Cellular Jail

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Cellular Jail

The Cellular Jail, also known as Kālā Pānī ('Black Water'), was a colonial prison in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. The prison was used by the British government for the purpose of exiling political prisoners to the remote archipelago. Many notable activists, including Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Batukeshwar Dutt, Hare Krishna Konar, Shiv Verma, Yogendra Shukla, and Sudhanshu Dasgupta were imprisoned here during the struggle for India's independence. Today, the complex serves as a national memorial monument.

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 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, a military 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. He and A. S. Lethbridge, a surgeon in the British administration, 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."

The construction of the prison started in 1896 and was completed in 1906. The original building was a puce-coloured brick building. The bricks used to build the building were brought from Burma.

The building had seven wings, at the center of which a tower served as the intersection and was used by guards to keep watch on the inmates; this format was based on Jeremy Bentham's idea of the Panopticon. The wings radiated from the tower in straight lines, much like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

Each of the seven wings had three stories upon completion. There were no dormitories and a total of 696 cells. Each cell was 4.5 by 2.7 metres in size with a ventilator located at a height of 3 metres . 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. The locks of the prison cells were designed in such a way that the inmate would never be able to reach the latch of the lock. The prison guards would lock up the inmates and throw the key of the lock inside the jail. The inmate would try to put his hand out and try to unlock the door but would never be able to do so as his hand would never reach the lock.

"The British Raj sent Indian dissidents and mutineers to a remote island penal colony in an 'experiment' that involved torture, medical tests, forced labour and, for many, death." In response to poor conditions in the prison, including the quality of prison food, numerous prisoners went on hunger strikes. Those who did were force fed by the prison authorities.

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

Most prisoners of the Cellular Jail were independence activists. Some inmates were Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, Yogendra Shukla, Batukeshwar Dutt, Babarao Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Bhai Parmanand, Sohan Singh, Subodh Roy and Trailokyanath Chakravarty Several revolutionaries were tried in the Alipore Case (1908), such as Barindra Kumar Ghose, the surviving companion of Bagha Jatin, was transferred to Berhampore Jail in Bengal, before his mysterious death in 1924.

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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.

Among the records of the Government of India's Home Department, we found the Empire's response in its Orders to Provincial Governors and Chief Commissioners. "Very Secret: Regarding security prisoners who hunger strike, every effort should be made to prevent the incidents from being reported, no concessions to be given to the prisoners who must be kept alive. Manual methods of restraint are best, then mechanical when the patient resists."

Hunger strikes by the inmates in May 1933 caught the attention of the jail authorities. Thirty-three prisoners protested their treatment and sat in hunger strike. Among them were Mahavir Singh, an associate of Bhagat Singh, Mohan Kishore Namadas and Mohit Moitra. These three died due to force-feeding.

Statue of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar at Cellular Jail.

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 history.

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.

Cellular Jail was declared a National Memorial by the then Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai on 11 February 1979.

The centenary of the jail's completion was marked on 10 March 2006. Many former prisoners were celebrated on this occasion by the Government of India.

Apart from guided tours, a sound-and-light show is also run in the evenings narrating and showcasing the trials and tribulations of the inmates. It is available in English and Hindi.