Andaman & Nicobar Islands
The Far Blue Edge
“Freedom is a word you only weigh properly in the places where it was once taken away.”
Two Hours of Open Water
The flight from Chennai to Port Blair spends two hours over water with no land in it, and somewhere in the middle of that blue I understood the geography I was entering. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are not off the coast of India; they are off the coast of nothing. Nearly six hundred islands strung along a drowned mountain range, closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than to the mainland, sitting on the seam where the Indian tectonic plate grinds under the Burmese, a fact the islands were violently reminded of in 2004, when the great earthquake and tsunami rearranged coastlines here and left memorials in half the harbour towns. From my window the first islands appeared as green so dense it read as black, edged in reef. The man beside me, a sailor returning to duty, looked past me at them and offered the only orientation I would need: 'Different India down there. The sea is in charge.'
The far edge of the map is now where Indians go to be happiest. There are worse verdicts on a century.From the chapter
The Prison at the Edge of the Map
Port Blair is a pleasant, hilly harbour town with an unbearable building at its heart, and the building is the reason every Indian should come here once. The Cellular Jail (Kala Pani, the black water) was completed by the British in 1906 as a machine for erasing people: seven wings radiating from a central tower, six hundred and ninety-three cells, each one solitary, each one facing the back of the next wing so that no prisoner could see another's face. Here the empire sent the men it feared most, revolutionaries, writers, the makers of 1857's rebellion earlier and the freedom movement's hard core later. Veer Savarkar was held a decade; the wing where he was kept preserves his cell. The gallows room keeps its three nooses. I walked the corridors in the afternoon with a school group from Lucknow, all of us going quieter wing by wing, and stood in a cell (three paces by two, one high slit of window) for as long as I could manage, which was not long.
But the jail saves its full weight for after dark.
The chapter continues in the book…
- AnticipationTwo Hours of Open Water
- ArrivalThe Prison at the Edge of the Map
- ExplorationIslands in Their Working Clothes
- DiscoveryLearning to Breathe Underwater
- Traveller's NotebookAndaman Essentials
- FarewellThe Edge That Turned Out to Be a Door
Read Chapter 8 in full
The complete Andaman & Nicobar Islands chapter — with when to go, getting around, what things cost, what to eat and how to travel responsibly — is in 28 Shades of India.