Gateway to the Andaman Islands — cellular jail, coral reefs, and the road to Havelock
Port Blair is the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago of 572 islands in the Bay of Bengal closer to Myanmar than to the Indian mainland, with some of the best coral reefs and clearest water in Asia. The town itself is functional rather than beautiful, but it contains the Cellular Jail (Kala Pani) — the British colonial prison where Indian independence activists were held and often killed, now a national monument with a moving sound-and-light show. It's the jumping-off point for Havelock Island (Swaraj Dweep), with Radhanagar Beach (consistently ranked Asia's best), and…
The Andaman Islands were used by the British as a remote penal colony from 1858, when the first convicts were transported after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The Cellular Jail (1906) was designed to impose solitary confinement on political prisoners — each prisoner isolated in a cell with no human contact for years. Freedom fighters including Veer Savarkar were held here. The indigenous Andamanese people — who lived in complete isolation for millennia — had their first sustained contact with outsiders through this colonial period, with catastrophic results: population decline from estimated t…