From Blair to Bose: Uncovering complex past of strategic Andaman islands

Inside a small museum in the city we knew as Port Blair is an interesting photograph. Taken in October 1945, it shows a group of Japanese soldiers saluting an Indian officer. The caption shows the officer as Lt Colonel (later Lt General) Nathu Singh of the Rajput Regiment, then part of the British Indian Army. Behind him are more soldiers, a mix of Indian and British, presumably of the same unit.

The event captured is an important one not just for the Andaman Islands but is part of Second World War history. It marks the surrender of Japanese troops to Allied forces in this part of the world, a full month after the Axis power had formally surrendered in Japan itself. The Japanese occupation of the Andaman Islands began in March 1942 and posed a massive threat to British control of mainland India, giving the original colonial power sleepless nights.

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Just as the Andaman Islands had the potential to become a launch pad for a Japanese assault on the Indian mainland, the recent renaming of Port Blair to Sri Vijaya Puram served as a reminder that centuries ago, the islands had a Chola naval base. From this base, the Cholas launched an assault in the opposite direction—on the empire of Srivijaya, which was based on the island of Sumatra, now part of Indonesia.

This entire episode of the renaming has highlighted both the complex and fascinating past of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as well as their strategic significance not just in the Bay of Bengal but for all naval dominance in the larger Indian Ocean region.

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To understand both aspects, one needs to delve into the past of the place. There is a great deal of naming and renaming, and each character that appears on this stage of history has a story to tell. If one were to ignore the ancient past as well as pre-historic times, the logical beginning of this narrative lies at the end of the 18th century.

Between December 1788 and April 1789, an East India Company marine surveyor called Archibald Blair did a study of the Great Andaman Islands. His objective was to identify places for setting up harbours, allowing the Navy to project its power eastward while making the sea routes safe from the threat of pirates.

It was Blair who established the first colony here and named it Port Cornwallis, after Admiral William Cornwallis, a distinguished British naval commander and brother to Charles Cornwallis, governor general of India. This colony, however, floundered in the absence of permanent settlers and never achieved self-sufficiency. The idea of a penal colony had by then been formed, and convict labour was used, along with contracted labourers.

In 1791-92, Blair was replaced by Major Alexander Kyd, and the colony shifted to North Andaman Island, under the old name of Port Cornwallis. Death and disease ran rampant, causing the government of Bengal—which means the East India Company—to shut it down in May 1796. If the British had been defeated by the Marathas in their decisive battle of 1803, the history of these islands too would have been different. But victory in that battle made the British the paramount power in India and gave them a cockpit to drive expansion across Asia.

In 1824, the First Anglo-Burmese War saw troop-carrying ships arrive at Port Cornwallis again. By the 1850s, a larger settlement on the islands began to be planned, and Blair’s work was revisited. A new colony sprang up, named Port Blair. Apart from being a strategic harbour, its purpose was to be that of a penal colony, for Indian prisoners captured during the revolt of 1857. The prison was on Viper Island, named after the ship on which Blair first came to these waters.

Post-1857, the first lot of convicts arrived. To keep them in check, four officials from Singapore were brought in, with Capt James Pattison Walker as a trained jailor suitable to handle the most hardened of prisoners. The idea was that the sea would serve as an impassable physical barrier to any escape, and it worked. Needless to say, Viper Island lived up to its sinister name and became known for brutal treatment of prisoners.

In the 1864–67 period, convicts were used as labour in the construction of Ross Island, just 3 km from central Port Blair. This island was named after Daniel Ross, Marine Surveyor General at Calcutta in the 1823–33 period and a master hydrographer.

From that point onwards, it was Ross Island that served as the administrative headquarters of the islands till 1945. Over time, apart from the prison establishment and barracks, the island saw elaborate construction—the Chief Commissioner’s grand residence, bakery, bazaar, tennis court, church, hospital, secretariat, and even a swimming pool.

Viper Island lost importance with the construction of the Cellular Jail in Port Blair itself. Built between 1896 and 1906, the structure comprises six blocks of prison cells converging like spokes around a single hub. Solitary confinement, torture, and executions were the norm here. This was the dreaded ‘Kala Pani’ gaining infamy across the subcontinent. Even today, stepping into one of those cells is a moving experience.

In March 1942, the Japanese arrived, ready to show the British what it meant to be colonised. The then Chief Commissioner of the islands, Charles Waterfall, was captured by the conquering Japanese and sent off as a prisoner to Burma. His deputy, Major Bird, was beheaded close to the clock tower in Port Blair. In December 1943, Subhash Chandra Bose arrived on a visit—he was then allied with the Japanese against the British as a common foe—and stayed at the Chief Commissioner’s residence on Ross Island. His hoisting of the Indian Tricolour during this visit is the first instance of the flag going up on Indian soil.

And it was due to this that in 2018, the Narendra Modi government renamed Ross Island as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep. At the same time, other prominent islands of the group were also renamed; Neil Island became Shaheed Dweep, while Havelock Island was called Swaraj Dweep. Brigadier General James Neill and Major General Henry Havelock were British heroes for their role in brutally suppressing the revolt of 1857, the former being killed in the fighting in Lucknow while the latter died of illness in late 1857. Furthermore, in January 2023, the government named 21 hitherto unnamed islands in the group after India’s Param Vir Chakra winners.

Amidst all the renaming, the point that sometimes gets missed is the Japanese treatment of the islanders during their occupation period. By the time the Japanese arrived in 1942, Port Blair and its immediate vicinity had achieved a strange population mix.

Apart from those involved in the colony’s administration, the Indians here were locally born descendents of convicts or former convicts who could never return to their old lives. In some cases, the British had moved in entire communities—such as the Moplahs—Muslims from Kerala who had brutally attacked the Hindu community in the state in 1919; the Bhantus—considered a criminal tribe linked to the notorious Sultana Daku in Uttar Pradesh; and Burmese convict labourers. Adding to this demographic cauldron were the Karens, a tribe from Burma who had converted to Christianity and a set of labourers from south Bihar who had migrated under a settlement scheme in the 1920s. And of course, the jailed convicts.

Japanese treatment of the locals—prisoners and others—was brutal. An example is the treatment of Dr Diwan Singh. This doctor was Director of Health on the island, and under the Japanese, he was also the President of the Indian Independence League (IIL), Azad Hind Fauj’s peace committee, and Seva Samiti. When he filed a protest against the atrocities being committed on the island and specifically against the local gurudwara being vacated to make space for Korean ‘comfort’ women, he was imprisoned in October 1943. After more than eighty days of incarceration and torture, he died at the jail.

It was during the same time that Bose visited the Cellular Jail. Perhaps he was unaware of the plight of his fellow countrymen at the hands of his ‘allies’. And one wonders what—if anything—he could have done even if he had come to know of what the Japanese were doing.

The photograph in the museum in Port Blair needs to be seen in this context. If that moment saw the Japanese colonisers being ejected, two years later the original colonisers were also gone. Today, the agony of the convicts is brought alive by a sound and light show on Ross Island. The grand old British structures have tree roots growing through them. In the words of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the renaming of Port Blair to Sri Vijaya Puram marks the continued effort to “to free the nation from colonial imprints”.

What does the future hold for the islands? The answer to that lies in the past. The same strategic reasons that drew Archibald Blair here still hold true. In the wider Indian Ocean, one of the islands that Blair surveyed is Diego Garcia, now a major US military base. There can be no greater testimonial to the accuracy of Blair’s work. Similarly, work is already underway on a massive Indian naval base on Great Nicobar Island, a vantage point that overlooks the entrance to the Malacca Straits and is barely 100 miles from the tip of Indonesia.

The author is a heritage explorer by inclination with a penchant for seeking obscure sites. A brand consultant by profession, he tweets @HiddenHeritage. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.