Most visitors arrive in the Andamans thinking about beaches and reefs. Few realize they’re landing in a place with one of the strangest, most layered histories of any Indian territory. A place inhabited for tens of thousands of years before it became, for a few brutal decades, the most feared address in the British Empire’s Indian holdings. Before our visit lets know the history of Andaman Islands.
Tens of Thousands of Years Before Anyone Else Arrived
The islands’ original inhabitants — the ancestors of today’s Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, and Sentinelese peoples — are believed by many anthropologists to descend from some of the earliest modern humans to leave Africa, arriving via the Indian Ocean coastline roughly 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. That figure isn’t a rounding error or a rough guess dressed up as fact; it’s based on genetic studies that place these groups among the oldest continuously surviving populations on the planet, having lived in near-total isolation from the rest of humanity for the vast majority of that time.
The isolation wasn’t accidental. Treacherous reefs, unpredictable currents, and dense interior jungle made the islands genuinely difficult to reach and survive on for outsiders, and that difficulty is precisely what allowed these communities to remain untouched for so long. It’s also why, legally, their territory remains off-limits today.
1789: The First Failed British Settlement
The British East India Company’s first attempt at a settlement came in 1789, when Lieutenant Archibald Blair established a naval base on the southeast coast — the site that would eventually take his name, Port Blair. It didn’t last. Disease and hostile encounters with local tribes forced the British to abandon the post by 1796, and the islands went largely unoccupied by outside powers for over sixty years.
1858: The Penal Colony Begins
Everything changed after the 1857 uprising against British rule. In the crackdown that followed, the British needed somewhere remote enough to exile captured rebels without any realistic hope of escape or return. The Andamans, 1,370 km from the mainland, fit the requirement precisely.
The first group — around 200 prisoners — arrived under the custody of jailer David Barry and Major James Pattison Walker in 1858. Another 733 arrived from Karachi in April 1858. Conditions were brutal from the outset: in March 1868, 238 prisoners attempted a mass escape. All were recaptured within a month, and 87 were subsequently hanged — a single event that set the tone for what the penal settlement would become over the following decades.
1896–1906: Building the Cellular Jail
As India’s independence movement gathered momentum through the late 1800s, the flow of political prisoners to the islands increased sharply, and British administrators concluded the existing settlement wasn’t harsh enough. Home Secretary Charles James Lyall and IMS surgeon A.S. Lethbridge recommended a dedicated high-security “penal stage” be added to the transportation sentence — something explicitly designed to punish, not just contain.
Construction began in 1896 and finished in 1906. The result was the Cellular Jail: seven three-story wings radiating outward from a central watchtower like spokes on a wheel, built from puce-colored brick imported from Burma, with iron fittings shipped from England. Each wing faced the back of the adjacent one, so no prisoner could ever see or communicate with an inmate in another wing — and within a wing, cells were arranged so prisoners couldn’t see each other either. In total there were 696 cells, each roughly 4.5 by 2.7 meters, with a single ventilation slit set three meters up the wall. No dormitories. No windows in any usable sense. Every prisoner held in complete solitary confinement.
The isolation was so total that two brothers — Babarao and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar — were imprisoned simultaneously in the jail for two years without either knowing the other was there.
An estimated 80,000 prisoners passed through the Port Blair penal settlement and the Cellular Jail over its operating life. Notable inmates included Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (sentenced to two consecutive 50-year terms and later commemorated in the airport’s name), Batukeshwar Dutt, Yogendra Shukla, Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, and large numbers of participants from the 1921 Malabar Rebellion. Savarkar reportedly composed thousands of lines of poetry on the cell walls using thorns and coconut shell fragments, memorizing the verses because jailers routinely whitewashed the walls to erase them.
The gallows, capable of executing three prisoners simultaneously, sat near the compound’s outer wall, with a separate, deliberately hidden exit used to remove bodies without alerting other inmates. Records indicate at least 80 executions took place there, though historians believe the true number is likely higher given incomplete records.
This is the origin of “Kala Pani” — literally “black water” — the phrase mainland Indians used for the sentence of transportation to the islands. For many, it was regarded as a fate worse than execution: not just imprisonment, but complete severance from the subcontinent, family, and any prospect of return.
The Campaign That Ended It
Sustained pressure from Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and the broader independence movement eventually forced the British to wind down the penal settlement. Deportations were suspended in 1922, resumed roughly a decade later as the movement resurged, and the jail was substantially emptied by 1939 following renewed public campaigning.
1942–1945: Japanese Occupation
World War II brought a strange reversal. Japanese forces invaded and occupied the islands from March 1942 to October 1945 — the only part of India to fall under direct foreign occupation during the war. The Cellular Jail, briefly repurposed to hold British prisoners of war and suspected loyalists, became a site where the roles of captor and captive inverted entirely.
In 1943, Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Indian National Army, visited the islands and raised the Indian tricolour for the first time on Indian soil at the Gymkhana Ground in Port Blair, declaring the territory liberated under the Azad Hind (“Free India”) provisional government — years before actual independence arrived. Ross Island, then the British administrative headquarters and now officially renamed Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island, still holds the ruins of that era: colonial-era ballrooms, churches, and residences now half-consumed by tree roots and wandering spotted deer. British control resumed on 7 October 1945, following the Japanese surrender.
After Independence
The islands became a Union Territory in 1947, administered directly by the central government rather than through a state legislature — a structure that continues today. The Cellular Jail was declared a National Memorial in 1979, though only three of the original seven wings survive; the other four were demolished in the years immediately after independence, before their historical value was fully recognized, and their loss remains a point of quiet regret among historians.
More recently, in 2018, the islands and their capital were officially renamed — Port Blair became Sri Vijaya Puram, and several islands including Ross Island and Neil Island received Indian names (Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island and Shaheed Dweep, respectively) as part of a broader move to shed colonial-era naming.
Why It’s Worth Understanding Before You Visit
The Cellular Jail’s evening light-and-sound show in Sri Vijaya Puram remains one of the most affecting historical experiences in the islands, narrated against the actual walls where the events happened. But the deeper value of knowing this history is what it explains about the islands today — why so much land remains under forest and tribal protection, why the population is still comparatively small, and why a place this remote carries such an outsized weight in India’s national memory.
The same isolation that made these islands a feared prison is also what kept the surrounding reefs and offshore waters remarkably intact. A day at the Cellular Jail pairs naturally with a day spent on that same water — which is where we come in at Andaman Island Spirit Charters.