Writing Indigenous Women's Lives in the Bay of Bengal: Cultures of Empire in the Andaman Islands, 1789-1906

C Anderson

doi:10.1093/jsh/shr054

Abstract

This article explores the lives of two Andamanese women, both of whom the British called “Tospy.” The first part of the article takes an indigenous and gendered perspective on early British colonization of the Andamans in the 1860s, and through the experiences of a woman called Topsy stresses the sexual violence that underpinned colonial settlement as well as the British reliance on women as cultural interlocutors. Second, the article discusses colonial naming practices, and the employment of Andamanese women and men as nursemaids and household servants during the 1890s–1910s. Using an extraordinary murder case in which a woman known as Topsy-ayah was a central witness, it argues that both reveal something of the enduring associations and legacies of slavery, as well as the cultural influence of the Atlantic in the Bay of Bengal. In sum, these women's lives present a kaleidoscope view of colonization, gender, networks of Empire, labor, and domesticity in the Bay of Bengal.

Highlights

This article centers on the lives of two indigenous women of the Andaman Islands, both of whom were known by the British as “Topsy.” The East India Company established a settlement in the Andamans archipelago in the Bay of Bengal in 1789, but abandoned it within a decade in the face of devastating rates of disease
The British were more successful in 1858, when they settled the Islands as a penal colony for rebels and mutineers convicted during the great Indian revolt of 1857
There were four main population clusters of islanders, totaling around 6500 souls, and they had a reputation as fierce cannibals In the years before the Indian revolt, islanders had made a series of attacks on shipwrecked or distressed vessels, and the British became concerned with their “pacification”, and the protection of trade routes

Summary

Introduction

This article centers on the lives of two indigenous women of the Andaman Islands, both of whom were known by the British as “Topsy.” The East India Company established a settlement in the Andamans archipelago in the Bay of Bengal in 1789, but abandoned it within a decade in the face of devastating rates of disease. Enough, two of the first residents were Topsy and Jumbo, who was described as her “husband”, together with Snowball and a boy the British called “Sambo.” A country-born man of the cloth from Calcutta, the Reverend Henry Corbyn, was placed in charge of the islanders and, extraordinarily in a penal colony, Indian convicts were used as overseers, or parawallahs (policemen).[11]

Results

Conclusion