The Andaman" Local Born": a history of ex-convicts and their descendants in a penal colony in the Bay of Bengal, 1858 to the present day.

This paper explores the history of ex-convicts and their descendants in the penal colony of the Andaman Islands, once part of British India, and now a union territory of the republic of India. Transportation and coeval punishment and labour regimes effected transformations in practices of everyday life and produced new social norms. Colonization and settlement, and its associated social reproductions and reinventions, created forms of de-socialisation and re-socialisation, and had profound effects on labour practices, gender relationships, and religious practices and affiliations. Indeed, the cultural effects of transportation were often encouraged, if unintentionally, by the British administration, though the growing number of freeborn islanders presented it with profound economic, penal and social dilemmas. Finally, the paper will describe how, since independence, both the islands and the mainland have celebrated the cultural legacies of the penal colony, in particular the erasure of many forms of social distinction. The convict history of the islands has thus been rewritten as part of a larger national story of patriotism and anti-colonial struggle.

Clare Anderson is a professor of history at Leicester University. Her interests are colonialism and colonial societies across the British Empire. Her research centres on the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.