ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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On the Beach in the Andaman Islands: Post-mortem of a Failed Colony

The short history of the first British-Indian colony in the Andaman Islands, established in 1789 and abandoned in 1796, shows that European settler colonialism at the time had not resolved the contradictions generated by native settlers. The place of aborigines in the political space of the settlement was further unresolved. The newcomers in the Andamans spent six years on a literal and conceptual beach: the limited space between the ship and the jungle. Not knowing how to integrate the Andamanese into the ideology of their intrusion, and unable to sustain the vision of a permanent civilisation in the islands, they fell into a state of panic and dispersed. This paper argues that the failed settlement represented a conceptual and logistical limit of the late 18th century imaginary of the offshore colony.

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Early in 1771, the hydrographer John Ritchie arrived in the Andaman Islands, stopping in a channel that he named Diligent Strait. Ritchie did not have a particular interest in the Andamans; he was conducting a survey of the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal, charting anchorages for an energetic British maritime project expanding out of eastern India and Malaya. For four days, Ritchie and his shipmates watched the shore, seeing mostly absences and mirages. We saw no boats, nor was there the least appearance of houses, or cultivation, he wrote. In the nightsthe shore was lighted up with hundreds of Torches, which made an appearance, as if we were in the middle of a great Lake, surrounded by houses lighted up.1 Their sense of seeing nothing substantial was accompanied by an acute sense of being watched by the invisible and the unreal.

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