ABSTRACT
The widely known allegory of “Kala Pani” gained particular traction in the first decades of the twentieth century when narratives and reports about the incarceration of bourgeois-nationalist revolutionaries in the British penal colony on Andaman Islands reached wider audiences. Kala Pani assumed a prominent position in postcolonial nationalist discourse when hegemonic forms of memorialization transformed the Andamans into an emblematic icon of anti-colonial resistance. Declaring them as major location of the freedom struggle caused an ideological “landscaping” of the islands as a nationalist pilgrimage location. This process had long-lasting effects on local negotiations of place, locality, and belonging; among others, it produced manifold elisions and silenced the subaltern histories of generations of islanders, largely of convicts and their descendants who have started to produce their own social histories. Taking up the problematic of how to write India, the chapter centers on the impact of dominant historiography on collective modes of self-definition and belonging. It critically discusses the dynamic interplay between the hegemonic narrative of the Andaman society as integral part of the “imagined community” of the Indian nation and attempts to resist epistemically by provincializing and localizing the history of the Andamans.
