PHILIPP ZEHMISCH      4 Freedom Fighters or Criminals? Postcolonial Subjectivities in the Andaman Islands, South-East India This article looks at how postcolonial subjectivities are related to the Indian freedom struggle and the transportation of criminal convicts to the Andaman Islands. It focuses on articulations of historically produced subject-positions in political negotiations of locality. By Philipp Zehmisch Upon my first arrival in the Andaman Islands in 2001, I had a certain imagination of a tropical island space in my mind. I expected picturesque sandy beaches, clear water and 'wild' jungles and, eventually, 'wild savages', too. 1 But disembarkation in the harbour of Port Blair after a three day journey by ship somehow disappointed my urgent and immediate curiosity to explore 'untouched nature'. Port Blair was just another town, not what I expected to be among a group of islands in the middle of the Bay of Bengal. The journey over more than thousand kilometres by sea from the Indian mainland towards Burma and Thailand had nurtured the sincere and somewhat naïve desire to transcend the frontier of the 'civilised' world towards an unknown destination waiting to be explored by me. I was astonished to find quite a well-maintained and organised townlet spreading over several hills along the rocky coastline of South Andaman. Apparently, a lot of funds from the Indian central government in New Delhi were flowing into these islands, helping to create a comparatively well-off island society. Soon I found out why. Taking a walk through the representative part of Port Blair, the Marina Park, I came across a lot of monuments that are supposed to reiterate the significance of this place for the Indian motherland – among them not only a statue of the famous poet Rabindranath Tagore, but also tanks and a missile, symbolizing the strength of the Indian Defence forces deployed in this strategically important chain of islands. Overlooking the small valley, in which the Marina Park is located, a giant map on a gentle gradient depicted the 1 Throughout the world, the Andaman Islands are known as being inhabited by some of the last groups of ‘Noble Savages’. These indigenous hunter-gatherers have gained popularity in anthropological literature. The most famous of these scholarly works is Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s structure-functionalist classic The Andaman Islanders (1922). geographical relief of India. The map included not only all the Indian states but also, in considerable distance from the subcontinent, a proportionately oversize version of the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 2 Its caption conveys the central message for the islanders and the visitors: “I love my India”. I found some more examples of the nationalist transformation of public space. Right next to the map, there is a sports complex called Netaji Stadium, named after the Bengali nationalist 'Netaji' Subhash Chandra Bose. A huge statue in Marina Park, depicting him in uniform with extended arm and index finger, is reminiscent of similar archaic and martial monuments of 'great' 20 th century leaders all over the world. In hegemonic nationalist accounts, the history of the Andamans, which were part of the British Empire, is predominantly memorized as an important location of the Indian freedom struggle, in which Netaji, as an icon of anti-colonial resistance, became inextricably entangled. 3 Netaji's political involvement in the island history becomes evident to the outsider by visiting the Cellular Jail, where he once held a speech to hail the Andamans as a symbol of anti-colonial resistance. Situated on a hillock above the Marina Park, the 2 In this paper, I will not focus on the Nicobar Islands, which, together with the Andamans, form a Union Territory of the Indian nation-state. 3 Bose headed the Singapore- based Indian National Army (INA) in anti-British war efforts along with the Axis Powers during WW II. Netaji's special historical relevance to the An- damans derives from his alliance with and support of Japanese forces against the Allied Forces in South-East Asia. Japan occupied the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 1942, until they were reoccupied by the British after the Japanese capitulation in May 1945. Concurrently, in 1943, Japan allowed Bose to come to the Andamans and to install a ‘Provisional Govern- ment of Free India’. However, executive powers of this 'pup- pet' government remained very limited due to Japanese aver- sion against handing over power (Mathur, 1984: 251).