Labour — The Grand Desideratum

Abstract

Although the Andamans were a penal settlement, the British always cherished a vision of transforming their imperial outpost into a flourishing agricultural colony like the other island colonies in the Indian Ocean. For the colonial administration the challenges were many. Converting the Andamans, covered with dense tropical forests, marshes and swamps, into a naval station, a port of call or a convict station, let alone an agricultural colony, required expending huge amounts of labour. Working the colony was a task beyond the convicts alone and necessitated the importation of free labour, Chinese contractors, Indian traders and merchants, and contractual labour. The use of free labour alongside convict labour raked up controversy that the Settlement could ill-afford. In addition, the long-term goal of transforming the Islands into a profitable entity had to be reconciled with the day-to-day working of the penal colony whose management rested in the hands of the individual superintendents and officials who had their own personal and divergent conceptions of working the island space. So far historians have discussed the ideological significance of labour in the Andamans as a crucial integrative and controlling (or reforming) device.2 This chapter focuses on the actual working of the labour regime in the Andamans. It examines how the colonial administration organized and allocated labour to the convict workforce and thereby attempted to reconcile and meet the challenges that it faced.