If you start on the southeast coast of India and sail across the Bay of Bengal towards Thailand and Myanmar, you will come upon the Andaman Islands. They are actually closer to the Malay Peninsula than to India, but are politically part of India. These islands were added to our ship’s itinerary after our visit to Myanmar was cancelled and we stopped in Port Blair on May 9 (Day 116).
The history of the Andaman Islands has all the features of other places in this part of the world and includes early and late colonial activity. In the mid 1800s, the British decided it would be a good place to imprison “criminals” from India, many of whom were freedom fighters for Indian independence.
Very few cruise ships come to Port Blair, and the infrastructure for locals and tourists is basic. I had booked a short boat ride to an island where the colonial infrastructure of the British was on display in crumbling buildings. Typhoon Mocha, however was starting to stir up the seas, so the boat trip was cancelled. (Our ship left Port Blair an hour earlier than planned and was able to avoid the path of the storm, which later devastated parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar.)
We did get to see the island we would have visited.
One interesting part of the visit to Port Blair related to the Japanese occupation of the islands during World War II. We visited this monument.
Our guide described the Japanese occupation of the islands during the second world war, as the Japanese liberating this territory from British Colonia rule on behalf of the Indians seeking independence. The monument in this picture is the place that the Indian Tricoulor flag was raised on India for the first time. While this is the story presented by our guide when we visited, the truth is much darker and more complex. I searched for more on this and found this article .
I believe our guide said that the Japanese originally built the airfield that services Port Blair today. I tried a quick search to confirm this, but couldn’t easily find it. The airfield was a source of pride to the guide, and a a chance to see it from afar was included on our tour.
This article just scratches the surface of Japanese atrocities with local population, collaborators. It hints that the flag raising was a photo op…, and yet, the struggle for Indian independence also is important. Once again, even generations later, we encounter places where the there still seems to be too much of a residue of traumatic history to make it talk-aboutable.
We did get a very comprehensive tour of the Cellular Jail. This was an “efficient” British remnant of the colonial times with many individual cell blocks. There were multiple wings coming from a central core and this picture only shows two of them.
Many revolutionaries from the struggles for Indian independence were transported to this facility. The displays were aimed to give a sense of the barbarity of the system for those swept up as freedom fighters and political prisoners.
Our tour ended with a visit to a local Hindu temple. This was in a state of disrepair and somehow that felt refreshing.
I took my shoes off and went inside for a blessing.
