Sri Vijaya Puram — the Andaman capital still known worldwide as Port Blair
Sri Vijaya Puram, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, carries one of India's most recent city renamings — recent enough that the older name, Port Blair, remains the dominant name on flight bookings, international maps, and in almost all everyday and travel usage.
What changed, and when
Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced the renaming of Port Blair to Sri Vijaya Puram on 13 September 2024. The change was formalized the next day through a notification in the Andaman and Nicobar Gazette. The government's stated reasoning connected the new name to the region's role in resisting colonial rule — Port Blair was the site of the Cellular Jail, where the British imprisoned Indian freedom fighters — and to the historical Sri Vijaya trading network, part of a broader push to replace colonial-era place names with names carrying Indian historical and cultural roots.
An island capital in transition
Because the renaming happened so recently, most of the infrastructure people actually interact with — airline booking systems, shipping manifests, international maps, hotel listings — still runs on "Port Blair." Name changes take years to fully propagate through global booking and mapping systems, and Sri Vijaya Puram's renaming is early enough in that process that the older name remains, by far, what most people search for and use, even for travel happening today.
History and significance
The islands' modern history is inseparable from the Cellular Jail, built by the British colonial government to house political prisoners, including many of India's independence movement's most prominent figures. The jail, now a national memorial, remains one of the region's most visited sites and a central part of why the area carries such strong historical weight in India's independence narrative — directly informing the government's reasoning for the 2024 renaming.
Geography and getting there
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands sit in the Bay of Bengal, roughly 1,200 kilometers from mainland India, reachable by flight from Chennai and Kolkata or by ship from mainland ports. Sri Vijaya Puram serves as the entry point for the islands' beaches, coral reefs, and forests — including Radhanagar Beach, Ross Island (officially Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island), and various diving and snorkeling sites across the archipelago.
Same place, two names — one much newer than the other
Whether referred to as Port Blair or Sri Vijaya Puram, it's the same capital city of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Unlike renamings that happened decades ago and have settled into public use, this one is still in its earliest stage — the gap here is mostly a matter of how much time has passed since the change, not competing identities.