The Horror House of Andaman

CHAPTER4

Britain had started sending political activists to the islands when the Andamans were little more than an isolated backwater – years before the jail had even been constructed – in an attempt to stop rebellious figures such as Savarkar and Sushil from spreading revolutionary ideas.

After 1857, it had seemed a necessity. In May of that year, the people rose up in mutiny across north and central India against the sovereign power of the British East India Company (EIC). Starting apparently spontaneously against the British garrison in Meerut, it soon moved south to Delhi where rioters besieged the city.

It took a year and a huge British military deployment, but when the British Crown finally suppressed the rebellion, the fallout forced them to bring an end to the EIC's reign. It was, however, a move that only gave birth to an equally brutal force – the British Raj.

One of the Raj's first acts in 1858 was to set up a penal colony on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and start exiling prisoners to it. It wasn't until decades later in 1893, after the number of banished prisoners became unmanageable, that the decision was taken to build a high-security jail to house them at Port Blair.

Fortunately, for the British they had a labour force already in place. For 13 years the prisoners were forced under pitiless conditions to become the agents of their own imprisonment, as their jail rose up around them by their own hand, to open in 1906.

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Surrounded by hundreds of miles of ocean in every direction, the Cellular Jail was designed with the sole purpose of keeping the men in isolation, and provided no hope of escape. At the centre of this massive three-storey structure stood a tall watch tower, out of which shot seven long concreted wings, like spokes on a wheel. Each wing had rows of single iron-gated cells – 693 in total.

It was here, when not working himself to the point of exhaustion, where Sushil would spend his time. He was locked up in small cell, measuring only 4.5m by 2.7m in size. To the back was a small iron vent. Out the front, all he could see was a brick wall compromising the rear of another wing. No other prisoners were in sight. Such solitary confinement was how the Cellular Jail got its name.