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Cellular Jail

British colonial prison in modern day India

  • 11 min read
  • 7 chapters

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Through Andaman and Nicobar Islands, British Raj and Indian independence movement

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Originally built with seven wings, the building suffered extensive damage during the earthquake of 1941. Later, two wings were dismantled during the Second World War by the Japanese, who repurposed the bricks for constructing bunkers and other structures. After India gained independence, two more wings were demolished in the 1950s to make way for the nearby Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital. Today, only the watchtower and three wings (1, 6, and 7) remain.

History

Although the prison complex itself was constructed between 1896 and 1906, the British authorities in India had been using the Andaman Islands as a prison since the days in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Shortly after the rebellion was suppressed, captured prisoners were put on trial, with many of them being executed. Others were exiled for life to the Andamans to prevent them from re-offending. Two hundred rebels were transported to the islands under the custody of the jailer David Barry and Major James Pattison Walker, an Indian Medical Service (IMS) doctor who had been warden of the prison at Agra. Another 733 from Karachi arrived in April 1868. In 1863, the Rev. Henry Fisher Corbyn, of the Bengal Ecclesiastical Establishment, was also sent out there and he set up the 'Andamanese Home' there, which was also a repressive institution albeit disguised as a charitable one. Rev. Corbyn was posted in 1866 as Vicar to St. Luke's Church, Abbottabad, and later died there and is buried at the Old Christian Cemetery, Abbottabad. More prisoners arrived from India and Burma as the settlement grew. Anyone who belonged to the Mughal royal family, or who had sent a petition to Bahadur Shah Zafar during the Rebellion was liable to be deported to the islands.

The remote islands were considered to be a suitable place to punish the independence activists. Not only were they isolated from the mainland, the overseas journey (kala pani) to the islands also threatened them with loss of caste, resulting in social exclusion. The convicts were also used in chain gangs to construct prisons, buildings, and harbour facilities.

By the late 19th century, the independence movement had picked up momentum. As a result, the number of prisoners being sent to the Andamans grew and the need for a high-security prison was felt. From August 1889 Charles James Lyall served as home secretary in the Raj government, and was also tasked with an investigation of the penal settlement at Port Blair. Both he and A. S. Lethbridge, a surgeon in the IMS, concluded that the punishment of transportation to the Andaman Islands was failing to achieve the purpose intended and that indeed criminals preferred to go there rather than be incarcerated in Indian jails. Lyall and Lethbridge recommended that a "penal stage" should exist in the transportation sentence, whereby transported prisoners were subjected to a period of harsh treatment upon arrival. The outcome was the construction of the Cellular Jail, which has been described as "a place of exclusion and isolation within a more broadly constituted remote penal space."

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