After the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), a penal settlement in the Andamans started operating to transport &ldquomutiny&rdquo and other prisoners, and gradually, a convict society in the Andaman Islands was formed, devised by class, caste, and religion. Starting 1909, the colonial government transported &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo whom they termed &ldquoterrorist prisoners&rdquo, and eventually, the penal settlement witnessed a revolutionary history from the much-hyped Cellular Jail. Post-independence, the Indian nation, in an effort to immortalise the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo, commemorated the Cellular Jail as a National Memorial and documented in detail their &ldquosacrifices&rdquo from post-colonial perspectives. Two significant phenomena occur during this period. First, it is established that between 1857 (the Mutiny /First War of Independence) and 1942 (the Japanese Occupation of the Islands), the Empire negotiated with Indian convicts to develop an elaborate convict society in the Andamans. The second part of the factual &ldquotale&rdquo of the negotiations between the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo and the colonial Government, as well as the Gandhian political system, is lost in oblivion, which invariably creates a subaltern site in postcolonial studies. Juridical petitions, native speeches on the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo incarcerated in the Cellular Jail and case files of &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo are sites hardly ever explored in Indian academia.

The memoirs and autobiographies of convicts, such as Barindra Ghosh&rsquos The Tale of My Exile and V.D. Savarkar&rsquos My Transportation for Life, composed after their release, present the struggle of the convicts appropriating themselves as &ldquonational heroes&rdquo while their juridical petitions complicate this history. This appropriation not only contradicts the colonial representation of these convicts as &ldquoterrorists&rdquo but also significantly ignores the negotiations that the prisoners had with the colonial government, Gandhi, and other Indian spokespersons to secure their release. Focusing on the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo case files, diary entries, petitions, and autobiographical narratives, this thesis highlights how the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo in the Andamans sought freedom&mdashboth personal and political&mdashfrom within the penal system by negotiating with contrasting ideological frames. In short, divided into six chapters, this thesis, while taking into account the history behind the colonisation of the Andamans, highlights its evolution, locates the narrative history behind incarceration of &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo in the Andamans and suggests that it is when the Empire transported the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo did the Andamans gain prominence and were integrated into the Indian nation. A shift in the image of the Andamans from a &ldquofar distant land&rdquo in the colonial times to the contemporary image of &ldquoMuktitirth&rdquo has only been possible because of the struggle of the &ldquopolitical prisoners&rdquo in the Cellular Jail and their subsequent integration with the nation&rsquos freedom struggle movement.

Keywords: Sepoy Mutiny Andaman Penal Settlement Cellular Jail Political Prisoners Hunger Strike Indian Nation