Andaman Islands · Island Realms
This region needs a different treatment from a mainland one, and the difference should be stated rather than smoothed over. There is no dynastic history here and none should be constructed. Two records exist and they are not the same kind of record. The Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese have lived on these islands for a very long time - archaeology and genetics both indicate many millennia - and their languages form a family with no demonstrated relative anywhere. But they kept no written record, they were never organised as kingdoms, and what has been written about them was produced almost entirely by outsiders, some of it under conditions the people described did not control. So no chronology of chiefs, reigns or dynasties is offered for them here, because there is none to offer; what is set down is only what is documented, and where the record is an outsider's record that is said. The second history is short and precisely dated. It begins on 10 March 1858 with a penal settlement, and everything the islands' settler society is - its creole Hindi, its towns, its mixed calendar - descends from that. The rulers list below therefore carries offices and administrators, because offices and administrators are what actually governed this place.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
Human occupation of these islands is very old and the internal chronology of it is not recoverable from written sources, because there are none. What exists from outside is a thin line of sailing references: Arab, Chinese and later European pilots knew there were islands here, knew ships had difficulty landing on them, and passed on. Those references tell us where the islands were on somebody else's map. They tell us almost nothing reliable about the people living on them, and the few descriptive claims they carry are hearsay collected at sea. Shell middens and stone material on the coasts are the local evidence, and it is archaeological rather than documentary.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 851 CE | An Arabic account of the sea route to China describes islands in this position whose inhabitants do not trade with passing ships - the earliest external notice of the group. |
| c. 1050 CE | The Thanjavur inscription of Rajendra Chola I names Nakkavaram, the Nicobars to the south, among the places reached by his fleet. These islands are not named; no mainland Indian state administered them. |
| late 13th century | Marco Polo's account carries the name Angamanain for the group, again from report rather than from landing. |
| throughout | Archaeological shell middens on the coasts indicate long, continuous occupation. No dated internal chronology can be reconstructed from them, and none is asserted here. |
For five centuries the islands stayed outside every state that surrounded them. They appear in sailing directions as a hazard and a place to give a wide berth, and in the eighteenth century they begin to appear in survey work as a possible harbour on the Bay of Bengal route. The Danish claim of 1756 covered the Nicobars to the south and not these islands. This is a genuinely thin period in the record, and it is thin because nothing was written down, not because nothing happened.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 15th-17th century | Arab, Chinese and European rutters and sailing directions name the group as a landfall to be avoided; no settlement is attempted. |
| 1756 | The Danish claim from Tranquebar covers the Nicobar group south of the Ten Degree Channel and does not extend to these islands. |
| 1771 | John Ritchie of the Bombay Marine surveys parts of the archipelago, the first systematic charting of its harbours. |
The modern history of the Andamans is the history of a prison that turned into a society. A first attempt at settlement in 1789 failed to disease within seven years. The second, in 1858, was made to hold men convicted after the revolt of the previous year, and it did not fail: it grew into Port Blair, took in successive waves of transported prisoners, built the Cellular Jail between 1896 and 1906, and by the 1930s had generated a settled local population of descendants, released convicts and their families with a creole language of its own. It also, from its first decade, pressed on the people who were already here, with consequences that the census returns record plainly. The Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945 is the only period in which the islands were held by a power other than Britain since the settlement began.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1789-1796 | Lieutenant Archibald Blair of the Bombay Marine establishes a settlement at Chatham Island in the harbour later named for him; it is moved to Port Cornwallis in 1792 and abandoned in 1796 after heavy mortality from disease. |
| 10 March 1858 | A penal settlement is re-established at Port Blair under the superintendence of Dr James Pattison Walker, with two hundred convicts transported after the revolt of 1857. Viper Island is the first site. |
| 17 May 1859 | An armed encounter at Aberdeen, near Port Blair, between Great Andamanese and the settlement's garrison - a defence of ground against a settlement, not part of any mainland movement. |
| 1863 onward | An Andaman Home is opened for Great Andamanese brought into contact with the settlement. Introduced disease follows. The Great Andamanese population, estimated in the thousands at the settlement's founding, is returned at 625 in the 1901 census, 455 in 1911, 207 in 1921 and 90 in 1931. |
| 1868 | A mass escape from the settlement ends in recapture and executions; the figures usually given are 238 escapees and 87 hanged, and they come from the settlement's own returns. |
| 8 February 1872 | Sher Ali Afridi, a convict, kills the Viceroy Lord Mayo during an inspection visit at Hope Town - the only Viceroy of India killed in office. He is tried and hanged. In the same year the Andaman and Nicobar islands are placed under a single Chief Commissioner at Port Blair. |
| 1896-1906 | The Cellular Jail is built at Port Blair: seven three-storey wings radiating from a central watchtower, 696 cells, each 4.5 by 2.7 metres, designed so that no cell faces another. |
| May 1933 | A hunger strike by political prisoners in the Cellular Jail. Mahavir Singh, Mohan Kishore Namadas and Mohit Moitra die during forcible feeding. |
| 1937-1939 | After a sustained public campaign on the mainland, political prisoners are repatriated to mainland jails and the Cellular Jail ceases to hold them. |
| 23 March 1942 - 7 October 1945 | Japanese occupation. Political control is transferred to the Provisional Government of Azad Hind on 29 December 1943, when Subhas Chandra Bose visits Port Blair and raises the flag, though practical authority remains with the Japanese command. On 30 January 1944 forty-four civilians are shot at Homfreyganj on suspicion of espionage. British forces reoccupy Port Blair on 7 October 1945. |
Rulers and commanders
Entered here to say plainly what is not entered. The Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese were not organised as kingdoms, chiefdoms or headships of the sort a rulers list is built for, and the ethnographic record does not support naming individuals as rulers over them. No such names are given here. Their reserves are closed by law and approach and photography are offences.
Surveyed the harbour and established the first British settlement in the islands in 1789. The settlement was moved north in 1792 and abandoned in 1796; the harbour kept his name.
Seat: Chatham Island, later Port Blair
The settlement had no ruler. It had a superintendent reporting to the Government of India, with authority over convicts, guards and the settlement's works. The first was Dr James Pattison Walker, who landed with two hundred convicts on 10 March 1858.
Seat: Port Blair
From 1872 both archipelagos were placed under one officer at Port Blair, an arrangement that governed the Nicobars from an Andaman town and set the administrative geography the islands still carry.
Seat: Port Blair
Administered the Andaman Homes and compiled a large photographic and anthropometric record of the Great Andamanese. It is the source of most published images of them, and it was made by an official of the settlement over people who were not in a position to refuse - which is a fact about the record and should be read with it.
Seat: Port Blair and Ross Island
Held the islands from 23 March 1942. Requisitioned labour and food, built defence works, and conducted espionage trials; the shootings at Homfreyganj on 30 January 1944 took place under its authority. It surrendered the islands in October 1945.
Seat: Port Blair
Political control of the islands was formally transferred to the Provisional Government of Azad Hind on 29 December 1943 and the islands were renamed Shaheed and Swaraj. Practical authority over supply, defence and policing remained with the Japanese command throughout.
Seat: Port Blair
The history of Andaman Islands from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (7)