Myriad Andamans

Bibliographic Data

ID20041099
AuthorsAparna Vaidik (Georgetown University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Pages132-160
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueImperial Andamans (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230274884_7
OpenAlexW4250030787
ISBN9780230274884
LanguageEN
References cited15

The Andamans as a lived entity was a chequered, multi-layered and multi-textured space. This chapter explores the way the convicts who inhabited the Islands experienced the space. The Andamans were simultaneously a hellish inferno and a paradise-like place for the convicts. Many fell prey to deadly diseases, several escaped never to be heard of again, and many in the face of humiliation and misery lost the will to live and committed suicide. But some were able to rebuild their life and regain what they had lost by virtue of being transported. For them being on the Islands was an opportunity to transform and rebuild their life in new ways. In narrating stories of lives in exile this chapter recounts the hitherto untold story of life on the Andamans as a brutalizing and dehumanizing reality and concurrently a creative and liberative experience. The chapter further looks at how the arrival of Indian revolutionary terrorists on the Andamans from 1910 marked the beginning of the transformation of the Andamans into a nationalist space. The news of their continuous incarceration and ill-treatment in the Cellular Jail made its way to the Indian subcontinent. The dust raked up by the nationalist press and the Indian members of the legislative assembly paved way for the eventual co-option of the history of the Andamans into the nationalist hagiography. With time, the apotheosis of the Andamans in the nationalist writings papered over the myriad convict experiences and created a monolithic vision of the Andamans as either Kalapani, the land of darkness and death, or Muktitirth, a land of nationalist pilgrims

Ancient history · Archaeology · Convict · Geography · Indian subcontinent · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

Tools

Open DOILibgen