Introduction

In an appendix to the 1911 census of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Major J. M. Woolley, the Senior Medical Officer, noted an apparent statistical anomaly. Among the population of male convicts transported to the penal colony, the rate of insanity was 11.4 in every thousand. Using the rather scant statistics available to him, the limitations of which he readily acknowledged, he estimated that this was fourteen times higher than the figure for British India as a whole, which he calculated to be 0.8 in a thousand. Indeed, the figure was nearly four times higher than the ‘regrettably high’ rates of insanity in England and Wales, which he cited as 3.6 per thousand. A year later, in an article published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Woolley highlighted a similar trend regarding the numbers of male suicides in the Andaman Islands' penal colony. It appeared that suicides were over sixteen times more frequent in the Andamans than in Bengal. In both cases his explanations for these exceptionally high figures were the same, shielding the penal system from any share of blame. Emphasizing the leniency of the regime and the general health of convicts on arrival, Woolley argued that there was a pathological link between murder, insanity and suicide. The high rates of insanity and suicide in the penal colony could thus be attributed to the high proportion of transported men convicted of murder, a figure of roughly 90 per cent.