Abstract
In its initial two decades (the 1860s and 1870s), the British had opened the penal colony on an experimental basis and the difficulties that the Settlement officers faced in settling the Andamans had done little to suppress the misgivings regarding the sustainability of the venture. Nonetheless, by the mid-1870s the initial uncertainties began to give way to greater assurance. Improvements in the physical condition of the Settlement gave a greater confidence to the Settlement officers that the colony could be maintained in the years to come as a penal station. Ironically, as the penal settlement acquired a firmer footing, the idea whether it should be retained in permanence began to be debated.2 Some officials saw this as the unfolding of the natural course of a penal settlement whereby it was developed enough to make way for a free settlement. There were others who felt that the idea of abolishing the penal settlement was not only premature but one which was fraught with logistical difficulties for the judicial department. The debate continued unresolved for several decades until the end of World War I. The political realignments and reconfigurations in the subcontinent following the war and the growing nationalist interest in the affairs of the Andamans pushed the Government of India to take a decision regarding the fate of the penal settlement. After much deliberation it was decided to retain the penal settlement of the Andamans but abolish convict transportation, i.e., to have a quasi-penal settlement on the Andamans which was peopled by convicts who had ‘voluntarily’ migrated there.
More often than not, our understanding of convict society is still based on the assumptions of its enemies1
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Notes
Home, Port Blair, July 1906, 38–40, A, NAI (in note written by H.G. Stokes, a government official, on 14 June 1906). Also T.K. Banerjee, Background to Indian Criminal Law, Orient Longman, Calcutta, 1963, pp. 91–92.
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Home, Port Blair, Proceedings Volume, Jan 1919, 61, NAI. The exploitation of the forests in the Andamans was not extensive. The limited and centralized character of human settlements prevented large-scale exploitation. Of the total of about 1,500 square miles of workable forests, twenty-five per cent was still virgin by 1958, in spite of about eighty years of interference. See O.P. Bhargava, ‘Tropical Evergreen Virgin Forests of Andaman Islands’, Indian Forester, 84, 1958, pp. 20–29.
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© 2010 Aparna Vaidik
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Vaidik, A. (2010). Island Colony and the Penal Settlement. In: Imperial Andamans. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274884_8
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