold to in life, – that it places them in a far different positions from the European who is transported to a Penal Settlement. […] It is necessary that they should labour for their support and the advancement of the Settlement, but the severities of the regular Jail discipline would be annihilation to them.11 Ensconced within this paradigm was the belief that an imposition of restrictions or a disability of any kind on the convicts was disproportionate to their status as transported convicts. The transportee from this perspective was closer in his character to an indentured labourer who was at liberty to associate with all sorts of free and unfree people than his counterpart in a mainland jail. In sum, the officials subscribing to this view saw the Andamans as a quasi-free colony, just like any other imperial colony with the difference that it employed convict labour. This made them openminded about the importation of other kinds of subordinate labour on the

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Islands along with the convicts. The fact that the Andamans was a colony peopled by transported criminals was, however, always duly acknowledged. The convicts, in this framework, were merely to provide an initial nucleus for the development of the Settlement, the aim of which was eventually to become a free colony. Moreover, if the colony was to become a free community then the convicts had to be managed in a way that prepared them for the life of a free and an honourable person at some time in the future, not as outlaws spending an entire life in penitence. Dr Walker (1823–1906),12 the first Superintendent of the Andamans (March 1858–October 1859), had already put into practice the kind of system that Napier was suggesting for the Andamans’ penal settlement. Walker felt that the life of the convict subsequent to his arrival was not to be made unduly harsh or arduous. In his opinion, the imposition of regular jail discipline led to an absolute extermination of the person of the convict.13 Although infamous for his cruel treatment of recaptured runaway convicts, J.P. Walker ran the Settlement on a much-diluted penal basis from the very beginning. Under Walker’s administration the convicts secured instantaneous benefits right after their arrival. Unlike the system of convict management prevalent in the Straits Settlement, where the convicts lingered for nearly a decade before being eligible for any indulgences, in the Andamans the convicts could instantly begin their lives as selfsupporters or rise to the rank of petty officers. The convicts were classed and worked in gangs, according to their physical capacity and previous training, without any reference to the sentence or the nature of their original offence which had given them the sentence of transportation.14 He also made no endeavour to segregate or classify the convicts, and, consequently, all classes of convicts freely intermingled in the Settlement.15 Walker was keen to have more settlers sent to the Andamans and was of the opinion that letting convicts mingle with free settlers would enhance their morale. Consequently, just a few months after the opening of the Settlement, Walker made the suggestion, that ‘It is not desirable that this should be exclusively a convict settlement but that the introduction of free settlers into the colony would exercise a salutory influence … since many of newly-arrived artificers were desirous of sending for their families’.16 Although Walker’s suggestion was not honoured by Fort William, it nevertheless was a significant expression of the view he held of the Settlement. Walker administered the Settlement as he would his demesne and also shared a relationship with the convicts which was closer to a patron–client relation of a landlord and peasants in a village than a formal and impersonalized one between the Superintendent of a jail and its inmates. The observers who came from the outside also commented on this aspect of personalized ties of consanguinity between Walker and ‘his convicts’. For instance, J.W. McPherson, who visited the Islands in November 1858, made an observation in his Memorandum of the Present State of the Settlement

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in Port Blair: ‘They came freely to him with all their wants and grievances, and he certainly possesses their entire confidence. Indeed if I had not known the penal character of the Settlement I should have supposed myself going round with a zemindar among his villagers.’17 The sole penal aspect of Walker’s regime was that the convicts were not permitted to leave the Islands at will and had to put in certain hours of labour every day towards the development of the Islands. Beyond these two conditions there was little to distinguish the Settlement from a hamlet in India. This reveals that J.P. Walker clearly did not consider the Settlement in the Andamans solely as a convict station. This attitude towards the Settlement was not only that of the officials working in the Settlement but was also shared by some members of the Governor-General’s Council. In 1859, some members of the Council aired the view that the convicts should be made to work with free men and that separation from their villages and friends was already punishment enough. And, therefore, they were keen that the convicts should not be made to feel their degradation and punishment more acutely.18 Lt. Colonel Ford, another Superintendent (May 1864–Feb 1868), ran his administration much on the same lines as J.P. Walker. He observed: ‘I hold that transportation for life, with all its concomitant heart-sinking, must be sufficient primary punishment in itself for men so noted for attachment to their relatives and villages as natives of India are, without driving them into the hopeless despair and misery that undue restraint is known to work in some severe systems of discipline.’19 Based on the view that he had regarding the nature of punishment, Ford initiated a system of classification in the Settlement. Ford wanted the classification to be based on the proficiency of the convicts as artisans, workmen, smiths, masons and bricklayers, lime, salt and basket-makers, and thatchers. The skilled labourers (artisans and mechanics) were supposed to be put in the first class, followed by semiskilled labourers (who were diligent and useful artisans) in the second, and the ordinary unskilled labourers in the third class.20 The Superintendent and the Executive Engineer were only given the power of promotion or reduction from one class to another. The system as Ford envisaged it was premised solely on the need to utilize labour efficiently. He displayed a complete disregard of the penal dimensions of labour; Ford’s singular concern was with the economic aspect of exploitation of convict labour.21 While the Governor-General extended his approval to Colonel Ford’s scheme and even praised it as ‘very good’, the premise for the class arrangement suggested by Ford did not remain uncontested. It was severely criticized and censured by certain members of the Governor-General’s Council when his recommendations came up for discussion. The Council polemicized: ‘[With] Such a classification according to proficiency in certain trades a clever scoundrel may get off with very little penal servitude, in its proper sense, at all. He will at once be in a far better position than the ignorant convict, who can easily give unskilled labour in a gang.’22 The fact that the Andamans had

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been colonized as a penal settlement could not be lost sight of and, therefore, Ford was urged to borrow from the Straits’ rules of convict management, which remained an ideal that continued to elude the administrators in Port Blair.

Existence as punishment Contrary to the view held by Walker, Ford and Napier there were colonial administrators who envisioned the existence of the transported criminals on the Andamans as one of punishment. In their view, the Island was the penal theatre and the convict’s punishment began after he arrived on the Islands. The idea that underpinned this perspective was that it was not simply the character of punishment that deterred the criminals but the certitude and assurance that harsh punishment will follow. Only the fear of imminent and certain punishment deterred the convict and others from any criminal activity forever. In this scheme, the only atonement for the convict was to live out his sentence for the rest of the life. Not a moment was to go by which made him forget the gravity and heinousness of his criminal act. Colonel Horace Man (March 1868–Feb 1871) was one exponent of this particular idea of punishment.23 A specific notion of crime and criminality underpinned his arguments. Crime in his opinion was a product of idleness, indolence and laziness, but with one vital difference: crime was not born of the personal character of the criminal but his environment, his milieu. Colonel Man’s perceptions prefigured Victorian views of crime and criminality which were to become dominant in penal ideology after the 1880s. It saw crime not as a matter of choice but a product either of heredity or, more importantly, of the environment. This was a departure from the view prevalent in the early and mid-nineteenth century of crime and criminality, where crime was a product of a defect in character. And the law in this earlier view was directed to play an educative role in the society and geared to deal with the consequences of people’s deviant behaviour.24 However, crime in Man’s framework was not a sign of depravity of character; it was circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, poor company and lack of education that contributed to an individual becoming a criminal. As Man once remarked: Among every batch of convicts some will probably be found who had breathed an atmosphere of crime from their earliest childhood, others who have been tempted by extreme want or evil associates, and possibly one or two of higher class who, with open eyes, have induced a widespread ruin in the hope of suddenly acquiring riches.25 Therefore crime was not something that threatened the social order but was more of an administrative problem easily solved by effective bureaucracy. Removing the convict from the place which made a criminal out of him, and spatially recasting him in a system with an in-built mechanism of

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incentives, where labouring and good behaviour were rewarded, was seen as achieving the rehabilitation of the convict.26 This view of punishment signified that it was the physical space of the Settlement that provided the setting for the expiation of the convict’s sins. Convicts’ entire existence in the Settlement was to be one of penalty, a one-act play. In this scheme, the Island space at once became a normative, a redemptive and a creative domain. It was normative because it prescribed certain norms, rules, regulations, and provided prescriptions for the deliverance of the fallen human. It was redemptive because passage towards betterment and final release structured the convict’s existence in the space. It was creative because it helped him reconstruct in some measure the life that he had left behind because of his sentencing. It was deemed to have the precise characteristics, the right mix of fear, deterrence, hard work, impartiality and objectivity which would lead the convict from darkness to light. Thus, for Colonel Man the Settlement in the Andamans was ‘an important branch of the judicial establishment of India’.27 Colonel Man’s views had a wide constituency not only amongst officials of the Government of India but also amongst the bureaucrats of the different provincial governments. A letter from the Punjab government is an example of the official support for Man’s opinion. It stated that ‘in Western Australia the convict is wanted for colonization, whereas Port Blair is purely [a] penal settlement’.28 In a similar vein was the opinion of J.S. Campbell, who visited the Islands in 1872.29 The Settlement, in his view, was ‘started solely with the object of providing an appropriate place of confinement for convicts sentenced to transportation beyond the seas’. Therefore, for Colonel Man, success in his enterprise could only be achieved ‘if the regulations of the Settlement admit of no compromise, but are conducted on principles determined calmly beforehand, and impartially administered, with no more regard to the convenience of the colony than to the previous station and means of the individual’.30 The transported criminal, according to this view, was socially dead.31 J.S. Campbell’s report was also a serious illustration of this view of punishment: ‘No life convict should, for the future, have any correspondence with India […] when a man is transported for life, he should become dead to his family.’ For Campbell, communications from the convict’s family tended ‘to render a man who has no hope of returning, sullen and unfit to make the most of the new life before him, and discipline is impeded’. He urged that the Government pass an ‘Act declaring any such convicts to be civilly dead, any property he may have left passing to the next-of-kin’.32 The convict deemed as socially dead could regain a measure of his previous life only through living by the norms of the penal colony. The Islands, therefore, were to be ‘penal’ in all respects and run on the lines of strict discipline known to mainland jails. Here the Andamans were envisioned as the

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jailhouse quarantined by the sea, which sealed the convicts from any negative influence. According to this view, the life of the convict in transportation had to be without any indulgences or comforts of any kind. Expected to perform hard labour under strict discipline, the convicts received ‘only such food as is necessary for health’. Anything over and above was ‘an indulgence which may at any time be withdrawn in whole or part’.33 Such a view emphasized enforcement of extremely stringent surveillance and a segregation policy with regard to the convicts, and aimed to seal off the Islands from any external communication or interaction. The convict was to become eligible for employment on his arrival in the Andamans after passing through a fixed probationary period ‘to prove his title to reward’.34 The classification of the convicts that Colonel Man proposed was based on the number of years that a convict had spent on the Islands. And, more importantly, unlike Ford’s scheme, the promotion to first class was to be a reward for good personal conduct, disciplined behaviour and hard work, and not as a matter of course.35 Based on his experience in the Straits, Man believed that unless the convict had spent nearly eleven years in the lower grades he should not be promoted to the selfsupporter grade (first class, where the convict got a ticket-of-leave36). The idea was to condense the harshest punishment in the early years of the convict’s life in transportation when the memory of his native life and criminal act was most vivid in his mind. Fettering, whipping, depriving of nutrition, clothing with rough garments or making the convict perform harsh penal labour by putting him to work in the chain-gang were some of the ways of inflicting physically arduous punishment.37 After some years, a relaxation and grant of indulgences was proposed if the convict displayed good conduct. Colonel Man felt this would offer an opportunity to the convict to reform as he could hope for less misery and retrieve some measure of the social life that he left behind. Further, he believed that reformation was possible only through enforcing a regulated scale of rewards for good behaviour and punishments for misconduct and misdemeanour.38 Colonel Man put this system of classification into place as the Superintendent of the Andamans. The Superintendents who followed him continued to make changes and refine this system of convict classification. However, the degree to which the system was followed in practice varied.

Dungeon for felons Transportation and incarceration were two penal devices with specific spatial dynamics. That is, both involved spatial removal of the convicts from their immediate environment and their being quarantined, either behind the walls of a prison or being hauled to a far-off place. The British officials had displayed ambivalence in their preference for incarceration

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over transportation. Incarceration had been viewed favourably since the 1830s because in the view of the British this was the only penalization which allowed gradations of punishment for each offence and each offender. This was in keeping with the nineteenth-century view that deterrence stemmed not from an exhibition of the pain of punishment but from its proportionate character, uniformity and certainty.39 The shift to incarceration as the most favoured punishment also marked a shift in attitude towards violence, which was now seen as more of a private matter. Capital punishment, in comparison to incarceration, was a form of public punishment and therefore seen as violent in nature and hence harmful to society’s health.40 In India, in keeping with the shifts in the British penal ideology, the colonial state also began to pay greater attention to the jail regime. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the retreat of public punishment in the form of greater use of the penitentiary in colonial India becomes visible.41 The Government of India sought to reform the prison system driven by its need to shore up the supposedly ‘reformed Indian penal code with an effective prison system’ and by ‘the perceived threat from unruly prisoners in Calcutta’.42 The late 1840s and 1850s saw the drafting of plans for new reformed prisons and cellular jails. The colonial administration also favoured incarceration because it was seen as the natural pre-condition for the enforcement of intra-mural labour, a healthier, less costly and more effective penal option. As one official in 1862 urged, ‘It is therein shewn, and proved at every step by the strictest Baconian induction, that the outdoor labour of Indian convicts is costly, unproductive, utterly subversive of Table 4.1

Indoor Outdoor

Mortality statistics for the period 1856 to 1861 in Indian jails44 Total Numbers

Died

Percentage

61,449 13,873

7,130 3,316

11.58% 23.90%

discipline, and extremely unhealthy.’43 Seen as unhealthy, outdoor labour was apparently so in fact (see Table 4.1). Thus, the view of the jail as the penal epicentre and as a healthier penal option was in vogue even at the time of the opening of the Settlement in the Andamans. The decade of the 1880s marked the theoretical demise of the extra-mural from the penal scene, whereby it began conclusively to be perceived as an indulgence. Intra-mural labour was accepted as more productive and punitive as it enabled a greater regulation of the labour time and offered the possibility of developing a more discriminatory scale of punishment.45 However, convict transportation and extra-mural

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labour, in spite of having fallen into disfavour, continued because of the financial, developmental and ideological needs of the colonial state. In the Andamans, within a few decades of the opening of the Settlement, J.S. Campbell, Secretary to the Home Department, and Henry Norman, Military Member of the Supreme Council of India, who visited the Settlement in 1874, suggested building a jail in their reports.46 They had made this suggestion with regard to the incarceration of the newly arrived or convicts who had misbehaved. Their recommendations could not be implemented because of the expense and time that was needed to erect such a building. However, by the late 1890s, the state of the Settlement overrode the concerns that the administration had with regard to expense and time in building a cellular jail on the Islands. In the 1890s the Settlement began to receive a great deal of censure from Calcutta officials and visitors for not being ‘penal’ enough. It was common knowledge that the customary penal practices were clearly unenforceable and there existed far too much variation in the way different superintendents sought to manage the Settlement’s affairs. What the bureaucrats in India saw was a poorly managed colony, which was failing to fulfil its role as the judicial and penal adjunct of the Indian empire. The ten-yearly review committee led by C.J. Lyall and A. Lethbridge, which arrived in 1890 on the Andamans, took note of the situation and suggested certain remedial measures. Amongst several other suggestions, it recommended the building of a cellular jail containing at least 600 cells. It was to be a Benthamite Panopticon, with a central watchtower and double-storey wings with individual cells constructed as seven radiating arms.47 There were two striking things about this suggestion. First, while incarceration and intra-mural labour was gaining favour with penal theorists in India, the advantages of the cellular system were still being debated. The official opinion regarding the cellular system was divided. The first suggestion to introduce the cellular system in Indian jails had been put forward by F.J. Mouat in 1858 following his appointment as Inspector General of Jails of the Lower Provinces in 1855. He was of the view that ‘separation in cells was much less fatal than association in insanitary wards’.48 In the period following the Revolt in 1857, Mouat’s suggestions found few takers but by 1864 his ‘insistency received its reward’ and a scheme of establishment of central penitentiaries with cellular accommodation was submitted to the Governor-General, Lord Lawrence. The Governor-General took the lead and refused to sanction any proposal for the construction of a jail ‘unless at least 10 per cent of the accommodation is cellular’. He was convinced that unless a portion of every term of confinement was spent in separation, ‘imprisonment in this country ceases to be punishment’. The Governor-General’s recommendation, however, did not meet F.J. Mouat’s approval, who was an official heavyweight by then. It is unclear whether Mouat opposed Lord Lawrence’s suggestions on

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the grounds that the provision of only 10 per cent of accommodation as cellular was insufficient; or whether there had been a turnaround in his views regarding the system of cellular confinement, of which he had hitherto been a vociferous exponent. Mouat, along with the then Superintendent of the Andamans, J.C. Haughton, opposed the introduction of the cellular system in Indian jails on sanitary and moral grounds. Being shut up in a cell which was ‘soon filled with unrenewed air, fouled by exhalation from the prisoner’s body’ was believed to be the chief cause of illness in the Rawalpindi and Allahabad Central prisons where the system had already been tried. It was opposed on moral grounds because the reformation of the ordinary convicts and criminals, it was argued, could not be achieved by keeping them separate. They felt that ‘if moral improvement was to be achieved then attention had to be paid to their teachers & guardians who would help reform their views and feelings’. They also saw the cellular system as a failure because of its supposed lack of success in France where it had been adopted before 1848 but abandoned by 1853 on account of expense.49 Given this background, it is surprising the cellular system had such vociferous supporters in Lyall and Lethbridge. The second striking thing about this suggestion was that the Andaman Islands, in spite of being a penal colony, was now seen as needing a prison on it – a jail within a jail. In the Committee’s view the jail was to serve a variety of purposes. Foremost, it was to be an effective deterrent to newly arrived convicts’ misconduct; it would aid in convict ethnography by facilitating the study of the character of the prisoners; it would improve discipline amongst the convicts, acclimatize them, and provide them with an opportunity to acquire literacy; and finally enable the authorities to dispense with fetters, which were the main cause of wounds and ulceration in the Settlement.50 Over and above these aims the most important aim was to render the early stages of convict’s life extremely harsh by the introduction of a stage of intra-mural labour for a period of eighteen months. The life on the Settlement had undergone a change and was no longer as harsh. The Andamans now had relatively better infrastructural capacity, with official residences, convict barracks, waterworks, drainage, a signalling system and a telegraph.51 Therefore, eighteen months in cellular confinement were seen as absolutely essential for the convicts now arriving on the Islands, to give them a taste of harsh prison life. The building of the Andamans’ own Cellular Jail received approval in 1892–93 and its construction began in 1898, and it finally became functional in 1905. The Jail, once operational, had its own free establishment for supervisory and sanitary works. The idea was to keep the Jail management completely separate from the Settlement. The Jail had its own Superintendent, a commissioned medical officer, appointed in 1906. For the work of overseers,

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Figure 4.1

The Cellular Jail under construction

(Source: AS-A6-7: AN73943001, E.H. Man Album, 1900, Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London).

Figure 4.2

A wooden model of the Cellular Jail

Redemptive Space 99

there was recruitment of free warders from the subordinate executive service and military police force.52 Even the menials employed in the jail were housed intra-murally.53 Once operational, the Jail housed three kinds of prisoners: the newly arrived convicts; political prisoners; and convicts convicted of petty crimes and penal offences on the Settlement and within the Jail. The daily rhythm of the convict’s life and the kinds of work that he performed in the Jail took on a completely different spatial overtone in comparison to the Settlement. While the intra-mural life was healthier, it was not easy. Harsh discipline and isolation drove some of the prisoners to insanity.54 Superintendent R.C. Temple (1896–1901) defined the life in the Cellular Jail as ‘a deterrent punishment not by severity of manual labour but by severe monotony of discipline’. Such a form of punishment, in his opinion, was effective because of ‘unvarying strictness of supervision’. He emphasized that the Jail’s efficacy lay not so much in the system of punishment but the manner in which punishment was carried out.55 Temple described it thus: We commence by placing our newly-arrived convict in the Cellular Jail, by way of breaking him to harness. Here all is discipline. There is no hard work. It is discipline, the sternest of discipline, from morning till night – hard, rigid, uncompromising. We oblige him to bend his rebellious nature to the yoke for six months at least. He remains in his cell all day and all night. […] The irksomeness of the discipline is shown in his action at exercise. It is not exciting exercise exactly, as he has to walk round and round the ring.56 In theory, the prisoners led a life confined within the four walls of the cell. They were ‘fed in their cells, the food being passed in through trapdoors provided for the purpose’.57 In their cells, the convicts cleaned and ground wheat, dal and kopra, pounded coir and made nets. Kopra was ground with the help of Donaldson’s patent mill, a small iron machine. The machine was fixed outside the cell and the convicts operated it by a crank from inside the cell. The grinding work was extremely severe and convicts disliked it immensely.58 Only a few prisoners were employed in coir-pounding as the particles of husk rendered the cell quite stuffy. An unnamed official described the nature of the convict’s confinement in the cell thus: A prisoner in the Cellular Jail occupies a cell to which access is obtained by a solid door, ordinarily fastened, from a corridor in which a warder is on duty. To the left of the door is a contrivance which the warder can open from the corridor to pass in and out small articles consisting chiefly of raw material for coir-pounding. Beyond the corridor is the

100 Imperial Andamans

Figure 4.3

Cells of the Cellular Jail

Figure 4.4

Convicts at work in-between the wings of the Cellular Jail

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

Redemptive Space 101

prison wall with grated openings for light. On the opposite side of the cell, next to the ceiling, is a small opening for light and ventilation only. The inmate is thus precluded from seeing his fellow-prisoners, and works at his task in complete isolation.59 The only time the convicts associated with others was during the latrine and bathing parade. By 1910 they began to associate during work hours as well in the worksheds erected in the yards situated between the radiating arms of the Jail. The adoption of this arrangement reflected the practical impossibility of working a large body of convicts entirely in cells.60 Although the convicts associated with each other, there were strictures against communication. In theory it was the severe monotony of discipline which defined the intra-mural penal regime; however, at times punishment in the Cellular Jail took on harsh physical overtones. This was reflected in use of flogging, handcuffs and fetters. The handcuffs were worn with wrists in the front or behind, while the fetters were of three kinds: link fetters (composed of a chain and ankle rings), bar fetters (composed of two bars joined together by a link and attached to ankle rings), and cross bar fetters (composed of a single bar for the purpose of keeping the legs apart and ankle rings). Fetters achieved the task of restraining the convicts’ movements and rendering their life extremely uncomfortable. As a punishment for intra-mural offences the convicts were either put on a penal diet or kept in solitary confinement. The penal diet consisted of two meals in the day consisting of 1 lb. rice, or wheat flour, boiled as porridge and seasoned with salt. It never continued for more than ninety-six hours or repeated before an interval of one full week. Solitary confinement was the most unbearable and painful of punishments and the Settlement officials reserved it for ‘serious’ offences or for indulging in homosexual sex. In view of the severity of this punishment, the solitary confinement with or without penal diet, according to the Settlement manual, was never to exceed fourteen days at a time and never repeated before a lapse of one full week. The dark cell punishment was not to exceed seventy-two hours and not repeated until fourteen clear days had elapsed since the prisoners’ release from his last confinement. The prisoner was to be allowed out for half an hour twice a day once for his bath and breakfast and once for his evening meal. The prisoner was also to be examined by a medical officer twice a day. As a measure of relief, the convicts were awarded maximum of two marks a day for good conduct and work. The total marks earned by the convict could shorten his stay in the Jail by twenty-three days. And a convict was to be released from the jail after six months only if his conduct was good, otherwise the administration had the authority to detain him further.61

102 Imperial Andamans

After six months of good behaviour, when the convict did step out into the Settlement, he was believed to have redeemed himself. This view of punishment, where the Jail was believed to be the penal epicentre, presents a historiographical problem. According to Satadru Sen, ‘the construction and deployment of the Cellular Jail’ was a watershed in the penal history of the Andamans and it ‘altered the nature and meaning of punishment in [the] Andamans’.62 The impact of the Jail was such that the ‘rest of the settlement receded into the background’. Sen in his monograph has reworked this idea into the way things happened instead of seeing it as a policy-statement. Indeed, some officials would have liked the Jail to become the focus of the penal administration and some even worked in the direction of achieving this goal. The watertight periodization that Sen imposes on the history of convict management with the year 1898 marking a watershed, however, is untenable. In terms of both the political history of the penal settlement and the social history of the convicts, the beginning of the construction of the Cellular Jail in 1898 did not herald a new era in convict management. As the discussion above demonstrates the Jail was a result of an alternative conceptualization of the redemptive space. Moreover, building the Cellular Jail and quarantining the convicts soon after their arrival for six months in the Jail was seen as the sum total of punishment only by a few of the Settlement officials. The divergent views regarding what constituted punishment continued to work themselves out in a variety of ways throughout the history of the Settlement. The building of the Jail did not alter other notions of punishment; it merely added a new dimension to them. The idea that the Jail dominated over the affairs of the Settlement derives from the attention that the Jail received from the Indian nationalist press and in middle-class nationalist politics. The political prisoners who had been implicated in various anti-British activities in India were sent to the Jail from 1905 onwards but, unlike other convicts, were never allowed to leave the Jail. The only view they ever got of the Andamans was from within the confines of the Jail. Thus the Jail in their memoirs and in national memory became synonymous with the Andamans, the Muktitirth, completely obliterating the Settlement.

Conclusion The Government of India and the Settlement officials were not unaware of the administrative conundrum in the Andamans. Some officials actually went on record conceding that antagonistic views regarding the character of the colony existed in the Settlement. A.P. Howell was one such official who inspected the Settlement, in 1868. His report was the clearest statement of the tangle that prevailed in the Andamans: In reading over the correspondence about Port Blair, I do not find that [the] Government has as yet expressed any decided view as to whether

Redemptive Space 103

Port Blair is simply to a be a great jail for life and long-term prisoners from India, where the journey across the sea is added to the terrors of imprisonment, or whether it is to be a colony where free men and convicts are to live together and gradually to people the Andamans.63 As the question of what constituted the punishment of transportation remained a contested one in the Andamans so did the issue of crime and punishment within the Settlement. The administration in the Andamans did not work with any objective or universal criterion of ‘crime’. The Settlement officers could adjudge a deed as ‘human necessity’ or as a sign of ‘human depravity’, contingent on their outlook. ‘Crime’ in the Andamans was thus a subjective category and defined by individual proclivities. The officials at times winked at or were even complicit in several aspects of convict ‘autonomy’ and ‘resistance’; and sometimes declared the same actions as ‘crime’. The efficacy of punishments lay in pinning down the convicts individually. The punishments ranged from nominal fines to death sentences depending on the view that the state took of the individual convict’s offence, his intentions, past history and conduct. What is significant is that there was no scale of punishments, whereby a particular offence earned a specific punishment. The Settlement Manual only listed the various acts of convicts belonging to different classes deemed as ‘convict offences’ without actually specifying the equivalent punishments.64 Moreover, the Settlement officers could apply any punishment to a convict irrespective of his class or the number of years that he had spent on the Islands. Furthermore, the punishment of the convict did not end with the infliction of a particular penalty as every punishment of the offender was recorded and considered when he became eligible for an indulgence or for release. The discordant dialetics between space and punishment on the Andamans was translating into a much looser system of administration than what the Government would have liked to see. J.S. Campbell, who visited the Islands in the capacity of Secretary to the Home Department of the Government of India in 1874, also acknowledged the perplexing state of affairs in the Andamans and that ‘several systems are now working side by side’. In his view, one of the reasons for the insufficiency of the system was the ‘non-establishment of any thoroughly approved system, each officer carrying out pretty nearly his individual views, which were liable to be superseded on the arrival of the new Superintendent’.65

5 Labour – The Grand Desideratum1

Although the Andamans were a penal settlement, the British always cherished a vision of transforming their imperial outpost into a flourishing agricultural colony like the other island colonies in the Indian Ocean. For the colonial administration the challenges were many. Converting the Andamans, covered with dense tropical forests, marshes and swamps, into a naval station, a port of call or a convict station, let alone an agricultural colony, required expending huge amounts of labour. Working the colony was a task beyond the convicts alone and necessitated the importation of free labour, Chinese contractors, Indian traders and merchants, and contractual labour. The use of free labour alongside convict labour raked up controversy that the Settlement could ill-afford. In addition, the long-term goal of transforming the Islands into a profitable entity had to be reconciled with the day-to-day working of the penal colony whose management rested in the hands of the individual superintendents and officials who had their own personal and divergent conceptions of working the island space. So far historians have discussed the ideological significance of labour in the Andamans as a crucial integrative and controlling (or reforming) device.2 This chapter focuses on the actual working of the labour regime in the Andamans. It examines how the colonial administration organized and allocated labour to the convict workforce and thereby attempted to reconcile and meet the challenges that it faced.

Organizing work and labour All over the world island penal colonies relied on the use of non-penal or extra-judicial principles for their functioning. Similar was the case of the Andamans. The standard penal classification of the convicts into different grades and classes was nearly unworkable for assigning them labour activities. The resultant policy was one of adoption of non-penal principles for putting the convicts to labour and settling the Islands. These methods ranged from letting convicts acquire kinship ties and property to working the convicts according to the skills that they possessed, or the race and gender that they 104

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 105

belonged to, or according to the time-period of their sentence. The use of these criteria was mostly an attempt to overcome the structural constraints implicit in administering a colony such as the Andamans and an effort to reconcile the divergent aspirations of the Settlement officials and the colonial administration. ‘Self-supporter’ convicts and their household ‘Self-supporters’ were first-class prisoners who had a ticket-of-leave and could take up any profession of their choice. In the initial years of the Settlement’s inception, the convicts got tickets after a short probation and those who brought money with them became self-supporters almost on arrival. By 1874, a more rigorous classification was introduced and no ticket was given until the convict had been resident for twelve years, a period which was subsequently reduced to ten years. At the turn of the century, out of a population of 11,947 convicts, 2,115 were self-supporters. In the view of the Settlement officers, once the convict achieved the selfsupporter status and set up a household there was a greater likelihood of the convict choosing to settle on the Andamans on release.3 The convict was, at one level, a criminal who had to atone for his crime through his desocialization, which began with his sentencing and the voyage to the Islands. The dropping of the convict’s surname and pinning on him a number for his identification, the donning of convict clothes and shearing of the head became the verbal and visual signifiers of the final severance of the natal ties and the ascription of a criminalized identity. This convict, at another level, also formed the core of a new society. His exertions could help him reconstruct and reconstitute his identity and begin his life anew as a hardworking and honourable member of a social community. The bridge between the two worlds was labour. The aim of the self-supporter system was to reform the convict and also to relieve the government of his maintenance cost and thereby make the Settlement financially self-sustaining. The state shored up the selfsupporters in the beginning until they settled into the new occupation and began to pay taxes. Those engaged in agriculture or manufacturing sold their products to the Commissariat Department and also to the other convicts. These privileges and indulgences made the life of self-supporter convicts more comfortable. However, the absence of any civil rights, the prohibition against leaving the settlement, and a political disapproval of remaining idle circumscribed the convicts’ existence. The convicts therefore had to earn the privilege of becoming self-supporters and continue exerting themselves thereafter to remain solvent lest they be degraded.4 Acquisition of the rights of matrimony and kinship were central to the selfsupporter system.5 In the Andamans, as elsewhere, there was an ideological emphasis on domesticity and ‘family’. For British officials the family was essentially a nucleated domestic unit; incomplete without the male partner as husband and the female partner as wife; and admitting of no other relations,

106 Imperial Andamans

dependents or associates, except children. The self-supporting convicts had to make an application to marry. In order to be eligible a convict had to possess a house, ten bighas of land, one pair of bullocks and fifty rupees in cash in the Savings Bank. Female agents visited the women’s jail, looked for partners, and negotiated on behalf of both the parties. Before sanctioning the application, the Superintendent examined the female convict’s legal position, crosschecking whether she was already married in India.6 As Table 5.1 shows, marriages Table 5.1 Year 1877–78 1878–79 1879–80 1880–81 1881–82 1882–83 1883–84 1884–85 1885–86 1886–87 1887–88 1888–89 1889–90 1890–91 1891–92 1892–93 1893–94 1894–95 1895–96 1896–97 1897–98 1898–99 1899–00 1900–01 1901–02 1902–03 1903–04 1904–05 1905–06 1906–07 1907–08 1908–09 1909–10 1910–11 1911–12 1912–13 1913–14 Total

Marriage between convicts and between convicts and free persons7 Marriage between convicts

Marriage between convicts and free persons

Total

39 109 104 67 65 42 85 88 82 82 58 63 61 38 37 23 23 56 47 43 60 48 47 33 28 25 72 57 42 57 48 46 32 37 33 60 44 1,981

1 – – 3 5 – – – – – – – – – 19 11 08 12 07 02 02 05 01 05 05 01 02 06 09 08 07 04 03 06 09 05 03 149

40 109 104 70 70 42 85 88 82 82 58 63 61 38 56 34 31 68 54 45 62 53 48 53 33 26 74 63 51 65 55 50 35 43 42 65 47 2,130

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 107

mostly took place between convicts and at times between convicts and free persons (sons and daughters of convicts). As an institution the household in the Andamans was supposed to fulfil several functions: it was a mode of regulating sexual union; controlling and ordering convict pleasure and desire; and an institution which imparted stability to the convict workforce. The convict household, besides being a social and a distinct labouring unit,8 was also a legal unit as it carried with it certain officially authorized obligations. For instance, the failure to sustain itself economically or ‘unlawful’ misbehaviour by its members carried the danger of the family unit being legally annulled, where its constituents were made to give up their house and go back to live in convict barracks. A gendered labour force Transportation of female convicts to the Andamans began in 1862 following repeated failures to induce the families of the convicts to migrate from the subcontinent.9 In the Andamans, the need for conjugal partners necessitated the transportation of the convict women.10 Thus, the attempt, since the beginning, was to have young and unattached female convicts in the colony. For example, as shown by Table 5.2, the first batch of convict women to arrive in Andamans had a high number of young and widowed females. The number of widows in this batch, however, seems highly improbable because the ‘widow’ possibly was a category of women who had not simply lost their husbands but perhaps their husbands had renounced them on their conviction. In a situation where the presence of convict women was primarily defined by a need for spouses, there was a greater emphasis on their sexuality than on their reproductive and productive capacities. The reproductive capacity of the female convicts was of limited consequence for the Settlement administration because the labour regime in the Andamans fundamentally depended on the importation of the labour force instead of local regeneration. Domestication of the convicts for providing stability and permanence to the male workforce was definitely one of the avowed aims. The production of progeny was a less-desired by-product because any substantial increase in Table 5.2 Religion, age and marital status of the first batch of 159 female convicts11 Religion Age (in years) Marital Status Total no. of women Area of Residence

Hindu

Muslim

117 42 Below 20 20–30 30–40 10 72 43 Single Married Widowed 01 25 133 159 Bengal, Bihar and United Provinces

Above 40 34

108 Imperial Andamans

the non-productive child population had the potential of threatening the survival of the precarious economic infrastructure of the island colony. For instance, the Settlement administration in the year 1868 annulled all convict marriages with a few exceptions because of an ‘alarming growth in the child population’. Marriage partners had to leave the self-supporter villages and return to the barracks.12 Therefore, the Settlement not only did not appreciate the reproductive capacity of the female convict but also sought to contain it. There was also subordination of the productive capacity of the female convicts. The Settlement officials did not see women as contributing to the labour pool that was in demand on the Islands. The female convicts in their opinion could not undertake the physically strenuous work of clearing the jungles and draining the swamps. Therefore, female convicts were mainly involved in cotton growing, cotton weaving, blanket weaving and basket weaving13 and the male convicts outnumbered them by a ratio of ten to one.14 There was ‘a large local trade in cloth of sorts’, besides which they also made ‘all the clothing’ for the self-supporter convicts.15 The female convicts who married the self-supporter convicts were mostly engaged in looking after the household. Such work, although important for the self-sufficiency of the Settlement, in the official view did not substantially reduce the cost of running the Settlement. This perception diminished the demand for convict women as a labour source. The informal training that a woman received in the various skills while staying at home, tending the hearth, raising children, or assisting her family members in the fields, in weaving, basket-making and various other caste-based economic activities and subsistence crafts had no recognition or value in this scheme of things.16 As Deborah Oxley has rightly pointed out, ‘skill was a category constructed according to political and economic power, rather than some objective and absolute proficiency’.17 The state subscribing to the notions of market economy derecognized the worth of the female labourer, and especially that of the convict women, as a ‘potential worker’. The sexual labour that they performed was the sum total of the skill they possessed, obliterating the value of other skills they had. Dexterous delinquents The need for certain kind of skilled labour was endless in the Settlement. There was a continuous and insatiable need for artisans, forest workers, clerks and accountants. Convicts for caste-specific works such as cooking and cleaning were also much needed.18 From the 1870s when the Settlement seemed to acquire greater permanency, the Settlement officials began to make earnest efforts in the direction of solving the problem by imparting training and skills to the existing body of convicts. This began with Colonel Man’s accession as Superintendent in March 1868. He undertook the organization of a convict artificer corps as an alternative to the costly skilled free labour. Thus far, the Settlement had relied on artificers from Moulmein and carpenters and blacksmiths from Calcutta.19 The Settlement had to resort to importation of free labour because the attempt to

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 109

recruit convict artisans from the Indian jails in the initial years had failed.20 Free labour in comparison to convict labour received remuneration at high rates, a huge concern to the budget-conscious authorities. On Colonel Man’s arrival, the Settlement had 297 free artificers. Most of them were Chinese carpenters, drawing two rupees per day. The rest were Madras or Bengal stonemasons drawing 38 rupees and 12 annas per month. Within no time, Colonel Man discharged nearly two-thirds of the Chinese labourers and all the stonemasons.21 Colonel Man found that the previous Superintendent had trained a sizeable number of convicts as stonemasons for employment on the European barracks and Church, and some of them had managed to acquire considerable skill. However, in other trades there were none that could be employed with free workers. Most of them were useful only in putting up temporary barracks or sheds which required no great workmanship. Skilled artificers ‘to take the place of costly free labour there were none’, except three or four blacksmiths. As a result, he decided to conduct a census of the convict body to ascertain what each man’s previous trade had been. Many of them, in Man’s opinion, had not cared to declare themselves because of ‘want of encouragement’. He was able to get a return of about 700 craftsmen out of nearly 10,000 convicts. Man immediately placed them under free maistrees, or masons, to improve their skills.22 He felt that working in the artificer corps would help in the rehabilitation of convicts, that is, ‘in the case of prisoners stimulated to industry by reward, the progress in skill is often very remarkable; and when they are under sentence for life, they soon amply repay the pains and cost of teaching them trades’.23 He then set about streamlining the convict artificer system by dividing them according to their skills into four classes. The convict artificers were to receive gratuities in addition to their settlement allowance,24 but were subject to the rules of the class that they otherwise belonged. The convicts of first and second class who belonged to the corps were to receive marks for good behaviour and industrious work.25 In addition, the convict artificers had the privilege to finish work at 4 o’clock while the rest of the convicts worked until 6 o’clock.26 While the overall charge of the corps rested with the Superintendent, there was selection of convict supervisor (or jemadars and tindals) out of the artificer corps for supervision of gangs of the labouring convicts in the corps. Thus, an ‘Artificer Corps’ of dexterous delinquents came into being. Besides carpentry and stonemasonry, literacy was also a coveted skill in the colony. The Settlement prized its literate convicts who served as Babus and munshis (clerks and accountants). Even the convicts debarred from transportation owing to restrictions regarding age and health were, if literate, sent to the Andamans as clerical staff.27 The ability to read and write ensured a superior treatment of such convicts. Mohammad Zafar Thanesari in his memoir anecdotally recounts the fate of an English-educated Indian, ‘who had a European name and wore coat and trousers’, and ‘came to the Andamans from Awadh’. The convict in question ‘received food like the Europeans, [a] good house, a

110 Imperial Andamans

bed and all other comforts. He did not have to perform any hard labour and instead became a clerk’.28 Although Thanesari complained about the comfortable position of this convict from Awadh, his own position was not any different. Appointed as Chief Munshi in the office of the Superintendent, Thanesari received a house and a free servant within a few days of his arrival in the Settlement. Thanesari’s story nevertheless sheds light on how convicts’ literacy, not their erstwhile social or caste status, privileged or safeguarded them against maltreatment. His account is credible because there were many convicts who were Nawabs, Zamindars, Muftis, Qazi, Deputy Collectors, Munsif, and Sadr,29 but they could not use their position to bargain for concessions in the Settlement. The way skilled labour was employed on the Andamans demonstrates that there was no alignment between the original crime, nature of the sentence, the class to which the convicts belonged and the labour that the convict performed.30 The revisionist historiography on Australian convict studies has used this lack of alignment between the crime and the labour assignment of the transported convict to demonstrate that the labour market in the recipient colony was ‘efficient, and the allocation of convict labour was not a lottery’: convicts performed jobs commensurate to those they had held before their arrival in New South Wales.31 However, the evidence from the Andamans does not entirely corroborate this conception. No doubt, the literacy of the convict or skill as a carpenter or artisan often led to the convict’s appointment in a similar capacity in the Settlement but this was not always the case. For instance, the Settlement received a high number of convicts belonging to the agricultural castes or ones engaged in agriculture-related occupations, as shown by Tables 5.3 and 5.4, but this did not guarantee an agricultural occupation on the Andamans. In fact, as Table 5.5 confirms, very few convicts were actually engaged in agriculture after their arrival. This shows that while the basis of labour assignment may not have been necessarily penal, contrary to Australian convict labour historiography’s contention, it was not always based on the skills that the convicts brought with them either. With male and the female convicts alike, the state prescribed what constituted skill. Table 5.3

Distribution of convicts according to previous occupation (in %)32

Total Convicts Govt. Servants Domestics Agriculturists Labourers Miscellaneous

1884–85

1885–86

1890–91

1897–98

1898–99

11,666 1.4 4.7 43.8 10.5 39.6

11,867 1.5 4.8 44.9 9.4 39.4

13,122 1.80 5.42 49.76 9.58 33.44

11,883 1.95 5.48 53.88 9.95 28.74

11,913 1.92 5.41 54.60 9.87 28.20

1898–99 1899–1900 1900–01 1901–02 1902–03 1903–04 1904–05 1905–06 1906–07 1907–08

Table 5.4

10,479 10,760 11,217 12,038 12,009 13,173 13,392 13,981 13,792 13,522

Total 6,088 6,286 6,580 7,177 7,147 7,919 7,993 8,303 8,206 8,019

Agriculture 1,104 1,126 1,254 1,347 1,377 1,587 1,681 1,846 1,835 1,815

Labour 1,124 1,128 1,136 1,169 1,162 1,176 1,182 1,202 669 664

Artisan 603 631 659 673 669 673 677 680 673 660

Domestic

Former occupation of the convicts (male) – 1898–99 to 1907–0833

346 356 370 420 433 482 489 510 499 487

Shops

214 226 229 238 226 235 232 235 223 239

Government

189 186 186 191 192 189 187 185 183 182

Boat/Fish

803 822 827 823 803 912 951 1,019 1,494 1,455

Others

111

1898–99 1899–1900 1900–01 1901–02 1902–03 1903–04 1904–05 1905–06 1906–07 1907–08

Table 5.5

1,016 1,007 1,118 920 900 909 931 1,136 1,120 961

Prison 164 145 162 168 202 196 195 335 668 738

Commissariat 213 136 125 212 224 243 260 275 298 308

Medical 293 279 290 329 351 379 373 373 441 451

Marine

620 794 706 834 954 907 1,083 1,080 1,044 728

Forest

556 546 616 590 626 494 565 439 402 371

Cultivation

Employment of the convicts (male) in the settlement of Port Blair (1898–99 to 1907–08)34

1,172 1,314 1,350 1,460 1,356 1,155 1,009 1,016 928 1,058

Manufacture

4,226 4,389 3,642 4,239 4,707 5,792 6,130 6,021 5,409 5,447

Other

112

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 113

Rising in the ranks – convict petty officers In order to encourage the convicts to choose the life in the Andamans over that in their home country, the British officials extended several privileges and rewards to them. The most common reward was promotion to a higher grade. Once the convict had fulfilled the conditions of the grade to which he belonged, he became eligible for promotion. This kind of reward was a routine matter and one that nearly all the convicts, with few exceptions, were able to attain. The other level of reward was a dividend for good work and behaviour. This was appointment as convict warders and petty officers (tindals, jemadars and umedwars) or watchmen (chowkidars). The Chowkidari System was adapted in the late 1870s from the precedent prevailing on the Indian subcontinent. It was introduced in those villages on the Andamans in which the self-supporting and released convicts had settled. Selected from released or conditionally released convicts or from the selfsupporting convicts, the prime responsibility of the village chowkidars was to report any instance of crime.35 Chowkidars were distributed in a proportion of one per fifty-six houses.36 The officials also quartered additional chowkidars ‘at the cost of the inhabitants in convict villages in which crime was reported to be unusually prevalent’.37 The village chowkidar was subordinate to the village chaudhari (or headman) to whom he had to report on a daily basis; and to the police station of the village on a weekly basis. The local officials put great faith in the system in detection and control of crime in the Settlement.38 The convict warder system of the Andamans on the other hand was an adaptation of the rules of convict management which Captain Forlong, the Executive Engineer on Special Duty to Singapore, had drawn up for the Straits Settlements.39 Bencooolen in 1825 and then the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore were the first to experiment with the convict warder system. In the mid-nineteenth century, most prison officials in India unequivocally favoured the merits of the convict warder system for preservation of discipline as it provided a reward for well-behaved convicts. They believed nothing could effect a greater behavioural change in the convicts than the hope of appointment as warders or supervisors. The system also helped in making savings, as it was economical to employ convict warders. In the Andamans, the job of the warders and petty officers was to keep the convicts under watch.40 They accompanied the labouring convicts on various works during the day and lived in their barracks by night. In some official quarters there was always some anxiety regarding the laxity in maintenance of discipline by the convict petty officers, especially the ones in charge of the extra-mural gangs at Port Blair.41 Nevertheless successive officials visiting the Islands from the subcontinent continued to vest their faith in the merits of the convict warder system. For instance, in his inspection report submitted in 1885, Alexander Mackenzie waxed eloquent on the benefits of the system, ‘The convict system is … to a large extent self-managed. As a class petty officers are said to work satisfactorily, most of them being up-country natives of a soldiery type who make good task-masters. They are restrained from bullying by

114 Imperial Andamans

Figure 5.1

Convict petty officers supervising prisoners at dinner on the beach

(Source: Photo 125/2/1, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

fear of the consequences to themselves, and neglect of duty by the constant inspection and check of the paid overseers and the Settlement staff.’42 The convict warder system thus served the administration by helping it make huge savings. Settlement officials believed that it provided an incentive for the convicts to behave well and to comply with the official dictates and that this co-option also secured the officers and the Settlement.43 Race and labour specialization The race of the convict was also an important denominator in the assignment of labour works. British officials associated proficiency in specific labour works with racial stereotypes. The Settlement officials divided the convicts on the Andamans primarily into three undifferentiated racial groups – Indian, Burmese and European.44 Indians, being the largest racial group, were employed on a variety of labour works but the Burmese were perceived as proficient in forest work or as boatmen and the Europeans worked as convict overseers.45 Burmese convicts The Government in November 1859 sanctioned the transportation of Burmese from Rangoon and Moulmein as demands for a larger labour force on the Andamans grew. They were engaged in forest work as loggers. The success of this initial experiment with Burmese convict labour led to

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 115

the Settlement request for more convicts from Tennaserim and Martaban provinces of Burma in November 1860.46 The Government of India complied because the Settlement prized them as an ‘efficient’ workforce and ‘capital workmen’. They were much in demand because they ‘thoroughly understood timber business’ and were ‘capable of teaching the arts of felling, dragging, hoisting and cutting out timber – matters which to [the] uninitiated are of great difficulty though apparently easy’.47 However, the Burmese also enjoyed a distinctive reputation for being exceptionally unruly and given to drinking. Even the visitors to the Andamans noted the riotous character of the Burmese convicts.48 Many Burmese were also excellent seafarers and therefore were believed to be responsible for many a case of escape.49 Indeed the Burmese convicts constituted between one-third and a half of the convicts who escaped from the Settlement every year. In fact, their unruliness was such that it made the various provinces in India where some Burmese convicts had been transported eager to be relieved of them. A case in point was the province of Madras whose Government wrote to the Government of India in 1875 beseeching to be allowed to send its Burmese convicts, who were ‘most troublesome’, to the Andamans. The then Superintendent D.M. Stewart quite keenly took the opportunity to have more Burmese foresters.50 The transportation of the Burmese convicts was stepped up whenever the need for skilled labour for undertaking the developmental works around the Settlement came up. For instance, the 1890 Lyall and Lethbridge Report forbade the continuation of transportation of term prisoners but made a concession with regard to the Burmese term-convicts, whose transportation to the Islands was to continue in view of greater demand for labour for the construction of the Cellular Jail.51 In 1907, the Settlement officials reopened the Andamans to Burmese life-convicts as well.52 Clearly, the developmental needs of the Settlement took precedence over penal requirements in the case of Burmese convicts. European and Eurasian convicts Transported European prisoners convicted in India, such as Conan Doyle’s protagonist Jonathan Small, arrived on the Andamans even during the time of the ‘first settlement’ of the Andamans in the late eighteenth century (1789–96).53 At the time, the Settlement officials had been hesitant about receiving European convicts because of the expenses involved in their maintenance. Moreover, the officials had felt that putting the European convict to hard labour in the tropical climate ensured a speedy death, defeating the purpose of transportation. Therefore, they saw the retention of European convicts in the Andamans as profitable only when they were used as warders, although this implied ‘privileging the European convict by placing him in a situation far superior to what he may have left behind in India’.54 Keeping this in mind, there was a change in policy with regard to the European convicts during the second settlement. As early as September 1858, eight European convicts received leave from the Alipore Jail for the remainder of their term, on the condition that ‘they

116 Imperial Andamans

Figure 5.2

Burmese convicts on road work with wooden neck tickets

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

Figure 5.3

Group of convicts (including rickshaw coolies and carpenters)

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

Convicts working on the old terminus of the tram-line on Bamlungta Creek, Middle Andaman, showing the tram-line

(Source: Photo 125/2/113, R.C. Temple Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

Figure 5.4

117

118 Imperial Andamans

Figure 5.5

Landing a big padaouk log on the timber ship

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

proceed to the Andamans to perform any duty that the Superintendent of Port Blair may require of them’.55 The European convicts were generally interested in coming to the Andamans as ticket-of-leave prisoners because the Settlement gave them greater freedom than the confined life in a jail.56 The Settlement was also keen on receiving the European convicts because there was always requirement for petty officers and other clerical staff on the Islands.57 These convicts received a ticket-of-leave on their arrival on the Andamans.58 This measure initially bore satisfactory results and in the early 1860s several European convicts were sent to the Andamans from Bengal.59 The Settlement made efforts to make the life of the European convicts comfortable and tolerable by extending several privileges to them. For instance, the families of the European convicts or Eurasian convicts had permission to join them at the Settlement.60 A library had also been set up

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 119

Figure 5.6

Unloading two elephants from a steamer for forest work on the Islands

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

in Port Blair for the European convicts to ‘assemble in the evening or during the leisure hours and employ themselves in improving their minds by having instructive books to read rather than spending their time in a questionable manner’.61 The library had books on mechanics, arts, sciences, cultivation, handbooks, narratives of travels and voyages, and the lives of eminent people. The European convicts received training to become overseers and the attempt was to instill a desire of reform in them.62 In 1862, the success of the system led to discussions between the local government in the Andamans and the Lord Bishop of Calcutta about the appointment of a clergyman with a family to the Andamans, in order to put the system on a sounder footing.63 While the Settlement benefitted from the presence of a class of European convicts, the officials never visualized them as future settlers. As temporary sojourners, the European convicts brought with them a fair share of trouble as well. Some misused their position and incidences of corruption were not unknown, which over the years challenged the initial optimism regarding the transportation of European convicts. For instance, in September 1858 a European overseer called Richardson was charged with misappropriation of commissariat articles and rations. He used to put his own dead fowls into the government hencoop, take a corresponding number of live ones, and send them to his wife in Moulmein.64 A similar incident in 1868 brought the issues to a head and initiated a debate regarding the inexpediency of sending

120 Imperial Andamans

European convicts to the Andamans. A European prisoner, G.J. Scott, embezzled money and used the misappropriated sums to buy his favourite female convicts clothing and jewellery. Colonel Horace Man, who was the officiating Superintendent at the time of Scott’s conviction, felt that the problem with the European convicts was that their deportation to the Andamans came too soon after their sentencing. He argued that instead, their transportation to the Andamans should come as a reward after displaying some years of good conduct. Besides the reduction of pay, the Settlement officers did not have proper means to punish the European convicts’ insubordination. The Government of India did not immediately respond to Colonel Man’s suggestion because it held the position that the transportation of European convicts to the Andamans came only when they had obtained the ‘license to be at large when his character has been such as to merit the indulgence’. And that the ‘licenses are not granted before a prisoner has served out at least half the term of his sentence’.65 With time, as a solution, the Settlement officials withdrew certain privileges extended to the European convicts and made efforts to put the European convicts on the same footing as the native convicts. The J.S. Campbell Report of 1886 went to the extent of suggesting that the European convicts in the Settlement be subject to all the rules applicable to native convicts of their class. Their good behaviour in jail before their arrival on the Andamans was to count towards their eligibility for indulgences.66 It is unclear whether Campbell’s suggestions were implemented but the initial enthusiasm for transportation of European convicts definitely waned. Lifers vs term-convicts In the Andamans, one of the fundamental points of differentiation within the convict body was the term of the sentence – for life or a few years. In principle, the sentence of transportation was for life. However, in the Andamans, convicts sentenced with a term of up to seven years also arrived.67 Although initially a product of overcrowding in the Indian jails, after some years the presence of the term-convicts in the Andamans’ labour regime was wholly a product of economic imperatives. As Table 5.6 shows, term transportation for three to seventeen years had existed since the early days of the Settlement. The economic imperative exerted by the Island colony on the Indian penal administration in the form of a greater need for convict labour, however, militated against the presumed deterrent value of transportation. The officials in India especially saw the presence of the term-convicts as severely undermining the penal discipline in the Andamans as the returnee convicts gave glowing accounts of their life there.68 Consequently, term transportation was subject to criticism and some officials even actively sought its abolition. Notwithstanding repeated censure, term transportation continued for most of the Andamans’ penal history. In order to make term transportation more palatable to the high officials in India, the Settlement officers justified its continued use on penal grounds. They contended that it contributed to the

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 121

security of the regime by serving as a counterbalance to the life-convicts. In their opinion the lifers ‘could not be placed in a position of trust’ and term transportation therefore answered the ‘object of supplying reliable men to act as petty officers’.69 Table 5.6 Numerical return of convicts at the penal settlement and periods of imprisonment awarded (Jan 1860)70 Period of imprisonment

Numbers

Life 21 years 18 years 17 16 14 12 10 9 8 7 5 4 3 unknown Total

997 01 01 01 18 240 05 175 04 06 199 163 18 01 02 1,831

The development of the colony over time required greater labour inputs. Superintendent R.C. Tytler, who joined the services in May 1862, pushed ahead a scheme of increasing the number of convicts in the Andamans to about 25,000 to enable the rapid clearance of the jungles.71 The Settlement could meet its labour requirement either by greater exploitation of the existing labour force or else by augmenting their numbers or by opening the Settlement to non-convict labour. In Tytler’s opinion, increasing the number of convicts was the safest and the most cost-effective option. Table 5.7

Increase in the number of convicts from the year 1862 to 1878

Year On Sep 1862 At the end of 1865 On Oct 1866 On March 1867 On Jan 1870 On Jan 1871 On June 1874 At the end of 1877–78

Total number of convicts 72

2,173 3,85473 6,46974 6,98275 7,49876 7,54677 7,82078 9,57979

[Labouring 1,608, Self-supporting 242]

[Labouring 6,483, Self-supporting 459]

122 Imperial Andamans Table 5.8 Statistical comparison of the number of term-convicts in the early twentieth century80 Year

Total no. of convicts transported

No. of Term-Convicts

1900 1901 1902 1903 1904

1,147 1,483 1,687 1,724 1,197

Year

No. of Life-Convicts

No. of Term-Convicts

1899 1905

9,513 10,321

1,609 4,282

437 589 806 864 690

At the centre of the debate regarding the enlarging of the labour force was the opening up of the Islands to term-convicts, along with other categories of convicts such as females, juveniles and ordinary criminals. As reflected in Table 5.7, the numbers of term-convicts in the Settlement indeed went up drastically between the years 1862 and 1878; and as Table 5.8 shows, the numbers remained quite high even in the early twentieth century. The temporality of the sentence of the convicts influenced their status within the Settlement and its labour regime.81 The fact that the termconvict could return home meant that he did not sever ties completely with his own society and community. Such a convict could not be categorized as ‘socially dead’ in the proper sense of the term. He was not compelled to rebuild his life in the Andamans, as was the case with a lifeconvict. The compulsions, legal and economic, facing the term-convict were thus very different from those facing a ‘lifer’. The issues of reform, rehabilitation and integration of the convict into the new life were not as pressing for the term-convict. What he and the administration expected of him was to fulfil his sentence and return to his homeland. An efficient discharging of his duties could also earn him extra marks, which went towards the remission of his sentence, expediting his return. This made the status of the term-convict ‘free/unbound’ in comparison to the life-convict. Moreover, the Settlement officials believed that the life-convict, as he had no hope of release, possessed a ‘desperate character’ in comparison to a term-convict. Whatever marks the life-convict earned for his good behaviour facilitated the speedy acquisition of self-supporter status but did not go towards the remission of his sentence. In addition, the Settlement officials saw the term-convicts as a more ‘efficient’ labour force because they had the ‘incentive’ of a brighter future, that is, returning to their homeland and roaming as free persons. In comparison, they saw the life-convicts as an ‘inefficient’ workforce which

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 123

in absence of the said incentive refused to work harder. It was ironic, though, that the term-convicts could not serve as domestic servants because the Settlement officers saw their disposition as unreliable for the purpose.82 They preferred the life-convicts as domestics to the term-convicts because they saw the former as having committed a crime in a moment of passion and extreme provocation, and therefore as being better than habitual thieves and criminals. This characterization of life-convicts, however, did not always do justice to the entire lot of them.

Engaging non-convicts In the Andamans, the use of non-convict labour was a testament to the Imperial dream of making the Islands a free agricultural settlement. Nonconvict labour was an important reservoir of ‘skilled’ labour. In some ways, it was also a solution to the perennial labour shortage, which was exacerbated by failure of voluntary migration of artisan convicts. The non-convict labour force consisted of contract labourers, the local-borns and the Andamanese. Contractual labour mainly came from China and different provinces of the Indian subcontinent. The local-borns were children of the convicts who lived in the Settlement villages as a free population under a licence and were subject to the ordinary law of India. There was always a debate amongst the officials regarding the use of non-convict labour on the Andamans. Some officials saw free labour as more ‘efficient’ and ‘productive’ in comparison to convict labour and others saw it as disrupting penal discipline. While the administrators continued to debate, one could not alter the fact that working the colony was a task beyond the convicts alone. Contractual labour While officials such as F.J. Mouat, Inspector of Jails for Lower Provinces, had suggested the use of free labour since the initial months of the Settlement,83 the first time the Settlement actually experimented with free labour was in the early 1860s. The then Superintendent, J.C. Haughton, engaged Chinese workers to collect edible birds’ nests. Haughton wanted a monopoly over the birds’ nest trade and hoped that the revenue from this would be an asset in the budget.84 From the time of Haughton’s tenure, Chinese labour became an important resource on the Islands, especially as carpenters.85 However, Chinese labour had never come cheaply to the Settlement. The convict labour was valued at four annas a day86; Chinese carpenters got as much as two rupees a day.87 Besides, the Chinese were also involved in various kinds of activities outlawed by the penal administration. Opium ‘smuggling’ was their forte and Superintendent Haughton once complained that he had to allow private trade in opium otherwise Chinese labourers would leave the place. He fumed that ‘gambling too, on their part, I have had to wink at’. The reason he had to put up with these excesses was that the labour of the Chinese

124 Imperial Andamans

workmen as smiths and carpenters was crucial for the rapid construction of barracks. And the bureaucrats in India were very keen to see their speedy completion. Superintendent Haughton therefore had the choice of either ‘letting them alone in these matters, or losing them’.88 The Settlement needed skilled smiths and carpenters but the main demand for non-convict labour was for forest work. For the first two decades the Settlement remained oblivious to the commercial potential of the Andaman forests and the Forest Department, with a sawmill on Chatham Island, mainly fulfilled the timber requirements of the Settlement and undertook forest clearings.89 In the 1880s, with the recognition of the value of the padouk timber in the international market, the Forest Department acquired a firmer footing.90 As the demand for Andaman timber for export to gun-carriage factories, arsenals, gymnasia and shipbuilding yards expanded so did the labour demand of the Forest Department.91 Until then the department had functioned with a small establishment of convict jemadars and tindals who served in the place of rangers and foresters whose numbers now fell woefully short.92 The shortage of labour for working the forests in turn pushed up the cost of extraction of timber.93 Further vitiating the situation was the diversion of the labour force for construction of the Cellular Jail in the late 1890s. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Settlement finally employed 400 coolies, mostly ‘Mundas’ recruited in Ranchi in eastern India on an agreement of six months, and some from Burma. The free labour was engaged in clearing sites, filling up swamps, and constructing jetties, huts and embankments.94 What the officials understood by ‘free’ labour was labour which was engaged through a civil contract. Colonial administrators were opposed to extending the indenture system to the Andamans. They were of the opinion that with suitable wages and proper accommodation there would be ‘no serious difficulty in securing an adequate supply of free labour from Madras’. The engagement of the labour, therefore, was to be a matter of civil contract, which was enforceable under section 492 of the Indian Penal Code. As one official in 1910 stated: This section gives the magistrate, who would be the civil officer in charge of the settlement, full discretion as to what is reasonable and proper service under the contract and as to whether the labourer’s refusal to perform it is reasonable. This is all that is required for the control of the labour force. […] The necessary provisions for housing, supply of food, water supply, etc., should be quite simple. They should lay down that all orders of the civil officer shall be carried out, subject to appeal to the Chief Commissioner.95 Under the contract, the labourer was ‘free not only in the sense that the recruitment of the coolie and his transport should be restricted; but also in the sense that he should be placed under no penal contract, so that his

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 125

freedom of movement backwards and forwards … might not be interfered with’. This experiment of using free contract labour met with partial success and there remained considerable anxiety and unease regarding working the ‘free’ labour and the convicts together became a thorny administrative issue in the early decades of twentieth century. The local-borns Another social group pressed into the service of the Settlement administration were the convict children, the local-borns. It was not the convictparents but the local-borns who were ‘natural’ civilians of the island colony. The Andamans were their home, their mulk. The administration was not unaware of this rather strange situation. The Settlement administration foresaw using the local-born as overseers, police, clerks and staff for various other subordinate services. The Settlement officers wanted to create ‘an indigenous class of skilled men to select from who would not be eager to leave the Settlement’.96 The Campbell Report of 1874 made a clear statement of these intentions: Now, considering that these children, born and bred in the Settlement, are never likely to move to the homes of their fathers, but must eventually form a community of which the members should stand by and help one another, I think it very desirable that they should be united by a common language, and that one language should be fixed, to be in future that of the free part of the Settlement. […] These children, when they grow up, will supply servants to the Government, and be associated in the management of the convicts.97 As a result, from the beginning the Settlement administrators made concerted efforts to provide education to the local-borns. They saw education as the only way to save the convict progeny ‘from the fate of their parents, so far as education (the best preventive of crime) can accomplish such an end, is an object well deserving the sympathies of all connected with the Settlement’.98 For the purpose, they formed a school committee in the early 1870s, which assiduously went about the task of establishing schools and encouraging convict children to acquire education. The education for children between six and twelve years became compulsory. In 1872 arrangements were made for the children of the Settlement to be educated in elementary schools, in their own language. Schools were set up at Ross, Chatham, Haddo, Viper and Port Mouat stations, with teachers instructing students in their own tongue or English, if they so wished. The teachers in these schools were all convicts. They were taught to read and write and do a little arithmetic. The textbooks for the schools were obtained from the curator of school books, North Western provinces, and those for English were procured from Calcutta booksellers.99 In 1875, Devnagiri (the script used for writing Hindi) classes were

126 Imperial Andamans

discontinued because Urdu teachers were easily available, and English and Urdu became the languages of instruction.100 The administrators also started various scholarship schemes and vocational training programmes, especially in those areas where the Settlement needed skilled workmen. For instance, in 1909 two students from Port Blair were given stipends to undergo a course of veterinary training in India.101 And, in 1911 local-born boys were apprenticed as lascars and stokers for the government launches, with a view to employing them in the Marine Department as Syrangs or Engine Drivers.102 Training the local youth as teaching staff was also a high priority.103 In addition, the girls received tailoring lessons and the boys learnt welding and other work.104 In spite of the Settlement administration’s best efforts the life of the localborns was not without tribulations. For instance, the inability of the administration to secure services of professional teachers because of the low scale of salaries fixed by the Government of India hindered their educational progress.105 The avenues for employment were also extremely limited. About one-third of them were in government employ and the majority worked as cultivators, although it was not a very profitable enterprise for the local-born (see Tables 5.9 and 5.10).106 The land tenure system was also unfavourably balanced and led to economic and financial losses for the community.107 Table 5.9

Local-born population (1801–1901)108

1881 1891 1901

Table 5.10

Male

Female

Total

488 1,288 1,168

266 211 862

754 1,499 2,030

Occupation of the local-born adults in 1901109

Occupation Govt. Service Trade and Shop Agriculture Pvt. Service Total

Nos. engaged

No. of dependents

Total

84 13 149 33 279

76 21 190 36 323

160 34 339 69 602

All the same, there was little in the life of the local-born community which did not measure up to the lives of free people on the Indian subcontinent. Their lingua-franca was a pidginized Hindustani with grammatical lenience to accommodate the linguistic idiosyncrasies of a variety of non-Hindi speakers.110 Most of the north Indian Hindu festivals such as

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 127

holi, diwali, and dusshera along with Id and Christmas were celebrated with great gusto. The creative life of the children revolved around theatre, dramatics and a number of sports competitions.111

Working the ‘savage’ The Andamanese lived scattered all over the Islands and their settlements consisted of no more than a few hundred people at a time. Unlike West Africans or Maoris their material culture was not at a stage where they could readily be engaged in the service of the Empire as subordinate plantation workers, foresters or boatmen. All the same, the ones whom the British did manage to befriend were gradually roped into colonial service. At the time of the Andamans’ colonization, no one could have guessed the role that the Andamanese later came to play in the colony’s labour regime.112 The Andamanse served the colonial regime as trackers, guides and bush police. The Andamanese trackers assisted the Settlement officials in finding out about the various rivers and creeks around the islands. Several place names which are used today in the Andamans come from the appellations employed by the Andamanese trackers. The Andamanese had their own names for the various areas, water bodies, creeks, harbours and islands.113 The British officers received assistance from the Andamanese, who accompanied them into the Islands’ inaccessible interiors, on topographical expeditions and as part of reconnaissance parties. They helped the British to map, survey and gain knowledge of the Islands. J.N. Homfray described one such expedition to the island of Little Andaman, in which the reconnaissance party received advance information from the accompanying Andamanese of a Jarawa attack: ‘Four of my Andamanese swam on shore at my wish to give such assistance as they could to the explorers; they helped so far as to watch the movements of these Jurrawallahs, and warned the explorers of the approach of them, thereby preventing a surprise.’114 By 1865, the Andamanese began to help the Settlement in capturing runaway convicts and providing intelligence of intended escapes. The Andamanese who visited the Settlement in order to obtain food were lured with promises of bigger quantities if they joined the ‘recapture expeditions’: The Burmese are those only who have the idea and pluck to try escape but even with them, although friendly to the Andamanese, information of intended getting away could always be obtained from the Andamanese if we feed them in return for it, as we at present do.115 Finally in June 1869, Superintendent Colonel Man organized a party of eleven Andamanese boys who assisted the convict police peons in apprehending runaways.116 The Andamanese also supplied the Settlement with other items such as bamboo mats, turtle shells, dugong carcasses, honey117 and

128 Imperial Andamans

Ledu shell (Turbo Obarius), whose trial shipments were sent to Colombo and Germany because of its mother of pearl’s commercial value.118 While the Andamanese were extremely helpful in a variety of tasks, there was one for which their presence rendered the undertaking almost impossible to accomplish – this was census enumeration, which began in the late 1890s. The counting of the number of Andamanese inhabiting the Islands was not an easy task because of the non-contiguous nature of their encampments. The high degree of excitement amongst the Andamanese compounded the task’s difficulty. Canoe-loads of Andamanese would follow the census officers from anchorage to anchorage and repeatedly give the names of the same persons. The census officers had to constantly humour and cajole the Andamanese to part with their information. Once the officers became conscious of the rather comical situation, they began to keep dense notes of physical characteristics, especially the facial features, of the Andamanese they enumerated. R.C. Temple, in his private papers, gives an account of their exasperating behaviour: Anything they fancied was got up on a spur of the moment and the census tour necessarily to the form of tour of amusement and sport, but in the midst of the fun the census officer was ever present with his note-book and his apparently casual questions.119 Another problem was that none of the Andamanese knew how to count. This made the cross-checking of statistical figures tricky. The officials had to devise a novel method to help the Andamanese count. Four kinds of coloured beads were given to the Andamanese, where each colour represented men, women, boys and girls; and the Andamanese ‘was to transfer from the full to the empty bag a bead, colour by colour, for each person he met’. The experiment met with only partial success but the British nevertheless were able to complete the census enumeration with considerable ease thereafter. The engagement of the Andamanese in different kinds of works in and around the Settlement had its utilitarian advantages but the British also harboured a strong ideological purpose in putting the Andamanese to work. It was a mode of ‘civilizing’ the ‘indolent and lazy savage’. Following the beginning of friendly intercourse with the Andamanese, the British decided to set up special encampments for temporary stay within the penal settlement, called Andaman Homes.120 The Homes were where the Andamanese were supposed to gradually acquire ‘civilizational habits’. As one official suggested: ‘One of the simplest and easiest methods, in my opinion, is to encourage them to live amongst us as civilized beings when by their observation of our usages in labor, the habits of life, they will in time learn the advantages of industry.’121 Thus, the main objective was the gradual acculturation of the Andamanese; to make their subsequent generations forget their hunting-gathering

Labour – The Grand Desideratum 129

culture. The administrators wished to separate the young from the old in order to ‘blot out’ the ‘savage spirit’ which persisted in those of higher ages.122 J.N. Homfray, the first official-in-charge of the Andaman Homes, declared: ‘It will be a great day when they can be induced to settle in a spot by building their own houses, and living by husbandry, when I will be better able to tell what real advancement in civilization they may make’123; and that ‘it has always been my desire to have them possess some property, to get them to settle down in a village, build huts and cultivate the soil’.124 Thus, the primary task for Homfray was to help the Andamanese to lead a ‘settled’ life and acquire ‘knowledge of agriculture’; the ‘protection and security of property; and then religion could follow’.125 Initially the Homes met with limited success. All that they succeeded in doing at first was to remove ‘the misunderstanding that existed amongst them with reference to strangers’,126 and thereby gave them, in the official view, a lesson in ‘the paramount policy of peace’.127 The Andamanese did not stay in the Andaman Homes for long but slowly began to return to them intermittently. Their return to the Homes was interpreted as the success of the British policy of settling and controlling them. J.N. Homfray noted: ‘From their carelessness or laziness in not taking the trouble they generally have to search for food, and were glad to come back to our hospitality.’ He felt that this was a sign of a time when ‘they would be entirely under our power and control, and will willingly give themselves over to our charge and management, when we shall be able to do almost anything with them; however, this will take, I should say, a couple of years to effectually carry out’. In the meantime, he proposed that the British should ‘continue to encourage them to be with us, feeding and treating them with all reasonable care & kindness’.128 The first step in the direction of settled life was to acquaint the Andamanese with value of labour. According to Settlement officers, instilling this core civilizational value would help the Andamanese to ‘develop capabilities which in the progress and extension of the colony will be of highest value’.129 Appreciation of the value of labour was to be instilled by inculcating in the Andamanese a sense of the value of money. According to Settlement officers, the Andamanese could appreciate money only when they desired it for fulfilling habits such tobacco smoking. As one of the officials stated in 1865: This tobacco would eventually be a good article to barter with, as the habit of using it will grow so on them they will not be able to do without it, and in a measure be forced to labor in some way or other to obtain money to purchase such a luxury which will then become almost a necessity of life for them. As it is, already there are demonstrations of a willingness to work for tobacco before almost anything.

130 Imperial Andamans

On several occasions I have got them to split bamboos that they have cut and brought in themselves from the Jungles, to work into mats.130 And with time the Andamanese did learn to appreciate the value of money: Almost everyday they entice persons to throw pice into the sea for which they dive, using such gifts in purchasing anything in the Bazar that takes their fancy […] I likewise allow them pice to purchase tobacco.131 For all their good intentions and J.N. Homfray’s positive reports the Andaman Homes failed to live up to expectations.132 There were complaints regarding the ‘failure’ to wean away the adults from their roaming life; the refusal of the Andamanese to take to clothing; and the lack of improvement in the ‘morals by association’ with the British.133 The Andamanese resistance to British efforts to ‘civilize’ them began to break down, however, not without transformations in their material culture. Free rations, addiction to smoking, sexual contact with convicts, and the forcible clothing of the Andamanese brought about this change.134 It also took toll on the health of the Andamanese. Many fell prey to syphilis, malaria and pneumonia.135 Most infants would die within six months of their birth. Diseases further legitimized colonial intervention as the infected Andamanese were pursued into the forests in the name of medical supervision.136 Thus were attempts of the British to cloak their discredited political alibi for colonizing the Islands made. By absorbing the Andamanese in the labour regime and inculcating in them a notion of the value of labour and money, the British decimated them, pushing them to the verge of extinction. With time, several conscientious officials who witnessed the destruction of the tribes took it upon themselves to document the lives and mores of the Andamanese. E.H. Man, M.V. Portman and R.C. Temple were the earliest to get down to this task.137 By the early twentieth century, ethnographers and anthropologists such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown also made their way into the Settlement.138 The anthropological enterprise became the handmaiden of empire.139 Thereafter the presence of the Andamanese in the space that the British created came to be defined by their quarantined existence within the confines of academia.

Conclusion By virtue of being administered as a penal settlement the general tenor of the labour regime on the Andamans was indeed demanding and repressive.140 This was reflected in the summary control that the colonial administration exercised as the sole employer of labour. The administrative isolation of the Andamans also left the convicts at the mercy of the local Settlement officials. Moreover, the convicts played no legal role in the

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formulation of the labour exchange relation.141 However, the labour regime on the Andamans possessed elements which at the same time make its categorization as an unremittingly coercive labour regime quite difficult. The use of non-penal principles for extraction of labour was one such feature of the labour system. Occasioned by the disconnect between official policy statements and the actual situation on the ground and contrasting pulls exerted by the economic and penal needs of the colony, the fractures in the colonial edifice opened up spaces for negotiation.142 They also limited and, in some cases, even prevented excesses that the convicts might be subjected to. Thus, the labour regime on the Andamans was like slavery for some convicts but not for all. For some, like Thanesari, it restored everything that they had lost.143 However, even after decades of colonization, the colonial administration was nowhere near realizing its dream of transforming the Andamans into an agricultural colony and a commercial outpost. One of the factors that had led to the colonization of the Andamans as a penal colony in the first place was that they were not located on commercial highways and were out of the way of main shipping lines, and therefore accessible only through statesponsored vessels. With time, this factor amongst others catalyzed the Andamans’ commercial failure. High shipping costs, absence of an international or domestic market and limited technical and infrastructural capacity set the Andamans apart from the contemporary plantation colonies that had wide international markets and export enclaves. The British obtained little in commercial terms from the Andamans. Therefore, unlike island colonies such as Penang, Singapore, Malacca and Mauritius, which had also begun their colonial history as penal settlements but with time had integrated within international trading, economic and military networks as free trading entrepots, and victualling and fuelling depots, the Andamans, instead of progressing to the next stage, continued its historical trajectory as a penal settlement.

6 Myriad Andamans

The Andamans as a lived entity was a chequered, multi-layered and multitextured space. This chapter explores the way the convicts who inhabited the Islands experienced the space. The Andamans were simultaneously a hellish inferno and a paradise-like place for the convicts. Many fell prey to deadly diseases, several escaped never to be heard of again, and many in the face of humiliation and misery lost the will to live and committed suicide. But some were able to rebuild their life and regain what they had lost by virtue of being transported. For them being on the Islands was an opportunity to transform and rebuild their life in new ways. In narrating stories of lives in exile this chapter recounts the hitherto untold story of life on the Andamans as a brutalizing and dehumanizing reality and concurrently a creative and liberative experience. The chapter further looks at how the arrival of Indian revolutionary terrorists on the Andamans from 1910 marked the beginning of the transformation of the Andamans into a nationalist space. The news of their continuous incarceration and illtreatment in the Cellular Jail made its way to the Indian subcontinent. The dust raked up by the nationalist press and the Indian members of the legislative assembly paved way for the eventual co-option of the history of the Andamans into the nationalist hagiography. With time, the apotheosis of the Andamans in the nationalist writings papered over the myriad convict experiences and created a monolithic vision of the Andamans as either Kalapani, the land of darkness and death, or Muktitirth, a land of nationalist pilgrims.

Isles of torture The torturous life of the convict began from the day of sentencing. Between their court trial and their arrival on the Andamans came internment in different jails in India, the infernal wait in convict depots, and a dreadful voyage to the Islands. A Home Department file which records the journey of convicts on board the Roman Emperor in 1858 offers a glimpse into their life.1 The 132

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convicts of the Roman Emperor complained that they had been convicted for a year and were continually transferred from jail to jail, until at last they reached Karachi, a western Indian port in the Arabian Sea, from where they were shipped to the Andamans. The passage from Karachi, round the Indian peninsula into the Bay of Bengal, took about forty days. During the voyage the convicts were kept ‘heavily ironed & looked sickly & feeble, many were much emaciated and had long been suffering from Dysentery and Scurvy, and several were landed in a dying state’. Many of them complained that they had not received sufficient food while on board. And when the captain of the vessel was ‘asked the reason for their wretched and sickly state he said that one half of the men were suffering from dysentery when put on board and that he did not expect to have landed so many alive as he did’.2 Although the voyage lasted only for a few days, it was nevertheless an extremely rough and unpleasant experience for the convicts, reducing many of them to a near-death state by the time of disembarkation. The sailing ship Fire Queen that arrived at Port Blair on 29 July 1859 had four out of 150 dead, mainly because of the gruelling voyage. Most suffered from seasickness, wet and exposure, ‘more especially as they were very crowded’: The Fire Queen experienced very severe weather during the voyage, having to lay two or three days, during which the sea was breaking over her, and washing the convicts about the decks … which would not have mattered much in fine weather; but in such very severe weather as we experienced, was no doubt very influential in causing mortality.3 Until as late as 1929 the standard way of transporting the convicts to the Andamans was to have them ‘menacled with their fetters riveted to their legs’.4 In the initial years, the convicts were kept in fetters even after landing.5 A clergyman, travelling on board a ship bound for the Andamans with 180 convicts described the voyage of the convicts from the subcontinent to the Andamans thus: It was a curious sight, and filled us with curious feeling, the arrival of our fellow passengers the convicts. The ominous rattle of their chains – they all wore both leg and arm chains – as they descended one by one to the hold was not a pleasant sound to hear.6 He was also witness to the humiliation of his fellow passengers: Twice daily during the voyage, the prisoners came upon the deck to breathe the balmy breeze and to perform their ablutions, an almost religious duty, in spite of present adverse circumstances both in position

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and surroundings; during that time of relaxation the police fixed bayonets, mounted guard on the poop deck. Not only was the passage to the Andamans a horrible experience for the convicts, their living conditions once they reached their destination, especially in the early decades of the Settlement, were also extremely poor. The convicts worked barefoot in face of wind and tide, burning sun and blustering rain. Their only protection from the elements were blankets, sails or canvases suspended from the trunks of the trees. The tents in which the convicts lived were insufficient protection as they began to rot with constant rain and shredded to pieces in a few days.7 After some time, the Settlement administration built wooden huts for the convicts. These huts were built on a raised platform of open bamboos, with unboarded floors, matted walls with roof made of leaves. There was little protection against the weather. For most of the time, the convicts slept on damp bedding and ate measly rations. In addition, the proximity of the huts to each other and the lack of sanitary arrangements made the barracks unhygienic. The convicts during the night relieved ‘themselves in the drains and space immediately around the barrack’.8 It was only from 1865 that iron-framed barracks were put up for the convicts.9 The most telling account of the utter misery of the convicts in the early years of the Settlement comes from Fazl-i-Haqq-Khairabadi’s (1797–1861) account of his life on the Andamans, entitled Baaghi Hindustan.10 Khairabadi’s text is an extremely valuable historical source as it was written in captivity.11 This is what Khairabadi had to say of his life on the Andamans: This situation is so horrendous that even the waves and the sea dread it. Its [the place’s] breath is like poison. Even its goodness is more harmful than poison and its food is more bitter than a bitter medicine. The water is also more harmful than poison. Its skies are pouring clouds and the clouds are flooding with misery. The ground is diseased like chickenpox and the wind is the wind of catastrophes. The houses are full of hasheesh and fraudsters. And the roof is still soft and porous and drips the way His eyes are dripping. The air is rotting, full of disease. The medicine is scarce and diseases and misery are spreading.12 So continues Khairabadi’s lament. The only succour for the tortured soul lay in invoking the name of Allah, the merciful, the protector and the rescuer. Khairabadi’s rescue came in the form of death in February 1861. The officials were fully cognizant of the privations that the convicts suffered, much beyond what their crimes and the sentences required. Coupled with these physical hardships were the mental agony and humiliation that the convicts suffered. The officials, however, were in no better position to rescue them, because death and disease knew no racial or social distinction

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and claimed its fair share of the British officials. In the first year, one-fourth of the convicts died of ill-health. As one official stated in report of 1859: The Amlah or a Judge or magistrate’s Court, the native Commissioned Officer of a Corps of the line, a Bunneah or Zemindar forced to take a faurah and pick-axe in hand, and fell trees, dig trenches, row boats, build jetties, or saw timber in all the states of weather, was a novelty of position which could not fail to tell on the health.13 While malaria was the main reason for the high mortality rate, in the view of officials, the depressing effect of banishment, bad weather and hard labour also made a fair contribution.14 It was clear that the inability of the Settlement administration to provide sufficient clothing, proper shelter, and medical attention worsened the situation, adding to the toll.15 Many whom the weather and hard labour spared fell to penal excesses. Working in a chain-gang, reduction of diet, withdrawal of privileges, tonsuring, wearing gunny clothing and other sundry punishments aimed at inflicting either disgrace or physical pain were the different ways in which the Settlement officials sought to keep the convicts under control. Flogging was one such punishment that the officials frequently resorted to. It simultaneously inflicted immense physical pain and carried the shame of having to bare one’s buttocks in public. As one Settlement official claimed, even a death sentence was not as strong a deterrent as flogging because the convicts dreaded ‘the disgrace of a public flogging, administered as it is in this Settlement, on the buttocks’.16 For the ‘badly conducted’ and ‘idle’ female convicts there was tonsuring and hair cropping, which were ‘reserved as the severest punishment of all’.17 The loss of hair for the female convicts, besides hurting their vanity, carried in the Indian context the association of widowhood and social ostracism.18 As a punishment, the Settlement administration also deprived those convicts who had managed to rise in the ranks and had achieved a certain degree of social standing of the privileges they had earned. Thus, life on the Islands, in spite of holding out promise, overstretched the limits of endurance of some. Convicts responded to the attenuating circumstances differently. Some escaped; some continued with their existence with a sullen resignation; and others simply gave up without a fight. One such convict was Mundraj Gir, No. 901, admitted in 1858 to the Settlement hospital with an ulcer of the leg. On one morning, he left the hospital and walked into the sea, thereafter ‘several convicts endeavoured to induce him to return to the shore, and threw in pieces of wood to aid him; but he refused to avail himself of them […] The deceased was carried out into deep water, soon sank, and disappeared. No cause is known for the act’.19 The final report of the Superintendent was non-committal with regard to the reasons behind the suicide of the convict. However, it took little

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imagination to comprehend the hopelessness and extreme duress that led the convict towards his ultimate destination. Mundraj Gir was hardly the only convict who opted for this kind of solution.

A pregnable fortress The British had thought the Andamans to be an impregnable fortress. They saw the ravenous sea surrounding the Islands and the dense jungles deterring convict escapes. But for the convicts, the sea and the jungles were ecological niches that made escape possible. Although escape from the Islands was certainly not easy, several convicts attempted it successfully. The ones who did not at least contemplated it or lived with the dream of making an escape one day. Escape for many was a source of comfort, a hope, a succour in times of depression and frustration. The Settlement opened in March 1858 and within fifty-one days nearly 228 convicts had escaped.20 The first major collective escape occurred within the first thirty days when six convicts from Phoenix Bay ran away on 17 April 1858. On 22 April, eighty-six from Phoenix Bay and seventeen from Chatham made a getaway. They took with them bedding, a supply of food, tools and muskets. Superintendent J.P. Walker was quick to realize that ‘no amount of guarding can prevent convicts employed in clearing jungle on the mainland from escaping’.21 Over time statistics showed that the newly arrived convicts were most likely to attempt escape.22 Most of the convicts were convinced that there was a road to Hindustan, or India, from the main island of the Middle Andamans, and that the fugitives who did not return had found it.23 As one captured escapee convict, Doolee, No. 3271, stated: About three of four days previous to my running away, Koondun convict told me that about eighteen months ago his … uncle had escaped and reached Hindoostan in safety – that he also knew the road to the continent of India and for me to make my escape with him.24 Besides the mistaken belief that a road connected the Andamans to the Indian subcontinent, the convicts in the early years harboured an unshakeable conviction that there lived a Rajah, a king, who governed the Islands, that the escaping convicts could offer their services to him, and that with enough forces, the Rajah would wage a war against the British and free the rest of the captive convicts.25 Thus, apocryphal stories prevailed amongst the convicts who sought to free themselves from the British jail. Returning to barracks at mealtimes or the point just before the lock-up were the times when the convicts attempted escape. According to officials, at these two points of the day prisoners tended to wander and then, ‘tempted by the sight of the jungle’ and once conveniently out of the petty

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officers’ gaze, absconded. There were also cases of planned escapes by groups of convicts into the jungles.26 A Home Department file of 1904 narrates such a case of a daring escape ‘made by a band of eleven Punjabi convicts, six of whom belonged to the notorious gang of Patiala dacoits. They escaped from three different stations on 4 December 1904, and joining forces made their way to the dense jungle near the middle straits where they lay hidden for a week. They then raided a village of self-supporters, wounding one of them severely. This disclosed their whereabouts and enabled a party of Andamanese to track and overtake them. The convicts offered resistance and one of them was killed and two wounded before they fled.’27 As the example of the Patiala dacoits shows there were some instances of a planned escape into the jungle, but such bids, in comparison to escape by sea, were rarely successful. The other form of planned departure, the ‘boat escapes’ were preferred by the seafaring Burmese and Chinese convicts, who had easy access to means of escape.28 Interestingly, several convicts who escaped into the jungle returned by themselves to the Settlement, ‘finding it impossible to withstand the savages or to exist in a jungle’. Most officials in India were of the opinion that in escaping ‘the men did but yield to a natural impulse, to which it is impossible to attach moral guilt’.29 The officials, after listening to reasons put forth by the returned convicts, felt that most escapes into the jungle, unlike the ones via the boats, were spontaneous and not pre-planned. For instance, one of them stated that ‘he was enticed away by one of the convict gardeners, and did not know that he was doing wrong’. Another confessed that he ‘was tipsy from something the gardener had given him’30 and his mate stated that ‘he escaped because he wished to get back to his country’.31 One of them declared that ‘he did not like his work’32 and another professed that ‘he never attempted to escape but he fell asleep’.33 And one of them blamed the hospital food for his escape claiming that as ‘he could not eat the hospital food he slipped away, and hid in the female hospital cook shed’.34 There were instances of some convicts who successfully reached the Indian subcontinent and even lived to tell their tales of bravado. There is one such story of a convict who worked as a convict lascar on one of the boats in 1859 that travelled up and down the sea to the other islands to bring wood, rice and paddy. One day the toledar, the convict petty officer, along with thirteen men decided to escape. The convict at the time of escaping hesitated because not only was his petition for release pending with the Superintendent, but all the money that he had earned would be left behind. However, persuaded by others he decided to escape. After about eight days of travel at sea the fugitives sighted land.35 This convict reached his father’s house in his village, where he had the misfortune of being recaptured. Following his re-arrest he provided a detailed statement of his escape and his successful arrival on the mainland.

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Another such account of supposed successful bid came from a Meena dacoit interned in a Delhi jail in the early 1870s whose account was provided by a warder: On my lately having occasion at Delhi to send to the Andamans, in conformity with the original warrant in his case, a Meena dacoit leader who had escaped from our custody after he had been admitted as an approver, and who thereby forfeited the exemption from transportation which had been promised to him in consideration of his services accordingly, and on my declining to overlook the offence, he exclaimed ‘what place in this which you, sahib logue, have made for us, this “kalapanee”, as if we were unable to escape from there too.’ Upon my hearing this, I at once directed a Detective to proceed in disguise in the train in which the prisoner was to be conveyed that night to Agra Prison. He informed me on his return that the prisoner declared that these escapes were looked upon as possible by his people under certain precautions, and were affected in open boats from the less supervised islands of the Settlement.36 Thus, the desire for escape and attempts to escape, planned or on impulse, were very much a defining characteristic of life as a convict on the Islands. Escape, besides being a simple act of resistance, was also a form of a convict’s self-expression which structured the life of the convict into binary opposites – one as the state of bondage, consisting of a life of hard labour, repentance and misery; and the other as the state of freedom and happiness. The physical and psychological bridge between the two was ‘escape’. Thus escape became the creative moment where the convict sought to take his fate and life into his own hands and transform it. And in this moment the Andamans became a fragile and vulnerable citadel – a pregnable fortress – from within.

A haven for illicit activities As with every prison, the Andamans for some of the convicts was a paradise for bootlegging, smuggling, counterfeiting and financial swindling.37 Owing to the shortage of literate assistants, most of the Settlement’s munshis, or account keepers, were convicts who maintained records in English and Urdu. This gave the convict munshis many opportunities for obtaining unauthorized indulgences and committing fraud and forgery.38 The most famous among the many noted cases was of the embezzlement of the princely sum of 30,000 rupees at the Port Blair treasury in 1910. A European Treasury Officer, E.J. Vint, along with a convict babu (or clerk or junior official), K.C. Bose, had planned the intrigue. On exposure of their misdeeds, Vint committed suicide, and Bose was arrested for serving as an accomplice in the unlawful activity.39 The convicts employed by the government as babus were not supposed to do business. However, illicit business transactions took place on a regular

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basis in the Settlement, much to the chagrin of the officials. Mohammad Jafar Thanesari’s memoir recounts the way he himself indulged in a bit of ‘tijarat’, trading, on the side while working as a clerk in the Chief Commissioner’s office. On the death of his local convict wife, he sold all her jewellery for 300 rupees. He sent this money to his wife in India, requesting her to send him some footwear purchased at a low price from India and which he hoped to sell in Port Blair as most Indian goods commanded twice to three times their actual price on the Andamans. However, by the time it arrived on the Andamans most of his consignment of footwear had rotted. As a result, Thanesari, much to his dismay, earned only 150 rupees, half the amount he had invested. Undeterred, with 150 rupees he tried again to obtain goods from India. This time it was through a Bengali trader who purchased the goods on Thanesari’s behalf under a false name. Unfortunately for the Bengali trader, he was caught. The hundi, or bill of exchange, found on the person of the detained merchant was written in Thanesari’s handwriting. This did it for him and thus ended Thanesari’s star-crossed attempts at doing business.40 Commerce in opium was also rife in the Settlement. The convicts were the main consumers of opium. In order to control opium ‘smuggling’, the Settlement administration licensed its sale. Two licensed shops for opium were set up in the Settlement and the Superintendent was empowered to rescind the licence of the shops. Stringent rules were laid down to prevent the sale of opium to convicts and its retail price was kept as high as silver.41 The exceptionally high price that opium commanded on the black market rendered it impervious to administrative control. According to official reports, the majority of the convict population flouted official rules and favoured the smuggling and black marketing of opium.42 The presence of a free population, in the view of the Settlement officers, made the situation worse because they encouraged the smuggling of alcohol and opium as well as gambling in the Settlement. It was mostly the free Chinese labourers who supposedly were engaged in smuggling and gambling. Further, until the time the convicts had permission to trade with India it was almost impossible for the officials to suppress unwanted communication and exchange. Superintendent D.M. Stewart, in an official correspondence, admitted to the existence of such an exchange: I have reason to know that communications are now regularly sent to India which do not pass through the Post Office, and I am aware that the Post Office is not infrequently used as a vehicle for such communications owing to the untrustworthiness of the officials employed in it. The total suppression of trade and correspondence with India would in many respects be very desirable.43 Much as Stewart would have liked to see all correspondence between the convicts and their friends suppressed on the grounds of administrative

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convenience, it seemed easier and much more productive to remove the defects of the system than to totally suppress it. He tried, thereafter, to place the convicts’ correspondence under the strictest supervision, and made the dispatch and receipt of letters entirely a matter of indulgence to be secured by good conduct alone, and at fixed intervals only.44 Superintendent Stewart’s life would have been much easier if it was only gambling, opium peddling and bootlegging that he had to deal with. The convicts also openly indulged in forging and hoarding currency. In the early 1860s, a special coinage called ‘Andaman Tokens’ had been created for the convict settlement of Port Blair. Initially the Andaman Tokens were made out of cardboard. Tickets cut out of cardboard with the aid of a punch were duly sealed and signed to serve as a rupee. However, trouble with the card token began at once when some Burmese forgers quickly imitated the mintage. They were soon detected and punished. To prevent forgery, in 1861 the Superintendent imported into the Settlement several thousand copper tokens with the nominal value of one rupee from the Calcutta mint.45 Convicts were paid in these tokens, while government officials and free persons were paid in silver. The aim was to check bribery, hoarding within the Settlement, and ‘to cut off communication with the entire outer world’. According to a rough estimate, on average one lakh specie per year was brought into the Settlement. Some of it went out as payments to Chinese carpenters, free labourers and salaries to military and police officials.’46 The convicts, through bribing and hoarding, managed to destroy this ingenious token system. It was the silver coins that the convicts were after. Unknown to officials most of the silver made its way into the hands of the prisoners. One official report conjectured that had the silver coin never been introduced, all transactions would have taken place only through the medium of copper. This would have saved the government the needless trouble of withdrawal from cash balances in India of the precious silver. The report reckoned that ‘the amount of silver coin now in the Settlement, has swamped all utility expected to be derived from having a distinct coinage, and to remedy the evil would take years’.47 The system in place was undeniably working completely against its proposed objectives. For instance, the captains of vessels could import silver, ‘exchange it for tokens at a profit, and then get drafts on Calcutta or Rangoon either from the treasury or from native convict dealers residing on the Ross Island, some of whom are wealthy men, and have wealthy connections in India’. Hoondies, or bills of exchange, were granted without any limitations, and ‘practically the whole machinery is adrift’. There was little advantage to be gained from the system, was the report’s conclusion.48 The above examples demonstrate that the administration in the Andamans was not in a position to fix the loopholes in the system which the convict population found some way or other of exploiting.49 And the last resort was to allow certain excesses that the administration was not in a position to

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prevent or check. The Andamans thus, for some convicts, was not just a prison but a haven for illicit activities.

A dream-like paradise For many the sojourn on the Andamans was like a pleasant dream. The following is a story of three returnee convicts who furnished glowing descriptions of the time they spent in the Andamans in 1859. The only discomfort that they admitted to having suffered was the separation from their home; otherwise, the life in exile restored to them all that they had lost because of their banishment: Immediately on arriving at the Island, their irons were struck off, and they each got a Rupee, to begin the world on. This kept them for the day or two that was spent in ascertaining what work they were fit for. […] 150 to 200 beeghas of land have been cleared and sown with seed, and vegetables are already growing in a small plot of ground. Dr. Walker told them that at the end of three years the cleared land would be made over to them to cultivate and have as their own. […] The [only] suffering they have is expatriation and separation from their families. […] These men say, the prisoners think that ‘air and water’ are so good, and the prospects of being able to make a comfortable house for the families so good, that they as suggested to them by Dr. Walker, have written to their wives, &c., to join them.50 Similar is Mohammad Zafar Thanesari’s account in which he describes his nearly twenty years’ of residence on the Andamans as ‘khwab-e-khyal’, a pleasant dream.51 He tells how, quite effusively, from the day he arrived on the Andamans to the day of his release, he never once saw the convict barracks, convict clothes or food, and remained on the Andamans as an ‘employee’ of the administration. He bade farewell to the Islands with a handsome sum of money in his pocket and with a wife and a pack of children in tow. There are also instances of convicts who were sentenced to transportation but not sent to the Andamans, owing to physical disability or age, often complaining that their retention in the Indian jails was very unfair.52 Colonel Lyall and Surgeon-Major Lethbridge encountered this phenomenon when they first visited the Alipore Jail and Presidency Jail of Calcutta in 1890, before their official visit to the Andamans.53 In the Alipore Jail they met several prisoners awaiting transportation and this gave them a ‘good opportunity for testing the correctness of the statement that prisoners preferred transportation to Port Blair to imprisonment in Indian jails’. All the convicts who were serving the sentence of transportation in Alipore unanimously expressed their wish to be sent to the Andamans than to be made

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to serve their sentence on the mainland. They also met a recaptured Sikh convict in Alipore who had run away from the Andamans and who was now requesting to be sent back. Even ‘the escaped convict, although he knew stripes and chain gang awaited him at Port Blair, was most urgent in his request to be sent at once to Andamans’. The following report, published in the Pioneer of 18 March 1907, also reaffirms the convicts’ preference for the Andamans over confinement in the Indian jails: One Maiku Pasi of Shahjenhanpur District was convicted on the offence of dacoity. There being several previous convictions against him, he was sentenced to transportation for life and sent to the Central jail in Bareilly. One night he was trying to dig through the bricks in the jail’s wall in order to make escape. On being caught by the convict warder, Maiku used the nail with which he had been digging to attack the convict warder. When caught he stated that he struck the warder with the nail but did not mean to kill him. But in the court he changed his statement. Finally Maiku was sentenced to death by the Sessions judge of Bareilly. He appealed to the High Court. The Judges on the question of what sentence to give to Maiku concurred: ‘In the present case he had received no provocation, and his assault was that of desperate man, disappointed in his attempted escape, and he himself adds, in his not being sent to the Andamans, We have no alternative but to confirm the sentence passed.’54 This newspaper clipping found tucked in a Home, Port Blair file was sent by W.R.H. Merk, the Superintendent of the penal settlement, to Herbert Risley, Secretary to the Government of India. Merk had served as the Superintendent of the penal settlement in the Andamans in 1904, and at the time had vociferously advocated the abolition of the Settlement. However, after a few years of service in India he admitted to having changed his views regarding abolition. He, in fact, became an advocate of the Settlement and forwarded the clipping in the Pioneer to Risley to ‘show the extent men prefer the Andamans to Indian Prison life’. Several convicts were happy on the Andamans because the poor living conditions of the Settlement altered over time. With the clearing of forests, draining of swamps and the growing habitability, living in Port Blair was no longer an unpleasant physical experience. The improvement in living conditions, however, did not entail complete elimination of the constraints and repression associated with a penal colony. For all purposes, the Andamans was still a penal settlement. The convicts were flogged and fettered, worked in chain gangs, spent time in solitary confinement and suffered the loss of privileges for non-compliance with the Settlement rules. Nevertheless, the penal system was certainly not one which subjected the convicts to a regime of unmitigated terror, torture or brutality. And the life in the Settlement, although arduous, did hold out promises, privileges and rewards for the convicts.

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Some convicts enjoyed the life on the Andamans because they were able to use social anonymity in a foreign land to refashion their identities. They could now subvert the traditional social taboos to better their conditions and affect upward caste mobility. Such convicts viewed the Andamans as a liberating space where they were absolved not only of their sins but also of penury, low-caste status and social ignominy. This is evident in the life of a convict named Sheikh Hossein who managed to carve out a life of considerable comfort for himself on the Andamans. An official report of 1874 narrated the following anecdotal account of Sheikh Hossein’s exploits. He landed in Port Blair in February 1862 and immediately on his arrival wrestled himself into the position of a government butcher by declaring himself to be skilled in the said task. In the same year, he contrived the indulgence to marry a female convict of his choice and to reside out of the barracks. The designated woman, because she was to wed, was granted out-of-turn ticket-of-leave by the administration. Following their marriage, the couple settled into domesticity and set up a shop in the Ross Island Bazaar. Catastrophe struck when Sheikh Hossein was relieved from his position of government butcher (the narrative is unclear at this point about what Sheikh Hossein had done in order to lose his job as the butcher). He was now in a quandary as he was not yet eligible for a ticket-of-leave and not being in government employ meant he had to give up his wife and go back to living in the barracks and working in labour gangs. Sheikh Hossein saved the day by getting himself assigned as a servant to his wife, to which she was eligible by virtue of being a ticket-of-leave convict.55 Although Sheikh Hossein was now officially the domestic servant of his wife but he no longer had to go back to the barracks or the labour gang, his life continued as before. Betterment of social status through adoption of a higher caste status was a common tendency amongst the convicts. Superintendent R.C. Temple gave the following account of two convicts of mehter, or sweeping caste, who affected their ‘sanskritization’, or upward caste mobility, at the turn of the century: The tendency is always with them to raise their caste wherever that is possible, and occasionally some crafty scoundrel is convicted of illegitimate association with fellow Hindus in regard to caste. Two Mehtars have recently been detected in successfully managing this: one, a self supporter, masqueraded for years, in his village as a Rajput (Rajbansi), and another who, for years, was cook to a respectable Hindu free family on the ground of being a Brahman. It is also not at all uncommon for low caste ex-convict settlers, with a view to raising their social status, to adopt a mode of dress and life, which would be quite inadmissible if they were to return to their native villages in India. In Port Blair, as elsewhere, the great resort of those desiring to raise their social status is the adoption of Mohammadanism. On the other hand instances have

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occurred, in which men who were not so by caste, have volunteered to become mehtars, debasing their social status in order to adopt what they regard as less arduous mode of life than daily coolly labour.56 Social identities such as caste or religion were not the only ones that convicts sought to refashion. In some cases they even altered their physical identity. The convicts when they arrived in the Andamans carried with them their Huliya, or Descriptive Roll, which consisted of the name of the prisoner, the facial description, the father’s name, religion/caste, place of residence, crime, age, height and the marital status of the convict at the time of conviction.57 In the absence of photographing or fingerprinting, the Descriptive Roll was the only document which could establish the identity of the convict who arrived on the Andamans. The officers on disembarkation points could ensure that the convict getting off the ship was the same one who had been convicted (or was the same person who had boarded the ship) only with the help of the Descriptive Roll. This document, however, was also not entirely dependable. The weight of the convicts for instance often altered from the time it was noted in the Descriptive Roll to when they arrived on the Settlement. Fabrication of other details such as the father’s name, religion/caste, place of residence, crime, present age and the marital status of the convict was also not difficult.58 Amongst all the descriptive details, it was the name of the prisoner (or the ticket number which the convict received following disembarkation on the Islands), the facial description and the height which were the most identifiable markers of the person’s physical identity. Yet, if Table 6.1 is anything to go by it would require a discerning official to distinguish one convict from another. Moreover, many of the facial features such as tattoos, scars and marks were easily manipulated. Alteration of the physical characteristics of a person also occurred in the natural course of aging, thus rendering the Descriptive Roll an ineffectual document in a case of impersonation or the escape of Table 6.1

Example of facial description in Descriptive Rolls59

Name of the convict

Facial description

Chama

Tattooed on the forehead between the eyes, nose and chin, small nose with scar on the right shoulder.

Kithoormony

Tattooed on the forehead, between eyes, high cheekbones, somewhat masculine, punctured on both arms, thick lips.

Chandmony

Tattooed on forehead and left hand, round face and stout.

Ahgun

Tattooed on the nose and chin, and signs of leprosy on the right hand.

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the convict. On many an occasion, when the central or the provincial government gave orders for the release of the convicts, locating the exact person became difficult. This for obvious reasons gave convicts many opportunities to reinvent themselves on this paradise-like place, the Andamans.

The silent isles How did the female convicts experience life on the Andamans? Silences and empty spaces are mostly what one finds when one comes to writing the history of female convict experiences.60 In the archival records, the female convict rarely speaks in her own voice. Male convicts, government scribes, and occasional visitors to the Islands mediate her voice. What comes down to us is a highly misogynist discourse which circumscribed the female convict’s representation by her contemporaries. Nevertheless, the muffled voice can bring to the fore the camouflaged texture of a female convict’s existence, her marginality and her empowerment. The representation of female convicts on the Andamans was quite similar to the depiction of their counterparts in Australia where the male contemporaries saw the women convicts as ‘disobedient, refractory, untalented, abandoned, vice-ridden creatures’ and ‘disreputable whores’.61 The opinion of an official visiting the Andamans in 1921 is illustrative of such a misogynist representation: To my mind the women seemed to me of a more criminal type than the men. They struck me as murderers of the most abandoned nature and obviously addicted to lustful excesses. They are all practically in for murder; but there is a distinction between the murder committed by the woman and the murder committed by the man. The man as a rule has found his wife in adultery and in his immediate passion of jealousy has slain her paramour; but the woman on the contrary has murdered her husband deliberately in conspiracy with her paramour.62 The old Victorian sensibility, woven around particular notions of crime, criminality and womanhood, was central to this representation. It incriminated the convict women for having transgressed the high standards of social and moral behaviour pressed upon them by contemporary social mores. Women as keepers of the social and moral fabric posed a serious threat to society when they violated and transgressed the moral code they were expected to preserve.63 In late nineteenth-century India, the Victorian sensibilities had their parallel in the rising tide of middle-class cultural nationalism that cast the Indian woman in a particular mythical and ahistorical mold, epitomizing immortal values. The cocooning of the women within the domestic womb, recreation of the notions of ‘Sugrahini’,

146 Imperial Andamans

or a good housewife, and ‘Bhadramahila’, or a genteel lady, and the movements for their emancipation, especially of high-caste Hindu women, were tied up with a new nationalist self-definition.64 Female convicts, especially those convicted of murder, in this context were an anomaly, a dangerous exception as they rescinded any claim to respectability, honour, modesty and morality. Most of the convict women who were deported to the Andamans were convicted for murdering husbands, paramours, or infants, which were considered the most heinous of crimes.65 In colonial penology, such crimes deserved the penalty of capital punishment, followed only by permanent incarceration or transportation. Another piece of baggage that the convict women eternally carried with them was their sexuality. Sexual disgracing was a common form of social representation of women. Labelling a woman as a whore was more of a ‘metaphorical device distilling all the features that were the obverse of what became the Victorian feminine ideal’.66 Moreover, when it was the female body in question the discourse centred on ‘community relations and sexual morality’ and the female’s transgression of these relations and morality.67 The notion that female convicts prostituted themselves was a product of the misogynic characterization of convict women which saw a close connection between harlotry and criminality. In India in the nineteenth century, a variety of issues relating to women’s intellect, habits and conduct were being debated. In all these debates the need to monitor women’s sexuality was repeatedly emphasized. In India ‘the proliferation of prostitution in multifarious forms and polymorphic stages of development’ underpinned this debate.68 It was postulated that male relatives had to be appointed as custodians in order to safeguard women from their own failings and to save men from their carnal charms. Challenging this supposition were the female convicts who, similar to their prostitute sisters, were bereft of any guardians; they had only jailers of questionable reputation as their custodians. This instinctively led to their characterization as wanton women of uncontrolled sexuality. This was the general picture of female convicts prevalent in the mainland jails. The ‘fictive rebirth’ of the convict women on the Islands might have held out some hope of deliverance from this misogynic characterization. But the life on the Andamans also cast them in an essentially sexual mould. The transportation of convict women thus made the circle of their social outcasting and misogynic characterization complete. Not only the colonial administrators but also the compatriot convicts saw the female convicts as ‘naturally’ promiscuous and fickle. Amongst the convicts, the female barracks were known as Randi Barrik, or barrack of whores. Thanesari’s memoir, a product of the author’s narcissist selfperception as a god-sent object of female desire, provides insight into the mind of the male convict. He recounts his tenure as a munshi in the Chief Commissioner’s office where women regularly visited him for official work. He describes the way many of them attempted to ‘prey’ upon him and how

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each time it was Allah who rescued him. Thanesari thus viewed the female convicts as non-virginal and sullied. He perceived the lack of shame and timidity in the women as a sign of their guilt and wayward character. Thanesari, in his account, also narrated the way he finally decided to get married in order to lead an honourable life and put an end to the women preying upon him. For obvious reasons, he did not opt for any of the ‘sullied’ inmates of the female jail but tied the knot with a newly arrived Hindu female convict.69 Thanesari’s narrative justifies his marriage to his second wife as Allah’s will, but we know little about the wife’s side of the story, about her perception of the marriage and her religious conversion. Marriage, it seems, endowed female convicts with privileges but also exposed their legal vulnerability. The foremost privilege that marriage bestowed on female convicts was that it gave them the status of a wife – a notion associated with respectability and a status that empowered the female in a variety of ways. Becoming a wife enabled her to enter the moral world and lead a decent life according to the norms and boundaries prescribed by the British on the Islands. Moreover, as a wife, she could choose to remain at home and engage in household chores or continue to labour outside. Thus, marriage for many female convicts became a means of acquiring a limited form of freedom within the confines of the domestic sanctuary. Even the Hindu widows got an opportunity for remarriage when the Settlement officials modified the marriage rules in 1882 to remove legal obstacles to their marriage.70 The convict-wives had considerable freedom in keeping their house, giving birth, and raising their children and generally rebuilding their personal lives, but limited choice in selecting the person they were to live with. Additionally, married female convicts could also hope for an early release. Married women, however heinous their crime, usually received remission when their husbands applied for release. On the other hand, female convicts who did not tie the knot were forced to complete their term of twenty years’ of stay before being released.71 They generally maintained themselves as grinders of grain, vegetable sellers, tailors and poultry rearers.72 Therefore, as Table 6.2 shows many of the females on the Settlement opted to marry. While contracting marriage with male convicts had its advantages, it also opened up avenues for the exploitation of female convicts. The high rate Table 6.2 Age Under 5 5–10 10–15 15–20 20 & over Total

Female marriage statistics (1901)73 Total females 268 201 173 153 1,339 2,134

Married 02 11 46 115 1,025 1,199

Unmarried

Widows

266 190 122 25 22 625

None None 05 13 292 310

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of abandonment of convict-wives on the release of male convicts was one such feature that put the lives of the former in considerable peril. There were other factors that also exposed the female convicts to exploitation. In the case of the female convicts their prior marital status was ascertained before they became eligible for marriage. Female convicts whose husbands were alive in India had the most difficult time.74 The Settlement officials refused to sanction the marriage of such convict women based on their understanding of Hindu traditions which had no provision for divorce or annulment of marriage. Repudiation by the original marriage partner, therefore, was crucial if married female convicts were to be considered for remarriage in the Andamans. However, the matter was at times further complicated if the husband back home refused to repudiate the wife but sanctioned her remarriage. For instance, in 1891 a resident of Gurdaspur belonging to the ‘Changa’ caste created a legal dilemma by stating that, ‘I have no objection to my wife marrying again. She may do so if she likes, but as long as I live I will not divorce her’. Another such case is narrated by Mrs Burt, the wife of a young officer who lived in the Andamans in 1933. She tells the following story of a female convict whose husband back home refused to repudiate her, preventing her marriage with her lover in the Andamans: An ayah, a young, good looking, quiet and respectable woman, had attempted to poison her husband. […] should have called it justifiable homicide, as I believe he treated her abominably! But she was sent to the Andamans for life or a long period of years. Unfortunately she and a fine young native in the Police, fell in love with one another and applied for permission to marry, which they are allowed to do if the first husband will divorce his wife. This the man, out of pure spite, refused to do. Consequently this wretched woman had to return to the jail for life as she was going to have a baby, and no convict is allowed to go out as a servant again if she has once misbehaved herself; – though according to her native idea she had not been in any way to blame.75 Such tangles were ever-present in the Settlement and the Settlement officers were continually forced to jog their wits to find suitable solutions.76 Not in every region of India were the local attitudes to marriage and remarriage the same. But when women convicts came from regions where sanctions against divorce and remarriage did exist, Settlement officials were at a loss for possible solutions to the legal tangles that the question of remarriage raised. Another important issue related to the female convicts in the Andamans was their limited numbers. At a given time the male convicts outnumbered them ten to one.77 According to Satadru Sen, this ‘scarcity’ empowered the females and gave them a capacity to bargain.78 This, in his view, was mainly in the form of choosing husbands from among the male prisoners; not being subjected to hard labour; spending fewer years in the lower grades; and having the choice to refuse the pressure of voluntary transportation.

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While Sen makes a cogent case for female empowerment based on their numerical scarcity, it appears from the Andaman Manual that the privileges which Sen enumerates as being occasioned by the numerical scarcity were actually instituted by the colonial administration to facilitate the early marriage of female convicts to the male convicts. The female convicts certainly did have a right to refuse contracting marriage if they did not wish to ‘venture on the life which local matrimony’ offered.79 Also, ‘The women knowing they were in minority, could afford to be particular, and asked searching questions about the man’s income, what he had saved, before deciding one way or the other.’80 While this quote is an example of the choice available to women in refusing or accepting a particular person as their partner, nonetheless this choice was never absolute because the male convicts also exercised their right to refuse or accept. Neither did the convict women always have a choice in their deportation. There were numerous cases of indiscriminate transportation of female convicts to the Andamans. Often young girls were sent to Port Blair for crimes that did not merit the sentence of transportation. One such case was of Thanesari’s second wife who had been accused of causing the death of a playmate by pushing her into a well. The playmate did not ultimately die but Thanesari’s wife, a child at the time, was

Figure 6.1 Burmese

Group of female convicts. The one on the right is the head woman and a

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

150 Imperial Andamans

Figure 6.2

Female convicts, one on the right spinning a wheel

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

not acquitted.81 Similar was the case of an eleven-year-old girl called Jhaboo Moosalmanee (daughter of one Sheikh Muthi) from Birbhum, accused of pushing her sister into a well. She too was sent to the Andamans to atone for her crime.82 Therefore, to relate the experience of empowerment, choice or victimization of female convicts merely to their numerical status, or the lack of it, is to overlook the variety of other factors that impinged upon their experience. It seems the experience of living on the Andamans for the female convicts was generally a mixed one and defies the characterization of convict women as ‘victims’ or ‘damned whores’.83 Dichotomous categories fail to capture the variegated character of their experience in the Andamans. Freedom in one realm of their lives did not guard against servility and exploitation in another; and, similarly, agency in a certain sphere did not prevent victimization in others.

The Andamans are my home? The British had to settle the Andamans through in-migration of subject populations because, except for the few thousand native Andamanese who

Myriad Andamans 151

Figure 6.3

Children of female convicts

(Source: Photo 252, Wilkinson Collection, India Office Records, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London).

inhabited the Islands, they were bereft of any human population. Since the redeemed convict was to be the future colonist, his redemption and the development of the colony had to go hand in hand. The lot of the convict in the Andamans was a bit like that of Irish convicts in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. The transported convict who arrived on the Andamans was thus simultaneously a criminal who was serving his sentence and the kernel of a future agricultural society. Some released convicts chose not to settle on the Andamans, putting the imagined future of the Islands at risk; and yet some chose to stay. The Settlement had begun releasing convicts as early as August 1858.84 In the early years, the system of pardon and release was seen as necessary for the security and health of the Settlement. As Sir Henry Norman, who visited the Andamans in 1874,85 stated in his report, ‘the hope of pardon and return to India, however distant, is one of the strongest inducements to good conduct’.86 Until the 1870s, officials did not resent convicts’ return because there was still indecision with regard to the permanency of the Settlement. Moreover, in the wake of the Revolt of 1857, convicts were still arriving on the Andamans in droves. By the early 1870s, as the Settlement gained firmer footing, a convict’s decision to settle down

152 Imperial Andamans

on the Andamans began to acquire significance for the sustainability of the colony. For all convicts, release from penal life in the Andamans was indeed the cherished dream. And undeniably, the day of release was a litmus test of sorts for the Andamans’ system. On this day, the convicts exercised their personal choice: whether to settle on the Islands or return to the home country. Unlike Australia, where over 95 per cent of the ‘convicts never saw Britain or Ireland again’,87 the number of convicts in the Andamans who went home was high (Table 6.3). Table 6.3 Statement showing the number of married convicts who have either left or been permitted to remain in the settlement as ex-convicts88 Year 1883–84 1884–85 1885–86 1886–87 1887–88 1888–89 1889–90 1890–91 1891–92 1892–93 1893–94 1894–95 1895–96 1896–97 1897–98 1898–99 1899–00 1900–01 1901–02 1902–03 1903–04 1904–05 1905–06 1906–07 1907–08 1908–09 1909–10 1910–11 1911–12 1912–13 1913–14 1914–15 Total

Couples who have left

Couples who applied and were permitted to remain

2 4 5 30 12 24 40 31 29 30 54 33 27 20 35 14 24 12 22 41 17 9 19 28 23 42 30 21 25 23 21 8

1 1 3 13 16 24 22 29 36 18 30 17 8 21 36 11 8 6 12 10 6 7 5 7 4 18 14 15 27 17 5 11

755

458

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The records show that some 62 per cent of married couples elected to leave the Settlement on release.89 Release for many meant not just giving up shackles, convict clothing or penal life but also all the relationships acquired while living out the sentences. The majority of the released married couples subsequently agreed to separate, or the women were deserted.90 Many convicts chose to return without their convict wives. There were exceptions, such as Mohammad Jafar Thanesari, who left the shores of the Andamans with the ‘wife’ and the children he had sired in the Andamans. Why did some convicts leave behind their life in the Andamans – their spouse, children and land that they had acquired with such hard labour? The answer lies in the convict’s desire for a closure of the convict identity, the impermanence of locally acquired social relations and livelihood insecurities on the Islands. Matrimony and domesticity in the island colony did not exonerate the convict of his criminal status. The local marriage was one contracted without any rituals and formal rites. No community members, friends, relatives or family elders were witness to the union. No ‘bureaucracies of labour’ such as ‘astrologers, bards, genealogists, barbers’ who provided continuities of family histories played a role in sanctification of this marriage or ‘reshaping the ideologies and practices of family formation’.91 Therefore, such a union contracted by putting a thumb impression on a parchment in front of a ‘Gora Sahib’ did not hold the social authenticity or the authority that marriage in one’s home country did. Traditions and norms did not bind the social space in a foreign land. The ghost of the ‘original’ family lurked. Anonymity, exigency, expediency and uncertainty shaped life in the Andamans. For most convicts, local marriages were not as sacrosanct as the ones they had in their homes and within their own social groups. These marriages were treated as a bonus that they received for their services, as an impermanent arrangement, valid until they returned to their normal lives in India. For the Settlement officials, enforcing monogamy, fidelity and self-reliance amongst the convicts was not easy because the convicts did not share the official view of local marriages as formal and permanent.92 One must note, however, that not all released convicts abandoned their wives. Those who decided not to return did see their local marriages as permanent. But for those who decided to return, it was the marital union sanctified by proper sacraments in the home country that was generally privileged.93 The insecurities with regard to livelihood was also a significant push factor. An inquiry in 1915 showed that 60 per cent of the self-supporters were in debt.94 The self-supporters were permitted to follow their own trades, which did not earn enough for them to send for their wives from India. A self-supporter obtaining a ticket as a cultivator had the option of taking a grant of rent-free cleared land for a year with free rations for eight months and free implements, or of attending a weekly auction at which rights in

154 Imperial Andamans

holdings were sold by the occupants. The market in licences, a result of the auction system, led to the creation of non-cultivating licensees. The convicts on taking self-supporters’ tickets had to take a loan from these noncultivating licensees in order to acquire land. Nearly all self-supporters found it preferable to become tenants. Since the government, for the purpose of dividing up the land, did not undertake any cadastral surveys,95 neither was there a check on the amount of land allotted, nor proper supervision over the management of the villages. Creditors obtained work without trouble from their debtors and some self-supporters, the Settlement officials believed, prostituted their locally married wives in return for labour. The non-cultivating self-supporters, especially the ones working as artificers or government clerks, were also not very well off. The provision of married quarters and the general moral condition of the villages prevented them from importing their wives.96 This system had been further degraded by the permission granted by the Government of India in 1908 for the released convicts to settle down in self-supporter villages. These freed persons gradually acquired the best lands, and not being bound by the same laws and restrictions as the self-supporters, were able to oppress the latter. This situation made life on the Andamans unattractive for self-supporters, many of whom on release chose to return to their home country. The push factors which made the released convict opt for leaving the Andamans were also the biggest pull factors. There were certain aspects of life on the Andamans that did hold out a promise of a better and more secure future than return to the home country. There were several convicts who were able to better their social and material circumstances on the Andamans in comparison to what they had back home. All convicts had the privilege of acquiring property and income even though it may not have been as stable or secure at all times. Most Settlement officials had no objection to convicts amassing personal property and possessing the ordinary rights of free men once they became self-supporters.97 Officials felt that the convict who had propertied interests would work not only for his redemption but for the welfare of the Settlement. The virtue of property was that it allowed the convict to rebuild his lost social status and served, at least the Settlement officials hoped that it did, as a crucial instrument in ensuring the convict’s political acquiescence. Under this scheme the convict could acquire personal property but not hereditary property rights. Nor did he have a legal claim to the property on which he worked as a self-supporter but the convict who married in the Andamans had, in legal terms, contracted obligations and therefore possessed certain hereditary rights. The general practice, until the 1880s, was that on the death of a convict any property found in his possession was sold and the money given over to the government; and neither claims of relatives of the convict in the Settlement nor of the ones residing in India were entertained.98 However, it was seen that in many cases these rules pauperized the families of the deceased convict or

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the orphaned children became a liability for the government.99 By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Government decided that in some cases the Chief Commissioner could confer upon a convict, who had served with good conduct for at least three years as a self-supporter, the privilege of making a will of any property which he had acquired in the course of his stay on the Islands. In case a widow or children survived the convict, the property of the deceased convict would pass to them.100 Life on the Andamans for female convicts was also full of promises. Those who arrived on the Andamans with children received humane and generous treatment from the administration. In most cases, if the children were below two years of age they accompanied their mother and the officials generally believed that ‘children in female jail have quite a happy time’.101 There was a case of young girl who accompanied her mother, a female convict called Bhagan, to the Andamans in December 1902. The mother and the daughter lived in the female jail. Bhagan was condemned to complete her twenty years in prison until October 1919. The Superintendent of the Andamans in 1911, Colonel Browning, felt that it was not ‘expedient’ for a young girl to grow up in the female jail and instituted inquiries as to whether Bhagan’s parents would be willing to take care of her daughter. On their approval, Bhagan’s daughter was sent away. The Government of India displayed considerable empathy and munificence in granting a free passage to such children such as Bhagan’s daughter who had families in India who were willing to take care of them.102 Some children were at times not as fortunate as Bhagan’s daughter and they lost their mothers following their arrival in the Andamans. One such case was of a female convict, Rajola, who died in 1919 leaving behind a six-year-old daughter. Her husband in India refused to have anything to do with the child. The settlement officers contemplated putting up the child for adoption but given the ‘standard of sexual morality’ in the Settlement this idea was discarded. Finally, they decided to get in touch with an orphanage located in the province to which the father belonged and sent the child there.103 The Settlement reports noted that most of the female convicts preferred on their release to remain in the Settlement instead of returning to their home country or accompanying their spouse. There were also cases of some female convicts who when released with their husbands applied to return as they had married children in the Andamans with whom they could spend the rest of their life.104 These cases when female convicts chose to remain on the Settlement recast the notion of ‘abandoned wives’. In fact, many female convicts had come to dread the time of their husband’s release. According to Superintendent Cadell the married convict women who looked upon release with apprehension were mainly those ‘who have families and whose husbands owned huts and may have acquired cattle and other

156 Imperial Andamans

property’.105 In addition, the return to the natal society was rendered near impossible after having traversed the seas. The status of the female convict, therefore, came with paraphernalia that could not be shaken off even after the expiry of their sentence. There was a general opinion amongst the officials that most of the female convicts had no desire to return home and once free they ‘were certain to relapse into a life of shame’. Even in the case of male convicts not everyone who returned to India found it easy to be accepted back into the fold of natal society. Even the Indians who had served on the Andamans in an official capacity found it difficult to be socially accepted back home. There was the case of one Lala Muttra Das (an agent for the Andaman Convict Family Migration and a confidant of Superintendent J.P. Walker). On his return to Agra in 1860, he faced considerable social opprobrium on account of having sojourned in the Andamans. He had to defend himself in front of the caste-panchayat (or the caste assembly), and finally at the ‘cost of much anxiety and money’ his entry into his family residence was secured.106 Thus the main question facing all the convicts on the day of the release was whether they would be accepted back into the fold of their society in the mulk (country). The uncertainty of the response in the mulk made several of them stay on. Thus, lack of social security and acceptance was obviously the major reason behind their unwillingness to return and to opt for the Andamans as their home.

Muktitirth Andaman Indian revolutionaries and political prisoners began to arrive on the Andamans from 1909 onwards. Until then little was known about life on the Andamans by the general public in India beyond the fact that it was an overseas penal settlement called Kalapani. The first batch of revolutionaries to arrive on the Andamans consisted of V.D. Savarkar, Ullaskar Dutt, Barindra Kumar Ghosh, Indu Bhushan Roy, Pulin Behari Das and Jyotirmoy Rai, all of whom were convicted in the Alipur Bomb Case and the Nasik Conspiracy, and Hoti lal Verma and Ladha Ram, the editors of the leading ‘seditionist’ newspapers.107 Although technically classified as ‘political prisoners’, they were treated as ‘seditionist prisoners’ in the Cellular Jail. Classified as seditionist prisoners, the revolutionaries were subjected to a harsh and brutal penal regime. In December 1909, the Superintendent had received instructions to treat ‘seditionists as specially dangerous men and not allow them to work in the same group with each other’.108 However, the revolutionaries refused to submit to the jail’s penal regime lying down. Within a few months of their arrival, they refused to co-operate with the Jail authorities by declining to do any kind of work or wash their clothes. The main grievance of the political prisoners was that they were ‘not treated like ordinary prisoners, that every other class of prisoners after passing the

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required time in Cellular Jail is allowed to go to out-stations, […] and have always since their arrival in the jail been kept at hard work and that they are not allowed the same liberty as the other prisoners of the Cellular Jail’. The revolutionaries were indeed not allowed to talk to each other, were not shifted or transferred to other cells and were also refused all remissions. The revolutionaries complained that they were kept in the jail as ‘Rigorous Imprisonment prisoners’ and treated as thieves and rapists.109 The prisoners finally went on a hunger-strike. Their non-compliance and refusal to eat led to forced feeding by an oesophageal tube passed either through the nose or through the mouth. Some prisoners broke down, some continued to resist, some like Ullaskar Dutt turned insane and some like Indu Bhushan Roy committed suicide.110 Except for the annual letters that the political prisoners were permitted to write home, it was mainly contemporary newspaper articles and government reports which were responsible for generating public knowledge regarding the Andamans and its penal system.111 News of their hunger strikes and agitation reached the Indian subcontinent through returnee convicts who smuggled notes and letters written by the revolutionaries. The first of these articles to appear was in September 1912 in a vernacular newspaper called Bengali. These articles, full of nationalist fervour, brought to light the ‘darker’ aspects of the penal administration on the Andamans.112 They created considerable furore by discussing Indu Bhushan’s suicide and the lunacy of Ullaskar. A member of the Governor-General’s Council, Bhupendra Nath Basu, drew the attention of the government to this news item and tabled a demand for clarification.113 However, the colonial administration in India displayed unwillingness to be drawn on the issue. Basu was told that the Government of India had left the treatment of the political prisoners to the discretion of the Superintendent of the penal settlement in Port Blair and that no orders for any particular convict to be treated with severity had been issued. The fear of hostile public opinion in India and questions being raised in the House of Commons made the Government of India retract and agree to institute an inquiry to ascertain the truth in this matter. The Government also agreed to institute an inquiry into Indu Bhushan and Ullaskar’s cases. Sir Reginald Craddock (1864–1937), a British official and the Chairman of the Indian Constitutional Reforms Committee, was chosen in 1913 to carry out the inquiry into the affairs of the penal settlement.114 By the time of Craddock’s inquiry the Superintendent, Colonel Douglas (1914–1919), had also become quite restless regarding the ‘the danger and inexpediency of keeping a large number of seditionists in the Cellular Jail’.115 He began writing letters to the Government of India for repatriation of the existing prisoners and for halting any further transportation of political prisoners. He strongly protested against the transportation of an ‘unlimited number of seditionist convicts to the Andamans’.

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Following detailed discussions regarding the merits of this policy, in 1915, eighteen political prisoners were transferred from Port Blair to different jails in India.116 In 1916, the Officiating Revenue Secretary to the Government of Punjab, H.D. Craik, also put forward a proposal for the relaxation of the rules regulating transportation to the Andamans. He also felt that if there was a relaxation and more convicts could be sent to the Andamans, it would ‘give fuller effect to Judicial sentences of transportation and clear the Punjab jails of prisoners’.117 Craik’s proposal did lead to a little relaxation in the treatment of political prisoners but a fresh round of conflict ensued when, in 1918, Indian revolutionaries convicted in the famous Lahore Conspiracy Case were brought to the Andamans.118 On arrival they also resorted to hunger-strikes and disrupting the prison regimen.119 The Superintendent, tired of managing the politically volatile prisoners, continued to urge the Government of India to stop any further transportation of revolutionaries on grounds of their ill-health and the overcrowding of the Jail.120 In the meantime the Indian members of the Governor-General’s Council continued to mount pressure from within. In February 1914, the Indian National Congress leader Surendra Nath Bannerjee, as a member of the Governor-General’s Council, asked for the participation of non-officials in the inspection of the penal settlement. A prominent leader from South India, Vijay Raghvachari, also demanded that a commission be appointed to look into the penal administration.121 Requests from local governments and provincial administrations also began pouring in, urging for changes in the system of transportation. The nationalists were mainly requesting that the Government lessen the restrictions on deportation.122 Eventually in October 1914 the Government of India conceded to the Indian nationalists’ demand to set up a Jail Committee.123 This became the Indian Jail Committee of 1919, which had to wait until the end of World War I for its formation. This was the first jail committee to include Indian members. And by the time it was instituted there was sufficient pressure from the Settlement administrators and the nationalist press for the end of transportation of political prisoners to the Andamans. The cause of the political prisoners interned in the Cellular Jail had wide political ramifications. Foremost, the horrific content of the political prisoners’ writings challenged British claims of ‘rule of law’.124 An article in Bengali stated: The account, we are sure, will be read with a sense of painful interest; and the feeling will be one of general regret that a Government, like the Government of India, presided over by a statesman whose watchword is conciliation and who has done much to heal wounds, should treat political prisoners in the way described in the account. It is in

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conflict with those canons of humanity and of prison-discipline which have been accepted by the civilized worlds.125 To critique the treatment of political prisoners the nationalists invoked the vocabulary of ‘humanity’ and ‘civilization’ which actually belonged to the colonial state. The British had continually used the rhetoric of humanity, dignity and civilization to institute penal reform and establish the principle of ‘rule of law’ as the bedrock of imperial rule since the 1830s.126 Rule of law distinguished the British from the Mughals and contemporary native states, which were deemed despotic, and brigand states with law being based on the personal discretion of corrupt rulers. According to the principle of rule of law, deterrence stemmed not from an exhibition of the pain of punishment but from its proportionate character, uniformity and certainty.127 The nationalists argued that punishment meted out to political prisoners in Cellular Jail was disproportionate, inconsistent and dependent on the personal will of the jailer and thereby invalidated the British claims of rule of law. The mounting nationalist critique was also part of a trend which started to manifest itself from the turn of the century. With the rise of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and the introduction of representational politics, the nationalists began expropriating colonial institutions such as schools, courts, the army and industries for the nationalist cause. A part of this trend was the appropriation of Indian prisons as a symbol of the anti-colonial struggle.128 So the colonial penitentiaries in India were already under fire and the nationalists used the gory tales of torture from the Cellular Jail as cannon fodder against the Raj. Second, the incarceration of Indian revolutionaries in Cellular Jail from 1910 onwards plugged the Andamans into the international network of the Indian revolutionaries. Political prisoners such as V.D. Savarkar had strong diasporic links with expatriate Indian revolutionaries such as Shyamji Krishna Varma in England, Madam Bhikaji Cama in Germany and Lala Hardayal, the leader of the Gadar Movement, in United States. These revolutionaries also shared ideological links with Irish Sinn Fein revolutionaries and had logistical ties with the German Foreign Office. From the Cellular Jail Savarkar continued to maintain his links with the international movement of Indian revolutionaries through the annual letters he was allowed to write home. In his letters to his younger brother he would ask about the progress of the international revolutionary movement, ‘How is the Republic of China? … from 1850 they have been strenuously at it, though the world knows not where the Sun is making its way – till it is risen: and Persia, Portugal and Egypt? And are the Indians in South Africa successful in getting their demands?’129 The conditions of the revolutionaries interned on the Andamans thus became a matter which began to be discussed not only on the Indian subcontinent but in Europe as well.

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The most significant ramification was the apotheosis of the Andamans into a Muktitirth, a pilgrimage, for the Indian revolutionaries. The nationalist press and the revolutionaries equated the rebellion of the Indian revolutionaries against the colonial state and their transportation to the Andamans with the Revolt of 1857 and the transportation of rebels and mutineers. They drew a direct teleological link between the two events. The Andamans in both cases became the space where the rebels lived out their sentences in the service of the nation. This catalyzed the Islands’ transformation into a nationalist space. The nationalist discourse tied to the history of the Andamans to that of the Cellular Jail and brushed the history of the Settlement and ordinary convicts into background. The experiences of the revolutionaries came to overlay those of the rest of the convicts and the monochromatic image of the Islands as a hellish inferno was immortalized. For instance, V.D. Savarkar in his memoir states: ‘Four generations of Indian political prisoners have sacrificed their lives, and the ashes of some of these have mixed with the soil of that country. The islands which have thus witnessed the hardships of so many Indians cannot be considered negligible’.130 The challenge that the revolutionaries posed to the state authority also gave their accounts visibility amongst the politically active Indians.131 With time, the Andamans acquired pride of place in nationalist hagiography as a site of pilgrimage for the Indian revolutionaries,132 or ‘brainy anarchists and intriguers’.133

Conclusion Through a reading of the convict voices which come from a range of government records, convict letters and memoirs, this chapter has attempted to problematize the picture of the Andamans as Kalapani and Muktitirth. These images confirm and render permanent the idea of the Andamans as a natural prison. They paint the life on the Andamans in brutal, violent and repressive colours, with of course a few instances of subaltern resistance thrown in. The convict subculture on the Andamans challenges this discursive vision. The lives of the convicts – both men and women – who arrived, lived, settled, escaped from or died on the Islands had myriad hues, of which brutality was just one. It also belies the binary representation of convicts as either powerless victims or rogues.134 Common to all convict narratives was the fact that they were dealing with life in exile. Different people chose to deal with their banishment differently. Some committed suicide, some escaped, some gave up in exhaustion, some took to swindling, bootlegging and corruption, and some rose to become warders, householders and parents.

7 Island Colony and the Penal Settlement

More often than not, our understanding of convict society is still based on the assumptions of its enemies1 In its initial two decades (the 1860s and 1870s), the British had opened the penal colony on an experimental basis and the difficulties that the Settlement officers faced in settling the Andamans had done little to suppress the misgivings regarding the sustainability of the venture. Nonetheless, by the mid-1870s the initial uncertainties began to give way to greater assurance. Improvements in the physical condition of the Settlement gave a greater confidence to the Settlement officers that the colony could be maintained in the years to come as a penal station. Ironically, as the penal settlement acquired a firmer footing, the idea whether it should be retained in permanence began to be debated.2 Some officials saw this as the unfolding of the natural course of a penal settlement whereby it was developed enough to make way for a free settlement. There were others who felt that the idea of abolishing the penal settlement was not only premature but one which was fraught with logistical difficulties for the judicial department. The debate continued unresolved for several decades until the end of World War I. The political realignments and reconfigurations in the subcontinent following the war and the growing nationalist interest in the affairs of the Andamans pushed the Government of India to take a decision regarding the fate of the penal settlement. After much deliberation it was decided to retain the penal settlement of the Andamans but abolish convict transportation, i.e., to have a quasi-penal settlement on the Andamans which was peopled by convicts who had ‘voluntarily’ migrated there. This decision, as this chapter explains, was the result of an inherent conflict of interest between the developmental needs of the Island colony and the disciplinary priorities of the penal administration. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the penal settlement had come a long way from being merely a mode of colonization of the Islands. The continued dependence of the Andamans on convict labour made the penal settlement crucial to its survival as a colony. Gradually, the Island colony and the penal settlement had become impossible to tell apart from each other. This chapter, 161

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by historicizing this lack of distinction between the Island colony and the penal settlement discernable at this juncture, challenges the ahistorical assumption in academic writings on the Andamans which treats the indistinguishableness of the two as a given, and presents it as a product of the island geography of the Andamans.

Debating the mode of colonization This section begins by examining the arguments – penal, commercial and moral – that the colonial administrators put forth in favour of and against conversion of the penal settlement into a free settlement. At the core of the imperial administrative dialectics were these questions – Was a penal settlement the best mode of colonization for settling the island colony? Were the Andamans significant for either their strategic location or as a penal colony? The dubious penal worth of convict transportation The debate regarding the penal worth of the Settlement began with the voicing of doubts about the deterrent value of convict transportation. For the first few years, the Settlement seemed to measure up to the expectations of the colonial administrators. By the late 1870s, dissatisfaction with the penal system in the Settlement began to surface. Some officials perceived the indiscriminate transportation of term convicts, females, juveniles and convict families, the presence of self-supporter convicts and the accounts of the returnee convicts as diluting the deterrent effect of transportation. This in turn generated misgivings and fears regarding the continued utility of this penal device. These informal and occasional jottings in the official correspondence between the Settlement and Fort William received a new direction with the Jail Conference of 1877, a decennial penal review committee. It arrived on the Andamans to reassess the efficacy of convict transportation and the merits of retaining the penal settlement.3 Once published, the Report of Jail Conference of 1877 opened the issue to wider official and public scrutiny. But the Government of India procrastinated. By the late 1880s, the chorus of voices denouncing the deterrent value of convict transportation reached a crescendo. Another school of thought, which saw it as an unquestionably reformative penal device, began to gain ground. The tussle between the two views continued well into the early decades of the twentieth century. Ultimately, however, convict transportation came to be seen as a defunct penal device which was neither deterrent nor reformatory. Deterrence – ‘an exploded bogey’ The condemnation and the loss of faith in the deterrent value of penal transportation began with publication of A.P. Howell’s Notes on Jails and Jail Discipline in India in 1868. Howell affirmed that the penal system of the Andamans had rendered the spirit in which transportation was retained in the

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penal statutes in 1838 a dead letter.4 Thereafter successive jail conferences and official visitors to the Islands voiced similar disapproval of penal transportation.5 The Jail Conference of 1877, looking into the question of jail discipline in India overall, severely indicted the sentence of transportation because the diminishing deterrence effect was most apparent in its case. In 1885, the inspection report of A. Mackenzie, Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department, explicitly stated that the scheme of surrounding the Andamans with mystery, as a place of concealed horrors for criminals, had to be totally abandoned. He noted that the conditions of life in Andamans were as well-known in the jails of India and Burma as in the Settlement itself.6 In 1890, the Lyall and Lethbridge Committee’s survey of Indian prisons also concluded that ‘confinement within the four walls of an Indian prison is now a much more severe form of punishment than transportation, and we are convinced that this fact is well-known to the criminal classes’.7 Thus, most officials believed that the deterrent character of a sentence of transportation was ‘an exploded bogey’. This notion that convict transportation was an effective penal device because of its immeasurable deterrent value was a product of the Prison Discipline Committee of 1836–38. For the Committee, the central objective of a penal system was to incapacitate the criminal forever from committing crime.8 Moral reformation, if achieved, was a fortunate by-product but not necessarily a desired one. Penal transportation, in the view of the Committee, achieved the said objective of punishment because it made the criminal ‘continue, even to the end of his life, subject to such restraint that he will not have the power of offending again’, especially in a colonial context.9 However, the viability of penal transportation as an effective punitive device had been in question since 1784 when it was used for the first time.10 In the year 1811, dissatisfaction with the system of convict transportation made the colonial authorities abolish it altogether.11 The ban on transportation did not last long because, besides being a penal device, convict transportation was an important tool of empire, which was used for colonizing distant colonies and for dealing with the problem of ‘collective’ crime and murder.12 In 1813, the punishment was restored and it was enacted that convicts sentenced to transportation should be sent to the various British Settlements in Asia. By 1830, the British had penal settlements in Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Tenasserim, Mauritius and Bombay. Thus, penal transportation’s much-criticized lack of deterrent value, which led to its brief abolition in 1811, did nothing to deter the British from continuing to use it in India. When convicts began to arrive on the Andamans in 1858 the belief in the deterrent value of penal transportation was firmly ensconced in British officialdom. Over time, the fortunes of penal transportation and the Settlement on the Andamans intertwined. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Andamans were the only major convict settler colony of the Raj.13 Hence, the Settlement on the Andamans

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for the British administrators was an exemplar of the assumed penal value of the sentence of transportation. That is, the convicts’ experience of transportation to the Andamans had to be such as to endorse and demonstrate the efficacy of penal transportation as a deterrent punitive device. While most officials were vociferously denouncing convict transportation, there were some administrators who maintained that it was indeed a deterrent. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Herbert H. Risley, Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department, was one official who felt that there were three reasons for which the sentence of transportation was still a creditable penal option. The first was that ‘the bulk of the criminals at Port Blair (in 1904–05 8,386 out of 14,088) had been convicted of simple murder and it is probable that in the majority of instances persons who commit this crime do not consider consequences at all. Either they are carried away by passion or, if the crime is premeditated, they count on escaping detection’. Second, the deterrent element in the sentence of transportation was represented ‘not by the mystery of transportation but the greater mystery of death, since transportation is usually inflicted only in commutation of the death penalty’, and no one would say that the capital punishment was not a deterrent. Lastly, he believed that for people who committed crime it was not the character of the punishment that deterred them but ‘the degree of certainty and probability that punishment in some form will follow’.14 For these reasons, Risley felt the idea that transportation was no longer deterrent was an exaggeration and that there was no substance to the accusation that it encouraged criminality among the general population. Some of the Indian provinces also threw in their weight in favour of penal transportation. For instance, Colonel C. MacTaggart, the Inspector General of Prisons in the United Provinces, stated that ‘transportation is still a much dreaded form of punishment’ and that it was ‘absolutely necessary in the interest of discipline in Indian jails that the transportation to the Andamans of “dangerous” life convicts be continued’.15 H.C. Quin, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, and W.M. Hailey, the Secretary to Government of Punjab and its dependencies, also seconded Herbert Risley’s opinion. Quin remarked that in this penal debate there was a ‘danger of underrating the deterrent effect of transportation’.16 Whilst Risely, MacTaggart, Quin and Hailey put forth a vociferous defence of penal transportation as a deterrent punishment, all of them did acknowledge the fact that popular opinion regarding the terrors of transportation to Port Blair had undergone a significant change. As Risely confessed: ‘the class from which they [the convicts] are drawn are aware that it is better to be transported to the Andamans than to be imprisoned in India’. MacTaggart also stated that the terrors hitherto associated with transportation had undoubtedly lessened in the past few years ‘owing to the return of convicts from the Andamans and the accounts of these men regarding the circumstances under which the prisoners live’. Thus, the general opinion in

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colonial administrative circles was that the Settlement on the Andamans was failing to live up to standards that were required to uphold the deterrent character of convict transportation. Unquestionable redemptive punishment The first Committee to firmly articulate a case in favour of the penal settlement based on its reformative values was the Lyall and Lethbridge Committee of 1890. The Government of India had asked Lyall and Lethbridge to make recommendations for the future organization of the penal settlement. It followed close on the heels of the Jail Committee of 1889 which had recommended the abolition of the penal settlement. The Lyall and Lethbridge Committee was unequivocal in its opinion that the proposed abolition of the penal settlement would be a ‘misfortune’. In their view, the state of Indian jails was not the only factor militating against abolition. The substitution of transportation for confinement in jails would not be the same because while incarceration was an effective deterrent, it was ‘impossible to make reformatory’.17 For the Lyall and Lethbridge Committee the main achievement of transportation was ‘to effect his reformation by removing him for a long period from the scene of his crimes and by placing before him the prospect of substantial advantages which he can earn by continued good conduct’. Thus, transportation attained the rehabilitation of the criminal in the manner where he could be restored back to the society as an industrious and responsible member on his release.18 The Committee argued: It appears to us that the [self-supporter] system yields the most satisfactory results in promoting the reformation of transported offenders. […] A course of discipline which, while adequately protecting society, effects the gradual reformation of the offender and his re-establishment as a useful member of the community should not in our opinion be condemned merely because it is less severe and penal in its character than that to which prisoners are subjected in the Indian jails.19 The Lyall and Lethbridge Committee thus gave transportation a firm foundation which rested on transportation’s unquestioned value as a ‘redemptive punishment’. The Committee’s views received affirmation from the shift in contemporary penal theory in the Indian subcontinent and the metropole, which upheld ‘reform’ as the main objective of the penal system.20 For instance, Rev. Dr W. Douglas Morrison, who had served as the Assistant Chaplain at Wandsworth Prison, London, opined in 1899 in praise of the Andaman system that it was progressive and ‘the convict was gradually accustomed to liberty and to depend on himself’. In his view, ‘if you kept people too long in prison you not only did not reform them, but depraved them’.21

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In addition, the belief that transportation was a valuable reformative penal device had been gaining ground since the 1870s within the Settlement and continued to do so well into the twentieth century. For instance, D.M. Stewart, who served as the Superintendent of the Andamans in the early 1870s, stated: ‘presumably the end of transportation means above all things, punishment; but, if I understand the question rightly, it also aims at profitable employment and reformation, leading up to a state of comparative freedom within the limits of the Settlement’.22 He believed that, ‘convicts who, by their ability and industry, acquire property and hold a stake in the Settlements, would be the direct source of support to the authorities’.23 The rigours of jail discipline were seen as being counterproductive to the idea of reform and went against the larger aim of settling and peopling the Islands. The Settlement reports continuously contrasted the self-supporter with convicts living out their sentences in Indian jails. As Superintendent R.C. Temple noted in 1899, it did ‘not require much imagination to contrast the difference in the personality of the same human beings as he reaches and leaves Port Blair. He that arrived as outcast, void of restraint, and unfit for association with his kind on equal terms, goes forth a useful citizen, broken to restraint, and not only fitted for human society, but well used to submit to the conventions by which alone that society can be maintained’.24 Similar was the view of Colonel Browning who was the Superintendent in Port Blair in 1906. According to him, ‘transportation, it has been accepted, is not in itself, except so far as it involves exile, as deterrent as imprisonment for a lengthy period in an Indian jail, but while in the Indian jail system the reformation of the criminal has been given up as impracticable, it is contended, for the Port Blair system, that reformation can be and has been effected’.25 Thus the general conclusion was that ‘while the Port Blair returned convict is a man fitted and habituated to support himself, the prisoner released from a jail is not only a pauper, but has become pauperised’. Island political economy: conflicts and challenges Labour shortage and commercial development of the Island colony had been issues for the Settlement since the 1870s. A natural consequence of labour shortage was a debate amongst officials regarding the wisdom in relying solely on convict labour for the Islands’ commercial development.26 At one level, the local administration continually reiterated its policy that ‘the forest administration must be strictly subordinated to the disciplinary measures required in a convict settlement’.27 On the other, the Settlement officials found it extremely difficult to carry out forest work with convict labour, which was perennially in short supply.28 Moreover, they saw convict labour as ‘unskilled’, ‘inefficient’, ‘bad and wasteful’, ‘unprofitable’ and given to malingering and indiscipline. As one forest report of 1897 stated, ‘the average convict, being an unpaid labourer, would only work to the extent

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that will keep him out of trouble, and therefore the outturn of work by a body of convicts was, within reasonable limits, merely the result of the strictness with which they were supervised’.29 Free and efficient on one hand and lazy, unskilled and inefficient on the other were categories that officials used to distinguish non-convict and convict labourers, while the distinctions between the two actually rested on their location within the labour regime and the manner of work extraction. The forest works required a particular kind of skill and training, which most of the convicts did not possess. In addition, it was well known that most convicts found forest work uncongenial and too laborious. There was a high sickness rate amongst the convicts assigned to forest work along with frequent outbreaks of epidemics of scurvy and malaria. Moreover, while the convicts lived on the Settlement they did not perform physically strenuous work for more than a year. This rule was unenforceable in the forest camps and the system of transfer from camp to camp delayed their pay.30 All these factors together made forest work unpopular amongst the convicts who resorted to either shirking work or simply escaping into the jungle.31 The discernible commercial potential of forestry and the heightened need for labour led to a decisive shift in the official attitude in the early years of the twentieth century. The presence of free or non-convict labour (contract labourers for working the forests, traders from India and Burma, and the Chinese contractors) became vital to the economic and social health of the Island colony. The economy of the local bazaar came to depend heavily on the presence of the free merchants who ensured a regular supply of goods from Calcutta and Rangoon. Since the Andamans was under a penal administration, the free persons visiting, residing, trading or carrying out any commercial activity in the Settlement had to obtain a licence, and a range of rules and regulations bound their residence and conduct on the Islands.32 This change was reflected in the forceful argument of Superintendent W.R.H. Merk (1904–1907), based on the political economy of the Islands, in favour of abolishing the penal settlement. In his view, the existence of a penal settlement was an enormous impediment to the commercial advance of the Andamans. Following the closure of the penal settlement, he wished Port Blair to be used as a naval harbour and coaling station, and the commercial resources of the Andamans to be given over to private enterprise to exploit.33 Merk based his argument on a theory that he had regarding the general progression of the history of transmarine penal settlements. The time has come to stop transportation. This is a point which is reached sooner or later in the history of every trans-marine penal settlement. First comes the stage of the exceedingly strong effect of deportation to a distant and unknown spot – Botany Bay, Tasmania, The Falkland islands, Singapore, The Andamans, Sahgalien, New Caledonia, Cayenne. The removal of men to so far a place produces of itself a

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profound moral impression. The paucity of convicts permits of the exaction of a rigorous discipline and of severe labour. The next stage is that, with the influx of convicts and the difficulty of expense of maintaining a coercive agency to correspond, more liberty must perforce to be allowed to the criminals. The third stage is when the terrors of distance and of the unknown disappear, when the laxity of discipline and of labor (inherent in local conditions) become known to the criminal classes, and transportation loses its effect. The final stage is abolition.34 In his view, overseas penal settlements had a linear growth pattern. They began as convict stations that the criminals dreaded, but as the number of convicts gradually increased, and the enforcement of discipline slackened because of growing administrative expenses, the penal colonies entered their second stage. In this stage the penal colonies became more ‘liberal’ and less harsh. Such colonies arrived at their third stage when the sentence of transportation and the life in the penal settlement completely lost their terror for the criminal class. The final stage was, as expected, one of abolition. The Andamans, in Merk’s view, had arrived at the final stage.35 As far back in the 1870s, the Jail Conference of 1877 had anticipated Merk’s arguments. The late 1870s was the period when the penal settlement had begun to shake off the initial doubts regarding its workability and started to acquire a semblance of permanency. Some officials at the time, much in the way Merk did at the turn of the century, saw the coterminous timing of the demand for the abolition of the penal settlement and its acquisition of sounder footing as the unfolding of the natural course of island colonies, which were strategically important but infrastructurally undeveloped. It was expected that a time would come when the penal settlement will have served its purpose of developing the colony and thereby run its course, and would be abolished to make way for the free settlement.36 What was vital in Merk’s theory was that by the time overseas penal settlements reached the final stage, their political economy was developed to an extent that they could not only be sustained without convict labour subsidizing them but where the presence of the convicts hindered future growth. Superintendent Browning, who followed Merk in 1907, also advocated the dissolution of the penal settlement. Browning pitched the argument slightly differently. In his view, it was impossible to carry out the extra-mural forest works on the Islands with a ‘limited’ labour resource.37 The Settlement’s gradual move away from the policy of upholding penal discipline over commercial benefits matured in the mid-1910s into the official decision to develop the forests of the North and Middle Andaman Islands with the help of ‘imported labour’ or by leasing the forests to

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private contractors.38 The penal settlement was located on South Andaman and thus was seen as not interfering with the developmental plans for the Middle and North Andaman Islands. The latter scheme of leasing the forests to private firms, however, failed to take off. The Settlement officials concluded that it was better to exploit the forests with contract labour. They began to make efforts to attract labourers on a basis of ‘temporary cultivating license’ (that is, employed by the Forest Department for 200 days in a year).39 The importation of free labourers was not easy because there was no recruiting system (like the kangani or the sirdar system) on which the Settlement officials could rely. Moreover, the success of the scheme required additional means of transport as there was only one steamer serving the Andamans at the time. The officials also feared the outbreak of epidemics and other unforeseen circumstances pushing up the cost of this project.40 Although the experiment of using free contract labour met with success, the anxieties regarding working the convicts and free labour together never eased. The Settlement officials on the one hand believed that free labour was reluctant to migrate because of ‘fear of contamination’, and on the other hand felt that the presence of non-convict labour hampered convict discipline.41 In the early 1910s, the forest department employed around 800 convicts, and the demand for non-convict labour was increasing exponentially. The political economy of the Islands therefore demanded either an increase in convict labour supply or total abolition of the convict system.42 Given the logistical constraints of the penal administration, the number of convicts could increase only so much and therefore some administrators saw the latter solution as the ‘natural’ choice. Finally, at the behest of the Settlement officials, the central government asked the decennial Jail Commission in the mid-1910s to look into the question of ‘the extent to which the conditions of forest employment are or can be made compatible with convict reform’.43 The Jail Committee of 1919, presenting its report in the wake of industrial labour strikes and abolition of indenture, was severe in its indictment of employment of convict labour on forest works and ordered the gradual abolition of its use. Damning moral filth The moral argument in favour of abolishing the penal settlement was officially put forth for the first time by Sir Reginald Craddock. He arrived on the Andamans in November 1913.44 His report was a vitriolic moral assault against any claims that the Settlement made about being reformative. He began by castigating the system of convict marriages, which in his view was ‘generally debased into promiscuous prostitution, the husband living on the proceeds. Released convicts are obliged to take their wives with them when they go over to India, but these will not be received

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by their caste people, and when sent off are sometimes abandoned at seaports or left to support themselves by prostitution’.45 He also believed that there existed unbridled homosexual contact or ‘unnatural vice’ amongst the male convicts. This was, at one level, presumed as the sign of poor health of convict morality and, at another, held up as being the cause for sexual crimes on the Settlement. His report stated: Several of the murder cases that come before me in the Home Department are very suggestive of what goes on; in one case a murder of a recipient in sodomy by another recipient who had been supplanted by him in the favor of the petty officer. The evidence was given by the convicts as a matter of course. It was common knowledge who were the recipients, why they had quarrelled, how hard jobs had been allotted to the discarded and light work to the new favourite; there had been no shame and no concealment.46 According to him the system in the Andamans was a ‘system of slavery’ where the ‘slave settlement controlled by slave petty subordinates with no family life and no social or religious restraints, is and must be a failure as a reforming agency’. He argued: The mere restraints of bars and fetters and jail punishments do not make for reform, and if these restrictions are relaxed, as they must be in a penal settlement like Port Blair as it at present or in the self-supporting colonies that I advocate, there must be some other restraints at work to check and reform. There must be moral restraints, religious restraints and social restraints. These do not exist at present and never can exist among large bodies of men deprived of a female society, without caste influences, with no village opinion, and without any religion; these very influences which keep men in respectability in an ordinary Indian Village or town are more than required in the task of leading a man to regain lost respectability.47 Although not in favour of a hasty abolition of the penal settlement, Craddock advised the Government of India to abolish the sentence of transportation and substitute it with penal servitude or rigorous imprisonment, and to keep the Cellular Jail for irreclaimables and habitual offenders whose rehabilitation should be given over to the Salvation Army. The immediate impact of Craddock’s report was limited but what it did do for the Andamans was to change the tenor of the conversion debate to a moral one. Hereafter one sees a vociferous denouncement of the Andamans’ system on moral grounds. Craddock visited the Andamans during the tenure of Colonel Douglas, the Superintendent of the Settlement between 1913 and 1916. Douglas was

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also amongst the detractors of the system of convict marriages on moral grounds.48 He quoted evidence from an independent report of the Settlement’s Treasury Officer, Khwaja Mohammed Ibadulla Akhtar, prepared in 1915. According to Akhtar’s report: It has been stated by almost every self-supporter that the convict marriage is a mere farce. To all appearances the aim of the parties is to escape from physical labor and they consider marriage to be the effectual means. The husband moreover counts on another benefit besides and that is to make money through the wife. The wife is not faithful to her husband and it is certain that moral sense does not exist in either of them. The marriage is one of convenience and with the close of their sentence the engagement dissolves.49 In order to strengthen his case Superintendent Douglas directly questioned two self-supporter convicts: Jahangir Khan, who was the Chaudhari (headman) of the village, and Qazi Hussain Ali. Both were of the opinion that the marriages generally dissolved once the convicts left the Settlement. The Qazi stated that he had not married because he could not find a ‘respectable’ woman. In Douglas’s view, the convicts were generally seen to be unwilling to import their wives from the marriages contracted in India before conviction as they feared the ‘moral contamination’ of their female relatives. In addition, they were disinclined to work, or support a wife, and could always fulfil their ‘natural needs’ by payment for another convict’s wife. Another such report in 1918 categorically stated: ‘Domestic fidelity was rare and … the standard of morality both in convict and free villages was low throughout the Settlement. There was no force of public opinion operating in the cause of morality, and panchayats and similar organizations for the insistence on the observance of caste or moral obligations did not exist. […] convicts systematically lived off their wives’ earnings by prostitution.’50 Thus the convict marriages were judged to be unscrupulous, corrupt and lacking in any social restraint. On the other hand, this belief that petty officers, jemadars and tindals were not always inclined to enforce stringent rules affecting the prevention of sexual contact between male convicts, and that the convict officers were hand in glove with the section of people who were the perpetrators of sexual excesses was strengthened when the Government of India ordered an inquiry into the oppression of convicts by the petty officers in October 1917.51 The background for this inquiry was a series of eight sessions cases of murder and attempt to murder tried between 10 December 1911 and 22 September 1917 in which the convicts had alleged that they had attempted to murder, or murdered, because of ‘provocation from petty officers’. This had caught the attention of the Government of India and it inquired into the matter. Superintendent Douglas drew up a report of

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crime statistics that found that fifty-four sessions cases which had been tried during the past five years were due to the following causes – eleven cases of quarrels over women, five cases of quarrels over unnatural crime, thirteen cases of crime arising from oppression by petty officers and twenty-five miscellaneous cases.52 The conclusions of the various officers regarding the findings differed. Superintendent Douglas was of the opinion that this image of oppression by the convict officers was the result of private animosities and that there were no cases that amounted ‘to any systematic practice of tyranny by petty officers’. However, the Deputy Superintendent (who actually conducted the inquiry) begged to differ. He was convinced that ‘in many cases same-sex contact was the real motive. A large number of petty officers were addicted to sodomy and kept a “boy”.’ In his opinion, it was a well-known pathological fact that the feeling aroused by ‘this perverted sexual intercourse’ was often as strongly passionate as that between a man and a woman, and if the petty officer discarded his ‘boy’ for another, murder or assault was frequently the result.53 The Chief Commissioner of the Andamans from 1920 to 1922, Lt. Col. H.C. Beadon, also decided to make a private inquiry into the matter. According to Beadon, the ‘vice’ unequivocally existed. Further, ‘in almost all murder cases tried by the sessions court the murder is the result of homosexual jealousies’.54 From the statistics collected it appeared that ‘two-thirds of the extra-mural laboring convicts and one-third of the intra-mural convicts have the reputation: furthermore there are estimated to be five active to every three passive exponents of the cult’. However, in Beadon’s views these figures were an exaggeration because there was no actual evidence to support these figures. What is interesting in both Douglas’s and Beadon’s reports is that ‘sexual jealousy’ is isolated as the reason for crime, and that the crime was seen as a ‘natural’ outcome of the unbalanced sex ratio. There was also the question of the character of the local-born population. In 1921, there were 11,532 convicts of whom 1,168 were self-supporters. In addition, there was a population of 3,000 which came under the category of local-born. The local-borns, as offspring of convicts, were seen as morally tainted. Some officials believed that no amount of education could cure the moral failings they had inherited from the previous generation. This view went against the spirit of moral reform. As one official in the 1920s stated: ‘To an old fashioned believer in heredity this system seems a very unwise one.’55 They were seen as people of low intelligence and poor moral character. The children of free parents avoided the schools to prevent contact between their children and the convict offspring.56 Another report, this time from the 1930s, stated: ‘The only respectable people are the convicts: the free people as a rule, are very depraved, which is not surprising, as they are the children of marriages arranged in the prison marriage market.’57

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The misanthropic representation of the local-borns had been around for quite a few decades. From the 1890s one finds reports hinting at officers believing that the convict-daughters prostituted themselves.58 The convict boys were also characterized as ‘inefficient’ and ‘untrustworthy’. Given the precarious employment situation on the Islands, most of them opted for government service or were engaged in forest works.59 Since the local-born had no property rights, merely tenancy rights, the Settlement officials punished them by shifting them from village to village at the will of the administration.60 At times, the administration even resorted to refusing to renew the residence licences of the local-born and deporting them. Besides heredity, immoral surroundings were adjudged as the reason for the poor moral character of the convict children. For instance, Superintendent R.C. Temple felt that children of self-supporters who lived with their parents grew up in ‘exceedingly bad moral surroundings’. He felt that his experience in Port Blair had shown him that these children commenced ‘a life of grossest immorality’ at a very early age. And by the time they grew to become adults they had turned into ‘grossly immoral couples leading the most undesirable lives’61 and became, as a traveller visiting in 1903 stated, ‘astonishingly wicked’.62 Thus the strongest argument in favour of abolition of the penal settlement was a moral one. Some British officials were convinced that the moral state of the Settlement was horrifying. One official recounted the view of a local person who candidly informed him that no ‘worse place’ existed on earth.63 The supposed descent of convicts into adultery or prostitution, instances of homosexual contact between male convicts, and the questionable character of the locally born convict progeny were all upheld as ‘factual’ evidence of the Andamans having become ‘just a little bit of hell on Earth’.

Changing context – 1919–1921 The changing political scenario in the subcontinent at the end of World War I galvanized the administrative debate regarding the reform of the penal settlement on the Andamans. The war gave the Indian nationalist movement a new internationalist outlook and generated new aspirations and expectations amongst Indian nationalists. The war also put immense economic strain on the empire and catalyzed certain political trends which were already underway in the pre-war period. The Indian Jails Committee was instituted against this backdrop in 1919. The recommendations of the Jail Committee became the basis for the Government of India’s final decision regarding the fate of the penal settlement on the Andamans.

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Indian nationalism and the Andamans World War I had an unquestionable impact on the politics of the Indian subcontinent and the British Empire. During the war most Indian nationalists associated with the Indian National Congress – Dadabhai Naoroji, Balgangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, Rabindranath Tagore and M.K. Gandhi – came out in support of British war efforts in the vain hope of it being a step towards self-rule. Their writings, in the form of poems, short stories, novels, journals, advertisements, cartoons, travelogues, art and political essays, during the war years reflect their hopeful attitude.64 The enthusiastic response of the Indian nationalists to the war effort was in contrast to the Indian revolutionary movement. The war bolstered the revolutionaries; they engaged in two revolutionary conspiracies on an international scale during the war years. These were the Indo-German Conspiracy led by the Gadar Movement and the pan-Islamist movement, Reshmi Rumal, led by the Deobandis stationed in Ottoman Turkey, Afghanistan and imperial Germany.65 By the end of the war the British had suppressed the revolutionary movement, and the nationalists, having reorganized their cadres, were clamouring for self-rule. However, the concessions offered by the British in the form of the Montagu Chelmsford Reforms disappointed the Indian nationalist leaders. The Jallianwallah Bagh massacre heightened the political frustration of the Indian nationalists. On 13 April 1919, British troops opened fire on a group of peaceful demonstrators in Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab; 1,650 rounds were fired in ten minutes killing over 1,000 people. Anger over killing innocent masses and disappointment with the piecemeal efforts of the colonial state to institute self-rule galvanized the nationalist movement and also revived the revolutionary movement.66 The reinvigorated revolutionary and nationalist movements displayed a new internationalist orientation.67 It was mostly a consequence of the exposure to the excesses of the war and the popularity of Lenin’s writings that Indian nationalism began to see itself as part of a larger international community which would soon make common cause against the Raj.68 The novel stance of the nationalist movement was reflected in Gandhi’s postWar Khilafat movement (1919–24) which supported the reinstitution of the Ottoman Caliph following his deposition after the war, and in the nationalist support for the cause of Indians living as coolies, indentured labourers, sepoys and convicts in overseas British colonies such as Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana and East Africa. Gandhi, for instance, declared that he would do all in his might to prevent the recruitment of indentured labourers.69 The concern with overseas Indian labour paralleled the rise of the trade union and labour movement on the Indian subcontinent following the war.70 Since the turn of the century, nationalist newspapers had been giving labour unrest in white-controlled industries wide coverage and various individuals had even provided financial help in setting up trade unions. After the

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war, the task of organization of labour was combined with that of national awakening.71 C.F. Andrews, an English priest who was a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, was both at the forefront of the abolition of indenture and leading labour organizations in India in the 1920s.72 According to Hugh Tinker, the issue of loss of labour went beyond mere rhetoric, as the rise of industry in India in the 1910s created huge labour requirements and these in turn compelled the state to take measures preventing the siphoning-off of labour to overseas destinations. This labour crunch heightened following World War I because of epidemics in towns, which checked rural in-migration.73 The issue of convict labour in the overseas colonies also became subsumed within this discourse. The espousal of the cause of the labour by nationalist leaders and parties gave a humanitarian halo to the issue of the abolition of indenture and the plight of transported convicts. Abolitionists such as C.F. Andrews, however, presented their case for abolition not on economic or penal grounds but in moral terms. In the case of indentured labour, an imagery of enslaved women, wives prostituting themselves and the destruction of family life was projected in official and media reports to build a case for abolition.74 The social and moral conditions of the plantation colonies, especially Fiji, overshadowed the imperatives of political economy which were actually producing the circumstances leading to the abolition. It was similar with the Andamans, which had been on the nationalist radar since the 1910s and were being denounced in colonial administrative circles as a ‘hell on Earth’.75 There is strong evidence of the shared concerns between the officials who were spearheading the abolition of the penal settlement in the Andamans and those arguing for the abolition of the indenture system. The report of General Craddock received wide publicity just before the outbreak of the war and was read by people such as C.F. Andrews who were involved in writing a similar report for the Fiji islands and its indenture system. In a letter to the Superintendent of the Andamans in the 1930s Andrews talked of his long-standing interest, drawing from his experiences in the Caribbean, in the penal colony and its abolition.76 Thus stimulated by both the abolition lobby and nationalist leaders, the issue of abolition of penal settlement on the Andamans gained ground. Indian Jails Committee, 1919: British and nationalist responses Against the immediate backdrop of political realignments that the Indian subcontinent was undergoing following World War I, the Government of India instituted the much-awaited decennial Indian Jails Committee in 1919, which was asked to make recommendations to ‘help strengthen the reformatory influences of prisons and ways to help restore released convicts to society’.77 The Indian Jails Committee visited various jails in India and also toured the Andamans before submitting its report in October 1919.

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The chief defects of the Andaman system noted in the Jail Committee’s report were: transportation had to a large extent lost its deterrent effect; the system in force in the Andamans had no reformatory influence; the paucity of women and the lack of domestic and family influences, and the absence of all restraints of the caste system; the resultant demoralization of prisoners and the prevalence of unnatural vice; the unhealthy climate and the prevalence of malaria; the greater expense involved in transporting a prisoner to the Andamans, as compared with keeping him in his own province in India; and the absence of any educated public opinion which would restrain the prison authorities and insist that the necessary reforms were properly carried out.78 In the view of the Jails Committee of 1919, there were three options for the Andamans: first, retention of the present system in an improved form; second, abandonment of the penal settlement in toto; third, conversion of the penal settlement into a colony of free men in which the outstanding feature would be a Central Jail to accommodate some select prisoners from India. The Committee advised in favour of the third course.79 The Jail Committee called for the abolition of the Andaman system mainly on moral grounds and concluded that the system was not reformative. The summary of its recommendations were: Deportation to the Andamans of all female convicts and of the great majority of male convicts should be stopped as soon as possible, and that these convicts should serve their sentences in the Indian jails. The cellular and associated jails at Port Blair should be retained as places of confinement for really dangerous criminals only, whose escape or rescue from an Indian jail would embarrass the administration, or whose presence in an Indian jail would be liable to cause commotion and unrest. The number of such prisoners is estimated at about 1500. They would not be employed on extramural labor … except in so far as such labor is resorted to in connection with Indian jails. The existing self-supporter system is to be abolished, and its place as a reformatory influence is to be taken by the introduction of the remission rules as existing in Indian prisons.80 Once the Committee submitted its report, the key question facing the Government of India was regarding the future course of action. The Settlement officials and those in the Governor-General’s council, especially H.D. Craik, the Deputy Secretary to the Home Department, were not convinced by the recommendations of the Jail Committee. He was not in favour of abandoning the Settlement but took the view that it should be retained and conditions improved. Craik also quite astutely

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anticipated the response that the report was going to evoke amongst the nationalist press: The Report may be made the basis of an attack on the efficiency of Government generally. It is, therefore, desirable that we should simultaneously, with the publication of the Report, if possible, issue a resolution on this subject explaining our policy.81 William H. Vincent, Home Secretary to the Government of India, also felt that the question of the future of the Andamans should be examined and decided as early as possible. He feared that: ‘The portion which deals with the Settlement is not pleasant reading … it will lead, in all probability, to severe criticism of the Government of India in the Press and on the platform, and though some of the statements made are over-coloured, yet the facts can be put in a very damaging light.’82 The Chief Commissioner of the Andamans, Lt. Col. H.C. Beadon (1920–23), also concurred with Craik and Vincent’s views. In a confidential report reflecting on the Jail Committee’s report, Beadon made it clear that he took issue with most of the Committee’s recommendations. He felt, contrary to what the Committee had argued, ‘in the Andamans the convicts have hope – hope of ameliorations during their terms – ever present hope: it can scarcely be urged that a long term convict in an Indian prison has any such vista’. He also expressed similar apprehensions about public response to the report: The report and concomitant resolution will certainly attract public attention, now that we live in an era of political fervour and I have little doubt that the general trend of Indian opinion will follow the lead of the minute of dissent, favouring abandonment of Port Blair as a penal settlement. Not much sympathy is felt for dacoits, murderers and prisoners generally, but the Andamans have gained a bad name amongst politically-minded folks, through the deportation of the misguided men, convicted of offences against the State. Accordingly, unless the Penal Settlement is to be abandoned, it is desirable to indicate in the resolution a progressive policy under which the lot of the convicts will be ameliorated and the existing defects removed.83 Both Craik and Beadon were anxious that the Government of India announce its policy decision as soon as the Report was published. Not only did the public response to the Jail Committee’s report worry Beadon, so did the Committee’s suggestion of complete abolition of penal transportation. In Beadon’s view, ‘to any one acquainted with the local conditions it is obvious that such a change could not be made,

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at all events not immediately, without involving the economic collapse of Port Blair’.84 The abolition of penal transportation implied the drying up of a major source of labour supply of the Island economy because the transported convicts were fulfilling most of the labour requirements. The ending of the self-supporter system especially was viewed as spelling the economic doom of the Islands. Moreover, there was little industry on the Andamans, except forestry, to attract voluntary immigration. Forest work was also in its initial stages and would take years to develop and become attractive enough for voluntary immigration.85 Local-borns were also not up to the task because of insufficient numbers.86 The capital investments that had been made on the Islands also made the officials vacillate. This was a concern which even Reginald Craddock, in spite of his severe indictment of the Andaman system, had not failed to voice in 1913: ‘the large capital sunk … at Rupees 170 lakhs, and the natural resources forbid its hasty abandonment’.87 Moreover, closing the penal settlement meant having to make arrangements for the repatriation of convicts to jails in India. In the past the condition of Indian jails had been upheld as a significant factor militating against abolition of the penal settlement. The Indian jails were seen as not suitable ‘for the confinement of all transportation convicts both because the jail establishments required to be reorganized, and because accommodation in central prisons in some provinces was inadequate even for convicts not under sentence of transportation’.88 In addition, retaining a large and volatile contingent of convicts within India was seen as a problem in case a war or a rebellion broke out. The Jail Conference of 1877 was the first to raise this issue. The disapproval of repatriation of the convicts to the Indian jails stemmed from the British experience of the Revolt of 1857 when ‘the final shock to law and order was in many places given by the release of the convicts from the jails’.89 These concerns were voiced again in 1921, once the Government of India finally decided to do away with the penal settlement. 90 There was also the financial aspect of ending convict transportation. The Government of India bore the cost of the Andamans, and if the Andaman prisoners were returned, then the cost of accommodating them would fall on provincial funds, unless some agreement to the contrary was made.91 Intertwined with the issue of convict repatriation was that of the local-borns. The officials were fully cognizant of the fact that the localborns knew no home other than the Andamans, and any change in the character of the Settlement would directly impinge on their fate. Then there was also the significant question of the strategic importance of the Islands. In 1885, Superintendent Colonel Cadell, in a letter to the Secretary to the Government of India, had expressed the fear that ‘in case of an eventuality of war with Russia, Port Blair could become a very convenient rendezvous for the enemy’s cruisers sent to prey on the commerce of Bay of Bengal. Port Blair at the time was not equipped for the purpose of

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war though it had the potential to be used as a very important strategic center for the operations of men-of-war’.92 This issue also came up later in 1921 when another official, reflecting on the ‘strategic importance from the Imperial point of view of these islands’, argued that ‘if they were abandoned by Great Britain it is quite conceivable that Japan might annex them and find them very useful as a coal base in the event of war with Great Britain … these islands which would be a serious menace, if they were occupied by a foreign hostile power’.93 The control over the Andamans was an assurance of the security of the Bay and was symbolic of the British control over the eastern part of the Indian Ocean. In addition the Islands also possessed meteorological and wireless stations which were of much value to shipping in the surrounding seas and for collecting naval intelligence.94 It was unclear what implications the closing of the penal settlement would have on imperial strategic concerns in the Indian Ocean. Craik and Beadon were also inclined to take a sympathetic view of the penal colony concept because they felt that it was the circumstances of the Settlement itself that vitiated the situation. The conditions in the Settlement, Beadon argued, were such to have ‘driven the weaker vessels on to the rocks of immorality and those of sterner build, into a calm of contended apathy’ and that most were ‘preferring to drag on as laboring convicts, treating the hospitals as green islands rising from an ocean of toil’. Beadon further added: Let me record as an instance the circumstances of the Viper District which comprises four stations for labouring convicts, who live in barracks, and fourteen villages occupied by the self-supporters, scattered over an area of 46 square miles. The total number of convicts approximates to 2,000 and in the whole area there are resident only 45 women, of whom two are wives of custodians and forty-three wives of selfsupporters. In such circumstances what is to be expected? With tobacco, opium, and gambling tabooed and, in the case of third class convicts, the possession of even money forbidden, to what can nineteen-hundred odd men be expected to turn for amusement or occupation? Unnatural circumstances must drive men to abnormal practices and, when such act on a coarse despondent people, to unnatural vice. The habitual recipient has come into being to satisfy a demand: he is really an ‘ersatz’ of a war, which the State has waged against nature.95 Cecil Beadon thus took a much more philosophical and humanist view of the situation than the Jail Committee of 1919. The Andaman system, in his opinion, could be remedied only if ‘we retrace our steps and treat these convicts as human beings with human wants, by adopting the true idea on which punishment of transportation is based. A large percentage of the convicts are just as moral, just as respectable as the majority of their

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unconvicted fellow countrymen. […] In short, we have tried to subdue nature unsuccessfully: why not take her as an ally and see what the union will do?’96 Indeed, most of the convicts lived in permanent or temporary barracks made of timber, and the self-supporters and the ticket-of leave convicts lived in cottages, ‘scattered throughout all the stations of the Settlement, many having their cottages in close proximity to the barracks occupied by other convicts’.97 This, according to the officials, gave the convicts ample opportunity to indulge themselves. Moreover, as the work in the Settlement was mostly extra-mural and often done in the jungles and other remote locations, it created prospects for the convicts to allow themselves ‘the luxury’ even in daytime.98 Flogging, segregating the young convicts overnight in separate trelliswork cells, and improving the lighting of the barracks were among the methods devised, in vain, to check this ‘proclivity’.99 Historically, whether promiscuity, adultery and prostitution existed to the degree alleged is open to question. However, notwithstanding Beadon’s defence, the incriminating evidence weighed heavily against the continuation of the system. The negative image of the penal colony as being peopled by depraved and debauched human beings in the long term not only discredited the penal colony in the eyes of contemporaries but also stoked the fires of abolition. The fears generated by Norfolk Island near Australia, which had once enthused the Western imagination, were resurrected and projected onto the Andamans. Finally on 11 March 1921, William Vincent announced the decision to abolish the penal settlement.100 The recommendation of the Committee to abolish the penal settlement and the Government of India’s decision to act on it in the face of nationalist censure in 1921 was not a surprise for contemporaries. Although the Government of India announced its decision to abolish the penal settlement it was conflicted about how to convert the penal settlement into a free colony. The question it faced was how to carry out evacuation and reconstruction simultaneously. For this purpose C.W. Gwyne, the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, led a deputation to the Andamans in July 1921. He stayed on the Andamans for three weeks and submitted his report on 13 August 1921.101 His report reiterated that ‘a considerable amount of capital estimated at nearly two crores of rupees has been sunk in the islands which it would be folly to waste’.102 There was a realization regarding the impossibility of implementing the recommendations of the Jails Committee of 1919 in their entirety. In the meantime the fears of British officials regarding nationalist pressure were not unfounded. While the nationalist leaders favoured abolition of the penal settlement the fact that evils of the kind described by the Jails Committee existed on the Islands was indeed taken up by the nationalist press to harangue the administration. On 13 May

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1921, Bijali, a Bengali newspaper, ran a diatribe against the Settlement officers, alleging nefarious motives for the slow progress in evacuation of prisoners. Orders have been passed for the abolition of the settlement, but the Chief Commissioner, Colonel Beadon, is actively trying to persuade the Government against the decision. He is being actively supported in his efforts by Syed Baniad Husain. This man is District Officer at Port Blair by dint of good deal of manipulation, and there is no more repressive and syncophantic officer here, ready to punish small offences with undue severity. He has begun persuading the prisoners that if they continue to stay at Port Blair, they will gain; but they know their man too well. Colonial Beadon has another able supporter in Major Barker. Indu Bhushan Roy hanged himself while he was Superintendent of the jail. So one can see how he is to the prisoners. He has abolished the allowance of milk for prisoners hewing wood in the jungles, substituting arhar dal for it; and also reduced their allowance of mustard oil considerably. Major Barker’s predecessor in office got a C.I.E. for reducing the hospital diet allowances. And these allowances, such as they are, are considerably encroached on by the thievish practices which all here are addicted to. The woes of those who are in the settlement under the Defence of India Act know no end. They are harassed and humiliated at every step, and their food being much worse than what it used to be in free life, they are suffering from dysentery and fever and what not. Had the country been free, the settlement would have been abolished long ago. The same principle which justifies a special dietary for European prisoners holds good for these political offenders as well.103 Bengali of 10 September 1921 complained: Some time ago Government declared with great éclat that the convicts in the Andamans would be repatriated; but the dilatoriness of the authorities makes our hopes wither. Oppression in the Andamans is still perpetrated as of old. […] Female convicts also are more inhumanely treated. They are kicked and cuffed by the matrons and have often to work from 6 in the morning to 7 in the afternoon on half rations. Their hair is cropped if they commit minor faults and they are made to wear gunny as well as handcuffs. Will Lord Reading remove this stigma from the name of the British Government?104 The native newspapers were mainly concerned with either the political prisoners or the female convicts. This shows that the penal excesses of the Cellular Jail and the condition of the females continued to absorb the nationalist media. The role played by these newspaper reports in forcing the pace

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of the Government’s actions is not clear but the colonial administration was definitely not unaware of the noise being made by the nationalist press. The Government’s dilemma regarding how to convert the penal settlement finally led to approval of a policy change on 26 October 1921 on the lines suggested by Gwyne and desired by Beadon.105 According to the new policy, a free settlement was to gradually evolve from the existing penal settlement. The nucleus of the free settlement was to come from those of the present convict population who voluntarily opted to remain on the Andamans. Besides the convicts already serving their sentences, the Settlement was to receive convicts from jails in India who ‘volunteered’ to be sent to the Andamans. This was the template for the new ‘free’ or quasi-penal colony which was to come into being on the Islands. For a complete abolition of the penal settlement, the Andamans had to wait until 1945.

The ‘quasi-penal’ settlement The creation of a ‘quasi-penal’ settlement was furthered through the ‘colonization scheme’. ‘The object of the colonization scheme was twofold: to provide a suitable free population for the Islands, which offered opportunities to settlers; and, second to be a means of mitigating the punishment of these men. They were being transferred from a life of hard labour to one of comparative freedom and provided with the means to support themselves.’106 The aim was to have contented settlers with a sense of civic responsibility and the ‘germs of decent citizenship’. It was hoped that in the future some of them would acquire education and provide good clerks for the Government.107 The convicts were given a choice to either stay or to be repatriated to an Indian jail to serve their remaining sentence. The ones who chose to stay would be granted a ticket-of leave after some time in order to replace the labour battalions. These ticket-of-leave convicts were to be used as agriculturists and in the various government departments. The settler convicts would also be encouraged to import their wives from the mainland. According to this scheme, the convict population would diminish with time and the Settlement would also by then be prepared with amenities satisfactory to the settlers. Religion was to provide the glue for the new society and the proposal was to encourage groups of self-supporters to settle down on a communal basis. The Settlement was to help build more mosques and temples. Besides the convicts, the local-born and free population of shopkeepers, traders and policemen from the pre-1921 period were to continue living on the Islands. The political prisoners were to return immediately to India because they fomented ‘trouble and spread disaffection among the other prisoners’.

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Convict transportation to the Andamans was to end because it was a punishment which led to ‘devitalization … by complete isolation from family ties’.108 However, the inward migration of convicts was to continue. The Government wanted convict volunteers from the mainland jails to migrate to the Andamans. The essential criterion for them was that they had to belong to the star class (or first class); not to be more than thirty-five years of age; should not have been in jail for over three years; had to be married and willing to take their wife with them.109 These convicts were offered various inducements. Within a month of their arrival they were to receive a self-supporter ticket. After five years as a wage earner they would be entitled to occupancy rights and given agricultural land to maintain themselves. Along with these privileges, much like convicts who were already in the Andamans, these volunteers would also be granted remission. Regarding the Andamanese, the administration firmly doubted their survival for many generations and believed that their existence could only be prolonged by collecting them in some isolated reserve. The Andamanese had been rapidly diminishing since the 1880s and by the late 1910s their numbers had reduced to 1,317. The Government of India therefore agreed to appoint a ‘sympathetic’ medical missionary ‘whose primary care would be their physical and moral improvement rather than active proselytisation’. The Jarawas, who were still ‘hostile’, continued to invade the Settlement and ambush convict settlers and police constables. Different suggestions were made for a solution to the ‘Jarawa problem’. Superintendent M.W. Douglas suggested appointing ‘a small Military force comprised of men who are trained in forest conditions; and whose duty it would be to hunt these savages persistently for some six months, or until they came to terms’.110 In Chief Forest Officer M.C.C. Bonnington’s view in 1922, as the number of convicts would lessen with their repatriation to mainland jails, the Islands would be encroached on by the Jarawas who ‘infested’ its forests like ‘vermins [sic]’. The only way to deal with Jarawas was to ‘infect them with some contagious disease’.111 The march towards a changed settlement took some time to take off.112 The Chief Commissioner initially found it difficult to persuade the convicts regarding the genuineness of the offer of self-supporter status.113 According to one Settlement official this happened because ‘the germs of non-cooperation had reached Port Blair (there was to have been an exposition of “Down-tolls” and Satyagraha on December 26th 1921, which was frustrated by my timely executive action); the convicts were disposed to regard the notice with some distrust, thinking that, if they took out selfsupporters tickets they would be kept back in the Andamans against their will, either after release or when opportunity to return to an Indian Jail occurred’.114 The convicts who were still serving their sentences petitioned to permanently settle on the Andamans because they were offered permanent employment in one of the government departments; or with a private

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individual, as a domestic servant; or had family members who were not in a position to migrate back to the home country.115 The work of repatriation also progressed unevenly. The self-supporters who did not wish to stay on the Andamans could not be released before the expiry of their sentences and asking them to serve the rest of their sentence in a jail after having led a life of considerable freedom was considered a serious hardship.116 Much to the Settlement officers’ dismay, some of the provinces refused to take back their prisoners because of inadequate jail accommodation.117 Overcrowding also began to occur in various local jails. This pushed the Government of India into temporarily reopening transportation to the Andamans in December 1921.118 By December 1925 the convicts in the Settlement numbered 7,740, a reduction of only 33 per cent.119 The ending of transportation also led to a shortage of labour. The administration tried to induce free emigration but initially did not meet with much success.120 Eventually two convict groups – the Moplah rebels from Malabar and Bhantu (a ‘criminal tribe’ of Sultana’s dacoit gang from the United Provinces) – decided to migrate to the Andamans from 1924 onwards.121 Besides these some social groups also migrated to the Andamans as forest labour. These included Karen, a Christian hill tribe from Burma, and Roman Catholic labourers from Ranchi, Bihar. Fresh village settlements were opened for the newly arrived settlers in Port Blair and residential colonies were also founded in the Middle and North Andamans. One labour shortage that the Settlement faced was that of convicts of sweeper class. Before 1921 the Settlement had not faced difficulty in finding men of this class but now there was no local set of sweepers. Their provision was becoming a problem because demand for them was considerable. This matter, the Settlement officers felt, was crucial to public health and therefore needed immediate attention. In view of this problem, the Superintendent, Lt. Col. H.C. Beadon, who was overseeing the transition of the Settlement, complained, ‘I think the Government of India now recognizes that the conversion of the penal settlement into a free colony cannot be carried out blindly by a rigid cessation of all transportation and that, until there is a free and regular influx of population from India, it is desirable for some years to transport a few convicts to fulfill special needs’.122 However, notwithstanding the initial setbacks in repatriating the convicts, with time the Settlement in the Andamans began to transform. While all labour in the Settlement continued to be performed by the convicts, gradually they began to be paid wages on a sliding scale. The convicts were also granted rations and free clothing to remove the stigma of convict status. There was also a great change in their mental outlook, bearing, conduct, capacity to work, and in general health. The proportion of selfsupporters increased from 10 to 56 per cent.123 The Settlement had received 276 men and thirty-one women convicts as volunteers. The women eligible for marriage had selected their husbands and settled down. There was a

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revision of land-holding rights to enable the development of land by people with capital. The idea was to give a secure occupancy right to smallholders. These changes served as a real stimulus to agricultural growth. The area under annual crops rose from 3,300 acres in 1921 to 6,400 acres in 1925, an increase of 94 per cent.124 Everyone who visited the Settlement in the mid-1920s noted the changes. Colonel Ferrar, speaking at the opening ceremony of the causeway connecting Chatham Island with the mainland on 21 April 1930, summed up these changes: On my arrival here in 1923 I was told that in 1926 the Penal Settlement would close suddenly like a book and that Port Blair would revert to Jungle. It is now 1930 and in reality what has happened? In every direction we see progress. The Penal Settlement remains, but changed, immensely changed, owing to the removal of the habitual criminals and the recruitment in their place of casual criminals who come as volunteers with the hope of speedy recovery of their self-respect and who can generally be trusted to behave and to work under less rigorous, less visibly penal forms of restraint. Large numbers of them have imported their families and to take one index we have now in Port Blair 4,000 children against some 1,209 in 1923. Every convict on the land has a wife and the dreary villages of idle bachelor convicts have disappeared. The humanizing effect of these changes is great. Then the placing of all convicts on wages has brought money into the bazaars and wealth or at least prosperity to the whole trading community. The standard of living has improved as is to be seen from the great number of fine houses erected in great numbers every year through the whole Settlement. The coconut growers who are more fortunate than their brethren elsewhere in having good markets will export this year about 3,000,000 nuts against the figure nil for 1923. The Forest Department is now exporting five times the amount of timber exported in 1923. Outside capital has still to be attracted but we have the Western India Match Company as the pioneer in this respect. Their factory, the first private factory in the Andamans, is in course of erection a few yards from where we stand. Another sign of advance is given by motor traffic. Against 2 Ford vans in 1923 we now have close on 150 motor vehicles of all sorts. The outcome of all this has been the building of firstly a deep-sea jetty at Chatham and secondly a road to take all traffic between that jetty and the mainland.125 Finally, the colonial administration had found a solution. The Andamans were to have a quasi-penal settlement.

Conclusion A forty-year long dialectic reflected the colonial administration’s unease with tension between its penal and developmental priorities. The Andamans

186 Imperial Andamans

had begun their colonial journey as a strategic colony being serviced by a penal station but gradually it became as much a penal colony in its own right as it was a strategic outpost. Crucial in this shift was the inability of the Andamans to put an end to its dependence on transported convicts for its labour requirements. Fulfilling its role as a strategic colony required it to shake off its initial dependence on convict labour and grow into an independent and commercial outpost, as Singapore, Mauritius and Penang had. Closure of the penal settlement entailed the drying up of labour reserves and their forcible replacement by indentured, contract or free wage labour which was difficult to come by. Thus, in the long term the Andamans’ failure to get away from its dependence on transported convicts tied the stakes of the colonial administration more closely to maintaining a penal station. The Andamans were saddled with a large convict population, their children, the Cellular Jail, huge capital investments, and a potential for commercial success which was yet to be realized. Taking a greater stake in the penal character implied that the Settlement administration could no longer prioritize the developmental demands of the colony over its penal requirements without Fort William or penal observers taking notice. The inauguration of a quasi-penal settlement in 1921 was an attempt to both reckon with the logistical impossibility of doing away with the penal settlement and an acknowledgement that the Andamans could never serve as an ‘ideal’ prison.

Conclusion: Colonial Encounter and Island History

Are islands natural prisons? The answer to this question is encrypted in the history of modern colonial encounters, that is, the European discovery and characterization of tropical islands and their inhabitants, as the colonial history of the Andamans illustrates. The spatial history of the Andamans began much before their colonization as a leaf in the fantastic tales of ancient and medieval travellers. The Andamans entered history through these accounts and ‘transformed into a place, that is, a space with a history’. The British stepped into the historical trajectory of the Andamans as their empire was shifting away from the Atlantic and starting to focus on the Indian Ocean. With this a new era of ‘modern globalization’, with linkages between the Indian Ocean and the European-Atlantic economy, was emerging. The events as they unfolded in the Andamans were reminiscent of the Columbian encounters in the late fifteenth century, the sixteenth century colonial encounter between Indians and English in the New World, and the Tupinamba and Europeans in Brazil.1 The violence in each case accompanied misanthropic characterization of the environments and peoples which the colonizers encountered. British surveyors and administrators brought colonial experiences and characterizations from European encounters with the non-European world to the Andamans. This is amply exemplified in the way disgust with the physical surroundings of the tropical islands was projected on to the natives in the Andamans. Over time, the need for physical violence diminished because an essential aspect of this hegemonic imagination was that it created and sustained spaces to which the aborigines had no physical access. Moral judgements were couched in scientific, albeit racialized, theories of environments and peoples. As a result of being diachronically encoded into the Andamans’ history, the colonial characterization of the Islands and their inhabitants displayed a tenacious staying power. This is reflected in the images that have come down to us today of the Andamanese as cannibals. The establishment of the penal settlement was instrumental in lending permanence to the image of kalapani, the land of darkness and death, and its nationalist alter ego, 187

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muktitirth. At the heart of both metaphors, kalapani and muktitirth, sustained and nourished by colonialism and nationalism, was the imagery of the Andamans as a natural prison. There was little endemic or innate in island geography for it to serve as a prison. However, a particular imagery and perception of nature and landscape influenced the way that space was used, controlled and transformed. This book not only demonstrates this point in relation to the Andamans but has also sought to free the Islands from the ‘island complex’ and ‘island metaphor’, which was not always a product of geographical location but of the colonial encounter. It reveals that the island complex was mostly a Euro-centric assumption that located islands, especially tropical islands, at the margins and extremities of the civilized and knowable world. This book, by employing the lens of spatial history, de-links the Andamans from the colonial spatio-geographic imagination, questions the historical conceit in transforming spatial stereotypes into acquired wisdom, and establishes that all prisons are simply human constructs. The history of the colonial encounter also demonstrates how colonialism produced, reordered, configured and negotiated spaces not simply domestic, familial and vocational but geographical and environmental as well. The encounter re-territorialized the Andamans. Britain’s larger imperial concerns, which were centred on securing the Indian Ocean, tied the fate of the Andamans to the empire in India and to port cities and islands along the Indian Ocean rim, such as Cape Town, Mauritius, Madagascar, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements and Australia. The new spatialization of the Andamans had the promise of breaking both the spatial and societal insularity of the Andamans. While at one level the colonization of the Islands in the mid-nineteenth century brought in ‘cultural traditions foreign to this area’ and wrought drastic social and economic changes in Andamanese society, the colonization, instead of minimizing it, reinforced the geographic isolation of the Islands. That is, assimilation into larger political entities – British India and the British Indian Ocean – did not really help the Andamans overcome geographical isolation. For the most part, this was a result of the view that the British took of the insularity of the Andamans. Instead of seeing the insularity as a consequence of geography and historical contingency, they attributed it to the Islands’ wild, uncivilized character. In some measure, this was also the consequence of the establishment of the penal settlement, which required isolating the Islands from any external contact. Their continued isolation from surrounding littorals and coasts was ensured because of high shipping costs, absence of a growing international or domestic market and a never-ending battle with limited technical and infrastructural capacity. Notwithstanding its significance as a strategic frontier outpost, the Andamans as a colony remained commercially non-productive. Since little, in commercial terms, was obtained from the Andamans, they continued as a penal settlement. This set the Andamans apart from the contem-

Conclusion 189

porary plantation colonies such as Penang, Singapore and Mauritius that became integrated within international and transoceanic commercial networks and had wide export enclaves. Imperial Andamans provides a new framework for studying the history of penal settlements which have hitherto been studied with the help of categories produced by histories of prison – labour, surveillance, segregation and medicine. These categories are inadequate and in many ways problematic for studying penal settlements. This book instead uses the spatial framework to study the Andamans’ penal history. First, it focuses on the island character of the penal settlement and the manner in which the physical and material exigencies of the island colony circumscribed its convict management system. The attempt to spatially appropriate the Andamans as a geographical extension of the Indian subcontinent, instead of bringing the Islands into the Indian mainstream, inadvertently imposed a great degree of administrative isolation and a huge financial burden on the colony’s administration. This in turn impinged on the system of convict management. While the colonial officials would have liked to enforce a much stricter and scrupulous system of segregation and surveillance, they were obliged to restructure the traditional penal devices in order to make the best of the situation. The political consanguinity between the convicts and the colonial officers, for instance, reflected the accommodations made by the colonial administrators. In the Andamans there existed a great deal of internal dissension amongst the Settlement officials regarding the spatial character of punishment. The spatial disassociation involved in the sentence of transportation was understood in different ways by the administrators. This divergence of opinion directly impinged on the system of convict management and the everyday functioning of the Settlement. Here, the task of the historian is difficult because the Settlement’s administration manual, its annual reports and the decennial Jail reports offer only an inkling of the internal conflict in the system. One can easily mistake policy pronouncements for the reality on the ground, which in no way approximated the picture these reports paint of the Settlement. It is in the private papers and the daily correspondence amongst the officials in the Settlement, and between the central government administrators and those in the Settlement that one finds the internal bickering and disagreements, as well as details of different visions and methods that administrators at various levels employed. Consequently, it is difficult and at times nearly impossible in the Andamans to map out a consistent and impersonal colonial policy that was followed by all. In many ways, the state of affairs in the Andamans was no different from the system that prevailed in the Straits Settlements and Mauritius. Kernail Singh Sandhu describes the Straits system as ‘liberal and effective’ and Clare Anderson reaffirms that in Mauritius ‘the system in practice was not based on strict discipline and surveillance, as was claimed’.2 Instead, positive

190 Imperial Andamans

incentives for good behaviour were ‘crucial to the successful operation of the convict system’. However, the Andamans were quite different from the Straits and Mauritius in two ways. Foremost, the Andamans functioned as a penal colony where the convicts formed the majority of the population and the free settlers were a significant but a very small section of the population. In contrast, the Straits and Mauritius were colonies with convict stations where the convict population was a small component of a larger free population of Europeans, Africans and Asians. Secondly, while the administration of the Andamans was riddled with internal differences of opinion, in the Straits and Mauritius the differences in administrative opinions were mainly expressed in the form of conflict between metropole and the colony. As Anand Yang shows in his work on Indian convict workers in Southeast Asia, the administrators in the colony displayed a greater homogeneity of opinion amongst themselves.3 Negotiation emerges as the essential variable which not only operated within the different levels (central, provincial, local) of the colonial administration but also defined the relationship of the colonial administration with the convict settlers. This is especially evident in the sections of the book examining the Andamans’ labour regime and the existence of the transported convict. The lives of the convicts – both men and women – who arrived, lived, settled, escaped from or died on the Islands appears in myriad hues in this book, of which brutality was just one. The transported convict, who was marginalized and rendered ‘socially dead’ by virtue of having been transported, was integrated into not only state-sponsored political hierarchies but also given space to re-build and re-enact his social life through a series of integrative processes. The labour regime on the Andamans also displayed a negotiated temper and was not entirely a coercive one. The works of other historians attest to the punitive, integrative and reformative role of convict labour and the lack of disjunction between the crime and the assignment of labour activities as the basis of the negotiated character of the labour regime.4 However, up to this point there is little discussion of the actual nature of this ‘negotiation’. Most studies see negotiation as initiated by the convicts, where the marginalized seizes historical agency in the form of his resistance to or acquiescence in the system. Where the present work steps away is in showing that it was the structural logic of the island penal colony that provided the framework within which negotiation took place. This is not to say that the convicts did not possess historical agency – they did. However, it was the contradictions inherent in the colonial structure which opened up spaces and created possibilities for negotiation. This book thus provides a distinct prototype for studying convict systems and island penal stations in history. The problems and issues that the British faced in administering the Andamans did not wither away with the coming of India’s independence. Following independence, there was a political debate about assimilating

Conclusion 191

the Islands into the state of West Bengal or according it the status of an independent state. It was ultimately settled that it would be administered as a Union Territory headed by a Chief Commissioner, to be nominated by the President of India. In 1982, the office of the Chief Commissioner was upgraded to the post of Lieutenant-Governor and now the Andaman Islands, together with the Nicobar Islands, send one elected representative to the Indian Parliament.5 Although the Andamans were assimilated into the Indian federal system, the problem of economic development has remained. The post-colonial Indian state inherited the uneven socio-economic geography of British colonialism. In 2004, reading about and watching the problems faced in the relief and rehabilitation work following the Tsunami on television and in newspapers was a case of déjà vu. The gap between central directives and local requirements, problems of communications and transport in between the islands, and the general administrative conundrum was reminiscent of the British attempts at settling and administering the Andamans. In spite of the nationalist apotheosis of the Andamans, it continues to be the marginal and outcaste space of the post-colonial Indian state. Imperial Andamans is a response to this marginalization and one method of reconsidering the place of oceanic prison islands in the historical and geographic imagination of imperialism, nationalism and post-colonial nations.

Notes Introduction 1 This was a generic term used in British India denoting a place beyond waters. 2 Bejoy Kumar Sinha, In Andamans: The Indian Bastille, Kanpur, 1939. 3 M.M. Kaye, Death in the Andamans, St Martin’s Minotaur, New York, 2000; Lee Langley, Persistent Rumors, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 1992. The film Kalapani was released in 1996. 4 Begun as a mutiny, a popular rebellion against the British engulfed most of northern India in 1857. 5 David Arnold, ‘India: The Contested Prison’, in Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown, eds, Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2007, pp. 147–184; and ‘The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories’, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, eds, Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 29–53; Frank Dikotter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002; Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001. 6 Bruce F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reforms in Russia, 1863–1917, Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, 1996, shows how Russian historiography has played a role in making revolutionary martyrs of political prisoners. 7 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, p. 7. 8 Mountbatten was the last Viceroy of the British India (1947) and the first Governor-General of independent India (1947–48). 9 Nicholas Mansergh and Penderel Moon, eds, India: Transfer of Power, 1942–47, HMSO, London, Doc no. 132 (June 1947, pp. 253–255); 133 (June 1947, p. 255); 165 (June 1947, pp. 312–313); 190 (June 1947, pp. 353–354). 10 Jinnah’s telegram to Viceroy Mountbatten cited in a letter from the Viceroy to Secretary of State on 5 July 1947, in Mountbatten Collection, India Office Records (IOR) British Library, Mss Eur/F 200, no. 3. Jinnah complained about Mountbatten’s decision to hand over the Islands to India on the basis that the Andamans were ‘not part of India historically and geographically’, and that these islands occupied a strategic position on the sea route which was the main channel of communication between East and West Pakistan. 11 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Congress Comments on the Draft Announcement, Secret, New Delhi, 16 May 1947’, in Mansergh and Moon, India: Transfer of Power, vol. IX, doc. no. 464, pp. 855–857. 12 Some of the local writers are Govindsingh Pawar, ‘Editorial’, in Dweep Lahiri, 25, 2001; Gauri Shankar Pandey, The Cellular Jail, The National Memorial, Port Blair, 1987. 13 L.P. Mathur, History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1756–1947, Sterling Publishers, Delhi, 1968. 14 R.C. Majumdar, The Penal Settlement in Andamans, Government of India, 1975; Barindra Kumar Ghose, The Tale of My Exile, Pondicherry, 1922; V.D. Savarkar, 192

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15

16

17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24 25 26 27

The Story of My Transportation for Life, translated by V.N. Naik, Bombay, 1950; Niranjan Sen, Bengal’s Forgotten Warriors, People’s Publishing House, Bombay, 1945; Bejoy Kumar Sinha, In Andamans: The Indian Bastille, 1939; Upendranath Bandhopadhyaya, Nirvasiter Atmakatha, National Publishers, Calcutta, 1967. Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion, Anthem South Asian Studies, London, 2007; and ‘Sepoys, Servants and Settlers: Convict Transportation in the Indian Ocean, 1787–1945’, Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown, eds, Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2007, pp. 185–220. K.S. Singh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, People of India Series, 12, Anthropological Survey of India, Madras, 1994; Clare Anderson, ‘Fashioning Identities: Convict Dress in Colonial South and Southeast Asia’, History Workshop, 52, Autumn 2001, pp. 153–174; and ‘Godna: Inscribing Indian Convicts in the Nineteenth Century’, in Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and North American History, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 102–117; and Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia, Berg, UK, 2004. Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000; ‘Policing the Savage: Segregation, Labor and State Medicine in the Andamans’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 58, 3, 1999, pp. 753–773; ‘Rationing Sex: Female Convicts in the Andamans’, South Asia, 30, 1, 1999, pp. 29–59. Frederick Cooper, ‘Postcolonial Studies and Study of History’, in Ania Loomba et al., eds, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Duke University Press, Durham, 2005, pp. 401–422. Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p. 6. Much in the same manner as Madagascar colonies. See Alison Games, ‘Oceans, Migrants, and Character of Empires: English Colonial Schemes in the Seventeenth Century’, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, 12–15 Feb 2003, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., http://www.historycooperative.org/ proceedings/seascapes/index.html. Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question, 1776–1811, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980 and Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1994; Mollie Gillian, ‘The Botany Bay Decision, 1786: Convicts, Not Empire’, English Historical Review, 97, 1982, pp. 740–766; David Mackay, ‘Far-Flung Empire: A Neglected Imperial Outpost at Botany Bay 1788–1801’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 9, 2, 1981, pp. 125–145. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, 2, 2002, pp. 87–109. Delhi Historians’ Group, Communalization of Education: The History Textbook Controversy, New Delhi, 2001; Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, Communalisation of History: The Assault on History: Press Reportage, Editorials and Articles, New Delhi, 2002. Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh, eds, History and Present, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2002. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000. Goswami, Producing India, 2004, pp. 4–20. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA, 2001; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, Verso, London, 1997; Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds,

194 Notes

28

29 30

31

32 33

34

The Post-colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, New York, 1995; Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003; Steven Englund, ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’, Journal of Modern History, 64, 2, June 1992, pp. 299–320; Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005, pp. 91–112. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, Edward Arnold, London, 1973, Consciousness and the Urban Experience, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, Faber and Faber, London, 1987; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991 (English trans.); Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1994. The idea and expression is borrowed from Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 1987. R. Mukherjee and L. Subramanium, eds, Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998; Satish Chandra, ed., Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics, Sage Publications, Delhi, 1987; Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966; see H.P. Ray, The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003; David E. Sopher, The Sea Nomads: A Study of the Maritime Boat People of Southeast Asia, National Museum, Singapore, 1977; K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Richard Hall, Empires of Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and its Invaders, HarperCollins, London, 1996; Kernail Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969; Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius 1815–53, Macmillan, Houndmills, 2000. E. Valentine, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass, eds, Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, Frank Cass, London, 1992; Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–74, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995; Shula Mark and Peter Richardson, eds, International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives, published for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies by Maurice Temple Smith, London, 1984; Barbara Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, eds, British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1987; Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 2000; Anand Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of World History, 14, 2, 2003, pp. 179–208. Shawkat M. Toorawa, The Western Indian Ocean: Essays on Islands and Islanders, The Hassam Toorawa Trust, Port Louis, 2007. Frank Broeze, ed., Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the Thirteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Kegan Paul International, London, 1997; Indu Banga, ed., Ports and Their Hinterland in India, 1700–1950, Manohar, Delhi, 1992; Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996; Barbara Bender, Landscape Politics and Perspectives, Berg Publishers, Providence and Oxford, 1993; Queeny Pradhan, ‘Empire in the Hills: A Study of Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund and Mount Abu (Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century)’, PhD thesis submitted at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2000. Richard Grove, ‘Conserving Eden’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 35, 1993, pp. 318–351; Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Edens and the

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36

37 38

39

Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; Ecology, Climate and Empire: The Indian Legacy in Global Environmental History, 1400–1940, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Fontana, London, 1966 [1981]; Marshall D. Sahlins, Islands of History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982; Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe, 1990, Chapter 5; Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion, Routledge, 1988; John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004. T.H. Eriksen, ‘In Which Sense do Cultural Islands Exist?’, Social Anthropology, 1, 1B, 1993, pp. 133–147. As Erikson argues, ‘in both biological, linguistic and socio-cultural respects, islands tend to be less isolated than, for example, mountain valleys’. This is because ‘water tends to unite; mountains tend to divide’. Also see D. Venkatesan, ‘Study of Island Cultures and Ecology: A Perspective’, Man in India, 72, 1, March 1992, pp. 15–27 and K.S. Singh, ‘Island Anthropology Retrospect and Prospects’, Man in India, 71, 4, 1991, pp. 545–569. Ibid.; Anderson, ‘Sepoys, Servants and Settlers’, 2007, pp. 185–220. Thomas R. Metcalf, ‘Empire Recentered: India in the Indian Ocean Arena’, in G. Blue, M. Bunton and R. Croizier, eds, Colonialism and the Modern World: Selected Studies, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 2002, pp. 25–39; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2006; Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997; Jerry Bentley, ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, Geographical Review, 89, 2, 1999, pp. 215–224; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 1997, pp. 735–762. This point has been also made with regard to the Atlantic by John R. Gillis who argues that ‘in the age of industrial capitalism and the nation state, history turned its back on Atlantic Oceania, forgetting that it had ever existed. The nineteenth century progressive imagination turned inward to focus on roads and bridges, ignoring water-borne forms of transportation. No longer stepping stones to the future, islands retreated into the mists of history, waiting, like castaways, to be rescued from oblivion’, in Islands of the Mind, 2004. On globalization and the historical profession see: Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, pp. vii–lxii; Prem Shankar Jha, Twilight of the Nation State: Globalization, Chaos and War, Pluto Press, London, 2006; John B. Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism, Anchor Books, New York, 2003; Kerry Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas?” The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, 12–15 Feb, 2003 Library of Congress, Washington D.C., http://www.historycooperative.org/ proceedings/sea-scapes/index.html.; Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 2002; Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen, ‘A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies’, Geographical Review, 89, 2, 1999, pp. 161–168; Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, Routledge, New York, 2004. Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas?”’, 2003; Games, ‘Oceans, Migrants, and Character of Empires’, 2003; Martin Lewis, ‘Dividing the Ocean Sea’, Geographical Review, 89, 2, 1999, pp. 188–214.

196 Notes 40 Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 1969; Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers, 1995; Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 2000, Frank Broeze, ‘The Muscles of Empire: Indian Seamen and the Raj, 1919–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18, 1, 2001, pp. 43–67. G. Balachandran, ‘Conflicts in the International Maritime Labour: British and Indian Seamen, Employers and the State, 1890–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39, 1, 2002; and ‘Searching for the Sardar: The State, Pre-capitalist Institutions, and Human Agency in the Maritime Labour Market, Calcutta, 1850-1935’, in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi and Oxford, 1996, pp. 206–236; J.J. Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914’, American Historical Review, 105, 1, 2000, pp. 69–91; Takashi Oishi, ‘Indian Muslim Merchants in South Africa 1875–1920: With Special Remarks on Their Migration in the Indian Ocean Region’, in Yasuro Hase, et al., eds, South Asian Migration in Comparative Perspective: Movement, Settlement, and Diaspora, Japan Center for Area Studies, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 2002, pp. 305–350, and Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000; Kenneth McPherson, ‘The Social Expansion of the Maritime World of the Indian Ocean: Passenger Traffic and Community Building, 1815–1939’, in Klaus Friedland, ed., Maritime Aspects of Migration, Bohlau, Cologne, 1989; Conference papers of G. Balachandran, ‘South Asian Seafarers and their Worlds: c. 1870–1930s’ and Diane Robinson-Dunn, ‘Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England’, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, 12–15 Feb. 2003, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/ seascapes/index.html; Robert Bollard, ‘How to Create a Tradition: The Seamen’s Union and the Great Strike of 1917’, http://www.historycooperative.org/ proceedings/asslh2/bollard.html; Ravi Ahuja, ‘Mobility and Containment, The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, 1900–1960’, International Review of Social History, 51, 2006, pp. 111–141. However, one must note that the Ocean as a historical framework is not entirely new to South Asian history. Unlike the Pacific and the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean boasts of a range of sophisticated historical research works on maritime history of the ancient, medieval and early modern periods. See Mukherjee and Subramanium, Politics and Trade, 1998; Chandra, Indian Ocean, 1987; Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean, 1966; Ranabir Chakravarti, ‘Seafaring, Ships and Ship Owners: India and the Indian Ocean (AD 700–1500)’, in David Parkin and Ruth Barnes, eds, Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology in the Indian Ocean, Routledge Curzon, London, 2002, pp. 28–61 and ‘Visiting Faraway Shores: India’s Trade in the Western Indian Ocean (c. CE 800–1500)’, presented at a Conference in Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2004; H.P. Ray, The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003 and ‘Seafaring in the Bay of Bengal in the Early Centuries AD’, Studies in History, 6, 1, 1990, n.s., pp. 1–14; Sopher, The Sea Nomads, 1977; Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe 1990; Hall, Empires of Monsoon, 1996; Parkin and Barnes, Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology, 2002; Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993; Radhakumud Mookerji, Indian Shipping: A History of Sea-borne Trade and Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1912; N. Karashima, Ancient and Medieval Commercial Activities in the Indian Ocean: Testimony of Inscriptions and Ceramic Sherds, Taisho University, Japan, 2002; K.S. Mathew, Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, Manohar,

Notes 197 New Delhi, 1995. H.P. Ray and J.F. Salles, eds, Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, Manohar, New Delhi, 1996; Mukherjee and Subramanium, Politics and Trade, 1998; Markus Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History, 14, 2, 2003, pp. 131–178; Vimla Begley and Richard Daniel de Pubma, Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1991; F. De Romanis and A. Tchernia, Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India, Manohar, New Delhi, 1997; Stanley Burstein, ‘State Formation in Ancient Northeast Africa and the Indian Ocean Trade’, Interactions: Regional Studies, Global Processes, and Historical Analysis, 28 Feb–3 March, 2001, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/interactions/burnstein.html 41 Lewis and Wigen, ‘A Maritime Response’, 1999 and Marcus Vink, ‘Indian Ocean Studies and the “New Thalassology”’, Journal of Global History, 2, 2007, pp. 41–62. 42 Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce and Navigation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797, Routledge, London and New York, 1992; Thomas C. Patterson, ‘Early Colonial Encounters and Identities in the Caribbean: A Review of Some Recent Works and Their Implications’, Dialectical Anthropology, 16, 1, 1991, pp. 1–14; Greg Dening, ‘The Geographical Knowledge of the Polynesians and the Nature of Inter-Island Contact’, in Jack Golson, ed., Polynesian Navigation, The Polynesian Society, Wellington, 1963, pp. 102–131 and Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880, The Dorsey Press, Illinois, 1980; Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; G. Jyotsna Singh, ‘History of Colonial Ethnography: The Ideological Formation of Edward Terry’s A Voyage to East India (1655 & 1665) The Merchants and Mariners Preservation and Thanksgiving (1649)’, in Ivo Kemps and J.G. Singh, eds, Travel Knowledge, European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period, Palgrave, New York, 2001, pp. 197–210; Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between the Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994; D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993; Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London, 1992; Zarine Cooper, ‘Analysis of the Nature of Contacts with the Andaman Islands during the last two Millennia’, South Asian Studies, 5, 1989, pp. 133–147. 43 Jeanne Garane, Discursive Geographies: Writing Space and Place in French, Rodopi, New York, 2005; Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Explorations and Empire, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001; Robert A. Stafford, ‘Annexing the Landscapes of the Past: British Imperial Geology in the Nineteenth Century’, in John M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990, pp. 67–89; Harvey, Social Justice and the City, 1973, Consciousness and the Urban Experience, 1985; M. Chisholm and D.H. Smith, eds, Shared Space and Divided Space: Essays on Conflict and Territorial Organization, Unwin Hyman, London, 1990; R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, Routledge, London, 1991; N. Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka, Westview Press, Boulder, 1998; Michael Kearney, World View, Chandler and Sharp, Novato, 1984; Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Thinking Space, Routledge, London, 2000.

198 Notes 44 Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory, British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003. Barrow demonstrates the way the clarity and scientific nature of the late eighteenth century colonial maps, like historical documents, was beguiling. These maps hid the existent reality of the contemporary colonial rule in Bengal that was still tenuous and where officials, engaged in mapping and surveying, were being constantly attacked and evaded by local people. 45 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Structuring of an Empire, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006, pp. 16–19. 46 I borrow the idea of unevenness from Goswami, Producing India, 2004. 47 Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000; Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 2000; Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 1969; J.B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1983. 48 Carlos Aguirre, ‘Prisons and Prisoners in Modernising Latin America (1800–1940)’, in Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown, eds, Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2007, pp. 14–54. 49 Zarine Cooper, ‘Early Communication Networks in the Bay of Bengal’, in Archaeology and History: Early Settlements in the Andaman Islands, Oxford University Press, India, 2002, pp. 8–31. The Andamanese today are represented by four groups – the Jarawa who inhabit the Middle and South Andamans; the Sentinelese who live on the North Sentinel Island; Onge who are located in Little Andaman; and the Great Andamanese who live on Strait Island. The Great Andamanese, originally a group of twelve tribes, occupied the length and breadth of the North, Middle and South Andamans, and were the first ones to come in contact with the British and the penal settlement. 50 Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 1994; Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

Chapter 1 1 2

3 4 5

Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1966 [1981]. The English East India Company (EEIC) was formed as a trading company in London by Royal Charter in 1600. It became a territorial power in India after 1757. The British Crown as the Government of India replaced the EEIC in 1858 and it was formally dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1874. Home, Public, 28 April, 1783, 43, National Archives of India, Delhi, hereafter NAI; Home, Public, 28 April 1783, 44, NAI. Home, Public, 10 March 1788, 30, NAI; Secret, 22 Dec 1788, Proc. Vol., pp. 4788–4808, NAI; Secret, 30 Dec 1789, 6–29, NAI. B. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996; C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996; J.B. Harley (edited by Paul Laxton) The New Venture of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997. According to Edney, ‘Easy systematic survey constituted a geographical “panopticon”’; Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory, 2003.

Notes 199 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18 19

20 21

R.H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 1, Eighteenth Century, Survey of India, Dehradun, 1945, p. 5. Ibid., p. 1. William Cornwallis to Blair, 4 Sep 1789, Cor 51, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, hereafter NMM; Home, Public, 6 August 1858, 76–78, NAI. M.V. Portman, History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, vol. 1, Calcutta, 1899, p. 91. Alastair Pennycook, in his English and the Discourses on Cannibalism, Routledge, London and New York, 1998. The works of David Harvey were among the first to contest the neglect of space in addressing social relationships, Harvey, Social Justice and the City, 1973 and Consciousness and the Urban Experience, 1985; Chisholm and Smith, eds, Shared Space and Divided Space, 1990; Shields, Places on the Margin, 1991. Charles Verlinden, ‘The Transfer of Colonial Techniques from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic’, in F. Fernandez-Armesto, ed., The European Opportunity, Variorum, Aldershot, 1995, pp. 225–248; Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, New York, Basic Books, 1991, p. 134; Dening, ‘The Geographical Knowledge’, 1963, pp. 102–131; Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, 2001, pp. 54–58; Games, ‘Oceans, Migrants, and Character of Empires’, 2003; Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas?”’, 2003. Jyotsna G. Singh, ‘History of Colonial Ethnography’, 2001, pp. 197–210; Seymour Phillips, ‘The Outer World of the European Middle Ages’, in Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between the Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994, pp. 23–63, Schwartz demonstrates the way New World discoverers ‘fell back on the implicit ethnographies’. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 1993 and Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992. Also see Brian V. Street, The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction 1858–1920, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1975. Moti Chandra in his Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, 1977, cites references to sea travel between India and China from Indian and Chinese sources, all of which concur that the ‘Indian ships had to encounter terrible storms in Bay of Bengal and in the South China sea which caused shipwrecks’, p. 93. Early history of the Andamans is reminiscent of the Waqwaq Islands, see Shawkat M. Toorawa, ‘The Medieval Waqwaq Islands and the Mascarenes’, in Toorawa, ed., The Western Indian Ocean: Essays on Islands and Islanders, The Hassam Toorawa Trust, Port Louis, 2007, pp. 49–66. According to M.V. Portman the Muslim travellers’ account has survived only as quoted in Pemberton’s Collection of Voyages and Travels, London, Vol. 7, 1811. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, translated and with an introduction by Ronald Latham, Penguin Books, 1958, p. 258. Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral, London, 1802, p. 133; F.J. Mouat, Adventures and Researches Among the Andaman Islanders, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1863, p. 7. John Mandeville, The Book of John Mandeville, translated with an introduction by C.W.R.D. Moseley, Penguin Books, 1983, pp. 136–139. Iain M. Higgins, Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1997; Sarah Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra: Paganity,

200 Notes

22 23

24 25

26 27

28

29 30

31

Hybridity and Representation in Mandeville’s Travels’, in Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds, The Monstrous Middle Ages, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2004, pp. 113–133. Cited in Peter Yapp, ed., The Travellers’ Dictionary of Quotation, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1983, p. 9. For a detailed exposition of the travel narratives see Zarine Cooper, ‘Early Communication Networks in the Bay of Bengal’, in Archaeology and History: Early Settlements in the Andaman Islands, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2002, pp. 8–31. Portman, History of Our Relations, vol. 1, 1899, pp. 50–79. Cited in Zarine Cooper, ‘Archaeological Evidence of Maritime Contacts: The Andaman Islands’, in H.P. Ray and J.F. Salles, eds, Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, Manohar, Delhi, 1996 and 1998, pp. 240–245, p. 19. Christine G. Andrews, ‘The Boucicaut Masters’, Gesta, 41, 1, Artistic Identity in the Late Middle Ages, 2002, pp. 29–38. Henri Omont, Livres de Merveilles, Marco Polo, Odoric De Pordenone, Mandeville, Hayton, Etc., Volume I, Catala, Paris, 1907; Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berri: the Boucicaut Master, Studies in the History of European Art, Vol. 3, Phaidon, London, 1968, pp. 117–122, and ‘Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings’, The Art Bulletin, 27, 3, 1945, pp. 175–181; Donal Byrne, ‘Manuscript Ruling and Pictorial Design in the Work of the Limbourgs, the Bedford Master, and the Boucicaut Master’, The Art Bulletin, 66, 1, 1984, pp. 118–136; Andrews, ‘The Boucicaut Masters’, 2002, pp. 29–38. Am grateful to my senior colleague Jim Collins, professor of French history, for his invaluable help in tracing the history of the Boucicaut image and illuminating me about the mistaken attributions and constructed nature of the manuscript’s text. Omont, Livres de Merveilles, Paris, 1907, Plate 70 (folio 76 verso), Plate 69 (folio 74 verso), Plate 92 (folio 106), and Plate 94 (folio 107). Anthony Pagden, ‘The Peopling of the New World: Ethnos, Race and Empire in the Early-modern World’, in Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler, eds, The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 292–312. Charles de Miramon, ‘Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of Race in the late Middle Ages’, and Valentin Groebner, ‘The Carnal Knowing of a Coloured Body: Sleeping with Arabs and Blacks in the European Imagination, 1300–1550’, in Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler, eds, The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 200–216 and pp. 217–231 respectively; John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981 and ‘Cultural Conflicts in Medieval World Maps’, in Schwartz, Implicit Understandings, 1994, pp. 64–95; Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5, 1942, pp. 159–97; Paul Freedman, ‘The Medieval Other: The Middle Ages as Other’, in Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, eds, Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, Michigan University Press, Kalamazoo, 2002, 1–24.

Notes 201 32

33

34

35

36 37 38

39 40 41

42

43 44 45

Debra H. Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence in Marco Polo’s Divisament du monde’, Journal Viator, 36, 2005, pp. 493–529; ‘The Exotic in the Later Middle Ages: Recent Critical Approaches’, in Literature Compass, 5, 1, 2008, pp. 58–72 and Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978; Wilton Marion Krogman, ‘Sherlock Holmes as an Anthropologist’, The Scientific Monthly, 80, No. 3, 1955, pp. 155–162. Romila Thapar, ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Early India’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 13, 1971, pp. 408–436 and Aloka Parasher-Sen, ‘Of Tribes, Hunters and Barbarians: Forest Dwellers in the Mauryan Period’, Studies in History, 14, 2, 1998, pp. 173–192. M.V. Portman was a British official who took his charge in the Andamans in 1879 and wrote A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, Calcutta, 1899. Also see Zarine Cooper, ‘Early Communication’, 2000. Home, Judicial, 27 April, 1860, 6–7, A, NAI. Also see Zarine Cooper, Ibid. Home, Public, 28 April 1783, 44, A, NAI. David Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, Westview Press, Boulder, 1996. Tomas refers to the Andamans and the experience of the encounter as ‘Transcultural Space’, that is ‘a transient space produced by fleeting intercultural relations and generated by situations governed by misrepresentation or representational excess’, p. 1. Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, p. 22. Also see the section on ‘piracy’ in Chapter 2. Ibid., p. 17. Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, 76–98, NAI and Foreign, 22 May 1857, 133, NAI. This was the view of many of the visitors to the Islands such as Colonel Symes and J.H Quigley. Colonel Symes argued that the desire to eat human flesh arose ‘more from the impulse of hunger, than from voluntary choice’, in Foreign, Political, 22 May 1857, 134, NAI. Most probably these people had read and were influenced by Blair’s account of the Andamanese in his survey report. This is evident in the public approval and popularity of shipwreck narratives which described instances of cannibalism by sailors for survival. One such case was the shipwreck of Meduse, in 1819, which had a strong impact on the contemporary European imagination. Some of the survivors of the wreck were said to have eaten human flesh which they cut into strips and dried in the sun, and claimed that it was quite palatable. Another such immensely popular narrative was an 1838 publication, Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle, by John Curtis. See Lynette Russell, ‘Mere Trifles and Faint Representations: The Representations of Savage Life Offered by Eliza Fraser’, in Ian J. McNiven, L. Russell and K. Schaffer, eds, Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser’s Shipwreck, Leicester University Press, London, 1998, pp. 51–62. A.W. Brian Simpson in his work (Cannibalism and the Common Law, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985) narrates the story of the shipwrecked Mignonette (1884) and the manner in which public opinion was unequivocally sympathetic towards its survivors who had eaten a young man. Home, Public, 23 March 1795, 1, A, NAI. Chatham Island is part of the Andaman group of islands where Blair started the Settlement in 1789. Cited in Portman, History of Our Relations, 1899, pp. 68–69, emphasis my own.

202 Notes 46

Even Portman attests that he ‘had evident doubts as to their alleged cannibalism’, but is loath to break with former traditions, in History of Our Relations, 1899, pp. 75–76 and Phillips, ‘The Outer World’, 1994, pp. 23–63. Also see Tomas, Transcultural Space, 1996. 47 Mouat mentions this in his ‘Narrative of an Expedition to the Andaman Islands in 1857’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 32, 1862, pp. 109–126. Also, Home, Judicial, 12 Feb 1858, 26, NAI, and Home, Judicial, 15 Jan 1858, 14–27, NAI. 48 Driver, Geography Militant, 2001. This book demonstrates the production and consumption of the exploration narratives in the course of the acquisition of the Empire. Also Stafford, ‘Annexing the Landscapes of the Past’, 1990, pp. 67–89; A.W. Crosby, ‘Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon’, in Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 103–117; Satpal Sangwan, ‘From Gentlemen Amateurs to Professionals: Reassessing the Natural Science Tradition in Colonial India, 1780–1840’, in Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan, eds, Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998, pp. 210–236; Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 1991. According to Greenblatt, ‘the European mimetic capital. […] Easily crossed the boundaries of nation and creed’. Similar is Pratt’s idea of anti-conquest regarding expeditions and travel writings by the Europeans in the eighteenth century employing Enlightenment classificatory categories. 49 Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, p. 66 (emphasis my own). 50 Mouat in his reports always juxtaposed his conclusions to those of Colebrook’s from the previous century demonstrating that he was well-acquainted with the earlier writings on the Andamans. Home, Judicial, 15 Jan 1858, 14–27, NAI. Home, Judicial, 12 Feb 1858, 26, NAI. 51 Felix Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995, pp. 144–153, see the section ‘Saving Meriahs: A Robinson Crusoe Complex’. Also, Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850, Knopf, New York, 2004. 52 J.C. Haughton, The Report on Intercourse with the Aborigines, in Home, Public, 21 Feb 1862, 50 A, NAI. 53 Gillis, Islands of the Mind, 2004. 54 Zarine Cooper, ‘Analysis of the Nature’, 1989’, pp. 133–147. 55 Ray, ‘Seafaring in the Bay of Bengal AD’, 1990, pp. 1–14. 56 Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean, 1966. A map in the book shows the location of Nicobars on the Dravidian and Chinese routes, pp. 102–103. 57 Buzurg Ibn Shariyar, Kitab Ajaib-ul-Hind, translated by G.P.S. Freeman-Grenville, East West, London, 1980. 58 Al-Marwazi, The Accounts of Al-Marawazi, translated by V. Minorsky, Hakluyt Society, London, 1942. 59 Ahmad Ibn Majid, Kitab al-Fawaid fi Usul al-Bahr wal-Qawaid, translated by G.R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London, 1981. 60 There exists a great deal of epigraphic evidence of ancient Tamil merchants traversing the Bay of Bengal and having a regular and sustained contact with Thailand, Burma, Java, parts of the Indonesian archipelago and China. For epigraphic evidence see N. Karashima, Ancient and Medieval Commercial Activities, 2002. Also see Ranabir Chakravarti, ‘An Enchanting Seascape: Through an

Notes 203 Epigraphic Lens’, Studies in History, 20, 2, 2004, pp. 305–315 and Frost, Convicts and Empire, 1980, p. 95. Fanny Parkes’ account also refers to the Nicobars, Wanderings of Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in Zenana, vol. 1, London, 1850, pp. 13–19; and so does Mirza Abu Taleb whose ship on the way to Europe was diverted towards Nicobar to replenish its stock of water, in Charles Stewart, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799–1803, London, 1814, p. 12. 61 P.J. Kitson, ed., Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770–1835, vol. 5, The South Seas: Writings from the Southern and Central Pacific, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2002; Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens, Academic Press, New York, 1979; N. Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka, Westview Press, Boulder, 1998; Michael Kearney, World View, 1984; C.A. Bayly, ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India’, Modern Asian Studies, 27, 1, 1993, pp. 3–43; Gillis, Islands of the Mind, 2004; Phillips, ‘The Outer World’, 1994, pp. 23–63. 62 Vinay Lal, ‘Unanchoring Islands: An Introduction to the Special Issue on “Islands: Waterways, Folkways”’, Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures, 10, 2, 2000, pp. 229–240. 63 Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt expresses this sense of pride perfectly when he calls England: ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle. […] This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This Fortress built by Nature for herself, Against infection and the hand of war: This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of the less happier lands.’ Cited in Richard II, in Stanley W. Wells and Gary Taylor, eds, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988. These notions had long been part of the British psyche. Thomas Coventry, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1635, strongly articulated this national sense of security in these words: ‘The dominion of the sea, as it is an ancient and undoubted right of the crown of England, so it is the best security of the land’, cited in Yapp, The Travellers’ Dictionary, p. 221. 64 Colley, Captives, 2004, examines the role of physical insularity of Britain in fostering its ‘imperial involvement and success’, p. 10. 65 Fabian, Time and the Other, 1983. According to him, ‘geopolitics had its foundations in chronopolitics’. John R. Gillis, ‘Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds, 1400–1800’, in Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds, Islands in History and Representation, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, pp. 19–31. In John Gillis’s view, the Islands epistemes began to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Once they were explored, mapped and inventorized the ‘utopia went subterranean’ or the utopia began to be seen in temporal instead of spatial terms. 66 David Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840–1950’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21, 1, 2000, pp. 6–18, p. 7. 67 For instance, the British located Mauritius, like the Andamans, on a differential time scale. However, Mauritius’s temporal location was seen as representing the infancy, the idyllic childhood of the British Isles, which had succumbed to the depredations of the modern industrial present. Unlike the Andamans, Mauritius was a romantic escape from Europe and served as a botanical laboratory and

204 Notes

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69 70 71

72

73 74

75 76 77

78

79

a conservatory of the empire. This shows that the interplay of the notions of Eden and Wilderness was not simply an inversion of binary categories. Grove, ‘Conserving Eden’, 1993, pp. 318–351; Green Imperialism, 1994; Ecology, Climate and Empire. 1998. Also see John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re–Creation of Paradise, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981 and also see P.C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth Century Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. According to Prest, until the eighteenth century Europeans commonly believed that the Garden of Eden was to be found in the East. John Mandeville, Christopher Columbus and Vespucci interpreted the newly discovered lands in terms of the Old Testament. This is concurrent with the shift in the characterization of island societies. Death and disease were the two main features of this discourse on the Tropics. See David Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998. Also see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New York, 1981. David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. Cited and discussed in Arnold, The Problem of Nature, 1996. Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850, Macmillan, London, 1965. Also see H. Reynolds, ‘Racial Thought in Early Colonial Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 20, 1, 1974, pp. 45–53. Reynolds argues that the ‘frontier’ life was not conducive to the idealization of the tribal life, and while the concept of Noble Savage might have been popular amongst the elite, ‘it may have not penetrated very deeply amongst the illiterate masses’. C.W.B. Anderson, Report on the Exploration in the North Andaman, Calcutta, 1905. Anderson was the assistant superintendent in the Andaman Commission. C.E. Parkinson, A Forest Flora of the Andaman Islands: An Account of the Trees, Shrubs and Principal Climbers of the Islands, published by M/s. Bishan Singh Mahendra Pal Singh, 23-A, New Connaught Place, Dehradun, 1921; P. Lal, Andaman Islands: A Regional Geography, Calcutta, Archaeological Survey of India, 1976. Michael Symes, An Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava in the Year 1795, London, 1800; 1995, p. 129. The failure of the British to retain hold over the Andamans at this time runs parallel to the failed colonization of Madagascar colonies which much like the Andamans were overrun with disease and death. See Games, ‘Oceans, Migrants, and Character of Empires’, 2003. Mouat, ‘Narrative of an Expedition’, 1862, pp. 109–126. Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, p. 95. John Ritchie, ‘Description of the Earliest Known Contact with the Andamanese’, this article was edited and published by R.C. Temple as ‘An Unpublished 18th Century Document about the Andamans’, The Indian Antiquary, 30, p. 232 of pp. 232–238 (seen cited on http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/ritchie/ rep-ritchie.html). N. Bhattacharya, ‘Pastoralists in a Colonial World’, in D. Arnold and R. Guha, eds, Nature, Culture and Imperialism, Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995, pp. 49–85. He locates this ideology of improvement not simply as colonial but one having a long lineage in the Western thought. H.N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage, New York, 1928. Fairchild quotes Walter Raleigh’s description of a particular non-cultivating community, ‘They never eat anything

Notes 205

80 81

82 83

84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98

that is set or sown; and as at home they use neither planting nor manurance, so when they come abroad, they refuse to eat … but that which nature without labour brings forth’, p. 21. Curtin, The Image of Africa, 1965, p. 62. P.C. Dutta, The Great Andamanese: Past and Present, Anthropological Survey of India, Government of India, 1978; J.C. Haughton, ‘Papers Relating to the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands’, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 30, 1861, pp. 251–263; E.H. Man, Aboriginal Inhabitants of Andamans, Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland by Trubner, London, 1883 (Sanskaran Prakashan, Delhi, 1975), and Portman, History of Our Relations, 1899. Also see Ajay Skaria, ‘Being Jangli: The Politics of Wildness’, Studies in History, 14, 2, 1998, n.s., pp. 193–215. L. Cipriani, On the Origin of the Andamanese, in Census of India 1951, appendix E, 17, 1, The Government of India, 1955, pp. 66–71. Niclas Burenhult ‘Deep Linguistic Prehistory, with particular reference to Andamanese’, Working Papers, 45, pp. 5–24, Lund University, Department of Linguistics, Lund, Sweden, 1996 (seen on http://www.ling.lu.se/disseminations/pdf/45/ Burenhult.pdf). Zarine Cooper, ‘Analysis of the Nature’, 1989, pp. 133–147. According to E.H. Man, the first British official to undertake an anthropological/ethnological study on the Andamans noted in his monograph On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andamans published in 1883 that they did not even know how to start a fire. Zarine Cooper, ‘Analysis of the Nature’, 1989, pp. 133–147. Ritchie, ‘Description of the Earliest Known Contact’, 1771, p. 232 of pp. 232–238. ‘Captain Blair’s Report, dated 9th June’, reproduced by R.C. Temple in Indian Antiquary, April 1900, p. 109. Ibid., p. 113. Home, Public, 23 March 1795, 1, A, NAI. Portman, History of Our Relations, 1899, p. 64. Home, Judicial, 15 Jan 1858, 14–27, NAI. Mouat, ‘Narrative of an Expedition’, 1862, pp. 109–126. Ibid. Patterson, ‘Early Colonial Encounters’, 1991, pp. 1–14. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 1992; Francis Baker et al., eds, Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998; Brian A.W. Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of ‘Mignonette’ and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which it Gave Rise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985; Jim McDowell, Hamatsa: The Enigma of Cannibalism on the Pacific Northwest Coast, Ronsdale Press, Vancouver, 1997. I.M. Lewis, Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. The lineage of the discourse on cannibalism in Europe goes back to the earliest times. The ancient Greek myth of the cannibalistic father of the Olympian god Zeus, and the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey, directly informs the cursed character of Atreus in Aeschylus’ famous play Agamemnon. Such portrayals took on a distinctive graphic hue following the xenophobic delirium of the Crusades. For instance, there is a miniature of a Tartar eating a human leg and roasting a body on the spit from the thirteenth century found in Matthew of Paris’s Historia Maiora, cited in Charles Zika, ‘Cannibalism and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Reading the Visual Images’, History Workshop Journal, 44, 1997, pp. 77–105.

206 Notes 99

100 101

102

103

104

105

106

107

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Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘“British Cannibals”: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer’, Critical Inquiry, 18, 1992, pp. 630–654. For a detailed discussion see Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 1986 [1982]. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Harper and Row, New York, 1984; Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 1991; Lewis D. Wurgraft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1983, Tomas, Transcultural Space, 1996; H.E. Martel, ‘Hans Staden’s Captive Soul: Identity, Imperialism, and Rumors of Cannibalism in Sixteenth-Century Brazil’, Journal of World History, 17, 1, 2006, pp. 51–70. Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘Narratives of the Self: Chevalier Peter Dillon’s Fijian Cannibal Adventures’, in Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn, eds, Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, Routledge, New York and Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001, pp. 69–111. On fear fuelling cannibal imagination see Paul Lyons, ‘Lines of Fright: Fear, Perception and the “Seen” of Cannibalism in Charles Wilke’s Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee,’ in Creed and Hoorn, eds, Body Trade, 2001, pp. 126–148. Bayly, Empire and Information, 1996; Philip B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 2003, pp. 783–814. Thomas Trautmann, ‘Inventing the History of South India’, in Daud Ali, ed., Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, Oxford University Press, London, 1999, pp. 36–54; Eugene F. Irschik, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994. These scholars study the process of formation of colonial knowledge in the context of British India and have argued in favour of it being a product of a ‘dialogic’ process where the European and indigenous cognitive frames coalesced. For a critique of these writings see Pratik Chakrabarti, ‘“Neither of Meate Nor Drinke, But What the Doctor Alloweth”: Medicine amidst War and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Madras’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 80, 2006, pp. 1–38. Chakrabarti argues that these historians fail to depict ‘the multifaceted shifts in economic realities, trust, legitimacy, and agency underlining these “dialogues”’. My argument here is closer to Bernard Cohn’s (Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996) who does not see the formation of colonial knowledge as a dialogic process. According to him, it was the European episteme which became the order of the day. Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, I.B. Tauris, London, 1995, Second edition, 1999, makes a similar argument in case of colonial Algeria where the staying power of colonial characterizations is attributed to the French racial ideology, which in turn embodied European Enlightenment values. Captain John Ritchie’s Report, ‘Remarks upon the Coast and Bay of Bengal, The Outlets of the Ganges and Interjacent Rivers’, 1771, reproduced by R.C. Temple ‘Unpublished XVIIIth Century Document about the Andamans’, Indian Antiquary, June 1901, p. 235 of pp. 232–238. Reported by T. Farquhar, Superintendent, Central Prison, Allahabad to W. Muir, Secretary to Government of the North-Western Provinces, 14 Jan 1859, in Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, NAI. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 1986, p. 85; Asad, ‘Anthropology’, 1979, pp. 87–94, and Gillis, ‘Taking History Offshore’, 2003, pp. 19–31.

Notes 207 109 110 111

Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, pp. 33–36. Mouat, ‘Narrative of an Expedition’, 1862, pp. 109–126. Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: Indian and the Creation of Imperial Britain, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006, p. 31.

Chapter 2 1

2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

Ernest Hart, Commissioner of the Nicobar Islands (1921–28). Hart wrote poems with a pencil in a personal journal that he maintained while living in Port Blair, in Collected Papers, Mss Eur/D 738, IOR. Colonel Horace Man was the Superintendent of convicts at Moulmein in 1858. Col. Man was in charge of the new settlement in the Andamans for the initial two months until Dr James Pattison Walker (an experienced Superintendent of jails in India) took charge as the first Superintendent of Port Blair in March 1858. Col. Man later served as the Superintendent of Port Blair from March 1868 to March 1871. Home, Public, 7 May 1858, 74, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 11 June 1858, 10–11, NAI. Several historians and writers present the heightened desire for an overseas penal station in the wake of the Revolt of 1857 as the raison d’etre for the colonization of the Andamans in 1858. See Majumdar, The Penal Settlement, 1975; K.S. Singh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1994; Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000; Abdul Subhan, Geography – Islands of Andaman and Nicobar, Government High School, Port Blair, 1938; Narayan H. Kulkarni, ‘Andamans and 1857’, in Mukti-Tirth Andaman, Calcutta, 1982, pp. 1–9; Pandey, The Cellular Jail, 1987; Govindsingh Pawar, ‘Swatantrata se Poorva Dweepon mein Hindi ke Vikas mein 1857 ke Kaidiyon ka Yogdaan’, Dweep Lahiri, 25, 2001, Editorial. Pandey, The Cellular Jail, 1987. Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, p. 17. Majumdar, The Penal Settlement, 1975. Secret Dept, 15 July 1789, No. 7 & 8, NAI; 14 July 1789, Extract from the Bengal Consultations, in Indian Antiquary, May 1900, p. 123. William Cornwallis’ Correspondence, Journal, Oct 1791–April 1794, Cor 15, NMM. Letter from Major A. Kyd to Governor-General, in Home, Public, 27 March 1793, 6, A, NAI. Letter from Mr. J. Fombelle, Registrar of the Nizamut Adalat to Mr. J.L. Chauvet, the Sub-Secretary, written on 3 April, in Home, Public, 8 April 1793, 7, C, NAI. Minute of the Governor-General, in Home, Public, 19 Dec 1794, 5, A, NAI. The British decided, as early as 1787, to transport convicts to Penang and engage them in clearing and cultivating the land. They believed that ‘it would be a greater punishment to a Bengallie to be thus forced from his connections than any other mode’ and it will ‘work great changes in those who are now wavering when they see the effects of their idleness’. Thus, Penang was also a place for correcting the ‘devious, effeminate, and indolent’ character of the Bengalis. Home, Public, 9 July 1787, 19, A, NAI. According to Nilkantha Sastri the Cholas conquered the Nicobars (called Manakkavaram) in 1025AD. See K.A. Nilkantha Sastri, History of South India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1955 [1999].

208 Notes 14

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17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

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Chakravarti, ‘Seafaring, Ships and Ship Owners’, 2002, pp. 28–61. Also see Kenneth McPherson, ‘Trade and Traders in the Bay of Bengal: Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, and Om Prakash, ‘European Corporate Enterprises and the Politics of Trade in India, 1600–1800’, in R. Mukherjee and L. Subramanium, eds, Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998, pp. 183–209 and pp. 165–182, respectively; Bentley, ‘Sea and Ocean Basins’, 1999, pp. 215–224. Jennifer L. Gaynor, ‘Maritime Ideologies and Ethnic Anomalies: Sea Space and the Structure of Subalternity in the Southeast Asian Littoral’, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, 12–15 Feb 2003, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/ index.html; M.N. Pearson, ‘Merchants and States,’ in James D. Tracy, ed., Political Economy of the Merchant Empires, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 41–116; John E. Wills, Jr., ‘Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination’, American Historical Review, 98, 1, 1993, pp. 83–105; Elizabeth Mancke, ‘Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space’, Geographical Review, 89, 2, 1999, pp. 225–236 and ‘Ocean Space and the Creation of a Global International System, 1450–1800’, in Daniel Finamore, ed., Maritime History as World History, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2002, pp. 149–166. Similar to the ‘islands’, ports also played a significant role in colonial ocean politics. There is a growing literature on the fate of various port towns in the colonial period which has informed the present study on islands. Broeze, Gateways of Asia, 1997; Banga, Ports and their Hinterland, 1992; Ashley Jackson, War and Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2001. Home, Public, 3 Jan 1787, OC. No. 32, pp. 91–94, NAI. Home, Public, 2 July 1784, OC. No. 14, NAI. K.K. Ghatak, ‘The Origins of the British Opium Monopoly’, Calcutta Review, 162, 1962, pp. 243–246. A. Aspinall, Cornwallis in Bengal: The Administrative and Judicial Reforms of Lord Cornwallis in Bengal Together with Accounts of the Commercial Expansion of The East India Company, 1786–1793, and of the Foundation of Penang, 1786–1793, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1931, pp. 188–205. K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, Penguin Books, India, 1981 [2005], pp. 237–248. Home Public, 7 Dec 1778, OC. No. 26, NAI; Home Public, 6 July 1781, OC. No. 32, NAI; Home Public, 6 July 1781, OC. No. 31, NAI; Home Public, 19 Feb 1781, OC. No. 3, NAI. Om Prakash, ‘Opium Monopoly in India and Indonesia in the Eighteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 24, 1, 1987, pp. 63–80. Bhaswati Bhattacharya, ‘Dutch East India Company and the Trade of the Chulias in the Bay of Bengal in the late Eighteenth Century’, in K.S. Mathew, ed., Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, Manohar, Delhi, 1995, pp. 347–361. Home, Public, 23 March 1795, 1, A, Letter from Major A. Kyd to Sir John Shore written on 4 March, NAI. Frost, Convicts and Empire, 1980, discusses the strategic and naval concerns of the Company in this period in the East and the way the Andamans and Australia figured in it. Also see Anirudh Deshpande, ‘The Bombay Marine: Aspects of Maritime History, 1650–1850’, Studies in History, 11, 2, 1995, pp. 281–301, for the evolution and deployment of the Bombay

Notes 209

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29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39

40

41

Marine against the Indian and Continental powers in the Indian subcontinent by the Company; and the role of Marine surveys in colonial conquests. Secret Dept., 22 Dec 1788, NAI. B.A. Saletore, ed., Fort William: India House Correspondence, 1782–85, vol. 9, Delhi, 1959. Foreign, Secret, 28 Nov 1789, Letter no. 26, NAI and Saletore, Fort William, 1959 and Phillimore, Historical Records, 1945. Also Edney, Mapping an Empire, 1997. Mathur, History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1968. Even on the eve of transfer of power in 1946, Viceroy Lord Mountbatten saw the Andamans and Nicobar Islands possessing a ‘great strategic significance’ and suggested, in case Nehru was to push for securing the Andamans for Union of India, to give up the Andamans and retain the Nicobars as a colony of His Majesty’s Government, in Mansergh and Moon, India: Transfer of Power, Doc no. 132 (June 1947, pp. 253–255); 133 (June 1947, p. 255); 165 (June 1947, pp. 312–313); 190 (June 1947, pp. 353–354) and Viceroy’s Correspondence in Mountbatten Collection, Mss Eur/F 200, no. 3, IOR. Mathur, History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1968. Home, Public, 28 April 1783, No. 43, NAI and Home, Public, 28 April 1783, No. 44, A, NAI. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, 1945, p. 46. A summary of Capt. Ritchie’s report (1771) in Indian Antiquary, June 1901, p. 238. Home, Public, 10 March 1788, 30, C, NAI; S.H. Askari, ed., Fort William – India House Correspondence, 1787–1791, vol. 16, Delhi, 1976. Lord Cornwallis (Governor-General) to William Cornwallis (Commander in Chief of East Indies), 27 June 1789, Letters of Admiral William Cornwallis (1744–1819), Cor/58, NMM. Lord Cornwallis to William Cornwallis, 5 Sep 1789, Cor/58, NMM. Also see Pradip Barua, ‘Military Developments in India, 1750–1850’, Journal of Military History, 58, 1994, pp. 599–616. Home, Public, 13 July 1791, 4, A, NAI and Home, Public, 29 July 1791, 3, A, NAI. Lord Cornwallis to William Cornwallis, 27 June 1789, Cor/58, NMM. Also Frost, Convicts and Empire, 1980, p. 148. Instructions to Lt. Blair, from E. Hay, Secretary to the Government of India, Secret Department, 22 Dec 1788, NAI. Company surveyors believed that sulphur could be unearthed on one of the volcanic islands amongst the Andaman group, called the Barren Island. Seizing new sources of sulphur was a persistent worry with the British because they had experienced its shortage during the Anglo-Carnatic Wars. The French had cut off their supply of sulphur by purchasing the entire stock in Cochin and other places on the Malabar Coast. Secret Department, 22 Dec 1788, NAI. Home, Public, 30 June 1790, NAI. Blair also sent the redwood found on the Island as an experiment to the China market and specimens of other kinds of wood which could be useful in building ships. Home, Public, 20 August 1790, 26, A, NAI; Home, Public, 21 Dec 1792, 40, NAI; Home, Public, 22 Sept 1790, 19, A, NAI; and Home, Public, 7 Sep 1791, 8, A, NAI. The EEIC solicited the expert aid of Colonel Kyd who was the Superintendent of the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta, and who had already been conducting experiments on cultivation of opium since the 1780s. He undertook a survey of Andaman’s flora and fauna to assess their commercial possibilities. Home,

210 Notes

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51 52 53 54

55

56 57

58 59

Public, 20 Feb 1789, NAI; Home, Public, 2 May 1792, 16, NAI; Home Public, 2 May 1792, 16, NAI. Deepak Kumar has shown how the early botanical investigations were of commercial and military, as well as scientific, importance, in ‘Evolution of Colonial Science in India Natural History and the East India Company’, in John M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990, pp. 51–66. Home, Public, 7 Sep 1971, 8, A, NAI. In the later 1780s there was also a drastic reduction of expenses in all establishments and salaries. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, 1945, p. 5. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 1981 [2005], pp. 237–248. Letter from Major A. Kyd to Sir John Shore written on 4 March 1975, in Home, Public, 23 March 1795, 1, A, NAI. Aspinall, Cornwallis in Bengal, 1931, p. 204. Ibid., p. 193. Secret Dept, 7 April 1788, NAI. McPherson, The Indian Ocean, 1993, pp. 214–215. McPherson, ‘Penang 1786–1832: A Promise Unfulfilled’, in Frank Broeze, ed., Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the Thirteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Kegan Paul International, London, 1997, pp. 109–126, and ‘Trade and Traders’, 1998, pp. 183–209; D.K. Bassett, ‘The Historical Background, 1500–1815’, in Wang Gungwu, Malaysia: A Survey, Frederick A. Praeger, London, 1964, pp. 113–127; Anand Yang, ‘Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 66, 4, 2007, pp. 881–896. Home, Public, 24 Aug 1785, OC. No. 52, NAI. Home, Public, 18 June 1787, OC. No. 8, pp. 221–223, NAI. Home, Public, 9 July 1789, 19, A, NAI. The British intelligence officers believed that the ‘piratical’ activity prevented small boats, carrying provisions of stock, from plying between different ports. As a measure to control piracy, they built ‘gallies’, to be rowed by ‘riverdacoits’ of Bengal who had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment. They hoped this would serve as a ‘very exemplary and appropriate punishment’ and also help curtail ‘piracy’. Home, Public, 22 Jan 1796, OC. No. 15, NAI. McPherson, ‘Penang 1786–1832’, 1997, pp. 109–126. However, Penang was to lose its supremacy in the Southeast Asian waters with the ascendancy of Singapore and the shifts in British trading patterns following the Napoleonic Wars. By 1830, Penang was demoted to the status of a Residency and, in 1832, also shorn of its title as the capital of the Straits. Home, Public, 5 Feb 1796, 8, A, NAI. Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 1981, pp. 174–175. Headrick quite astutely notes, ‘Among Empires, the most unusual kind is that of the sea. The Minoans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Vikings all dominated for the time the seas around them, but only once has there been a truly global thalassocracy, a nation whose fleet and merchant marine were dominant on almost all the seas of the world. This was Great Britain in the nineteenth century’. McPherson, ‘Trade and Traders’, 1998, pp. 183–209. For a study of the disastrous impact of abolition on Indian cotton manufacturers and the sagging value of the Indian rupee, see Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency, 1793–1833, Oxford University Press, Calcutta, 1979.

Notes 211 60

Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1951; Reprint 1969. 61 Davis Skuy, ‘Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the 19th Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 32, 3, 1998, pp. 513–558. C.A. Bayly and Thomas A. Timberg reinforce the thesis of N.K. Sinha, Amales Tripathi and Asiya Siddiqi in their articles ‘The Age of Hiatus: The North Indian Economy and Society, 1830–50’, and ‘Hiatus and Incubator: Indigenous Trade and Traders, 1837 and 1857’, in A. Siddiqi, ed., Trade and Finance in Colonial India, 1750–1860, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1995, pp. 218–249 and pp. 250–264 respectively. 62 Radhika Singha designates the various Acts passed at this time as ‘crude devices for securing conviction with the semblance of “due process”’, in ‘Providential Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation’, Modern South Asia, 27, 1, 1993, pp. 83–146. 63 K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757–1947)’, in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, 1757–1970, Orient Longman, Madras, 1982, pp. 804–877. 64 Chaudhuri shows the way India, in the 1830s, was ‘rapidly becoming the clearing-house for the reciprocal payments in the triangular trade between Britain, China and United States and also in-between Britain, China and India, giving rise to a complex system of multilateral financial settlements’. See his ‘India’s Foreign Trade and Cessation of the English East India Company’s Trading Activities, 1828–1840’, and Amales Tripathi, ‘Indo-British Trade between 1833 and 1847 and the Commercial Crisis of 1847–8’, in Siddiqi, Trade and Finance, 1995, pp. 290–320 and pp. 265–289 respectively. 65 C.A. Bayly, ‘The Age of Hiatus: The North Indian Economy and Society, 1830–50’, in Siddiqi, Trade and Finance, 1995, pp. 218–249. 66 H.P. Ray, ‘Seafaring in Peninsular India in the Ancient Period: of Watercraft and Maritime Communities’, in David Parkin and Ruth Barnes, eds, Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology in the Indian Ocean, Routledge Curzon, London, 2002, pp. 62–91; G.A. Prinsep, An Account of Steam Vessels and of Proceedings Connected with Steam Navigation in British India, Calcutta, 1830; Henry T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges: An Exploration in the History of India’s Modernization through Science and Technology, Orient Longman, Calcutta, 1960; Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 1981 and The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988; Anne Bulley, The Bombay Country Ships, 1790–1833, Curzon Press, Surrey, 2000; Mookerji, Indian Shipping, 1912. Mookerji documents the gradual decline of Indian shipbuilding in the nineteenth century. 67 P.J. Marshall, ‘Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion’, Modern Asian Studies, 14, 1, 1980, pp. 13–28. 68 Prinsep, An Account of Steam Vessels, 1830, p. 5. 69 Steamers were popular initially only for inland navigation. Amongst the few reasons which slowed down the advance of steam navigation in the Indian Ocean was the prohibitive costs of freight rates and cabin charges, and the absence of natural harbours of sufficient size which the British could exploit effectively. The existing port towns of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were such that they catered only to limited requirements. Further, the civil engineering works which had to be undertaken in order to overcome the difficulties in building good harbours were still in their infancy in the Subcontinent and the

212 Notes

70

71 72

73 74 75 76

77 78

79

80 81 82

administrative and financial backup required for the purpose was also missing. See F.J.A. Broeze, K.I. McPherson and P.D. Reeves, ‘Engineering and Empire: The Making of Modern Indian Ocean Ports’, in Satish Chandra, ed., Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics, Sage Publications, Delhi, 1987, pp. 254–301. Even Marx saw steam as a force to reckoned with. In an article titled ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, published in the New York Herald Tribune on 8 Aug 1853, he remarked, ‘Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has connected its chief ports with those of the South-Eastern Ocean and has revindicated it from the isolated position which was the prime law of its stagnation’. Cited in P.C. Joshi, ed., Rebellion 1857: A Symposium, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1957, p. 213. Freda Harcourt, ‘Black Gold: P & O and the Opium Trade, 1847–1814’, International Journal of Maritime History, 6, 1, 1994, pp. 1–84. Steam had a similar impact on the islands in Pacific Ocean where ‘harbours with little or no hinterland like Gibraltar, Papete (Tahiti), Las Palmas (Canaries), and Saint Vincent (Cape Verde Islands) became major halting and coaling stations for passing steamers’, in Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, pp. 18–48. Arakan and Tenassarim were provinces in Burma. The Commissioner was the head of the administration in a particular area. Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, NAI. Extract from the Memorandum by Captain J. C. Haughton, in Home, Public, 15 Oct 1862, 12–13, A, NAI. Wurgraft, The Imperial Imagination, 1983, shows how in the mid-nineteenth century the British shifted their attention to the ‘frontier’ and the way the British literature of the times began to celebrate the ‘British heroism on the frontier’. Michael H. Fisher, The Politics of British Annexation, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993, pp. 1–49. French privateers in collusion with American ships also continued to menace the British supremacy of the Indian Ocean in the early decades of the nineteenth century. See S.B. Singh, European Agency Houses in Bengal, 1783–1833, Calcutta, 1966, pp. 198–210; Nicholas Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay World: A Study of British Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century South-East Asia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963; Carl A. Trocki, Prince of Pirates: Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore, 1784–1884, Singapore University Press, Singapore, 1979. Tarling and Trocki talk about the way the Europeans essentialized the Malay character as ‘pirates’. The references to piracy in the region abound in the Foreign Department records of the mid-nineteenth century. Foreign, Secret, 16 Sep 1831, 1–2, NAI; Foreign, Political, 5 Oct 1844, 240–245, NAI; Foreign and Political, 5 Oct 1844, 980, NAI; Foreign, Political, 25 April 1845, 171, NAI; Foreign, Political, 25 April 1845, 175, NAI; Foreign, Political, 25 April 1845, 176, NAI; Foreign, Secret, 27 Nov 1847, 12–13, NAI; Foreign, 9 Aug 1850, 219, NAI; Foreign, 26 Dec 1851, 194–206, F.C., NAI; Foreign, Political, 28 April 1854, 180–187, NAI; Foreign and Political, 14 Sept 1855, 86–97, NAI; Foreign and Political, 28 Feb 1856, 107–108 K.W., NAI; Foreign, Political, 8 Jan 1858, 63, NAI. Also the Journal of Robert Allan (an officer of HMS Salsette, 1813) Mss Eur/ A 196, IOR. Allan exchanged fire with an American privateer around Nicobar in 1813. Foreign, 15 Oct 1852, 74, NAI, Dicey, here, is referring to the Nicobar Islands. Foreign, 15 Oct 1852, 71–72, NAI. Foreign, 29 May 1857, 131–134, NAI.

Notes 213 83 84 85 86 87

Home Public, 6 Aug 1858, NAI. Foreign and Political, 28 Feb 1856, 107–108 K.W., NAI. Foreign, Political, 25 April 1845, 170, NAI. Foreign, Political, 25 April 1845, 173, NAI. Osamu Kondo, ‘Japan and the Indian Ocean, at the Time of the Mughal Empire, with Special Reference to Gujarat’, in Satish Chandra, The Indian Ocean Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics, Sage Publications, New Delhi 1987, pp. 174–190. Kondo’s article talks about the wako pirates of Japan, who along with the Chinese had raided the Korean peninsula and the South and East China Seas since the fourteenth century. Toussaint, in History of the Indian Ocean, 1966, also reaffirms that ‘the great plague of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century was piracy’, which was ‘a veritable hydra with hundreds of heads forever springing up anew’, p. 144. Ashin Das Gupta, ‘Trade and Politics in Eighteenth Century India’, in Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500–1800, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2001, pp. 141–179, talks about the Bugi and Anak Raja pirates of Malaya, whose activities in the late eighteenth century had their origins in the disruptions caused by Dutch intervention in the Indian Ocean and the in-fighting between the local leaders. Also see H.P. Ray, The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 43–47. 88 See Lauren Benton, ‘Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47, 4, 2005, pp. 700–724. 89 In one case in 1789 some speculators from Madras erected, on the Coco Island, a windmill for the manufacture of coconut oil, without obviously bothering to bring it to the knowledge of the British. Much to their chagrin the Company officials found out about it only when a ship coming towards the Andamans picked up two starving natives, who had been abandoned by the mill’s proprietor on the Islands, in 6 May 1793; Letter from Major Kyd to Edward Hay, Secretary to Government, Fort William, in Indian Antiquary, April 1902, pp. 209–210. 90 For a historiographical overview on piracy see J. Starkey David, ‘Pirates and Markets’, Research in Maritime History, 7, 1994, pp. 59–80. See Deshpande, ‘The Bombay Marine’, 1995, pp. 281–301, for everyday piracy, or ‘cruising’ as it was called by the Company’s Bombay Marine in the eighteenth century; Tonio Andrade, ‘The Company’s Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621–1662’, Journal of World History, 15, 4, 2004, pp. 415–444, shows the way the Dutch hired Chinese pirates to conduct maritime raids. 91 Janin Hunt, The India-China Opium Trade in the Nineteenth Century, McFarland & Co., North Carolina, 1999, pp. 141–153; S.C. Hill, ‘Notes on Piracy in Eastern Waters’, Indian Antiquary, 52, 1923, p. 26. 92 Zarine Cooper, Archaeology and History: Early Settlements in the Andaman Islands, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002. Cooper, while analysing piracy in the Indian Ocean, does not problematize the use of the category of ‘piracy’ and reasserts the European notions of oriental pirates disrupting the flow of legitimate commerce in the Indian Ocean. 93 See Chakravarti, ‘Visiting Faraway Shores’, 2004. He talks about the famous Chinese voyages under Admiral Cheng Ho (1404–33) during the Ming period. Also Ray, The Archaeology of Seafaring, 2003; Sopher, The Sea Nomads, 1977. 94 There is considerable historical data attesting to the involvement of the Europeans (the Dutch and the French), and the Asians (the Malays and Chinese)

214 Notes

95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110

111 112

113 114

115

in the slave trade since the seventeenth century. See R.C. Temple, ‘The Trade in Andamanese Slaves’, Indian Antiquary, 30, 1901, p. 120; Vink, ‘The World’s Oldest Trade’, 2003, pp. 131–177; Zarine Cooper, ‘Analysis of the Nature Millenia’, 1989, pp. 133–147 and Archaeology and History, 2002, pp. 8–31. Hill, ‘Notes on Piracy’, Indian Antiquary, 1923, p. 27. Nicholas Tarling, ‘Pirates and Convicts: British Interest in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Nicholas Tarling, ed., Imperial Britain in Southeast Asia, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1975, Chap. 10, and also his Piracy and Politics, 1963. He talks in detail about the prevalence of piracy in the Andaman seas and the involvement of Nicobarese in it. This is about the only historical work that draws a connection between ‘piracy’ and the subsequent colonization of the Andamans. Foreign and Political, 5 Oct 1844, 90, NAI. Home, Judicial, 4 July 1860, 3–6, A, NAI. See Mathur, History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1968, for a detailed survey of the history of the Nicobars and its occupation by the Danes. Foreign, 15 Oct 1852, 75, NAI; Foreign, 1 Oct 1856, 37, NAI; Home, Port Blair, July 1875, 18, NAI. Home, Marine, 2 Nov 1855, 2, NAI. Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, NAI. Captain Henry Hopkinson, Commissioner of Arracan to W. Grey, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 8 Feb 1856, Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, NAI. The Committee comprised Dr Mouat who was to inspect the possibility of establishing a penal settlement on the Islands; Dr Playfair was to judge the Islands on medical and scientific basis and Lt. Heathcote was responsible for surveying the coast and harbour. Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Home Dept.), no. 25, The Andamans Islands, Calcutta, 1859. Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, NAI. Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, 76–98, NAI. The Secretary to the Government of India in the 1830s and Governor of Jamaica in the 1870s. Home, Public, 6 Aug 1858, 76–98, NAI. Comment by the President-in-Council, J.P. Grant on 19 March 1856 (emphasis my own) in Home, Public, 6 August 1858, 76–78, NAI. Captain Henry Hopkinson, Commissioner of Arracan, to W. Grey, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 8 Feb 1856, cited in Portman, History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, vol. 1., pp. 190–191. Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, p. 45. Michael Ignatieff, ‘State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment’, in S. Cohen and A. Scull, eds, Social Control and the State, Historical and Comparative Essays, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983, pp. 75–105. Ibid. Home, Marine, 27 March 1857, 19, A, NAI; Home, Marine, 27 March 1857, 20, A, NAI. The Andamans were given a priority during the surveys because of the ‘traffic between Madras and Pegu’ and because of the proposed reoccupation of the Islands. John William Kaye, The History of the Great Revolt, 3 volumes, Gian Publishing House, New Delhi, 1988; Charles Ball, The History of Indian Mutiny, Masters Publishers, New Delhi, 1981; R.M. Coopland, A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior, London, 1859; G.W. Forrest, A History of the Indian Mutiny, 3 volumes, London,

Notes 215

116 117

118 119 120 121

122

123

1904; G.B. Malleson, History of Indian Mutiny, 3 volumes, Scribner and Sons, New York, 1878–1880; J. Cane-Brown, The Punjab and Delhi in 1857, Delhi, 1861 [1970]; Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, London, 1926; C.J. Griffiths, A Narrative of the Siege of Delhi with an Account of the Mutiny at Ferozpore in 1857, London, 1910; C.T. Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi, London, 1898; William H. Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, London, 1857; R.C. Majumdar, Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857, Calcutta, 1957; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857–58: A Study of Popular Resistance, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1984; and C.A. Bayly, ed., Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986. Bayly, Empire and Information, 1996, p. 316. The sentence of transportation was revived earlier in the century in the 1820s against the backdrop of the Company’s final drive to secure a stable frontier and to offset the financial costs of annexations by making the conquered territories pay for their development. The colony of Amboyna was the first to employ Bengal convicts. In 1816, with the passage of Regulation XIV, transportation to Mauritius and its immediate dependencies and the employment of convicts to work at such a place was legalized and with it transportation of convicts to Mauritius began in earnest. In 1828, Tenasserim, which had been ceded by the King of Ava in 1826, was added to the penal settlements under the British. See T.K. Bannerjee, Background to Indian Criminal Law, Orient Longman, Calcutta, 1963, pp. 91–93. Home, Judicial, 26 Feb 1858, 12–13, NAI and Home, Judicial, 9 April 1858, 4, NAI. Foreign, 6 Aug 1858, 554–559, NAI. This was to change later, when the physical health and the age of the convict became major considerations in his eligibility for transportation to the Andamans. A letter from C.B. Thornhill, Inspector General of Prisons, North-West Province to G.E.W. Couper, Secretary to the Government of North-West Province, in Home, Judicial, 20 April 1860, 3–7, A, NAI. See D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and Criminal Law’, in D. Hay, ed., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, for an illustration of the point that criminal law functioned as an ideological system; and Kaushik Roy, ‘Coercion through Leniency: British Manipulation of the Courts-Martial System in the Post-Mutiny Indian Army, 1859–1913’, The Journal of Military History, 65, 2001, pp. 937–964, which looks at the way the British evolved a bureaucratic penal system through the court-martial system following the mutiny, which was aimed at maintaining discipline through ‘moderation’; also see Kaushik Roy, ‘Logistics and Loyalty: The Welfare Mechanism in the British-Indian Army, 1859–1913’, in P.S. Gupta and Anirudh Deshpande, eds, The British Raj and its Indian Armed Forces: 1857–1939, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002, pp. 98–124. Beattie has also remarked that transportation ‘[provided] proof of the king’s care for his people and frequent demonstrations of his exercising his proper role by tempering justice with mercy’, J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1600–1800, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986, p. 473; Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; John Styles, ‘“Our Traitorous Money Makers”: The Yorkshire Coiners and the Law, 1760–83’, in John Brewer and John Styles, eds, An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, Hutchinson University, London, 1980, pp. 172–249.

216 Notes 124 125

126

127 128 129 130 131 132

133

134 135 136

Home, Judicial, 14 Jan 1859, 17–21, NAI; Home, Judicial, 31 May 1864, 91–101, B, NAI. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000. Sen erroneously locates transportation within the Foucauldian paradigm where he sees it as part of the general movement of ‘retreat of public punishment’. See Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers’, 2003, pp. 179–208; David Arnold, ‘The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in Nineteenth Century India’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman, eds, Subaltern Studies, Vol. 7, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1994, pp. 140–178; Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 2000; and Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 1969. Also see Abbot Emerson Smith, ‘The Transportation of Convicts to the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century’, American Historical Review, 39, 2, 1934, pp. 232–249; Curtin, The Image of Africa, 1965, pp. 91–95; Frost, Convicts and Empire, 1980 and Botany Bay Mirages, 1994; Gillian, ‘The Botany Bay Decision’, 1982, pp. 740–766; Mackay, ‘Far-Flung Empire’, 1981, pp. 125–145; C.H.M. Clark, A History of Australia: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie, Vol. 1, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962–87; and Tim Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001. Coates has looked at the way exile, as a sentence of the Portuguese courts (and after the 1550s the Tribunals of the Inquisition), was used as a powerful tool by the Portuguese state. The state moulded the punishment to suit its changing needs. Criminal exiles, in Coates’ opinion, were the answer to various dilemmas, which extended from labour shortages in the army and on the galleys to the problem of scant supply of colonizers at home or overseas. In the two hundred years (c.1550–1750) of history that Coates has examined, the judicial and inquisitorial authorities around the Portuguese world channelled nearly 50,000 exiles to new homes. This was a notable figure when contrasted to the humble population statistics of these regions. His work further charts some of the ways in which the Portuguese authorities used exiles for empire-building and demonstrates how exile was a durable and yet a flexible sentence. Remark by the Governor of Straits Settlements, cited in Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 1969, p. 139. Home, Judicial, 8 Jan 1858, 7–9, NAI. Home, Judicial, 8 Jan 1858, 270–274, NAI; Home, Judicial, 8 Jan 1858, 7–9, NAI. Home, Public, 8 Jan 1858, 270–274, NAI. Home, Public, 22 Jan 1858, 63–65, NAI. A sanitarium was to be established at Curlew Island (Callagouk) on the Tenasserim Coast. However, the project had to be given up because the redirection of convict population to the Andamans created a labour shortage. Home, Judicial, 30 July 1862, 64–65, A, NAI and Home, Judicial, 6 Nov 1862, 5–8, A, NAI. George K. Alapatt, ‘The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857: Indian Indentured Labour and Plantation Politics in British Guiana’, Journal of Indian History, 59, 1–3, 1981, pp. 295–314. The Colonist, 14 Oct 1857, The Port of Spain Gazette, 26 Oct 1857, The Palladium, Oct 1857, cited in Alapatt, ‘The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857’, 1981, p. 303. Lytton to Wodehouse, Despatch no. 2, 71/6349, 15 July 1858, cited in George K. Alapatt, ‘The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857’, 1981, pp. 307–308. Home, Judicial, 25 June 1858, 12–19, NAI; Home, Judicial, 15 Jan 1858, 12–13, NAI; Home, Judicial, 26 Feb 1858, 1, NAI.

Notes 217 137

138 139 140 141

142

143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151

152 153 154

Home, Judicial, 19 Feb 1858, 5–8, NAI; Home, Judicial, 26 Feb 1858, 1, NAI; Extract from a Despatch from Court of Directors in Political Dept., No. 19 of 1858, 18 May 1858, Selections from the Records, 1859. Home, Judicial, 9 July 1858, 5–6, NAI; Home, Public, 26 Nov 1858, 76–92, NAI. Home, Judicial, 16 July 1858, 6–10, NAI. Ibid. J. P. Grant was reacting to the execution of 81 recaptured convicts who had escaped from the Settlement in April 1858. Captain Horace Man reoccupied the Andamans as a convict settlement in March 1858. At the time, Man was the Executive Engineer and the Superintendent of Convicts at Moulmein. Until J.P. Walker’s arrival Man looked after the Settlement and served as the Superintendent of the Andamans from March 1868 to March 1871. Letter from C. Beadon, Secy to the Govt. of India to Captain H. Man, 15 Jan 1858, Selections from the Records, no. 15, 1859, in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/ F 98, no. 29, IOR. Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 1–20, NAI. Ibid. Ibid. Home, Judicial, 6 Jan 1860, 7–23, A, NAI; Home, Judicial, 2 Dec 1862, 1–3, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 30 Sept 1859, 18–20, NAI; Home, Judicial, 11 Nov 1859, 9–10, NAI. However, there remained a lack of clarity over the issue. Many convicts sentenced to transportation continued to await their turn in provincial jails for deportation either because of overcrowding in the Andamans or else because they did not measure up to the minimum physical standards prescribed by the State for deportation. (In April 1858 it was decided not to transport men who had lost a limb to the Andamans, even though they might have been sentenced to transportation. Home, Judicial, 2 July 1858, 1–14, NAI). Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, No. 40, IOR. Aparna Vaidik, ‘Sazaa-i-Kalapani: Banished Rebels of 1857’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ed., Rethinking 1857, Orient Longman, forthcoming. Home, Public, 5 March 1858, 10–14, NAI. Home, Judicial, 11 Nov 1859, 8, NAI; Home, Judicial, 20 April 1860, 3–7, A, NAI; Home, Judicial, 9 Dec 1859, 6–7, NAI; Home, Judicial, 14 Jan 1859, 17–21, NAI; Home, Judicial, 30 July 1858, 18–20, NAI; Home, Judicial, 11 Nov 1859, 8, NAI. Home, Judicial, 9 July 1858, 5–6, NAI; Home, Judicial, 26 Feb 1858, 12–13, NAI. Home, Public, 17 Dec 1858, 96–101, NAI. R.C. Temple, ‘Round About the Andamans & Nicobars’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 22 Dec 1899, 48, 2, 457, pp. 105–125, in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, No. 36, IOR.

Chapter 3 1

Home, Judicial, 16 July 1858, 6–10, NAI. The central government, however, did retain the veto power to sanction or disallow any policy or regulation that it thought unsuitable. The case of Norfolk Island was similar to that of the Andamans where there was no blueprint available for its penal system. The

218 Notes

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

work of Lauren Benton (A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010) shows that this resulted in enforcement of a quasi-legal system on Norfolk Island. Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935, Duke University Press, Durham, 2005. Aguirre also discusses, in the context of Latin American prisons, the way various factors such as paucity of financial resources, lack of control over prison guards, a poor personnel recruitment policy and corruption in the jail limited state authority and disrupted state goals within the prison. Home, Judicial, 16 July 1858, 6–10, NAI. Home, Public, 1 April 1864, 1–12, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, June 1901, 60, NAI. Home, Judicial, 11 June 1858, 10–11, NAI, A letter of Henry Hopkinson, the Commissioner of Tennasserim to Cecil Beadon, Secretary to the Government of India, April 1858. Home, Marine, 20 June 1861, 40–47, NAI; Home, Marine, 22 April 1861, 10, NAI. Home, Marine, 7 March 1861, 5–16, NAI; Home, Marine, 22 April 1861, 10; Home, Marine, 15 April 1861, 5–7, NAI. Home, Marine, 7 March 1861, 5–16, NAI. Home, Public, 28 Oct 1862, 176, B, NAI. Home, Judicial, 25 June 1858, 31–33, NAI. Home, Marine, 23 March 1855, 8, NAI; Home, Marine, 23 March 1855, 7, NAI. Home, Judicial, 25 June 1858, 4–6, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI. Home, Judicial, 5 March 1858, 4, NAI. Home, Judicial, 9 July 1858, 5–6, NAI. Home, Judicial, 2 Feb 1861, 1–7, A, NAI. Home, Public, 1 April 1864, 1–12, A, NAI; Home, Public, 29 May, 1866, 61–62, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, NAI. Census Report for 1901, R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/ F 98, no. 42, IOR. Lord Canning at the time of the colonization of the Islands had warned that enemies could use the colony as a stepping-stone to India in the event of war. This happened eventually in 1942 when the Japanese took over the Andamans and used it as a naval base until their defeat in 1945. Officials had repeatedly cautioned the Government regarding the possible security threats to the Islands. As J.S. Campbell noted, ‘It may be a matter for the consideration of the government whether the entrances to the bay should not be, to some extent, fortified, so as to protect the Settlement from a foreign enemy’: Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI. Home, Public, 28 Oct 1862, 41–43, NAI; Home, Public, 29 May 1866, 61–62, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 25 Feb 1859, 4–6, NAI. Census Report for 1901, R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/ F 98, no. 42, IOR. Home, Public, 26 April 1866, 22–23, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 1 July 1860, 15–16, NAI. The whistlers were substituted by firing of guns by the year 1904. Home, Port Blair, July 1904, 26, NAI. Home, Port Blair, April 1905, 116, NAI and Home, Port Blair, Dec 1905, 15 to 17, NAI.

Notes 219 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52

Revenue and Agriculture Department, Forests, May 1882, 145–146, B, NAI. Letter from Captain B. Rogers, 26 April 1871, Mayo Papers, Add. MS 7490/8/9, Cambridge University Library (CUL). Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Jan 1919, 61, NAI. ‘The quantity of fish adapted for the food of man he [Dr Playfair] ascertained to be inexhaustible and the stock of small sweet oysters large enough to replenish the exhausted beds in every part of the world … we could depend on an abundant, unintermittent supply of excellent water during the whole year’, from the report of the Andaman Committee, cited in Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 1863, p. 195. Home, Public, 20 Feb 1869, 62–63, A, NAI. It was as early as 1870, at the behest of Lord Mayo, that the question of making Port Blair self-supporting by the expansion of agriculture was taken up by the Government: see Census Report of the Andaman and Nicobars, Government of India, 1931, p. 31. Home, Judicial, 18 June 1858, 12–13, NAI; Home, Judicial, 21 May 1858, 8, NAI. Home, Marine, 25 Feb 1859, 33–35, NAI. Home, Public, 9 Dec 1862, 4–10, NAI. Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, NAI; Home, Port Blair, March 1905, 43, NAI; Home, Port Blair, August 1907, 142, NAI; and Home, Port Blair, June 1911, 52, NAI. Home, Public, 28 March 1862, 40–42, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Aug 1882, 76–78, NAI. Home, Port Blair, March 1880, 25–27, NAI. Home, Judicial, 29 July 1860, 7–23, A, NAI. Although the inhabitants of the Islands were forest dwellers, it was not possible for the British or the settlers to set up habitation without clearing the forests and underwood. These Islands have some of the world’s best decorative timbers – Padauk, Silvergray, Chikrassy, Koko, Marblewood. Until the 1880s, the local timber was seen as ‘useless’, and teakwood from Burma was being imported. In fact, until as late as 1929, the Dhup and Papita wood which was later found most ‘useful’ as matchwood, was ‘being thrown away after making use of them as floats to raft sinker logs’: see Census of India, 1951, Report of B.S. Chengapa, Conservator, Working Plans, Port Blair, Andamans. Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Nov 1881, 16, NAI. Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, No. 51, NAI. Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 1–20, NAI. A month after being at Port Blair, Dr Walker had sent for his wife. Mrs Walker on her arrival found no house ready for her to live in and therefore camped in the naval vessel in the harbour with her husband. Also in ‘The Forgotten Islands’, by Frances Stewart Robertson, wife of Anthony William Robertson, Indian Police, Asst Commissioner in Andamans (1923–27), Mss Eur/F 209, No. 1, p. 14, IOR. Home, Judicial, 17 Sep 1858, 11–14, NAI. Home, Public, 28 Oct 1862, 41–43, NAI. Warneford, Mss Eur/ F 388, No. 1, IOR. ‘Sketch of life in the Andaman Islands’, R.H. Lowis, India Forest Dept., Asst Supdt. and Deputy Commissioner at Port Blair (1898–1922), Mss Eur D 1032, IOR. ‘A Short Account of a Visit to the Andaman Islands’ by E.W. Prevost from Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalist Field Club, Vol. XI, Part 3, 1894–95,

220 Notes

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73

in E.H. Man Collection, MS 118, in the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London (RAI). C. Beadon Kloss, In the Andamans and Nicobars: The Narrative of a Cruise in the Schooner ‘Terrapin’, with Notices of the Islands, their Fauna, Ethnology, John Murray, London, 1903, p. 20. ‘The Forgotten Islands’, Mss Eur/F 209, No. 1, p. 62, IOR. Ibid., pp. 4 and 65. Ibid., p. 63. Report of the Visit to the Penal Settlement at Port Blair by the Hon’ble Sir Reginald Craddock in November 1913, in Home, Port Blair, April 1914, 34, NAI. ‘The Forgotten Islands’, Mss Eur/F 209, No. 1, p. 4, IOR. Letter from Captain B. Rogers, 26 April 1871, Mayo Papers, Add. MS 7490/8/9, CUL. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, Appendix I, NAI. Rogers, CUL, 1871. Ibid. Martin G. Wynne, Indian Police (1929–47), Asst. Commissioner of the Settlement (1934–38), Collected Papers Mss Eur/C 294, IOR. T.S. Blakeney, ‘An Impression of the Andaman Islands’, in T.S. Blakeney, Collected Papers, Mss Eur C 299, IOR. He was the Assistant Manager (Injipara) Estate, Valparai, Coimbatore, and visited the Andamans in 1936. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, Appendix I, NAI. Ibid. Mark Harrison, Climates & Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. In Harrison’s view, in the nineteenth century the European vision regarding the possibility of their acclimatization in Indian climate shifted and a more racialized distinction began to be made between temperate and tropical Indian climates, whereby India came to be ‘viewed with terror, as a reservoir of filth and disease’. Thus climate, according to Harrison, became ‘one of the chief constraints upon their imperial ambitions’ because ‘to admit the possibility of acclimatization was to admit that the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized was less than fundamental’. In the case of the Andamans, no significant shift in episteme from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century (a phenomenon which was occurring on the Indian subcontinent as a result of British territorial expansion) is discernible because the Islands’ colonization did not really begin until the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike India (and the West Indies) where there was a ‘considerable optimism in the late eighteenth century about the possibility of acclimatization’, in the Andamans acclimatization of the British was never even considered a possibility. Also see Arnold, ‘Illusory Riches’, 2000, pp. 6–18. Home, Marine, 3 Sep 1858, 9–11, NAI. Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, No. 51, NAI. Home, Judicial, 7 May 1858, 24–46, NAI. Man, Aboriginal Inhabitants, 1883, p. xvi. Home, Public, July 1867, 21–211, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, March, 1880, 25–27, NAI; Report by E.E. Waters, Senior Medical Officer on 1 October 1903 in Home, Port Blair, April 1904, 42, NAI; Home, Port Blair, April 1906, 73, NAI; and Home, Port Blair, April 1906, 81, NAI; and Report of Colonel C.J. Bamber, a Sanitary Commissioner, who visited the Andamans in October 1908, in Home, Port Blair, Dec 1908, 26, NAI.

Notes 221 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86

87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101

Home, Judicial, 6 Jan 1860, 7–23, A, NAI. In the later period, overcrowding in the barracks, insufficient supplies and infrastructure for the increased number of convicts along with mosquitoes breeding in swamps and rice fields, lack of a proper local sewage system, and insufficient nutritious food also contributed to diseases such as phthisis, malaria and dysentery. Annual report for the year 1884–85, Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 2, NAI. Jacques Pouchepadass, ‘Colonialism and Environment in India, Comparative Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, August 19, 1995, pp. 2059–2067. Foreign, 22 May 1857, 133, NAI. C.J. Lyall and A.S. Lethbridge, The Report on the Working of the Penal Settlement of Port Blair, Home, Port Blair, June 1890, NAI. Arnold, The Problem of Nature, 1996, p. 153. Randall Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2007. Ibid., p. 12. Rhodes Murphey, ‘The City in the Swamp: Aspects of the Site and Early Growth of Calcutta’, The Geographical Journal, 130, 2, 1964, pp. 241–256. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease, 2007, pp. 84–110. The author’s conclusions are borne out by a recent publication by scholars in the Department of Zoology of Oxford University. See G.D. Shanks and D.J. Bradley, ‘Island Fever: The Historical Determinants of Malaria in the Andaman Islands’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, 104, 3, March 2010, pp. 185–190. James L.A. Webb, Jr., Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 7. David Arnold, ‘Indian Ocean as a Disease Zone, 1500–1950’, South Asia, 14, 2, 1991, pp. 1–21. David Arnold, Warm Climate and Western Medicine, Rodopi Press, Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1996; Also see Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000, Chapter 4, titled ‘Doctors and Discipline’, and ‘Policing the Savage’, 1999, pp. 753–773, for an in-depth analysis of the use of medicine as a disciplinary device on the Andamans. Home, Judicial, 25 March 1859, 28, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Oct 1873, 19–22, A, NAI and Home, Port Blair, March 1880, 25–27, NAI. Experiments for treating leprosy with gurjan oil and quinine for malaria were conducted on the convicts. Home, Public, 24 Sept 1870, 44–45, A, NAI, and Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1902, 74, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, May 1873, 10 to 17, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI. Portman, History of Our Relations, 1899, vol. I, pp. 68–69 (emphasis my own). Ibid., p. 53 Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 115. Home, Public, 4 Aug 1863, 6–8, A, NAI. Corbyn wrote three narratives of the expeditions that he undertook with the Andamanese, including reports on the Andaman Homes. Home, Judicial, 27 Aug 1858, 6–8, NAI. Home, Judicial, 7 April 1860, 2–8, NAI. Home, Judicial, 19 May 1860, 9–12, NAI. Home, Public, 3 March 1865, 1–6, A, NAI. The Great Andamanese is the term used for an amalgamation of twelve Andamanese tribes spread out throughout the length and the breath of the Great

222 Notes

102 103 104 105 106

107

Andamans (a set of three huge islands – North, Middle and South Andamans). By the 1960s, intermixing between the twelve tribes had taken place and the nomenclature ‘The Great Andamanese’ began to be used for them. Amongst the Great Andamanese, it was the Aka bea Da who were the first tribe to come into prolonged contact with the British. Report on Andaman Homes written by J.N. Homfray for Jan 1873, in Home, Port Blair, May 1873, 10 to 17, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Aug 1873, 7–8, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, May 1882, 20–21, B, NAI. Home, Port Blair, May 1873, 10 to 17, A, NAI. A note by R.C. Temple, ‘Memorandum on the Supervision of Labour in Port Blair’ on 7 Jan 1895 in R.C. Temple Collection, MSS Eur/F 98, no. 42, IOR. For instance, according to Sen, the ‘legal and procedural feasibility of surveillance in the Andamans was in sharp contrast to the situation on the mainland’. In his view the enforcement of surveillance was extremely difficult in the mainland jails, while the island character of the colony in the Andamans made it easier to cordon, quarantine, segregate and keep the convicts under surveillance: Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000. Similarly, Clare Anderson asserts: ‘Indeed, during the early years of settlement the landscape and population of the Islands provided a sort of natural prison. In the absence of secure places of confinement or sufficient personnel, the threats posed by the unknown jungle, sea and inhabitants comprised the convict guard’: Anderson, ‘Sepoys, Servants and Settlers’, 2007, pp. 185–220, p. 207 (emphasis my own). Also see Majumdar, Penal Settlement, 1975. Murphey, ‘The City in the Swamp’, 1964, pp. 241–256, p. 255.

Chapter 4 1 Stephen A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854–1952, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2006. Toth also argues that on examination of the penal administration ‘one sees not a monolith of surveillance and success but rather a deeply contingent and often fractured domain’. 2 The early studies on convict management in the Andamans have been mostly descriptive in character or have sought to bolster the nationalist position by highlighting the excesses of the system. Satadru Sen’s monograph on the Andamans is the only significant academic work, which has analyzed the system of convict management in the Andamans. See Majumdar, Penal Settlement, 1975 and Mathur, History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1968 and Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000. 3 I am grateful to Lauren Benton for this insight. 4 Frank Dikotter, ‘“A Paradise for Rascals”: Colonialism, Punishment and the Prison in Hong Kong 1841–1891’, Crime, History and Societies, 8, 1, 2004, pp. 49–63. Dikotter also demonstrates that the ‘colonial state’ was not a homogenous entity. 5 Victor Turner, The Forests of Symbol: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1967; see its Chapter 4, ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, pp. 93–111. 6 Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, No. 57, NAI. 7 Home, Public, 25 June 1870, 68–70, A, NAI. 8 The issue of loss of caste because of travel overseas was purely a colonial construct and affected only a small section of Hindu society. The British worked the Brahminical notion and the fear of loss of caste into an all-compassing category in their haste to classify the essential characteristics of Indian society. Indians

Notes 223

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21

22

have had a long and robust seafaring tradition since ancient times, which would not have existed if there were a strong taboo attached to crossing the seas. See Chakravarti, ‘Seafarings, Ships and Ship Owners’, 2002, pp. 28–61; Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India, 1977; Chandra, The Indian Ocean, 1987; Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe, 1990; McPherson, The Indian Ocean, 1993; Mookerji, Indian Shipping, 1912; Ray, ‘Seafaring in the Bay of Bengal’, 1990, pp. 1–14 and Archaeology of Seafaring, 1999. The clearest enunciation of this could be found in the report of The Prison Discipline Committee of 1838 which had decided to retain penal transportation in the penal statutes, based on the view that it had the capacity to inspire fear and awe in the hearts of the natives of India. ‘On the people of this country, the simple operation of removal to a distance is to increase the exemplary force of punishment to a very great degree. Generally over India a sentence of transportation beyond the black water is regarded with inexplicable horror. The effect of such a sentence on the convict is short of the effect of a sentence of death, whilst the effect of such a sentence on the bystanders is greater than the effect of the sentence of death.’ Report of the Prison Discipline Committee, Government of India, Calcutta, 1838, p. 86. Home, Public, 1 April 1864, 1–12, A, NAI (emphasis my own). Ibid. Trained to be a medical practitioner, Walker studied medicine at Aberdeen and became assistant surgeon in 1845 in the Bengal Medical Service. Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 1–20, NAI and Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 1–20, NAI. Ibid. Home, Judicial, 6 Jan 1860, 7–23, A, NAI; Home, Judicial, 2 March 1860, 13–16, A, NAI and Home, Public, 4 Aug 1865, 7–8, A, NAI. All the ordinary convicts received an allowance of one anna and nine pice per day, out of which they provided for their own clothes and food. Orderlies, petty officers, mechanics, and boatmen received four to five rupees a month, the Commissariat coolies received four to six rupees. Home, Public, April 1864, 1–12, A, NAI; Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 20, NAI; Home, Judicial, 9 March 1860, 26–32, A, NAI; Home, Public, 28 March 1862, 67–68, A, NAI; Home, Public, 15 Sep 1862, 40–42, A, NAI; Home, Public, July 1867, 21–211, A, NAI; Home, Public, 2 July 1870, 18–19, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, July 1873, 27–28, A, NAI. The Government of India, however, refused to sanction any general introduction of the free settlers on the Island but agreed to let the free people employed by the settlement administration on the Islands to import their families. Home, Judicial, 30 July 1858, 11–15, NAI. Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 1–20, NAI. Note by G.C. Collyer, Chief Engineer, Straits Settlement, to Capt. J.G.R. Forlong, Executive Engineer on Special duty, 24 Sep 1859, in Home Judicial, 4 Oct 1865, 22–23, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 4 Oct 1865, 22–23, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 1 July 1864, 10–11, NAI. B. Ford, The Acts, Resolutions, Orders, & c., of the Government of India to Regulate the Administration of the Penal Settlement of Port Blair, Andaman Islands, With a Code of Regulations Based Thereon, Calcutta, 1868, pp. 85–86. Cited in A.P. Howell, Note of Jails and Jail Discipline in India, 1867–68, Calcutta, 1868, also Home, Public, 29 May 1866, 61–62, A, NAI.

224 Notes 23 Colonel Horace Man was the father of the famous E.H. Man. Both father and son had served as Superintendents of the Andamans. See Home, Judicial, 15 Jan 1858, 21, A, NAI and Home, Judicial, 15 Jan 1858, 23, A, NAI. 24 Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 1990. Wiener maps the differing views on crime and criminality in nineteenth-century England on a linear scale of succession. However, the occurrence of these views in a chronological linearity needs to be problematized because Wiener does not take into account the possibility of co-existence of the differing views. Moreover, he presents the existence of these ideologies in different eras as hegemonic ideas without any contestation, thereby silencing any contemporary criticisms of the dominant ideologies. 25 Home, Public, 27 March 1869, 167 to 169, A, NAI. 26 The Prison Discipline Committee (1838) took a similar view. It did not see crime in India as a product of ‘depravity of character, such as is usually the crime of an English malefactor’. Crime was more a result of the social environment of the criminal: ‘His general character differs less from that of the mass of his countrymen than would be the case in more civilized and moral countries. A large proportion of crimes in this country are committed by persons whose tribe have done the same time out of mind, and they are almost as naturally the result of birth, as another man’s honest trade.’ Given this character of the Indian criminal application of this punishment was quite effective because the convict, once removed from all that is familiar, finds it easy to commence an honest life unlike the English criminal who suffers from depravity of character. Report of the Prison Discipline Committee, 1838, p. 97. 27 Home, Public, 27 March 1869, 167 to 169, A, NAI. 28 Home, Judicial, 30 Oct 1869, 57–59, A, NAI. 29 J. Scarlet Campbell was the Secretary to the Home Department, Government of India, at the time. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI. 30 Home, Public, 27 March 1869, 167 to 169, A, NAI. 31 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982. 32 Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI (emphasis my own). 33 Ibid. 34 Home, Public, 27 March 1869, 167 to 169, A, NAI. 35 Ibid. 36 Convicts who had served a fixed period of term on the Settlement received ticket-of-leave. It conferred on the convicts the status of self-supporters. With the ticket-of-leave the convicts were free to seek employment within the Settlement and also to marry. In the initial years of the Settlement’s inception, the convicts were given tickets after a short probation and those who brought money with them were made self-supporters almost on arrival. There were twelve divisions of convicts of whom the self-supporters constituted the twelfth division with headquarters on Ross. In 1871, the number of divisions was reduced to six of which the first consisted of self-supporters. By 1874, a more rigorous classification was introduced and no ticket was given until the convict had been resident for twelve years, a period which was subsequently reduced to ten years. In 1901, out of the population of 11,947 convicts, there were 2,115 self-supporter convicts. 37 Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1908, pp. 84–87. 38 Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 51–84, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI; Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1908, pp. 59–76. 39 Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998.

Notes 225 40 See Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 1986; George Rudé, Criminal and Victim: Crime and Society in Early Nineteenth Century England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985; and Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 1990; and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin Books, London, 1977; David J. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, Little, Brown, Boston, 1971; Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978. 41 Although the Prison Discipline Committee (1838) upheld indoor jail labour, intra-mural labour did not evince immediate converts. The financial logic of the Colonial State ensured continued use of extra-mural labour for fulfilling the government schemes for building all-weather roads linking the Presidency towns and the ill-equipped jail buildings. 42 Arnold, ‘India: The Contested Prison’, 2007, pp. 147–184 and Singha, A Despotism of Law, 1988. 43 Home, Judicial, 17 Oct 1862, 23–24, NAI. 44 Ibid. 45 Arnold, ‘The Colonial Prison’, 1994, pp. 140–178; Singha, A Despotism of Law, 1998; Padmini Swaminathan, ‘Prison as a Factory: A Study of Jail Manufactures in the Madras Presidency’, Studies in History, 11, 1, 1995, pp. 77–100; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 1990; Anand Yang, ‘“Disciplining Natives”: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India’, South Asia, 10, 2, 1987, pp. 29–45, and Crime and Criminality in British India, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1985. 46 Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI. 47 Home, Port Blair, March 1894, 5, NAI; Home, Port Blair, April 1895, 14, NAI; Home, Port Blair, July 1893, 78–81, NAI. 48 John Mulvany, ‘Two Notable Prison Administrators’, Calcutta Review, 6, 292, 1918, p. 83. 49 Home, Judicial, 19 June 1869, 14–15, A, NAI. 50 Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, A, NAI. 51 This is not to suggest that the physical and logistical problems that the British confronted on the Islands were resolved in entirety. The problems continued to persist but over the years the British became more equipped to deal with them. 52 Home, Port Blair, Aug 1909, 31–33, A, NAI. 53 Home, Port Blair, July 1893, 78–81, NAI. 54 See Chapter 6. 55 Home, Port Blair, Sep 1895, 26–28, NAI. 56 R.C. Temple, ‘The Penal System at the Andamans’, Journal of Society of Arts, Feb 24 1899, vol. XLVII, No. 2, 414, pp. 192–305, in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 36, IOR. 57 Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, May 1906, 137, NAI. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Letter of Lt. Col. H.A. Browning, 6 Dec 1910, in Home, Port Blair, May 1911, 77–78, A, NAI. 61 Home, Port Blair, Jan 1896, 94, NAI. 62 Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000. 63 Howell, Note of Jails and Jail Discipline, 1868. 64 Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1908, pp. 77–88. 65 Home, Port Blair, August 1874, no. 52, NAI.

226 Notes

Chapter 5 1

2

3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

As one official stated, ‘Labour is the grand desideratum in the infancy of every colony; and it is especially so in the present state of Andamans Islands. Dense jungles are to be cleared, in order to render these Islands a fit abode for man. […] It is work, hard work that is wanted.’ Report by Dr G.G. Brown, dated March 1859, in Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, No. 51, NAI. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000; Aparna Vaidik, ‘Working the Islands: Labour Regime in Colonial Andamans (1858–1921)’, in Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu Mohapatra, eds, Towards Global Labour History: New Comparisons, Tulika, Delhi, 2009, pp. 57–81. Matrimony and domesticity were a continuing concern even in the colony of New South Wales. According to local officials ‘more marriages would make the colony more “moral”’. See Hirst, Convict Society, 1983, p. 80, and Aparna Vaidik, ‘Settling the Convict: Matrimony and Family in the Andamans’, in Studies in History, 22, 2, 2006, pp. 221–251. Home, Port Blair, Nov 1908, 48–52, A, NAI. Marriage, as a socio-economic institution, was favoured in this period of history in most of the plantation colonies. The works of Marina Carter and Prabhu Mohapatra on indentured labour in Mauritius and British Guiana show the way marriage provided the much-needed social stability to the labour force and also aided in local reproduction of labour once the shift in the international migration of labour began to take place. Another very important reason for an indenture system favouring marriage was to fob off any criticism by the colonial authorities because negative press regarding the social life of the indentured labour had the potential of leading to its discontinuance, as it had in the case of slavery. Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers 1995; Prabhu P. Mohapatra, ‘Restoring the Family: Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labor in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860–1920’, Studies in History, 11, 2, n.s. 1995, pp. 227–260. The marriage of the deported female convicts was sanctioned after five years of stay in the Settlement. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1915, 66, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1915, 66, NAI. See Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers, 1995; Mohapatra, ‘Restoring the Family’, 1995, pp. 227–260. Home, Judicial, 2 Dec 1862, 1–2, A, NAI. See Vaidik, ‘Settling the Convict’, 2007, pp. 221–251. See Paula J. Byrne, Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810–1830, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, for a study of the female convicts in New South Wales whose presence was also primarily determined by their ‘sexual value … to the convict colony’. The fact that women were undervalued and underemployed in the Australian penal colony is also borne out by Stephen Nicholas, Deborah Oxley and Peter R. Shergold, eds, Convict Workers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988. Home, Judicial, 19 May 1860, 41–48, A, NAI. Cited in the Proceedings Volume of Home, Port Blair, August 1915, 66, NAI. Home, Public, 7 June 1865, 11–13, A, NAI. Cited in Sen, ‘Rationing Sex, 1999, pp. 29–59. R.H. Lowis, ‘Sketch of Life in the Andaman Islands’, Mss Eur D 1032, IOR.

Notes 227 16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

For a discussion of women’s work, see Nirmala Banerjee, ‘Working Women in Colonial Bengal: Modernization and Marginalization’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women, Kali for Women Press, New Delhi, 1989, pp. 267–301. Deborah Oxley, The Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 227. For instance, there were very few convicts of sweeper or ‘Bhungee’ caste, and in the early years of the Settlement, the hospital often overran with convicts suffering from bowel complaints, which made the sanitation situation quite grave. Given the convicts’ caste sensibilities, Superintendent Walker in 1858 decided not to compel ordinary convicts to work as sweepers but to hire some from Calcutta. Thereafter in the Settlement, Brahmins cooked and the ones from lower castes cleaned but they were always in short supply. Home, Judicial, 20 Aug 1858, 25–33, NAI. Ibid. For instance, Walker received a proposal in 1858 from the Government of India for sending volunteer convict artisans from Bengal to Port Blair. However, much to Walker’s dismay none of the convict-artisans in Bengal jails were willing on any terms to cross the kalapani. Suggestions to obtain convicts from Straits Settlement or hiring of a free gang from Calcutta also did not work out. Home, Judicial, 25 June 1858, 21–23, NAI. Home, Public, June 1870, Proceedings Volume, 61 and 62, NAI. Home, Public, 4 Feb 1871, 168–171, A, NAI. Home, Public, 1 Jan 1870, 83–85, NAI. Gratuities: Jemadars at Rs. 5 per month; 1st Tindal at Rs. 2; 2nd Tindal and Rs. 1; Peons at Rs. 1; 1st Class Workmen at Rs. 2; 2nd Class Workmen at Rs. 1; 3rd Class Workmen at 8 Annas; and the 4th Class Learners were not given any gratuity. Handbook for the Andaman and Nicobars, 1877, pp. 31–32. The Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1908, pp. 69–71. Handbook for the Andaman and Nicobars, 1877, pp. 31–32. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Oct 1907, 65, NAI. Thanesari, Mohammad Jafar, Kalapani Ya Tarikh-Ajib, Delhi, 1879, reprint, Lahore, 1993, p. 67. High officials, landowners, clerics, state officials. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000 and Hirst, Convict Society, 1983. In the Andamans, the system of classification took some time to evolve but even after its introduction, convicts from different classes could be worked together on the same kind of labour work; see Vaidik, ‘Working the Islands’, 2009, pp. 57–81. Nicholas et al., Convict Workers, 1988, passim; David Kent and Norma Townsend, The Convicts of the Eleanor, Merlin/Pluto Press, Sydney, 2002. However, the data from the Andamans challenges this conception of ‘efficiency’ posited by the revisionist historiography. Home, Port Blair, June 1887, 34, NAI and Home, Port Blair, 5 Feb 1900, 27, NAI. Home, Port Blair, July 1909, 14, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, March 1880, 25–27, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, Aug 1883, 76–78, NAI. Ibid.; Home, Port Blair, May 1881, 3–5, NAI.

228 Notes 39

40

41 42 43

44

45

46 47 48

49

50 51 52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

J.F.A. McNair’s (Superintendent of Convicts in Straits Settlement) note on the Convict Warder System, Home, Judicial, 11 Aug 1864, 44, B, NAI; Home, Judicial, 30 April 1864, 102–103, B, NAI; Home, Judicial, 4 Oct 1865, 22–23, NAI. Also, Arnold, ‘The Colonial Prison’, 1994, pp. 140–178. There was one jemadar to every station containing more than a hundred convicts; and for every hundred convicts, there was one tindal, six peons, and two umedwars. The overseers arranged with the station jemadar for the distribution of the men for the next day’s work, to prevent any delay in the morning parade. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI. Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI. According to Clare Anderson, the use of convict petty officers was a way of ‘integration of convicts within the hierarchy of command’, to give the colony greater social stability. At one time the Superintendent was even willing to take on Nubian and African long-term prisoners from the East African Protectorate in order to ‘meet the labour difficulty’. Home, Port Blair, Feb 1900, 5, A, NAI. For some years, the Settlement officials debated starting the transportation of Chinese convicts. They were useful from the point of view of skilled labour as they made valuable artificers. The Settlement officers were not much interested in having Chinese convicts because there was a general stereotype about them being ‘of desperate character convicted of piracy and burglary’. Home, Public, 15 Oct 1862, 8–9, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 16 Nov 1860, 7–9, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 9 March 1860, 18–20, A, NAI. Kloss, In the Andamans and Nicobars, 1903. He noted, ‘Of the Burmese, however, the greater part are serving sentences of ten years, for engaging too recklessly in the national pastime of dacoity, and many of them are employed in the jungle and as boatmen’, p. 27 (emphasis my own). Home, Judicial, 6 Jan 1860, 7–23, A, NAI; Home, Judicial, 9 March 1860, 18–20, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, 18 May 1898, 29–30, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, 16 Dec 1901, 18, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, 12 May 1906, 135, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, 20 Feb 1907, 37, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, Sep 1875, 237–239, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, May 1907, 19, A, NAI. Burmese female term-convicts also began to be transported to the Andamans in time, ‘in view of the desirability of encouraging convict marriages’. See Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Jan 1918, 80–83, NAI. They were even being sent to Southeast Asian colonies. Most of them were Portuguese and received preferential treatment. See Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers’, 2003, pp. 179–208. Home, Public, 19 Jan 1794, 4, A, NAI; Home, Public, 31 Oct 1794, 2, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 10 Sep 1858, 20–21, NAI. Home, Judicial, 16 July 1858, 28–31, NAI; Home, Judicial, 6 May 1859, 22–26, NAI. Home, Judicial, 10 Sep 1858, 20–21, NAI; Home Judicial, 7 Jan 1859, 6–8, NAI; and Home, Judicial, 1 June 1860, 1–6, NAI. Home, Judicial, 7 Jan 1859, 6–8, NAI. Home, Judicial, 28 Jan 1863, 49–51, A, NAI. Home, Public, 20 Dec 1862, 39–40, NAI.

Notes 229 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 86 87 88

Home, Public, 14 Sep 1863, 24–27, A, NAI. It is unclear whether only the Europeans were allowed in the library or if anyone who read English could access it. Home, Public, 1 Feb 1865, 1–3, A, NAI. Home, Ecclesiastical, 6 Oct 1862, 4–5, NAI. Home, Judicial, 10 Sep 1858, 7–9, NAI. Home, Judicial, Proceeding Volume, Sep–Dec 1868, 11–12, NAI. Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI. A term-convict was one who did not serve a life sentence. The terms of sentence generally ranged between three to seven years. On the expiry of his sentence, the term-convict was to return to his homeland. Home, Judicial, 30 July 1858, 18–20, NAI; Home, Public, 10 Sep 1858, 60–61, NAI. Discussed in Chapter 7. Foreign, Internal, Sep 1891, 35–36, B, NAI. Home, Judicial, 6 Jan 1860, 7–23, A, NAI. And he felt that ‘if somewhat heavier expense was incurred, and the extension of the plan pushed on energetically in a short time there would undoubtedly be a flourishing agricultural settlement and a Province worthy of the British nation. It is also probable that considerable revenue would be obtainable from other sources viz. Coffee, iron, coal, wood’, in Home, Public, 27 Jan 1863, 60–62, A, NAI. Home, Public, 28 Nov 1862, 71, A, NAI. Home, Public, 20 Dec 1865, 37–38, A, NAI. Home, Public, Feb 1867, Proceedings Volume, A, NAI. Home, Public, July 1867, 21–22, A, NAI. Home, Public, 19 March 1870, 141–143, A, NAI. Home, Public, 8 April 1871, 67–68, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 75, A, NAI. Annual Report for the year 1878–79, Home, Port Blair, March 1880, 25–27, NAI Home, Port Blair, Proceeding Volume, March 1906, 50–56, NAI. In Robert J. Steinfeld’s account of the nineteenth-century discourse on free and unfree labour, the ‘duration of the contracted-for service’ formed an index of classification between free and unfree labour. The working men saw the men under long duration contract service as ‘bound as slaves’ and the ones with short-term contract as ‘free’. Steinfeld establishes, through this examination of working men’s attitude to labour obligation, that not only were the labour practices and regimes being continuously reinterpreted from below but a crucial denominator for internal differentiation of the workforce was the ‘temporality of labour obligation’. See Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labour in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. See Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1908. Letter from F.J. Mouat, Inspector of Jail to C.J. Buckland, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, written on 11 May 1858 in Home, Judicial, 25 June 1858, 21–23, A, NAI. Home, Public, 28 March 1862, 67–68, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, A, NAI. 16 annas in a rupee. J.S. Campbell mentions these rates in his report written in April 1872, in Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, A, NAI. Home, Public, 24 Jan 1865, 33–35, A, NAI.

230 Notes 89

90

91

92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99

100

101 102 103 104

Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 20, NAI; Public Works Department, Forests, Jan 1868, 8–11, B, NAI; Public Works Department, Forests, Sep 1868, 16 to 18, NAI; Home, Public, 26 Nov 1870, 122–123, B, NAI; Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Nov 1874, 30–33, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Feb 1881, 36–38, NAI. The survey of the Andamans’ forests began in 1881–82. Home, Forests, May 1880, 9, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Dec 1880, 11–12, B, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Nov 1881, 16, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Aug 1883, 76–78, NAI; and Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI; Revenue and Agriculture Department, Proceedings Volume, Feb 1895, 90–92, A, NAI. In response to the need of the hour the Settlement officials prepared a separate Forest Manual for the proper regulation of convict labour, which classified and specified the hours of work; and the time required for completion of a task work; see R.L. Heinig, Forest Manual of the Andamans, 1899, in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 35, IOR. The Madras and Bombay Government gun-carriage factories, the Military Gymnasium in Roorkee, the Indian Marine Department, and Woolwich Arsenal were some of the buyers of Andaman timber. Kloss, In the Andamans and Nicobars, 1903. M.H. Ferrar, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1884–85, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1886. In the year 1894–95, the Forest Department’s daily labour force was 436 compared to 532 in the previous year, which was further reduced to 316 in 1895–96. The actual need of the Forest Department was about 1,200 forest workers. The cost of extraction amounted to Rs. 19 per ton in the year 1896–97 compared to Rs. 7.8 a ton in 1890–91. See Revenue and Agriculture Department, Forest, Sep 1895, 33–35, B, NAI. W.R.L. Jacob, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1919–20, Calcutta, 1921. Revenue and Agriculture Department, Forests, Nov 1910, 6–8, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Nov 1911, 35–36, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, NAI. A note by L. Carthy, the Secretary of Port Blair School Committee, in Home, Public, 6 Jan 1865, 6, A, NAI. Home, Education, May 1872, 17–18, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, 1875, 9 to 11, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1919, 56, NAI. The books prescribed for study were – Tashri ul Huroof, Kissa Soorujpoor, Taleem ul Mobbtadee, Kissa Dhurm Singh, Khoosh ha Sibeean, Mufaid ul Insha, Hissa doyam Insha Urdu, Mizabah ul Musahut, Tarikh Badshahan Inglistan, Kurreem ul loghat, Geography awul, Tarikh Hindostan, Tasheel ul Kawaid. Home, Port Blair, Dec 1875, 19 to 21, NAI. Home, Department, October 1910, 5, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Nov 1911, 35–36, NAI. Home, Port Blair, March 1915, NAI; Home, Port Blair, July 1918, 22–23, NAI; Home, Port Blair, April 1918, 81–82, A, NAI. Abdul Majeed, ‘Memoirs of Master Subhan’, in Golden Jubilee Souvenir, Government Boys’ Senior Secondary School, Port Blair (1946–1996), Sep. 1997, pp. 6–10. Master Abdus Subhan, born in 1894, is revered in the Andamans as a great educationist. The Settlement administration employed him as a teacher from 1913 until he retired in 1950. He was one of the beneficiaries of the scholarship for higher studies in Burma. In this article, his son has reproduced a memoir, that

Notes 231

105 106 107

108 109 110

111

112

113

114 115 116 117

he chanced upon after his father’s death, on the early education system in the Andamans. Home, Port Blair, June 1876, 19 to 22, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1915, 66, NAI. F.A.M. Dass, The Andaman Islands, Good Shepherd Convent Press, Bangalore, 1937, pp.71–72 and Census of India, Report on the Andamans, Chapter 7, ‘The Local-Born Population’, 1931, pp. 29–30. Temple, Collection, MSS Eur/F 98, no. 42, IOR. Ibid. K.S. Singh, ‘Rise of Andaman Hindi’, in K.S. Singh, ed., Andaman and Nicobar Islands: People of India Series, 12, Anthropological Survey of India, Madras, 1994, pp. 246–252. Gauri Shankar Pandey, ‘The Most Happiest Day’, in Golden Jubilee Souvenir, Government Boys’ Senior Secondary School, Port Blair (1946–1996), Sep. 1997, pp. 12–22; Madan Mohan Singh, ‘Andaman Mein Natak Nautanki’, Sankalp, Akashwaani Port Blair, 3, Sep 2001, Port Blair, pp. 26–30; and Govind Mishra, ‘Ahlakhand Suna Nahi Dekha’, in Silver Jubilee Souvenir, Akashwaani Club, Port Blair, 1990, pp. 21–23. There is a huge amount of literature on Australian labour history which establishes the crucial role played by aboriginal labour in the development of the Frontier. These writings also see racial management as a significant part of the aboriginal labour system. Michael Bennett, ‘A Long Time Working: Aboriginal labour on the Coolangatta Estate, 1822–1901’, The Past is Before Us, 30 June–2 July, 2005, University of Sydney, http://www.historycooperative.org/ proceedings/seascapes/index.html; Mark Hannah, ‘Aboriginal Workers in the Australian Agricultural Company, 1824–1857’, The Past is Before Us, 30 June–2 July, 2005, University of Sydney, http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/index.html; A. Curthoys and C. Moore, ‘Working for the White People: A Historiographical Essay on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Labour’, Labour History, 69, 1995, pp. 1–29; C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970; R. Evans, ‘“Kings” in Brass Crescents: Defining Aboriginal Labour Patterns in Colonial Queensland’, in K. Saunders, ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920, Croom Helm, London, 1984; H. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1982; A. McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987; D. May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland From White Settlement to the Present, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; P. Brock, ‘Pastoral Stations and Reserves in South and Central Australia, 1850s–1950s’, Labour History, 69, 1995, pp. 102–114; S. Hodson, ‘Nyungars and Work: Aboriginal Experiences in the Rural Economy of the Great Southern Region of Western Australia’, Aboriginal History, 17, 1, 1993, pp. 73–92; D. Bairstow, ‘With the Best Will in the World: Some Records of Early White Contact with the Gampignal on the Australian Agricultural Company’s Estate at Port Stephens’, Aboriginal History, 17, 1, 1993, pp. 4–16. The Jarawas was one such term. The Andamanese trackers associated with the British (now known as Great Andamanese) were the ones to use the term to describe their unfriendly co-Islanders. It was not a self-appellation of the Jarawas. Home, Public, Aug, 1867, 49, NAI. Home, Public, 21 June 1865, 51, A, NAI. Home, Public, 21 Aug 1869, 165–116, NAI. Home, Public, 19 June 1869, 2–4, NAI.

232 Notes 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

136 137

138

Annual Report for the year 1904–05, in Home, Port Blair, 12 May 1906, 135, NAI. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 40, IOR. Home, Public, 31 July 1863, 17–20, A, NAI. J.N. Homfray’s report on the ‘Andaman Home’, in Home, Public, 8 April 1865, 35, A, NAI. Home, Public, 18 Dec 1869, 64–65, A, NAI. Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in the Nineteenth Century in Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2002, shows how aboriginal children, through institutionalization, were being prepared for ‘low-status employment’ in Western Australia. Also see Viswajit Pandya, ‘Deforesting among Andamese Children: Political Economy and History of Schooling’, in B.S. Hewlett and M.E. Lamb, eds, Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods – Evolutionary, Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, Aldine Transactions, New Brunswick, 2005, pp. 385–406. Home, Public, 31 March 1866, 108–109, A, NAI. Home, Public, 16 Jan 1869, 60–61, A, NAI. Home, Public, 28 Dec 1866, 94–96, A, NAI. Home, Public, 31 March 1866, 108–109, A, NAI. Home, public, Nov 1867, 37, NAI; Home, Public, 16 Jan 1869, 60–61, A, NAI. Home, Public, 21 June 1865, 51, A, NAI. Home, Public, 11 Jan 1864, 10–11, A, NAI. Home, Public, 21 June 1865, 51, A, NAI. Ibid. Home, Public, 13 Aug 1865, 28–31, A, NAI. Home, Public, 20 Feb 1869, 62–63, A, NAI. Zarine Cooper, ‘Perceptions of Time’, 1993, pp. 261–267. Three Andamanese had been captured and taken to Moulmein for ethnological study. It was found that all three were suffering from a pulmonary infection. The officials in Moulmein cited the example of the tribes in Tasmania and New Zealand who had also developed pulmonary disease since the introduction of blankets and other European clothing, ‘which seems to have been unknown before’. Sen, ‘Policing the Savage’, 1999, pp. 753–773. Man, The Aboriginal Inhabitants, 1883; 1975, p. iii; E.H. Man, A Dictionary of the South Andaman Language, Bombay, 1923, and The Nicobar Islands and Their People, Guildford, 1932; Portman, History of Our Relations, 1899, ‘Andamanese Music’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 20, 1888, pp. 181–218, ‘Notes on Andamanese’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1896, pp. 362–371, ‘The Andamanese Fire Legend’, Indian Antiquary, 26, 1898, pp. 14–18, ‘Disposal of the Dead among the Andamanese’, Indian Antiquary, 25, 1896, pp. 56–57; R.C. Temple, The Practical Value of Anthropology, Indian Antiquary, June 1905, pp. 132–144, ‘Remarks on the Andaman Islanders and Their Country’, Indian Antiquary, 52, 1923, pp. 151–157 and 216–224, ‘A Plan for A Uniform Scientific Record of the Languages of Savages’, The Indian Antiquary, July 1907, pp. 181–195, ‘The Trade in Andamanese Slaves’, The Indian Antiquary, 30, 1901, p. 120; and A. Thompson, ‘Description of the Andaman Bone Necklace’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 1881, pp. 295–309. Edward Gait, ‘Some Observations on the Andamanese’, Man in India, 2, 1922, pp. 97–99; A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The Religion of the Andaman Islanders’, Folklore, 20, 1909, p. 257, ‘Notes on the Language of the Andaman Islands’,

Notes 233

139

140

141 142 143

Anthropos, 14, 1914, pp. 36–52, and The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1922; Louis Robert Sullivan, A Few Andamanese Skulls: With Comparative Notes on Negrito Craniometry (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 23, 4), The Trustees, New York, 1921, pp. 175–201. I. Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology, W.H.R. Rivers and Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898–1931, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Holland, 1981; Sita Venkateswar, Development and Ethnocide, Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands, IWGIA, Copenhagen, 2004; Zita van der Beek and Marcel Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector Salvaging Andamanese and Nicobarese Culture through Objects’, Journal of the History of Collections, 17, 2, 2005, pp. 135–153; David Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade. The Production of Ethnographic Observations on the Andaman Islands, 1858–1922’, in G.W. Stocking, ed., Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contactualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1991, pp. 75–108; E. Edwards, ‘Science Visualized. E.H. Man in the Andaman Islands’, in E. Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1992, p. 113. Robert Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labour: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1991, ‘Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labour’, in Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labour: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labour, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, pp. 144–146, and ‘Labour – Free or Coerced? A Historical Reassessment and Differences and Similarities’, in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds, Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues, Berne, Switzerland, 1997, pp. 107–126; David Northrup, ‘Free and Unfree Labour Migration, 1600–1900: An Introduction’, Journal of World History, 14, 2, 2003, pp. 125–130; David Eltis, Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002; Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. Though existence of convict resistance, for instance in the form of escapes, did circumscribe the functioning of the colonial administration. David Neal, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. Kent and Townsend, The Convicts of the Eleanor, 2002; Kent and Townsend also challenge the ‘slave’ or victim thesis and stress the complexity of convict employment.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5

Home, Judicial, 12 Nov 1858, 6–16, NAI. Ibid. Home, Judicial, 19 Aug 1859, 10–12, NAI. Home, Jails, 1929, 186, NAI. Home, Judicial, 22 Oct 1858, 13–18, NAI. This policy of keeping the convicts fettered changed when the Settlement officials saw that wounds and ulcers caused by fetters increased mortality amongst convicts. Also see Clare Anderson, ‘“The Ferringees are Flying – the Ship is Ours!”: The Convict Middle Passage in Colonial South and Southeast Asia, 1790–1860’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 42, 2, 2005, pp. 143–186.

234 Notes 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21 22 23

A. Saunders Dyers, ‘The Andaman Islands’, Calcutta Review, 116, 1903, pp. 260–291. Home, Judicial, 12 Nov 1858, 6–16, NAI. Home, Public, 1 April 1864, 1–12, A, NAI Home, Public, 14 Sep 1864, 48–49, A, NAI; Home, Public, 13 Aug 1865, 28–31, A, NAI. Fazl-i-Haqq-Khairabadi, Baaghi Hindustan, Almajma-ul-Islami Fazul Uloom Mohammadabad, Guahana, Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, 4th edition, 1985. A Translation of Assouratul Hindiah wa Qasaid fitnatul Hind: Angrezi Mazalim Ke Larzakhez Waquaiat Jung-e-Azadi ki Khooni Dastan. Fazl-i-Haqq Khairabadi was a theologian, linguist and litterateur par excellence of his times. He was friends with great luminaries such as poet Ghalib and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. It is believed that writing a fatwa against the British during the Revolt of 1857 was the ‘crime’ which got him deported to the Andamans. For further details see Jamal Malik, ‘Letters, PrisonSketches and Autobiographical Literature: The Case of Fadl-e Haqq Khairabadi in the Andaman Penal Colony’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 43, 1, 2006, pp. 77–100. Fazl-i-Haqq Khairabadi wrote his book with charcoal and pencil on pieces of cloth and scraps which were brought back to India and put together by his son Abdal Haqq Khairabadi in book form. This book narrates the story of the rebellion in 1857 and the life of Fazl-i-Haqq Khairabadi on the Andamans. Baaghi Hindustan is also considered a very fine example of Arabic literature. The book remained in a manuscript form in private hands until its publication on India’s independence in 1947. Khairabadi, Baaghi Hindustan, 1985, p. 76 (of the Arabic version). This is not a literal translation. The book was read out to me in translation from Urdu and Arabic by Dr Faizan Ahmad, Assistant Archivist, National Archives of India, and Dina Hussein, graduate student at Georgetown University, History Department. Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, No. 51, NAI. Amlah – officer, Bunneah – trader or merchant, Zamindar – landowner, Faurah – showel. Home, Judicial, 30 July, 1858, 11–15, NAI and Home, Judicial, 3 August 1858, 5–7, NAI. Home, Public, 1 April 1864, 1–12, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Nov 1881, 16, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Dec 1880, 59 to 61, NAI. Inspection Report by Alexander Mackenzie (Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, visited the Andamans to review the working of the penal settlement), 29 Dec 1885, in Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI. See Anderson, ‘Fashioning Identities’, 2001, pp. 153–174, for a detailed analysis of the significance of hair cropping amongst the convicts; and Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 85–110, shows the way headshaving was used to undermine the femininity of convict women. J.P. Walker to C. Beadon, 20 July 1858, Selections from the Records of the Government of India in the Home Department, No. XXIV and XXV on Andamans, Calcutta, 1859. Home, Judicial, 16 July 1858, 6–10, NAI. Home, Judicial, 7 May 1858, 24–46, NAI; Walker to C. Beadon, 17 April 1858 (Doc. no. 36). Home, Judicial, 7 Jan 1859, 14, NAI. Home, Judicial, 29 July 1859, 1–20, NAI.

Notes 235 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57

Home, Judicial, 19 May 1860, 29–31, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 7 May 1858, 24–26, NAI. See Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 75, NAI. Home, Port Blair, 12 May 1906, 135, NAI. Home, Judicial, 6 Jan 1860, 7–23, A, NAI. Home, Judicial, 16 July 1858, 6–10, NAI. Home, Public, 4 Jan 1896, 21–22, NAI. Ibid. Home, Public, 8 Feb 1868, 52–53, NAI. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Letter from W. Hudleston, Secretary to the Government to Madras to the Secy to the Govt of India, Home Dept., Ooty, 10 June 1873’, R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur /F 98, no. 37, IOR. ‘Letter from Colo. C. Harvey, General Superintendent of Operations for the Suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity to the Secy to the Gov. of India, Foreign Dept., 16 April 1873’, in Selection from Correspondence (1870–75) of the late Field Marshall Sir D.M. Stewart, when Chief Commissioner of the Andamans and Nicobar Islands, 1900, in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 37, IOR. Patricia O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth Century France, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982. O’Brien has demonstrated how the inmate subculture, instead of converting the prisoners into honest citizens, reinforced criminal identifications. Home, Port Blair, June, 1890, 74, NAI. Home, Port Blair, July 1910, 13–20, NAI. Thanesari, Kalapani Ya Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, 1879 [1993], pp. 72–73. Home, Port Blair, June 1893, 8–9, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Aug 1896, 39–45, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, Appendix I, NAI. Ibid. Temple, ‘The Andaman Tokens’, The Indian Antiquary, July 1897, pp. 192–194. Home, Public, Nov 1867, 98–101, B, NAI (Report on the Settlement by Major H.N. Davies, Secretary to Chief Commissioner, British Burma, On Special Duty). Ibid. Ibid. Patricia O’ Brien, The Promise of Punishment, 1982. Narrated to the superintendent of the prison in their home province, in Home, Judicial, Proceedings Volume, July–Dec 1859, No. 57, NAI. Thanesari, Kalapani Ya Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, ‘Is tarikh se, tarikh-e-rihai tak humne phir barrack ya libas ya khana kaidiyon ka kabhi nahi dekha. […] go, 18 baras tak misle-mulziman kalepani mein rahe’, 1879 [1993], p. 58. W. Walker, Report of the Committee of Jail Administration in India, Calcutta, 1889. Report by Lyall and Lethbridge, in Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Dec 1910, 80–93, A, NAI (emphasis my own). Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, NAI. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, No. 40, IOR. Home, Judicial, 19 May 1860, 41–48, A, NAI.

236 Notes 58

59 60

61

62 63

64

65

66 67 68 69 70 71

See Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Ian Duffield, ‘Skin Deep Devotions: Religious Tattoos and Convict Transportation to Australia’, in Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 118–135. They show that the convicts were tattooed by the administration on board the ship to Australia but the ships were also the place where the convicts removed their tattoos. The voyage was a creative and a reconstitutive space where body modification and alterations took place. Also see J. Bradley and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Embodied Explorations: Investigating Tattoos and the Transportation System’, in I. Duffield and J. Bradley, eds, Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Transported Labour Migration, Leicester University Press, London, 1997, pp. 183–203, and Anderson, Legible Bodies, 2004. Home, Judicial, 19 May 1860, 41–48, A, NAI. The notion of ‘silence’ is borrowed here from the anthropological theory of ‘muted groups’, which was first proposed by Edwin Ardener. ‘Muteness’, according to this theory, was the result of power relations between the dominant and sub-dominant groups. By muteness he did not simply imply silence or neglect but a failure to document the lives of the mute groups based on their versions of reality and their ways of structuring and understanding the world. See M.C. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988. Oxley, The Convict Maids, 1996. Also see Ashruya Faruqee, ‘Conceiving the Coolie Women: Indentured Labor, Indian Women and Colonial Discourse’, South Asia Research, 16, 1, Spring 1996, pp. 1–76. ‘Mr Gwyne’s Deputation to Andamans in July 1921’. This paragraph is from the notes in his diary, in Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI. See Oxley for an excellent exposition of the Victorian class and moral prejudices circumscribing the characterization of female convicts in The Convict Maids, 1996; also see Ian Gothard, Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1989; Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Story, History and Her Story’, Studies in History, 9, 1, n.s., 1993, pp. 71–85; Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2001; Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, 2004. Padma Anagol, ‘The Emergence of the Female Criminal in India: Infanticide and Survival under the Raj’, History Workshop Journal, 53, 2002, pp. 73–93. Anagol discusses how the ‘infanticidal woman was a creation of colonialism’. Satadru Sen, ‘The Female Jails of Colonial India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39, 4, 2002, pp. 417–438. Deborah Oxley, ‘Female Convicts’, in Stephen Nicholas et al., eds, Convict Workers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 85–97. Byrne, Criminal Law, 1993. Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Seagull, Calcutta, 1998. Thanesari, Kalapani Ya Tarikh-Ajib, 1879 [1993], pp. 69–71. Home, Port Blair, March 1882, 45 to 51, NAI. With time feelings of resentment brewed amongst unmarried female convicts who were well behaved and had also served as petty officers. The system of granting remissions to female convict wives, which had been brought into force to facilitate the marriages of life-term convicts, was found to be inequit-

Notes 237 able. Yet the system was continued. It was feared that ending the practice would jeopardize the already unstable system of convict marriages. Home, Port Blair, Oct 1884, 81 to 82, NAI. 72 Home, Public, 16 July 1862, 17–18, A, NAI. 73 Census Report for 1901, R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 42, IOR. 74 The convict marriages involved a range of contradictions which the colonial officials either sought to deal with or ignore. This was also the case with convict marriages in Australia; see David Kent and Norma Townsend, ‘Colonial Marriage: A Case Study of the Swing Protestors’, Labour History, 74, May 1998, pp. 40–53. 75 ‘Ethnographic Doc.’ No. 1714, Centre for Anthropology (CA), British Museum. 76 Home, Port Blair, Aug 1891, 92 and 94, NAI. 77 Sen gives these statistics in ‘Rationing Sex’, 1999, pp. 29–59. 78 Ibid. 79 Home, Port Blair, Proceeding Volume, August 1915, 66, NAI. 80 ‘The Forgotten Islands’, Mss Eur/F 209 no. 1, p. 58, IOR. Frances Stewart Robertson was entrusted with the task of persuading women prisoners in the Indian jails to migrate to the Andamans for the purpose of providing female marriage partners. 81 Thanesari, Kalapani Ya Tarikh-Ajib, 1879 [1993], p. 74. 82 Her case was significant as it incurred the ire of Superintendent D. M. Stewart, who made sure that in future the deportation of under-age girls was stopped. He expressed his outrage at such a young child being sentenced to transportation for life, where ‘transportation is simply a piece of brutal cruelty’. He felt that the place of the child was in some reformatory, in Home, Judicial, April 1872, 235–236, B, NAI. It was urged that juvenile convicts be kept in reformatories or penitentiaries in India until they were at least twenty years of age. Finally, in 1875, the Government of India decided that juvenile convicts if sentenced to transportation were to be detained by the local governments until they attained the age of eighteen, in Home, Port Blair, April 1875, 30–33, NAI. 83 For a dichotomous characterization of female convicts’ experience as victims or as liberating in the Australian context see A. Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975 and M. Dixon, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788–1975, Penguin, Melbourne, 1976; M. Aveling, ‘She Only Married to be Free, or Cleopatra Vindicated’, in The Push from the Bush: A Bulletin of Social History: Devoted to the Year of Grace, 1838, 2, Nov. 1978, pp. 116–124. For a detailed historiographical discussion see Norma Townsend, ‘The Other Matildas or The Empresses Have No Clothes’, presented at the Convict Conference Colonial Places, Convict Spaces, in Leicester, December, 1999. Also see Ashruya Faruqee, ‘Conceiving the Coolie Women’, Spring 1996, pp. 1–76. Faruqee shows that the coolie women were construed as culprits than as victims. 84 Home, Judicial, 17 Sep 1858, 1–2, NAI; Home, Judicial, 12 Nov 1858, 6–16, NAI; Home, Public, 17 Dec 1858, 96–101, NAI. 85 Sir Henry W. Norman (1826–1904) was the military member of the Supreme Council of India (1870–77). He visited the Andamans in 1874, following the murder of Lord Mayo, to ‘confer with the Superintendent on all matters connected with the welfare of the Settlement and specially as to the proposed rules for the management of convicts’. Home, Port Blair, Aug 1874, 72, A, NAI. 86 Home, Port Blair, Aug 1874, 75, NAI. 87 Nicholas, ‘Unshackling the Past’, 1988, pp. 3–13. 88 Home, Port Blair, Aug 1915, 66, NAI.

238 Notes 89 90

91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107

108 109

Home, Port Blair, Jan 1919, 61, NAI. J.S. Campbell’s Report, written in April 1872, reference in Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, NAI; Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1915, 66, NAI; Home, Port Blair, April 1877, 5 and 6, NAI; Home, Port Blair, October 1881, 8 to 9, NAI. Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1915, 66, NAI. It is interesting to note the way the study of convict marriage in the Andamans presents a completely different picture from Australia, where it was the jailers who saw the convict marriages more as concubinage than as a formal marital arrangement; see Oxley, The Convict Maids, 1996 (the case studies of Australia and the Andamans may differ in this regard but are surprisingly similar in the way both the Settlement officials and the male convicts characterized the convict women). In the Andamans, the officials took pains not only to educate but to enforce the sanctity of the marriage that the convicts contracted; while the convicts, on the other hand, took a much more informal view of their marriage in the foreign land. Thus, this ‘difference in the cultural capital of the convicts and their gaolers’ was significant in determining the contours of social and political rehabilitation of the convicts in penal societies. In the case of Australia the ‘convict cultural capital’ was tied up with class perceptions, in the Andamans, race was the constitutive element of convict cultural capital that distinguished them from the colonial administrators. Home, Port Blair, Sep 1915, 37–40, A, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, Feb 1918, 39, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, No. 52, Appendix I, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Jan 1889, 110–112, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, no. 52, NAI. Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1908, pp. 159–166. R.H. Lowis, ‘Sketch of Life in the Andaman Islands’, Mss Eur D 1032, IOR. Home, Port Blair, May 1911, 81–82, NAI. Home, Port Blair, October 1919, 495, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volumes, August 1887, 68 and 69, NAI. Home, Judicial, 13 July 1860, 8–14, A, NAI. Muttra Das was rewarded for all the trouble he went through by being appointed the Tehsildar in the Agra and Allahabad Division. Home Judicial, 11 Aug 1860, 19–20, A, NAI. The Alipur Bomb Conspiracy: some revolutionaries in the wake of Swadeshi movement organized into a group called Jugantar and Dacca Anushilan Samiti. On 30 April 1908, members of Jugantar attempted to kill Magistrate Kingsford, a British judge known for giving harsh sentences to Indian nationalists. The bomb however missed its target and instead killed two British women. The Nagpur Conspiracy case: V.D. Savarkar’s brother Ganesh Savarkar organized an armed revolt against the Minto-Morley reforms of 1909. He was arrested and transported to the Cellular Jail. V.D. Savarkar was also implicated for allegedly plotting the crime and eventually sent to the Andamans. Home, Port Blair, December 1909, 84–87, NAI. Extract from the diary of David Barry, Overseer, Cellular Jail, dated 28 July 1912, in Home, Political, 3 December 1912, 11–31, NAI.

Notes 239 110 111

Home, Political, Oct 1912, 61–64, B, NAI. The jail memoirs of the revolutionaries were not published until later in the 1920s and 1930s, Ghose, The Tale of My Exile, 1922; Savarkar, The Story of My Transportation for Life, 1950; Sen, Bengal’s Forgotten Warriors, 1945; Sinha, In Andamans: The Indian Bastille, 1939; Bandhopadhyaya, Nirvasiter Atmakatha, 1967. 112 Home, Political, July 1912, 1, NAI; Home, Political, 3 December 1912, 11–31, NAI. This article, ‘Political Prisoners in the Andamans’, was reproduced in a newspaper called India published in London and dated 25 July 1913; clipping found in Home, Political, Jan 1914, 12, Deposit, NAI. 113 Home, Port Blair, Sep 1912, 149, NAI; Home, Political, Aug 1912, 107–108, B, NAI; Home, Political, Nov 1912, 43–44, B, NAI. 114 One can find a detailed account of Craddock’s visit in Majumdar’s famous monograph The Penal Settlement in the Andamans (1975). He pieces together archival sources with prisoners’ autobiographical accounts published following their release to present a fair picture of the struggle. 115 Home, Political, Jan 1919, 207–216, B, NAI. 116 Majumdar, Penal Settlement, 1975. 117 Home, Port Blair, Sep 1916, 22–24, NAI. 118 The Lahore Conspiracy Case: the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial was held in the aftermath of the Gadar Conspiracy of 1915. A group of Indian revolutionaries stationed in United States called the Gadar Party had planned a pan-Indian mutiny in the British Indian army during the First World War. Exposed by infiltrators, several Gadarites were rounded up and tried in Lahore. Many of them were transported to the Andamans. 119 Majumdar, Penal Settlement, 1975. 120 Home, Political, August 1919, 27–32, B, NAI. 121 Home, Port Blair, March 1914, 2–2A, A, NAI. Mathur, History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1968, also mentions this, p. 143. 122 Letter from L. Stuart, from Lucknow to A. Earle, 5 April 1911, in Home, Port Blair, May 1911, 2, Deposit, NAI. 123 Home, Jails, Oct 1914, 32–45, NAI. 124 Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 2001. Zinoman shows how the anti-colonial struggle exploited the colonial contradictions; also see Arnold, ‘India: The Contested Prison’, 2007, pp. 147–184 and ‘The Self and the Cell’, 2004, pp. 29–53. 125 Home, Political, 3 December 1912, 11–31, NAI. 126 See Fisher, The Politics of British Annexation, 1993, pp. 1–49; and Skuy, ‘Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862’, 1998, pp. 513–557. 127 Singha, A Despotism of Law, 1988; Anupama Rao, ‘Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36, 43, 2001, pp. 4125–4133. 128 Arnold, ‘India: The Contested Prison’, 2007, pp. 147–184; and ‘The Self and the Cell’, 2004, pp. 29–53; Anindita Mukhopadhyay, ‘Jail Darpan: The Image of the Jail in Bengali Middle-Class Literature’, Studies in History, 15, 1, n.s., 1999, pp. 109–144. 129 An Echo from Andamans, Letters Written by Br. Savarkar to his Brother Dr. Savarkar, Vishvanath Vinayak Kelkar, Nagpur, 1928, in a letter dated 15 December 1912. 130 Savarkar, The Story of My Transportation for Life, 1950, p. 76. 131 Toth, Beyond Papillon, 2006, argues that the reason that the public saw the writings of prisoners as authoritative because ‘they adhered to enormously popular literary and journalistic conventions that had wide currency at the time’; Aguirre, ‘Prisons and Prisoners in Modernising Latin America’, 2007, pp. 14–54.

240 Notes 132

133 134

Dikotter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison, 2002, Dikotter shows how incarceration of party members strengthened the Communist Party of China; Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 2001. Zinoman also examines ‘the crucial historical role of the colonial prison in the rise of Vietnamese communism’. Home, Political, April 1911, 11–12, B, NAI. Kent and Townsend, The Convicts of the Eleanor, 2002; Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, eds, Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5

Hirst, Convict Society, 1983, p. 217. Report of the Indian Jail Conference, Calcutta, 1877. Ibid. Howell, Note on Jails and Jail Discipline in India 1867–68, 1868. A similar dialectics existed in the case of the abolition debate on the French penal colony, New Caledonia. See Toth, Beyond Papillon, 2006. 6 Inspection Report by A. Mackenzie, 29 Dec 1885, in Home, Port Blair, July 1886, 98, NAI. 7 Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, NAI. According to the Committee ‘the journey from Calcutta or Madras to Port Blair is but three and a half days by steamer and the voyage [is] now performed under conditions of little hardship, and is in no respect likely to be more dreaded that a voyage to Rangoon, which hundreds of Indians voluntarily undertake every year’. 8 For example, according to E.C. Bayley, the ‘main object of punishment – the main ground on which there is any justification for inflicting it – is the deterring effect which it has on others, anything which affects this, as the uncertainty of the weight of punishment, or the possibility of greatly lightening its burden, pro tanto, diminishes its efficacy, and also the justification for inflicting it’. 9 Report of Prison Discipline Committee, Calcutta, 1838. 10 Home, Port Blair, July 1906, 38–40, A, NAI (in note written by H.G. Stokes, a government official, on 14 June 1906). Also T.K. Banerjee, Background to Indian Criminal Law, Orient Longman, Calcutta, 1963, pp. 91–92. 11 The Government of India passed a resolution at Fort William in 1811, which stated: ‘At all events, it is an unquestionable fact that a sentence of transportation is at present by no means regarded with that dread which it is essential is should inspire in order to restrain ill-disposed persons from the commission of public offences.’ Resolution of the Govt. at Fort William, Bengal Criminal Judicial Consultations, 10 Dec 1811, cited in T.K. Banerjee, Background, 1963, p. 91, footnote 154. 12 Alapatt, ‘The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857’, 1981, pp. 295–314; Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 2000, ‘Fashioning Identities’, 2001, pp. 152–174, and The Indian Uprising, 2007; Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 1969; Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers’, 2003, pp. 179–208, and ‘Bandits and Kings’, 2007, pp. 881–896. 13 The Andamans were not the only place being used for transportation. In 1870, the Lahore Central Jail and all the Central Jails in Bengal were appointed as places to which persons sentenced to transportation could be sent. However, the Andamans were the only major convict settler colony. Home, Judicial, 8 Jan 1870, 40–42, A, NAI; Home, Judicial, 22 Jan 1870, 30–31, A, NAI. 14 Foreign, Internal, Sep 1906, 90–91, B, NAI.

Notes 241 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

29 Sep 1906 in Foreign, Internal, May 1907, 143–151, B, NAI. 30 Nov 1905 in Ibid. Report by Lyall and Lethbridge, in Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, June 1890, 74, NAI. Sanjay, Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth”, Part I: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype – The Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 27, 2/3, 1990, pp. 131–164, and Part II: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 27, 2/3, 1990, pp. 257–287; and Meena Radhakrishna, ‘Surveillance and Settlements under the Criminal Tribes Act in Madras’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 29, 2, 1992, pp. 171–198. R.C. Temple ‘The Penal System at the Andamans’, Journal of the Society of Arts, Feb 24 1899, 47, 2, p. 414 in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 36, IOR. The views of the people who believed that the Andamans was a place of reform are resonant of those of the Australian colonists who, in the face of opposition by abolitionists, claimed that ‘the colony imported criminals, but didn’t make its own’. See Hirst, Convict Society, 1983, p. 210. Home, Port Blair, August 1874, no. 52, Appendix I, NAI. Ibid. Temple, ‘The Penal System’, 1899, p. 414, IOR. Home, Port Blair, Nov 1908, 48–52, A, NAI. C.G. Dingwall-Fordyce, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1893–94, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1895; R.L. Heinig, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1895–96, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1897; Anderson, Report on the Exploration, 1905 and Report of Forest Resources, 1981. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, January 1919, 61, NAI. The complaints of the Settlement officials were reminiscent of those of the curator of Herbarium of the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta called Mr Kurz, who had been sent to the Andamans (in March 1856) to make a collection of plants. He had also complained about convict labour and stated in 1868 that ‘the convict labour too is a very indifferent one (five convicts are said to do the same work as one free native worker) and scarce. […] Their untrustworthiness, moreover, would make a story of a Conservator in jungles without good protection dangerous’. Public Works Department, Forests, Jan 1868, 8–11, B, NAI. In Heinig, Progress Report of Forest, 1897. Jacob, Progress Report of Forest, 1921. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Jan 1919, 61, NAI. Home, Public, 4 Aug 1865, 7–8, A, NAI; Home, Port Blair, August 1874, 52, A, NAI. For instance, they were not allowed to bring in or sell liquor, arms, powder, shot or saltpetre in the Settlement. They had to obtain a ‘pass’ for keeping individuals in employment and for bringing goods into the Settlement, and the Superintendent could ask them to leave the Islands at any time. Merk’s note written on 15 Sep 1904, in Foreign, Internal, Sep 1906, 90–91, B, NAI. Foreign, Internal, Sep 1906, 90–91, B, NAI. Home, Port Blair, July 1906, 39, NAI. Report of the Indian Jail Conference, Calcutta, 1877. 22 Feb 1907 in Home, Port Blair, Dec 1910, 80, NAI. Report by C.W. Gwyne, 13 August 1921, in Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI.

242 Notes 30

40

41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, July 1920, 120, NAI; Revenue and Agriculture Department, Forests, Nov 1910, 6–8, A, NAI and Home, Port Blair, August 1920, 77–78, A, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Jan 1919, 61, NAI. The exploitation of the forests in the Andamans was not extensive. The limited and centralized character of human settlements prevented large-scale exploitation. Of the total of about 1,500 square miles of workable forests, twenty-five per cent was still virgin by 1958, in spite of about eighty years of interference. See O.P. Bhargava, ‘Tropical Evergreen Virgin Forests of Andaman Islands’, Indian Forester, 84, 1958, pp. 20–29. Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, No. 40, IOR. The Settlement overcame the shortage of labour in some cases by greater input of technology. For instance, the handlooms used by the female convicts slowly gave way to pedal looms in 1902. In addition a new pin winder, bobbin winder and warp beaming machine were brought into use to improve the quality of the thread used. It was hoped that this would economize labour, increase the outturn and improve the discipline among the female convicts as the use of these machines prevented concealment of bad work. Home, Port Blair, 22 Dec 1902, 110, A, NAI. J.W.A. Grieve, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1914–15, Calcutta, 1916. Report by Sir Reginald Craddock on his visit in November 1913 in Home, Port Blair, April 1914, 34, NAI. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, August 1915, 66, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, Feb 1918, 39, NAI. David Arnold has shown that the mainland jails were also rife with corruption by convict warders; ‘The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in Nineteenth Century India’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman, eds, Subaltern Studies, vol. 7, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995. Home, Port Blair, Oct 1917, 40–41, A, NAI. Ibid. Home, Jails, Dec 1920, NAI. Ernest Hart, Collected Papers, Mss Eur/D 738, IOR. Home, Education, May 1872, 17–18, A, NAI and Home, Port Blair, Dec 1874, 42–44, NAI. Also see the Census of India, Report on the Andamans, Chapter 7, ‘The Local-Born Population’, 1931, pp. 29–30. ‘Ethnographic Doc.’ no. 1714, CA. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, July 1895, 78–81, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, August 1915, 66, NAI. Home, Jails, 1926, 120, NAI; Education, Health and Lands, Oversees branch, Oct 1926, 59–61, B, NAI. R.C. Temple to the Secretary to the Government of India, 27 Sep 1895, in Home, Port Blair, Jan 1896, 111, NAI. Kloss, In the Andamans and Nicobars, 1903, p. 344. Ernest Hart, Collected Papers, Mss Eur/D 738, IOR. He was the Commissioner of the Nicobar Islands, 1921–28. Santanu Das, ‘Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus: India, the Great War, and Two Colonial Journals’, in Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed, eds, Publishing in the First

Notes 243 World War: Essays in Book History, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. 61–77; Judith M. Brown, ‘War and the Colonial Relationship: Britain, India and War of 1914–1918’, in D.C. Ellinwood and S.D. Pradhan, eds, India and World War I, South Asia Books, Columbia, 1978, pp. 19–48. 65 A.C. Bose, ‘Indian Revolutionaries during the First World War: A Study of their Aims and Weaknesses’, in Ellinwood and Pradhan, eds, India and World War I, 1978, pp. 109–126; Alan Raucher, ‘American Anti-Imperialists and the Pro-India Movement, 1900–1932’, The Pacific Historical Review, 13, 1, 1974, pp. 83–110; Amit Kumar Gupta, ‘Defying Death: Nationalist Revolutionism in India 1897–1938’, Social Scientist, 25, 9/10, 1997, pp. 3–27; Don Dignan, The Indian Revolutionary Problem in British Diplomacy, 1914–1919, Allied Publishers, New Delhi, 1983; Tilak Raj Sareen, The Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad, 1905–1921, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1979; Durba Ghosh, ‘Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in Inter-war Years’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds, Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, Sangam Books, Orient Longman, 2006, pp. 270–292. 66 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, Macmillan, New Delhi, 1983, p. 165; Stanley Wolpert, ‘Congress Leadership in Transition: Jinnah to Gandhi 1914–1920’, in Ellinwood and Pradhan, eds, India and World War I, 1978, pp. 127–140. 67 Michael Silvestri, ‘“The Sinn Fein of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’ The Journal of British Studies, 39, 4, 2000, pp. 454–486. According to Silvestri, after the First World War the Indian nationalists no longer saw Irishmen who were serving in India as ‘imperial servants’ but embraced them as a ‘fellow subject race’. 68 John Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars’, The Historical Journal, 23, 3, 1980, pp. 657–679; John Gallagher, ‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922’, Modern Asian Studies, 15, 3, 1981, pp. 355–368; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. Manela seeks to examine world history from a non-Eurocentric lens which gives equal historical agency to non-western actors in world politics but he attributes the creation of an international linkage between anti-colonial nationalisms to the then American President Woodrow Wilson’s inspirational speeches. For the Russian connection see Tilak Raj Sareen, Russian Revolution and India, 1917–1921, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1977; Puran Chandra Joshi, Lenin in Contemporary Indian Press, by P.C. Joshi, Gautam Chattopadhyay, Devendra Kaushik, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1970; Ali Ashraf and G.A. Syomin, eds, October Revolution and India’s Independence: Proceedings of the Soviet Land, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1977. 69 P.G. Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and Constitution 1916–1921, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976, p. 43. 70 A.K. Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972; S.G. Panandikar, Some Aspects of the Economic Consequences of the War for India, D.B. Taraporewala, Sons & Co., Bombay, 1921, Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, Indian Politics, 1915–22, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972; Ravindra Kumar, ‘Bombay Textile’ 1919’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 8, 1, 1971, pp. 1–29; P.C. Emmer, ‘The Meek Hindu’: The Recruitment of Indian Laborers for Service Overseas, 1870–1916’, in P.C. Emmer, ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1986, pp. 187–208; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery, Oxford University Press, London, 1974, p. 367; Partha Sarthi Gupta,

244 Notes

71

72 73 74

75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964, Macmillan, London, 1975, p. 52. Another reason for the economic (industrial and labour) issues being at the forefront was because World War I had put immense economic strain on the empire. See B.R. Tomlinson, ‘India and the British Empire, 1880–1935’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13, 4, 1975, p. 349. Sarkar, Modern India, 1983. Tinker, New System of Slavery, 1974 and Sarkar, Modern India, 1983, pp. 244–247. C.F. Andrews and W.W. Pearson, Indian Indentured Labour in Fiji (A Report to the Viceroy of India) 19 February 1916; John D. Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991; and Mohapatra, ‘Restoring the Family’, 1995, pp. 227–260. John Gallagher and Anil Seal, ‘Britain and India Between the Wars’, Modern Asian Studies, 15, 3, 1981, pp. 387–414. According to Gallagher and Seal the War galvanized and accelerated certain issues and problems which pre-dated it, p. 9. Letter from C.F. Andrews to R.H. Maxwell, Superintendent of Andamans, written from Manorville, Simla on 11 Sep 1937, in Home, Jails, 1937, 77/2, NAI. Sarkar, Modern India, 1983, p. 165; Home, Jails, 28, Resolution no. 63, 1919, NAI. Home, Jails, Dec 1920, NAI. Report of Indian Jail Committee, Oct 1920 in Home, Jails, Dec 1920, NAI. Ibid. Ibid. Home, Jails, Dec 1920, A, NAI. Ibid. Home, Jails, Dec 1920, NAI. Ibid. Ibid. Sir Reginald Craddock, Home member of the Governor General’s Council, in Home, Port Blair, April 1914, 34, NAI. Report of the Committee of Jail Administration in India, Calcutta, 1889. H.H. Risley, the Secretary to the Government of India, to Superintendent Merk, in Foreign, Internal, Sep 1906, 90–91, B, NAI. Home, Jails, 1921, 2-T-1(1), West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata (WBSA). Ibid. Home, Port Blair, June 1885, 84–87, A, NAI. Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI. Ross Island had a meteorological station since 1868 and a tidal observatory since 1880, in R.C. Temple Collection, MSS Eur/F 98, No. 38, IOR. Home, Port Blair, Dec 1920, 27, NAI. Home, Jails, Dec 1920, NAI. Ibid. J.S. Campbell’s Report, written in April 1872, reference in Home, Port Blair, August 1874, no. 52, NAI. Home, Port Blair, May 1880, 1 to 3, NAI. Ibid. Legislative Assembly Debates, 11 March 1921, pp. 956–960, Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, Delhi (NMML). Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI. Ibid. Native Newspaper Reports, Calcutta, 1921, NAI Library.

Notes 245 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123

124 125

Ibid. Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI. Home, Jails, 1922, 44, NAI. Home, Port Blair, Jan 1921, 27–29, NAI. Report of the Indian Jail Committee, 1919–1920, Calcutta, 1920, vol. 1, pp. 310–311. The Indian Jail Committee of 1919 had denounced penal transportation as a ‘dehumanizing system’ and as the ‘relic of an exploded idea of ancient penology’, in which the ‘reformation of the individual was not seriously contemplated if it was not entirely ignored’. It recommended the substitution of transportation for life with rigorous imprisonment for life. This led to the abolition of the sentence of transportation in the Indian subcontinent in 1921. For the purpose, a bill was introduced in the legislative assembly on 23 September 1922, Legislative Assembly Debates, NMML. Punjab was the only province granted temporary permission to deport convicts against their will, in Home, Jail, 1931, 111, NAI. Home, Political, July 1920, 120, NAI. Home, Jails, 1922, 8, NAI. See Taylor C. Sherman, ‘From Hell to Paradise? Voluntary Transfer of Convicts to the Andaman Islands, 1921–1940’, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 2, 2009, pp. 367–388. Home, Jails, 1922, 157, NAI. Ibid. Home, Port Blair, Jan 1921, 27–29, NAI. Home, Jails, 1926, 120, NAI. Home, Jails, 1925, 83, NAI. Home, Jails, 1922, 44, NAI; Home, Jails, 1921, 2-T-1(1), WBSA. Home, Jails, 1926, 120, NAI; Education, Health and Lands Dept, Overseas branch, Oct 1926, 59–61, B, NAI. Home, Jails, 1926, 120, NAI. Home, Jails, 1924, 451, NAI; Home, Jails, 1926, 404, NAI; Home, Jails, 1927, 187, NAI; Education, Health and Lands Department, Forest Branch, Sep 1926, 135–139, B, NAI; Home, Jails, 1929, 74, NAI; Home, Jails, 1925, 554, NAI; Home, Jails, 1927, 351, NAI; Home, Jails, 1922, 527, NAI; Home, Jails, 1923, 66, NAI; Home, Jails, 1925, 279, NAI; Home, Jails, 1927, 17, NAI; Home, Jails, 1926, 398, NAI; Home, Jails, 1926, 59, NAI; Home, Jails, 1927, 48, NAI; Home, Jails, 1927, 307, NAI; Home, Jails, 1927, 36, NAI. Home, Jails, 29 Aug 1922, 418, NAI. At the time of the decision to abolish transportation there were 11,532 convicts of whom 1,168 were self-supporters. Of the convicts 3,000 were convicted of ‘crimes of passion’, 6,000 were convicted of ‘serious offences’ but not ‘habitual’, and 2,500 were professional criminals. In addition there was a population of 3,000 which came under the category of local-born. Home, Jails, 1926, 120, NAI; Education, Health and Lands Dept, Overseas branch, Oct 1926, 59–61, B, NAI. Home, Jails, 1926, 120, NAI; Education, Health and Lands Dept, Overseas branch, Oct 1926, 59–61, B, NAI. Home, Jails, 1930, 30, NAI.

Conclusion 1 Brian Sandberg, ‘Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1492–1700’, Journal of World History, 17, 1, 2006,

246 Notes

2

3 4

5

pp. 1–25; M. Perreault, ‘“To Fear and Love Us”: Intercultural Violence in the English Atlantic’, Journal of World History, 17, 1, 2006, pp. 71–94; Martel, ‘Hans Staden’s Captive Soul’, 2006, pp. 51–70; Janet Whatley, Jean de Lery: History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992, pp. xv–xxxviii. According to Clare Anderson, the management in Mauritius ‘was also far more reliant on the integration of convicts within the hierarchy of command that was ever explicitly acknowledged’. The case in the Andamans, however, differed, where the attempt was not only to integrate the convict into state-sponsored hierarchies but also to reform by restoring some measure of his social life which he had lost as a result of transportation. Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers’, 2003, pp. 179–208. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1944; Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of Human Sensibility’, parts 1 and 2, American Historical Review, 90, 2–3, 1985, pp. 339–361 and 547–566; Solow and Engerman, British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery 1987; Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labour, 1991, ‘Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labour’, 1999, pp. 144–146, and ‘Labour – Free or Coerced?’, 1997, pp. 107–126; Northrup, ‘Free and Unfree Labour Migration’, 2003, pp. 125–130; Eltis, Coerced and Free Migration, 2002; Prakash, Bonded Histories, 1990; Nicholas, Convict Workers, 1988; Duffield and Bradley, Representing Convicts, 1997; Oxley, Convict Maids, 1996; John McDonald and Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘The Cost of Shipping Convicts to Australia’, International Journal of Maritime History, 2, 2, 1990, pp. 1–32; George Rudé, Protest and Punishment: The Story of Social and Political Protestors Transported to Australia, 1788–1868, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978; Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 1969; Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2000; Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 2000; Yang, ‘Indian Convict Workers’, 2003, pp. 179–208. Singh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1994, p. 9.

Bibliography I.

Unpublished Government Records and Private Papers

National Archives of India, New Delhi Secret and Foreign Department (1789 to 1796) Press List (1780 to 1800) Home Department (1857 to 1945) Foreign Department (1857 to 1945) Home, Port Blair (1872 to 1913) Forest Branch (1866 to 1942) Home, Political (1907 to 1947)

West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata Jail Branch Records (1859 to 1928) Forest Branch Records (1861 to 1938) Confidential Reports on Native Newspapers (1873 to 1937) Judicial Branch Records (1857 to 1945)

National Library, Kolkata Annual Forest Reports for Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1888–1945)

Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, Delhi Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly Debates, 1921–1947

India Office Records, British Library, London Selected Documents from the European Manuscripts T.S. Blakeney, Collected Papers, MSS Eur. C 299. F. Booth Tucker, ‘The Salvation Army and the Indian Criminal’, The Police Journal (1928). India Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161, No. 158. F.C. Daly, ‘Some Types of the Indian Hereditary Criminal’, The Police Journal (1928), India Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161, No. 158. L.V. Deane, The Andaman Islands: A Family Connection, MSS Eur. F 114, No. 16/53. Robert Napier, Letter to the Duke of Cambridge, MSS Eur. F 114, No. 16/53 and Pamphlets on Various Military Expeditions, MSS Eur B 116. N.K. Patterson, Collected Papers, MSS Eur. F 180. F.T.S. Robertson, ‘Role of a Policeman’s Wife in India by One of Them’, MSS Eur. D 1041, No. 8. Frances Robertson, ‘The Forgotten Islands’, MSS Eur. F 209, No. 1. Richard C. Temple, Collected Papers, MSS Eur. F 98. Royden Wilkinson, Collected Papers, MSS Eur. D 716. Martin Wynne, Collected Papers, MSS Eur. C 294. Captain Kyd, Account of the Andamans, MSS Eur. F 21. Robert Allan, Journal of Robert Allan, MSS Eur A 196. Memoirs of Frances T. Stewart, ‘The Blackberry Basket’, MSS Eur C 701. 247

248 Bibliography Reverend Pollock, Two manuscripts on his visit to Andamans and Burma, MSS Eur D 674. Papers of Ernest Hart, Assistant Commissioner of Nicobar islands, MSS Eur D 738. E.H.M. Lowis and Mary Deane, articles and memoirs on Andamans, MSS Eur D 1032. Mrs and Brigadier C.E. Gray, Letters & Account of life in Indian Army, MSS Eur. D 1037. Admiral Cornwallis, Three letters regarding Naval Affairs, MSS Eur E 368. Sorabji Collection, the Papers of Cornelia Sorabji, MSS Eur F 165. Indian Civil Service Collection, MSS Eur F 180. John Henry Hutton, Papers, IOR Neg 11711–12. Mountbatten Collection, IOR Neg 15538–67. Miscellaneous Collection of Official and Private Correspondence and Papers of Historical and Geographical Accounts, IOR Pos 4211–32. Alexander Kyd, Three Reports, MSS Eur J 810–12, and Documents Collected on Andamans, MSS Eur K 150.

Home Miscellaneous Series Plan for Port Cornwallis, 388 (pp. 88–101). Observations of Melchior La Beaume on Colonization of Andamans, 434 (pp. 375–385). L.R. Reid to Lieut. Jacob, 552 (p. 5).

Centre for Anthropology, British Museum, London Collection of objects by M.V. Portman. Ethnographic Document (no. 1714) by Mrs. W.H. Burt (1933).

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London The Photographic Collection on Andamans by E.H. Man, M.V. Portman, Rogers and G.E. Dobson. E.H. Man Collection, MSS 110–119.

National Maritime Museum, London Letters by Admiral Cornwallis and Lt. Blair and report on Andamans, Cor/58.

Rhodes House Library, Oxford Manuscript on Andaman Islands, MSS Brit. Emp. S. 22, G 351.

University Library, Cambridge Mayo Papers, Add. 7490, 1–61. Haddon Collection

National Army Museum, Camberley, Surrey Papers of Surgeon-General, W.H. Rean, Acc. 5612/41.

II.

Government Publications and Reports

Andaman and Nicobar Manual, 1868, 1886, 1908. Anderson, C.W.B., Report on the Exploration in the North Andaman, Calcutta, 1905. Askari, S.H., ed., Fort William – India House Correspondence, 1787–1791, vol. 16, Delhi, 1976. Black, C.E.D., Memoirs of Indian Surveys, 1891. Bradley, J.W., Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1920–21, Calcutta, 1922.

Bibliography 249 Census Reports of the Andaman and Nicobars, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1951, 1961. Christophers, S.R., Malaria in the Andamans, Scientific Memoirs by Officers of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India, Calcutta, 1912. Dingwall-Fordyce, C.G., Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1893–94, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1895. Ferrar, M.H., Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1884–85, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1886. Ford, B., The Acts, Resolutions, Orders, & c., of the Government of India to Regulate the Administration of the Penal Settlement of Port Blair, Andaman Islands, With a Code of Regulations Based Thereon, Calcutta, 1868. Grieve, J.W.A., Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1914–15, Calcutta, 1916. Handbook for the Andaman and Nicobars, 1877. Heinig, R.L., Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1895–96, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1897. ——, Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1896–97, Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1898. Howell, A.P., Note of Jails and Jail Discipline in India, 1867–68, Calcutta, 1868. Hutchinson, J., Observation on the General and Medical Management of Indian Jails, Calcutta, 1845. Imperial Gazetteer, Provincial Series, Andaman and Nicobars, Calcutta, 1907. Memoranda submitted to the Indian Statuary (Simon) Commission by the Government of India, Vol. IV, Part I, 1930, pp. 361–402. Jackson, J., Report of English System of Penal Servitude, 1926. Jacob, W.R.L., Progress Report of Forest Administration in Andamans, 1919–20, Calcutta, 1921. Parkinson, C.E., The Forest Flora of the Andaman Islands: An Account of the Trees, Shrubs and Principal Climbers of the Islands, published By M/s. Bishan Singh Mahendra Pal Singh, 23-A, New Connaught Place, Dehradun, 1921. Phillimore, R.H., Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 1, Eighteenth Century, Survey of India, Dehradun, 1945. Report of Forest Resources of South and Middle Andamans, Forest Survey of India, Dehradun, 1981. Report of the Committee of Jail Administration in India, Calcutta, 1889. Report of Indian Jail Conference, Calcutta, 1877. Report of Indian Jail Committee, Calcutta, 1864. Report on Indian Jail Committee, 1919–20, Govt. Central Press, Simla, 1920. Report of Prison Discipline Committee, Calcutta, 1838. Saletore, B.A., ed., Fort William: India House Correspondence, 1782–85, vol. 9, Delhi, 1959. Selections from the Records of the Government of India in the Home Department, No. XXIV and XXV on Andamans, Calcutta, 1859. Walker, J.P., Rules for the Management and Discipline of Prisoners, Commission of Jail Management, 1889.

III. Colonial Literature (Monographs, Diaries, Articles) and Travel Literature Andrews, C.F. and Pearson, W.W., Indian Indentured Labour in Fiji (A Report to the Viceroy of India) 19 February 1916. Aspinall, A., Cornwallis in Bengal: The Administrative and Judicial Reforms of Lord Cornwallis in Bengal Together with Accounts of the Commercial Expansion of The East

250 Bibliography India Company, 1786–1793, and of the Foundation of Penang, 1786–1793, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1931. Birch, W.B., ‘The Andaman Islands’, Calcutta Review, 116, 1878, pp. 157–177. Bruce, G.E., Tom in the Andamans, Whitcombe and Tombs, Melbourne, 1930. Bryson, Alexander, Report of the Climate and Principal Diseases of the African Station, London, 1847. Cane-Brown, J., The Punjab and Delhi in 1857, Delhi, 1861; 1970. Colebrook, Lt. R.H., ‘On the Andaman Islands’, Asiatik Research, 4, 1795, pp. 385–395. Coopland, R.M., A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior, London, 1859. Cutting, S., The Fire Ox and Other Years, Collins, London, 1947. Dass, F.A.M., The Andaman Islands, Good Shepherd Convent Press, Bangalore, 1937. Day, Francis, ‘Observations on the Andamanese’, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, June 1870, pp. 153–163. Dyers, Saunders, A., ‘The Andaman Islands’, Calcutta Review, 116, 1903, pp. 260–291. Fairchild, H.N., The Nobel Savage, New York, 1928. Forrest, G.W., A History of the Indian Mutiny, 3 volumes, London, 1904. Freeman-Grenville, G.P.S., Kitab Ajaib-ul-Hind, East West, London, 1980. Gait, Edward, ‘Some Observations on the Andamanese’, in Man in India, 2, 1922, pp. 97–99. Griffiths, C.J., A Narrative of the Siege of Delhi with an Account of the Mutiny at Ferozpore in 1857, London, 1910. Haughton, J.C., ‘Papers Relating to the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands’, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 30, 1861, pp. 251–263. Hill, S.C., ‘Notes on Piracy in Eastern Waters’, Indian Antiquary, 52, 1923, p. 26. Kaye, John William, The History of the Great Revolt, 3 volumes, Gian Publishing House, 1988. Kloss, C. Beadon, In the Andamans and Nicobars: The Narrative of a Cruise in the Schooner “Terrapin”, with Notices of the Islands, their Fauna, Ethnology, John Murray, London, 1903. Lee-Warner, William, Memoirs of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wylie Norman, London, 1908. Mackenzie, Compton, All Over The Place, Fifty Thousand Miles By Sea, Air, Road And Rail, London, 1949. Malleson, G.B., History of the Indian Mutiny, 3 volumes, 1878–1880. Man, E.H., Aboriginal Inhabitants of Andamans, Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland by Trubner, London, 1883 (Sanskaran Prakashan, Delhi, 1975). ——, The Nicobar Islands and Their People, Guildford, 1932. ——, A Dictionary of the South Andaman Language, Bombay, 1923. Mandeville, John, The Book of John Mandeville, translated with an introduction by C.W.R.D. Moseley, Penguin Books, 1983. Markham, C.R., Memoir of Indian Surveys, London, 1878. Marshall, Henry, Notes on the Medical Topography of the Interior of Ceylon, London, 1821. McNair, J.F.A., Prisoners Their Own Warders: A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits Settlements Established 1825, Discontinued 1873, Together with a Cursory History of the Convict Establishments at Bencoolen, Penang and Malacca from the Year 1797, Westminster, 1899. Metcalfe, C.T., Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi, London, 1898. Minorsky, V., The Accounts of Al-Marawazi, Hakluyt Society, London, 1942. Mouat, F.J., Adventures and Researches Among the Andaman Islanders, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1863. ——, ‘Narrative of an Expedition’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 32, 1862, pp. 109–126. Mulvany, John, ‘Two Notable Prison Administrators’, Calcutta Review, 6, 292, 1918.

Bibliography 251 Omont, Henri, Livres de Merveilles, Marco Polo, Odoric De Pordenone, Mandeville, Hayton, Etc., Volume I, Paris, Catala, 1907. Parkes, Fanny, Wanderings of Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-andTwenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in Zenana, vol. 1, London, 1850. Pemberton’s Collection of Voyages and Travels, London, 1811, vol. 7. Polo, Marco, Travels of Marco Polo, translated and with an introduction by Ronald Latham, Penguin Books, 1958. Portman, M.V., History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, vol. 1, Calcutta, 1899. ——, ‘The Andamanese Fire Legend’, Indian Antiquary, 26, 1898, pp. 14–18. ——, ‘Disposal of the Dead Among the Andamanese’, Indian Antiquary, 25, 1896, pp. 56–57. ——, ‘Notes on Andamanese’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1896, pp. 362–371. ——, ‘Andamanese Music’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 20, 1888, pp. 181–218. ——, The Exploration and Survey of the Little Andamans, reprinted from the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 1888. Prain, D., ‘Non-Indigenous Flora’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 59, 1891, pp. 235–261. Prinsep, G.A., An Account of Steam Vessels and of Proceedings Connected with Steam Navigation in British India, Calcutta, 1830. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1922. ——, ‘Notes on the Language of the Andaman Islands’, Anthropos, 14, 1914, pp. 36–52. ——, ‘The Religion of the Andaman Islanders’, Folklore, vol. 20, 1909, p. 257. Ritchie, John, ‘Description of the Earliest Known Contact with the Andamanese’, 1771, this article was edited and published by R.C. Temple as ‘An Unpublished 18th Century Document about the Andamans’, The Indian Antiquary, 30 June 1901, p. 232 of pp. 232–238 (seen cited on http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/ ritchie/rep-ritchie.htm). ——, ‘Remarks upon the Coast and Bay of Bengal, the Outlets of the Ganges and Interjacent Rivers’, 1771, reproduced by R.C. Temple, ‘Unpublished XVIIIth Century Document about the Andamans’, Indian Antiquary, June 1901, p. 235 of pp. 232–238. Ritson, Joseph, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral, London, 1802. Russell, William H., My Indian Mutiny Diary, London, 1857. Schlich, W., Schlich’s Manual of Forestry, Vol. 1, Policy in the British Empire, London, 1922. Stewart, Charles, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799–1803, London, 1814, p. 12. Sullivan, Louis Robert, A Few Andamanese Skulls: With Comparative Notes on Negrito Craniometry (Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 23, 4), The Trustees, New York, 1921, pp. 175–201. Symes, Michael, An Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava in the Year 1795, London, 1880; 1995. Temple, R.C., ‘Remarks on the Andaman Islanders and Their Country’, Indian Antiquary, 52, 1923, pp. 151–157 and 216–224. ——, ‘A Plan for A Uniform Scientific Record of the Languages of Savages’, Indian Antiquary, July 1907, pp. 181–195. ——, ‘The Practical Value of Anthropology’, Indian Antiquary, June 1905, pp. 132–144. ——, ‘The Trade in Andamanese Slaves’, Indian Antiquary, 30, 1901, p. 120. ——, ‘The Penal System at the Andamans’, Journal of Society of Arts, Feb 24 1899, vol. XLVII, No. 2, 414, pp. 192–305, in R.C. Temple Collection, Mss Eur/F 98, no. 36, IOR. ——, ‘The Andaman Tokens’, Indian Antiquary, July 1897, pp. 192–194. Thompson, A., ‘Description of the Andaman Bone Necklace’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 1881, pp. 295–309.

252 Bibliography Thompson, Edward, The Other Side of the Medal, London, 1926. Tibbetts, G.R., Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese, translation of Kitab al-Fawaid fi usul al-bahr wal-qawaid of Ahmad b. Majid al-Najdi, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London, 1981. Troup, R.S., Colonial Forest Administration, Oxford, 1941. Von-Furer-Haimendorf, Christoph, The Naked Nagas, Head-hunters of Assam in Peace and War, Thacker, Spink and Company Limited, Calcutta, 1946. Yapp, Peter, ed., The Travellers’ Dictionary of Quotation, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1983.

VI.

Prison and Convict Literature

An Echo from Andamans, Letters Written by Br. Savarkar to his Brother Dr. Savarkar, Vishvanath Vinayak Kelkar, Nagpur, 1928. Ghose, Barindra Kumar, The Tale of My Exile, Pondicherry, 1922. Khairabadi, Fazl-i-Haqq, Baaghi Hindustan, Almajma-ul-Islami Fazul Uloom Mohammadabad, Guahana. Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, 4th edition, 1985. Savarkar, V.D., The Story of My Transportation for Life, translated by V.N. Naik, Bombay, 1950 (first published in Marathi in 1927). Sen, Niranjan, Bengal’s Forgotten Warriors, People’s Publishing House, Bombay, 1945. Sinha, Bejoy Kumar, In Andamans: The Indian Bastille, Kanpur, 1939. Thanesari, Mohammad Jafar, Kalapani Ya Tarikh-Ajib, Delhi, 1879, reprint, Lahore, 1993. Upendranath Bandhopadhyaya, Nirvasiter Atmakatha, National Publishers, Calcutta. 1967.

VII.

Secondary Books and Articles

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Index Alipore bomb case, 156 jail, 115, 141–142 Andaman Islands agricultural colony, 14, 16–17, 23–28, 68–70, 76–79, 104, 105, 154, 182, 183, 185 climate, 4, 10, 45–46, 63, 70, 75–76, 115, 134, 135, 176 commercial colony, 6, 14, 23–25, 40, 67, 68–70, 104, 105, 123, 127–128, 131, 161, 162, 166–169, 176, 178, 185, 186, 188 committee, 17, 30, 51, 62, 68 cost, 34, 40, 61–65, 64, 65, 86–70, 80, 86–87, 105, 108, 113–114, 115, 168, 169, 176, 178, 186, 188, 189 first settlement, 6, 16, 22, 27–28, 36–43, 115 forests, 4, 10, 21, 27, 36, 45, 61–62, 68, 69–70, 75–79, 82, 86, 104, 108, 114–115, 118, 119, 121, 136–137, 142, 167, 168–169, 176, 180, 181, 183 see also tropical jungle life, 14, 70–75, 71, 72, 97, 118–119, 126–127, 134–135, 141–142, 156, 160, 162, 185 Little Andaman, 8, 127 Middle Andaman, 8, 117, 136, 168, 169, 184 nationalist apotheosis, 2–3, 7, 132, 159–160, 191 see also India North Andaman, 8, 81, 168, 169, 184 penal colony, 1–2, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 35–37, 50–60, 61–62, 65–68, 74–75, 79, 82, 86, 89–103, 131, 132–160, 161–186, 187–190 see also penal settlement at Port Blair second settlement, 6, 23, 35, 43–60 see also penal settlement at Port Blair

settling, 34, 36, 61, 68, 76–79, 82, 103–105, 166, 184 South Andaman, 8, 24, 169 strategic colony, 33, 35–36, 39–40, 42, 46–47, 51, 52–53, 87, 162, 178–179, 186, 188 traveller’s accounts, 5, 7, 17–18 see also surveyors Andamanese, 8, 10, 15, 16, 17–23, 24, 25, 29–33, 52, 73, 80–84, 86, 137, 150–151, 183, 187 Aka Bea De, 84, 86 cannibalism, 1, 4, 5, 6, 15, 17–23, 26, 28, 29, 31–32, 33, 35, 52, 80–82, 84, 187 Census, 128 civilizing, 6, 14, 17, 28–29, 30–31, 33–34, 52, 84, 128–130 disease, 130, 183 Great Andamanese, 81, 84, 86 hostility, 29–30, 50, 80, 81, 84, 183 Jarawas (Jarrahwallah), 84, 86, 127, 183 labour, 15, 28–29, 123, 127–130, 161 Little Andamanese, 86 population, 127 resistance, 15, 20–31, 61, 82, 130 settled life, 29, 129 silence, 15, 30 trade, 127–128 tribes, 8, 84, 85 see also under individual names see also Orientalism Arab, 17, 19, 25 artificer corps, 36, 108–109, 154 Atlantic history, 11 islands, 12 Ocean, 11, 12, 17, 187 Australia, 6, 26, 37, 52, 54, 55, 93, 152, 188 colonization of, 6, 93 convict transportation, 54, 55 female convicts, 145 history, 110 277

278 Index Bay of Bengal, 1, 6, 12, 16, 23, 24, 25, 33, 35, 38–41, 43, 45, 46, 47–50, 51, 62, 87, 133, 178 see also Indian Ocean Bencoolen, 37 Bengal, 8, 16, 36, 39, 40, 47, 58, 79, 109, 118, 139, 159, 191 Bhantu, 184 Blair, Archibald (member, the Bombay Marine), 16–17, 21, 22, 28, 30, 35, 36, 39, 40 Boucicaut, Master, 19 branding, 106 Burma, 20, 33, 39, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 64–65, 114–115, 116, 124, 127, 137, 140, 162, 167, 184 Campbell Report, 93, 96, 120, 125 Campbell, J.S. (secretary to the Home Department of India), 93, 96, 103 cannibalism, see Andamanese Caribbean, 31, 33, 175 see also West Indies Cellular Jail on the Andamans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 65, 73, 96–97, 99, 101–102, 156–160, 170, 176, 181, 186 administration, 97, 99, 101–102 construction, 97, 115, 124 labour, 95–96, 97, 99 life, 99, 101 recommendations, 96 solitary confinement, see punishment Ceylon, 9, 27, 37, 38, 41, 188 chain gangs, 73, 94, 133, 142 Chief Commissioners, 64–65, 124, 155, 183, 191 Beadon, Lt. Col. H.C., 172, 177–181 see also superintendents China, 14, 20, 33, 47, 49, 55, 69, 104, 109, 123–124, 137, 139, 140, 167 trade, 38, 39, 42–43, 44, 45 Chowkidari system, 113–114 Colebrooke, R.H. (member, Bengal Engineers, c.1780s), 16, 21, 22, 28, 30, 39 convicts, 1, 11, 14–15, 35, 36–37, 52, 53–60, 56, 61–64, 66–69, 73, 74–75, 76–77, 79–80, 84, 86, 88–103, 104–125, 127, 130–131, 132–160, 161–173, 175–186, 190 accounts, 7, 93, 137, 141–142, 157, 164

Burmese, 51, 114–115, 116, 137 caste, 89, 108, 110, 143–144, 148, 156, 170, 171, 176 children, 14, 108, 125–127, 126, 153, 155, 173, 186 see also local-borns classification, 14, 90, 91, 94, 104, 105, 109, 183 crimes, 14, 74–75, 138–141, 170 Eurasian/European, 114, 115, 118–120, 181 escape, 14, 61–62, 76, 82, 90, 115, 127, 132, 135, 136–138, 142, 144, 145, 167 family, 14, 104, 105–107, 141, 153, 154–155, 176, 183, 185 family migration, 57, 107, 118, 141, 156, 162, 182, 183, 185 female, 14, 79, 104, 105–108, 107, 110, 120, 122, 135, 143–150, 147, 149, 150, 155–156, 162, 176, 181, 184 Indian, 7, 33, 35, 57, 89, 93, 95, 103, 109–110, 114, 190 see also political prisoners labour, 14, 36–37, 51, 52, 55–56, 68, 69, 87, 89, 91, 95–96, 100, 104, 109, 113, 120, 121–123, 161, 166–167, 168, 169, 178, 179, 184, 186, 190 life, 14, 88–97, 99, 101–102, 115, 120–123, 121, 122, 132–160, 156–158, 164, 179, 184, 190 life-time, 14, 115, 121, 122–123, 122, 164 compare term convicts literate, 14, 97, 109–110, 138 marriage, 14, 105–107, 106, 143, 147–148, 147, 149, 169–170, 171, 172, 184 mortality, 76, 77, 80, 115, 133, 135 occupation, 108–110, 110, 111, 112, 147 officers, 66–67, 90, 113–114, 118, 121, 137, 170, 171–172 property, 153–155, 184–185 punishment, see punishment race, 14, 114

Index 279 redemption, 52, 88–94, 97, 101–103, 151, 154, 164–166, 169–173, 175, 176, 190 release, 103, 105, 113, 122, 141, 145, 147, 152–156, 152, 169–170, 171, 175, 178, 183, 184 religion, 107, 119, 143–144, 147, 148, 170, 182 segregation, 3, 4, 10, 62, 65, 87, 90, 94, 96, 99, 101, 180, 189 self-supporters, 69, 90. 94, 105–107, 113, 137, 153–155, 162, 165, 166, 171, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184 suicides, 14, 77, 132, 135–136, 138, 157, 160 surveillance, 3, 4, 10, 62, 65–68, 87, 94, 113–114, 189 term, 14, 115, 120–123, 121, 122, 162 compare life-time convicts ticket-of-leave, 94, 105, 118, 143, 180, 182 transportation, see punishment voluntary migration, 7, 123, 182–186 wages, 123, 167, 184, 185 warders, 99, 113–114, 115 wives, 14, 139, 147–148, 153, 154, 155, 171, 179, 182, 183, 185 Corbyn, Reverend H., 82 Cornwallis, William (Commander in Chief of East Indies, brother of Lord Cornwallis), 40 Craddock, Sir Reginald (Chair, Indian Constitutional Reforms Committee), 73, 157, 169–170, 175, 178 Craik, Henry D. (Officiating Revenue Secretary to the Government of Punjab; Deputy Secretary to the Home Department of India), 158, 176–177 crimes, 14, 57–59, 58, 59, 92, 103, 105, 110, 113, 119–120, 123, 125, 134, 138–140, 145–146, 149–150, 163, 164, 171–172 character, 92, 95 environment, 92 hereditary, 92 habitual, 123, 170, 185 passion, 123, 164, 185 Crusoe, Robinson, 22, 23, 26, 31

Denmark, 39, 41, 43, 49–50 descriptive roll, 64, 144 discipline, 3, 68, 88, 90, 92–94, 95, 97, 99, 101–102, 113–114, 120, 123, 161–166, 168, 169, 176–182 see also convicts; punishment disease, 1, 6, 27–28, 40, 61, 75–80, 130, 132, 133, 134, 167, 169, 175, 181 see also medicine malaria, 27, 46, 68, 75, 76–79, 78, 130, 135, 167, 176 syphilis, 130 tropical, 27–28, 45–46, 75–80 venereal, 79 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1, 19, 73, 115 dubhash, 32–33 Dutch, 37, 38, 41 English East India Company (EEIC), 16, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40–41, 43–44, 47, 48–49, 50, 56, 57, 87 First World War, 7, 158, 161, 173, 175 food, 21, 22, 63, 68–69, 89, 94, 99, 101, 109, 124, 127, 129, 133, 135, 137, 181 Forest Department, 66, 124, 169, 185 Forrest, Captain Thomas, 16, 39 Fort William, 43, 50–51, 61, 90, 162, 186 see also India free settlers, 36, 89, 90, 91, 103, 107, 173, 176, 182, 184, 190 see also labour France, 19, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43–44, 97 Gadar (or Ghadr) Party, 159, 174 gambling, 123, 139, 179 Governor-General in India Canning, Lord, 52, 53 Cornwallis, Lord, 36, 39 Mayo, Lord, 68, 73 Mountbatten, 2, 13 see also India Grant, J.P. (member, Supreme Council of the Governor-General, 1854–59), 51–52, 57 Homfray, J.N., 127, 129–130 homosexuality, 68, 101, 170, 171–172, 173, 175, 179–180

280 Index Hopkinson, Henry (Captain, Commissioner of Arracan), 51–52 Howell, A.P., 102–103, 162–163 India, 6, 19–20, 26, 32–33, 38–39, 44–47, 73, 79, 87, 93, 95, 96, 104, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 123, 124, 126, 132–135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 145, 146, 153, 154, 155, 156–160, 166, 169–170, 171, 174–175, 182, 184, 188, 189, 190–191 convicts, see convicts Government of, 48, 51, 53–54, 55, 57, 58, 64–65, 120, 161, 165, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176–177, 178, 180, 182 jails, see jails nationalists, 2–3, 7, 9, 102, 156–160, 161, 173–174, 177, 180–182, 187–188, 191 see also Andamans Indian Jails Committee, 69, 158, 165 Committee of 1919, 158, 169, 173, 175–182 Indian Ocean, 6, 9, 11–12, 13, 35, 37, 42, 43–45, 47, 54, 55, 60, 179, 187, 188 see also Bay of Bengal islands Chatham, 22, 65, 124, 125, 136, 185 Devil’s, 4, 174, 175 Fiji, 26 Nicobar, 19, 24, 25–26, 29, 35, 37, 39, 43, 46, 47, 49–50, 73, 191 Norfolk, 4, 26, 180 Ross, 65, 67, 73, 75, 79, 84, 125, 140, 143 Viper, 125, 179 see also under individual names see also space jails, 11, 54, 94–97, 131, 155, 165, 170, 180, 184 Cellular, see Cellular Jail on the Andamans Indian, 51, 54, 55, 93, 94–95, 95, 109, 120, 132, 138, 141–142, 146, 163–166, 175–178, 182–184 Jail Conference of 1877, 163, 164, 168, 178 Jarawa, see Andamanese

kalapani, 1–2, 4, 7, 73, 89, 132, 156, 160, 187–188 compare muktitirth Khairabadi, Fazl-i-Haqq (1797–1861), 134 labour, 3, 11–13, 14, 28–29, 36–37, 51, 52, 55–56, 68, 69, 79, 91, 99, 104–131, 135, 166–169, 173, 174–175, 178–180, 182–186, 189 Andamanese, 15, 28–29, 123, 127–130, 161 contractual, 14, 104, 123, 167, 169, 186 convict, see convicts female, 107–108 forest, 36, 68, 69, 75, 76, 114–115, 118, 119, 124, 127, 166–167, 168–169, 173, 176, 178, 184 free, 14, 36, 64, 68, 104, 108, 109, 123–125, 139, 140, 167, 169, 176, 186 see also free settlers indentured, 56, 89, 124, 169, 174–175, 186 intra-mural, 95–96, 97, 99 and local borns, 125–126, 126 and race, 56, 104, 114 shortage, 55–56, 166, 168, 178, 184, 186 wages, 123 see also convicts Lahore Conspiracy Case, 158 Legislative Assembly of India, 7 leprosy, 19 Lethbridge, A.S., see Lyall & Lethbridge Committee local borns, 125–126, 126, 172–173, 178, 182 Lyall & Lethbridge Committee (C.J. Lyall and A. Lethbridge), 96, 97, 115, 141, 163, 165 malaria, see diseases Malacca, Straits of, 24, 41, 42, 43, 47 see also Straits Settlements Malaya, 15, 20, 21, 32, 33, 36, 47, 48, 49, 131, 163 Man, E.H. (Captain), 57, 69, 76, 130 marks system marks, 101–102, 109, 122

Index 281 marriage, 14 see also convicts Mauritius, 6, 9, 10, 37, 45, 56, 69, 131, 163, 174, 186, 188, 189–190 Moplah, 184 Mouat, F(rederick) J(ohn) (Inspector General of Jails, Bengal; Head, the Andaman Committee), 17, 22–23, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 51, 52, 55, 96–97, 123 Moulmein, 23, 50, 51, 63, 108, 114, 119 see also Burma muktitirth, 1, 2, 4, 7, 102, 132, 156–160, 187–188 compare kalapani mulk, 3, 125, 126 Napier, General Robert, 89, 92 nationalism see Andamans; India; space Norman, Henry (military member, Supreme Council of India), 96 opium, 38, 40, 45, 64, 68, 123, 139, 179 Orientalism, 5, 6, 9, 19, 20, 22, 26–27, 30–31, 33–34, 188 Pacific Ocean, 12, 17, 54, 55 padouk (timber), 124 Panopticon, 96 see also Cellular Jail on the Andamans; jails penal settlement at Port Blair, 6, 13–14, 35–36, 50–53, 56–60, 61–87, 66, 88 abolition, 142, 161, 165, 167–168, 170, 173, 175–182 administration, 61–63, 64–68, 73–74, 82, 97, 99, 102–103, 104, 113–114, 157, 189, 191 communication and transport, 61–65, 67–68, 70, 72, 74–75, 139–140, 169, 188, 191 see also punishment construction, 6, 50–60 currency, 140 education, 125–126, 172, 182 medicine, 3, 66, 79–80, 97, 101, 130, 135, 183, 184, 189

military and police, 66, 67, 99, 127, 140, 183 review, 161–182 see also Andaman Islands Penang, 9, 37, 40, 41–43, 50, 55, 64, 113, 131, 163, 186, 189 piracy, 6, 20, 43, 47–50, 60, 63 Bay of Bengal, 47–50 Malay, 47–49 Nicobar, 43, 47, 49–50 taxonomical invention, 48 political prisoners, 1, 2, 3, 7, 57–59, 99, 102, 132, 156–160, 177, 181–182 hunger strike, 157, 158 life, 156–157 petition, 7 repatriation, 157–158 seditionist, 156 see also Cellular Jail on the Andamans; India Polo, Marco, 18, 19 Port Blair, 35 see also Andaman Islands; penal settlement at Port Blair Port Cornwallis, 40 Portman, M(aurice) V(idal), 80–82, 82, 83, 130 Prison Discipline Committee of 1836, 163 prostitution, 146, 154, 169–170, 171, 173, 175, 180 punishment capital, 54, 57, 95, 135, 146, 164 economic, 173 fetters, 97, 101, 133, 142, 170 flogging, 101, 135, 142, 180 hair-cropping, 135, 181 incarceration, see Cellular Jail on the Andamans; jails penal diet, 101, 181 public, 54, 95 solitary confinement, 101, 142 tonsuring, 135 transportation, see transportation withdrawal of privileges, 135 race, 18, 21, 52, 56, 80–81, 86, 104, 114 Rangoon, see Burma release, see convicts religion, see convicts

282 Index reports Indian Jails Committee of 1919, 158, 169, 173, 175–182 Jail Conference of 1877, 164, 168, 178 Prison Discipline Committee of 1836, 163 resistance, see Andamanese; convicts Revolt of 1857, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 35, 50, 53, 55, 58, 96, 160, 178 Ritchie, John (hydrographer, English East India Company), 16, 17, 20, 28, 29, 32–33, 39 Risley, Herbert H. (secretary to the Home Department of India), 163–164 Robertson, Frances Stewart (wife of Anthony William Robertson), 72–73 rule of law, 158–159 Savarkar, V.D., 156, 159, 160 Shipping, see penal settlement at Port Blair; transportation Singapore, 9, 37, 48, 50, 52, 55, 64, 113, 131, 163, 167, 186, 189 see also Straits Settlements space, 2–3, 5, 8–10, 23–29, 33–34, 35, 92–93, 102, 130, 132, 187–191 colonial, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 15, 130 island, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 26–29, 33–34, 37–38, 45, 61–87, 93, 104, 187–188 national, 2–3, 5, 7, 8, 132, 159–160 spatial history, 5, 8–10, 187–191 Sri Lanka, see Ceylon steamships, 13, 44–45, 48, 51, 62, 63–64, 72, 119, 169 companies, 45, 64 impact on the Indian Ocean, 45 impact on the Andaman Islands, 13, 45–47, 63–64 navigation, see penal settlement at Port Blair Straits Settlements, 47, 54, 55, 56, 90, 92, 94, 113, 188, 189–190 see also Malacca, Straits of; Penang; Singapore Sumatra, 13, 19, 24, 81

Superintendents, 63, 64–65, 66, 69, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 106, 109, 118, 135, 137, 139, 156, 157, 175, 181 Browning, Col., 155, 166, 168 Cadell, Col., 178–179 Douglas, Lt. Col. M.W., 157, 170–172, 183 Ferrar, Col. M.L., 184, 185 Ford, Lt. Col., 91, 92, 94 Haughton, J.C., 97, 123–124 Kyd, Alexander, 16, 21, 30, 36 Man, Col. Horace, 92–93, 94, 108, 109, 120, 127 Merk, W.R.H., 142, 167–168 Stewart, D.M., 74–75, 115, 139, 166 Temple, R.C., 60, 80, 99, 128, 130, 143, 166, 173 Tytler, R.C., 121 Walker, J.P., 57–58, 70, 76, 90–91, 92, 136, 141, 156 surveyors, 5, 6, 16–17, 19, 20–23, 27, 28, 29, 32–33 Ten Degree Channel, 23–24, 25 Thanesari, Mohammad Jafar, 109–110, 131, 139, 141, 146–147, 149, 153 tobacco, 68, 129–130, 179 transportation abolition of, 161–166, 167, 170, 177, 183, 184 sentence of, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 36, 53–55, 56, 57, 59, 73, 93, 94, 95–96, 103, 120, 138, 141, 146, 148, 157–158, 160, 176, 179 voyage, 70, 88–91, 115, 132–134, 189, 190 tropical jungle, 5, 10, 13, 45, 75, 76, 77, 82, 86, 104, 108, 121, 130, 136, 137, 167 see also Andaman Islands tropics, 4, 9, 17, 27–28, 115, 187 see also Andaman Islands West Indies, 46, 55, 56, 69, 174, 175 see also Caribbean women, 14, 72–73, 153, 154, 171, 172, 175, 176, 179, 184 see also convicts