Cellular Jail in Andaman Islands

The Cellular Jail, also known as Kala Pani located at Port Blair, stood mute witness to the tortures meted out to the freedom fighters, who were incarcerated in this jail.The jail, completed in the year 1906 acquired the name Cellular because it is entirely made up of individual cells for the solitary confinement. The saga of the heroic freedom struggle, brought alive in a moving Son-et-Lumiere, in the Cellular Jail, is very popular among the tourists.

The Cellular Jail, also known as Kālā Pānī (Hindi for black waters), was a colonial prison in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. The prison was used by the British especially to exile political prisoners to the remote archipelago. Many notable independence activists such as Batukeshwar Dutt, Yogendra Shukla among others and the famous Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, were imprisoned here during the struggle for Indias independence. Today, the complex serves as a national memorial monument. Although the prison complex itself was constructed between 1896 and 1906, the British had been using the Andaman islands as a prison since the days in the immediate aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. The construction of the prison started in 1896 and was completed in 1906. The original building was a puce-colored brick building. The bricks used to build the building were brought from Burma. Most prisoners of the Cellular Jail were independence activists. Some inmates were Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, Yogendra Shukla, Batukeshwar Dutt, Babarao Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Bhai Parmanand, [Sohan Singh], Subodh Roy and Trailokyanath Chakravarty Several revolutionaries were tried in the Alipore Case (1908), such as Barindra Kumar Ghose, the surviving companion of Bagha Jatin, was transferred to Berhampore Jail in Bengal, before his mysterious death in 1924. The Savarkar brothers, Babarao and Vinayak, didnt know that they were in different cells in the same jail for two years.