All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Andaman Islands Penal Colony and the Great Andamanese

1858–1945 · South & Central Asia

Confinement Abduction (Children)

Confined

80,000

Colonial penal records are relatively good: about 200 rebels of 1857 arrived in March 1858, and the settlement received convicts continuously until 1938, with cumulative transportations usually put at around 80,000 from India and Burma. Indigenous population figures come from colonial censuses and later anthropological counts: the Great Andamanese numbered about 4,800 in 1858, 625 in 1901, 90 in 1930 and 28 in 1988, with 39 recorded in the 2011 census of India.

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What happened

After the rebellion of 1857 the British Indian government re-established a penal settlement in the Andaman Islands, landing its first 200 convicts at Port Blair in March 1858; escapes in the first months ended in recapture and mass hangings. Over eighty years the colony received roughly 80,000 transported convicts from India and Burma, who cleared forest, built the settlement and were subject to a labour and ticket-of-leave regime; the Cellular Jail, completed in 1906, held political prisoners in solitary confinement, among them Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and later Bengali and Punjabi revolutionaries, and became a centre of hunger strikes in the 1930s. The colony also destroyed the indigenous Great Andamanese, whose numbers fell from about 4,800 in 1858 to a few dozen, mainly through introduced pneumonia, measles and syphilis and through the 'Andaman Homes' in which children were gathered and died. Japanese forces occupied the islands from 1942 to 1945. Independent India closed the penal settlement and made the Cellular Jail a national memorial; how the colony and its political prisoners should be commemorated, and which prisoners, remains a live argument in Indian public life.

Parties

The British Indian government transported convicts to a penal colony at Port Blair, whose establishment also destroyed the indigenous Great Andamanese

Disputed

Indian memory politics over the Cellular Jail, particularly the commemoration of Savarkar and his clemency petitions, is actively disputed; the historical record of the colony itself is comparatively well documented.

The denominator

The two populations involved have no common denominator. The roughly 80,000 convicts transported to Port Blair between 1858 and 1945 were drawn from the whole of British India, a population of hundreds of millions, so no meaningful share can be computed. The indigenous Great Andamanese, destroyed by the colony's diseases and punitive expeditions, are estimated at about 5,000 in 1858 and had fallen to 19 individuals by 1961.

Where the baseline comes from

Cellular Jail — Wikipediaopen-edited
Great Andamanese — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No cumulative toll exists. Mortality among convicts in the first decades was very high from malaria, dysentery and overwork, and 87 recaptured escapers were hanged in 1858; the destruction of the Great Andamanese, a fall of more than 99 per cent of the population, was caused chiefly by introduced disease rather than direct killing.

Documented forms of violence

Forced LabourArbitrary DetentionAbduction of Children

Colonial penal records and Clare Anderson's archival work document penal labour and indefinite detention; colonial reports describe the Andaman Homes into which indigenous children were taken.