Three Hunger Strikers Died in the Andamans in May 1933. The Government Told the Commons That Two Had Died of Pneumonia, Not of Hunger.

On 26 June 1933 Mr. T. Williams put a question to the House of Commons about “40 political prisoners who are on hunger strike in the Andamans.” He asked the Secretary of State for India to say “how many deaths have occurred and the date of each death.” Mr. Butler, answering for the minister, Sir Samuel Hoare, read out what the Government of India had reported: “Three deaths occurred, on the 18th, the 26th and about the 28th of May. In two cases death is stated to have been caused by pneumonia and not to have been due to hunger-striking.”

The answer named no one. The Hellenic-Indian Society for Culture and Development, in its summary of the strike, names Mahavir Singh, Mohan Kishore Namadas and Mohit Moitra. It says British officials force-fed the strikers through tubes pushed up the nose and that “Some died of pneumonia when the milk entered their lungs.” Hansard and the society both use the word pneumonia. They disagree about what brought it on.

The prison was the Cellular Jail at Port Blair, and by 1933 the British had held a convict settlement there for 75 years. This piece follows it from the first ship to the strike of 1937, using committee reports, the prisoners’ own books and the Commons record. The reprisals that filled the first ships are told in the British revenge for 1857 and are not repeated here.

A committee looks for an island

In November 1857 the Government of India was still fighting the rising that began with the greased cartridges at Barrackpore. It also had a problem of numbers. Charles Low’s History of the Indian Navy (1877) says the mutiny “placed in the hands of the Government many thousands of rebels” and that what to do with them “became one of pressing urgency.” Lord Canning appointed a committee to examine the Andaman Islands “and report upon their suitability for a convict establishment.” Its members were Dr F. J. Mouat, the Inspector of Prisons, Lieutenant Heathcote of the Indian Navy and Surgeon Playfair. The steam frigate Semiramis sailed with them on 23 November 1857.

Mouat told the story himself in Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders (1863), and he was plain about the purpose. A settlement was needed for rebels whose crimes, in his view, did not call for the death penalty but who could not safely be freed “until either the last traces of disaffection had entirely disappeared, or the natives of India were thoroughly convinced that any further attempt at rebellion against the authority of England must infallibly be put down.” He found “something poetical in the retributive justice” of having Indian rebels reclaim a “fair and fertile tract of land.” That land was the home of the Andamanese, whom the same sentence calls a “more primitive” race.

India’s submission to UNESCO says the committee surveyed the islands in December 1857 and reported in January 1858, and that the first batch of 200 convicts arrived on 10 March 1858 “under the overall charge of Dr. J. P. Walker.” Later deportees, the submission says, included men from the Wahabi movement, the Manipur revolt and Burmese rebels.

A death rate “not a high one”

The settlement’s own reports show the cost. The administration report for 1866 to 1867, by Lieutenant-Colonel B. Ford, gives the population as 8,070 and records 675 convict deaths in 1866, a death rate of 10.56 per cent. Ford did not treat that as an alarm. Many new arrivals were old or worn out, he said, and he concluded: “in view of the above circumstances, and of the generally laborious nature of the work required of the convicts in Port Blair in all weather, the death-rate cannot be considered a high one.”

A Viceroy at the jetty

On 8 February 1872 the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, spent a day inspecting the settlement. W. W. Hunter, his official biographer, describes the precautions. Convicts were “kept at their regular work, so that the Viceroy might see the Settlement as it really was.” Armed police walked in front, on the flanks and behind, and troops stood under arms on Viper and Ross Islands, “where the worst characters are quartered.”

The danger was thought to be over. After dark, at the Hopetown jetty, with Mayo coming down from a walk up Mount Harriet, a convict rushed out from behind loose stones and stabbed him twice. Mayo was dead by the time the launch reached his ship.

The killer, Hunter writes, was a man from beyond the North-Western Frontier who had been condemned to death at Peshawar for killing an enemy. Because the evidence was “chiefly circumstantial,” the sentence was commuted to transportation for life, and at Hopetown he became a barber among the ticket-of-leave convicts. Asked why he did it, he said, “By the order of God.” Hunter would not name him: “Neither his name, nor that of his village or tribe, will find record in this book.” He was hanged on Viper Island on 11 March 1872.

Seven wings around one tower

By the 1890s the authorities wanted a jail where convicts could be held alone. India’s UNESCO submission says a committee of Sir Charles Lyall and Sir A. S. Lethbridge visited Port Blair in 1890 and recommended a penal facility near the port. Work began under a settlement order of 13 September 1893 and finished in 1905 to 1906. Ministry of Culture records, as summarised by the visitor site CellularJail.com, date the start to 1896.

Convicts built it. The submission says prisoners made 30 lakh (3,000,000) bricks for it, and that its “Iron grills, chains, fetters, shackles, flogging stands, and oil mills” came from England. The jail had three storeys and seven wings of unequal length, spreading from a central watch tower. Each cell measured 13 and a half feet by 7 and opened on a verandah four feet wide. None had a toilet.

The plan followed two European ideas, the Separate System, in which every prisoner is confined alone, and the Panopticon, in which one guard in a tower can watch every wing without being seen. The submission says the jail was designed “to check exchange of ideas” so that the settlement “could be considered as next to capital punishment.”

The cell count depends on who is counting. The UNESCO submission says 698. CellularJail.com, reporting Ministry of Culture figures, gives 663 by 1905 to 1906 plus 30 more in 1909, which makes 693, and reports 689 from a Prime Ministers Museum and Library paper.

Ten pounds of mustard oil or thirty of coconut

Barindra Kumar Ghose, convicted in the Alipore bomb case, arrived “perhaps on the 11th of December” 1909, according to The Tale of My Exile (1922). In its first pages he says the book is “the joint utterance of two tongues”, his own and that of a fellow prisoner he calls Upen.

They had been at Port Blair six or seven months when, he writes, “a veritable comet arose in the heavens of our destiny in the person of a new Superintendent. Our fate was sealed.” The new man put some of the political prisoners on the oil mills. “Each had to turn out per day either 10 lbs. of mustard oil or 30 lbs. of coconut oil. Even robust and stalwart fellows get prostrated in turning an oil mill.” The men had to run up to the third storey, each with a 50 lb. sack of coconuts on his back, and start at once.

Nandagopal, the editor of Swaraj of Allahabad, resisted by quoting the prison’s own rules back at the jailer. The Government had fixed the hours from 10 to 12 for rest, he said, so he chewed each mouthful slowly and lay down on a blanket. When the oil came up short he told the authorities: “I am not a bullock certainly that I should turn the mill the whole day.” The ration he got, he said, was “not worth even one anna and a half.” The authorities then ordered everyone to grind oil for three days, and Barindra writes that “many of us refused this time to work at the mill. Thus the strike began.”

The punishments were rice-water gruel, bar fetters and handcuffs, then separate cells. Indubhushan hanged himself from a skylight. Ullaskar, left hanging by his handcuffs with a fever, lost his mind. The strikers’ demands were “(1) proper food, (2) release from labour and (3) freedom to associate with each other.”

A young man from Chinsura, Nanigopal, went on hunger strike on Viper Island, and after four days the authorities fed him milk through a rubber pipe pushed into his nose. He stayed with the strike, and “when he was exhausted and helpless through fasting for more than a month and a half, even then the authorities did not hesitate to hang him up by the handcuffs.” The press took it up, Barindra says, and the Government sent Dr Lukis to inquire. He adds that the doctor’s report was never published.

In 1913 Sir Reginald Craddock, a member of the Viceroy’s council, visited Port Blair. Barindra records what he told the prisoners: “You were hatching conspiracy while outside.” When Nanigopal told his own story, Craddock said: “You are an enemy of the Govt, you ought to have been shot down.” Nanigopal answered that if so, the Government could have saved itself the cost of courts and laws.

Savarkar and the jailer Barrie

V. D. Savarkar wrote Majhi Janmathep in Marathi after his release from the islands. Its English translator’s publisher says the first edition, in 1927, sold out within months, that the Bombay Government then banned it, and that the ban was lifted in 1947. The translator’s note says the Bombay High Court sentenced Savarkar at the end of 1910 to fifty years’ transportation.

On arrival he was received by the jailer, Mr. Barrie. “Leave him; he is not a tiger,” Barrie told the sergeant, before asking whether Savarkar was the man who had tried to escape at Marseilles. Barrie would not use the words “political prisoner”. “You are not political prisoners” was his slogan, Savarkar writes, and the political prisoners wore a badge marked D, which stood for “dangerously.”

Savarkar’s account of the oil mill matches Barindra’s. The prisoners were “yoked like animals to the handle that turned the wheel,” and “out of a hundred, only one with a callous body could hardly complete his daily quota of thirty pounds of cocoanut oil.” On the day of the coronation celebrations in December 1911, prisoners who had hoped for release were locked back into their cells. Barrie told Savarkar: “I am very sorry, indeed, that the man with the longest punishment in this jail should not get even a day’s remission on this happy day.”

Savarkar also records a disagreement among the strikers. Nanigopal was close to death after his long fast, and Savarkar, who says he was “always against the suicidal policy of hunger-strike,” went on a three-day fast himself to persuade the young man to eat. The Government of India then issued a notification, which Savarkar prints and Barindra lists in the same terms. Men with fixed terms would go back to Indian jails. Men sentenced for life would serve fourteen years inside the prison, and after that be given lighter work.

The closure that never closed

In January 1920 a jail commission visited Port Blair and, Barindra writes, “spoke very strongly” against the hospital arrangements. In the 1920s the settlement was reorganised, Taylor Sherman’s study shows, so that convicts could take land and bring their families from the mainland.

Then came the reversal. On 11 July 1932 Sir Samuel Hoare told the Commons that 100 prisoners convicted of terrorist offences would be moved from Bengal to the Andamans, a step “necessary in the interests of gaol discipline, which the terrorist prisoners have been doing their utmost to undermine.” On 24 October 1932 he said the Government of India had “made no change in their policy of gradually abolishing the penal settlement,” and that the prisoners “will serve their sentences in the cellular gaol.”

Colonel Wedgwood told Hoare that it was ten years since the decision to end the settlement. Mr. Attlee asked whether the climate, on which that decision had been based, had changed. Sir Alfred Knox pointed out that British soldiers were stationed there and said that if the climate was good enough for them it was good enough for “Indian terrorists.”

May 1933: the Commons argues

Political prisoners on the mainland had already used the fast. The Kakori prisoners did so in 1927, and Bhagat Singh and his comrades in a Lahore jail. At Port Blair the strike of May 1933 produced the three deaths that Mr. Williams asked about.

Butler held to the official line. The Commons was told on 26 June that “the hunger strike was started with a view to breaking prison discipline, and the authorities were bound to resist it.” Williams answered that the strike “actually started because prisoners were sent to the Andamans.”

On 17 July Butler said the Government were “satisfied that the hunger strike is ended, and that the conditions are satisfactory.” Colonel Barker, the Punjab inspector-general of prisons, had gone to the Andamans to look at the medical arrangements for the strikers. Butler said Barker had been sent “not to make a formal inquiry and present a report, but to consult with, and advise, the local authorities.” The cause of the strike, he said, was “an attempt to undermine prison discipline, and the hunger strike was defeated.”

In India the reaction was different. On 2 September 1933 Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to B. K. Das Gupta, agreeing to support a manifesto on the Andaman prisoners that was being prepared for Rabindranath Tagore, P. C. Ray and others. “I have been deeply shocked,” he wrote, “at the terrible tragedy that has been enacted in the Andamans and at the amazingly callous attitude of the government in regard to it.”

July 1937: “painfully starving to death”

The next mass strike began on 24 July 1937. On 6 August Nehru issued a statement from Allahabad: “For some days now we have lived under the oppression of thought that nearly two hundred of our countrymen are on hunger strike in the Andamans and are painfully starving to death.” The Congress Working Committee, in a resolution reproduced in Gandhi’s Collected Works, said it had long held that using the islands as a penal settlement, “more especially for political prisoners, is barbarous.” Nehru conceded on 19 August that “no government can surrender simply because there is a hunger strike.” On 29 August he said the Government of India was not prepared to consider the prisoners’ demands.

Gandhi’s volume of the Collected Works shows what he did. He asked the strikers to give up the fast and to assure him that they no longer believed in terrorist methods. On or after 16 August he told Tagore by telegram that he would do his utmost to end the crisis. On 29 August all but seven strikers suspended the fast. The chronology then lists Gandhi’s telegrams of 3, 8 and 11 September urging the rest to stop, and enters the last suspension between 15 and 25 September. India’s UNESCO submission counts the strike at 45 days and says it ended only through the intervention of Gandhi and Tagore.

By 30 October 1937 Gandhi was meeting Andaman prisoners at Alipore Central Jail in Calcutta, which means some had already been brought back to the mainland. The UNESCO submission says all the political prisoners were back on the mainland by January 1938.

What stands there now

The Japanese held the islands from 1942 to 1945. India’s submission says Subhas Chandra Bose visited the Cellular Jail on 29 December 1943 and called it the “Indian Bastille.” When Parliament discussed renaming the islands on 22 August 1969, The News Minute reports, K. R. Ganesh told Parliament that the history of the islands began in 1858, not 1943.

Four of the seven wings are gone. The UNESCO submission says they were demolished after damage in the earthquake of 1941. The Ministry of Culture, as CellularJail.com reports it, says two were dismantled for building material during the Japanese occupation and two later made way for a hospital. The surviving three wings and the central tower were declared a National Memorial by the Prime Minister on 11 February 1979.