Kala-Pani or Primitive Paradise?
Romila Thapar
THE ANDAMAN STORY N. Iqbal Singh Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1979, 321 pp., 75.00
Jan-Feb 1979, volume 3, No 4

The Andaman and Nicobar islands for all their remoteness have nevertheless been the subject of a number of books. Among the classics in ethnography is the study of the tribes of the islands by Radcliffe Brown and as ethnographical studies go it has yet to be replaced. The history of the islands, recorded essentially from the early nineteenth century onwards, tends to be marginal to the history of the subconti­nent, yet, because of the function of one of the islands as a penal settlement the perspective on the history of the Indian subcontinent has a certain uniqueness. It remains something of an accident that the islands came under British rule, when in fact their physical proximity is greater to South-East Asia. This was not however entirely a quirk of colonial enterprise since their location in the Indian Ocean made of them an area of great strategic impor­tance in the maritime control over the ocean and with the expansion of commer­cial links with South-East Asia and China by the mid-nineteenth century, such a location was bound to be of considerable significance.

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