26/2: When the Empire Receded from the Andamans
By Gajanan Khergamker
On 26 February 1942, the Union Jack was lowered not in ceremony but in retreat at Cellular Jail and across Port Blair. The British administration, battered by Japanese air raids earlier that month and isolated by the rapid fall of imperial outposts across Southeast Asia, evacuated the Andaman Islands. What followed was Japanese occupation. What lingered, however, was something more layered: a symbolic rupture in British authority on Indian soil.
For decades, the Cellular Jail had stood as the empire’s distant fortress of punishment. Built to isolate and silence political prisoners, it had housed men whose names would later enter the vocabulary of India’s freedom struggle. The Andamans were meant to be a place of exile, a geography of erasure. Instead, by the early 1940s, global war had reached these waters of the Bay of Bengal and inverted the meaning of the islands. The coloniser departed under duress. The prison that once embodied British permanence became a witness to imperial vulnerability.
The evacuation of 26/2 did not hand power to Indians in any formal constitutional sense. Japanese forces moved in within weeks. Civilian life entered a period of suspicion and hardship under wartime occupation. The archipelago endured fear, shortages and the uncertain calculus of survival between competing empires. Freedom was not immediate. It was fractured, complicated and shadowed by a new occupying power.
And yet, historians often mark this date as the first moment in the twentieth century when a British-ruled Indian territory slipped from London’s grasp under the pressure of war. It was a crack in the façade of invincibility. The empire that had transported freedom fighters in chains to the Andamans now withdrew without ceremony. For many nationalists on the mainland, the news carried a quiet resonance. The empire could be dislodged.
The Andamans would later enter the national imagination again when Subhas Chandra Bose visited in December 1943, symbolically raising the tricolour. But 26 February remains the hinge. It was the day the British left, even if history refused to offer uncomplicated liberation in its wake.
Eighty four years later, the memory of that departure is finding a new voice. Assistant Editor Manu Shrivastava announces the launch of a documentary initiative titled 'The Cellular Jail Yatra' as part of The Draft's exclusive foray into Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
Shrivastava describes the work as an attempt to “walk the corridors not merely as tourists, but as inheritors of unfinished conversations”. The documentary will revisit the jail’s radial wings, its watchtowers and the harbour that once watched ships carry prisoners into exile and administrators out of retreat. Archival material, survivor accounts and military records are expected to anchor the narrative in documented fact, even as the storytelling aims to evoke the turmoil of those weeks in 1942.
The choice of date as a peg is deliberate. It falls within the fortnight that saw British evacuation harden into Japanese control, allowing the film to frame 26/2 not as an isolated date but as the beginning of a volatile interregnum. The title “Yatra” signals pilgrimage rather than spectacle. It suggests movement through memory.
For India, 26 February 1942 is not Independence Day. That would come on 15 August 1947. But in the salt air of Port Blair, it marked an earlier moment when imperial certainty faltered. The Cellular Jail, once designed to extinguish dissent, endured to tell the story. History often moves in grand declarations. Sometimes it shifts in the quiet act of departure.
On 26/2, the empire left the islands. The idea of India remained.
