City Tour

14th February, 2012 - Tuesday (Day 5):

After discovering the Andaman Cellular Jail we visited Anthropological Museum, Forest Museum, Fisheries Marine Museum,  Naval Marine Museum (Samudrika) and Chatam Saw Mill (one of the oldest & largest in Asia) 

Facts about Anthropological Museum:

It depicts the life of Palaeolithic Islanders and shows their houses and tools used by them for living.
Facts about Chatham Saw Mill:

A small island, connected to Port Blair by a bridge. It is famous for its saw mill, considered to be one of the oldest and the largest in Asia operating by the department of Forest & Environment and a big store house for different varieties of wood including Marble, Padauk, Gurjan and Satin wood.. The mill was built by the British in 1836. The island also has the second largest wharf in the Andamans.


Photography: R.Bhuvanesh Babu

Andaman Cellular Jail

14th February, 2012 - Tuesday (Day 5):

After breakfast at Peerless Hotel - Port Blair, We started for a tour of places in & around Port Blair (City Tour) - covering the famous Cellular Jail (a witness to the freedom struggle) by Tata Sumo in the sunny weather.

Facts about Andaman Cellular Jail:

The Cellular Jail, also known as Kālā Pānī, literally 'black water', in the sense of deep sea and hence exile), was a colonial prison situated in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. The prison was used by the British especially to exile political prisoners to the remote archipelago. Many notable freedom fighters such as Batukeshwar Dutt and Veer Savarkar, among others, were imprisoned here during the struggle for India's independence. Today, the complex serves as a national memorial monument.

The Cellular Jail is one of the murkiest chapters in the history of the colonial rule in India. Although the prison complex itself was constructed between 1896 and 1906, the British had been using the Andaman islands as a prison since the days in the immediate aftermath of the first war of independence.

Shortly after the rebellion was crushed, the British sent thousands to the gallows, hung them up from trees, or tied them to cannons and blew them up. Those who survived were exiled for life to the Andamans to sever their connections with their families and their country. 200 mutineers were transported to the islands under the custody of the jailer David Barry and Major James Pattison Walker , a military doctor who had been warden of the prison at Agra. Another 733 from Karachi arrived in April, 1868. More prisoners arrived from India and Burma as the settlement grew.[5] 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 rebels. Not only were they isolated from the mainland, they could also be used in chain gangs to construct prisons, buildings and harbor facilities. Many died in this enterprise. They served to colonize the island for the British.

By the late 19th century the independence movement had picked up momentum. As a result, the number of prisoners being sent to the Andamans started growing and the need for a high-security prison was felt.

The construction of the prison started in 1896 and was completed in 1906. The original building was a puce-colored brick building. The bricks used to build the building were brought from Burma, known today as Myanmar.

The building had seven wings, at the centre of which a tower served as the intersection and was used by guards to keep watch on the inmates. The wings radiated from the tower in straight lines, much like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. A large bell was kept in the tower to raise the alarm in any eventuality.

Each of the seven wings had three stories upon completion. There were no dormitories and a total of 693 cells. Each cell was 4.5 metres x 2.7 metres or 13.5x7.5 feet in size with a ventilator located at a height of three meters. The name, "cellular jail", derived from the solitary cells which prevented any prisoner from communicating with any other. Also, the spokes were so designed such that the face of a cell in a spoke saw the back of cells in another spoke. This way, communication between prisoners was impossible. They were all in solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement was implemented as the British government desired to ensure that political prisoners and revolutionaries be isolated from each other. The Andaman island served as the ideal setting for the government to achieve this.

Most prisoners of the Cellular Jail were independence activists. Some famous inmates of the Cellular Jail were Dr. Diwan Singh Kalepani, Maulana Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, Yogendra Shukla, Batukeshwar Dutt, Maulana Ahmadullah, Movli Abdul Rahim Sadiqpuri, Babarao Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Bhai Parmanand, V.O.Chidambaram Pillai, Subramaniam Shiva, Sohan Singh, Vaman Rao Joshi and Nand Gopal. Several revolutionaries tried in the Alipore Case (1908) such as Barindra Kumar Ghose, Upendra Nath Banerjee, Birendra Chandra Sen. Jatish Chandra Pal, the surviving companion of Bagha Jatin, demented under torture here, was transferred to Berhampore Jail in Bengal, before his mysterious death in 1924. The jail is a mute narrator of the brutality and torture of Indian freedom fighters by the British colonialists. Savarkar brothers Babarao and Vinayak didn't know of each other in the same jail but in different cells, for two years.

In March 1868, 238 prisoners tried to escape. By April they were all caught. One committed suicide and of the remainder Superintendent Walker ordered 87 to be hanged.

Hunger strikes by the inmates during the early 1930s called attention to the inhumane conditions of their imprisonment. Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore intervened. The government decided to repatriate the political prisoners from the Cellular Jail in 1937-38.

The Empire of Japan invaded the Andaman islands in 1942 and drove the British out. The Cellular Jail then became home to British prisoners. During this period, Subhash Chandra Bose also visited the islands. Two out of the seven wings of the Jail were demolished during the Japanese regime. In 1945, the British resumed control with the end of World War II.

Another two wings of the jail were demolished after India achieved independence. However, this led to protests from several former prisoners and political leaders who saw it as a way of erasing the tangible evidence of their persecution. The remaining three wings and the central tower were therefore converted into a National Memorial in 1969. The Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital was set up in the premises of the Cellular Jail in 1963. It is now a 500-bed hospital with about 40 doctors serving the local population. The centenary of the jail's completion was marked on 10 March 2006. Many erstwhile prisoners were felicitated on this occasion by the Government of India.

Courtesy: Wikipedia
Photography: R.Bhuvanesh Babu