ABSTRACT
British rule in the Andamans was initiated and punctuated by acts of kidnapping: not only the penal transportation of convicts, but also the removal from their homes of indeterminable numbers of Andamanese. The numbers are necessarily beyond determination, because these were relocations without precise beginnings, middles and ends. It was not always clear, for instance, what constituted ‘home’ for an ‘Andamanese’ abducted from a vaguely defined space called ‘the jungle’, kept in an imprecisely bordered institution (also called a ‘Home’), taken by British officers on trips within and beyond the archipelago, and then allowed to disappear. It is not immediately apparent that a Jarawa child sent to boarding-school in Bengal with the expectation that he will return ‘home’ in the future has been kidnapped. The level of coercion involved in tours of Calcutta by groups of Andamanese is not self-evident; it must be distilled from the voices and silences of civilized escorts and observers. There were, in other words, gradations and ambiguities within the experience of kidnapping. Nevertheless, we can say with some certainty that from the outset of colonialism in the islands, coercion was used systematically to move, freeze and re-move aborigines in a geography geared towards the display of savagery.
