The cellular jail brings back memories of torture chambers during the British Raj, of all those great names who were condemned to a life in the small, dark cells.

The genesis of the Cellular Jail in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands can be traced back to the British efforts of suppressing the rampant hoards of thugs or thuggies (clan of dacoits), who ravaged large tracts of India. However, the jail became significant and grasped the imagi­nation of the people of India and abroad when, during the course of our freedom strug­gle, the British began deporting political pris­oners to Port Blair. The penal settlement in Andaman goes back to 1857 (the first war of Indian independence), when a lot of revolutionaries were deported to this island. Though not much literary and material evidence of that colony is available, it is said that the deportees were badly treated and made to live in sub-human conditions.

The construction of the jail was started in 1896 and took 14 years to complete. Located at Aberdeen, it stands on an outcrop over­looking Sessostris Bay facing the Ross Island.

The original building was a seven pronged, puce-colored brick building with a central tower as the fulcrum. The tower used to house a bell which tolled the hour, but which was also sent into a frantic, frenzied alarm during a crisis.

On each story near the fulcrum, was posted a guard who had to merely walk around like the hand of a clock to get a clear, unobstructed view of the verandas, which faced the cells and from which he was protected by iron grilled doors. When completed in 1910, the Cellular Jail had 698 cells. Each cell was 4.5 meters by 2.7 meters with a solitary ventilator located three meters off the ground. Thus, a prisoner could neither see anything nor communicate with other inmates. And to make it just a little harder for the prisoners, each wing faced the rear of the other. Even now, as one walks around the prison complex and the execution room where prison­ers were hanged, the shed where they worked at the oil press, the walls with hooks from which the prisoners were tied as punishment - one gets a shiver down ones spine.

The quality of life in the Cellular Jail was poor. Prisoners were incarcerated, tortured, and subjected to most inhuman living conditions by the British officers. In 1942 during World War II, the Japanese imperial forces captured the island and freed the Indian prisoners. However, their occupation of the islands was not without its own tales of horror and brutality.