You may have heard of Blackwater, an American private military contractor, but have you heard of Blackwater, the British gulag? Whilst the former was nicknamed “Gutter Company” – the latter took on the name of “Kalapani” owing to abhorrent conditions, and the certainty of death.
Ross Island Penal Colony was a convict settlement established in 1858 in the Andaman Islands by the British Crown, primarily to jail prisoners from the War of Independence, 1857. Over time, several other islands including Chatham and Viper were also used for the penal colony. This British Gulag on the Andaman Islands was described as "hell on earth" by a prisoner who survived.
It became infamous as Kalapani (Blackwater) for the brutalities inflicted by the British authorities on the political prisoners, most of which died due to illness and torture by 1860.
The British also attempted to “civilize” the tribes of the Andaman Islands by holding them hostage at the prison. In 1863, island chaplain the Rev Henry Corbyn, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, captured 28 Andamanese, 10 of them children, and held them hostage to "restore them to a place in the human family" and teach them to respect the British.
The islands are said to have held 80,000 political prisoners. A survivor described that the food was riddled with white threads of worms, discovered in a paper trail the British tried to hide before they pulled out of the Indian Subcontinent.
The paper trail later revealed more harrowing details. Prisoner 38360 was suspended in an iron suit for three years. Prisoner 38511 was beaten to death. They were often refused treatment, starved, flogged until their skin split, or half drowned. Standing handcuffs, cross-bar fetters, and being hung from a peg for several weeks at a time were common punishments. A group of prisoners who went on hunger strike was also force fed with tubes, and “rectal feeding” was to be employed if mouth tubes don’t work.
Besides the strategic reasons to build a gulag on an island, it also had a psychological impact. Hindu belief dictated that the faithful were parted from their souls by crossing the sea. Thus, Kalapani was also feared as a godless place.
On March 10, 1858, Dr James Pattison Walker brought the first batch of 200 "grievous political offenders" in a ship. Built on a vantage point, a jungle surrounded the prison. Dr Walker dispatched the men in fetters, ordering them to build their own shelters. From Calcutta and Madras, from Karachi, Singapore and Burma, more prisoners kept coming in.
Walker wrote that some of the prisoners were "so sick and debilitated that they cannot be now employed" so he asked the Raj to ship him another 10,000 men. He also read out Marco Polo’s descriptions of the people to frighten prisoners, that the Andalamese “eat anyone who is not from their tribe” even though Polo’s accounts were based on hearsay, and there was no evidence of cannibalism amongst the tribes.
Prisoners from what is now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh were also used as lab rats for experiments with drugs and poisons during WWII. Other pharma drugs were also tested. A memo read: "From the Secretary to the Government of India, Simla, June 24th 1880, despatch 197, to Dr J Reid, Senior Medical Officer, Port Blair: Regarding a new drug, cinchona alkaloid, the experimental use is very desirable... and should be confined to 1,000 convicts."
By 1866, the British population had successfully, but quietly, executed a genocide on the Islands. Besides clearing forests and disrupting local food chains, instances of rape introduced syphilis, along with measles, flu, tobacco, opium and whisky which the British brought along with them, more than half the tribal population was dead, and one of the tribes, the Jangil, were wiped out.
At the end of the 18th century, when they first came into sustained contact with outsiders, before the British arrived, there were some 5000-7000 people on the islands. Today, only roughly over 500 Andamanese remain. The Jangil tribe was wiped out entirely. The Sentilanese have refused all attempts at contact by outsiders after a British officer kidnapped a family from the island.
The first group of prisoners was repatriated in 1937. The Cellular Jail was forced to empty in 1939. Two years later, the Japanese Imperial Forces conquered the territory, and turned the gulag into a POW camp. The first to be incarcerated were the British warders on the islands. (Not surprise there). The Japanese also attacked the Jarawa people for their hostility, and killed many. The Jarawa people have also resisted outside contact since then.
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