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The Cellular Jail in Port Blair is a testimony to
the steadfast conviction that men and women—political prisoners
all—had in their nation’s destiny, and the hardships and
sacrifices they readily gave for it.
When the Andaman colony
was set up by Dr. James Pattison Walker, the British did not follow
any consistent policy. It was in the suppression of thaggi and
dacoit in India, that the genesis of the Cellular Jail can be traced.
However, the jail became significant and grasped the imagination of
the people of mainland India and abroad when, during the course of
India’s freedom struggle, the British began to deport political
prisoners to Port Blair. The Lyall Commission (headed by Charles
James Lyall, Home Secretary to the Government of India) decided that
to make the earlier stages of imprisonment more penal there was to be
a ‘preliminary stage of separate confinement for a period of six
months in cells’. And so for the ticket-of-leave convicts, or
the self-supporters, the Cellular jail was built in the penal
settlement that covered 1876 square kilometres of grazing and arable
land, swamps, dense forests, harbours and inlets, and a few villages.
The construction of the
jail was started in 1896 and took 14 years to complete. Located at
Aberdeen, it stands on a promontory that overlooks Sessostris Bay,
facing Ross Island. The original building was a seven pronged,
puce-coloured brick building, with a central tower as the fulcrum.
Each wing was four-storeyed, with cells on the first three and a
watchtower on the fourth. These spanned out in straight lines from
the central tower, rather like the spokes of a bicycle. The tower
used to house a bell which tolled the hour, but which was also sent
into a frantic, frenzied alarm during a crisis. On each storey, near
the fulcrum, was posted a guard who had to merely walk around like
the hand of a clock to get a clear, unobstructed view of the verandas
which faced the cells and from which he was protected by iron grilled
doors. When completed in 1910, the Cellular Jail had 698 cells. Each
cell was 4.5 metres by 2.7 metres with a solitary ventilator located
three metres off the ground. Thus a prisoner could neither see
anything nor communicate with other inmates. And to make it just a
little harder for the prisoners, each wing faced the rear of the
other. Even now, as you wander around the Jail Complex, the execution
room where prisoners were hanged, the shed where they worked at the
oil press, the eerie silence in the long corridors and the walls with
hooks from which the prisoners were tied as punishment, will send a
tremor of fear in you. After independence in 1947, the government of
India demolished four of the seven wings to make way for a hospital.
Of the three that remained, two house some offices while only one
wing is used as a jail for both men and women prisoners. And as if
prophesying the future, the lower of even this wing, tumbled down
during the great Andaman earthquake of 1941. This new tower is wooden
and no bells toll for anyone.
As to the quality of life
offered to convicts, it is better described by Sir Richard Temple who
says, “The life term convicts are received in the Cellular Jail
for six months, where discipline is severest, they are then
transferred to Associate Jails for 18 months where work is hard, and
so on until the convict has spent 20 to 25 years at the settlement.
Women convicts were meted out the same treatment and an obvious
fall-out of the fact that men far out-numbered women was that there
was rampant prostitution. In any case the dehumanizing treatment,
harsh living conditions and the utter cruelty of officers towards
convicts, failed to achieve the avowed aim of the British in the
Penal Settlement: to provide a long education to useful citizenship.”
The outbreak of the Sepoy
Mutiny in 1857 motivated the British to re-establish the penal
colony, though it was subsequently abandoned in 1796. The increasing
tempo of the Indian freedom movement in the closing years of the last
century and the early years of the present one led the British to
confine separately prominent rebels who were too dangerous to be
allowed to mix with ordinary convicts. The Andamans offered a
natural answer and henceforth political prisoners were deported to
the island and kept in solitary confinement. The prisoners included
not just those actively involved in the freedom movement, but also
journalists convicted for seditious writing. Such men and women were
nearly all sentenced to life imprisonment.
During the years 1910 to
1916, when these crusaders and many others were imprisoned in the
Cellular Jail, an English man called Barry was the Jail
Superintendent. This man was so utterly cruel that some prisoners
became insane, while others committed suicide in a bid to escape
malnutrition, the denial of hygiene, callous medical facilities, hard
labour and a prohibition to communicate with family members and
friends. The worst degradation was when political prisoners were sent
out for hard labour everyday, their feet shackled and fettered in
chains. Read the memoirs of Savarkar and you will conclude that in
this penal settlement there were ‘no men’, just ‘convicts’.
Notwithstanding the degradation and the deprivation of his existence,
Savarkar wrote, “The island ornamented the sea like a palace
built in the land of fairies… It was so picturesque and compact
that it could not fail to ravish the mind of even a prisoner in
chains like me.”
Barry’s cruelty
resulted in the prisoners going on two successive strikes. At last
the government of India was forced to admit that something was very
wrong in the penal settlement and Sir Reginad Craddock visited the
Andamans in 1913. After concerted deliberations it was decided that
political prisoners would be repatriated from the Cellular Jail from
May to September of 1914. But before this could accomplished World
War I broke out, enmeshing every part of the world in it. In India
the war resulted in renewed revolutionary activity. By the 1920s the
British had definitely decided to abandon the settlement and it was
decided that a self-supporting community of ticket-to-leave convicts
be encouraged. This was because the government of India understood
the strategic importance of the Andamans to enable the control of the
seas and the abundant natural wealth it offered.
During World War II, on
March 23, 1942, ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy gained control of
Ross and Chatham, blew up the wireless station at Port Blair and by
six the next morning had established control of the Andamans. Colonel
Bucho, the Japanese Civil Governor, immediately arrested Chief
Commissioner Waterfall and released all prisoners from the Cellular
Jail. While they sentenced many British to death, they pardoned the
Indians whom they vowed to liberate. However, their occupation of
these islands was not without its tales of horror and brutality.
Finally, on August 15,
1947, when India became independent the penal settlement was closed
down. On Public demand the central tower of the Cellular Jail has
been declared a protected monument, with plaques put up to
commemorate the famous occupants of these dreadful cells. Not
surprisingly then, to many the Andaman Islands stand haloed by the
sacrifices of martyred freedom fighters. For them it is a place of
pilgrimage.
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