Place · colonial prison · India
Cellular Jail, Andaman Islands
The panopticon-plan colonial prison on Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, built by the British between 1896 and 1906 to exile Indian political prisoners for life (kala pani — black water, the sea voyage that caste tradition held broke dharma). The seven three-storey wings radiated from a central watchtower in Jeremy Bentham's panopticon design, with 693 individual cells. Prisoners held here included Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1911-21), Batukeshwar Dutt, Bhai Parmanand, Barindra Ghosh and over 10,000 others across the 1858-1947 transportation years. Four of the original seven wings were destroyed by the 1941 Japanese occupation (1942-45) and the 1945 British bombing. The surviving three wings now house the National Memorial opened by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1979.
- Function
- Water & infrastructure
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.675, 92.748
Connections (5)
- Succession in timeSabarmati Ashram
Sabarmatī and the Cellular Jail are the two faces of the same struggle in the same decades: an ashram in Ahmedabad running a mass movement in the open, and a purpose-built island prison in the Andamans holding those the state had decided not to argue with. Both are now national memorials.
- Succession in timeDandi
Transportation to the Andamans and the salt march are the two answers the freedom movement gave and the two the state gave back. The Cellular Jail was built in 1906 for those who used force; Dāndi in 1930 was the method that made force unnecessary, and its marchers were jailed in ordinary prisons by the tens of thousands.
- CampaignChittagong armoury
Transportation to the Andamans was the standard sentence for the Bengal revolutionary groups, and the survivors of Chittagong went there along with men from the Alipore, Kakori and Lahore cases. The jail's function was distance: a cellular plan a thousand miles out to sea, where a prisoner could be worked on an oil mill in solitary confinement and no newspaper would hear of it. Hunger strikes in 1933 and 1937 and the publicity they got finally emptied it.
- Imperial administration ofKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Convicts sentenced to transportation were shipped from Calcutta to the Andamans, first after 1857 and then, once the Cellular Jail opened in 1906, as political prisoners under sentences designed to remove them from any audience. The penal settlement is the outer edge of the Bengal presidency's judicial machinery, a thousand miles offshore and administered from Fort William.
- AnalogueRed Fort, Delhi
The Red Fort was inscribed in 2007 and the Cellular Jail is still on the list, and both are sites of colonial trials and imprisonment: Bahadur Shah Zafar and the INA officers in one, the Ghadr, Chittagong and Andaman political convicts in the other. One is a Mughal palace with that history attached; the other is only that history, which is a harder thing to inscribe.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
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