In the wake of the 1857 uprising, the British found themselves with more prisoners than prisons. To manage the overflow of captured rebels, they turned to the remote Andaman Islands, where they established a penal colony that would eventually become the infamous Cellular Jail, also known as Kala Pani , in Port Blair in 1906.

The journey to these islands was punishment in itself. Prisoners were forced to violate caste and social norms: food was shared, water came from a common pump, and men of all backgrounds were shackled together. Disease ran rampant, and hygiene was nearly absent.

The nineteenth-century Urdu poet Munir Shikohabadi alluded to the impact of Kala Pani in the following verses:

When they had to leave India and come to this island

The prisoners’ evil fate made the wate

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