Ross Island Penal Colony was a convict settlement that was established in 1858 in the remote Andaman Islands by the British colonial government in India, primarily to jail a large number of prisoners from the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the Indian Mutiny. With the establishment of the penal colony at Ross Island, the British administration made it the administrative headquarters for the entire group of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and built bungalows and other facilities on the site. This colony was meant as "manageable models of colonial governance and rehabilitation". The Chief Commissioner's residence was located at the highest point on the island. Over time, several other islands including Chatham and Viper were used for the penal colony.
The penal colony became infamous as "Kalapani" or "black water" for the brutalities inflicted by the British authorities on the political prisoners from India, and most of whom had died by 1860 due to illness and torture suffered during the initial stages of the clearance of the forest to establish the colony. In later years the colony experimented for a short time with civilizing the indigenous people of Andamans. The penal colony was used as an experimental station for various methods of torture and medical tests. During World War II, the island was invaded by the Japanese army, forcing the British to evacuate. The administrative buildings were destroyed but the penal colony remained. After the Allied forces reoccupied the island the penal colony was disbanded on 7 October 1945.
Geography
Ross Island (now known as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island), one of the islands chosen for establishing the penal colony, is located near the entrance to the harbour at Port Blair in South Andamans. It is a small island which has a circumference of only. The penal colonies were initially located on Ross, Chatham and Viper Islands. Viper Island was meant for the most dangerous prisoners. By 1871, it included Perseverance Point, Hopetown, Command Point, Mount Harriet, South Point, Aberdeen, Haddo, Navy Bay and Port Mouat, twelve stations in all. Once called "Paris of the East" for its exciting social life and tropical forests, the island was devastated by the invading army of the Japanese and also by an earthquake which had struck the island in 1941, and it now appears more like a "jungle-clad Lost City."
History
The earliest known effort to establish a penal colony was by Archibald Blair who found the remoteness of the island as ideal for such a colony. But his initiative failed to go beyond 1796 as malaria prevented it. The First War of Indian Independence in 1857 rekindled the interest of the British Administration in India to establish a penal colony in the Andaman Islands for political prisoners.
The first group of 200 prisoners were transported under the control of Dr James Pattison Walker from Calcutta. Deportees included many prominent leaders of the Wahabi movement (an Islamic "reform movement") and the subsequent revolution. The prisoners landed at the Andaman Islands on 10 March 1858. Walker soon put the convicts on the arduous task of clearing the dense forest of Ross Island, building their own shelters and other buildings, and laying roads. The prisoners were chained and collared around the neck with identity tags, and were in a poor state of health. In the beginning there were no basic amenities. During the rainy season they had to live in tents. In November 1858 temporary barrack-type huts with walls made of mats and with leaking thatched roofs provided accommodation for about 1,000 prisoners.
At one stage, of the 8,000 prisoners who had been transported to the islands under the penal project, 3,500 had died due to sickness. Sir Robert Napier, who came to Port Blair to investigate, found the conditions "beyond comprehension" as there was no food, clothing and shelter provided to the convicts. However, Ross Island was comparatively a better place than in the earlier initial years as Colonel RC Tytler and his wife Harriet had improved the facilities for the community. Tytler had been posted as Superintendent of the Convict Settlement, also known as the "British gulag", from April 1862 to February 1864. He tried to improve the conditions at the camp, where the death rate of the prisoners was 700 per year. At that time the doctors at the camp reported that only 45 prisoners out of the 10,000 were considered medically fit.