Ross Island Penal Colony

Ross Island Penal Colony was a convict settlement that was established in 1858 in the remote Andaman Islands by the British colonial government in India, primarily to jail a large number of prisoners from the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the Indian Mutiny. With the establishment of the penal colony at Ross Island, the British administration made it the administrative headquarters for the entire group of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and built bungalows and other facilities on the site. This colony was meant as "manageable models of colonial governance and rehabilitation". The Chief Commissioner's residence was located at the highest point on the island.

The penal colony became infamous as "Kalapani" or "black water" for the brutalities inflicted by the British authorities on the political prisoners from India, and most of whom had died by 1860 due to illness and torture suffered during the initial stages of the clearance of the forest to establish the colony. In later years the colony experimented for a short time with civilizing the indigenous people of Andamans. The penal colony was used as an experimental station for various methods of torture and medical tests. During the Second World War the island was invaded by the Japanese army, forcing the British to evacuate. The administrative buildings were destroyed but the penal colony remained. After the Allied forces reoccupied the island the penal colony was disbanded on 7 October 1945.

Ross Island, one of the islands chosen for establishing the penal colony, is located near the entrance to the harbour at Port Blair in South Andamans. It is a small island which has a circumference of one mile (1.6 km) only. Once called "Paris of the East" for its exciting social life and tropical forests, the island was devastated by the invading army of the Japanese and also by an earthquake which had struck the island in 1941, and it now appears more like a "jungle-clad Lost City."

The earliest known effort to establish a penal colony was by Archibald Blair who found the remoteness of the island as ideal for such a colony. But his initiative failed to go beyond 1796 as malaria prevented it. The First Indian War of Indian Independence in 1857 rekindled the interest of the British Administration in India to establish a penal colony in the Andaman Islands for political prisoners.

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