My report on the Andamans is out in Granta. It is probably the fourth essay on India, part-memoir, part-travel, that Luke Neima has helped me publish there, and my appreciation for Luke as an editor, thoughtful and exact, is profound and filled with gratitude. (He would have improved this preceding sentence. I’m writing in a cab taking me to my hotel in Delhi after a long day of travel.) Here is how the essay begins:

The guide at the Cellular Jail Museum in Port Blair first took us into the small room that had served as the gallows when the place was a working prison under British rule. The jail had been a part of the colonial penal settlement in the Andaman Islands. Situated more than a thousand kilometers from the Indian mainland, the Andamans are a remote archipelago made up of nearly two hundred islands, of which only a few are inhabited. There is evidence to suggest that the indigenous Andamanese tribes have lived on some of the islands since perhaps the end of the Last Glacial period. For much of my life, long before the Andamans became popular as a vacation site, they loomed large as a notorious penal settlement. Thousands of Indians, many of them nationalist rebels, died there. And this fact was confirmed during my visit to the prison-museum in Port Blair. Three nooses hung from the roof of the small room; the rope was new and so was the green paint on the wooden walls, but everything else had been preserved from the time when executions were still taking place. There was a door on the side and a short flight of steps leading to an underground chamber. A sunken rectangular area in the floor marked the space directly under the spot where a body would have dropped with the rope around the neck.

More here.