Cellular Jail, the Indian Bastille, and its dedication as a National Memorial

Background

The Cellular Jail stands in the capital town of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and is also known as Kala Pani. A Press Information Bureau feature records that the British revived the idea of a penal settlement in the Andamans in the wake of the First War of Indian Independence of 1857, and that on 10 March 1858 the first batch of 200 grievous political offenders touched the shores of Chatham Island within Port Blair harbour in South Andaman. Fearing that political prisoners would spread revolutionary ideas among other prisoners and also mingle within their group, the British rulers decided on solitary cells in a far off place, and the Cellular Jail was completed in 1906. Incredible India records that construction started in 1896 and took ten years, that the design was based on the idea of the Panopticon, a prison with a central observation tower overlooking individual cells, and that the building contained three floors and seven wings connected like the spokes of a wheel, of which three wings stand today. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose described the jail as the Indian Bastille. After 183 prisoners went on a 37-day hunger strike from 24 July 1937, the first batch of freedom fighters left the Andamans on 22 September 1937 and the last batch by 18 January 1938; the penal settlement itself was abolished in 1946. The jail was dedicated as a National Memorial on 11 February 1979 by the then Prime Minister, Shri Morarji Desai, and it is in UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage Site.