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READING 3
Anand Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2
(Fall 2003), 179–208.
Abstract: South Asian convicts transported to Southeast Asia in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were part of a global system of
forced migration. Together with slaves and bonded and indentured laborers,
they helped settle and colonize the overseas European empires. No wonder,
then, that recent writings have designated them as “convict workers,” an
emphasis that shifts attention away from their earlier characterization as
“professional and habitual criminals” to highlight their actual lived
experiences in the penal settlements. Indeed, Indian “convict workers” filled
a critical need for labor in Southeast Asia, playing an especially significant
role in carrying out the public works projects that were so essential to the
establishment and consolidation of the British Empire in the region. This
convict system came to an end in the late nineteenth century.
Convicts transported from South Asia to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries were part of a global system of forced
migration. Along with the convicts sent to Australia from Britain and Ireland,
they were, as scholars of transportation have rightly insisted,
part of a larger international and intercontinental flow of forced migration
including . . . French, Spanish and Russian convicts, and “bonded” Indian and
Melanesian contract labour. After 1820 a quarter of a million convicts were shipped
across the world’s oceans to colonise Australia, New Caledonia, Singapore and
French Guiana, and to meet labour demand in Gibraltar, Bermuda, Penang,
Malacca and Mauritius. . . . Transportation, like the recruiting of slaves and the
contracting of bonded workers, was complementary to the international migration
of free European peoples before 1914. Convictism was a labour system existing in
many countries of the world in the nineteenth century. 1 [End Page 179]
Indeed, the history of transported convicts can be located “within the
comparative literature of international ‘unfree’ labour migration” and tied to
such “mainstream” topics as: the slave-trade from Atlantic and Indian Ocean
Africa; the Trans-Saharan slave-trade; the international migration of
indentured labourers from South and East Asia; the large-scale mobilization
of various kinds of ‘unfree’ migrant labour within colonial Africa and South
Asia; the migration of indentured servants from Britain to North America and
the Caribbean; and the uses made of all this vast and varied flow of humanity
on the one hand and its own historical agency, lived experience and cultural
history on the other, in destinations around the world. 2
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1
The flows of convict workers between 1787 and 1920 involved significant
numbers, especially to Australia. The traffic from Britain—extensively
studied because of its centrality in the peopling of Australia—involved as
many as 80,000 to New South Wales between 1788 and 1840; 67,000 to 69,000
to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) between 1801 and 1852; and two smaller
cohorts of 3,000 and 9,700 people during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. These
forced migrations followed on the heels of the transportation of some 50,000
convicted felons from Britain to North America, principally to Maryland and
Virginia, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Smaller in scale and far
less known are the movements of convicts from South Asia to Southeast Asia.
India dispatched 4,000–6,000 convicts to Bengkulen between 1787 and 1825
and 15,000 to the Straits Settlements between 1790 and 1860. Another 1,000–
1,500 were transported from Ceylon to Malacca in the Straits Settlements
between 1849 and 1873, and several thousand more were sent to Burma and
to areas outside of Southeast Asia, principally Mauritius between 1815 and
1837 and the Andaman Islands after 1857. 3
This paper tracks the history of convicts from South Asia to their Southeast
Asian penal destinations in order to assess their roles as “convict workers.”
That is, it examines their roles as members of a labor [End Page 180] force that
was recruited and organized to service the projects of the emerging British
Empire in the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
My use of the term “convict workers,” derived from the revisionist
scholarship on Australian convict history, is deliberate. As in that literature,
so too here it is intended to underscore their roles as productive laborers and
to shift attention away from their criminal pasts, which previously misled
considerations of their potential and effectiveness as workers. Nor did the
earlier generation of writings in Australian history apparently plumb deeply
enough into the criminal and personal backgrounds of the offenders. Instead
it wrongly assumed that the convicts were “professional and habitual
criminals” whose character and criminality destined them to become
inefficient workers. The notion of “convict workers” therefore tilts against
“the received interpretation… [that] has emphasised male convicts as
hardened and professional criminals, females as prostitutes and convictism as
a brutal and inefficient system of forced labour.” 4
The new emphasis on convicts as workers is also directed at relocating the
scholarship on convict transportation within the comparative literature of
“ ‘unfree’ labor migration.” Such a global perspective moves away from the
earlier insistence on viewing the phenomenon of transportation solely within
national histories and toward understanding its comparability with other
forms of forced migrations and its direct connections to these other flows, as
this account of their experiences in Southeast Asia will indicate.
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2
Although the discussion here is centered on Indian convicts, it recognizes that
they were part of a larger traffic pattern in South and Southeast Asia that
transported different peoples in different directions across these regions.
“[N]atives of the Malay countries” were transferred to India, Chinese from
Singapore and Hong Kong were exiled to India and from Hong Kong also
briefly to the Straits Settlements, and convicts from Ceylon and Burma were
dispatched to these venues as well. 5 In 1853 the convicts lodged in the Straits
were described as of a “most heterogeneous nature, comprising individuals
not only of all [End Page 181] the tribes of Asia from the Punjaub to Ceylon,
but also men from many of the provinces of China, Jews, Parsees[,] Seedi
Caffers and Malays, and the House of Correction . . . held of late not a few
Europeans . . .” 6
Indian convict transportation to Southeast Asia provided much needed labor
in the rising outposts of the British Empire in Southeast Asia in the late
eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Important in this historical
context is an understanding of the conditions and circumstances that
generated a pressing need for their labor as well as of the roles these convicts
played—literally and figuratively—in establishing and consolidating the
foundations of colonial rule. Significant also to this study is the larger
framework of labor in all its more coerced and less forced varieties ranging
from slavery and serfdom that “have generally been permanent conditions”
to “unfree labor” that is essentially temporary. Convict labor falls into the
latter category, as does “indenture, military service, debt peonage, and
apprenticeship, as well as the systems used to enforce types of agricultural
and mining labor in various parts of the world.” Slavery, by contrast, is
generally not “limited in duration” and often entitles “the rulers having the
right and ability to exploit labor and to control not only the serf or slave, but
also their offspring.” 7 Labor in Southeast Asia tended to be organized by
slavery, bondage, and dependency. In the words of one scholar, “the labour
system of Southeast Asia through most of its recorded history . . . [was] based
on the obligation to labour for a creditor, master or lord.” 8
Although the prevailing Southeast Asian labor system decisively shaped the
colonial framework in which Indian convict labor became imperative, it was
rarely factored into the British discourse about labor. Official discourse, in
fact, shied away from highlighting the ties that bound together the different
systems of coerced labor, almost as if colonial administrators were fearful of
their advocacy of convict labor eroding the high moral ground that they had
claimed by advocating the abolition of slavery in the region. The two forms of
labor were nonetheless closely interrelated: the closing down of the slave
trade (banned in theory by the British parliament in 1807) and the subsequent
abolition of slavery in many areas of the region exacerbated [End Page 182]
labor shortages. So did local labor systems by virtue of their networks of
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3
bondage and obligation that discouraged the growth of a labor market.
“Southeast Asians,” notes one writer, “themselves appear to have continued
to regard wage labour as alien and demeaning.” 9
Implicit here but not developed in any detail is my larger argument made
elsewhere about convicts characterizing themselves as Company ke naukar
(servants of the company). Indian convicts, in other words, opted to define
themselves as workers, as men who were engaged in the service of the East
India Company rather than as bandwars (prisoners, literally means those locked
up). The idea of naukar or retainer, an offshoot of the term naukari or service,
stemmed from the precolonial concept of “honourable service in the warband,
the retainership of the lord’s companion, hence employment.” Whereas today it
implies menial service, it meant something quite different in the colonial era
when it alluded primarily to “long distance service as a retainer, for instance in
the British East India Company’s army” or as migrant labor. 10
Whether the notion of the transportation experience as naukari or service
arose exclusively out of the convict roles as workers overseas or grew out of
the labor regimens that some prisoners in some prisons in India followed
prior to the development of transportation cannot be clearly ascertained.
However, it is highly unlikely that the term sprang up on Indian soil in
conjunction with the incarceration experience because prisons were a
relatively new phenomenon in the late eighteenth century, and relatively
newer was even the possibility of employing prisoners to engage in manual
labor. Indeed, the practice of organizing prisoners to perform manual labor
did not become a systematic or widespread practice until the beginning of the
nineteenth century. By then, the term naukars (or retainers or servants), which
convicts applied to themselves, was already in usage. The use of the term
naukari may have also emerged as an apposite self-designation because longdistance service was central to the transportation experience. 11
Convicts, furthermore, increasingly defined themselves as part of [End Page
183] an “Indian” community that emerged in these outposts of empire as a
result of the mixing and melding of different groups of people from the South
Asian subcontinent. This community consisted of transportees and sepoys
(soldiers), as well as a number of other groups, including indentured laborers
who began to trickle in toward the middle of the nineteenth century and then
stream in much greater numbers later that century. Convicts developed a
more encompassing identity through their shared experiences as laborers,
subject positions that enabled people drawn from different regions of the
Indian subcontinent and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to forge a
sense of a wider Indian community. 12
The identities of Indian convict workers were also shaped by their encounters
with other ethnic groups. For instance, in Bengkulen in the late eighteenth
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century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, they lived and
labored alongside the East India Company’s other major coerced labor group,
African slaves who had been brought in primarily from Madagascar. Indian
convicts and “kaffirs”—as African slaves were called in this region—worked
so closely together that they were jointly supervised by an officer designated
the superintendent of “convicts and coffrees [kaffirs].” Work and residential
associations also issued out of and resulted in their teaming up sexually and
permanently, arrangements that typically involved Indian convicts who were
overwhelmingly male pairing up with African slaves who were
predominantly female. In addition, Indian convicts were involved in liaisons
with Malay women. All these relationships were further complicated by the
fact that Malay women also consorted with Indian soldiers, thus further
consolidating the social and personal ties that often formed among all the
different groups of Indians who were thrown together in the foreign lands
across the black waters. In some localities Indian convict workers also labored
side by side with imported Chinese workers and some local Malay men. 13
Indian convict workers forged ties to Indian indentured workers as [End
Page 184] well and to the rest of the Indian community by adapting to a
variety of roles, both when they served in the capacity of unfree labor and
when they stayed on as free labor in the penal colonies. My argument about
the development of an “Indian” community also entails extending the
connections between slavery and bondage on the one hand and forced
convict labor on the other hand to encompass indentured labor. My
contention is not that indentured labor represented “a new system of slavery”
or was, by contrast, a labor migration of opportunity. Rather it insists on
linking the two, on establishing the connections between the earlier forced
migration of convicts and the later streams of Indian migrant labor that
gained in size and momentum by the 1840s. By the 1880s Indian indentured
laborers numbered over 10,000 a year. 14
I will focus first on highlighting the dynamics that led Indian convicts to
become part of a global system of forced migration and part of a productive
labor force in the enclaves of the rising British Empire in Southeast Asia. Part
of the discussion here is centered on unraveling the contradictory policy
impulses of the colonial authorities in South and Southeast Asia. The Indian
government was primarily concerned with the penal aspects of transportation
while the administration in the latter sites were principally interested in the
labor utility of the able-bodied men they had acquired. My discussion will
then shift attention to the convict workers themselves and their activities in
the Southeast Asian penal colonies. Their story ends in the late nineteenth
century, when the major penal sites in the Straits Settlements, specifically
Singapore, refused to accept any more convicts from South Asia.
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Developing out of the medieval punishment of banishment, transportation
had been in existence in England since the sixteenth century, and it became
more widely used in the late seventeenth century when North America was
opened up to receiving convict traffic. In the eighteenth century it was by “far
the most important of all . . . secondary punishments . . . in which minor
criminals or those reprieved from the death sentence were banished to
foreign lands as indentured labour. Transportation overseas was a feature
unique to British penal culture.” 15
Transplanted to India in the late eighteenth century, transportation [End Page
185] took root in the emerging colonial penal culture of the early nineteenth
century and flourished because colonial administrators viewed it as an
especially suitable technology of punishment for Indian society and culture.
In India, as in England, it was aimed at attaining the penal objectives of
removing criminals from their local societies, of deterring others from
committing crimes, and of reforming the convicts. 16 And in India it was
believed to have the added virtue of being a transgressive punishment, that
is, it transgressed indigenous notions about the religious and cultural dangers
of crossing the kala pani or the “black waters.”
Thus, British officials considered transportation to be “a weapon of
tremendous power. The horror with which the people regard transportation
is a feeling born with them, and the questions whether it be a wise or a foolish
feeling, whether it be a just deduction from true premises or the result of
ignorance and superstition, are nothing to the purpose.” 17 In other words,
transportation was said to pack an extra punitive punch because of its
negative cultural and religious implications. Furthermore, because of the
peculiarly Indian cultural currency of this punishment, it was to be appraised
differently in India than in England. Therefore the objections of the “many
persons of very high authority . . . who have made themselves masters of the
science of criminal-discipline” (presumably among them the law reformer
Jeremy Bentham) and who raised doubts about its merits were not pertinent
to the Indian penal scene. 18
Transportation, as utilized by the colonial regime, had little precedence in
Indian history. Although banishment existed as a punishment for certain
crimes in ancient India, its scope appears to have been limited. According to
the Manusmrti (the code of law associated with Manu) and to other ancient
texts, it was a substitute punishment for Brahmins whose transgressions
otherwise merited the death penalty or branding. It was also levied on
offenders for crimes ranging from adultery to not rendering assistance when
a village was being plundered, and on undesirable characters such as
gamblers and heretics that the authorities wanted to expel from their
kingdom. Little evidence exists [End Page 186] as to the specific areas to
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which people were banished. Apparently, the practice simply was to ensure
that offenders left the state or the kingdom that banished them. 19
The British interest in utilizing this “weapon of tremendous power” was
enhanced by their preoccupation with the deployment of punishments that
inflicted a “just measure of pain.” Ironically, this emphasis meshed
uncomfortably with their rhetoric that sought a moral high ground by
espousing the replacement of harsh Islamic laws with the civilized and
civilizing regime of colonial discipline and punishment. Indeed, colonial law
increasingly replaced or revised Islamic law in the initial century of the Raj,
discarding particularly those punishments the British considered repugnant
such as mutilation—a trend that conformed with the European tendency to
shift away from torture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
But this represented one trend at a time when the overall emphasis was on
ensuring that the severity of punishments was not undermined and that
appropriate punishments existed to facilitate the maintenance and
enhancement of law and order.
Jorg Fisch’s study of the British transformation of the Bengal criminal law
between 1769 and 1817 has judiciously extricated the seemingly
“humanitarian” strands of legal changes from the larger fabric with its clearcut sanguinary design.
Punishments more or less familiar from Europe were hardly ever questioned,
flogging included, while capital offences were much more frequent in English than
in Islamic law. . . . Crime had to be fought in the interests of the state and of
society. This led to deterrence and prevention as the most important means.
Almost every measure was justified if it contributed to them. . . .
British administrators . . . did not want to revenge, to retaliate or to impose
suffering for its own sake. The ultimate goal of the punishment was not the body of
the criminal but rather the impact on society and the future behaviour of the
offender. Within this framework, mutilation was of doubtful use. It caused much
and long suffering, while its deterrent effect was limited, and it encouraged rather
than prevent the commission of further crimes by the punished person. Capital
punishment, on the other hand, excellently fitted in with the British needs: it could
be administered with comparatively little physical [End Page 187] suffering, but
with much deterrent effect, and its preventive value was absolute. Transportation
was seen in a similar manner . . . 20
Central to the colonial preoccupation with transportation was the British belief
in the unusual “power” that it exerted over indigenous minds. And many
colonial administrators continued to repose their faith in the “horror” of the
punishment, even in the face of growing evidence to the contrary over the
course of the nineteenth century. Such conviction grew out of the long-standing
belief that Indians regarded the punishment with dread and out of the rising
colonial state’s desire for balancing and even vitiating “humanitarian” reform
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by perfecting a suitable technology of punishment for India and Indians. This
framework guided colonial administrators from the very outset of their
attempts at “reforming” Indian laws and punishments. Consider the responses
of magistrates to the inquiry instituted by Governor-General Cornwallis into
the criminal justice system in 1789 and 1790. An underlying tone in these
deliberations was a concern about the lack of severity in punishments applied
by the new colonial legal system. Several administrators therefore urged the
establishment of more sanguinary punishments, including public hangings;
some recommended the imposition of transportation. 21
Much the same tenor is discernible in the responses that Governor-General
Wellesley elicited from his subordinate officers when he sought out their
views on the prevailing judicial and penal systems. In fact, the official voices
were even more insistent on this occasion that transportation be deployed as
the “weapon” of choice against certain kinds of criminals. Once again the
accent was on the “horror” that the punishment evoked among Indians. The
three judges of the Provincial Courts of Appeal and Circuit in Calcutta, for
instance, reported that transportation was “considered by many as more
severe than death.” The judge of Bakarganj chimed in that “natives in general
dread it more than hanging; and persons under that sentence have repeatedly
requested me to get their sentences changed to death in preference.” The
judge and magistrate of Hughli lamented that it was not utilized more
extensively because it was “held in such terror.” 22 [End Page 188]
The 1838 report of the Committee on Prison-Discipline, which became the
textual primer for the emerging “scientific” discourse on penology in colonial
India, echoed these sentiments. Charged with designing a “good machinery
for the infliction of punishment” 23 —a machinery that was to work in tandem
with the new penal code that the Law Commission was formulating—the
committee found transportation to its liking because of its “horror” and
“terror” potential. Although imprisonment received the most extensive
coverage in the report because it was considered the primary punishment,
transportation was singled out as the second most important form of
punishment. A “distinct” section of the report highlighted the “system under
which that punishment is now inflicted, with a few recommendations of
improvements . . . and our plan of a new system under which we recommend
the future infliction of that punishment.” 24
Transportation, to use the words of the Committee on Prison-Discipline
report, was “a branch of prison-discipline,” its value as a punishment
measurable largely in terms of its effectiveness in relation to imprisonment.
Whereas the committee acknowledged that “the temporary discipline of a
penitentiary has great advantages over the temporary discipline of a penal
settlement,” it was decidedly in favor of transportation for life, which it
considered a highly reliable form of “criminal discipline.” The subject of
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capital punishment it chose not to broach, at least not to consider extending
its use. However, it did weigh the merits of “whether death or transportation
were [sic] the most awful to the people” and found “that transportation for
life would generally, in India, have a greater deterring effect than this most
grievous infliction.” Transportation, according to the committee report, was
also the tougher punishment in the eyes of those people “who do not
consider imprisonment for life, in solitude and without occupation, a
punishment absolutely unjustifiable.” From this line of reasoning followed
the conclusion that “at present imprisonment for life is universally considered
as the milder, and transportation for life as the severer punishment. In fact
the permanence of the effect in both punishments is equal, and the intensity
of the effect of the latter in India, is incalculably greater than that of the
former.” 25 [End Page 189]
Transportation was intensely feared by the people in India, the committee
maintained. Unmistakable proof of this attitude was its finding “that even
under the present very lax treatment of transported convicts, out of those
who are actually experiencing the tedium of perpetual confinement in
Allipore Gaol, to whom if to any native the idea of novelty and release from
the walls of a prison would be agreeable, few comparatively have petitioned
to have their sentences commuted to transportation.” 26 The superintendent
of this Calcutta jail offered his support for this belief when he urged that the
“desperate characters” held in his facility be banished overseas, “a plan” that
he considered “more consonant with the principle of punishment, and more
suitable to the condition of such heinous offenders.” 27
From the outset transportation was also developed as a punishment in
India—as it had been in England—to serve economic objectives as well. The
latter intention was clearly spelled out in the Transportation Act of 1717,
specifically in its wording that “in many of His Majesty’s colonies and
plantations in America, there was a great want of servants, who by their
labour and industry might be the means of improving and making the said
colonies and plantations more useful to this nation.” 28 In short, this
punishment had the added advantage of supplying “servants” to labor-deficit
areas that were vital to the project of the British Empire.
From the outset, the colonial decision to extend transportation to India was
made with an eye to realizing both the penal and economic objectives.
Certainly well aware of these dual goals was the superintendent of the
Andamans, the first systematic major penal settlement for convicts from South
Asia. Writing in 1795, he insisted that “in all cases of transportation two points
must be established[:] the one that there is strong local attachment from habit,
possession of fixed property; ties of consanguinity or affection, the dissolving
of which with condemnation to hard labour constitutes the exemplary
punishment, the other that the country chosen for the place of banishment is to
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derive benefit . . .” He added that this advantage was attained “by the
acquisition of even such bad subjects as was formerly the case in the [End Page
190] transportation of convicts from Great Britain to its colonies in North
America and at this time to Botany Bay.” Furthermore, he emphasized that
European convicts were not be added to the “native labourers” because they
were incapable of working and surviving “in such a climate.” 29
In the initial years of transportation of convicts from South Asia to Southeast
Asia, a few Europeans were transported along with Indians, and they were
invariably treated differently. In fact, on the few occasions that European
convicts—mostly Portuguese—were shipped out together with Indians they
were housed separately and eventually placed in an overseer capacity over
their fellow convicts from India. Generally, however, Europeans convicted of
transportable offenses were dispatched to Australia. Furthermore, early on
the authorities in London decided not to send any Indian convicts to
Australia but to preserve it as a place for Europeans only. 30
The punitive and economic objectives of transportation did not always
dovetail, however. Certainly, they did not mesh well when the primary
colonial interest in inflicting this punishment was in capitalizing on its severity
and its capacity to deliver a “just measure of pain.” By contrast, the
transportation destinations were far more invested in its labor value, that is, in
the promise of its capacity to provide a cheap and reliable pool of convict labor,
the greater the number and the more physically fit the better. At times, these
conflicting pulls, emanating largely from the sending and receiving ends, led to
seemingly contradictory shifts in colonial policies about transportation.
The subject of transportation was broached in India as early as 1773, when
Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, recommended banishing prisoners
to Bengkulen (also known as Fort Marlborough) in West Sumatra. Although
sources differ on when the first Indian convicts were actually transported
there—according to one account as early as 1784 31 —an early batch was
sentenced by the Supreme Court in Calcutta in 1787 and deported to
Bengkulen. Thereafter, [End Page 191] other destinations were sought and
developed because of the lack of jail facilities in Bengal and the increasing
number of prisoners. In 1788 Governor-General Cornwallis recommended
transportation to the Prince of Wales Island, better known as Penang, which
the East India Company had acquired in 1786, or to comparable sites in lieu
of certain sentences: life imprisonment, a term of seven years, or forfeiture of
limbs. By 1790 the first Indian convicts had set foot on Penang soil. 32
Thereafter, the number of prisoners eligible for transportation and the locales
to which they were transported varied with changing legislative and
administrative imperatives and with the changing geography of the British
Empire in Southeast Asia. Penal destinations in the late eighteenth and the first
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two decades of the nineteenth century included Bengkulen, Malacca, Penang,
the island of Amboyna ( south of the principal Moluccan islands), and Java. By
1819 the flag of the empire also flew over the island of Singapore, which Sir
Thomas Raffles had acquired when he was governor of Bengkulen. The British
advance into Burma opened up additional venues, specifically in Arakan and
Tenasserim, where they had secured concessions in the late 1820s. And by the
close of 1810 Britain had also acquired the former French territory of Mauritius.
Periodically, administrators in Calcutta and London broached the possibility of
adding Botany Bay, West Indies, Aden, and various locales in Asia to this
changing list of penal sites, but these were not developed into penal colonies
for Indian convicts from South Asia. 33
If one impulse shaping transportation laws was the ongoing colonial Indian
interest in making the punishment more severe, another dynamic was the
Southeast Asian preoccupation with transforming the recipients of this
punishment into convict workers for their settlements. And always there was
a concern about increasing the numbers who could be targeted by such laws.
As early as 1799, Regulation II displayed this intent in adjudging “convicts
who may escape from confinement during their sentences liable to
transportation.” 34 Much of [End Page 192] the initial focus, however, was on
revising the terms of this punishment so that it operated with optimum
severity, a condition that was believed to be best safeguarded by maintaining
it as a long-term sentence. Regulation LIII of 1803 therefore sought to curtail
its use to “none, except persons convicted of heinous offences and sentenced
to be imprisoned for life . . .” 35 In its insistence that “transportation beyond
sea shall be hereafter restricted to convicts who may be sentenced to
confinement for life,” this regulation nullified section X of Regulation IV of
1797 whereby prisoners could be banished overseas for shorter terms, seven
years or other time periods. Enacted in part as a response to the concern
registered by several administrators that the return of transportees to their
native soil diminished the terror of that punishment, this regulation also
instituted capital punishment for escaped convicts. To one scholar, these
changes show that the “warnings in the replies to Governor-General
Wellesley’s enquiry of 1801, that the deterrent effect of this punishment was
mainly based on uncertainty and would be destroyed by returning convicts,
was taken seriously.” 36
Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly favorable light in which the judicial
authorities had cast transportation in 1801, and notwithstanding the several
legal measures enacted to tailor it into a more long-term and effective
punishment, it was briefly abolished by Regulation XIV of 1811. This decision
to amend the “provisions of the existing regulations respecting the punishment
of criminals by transportation” emanated ostensibly from the administrative
concern—to use the language of the Regulation—regarding the “delay
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experienced in carrying such sentences into execution.” This seemingly
dramatic turnaround in view was also justified by government on the grounds
that (1) it entailed considerable expense, (2) its reputation as a terrible
punishment had been compromised by the frequent return of transported
prisoners, and (3) its capacity to evoke terror had been diminished partly from
the laxness in treatment of prisoners, particularly those held in Penang.
On the one hand, then, the decision to abolish transportation as a punishment
stemmed from financial and practical considerations; on the other hand, it
issued from an ongoing concern regarding the severity of the punishment
because of escapes and returns and the relaxed [End Page 193] treatment of
prisoners. Convicts, especially in Penang, were said to enjoy privileges that
diminished the rigors of their punishment. Moreover, government now had
the additional option of confining prisoners in its Alipur jail. Some authorities
believed that this new jail in Calcutta, in the heart of the emerging Indian
empire, could take over the transportation function of removing criminals
from their home turf. They also believed that it could guarantee better the
severity of the punishment because of the secure confines of the jail and the
added possibility of requiring and extracting hard labor from the prisoners. 37
Regulation XIV was a momentary departure from an otherwise consistent
line in favor of transportation. Not surprisingly, it was quickly overturned by
Regulation IX of 1813, which reinstated transportation. That it was abolished
at all has rightly appeared puzzling, particularly given the relative absence of
official deliberations over why this decision was undertaken in the first place.
38 Whatever wavering there was over this form of punishment related not to
its intrinsic merits as a harsh sentence but to a concern about the lack of rigor
enforced in its implementation and practice.
The timing of this revival—and the language employed in its reinstitution
and in subsequent legislative refinements of this punishment confirms this—
can be closely correlated with rising imperial ambitions and imperatives.
Indeed, political and territorial advances abroad and in the subcontinent
altered the parameters of the penal discourse regarding transportation from
one directed solely at weighing its severity as a punishment and its
effectiveness as a deterrence to an estimation of its role in the larger imperial
configuration. In other words, policies about transportation increasingly
became tied to questions of labor. These new considerations not only revived
interest in transportation but also enhanced its value.
Note the imperial address to which Regulation IX of 1813 reestablishing
transportation was directed. This enactment authorized the governor-general
to transmit convicts to whatever “British settlements in Asia” that he deemed
appropriate and to move “convicts from one place to another in the
settlements aforesaid.” Convicts were, moreover, “liable to be employed at
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any places within the limits of the settlement to which they shall be sent,
which shall from time to time be [End Page 194] fixed on by the local
administration.” 39 All these strictures were clearly designed to accommodate
the shifting labor needs and imperatives of the rising British Empire.
Labor considerations were also clearly etched into Regulation I of 1828, the
next legislative change in the conditions of transportation. This regulation
empowered the governor-general “to commute sentences of imprisonment
for life in the Allypore Gaol, to transportation for life to any of the British
settlements in Asia, in certain cases,” an amendment that not only widened
the pool of eligible offenders but also added new transportation destinations.
Thus, those Alipur prisoners under life sentences who were desirous of
securing a commutation of their sentences could, by this legislation, seek
“transportation for life.” Another change enacted by this law was the ruling
that prisoners could “from time to time . . . be transported to the coast of
Tenasserim, or to other British settlements to which convicts are now usually
transported, in lieu of being imprisoned for life . . .” 40
Administrative confidence in transportation’s efficacy in extirpating criminals
from Indian soil and in supplying workers to labor-deficit settlements
overseas is conspicuously evident in the deliberations of the Prison-Discipline
Committee. No wonder its report strongly advocated continuation of this
punishment and even its greater use, a recommendation that enabled
transportation to persist in South Asia well into the nineteenth century.
In the Southeast Asian outposts the support for transportation of convicts
from India remained strong as long as the economic calculus outweighed
other considerations. As one governor of Prince of Wales Island put it
euphemistically, this type of coerced labor was helpful in providing “public
service.” To continue in his words, as he noted in 1800 in making a pitch for
Indian convicts, they were needed “to carry on works, particularly roads,
which could not otherwise have been effected, but at a most enormous
expence. The roads at present are extensive, and as the cultivation and
population increases they will still require to be further extended, this can
only be done in the first instance by government, the inhabitants not having
the means . . .” 41
The resident of Fort Marlborough echoed similar sentiments. He wanted
Bengal convicts because their services cost less than the “usual [End Page
195] price of labor of a Malay” and because their labor was vital to his plans
to develop the cultivation of coffee and spices in west Sumatra. The first
British governor of Mauritius, Sir Robert Farquhar (1810––23), added his
voice to this chorus when he sought Indian convict labor to develop the
island’s agricultural resources. And speaking in the aftermath of the abolition
of transportation, the British resident at Amboyna called for its immediate
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13
reinstatement, his argument for convict labor uttered in words that were all
too familiar in Calcutta and in many locales across Southeast Asia. Convicts,
he observed, performed “public service” that was in the best interests of the
British government to support. Such “service” enabled the “natives” in
Amboyna to adhere to “their domestic occupations” while the convicts were
assigned to other pressing engagements. 42
The imperatives of empire also favored transportation by generating “push”
factors: forces that encouraged the banishment of convicts from the British
dominion in India to their rising empire overseas. As colonial rule expanded
across the subcontinent—through the annexation of new territories and the
extension of its reach into the countryside—British authorities increasingly
perceived transportation as a punishment perfectly calibrated to rid the
emerging empire of political opponents on the one hand and vicious
criminals on the other. In other words, they regarded it as a pliable
instrument of empire building, to shore up the foundations of colonial rule,
by extirpating those people who resisted or threatened to undermine its
evolving regime of law and order.
Among the first to whom transportation was extended were the Poligars,
seventy-three of whom were dispatched to Penang after their Sivaganga
Revolt of 1799––1801 had been crushed in southern India. Several of the
principal supporters of the Pychee Raja who fought against company rule in
Mysore between 1799 and 1806, including Yeman Nayar of Malabar, were
also transported and found themselves living alongside the Poligar prisoners.
Briefly, authorities in Calcutta considered banishing Indian soldiers who had
fought pitched battles against their superior European officers in the Vellore
Mutiny of 1806. Although not carried out, the initial plan was to divide the
mutineers [End Page 196] into batches to be shipped off to the Cape, Penang,
Bengkulen, and Malacca. 43
Transportation was also a weapon in the colonial arsenal aimed at
maintaining and reinforcing law and order. It was directed in the initial
century of colonial rule at those crimes relating to property that were
considered especially malicious—burglary, dacoity, and housebreaking,
crimes that may have increased in the wake of agrarian changes ushered in
by the British-instituted Permanent Settlement of 1793. Regulation XVII of
1817 “for the more effectual administration of criminal justice in certain
cases” specifically targeted such offenders; “persons convicted of robbery by
open violence” in certain cases were liable to be whipped as well as
imprisoned and transported for life. The same punishment was to be
awarded for burglary and theft under certain conditions. 44 According to the
“Comptroller of Indian Convicts” in the Straits Settlements, Indian convicts in
Southeast Asia were offenders whose crimes included “Murder, Thuggee,
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14
and Dacoity” and some who were “tried and convicted of frauds and
forgeries, robbery with violence, and such like misdemeanours.” 45
Increasingly in the nineteenth century, the Straits Settlements aggregated the
largest body of convicts. Penang, which had been home to Indian convicts
from the late eighteenth century onward, initially housed the largest number.
Its total stood at 1,469 in 1824, 998 of whom had been sent from Bengal; the
remainder were made up of 272 from Madras, 192 from Bombay, and 7 from
Ceylon (Sri Lanka). A sizable proportion of these convicts had arrived
between 1819 and 1823: 124 in 1819, 304 in 1820, 195 in 1821, 154 in 1822, and
185 in 1823, or 962 of the 1,469 present in 1824. Only 24 of these 1,469, or less
than 1% of the overall convict population, were women. In 1824, on the eve of
its return to the Dutch, Bengkulen supported 773 convicts, a majority (579) of
whom were from Bengal; the other 194 had been sentenced from Madras.
Although an initial batch of over one hundred convicts had been dispatched
to Malacca in 1805 to clear its Dutch [End Page 197] fortifications, their
numbers were not added to until 1825 when it was returned to British hands
in exchange for Bengkulen. 46
The geographical distribution of convicts changed somewhat as Singapore
and Burma emerged as penal destinations and other settlements declined as
penal sites. They became the principal penal destination by the 1830s, as the
Prison-Discipline Committee acknowledged in its report and in designating
them as the optimum places to receive convicts. By 1835 Tenasserim in Burma
counted 1,172 convicts, a substantial number considering the fact that this
traffic had only been in motion since the 1820s. In the Straits, Singapore
rapidly surpassed Penang and Malacca as the premier settlement for South
Asian convicts. It boasted a tally of 901 by the mid-1830s, at a time when
Malacca only housed 284. Its numbers had grown in one big leap in the mid1820s when Bengkulen convicts were transferred there on the occasion of its
return to the Dutch. Penang’s total stood at 566, which probably represented
a considerable underestimation because it counted only convicts sent out
from Bengal and not those transported from Bombay and Madras, the latter
of which according to an 1837 estimate amounted to 122. The total for
Mauritius that same year was 750, a drop from the all-time high of 986
returned for 1834 and the beginning of a downward trend because it stopped
accepting convicts in the late 1830s. 47
The Straits and Burma options persisted as the premier receiving locales after
the 1830s. 48 A tally taken in the late 1840s counted 2,000 convicts in the
Straits, with Singapore alone accounting for almost 1,500 in 1846 and Penang
601. By the early years of the next decade—with the pool of offenders eligible
for transportation widened by additional legal changes instituted in the late
1840s—the total had reached nearly 3,000; 2,936 in 1854, to be precise. By
September 1855 the number had reached 3,802, the majority of whom were in
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Singapore and Penang; Malacca, which supported the smallest number, only
had [End Page 198] 388 in May 1854 but this tally rose to 735 when 347 were
added to this mix in 1854/55. 49
South Asian convicts became vital members of the workforce in the rising
outposts of the British Empire in Southeast Asia. The first generation of
British settlers and administrators in the region was quick to recognize their
potential and to capitalize on it. Thus, immediately after assuming formal
possession of Penang in 1786 on behalf of the Crown, the “country trader”
Francis Light asked the governor-general in India to “supply. . . one hundred
coolies, as the price of labour in Penang was enormous.” 50 Light’s request for
labor, framed in terms of the high costs of local labor, became a standard
refrain in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
At times, the demand for laboring hands was cast in specific terms, such as
was expressed in Penang’s 1796 application for skilled workers or “artificers.”
51 Bengkulen’s request in 1805 began with a familiar lament about the high
wages for coolies (15 rupees a month) and the “equally exorbitant” rates for
artificers. It then expressly mentioned convicts who could work as “artificers,
blacksmiths, bricklayers, braziers, carpenters and particularly comars or
potters of which last description there is not one at this place.” 52 Many were
the calls as well for convicts who could be employed in the different kinds of
agricultural projects that were being launched in Southeast Asia, tasks that
Indians were said to be especially suited for because of their peasant
backgrounds. 53
Local authorities in Southeast Asia also attempted to meet their labor
demands by seeking out other types of labor, including “free” labor recruited
from India. In fact, Light’s original request, although [End Page 199] denied,
led to the recruitment of twenty-five Bombay artificers who arrived in 1787,
the following year. Other Indians came as part of the entourage of European
officers and settlers and troops. By the early 1790s, according to Light, there
were “about one thousand” Indian shopkeepers and “coolies” on the island.
In addition, vessels from south India were said to bring in as many as 1,300 to
2,000 men to work every year. 54
The principal assignment for most convicts, as in Penang, was “public
works,” that is, the construction and maintenance of the communications
infrastructure of these colonial settlements. They also toiled on many of the
major government buildings and provided much of the sweat and blood
involved in clearing swamp and forestlands for colonial expansion and
reclamation.
An 1818 Penang list of convict duties furnishes additional details on the
enormous range of tasks that convicts performed and the numbers that were
involved in the different undertakings. A sizable proportion, two hundred in
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toto, labored on the roads. The rest performed menial tasks in a variety of
offices. For many there are no specific job descriptions, only an identification
of the office they worked in and in what numbers: council house (50
convicts), warehouse (45), customhouse (45), engineers’ department (30),
paymaster and storekeeper (16), town major and his garrison (20), hospitals of
the 20th regiment (50), courthouse (12), accountant’s office (4), treasury office
(2), police office (5), brigade major’s office (2), Chinese poorhouse (8), convict
hospital (6), officer commanding troops (8), superintendent of convicts’ office
(10), free school (2), signal sergeant on Mount Erskine (2), junior civil servants
and military (56), military officers and deputy commissary (2 each), signal
sergeant on great hill (2), commissariat department (10), and government
house (1). For some there are specific designations: cooks for European troops
(8), custodians for the lines of the 20th Regiment (10), hospital attendants (18),
dholi (litter) bearers and medical stores (8), sweepers for the navy house (2),
church furniture cleaners (4), gravediggers (3), jail water carriers (7), cleaners
and weighmen in the convict lines (12), and sweepers, water carriers, and
cleaners of the stationery in the secretary’s office (15). Another 122 were hired
out to various government and private individuals. 55
Information for other years shows a similar profile of convict work. The
largest contingent of Penang’s 1,469 convicts in the 1820s, 351 [End Page 200]
people in all, were dedicated to road construction. The rest were relegated to
positions designated servants, attendants, and coolies for different senior
administrators (254), workers employed in the botanic and hill gardens and in
cleaning the lines of troops (128), and labor for hire for various individuals
(98). Small groups worked as menial servants and attendants at the hospitals
(59), as syces (grooms) and grass cutters to junior civil and military servants
(46), as cooks and servants for British troops (22), in various capacities for
nonofficial Europeans (16), and other comparable duties. 56
Colonial officials invariably appreciated the work carried out by Indian
convict workers. Typical was the following assessment made by one Penang
official, obviously uttered in appreciation of their accomplishments, that
convict labor there had resulted in “numerous and extensive roads. . . [that]
intersect the island in every direction, . . . extensive public buildings . . . and
the swamps and marshy grounds . . . have been drained and raised, around
and within Georgetown . . .” 57
Lavish praise was also heaped upon convicts for their work in Singapore
where they had played a critical role in its development as a major British
entrepôt after it was founded in 1819. In the estimation of Governor Blundell
of the Straits Settlements, convicts deserved credit for building the
whole of the existing roads throughout the Island . . . every bridge in both town
and country, all the existing canals, sea walls, jetties, piers, etc. . . . But not only is
the community indebted for these essential works to the mere manual labour of
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convicts, but by the introduction among them of a system of skilled labour,
Singapore is indebted for works which could not otherwise have been sanctioned
from the State funds. A church has been erected [St. Andrew’s Church], every brick
and every measure of lime which has been made and laid by convicts. . . Powerful
batteries have been erected at various points . . . which would have been too
expensive for sanction if executed by free labour while by means of convict labour,
the whole of the public buildings in the place . . . [were] kept in a state of efficiency
and repair . . . 58
Convict hands were also responsible for the building of other notable
Singapore edifices, including the Government House and the Mariamman
Hindu Temple.
In addition, in every settlement Indian convicts were put to work [End Page
201] as private servants for government and private individuals. Although
this practice may have grown out of the familiarity that many British
administrators and settlers had had with Indians because of their prior South
Asian experiences, it also stemmed from necessity because local people were
not readily available for hire, and especially not for the wages that were
offered. Several generations of British officials and nonofficials alike in
Southeast Asia would, no doubt, have agreed with the administrator who
admitted that “the allotment of convicts gratuitously as private servants has
been resorted to in order to meet the great inconvenience which seems to
have always prevailed in respect to the want of hired servants.” 59
Both because of the kinds of tasks Indian convicts undertook, ranging from
“public works” to private employment, and because of the virtual absence of
a local labor market, their working and living conditions were apparently
better than what Indian authorities had expected them to endure during their
terms of transportation. That is, convicts were, contrary to the sentences
passed on many of them, generally not shackled, allowed to live relatively
freely and not behind walls, and often released from their terms of servitude
well before the expiry of their sentences. In many locales convicts were not
chained together because the shackles interfered with their work operations.
Nor was it easy to compel all the convicts to stay in one area because so many
of them were scattered across the settlement, especially if they were assigned
to a variety of chores. Moreover, local administrators at times deliberately
sought to distribute their convict populations across their localities so that
they could be more easily controlled and with less manpower. After all, the
colonial line of administration was stretched thinly across these outposts of
empire in Southeast Asia; it was strongest in the principal towns where the
machinery of government was generally aggregated and greatly attenuated in
areas removed from these urban settlements.
Furthermore, most settlements were unprepared to absorb large numbers of
convicts and had to scramble to build convict lines to house them; these
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residential quarters were built up gradually and then too only with the help
of convict labor. Because of the variety of occupations that penal
administrators slotted convicts into, including on at least one occasion in
Bengkulen into the ranks of a convict militia, [End Page 202] they were in
some localities lax about enforcing the terms of hard labor that most
transportees were sentenced to. In fact, Bengkulen convicts who performed
military service were formally released long before their terms had expired. 60
No wonder the system of control that evolved in the penal colonies was
characterized as—in fact by an officer in charge of convicts—”prisoners their
own warders.” That is, some convicts, typically those identified as the better
behaved and further along in the duration of their sentence, were designated
as the warders for their fellow prisoners. This arrangement minimized the
demands on government for an elaborate machinery of control, personnel to
staff this infrastructure, and the costs of running all this and maximized the
possibilities of utilizing convicts as “free labour.” 61 Moreover, the very terms
of convict labor—whether involving “public works” or other kinds of jobs
ranging from service in virtually every administrative office to private service
for various European officials and non-officials—ruled in favor of a limited
system of discipline for Indian convicts in Southeast Asia.
To the authorities in India, for whom the economic utility of transportation
was not the paramount concern, the convict worker system appeared much
too benign and shorn of the “horrors” that this punishment was supposed to
inflict. Not surprisingly, they repeatedly chided their counterparts in
Southeast Asia to stiffen the conditions under which convicts worked and
lived. A frequent complaint from the Indian government was that the
convicts were generally not shackled or chained, as per the terms of their
sentences, and when chained were only lightly secured “in irons.” And,
above all, convicts freely mingled with the local population, and occasionally
escaped with the help of other Indians and Malays. The response of the
government of Madras to the annual report on its convicts transported to
Malacca sums up the extent to which sentences of “hard labour in irons on
the roads or other public works” were apparently not enforced. Instead, some
convicts were said to be
“providing for themselves” suffering it would appear, no part of their sentence,
but that of expatriation. Others, . . . [were] “let out”. . . as private servants, and
necessarily therefore in circumstances of much comfort, others, even in offices of
some trust; one is returned as a [End Page 203] “chokeedar” [night watchman],
and several “in care of the commissariat bullocks.” One individual, no 117, under
sentence for returning from transportation, is stated be “in the charge of
bungalows” . . . 62
Many convicts who served out their terms of transportation elected to remain
in their host communities, their descendants becoming part of the significant
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19
minority that Indians constitute in the plural society of Malaysia. Some
married Malay women and became part of the Jawi Pekan, or Indo-Malay
community. An estimate for Singapore suggests that in 1838 only 60% of the
convicts returned to India, a number that fell considerably by the 1860s when
“only very few returned.” 63
Yet even as the flow of convicts to the Straits reached new levels, attitudes
about continuing this traffic began to change in the receiving communities.
The emergence of Singapore as a thriving port city by the mid-nineteenth
century led many of its prosperous residents to reassess their support for its
convict population and to harp on the dangers of the potentially volatile
population mix that this group of Indians created. In the words of one
Singapore governor, “Europeans were apprehensive at being a tiny minority
among thousands of Asians, and well-to-do merchants of all races looked
with misgivings at the mass of poor, illiterate, half-starving rootless youths
who came to make their fortune. They also began to appreciate that cheap
convict labour was recruited at the cost of flooding Singapore with dangerous
criminals.” 64 The Singapore Free Press declared that the Straits Settlements was
“the common sewer . . . for all the scum and refuse of the population of nearly
the whole British possessions in the East.” 65
To what extent the presence of a large population of Indian convicts alarmed
many inhabitants is also apparent from the scare of 1853 when lightning
struck Singapore’s well-known St. Andrew’s Church and parishioners had to
carry out their services in the courthouse. This change of locale prompted a
swirl of rumors, especially in the Chinese community, regarding the
authorities dispatching convicts to collect human heads in order to pacify the
evil spirits that had taken up residence in the church. It was also in 1853 that
about a hundred Sikh prisoners, forwarded from Calcutta’s Alipur jail,
attempted to break out of the Singapore Convict Gaol, further fueling the
concern that many in [End Page 204] that city had developed about the
presence of dangerous criminals in their midst. Moreover, there were also
“grave objections” about plans underway to add European convicts to
Singapore’s Indian and Chinese convict population. Governor E. A. Blundell,
who took the lead on this issue, spoke out in 1856 against any further
importation of Chinese convicts who had been coming in from Hong Kong
since the late 1840s. Nor did the periodic riots by Chinese and Indians in the
1850s allay fears about the growing ethnic mix of the city, as was manifested
in the disturbance by Indian convicts on the occasion of the Muslim festival of
Mohurrum in 1856. 66
The rising tide of opinion against any further influx of Indian convicts crested
during the mutiny/rebellion of 1857–58, when the colonial government in
India suddenly found itself faced with having to dispense with huge numbers
of mutineers and rebels. One option broached in Calcutta was to export the
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problem overseas by dispatching large numbers of them to the Straits
Settlements, or instead to send the “criminals” who were already behind bars
so that their removal to Singapore would open up space in the jails for the
newest offenders. Singapore authorities were especially taken back by the
public declaration made by the lieutenant governor of Bengal clamoring for
the right to banish to the Straits “all prisoners sentenced to more than three
years imprisonment, whose retention . . . may, from political reasons, or from
the insecurity of their jails, be deemed unadvisable.” 67
The response from Singapore was swift and emphatically negative. The
“Christian inhabitants” of one locality in Singapore submitted a memorial
stating that:
The whole convict system is rotten to the very core. . . . We are no longer an infant
colony—that state has been passed when convict labour is either desirable or
necessary. But the treatment of the convicts reflects strongly upon a system which
holds out greater privileges than are conferred on nearly all the lower classes of
natives. Either let the flow of convicts cease, or place them under a proper system,
with a large body of European troops to keep them down. We would rather
dispense with their service altogether, and return to the various presidencies these
offscourings. 68 [End Page 205]
Even Governor Blundell, who had called convicts “harmless settlers” 69 in
1856, joined the ranks of this dissenting chorus. He added his voice to the
following memorial submitted by a body of European merchants anxious
about rumors regarding the imminent arrival of a large contingent of “sepoy
mutineers” to Singapore:
Hitherto . . . convicts have been men from all parts of India, unknown to each
other, speaking different languages and brought up in different habits and
pursuits. These mutineers, on the other hand[,] are men bound to each other in a
sort of tie of brotherhood, accustomed to act together, speaking the same language,
and naturally entertaining the most deadly sentiments of hatred and revenge
against us. To keep such men under control requires an amount of physical force
not at our disposal. We have no convict guards nor have we any means of
organizing any such guards . . . The internal economy of the [convict] Lines and the
supervision of the convicts when at work outside, is entrusted to the convicts
themselves . . .
I concur in what is stated in the memorial that any outbreak on the part of the
convict body might have the effect of stimulating the turbulent disposition of the
lower classes of our Chinese population. . . . I do not mean that there would be any
coalescing between convicts and Chinese, because they would have no access to
each other, but the passions and cupidity of the lower classes of Chinese and the
result would be very awful. Indeed, I concur generally in the sentiment . . . that
commercial settlements like Penang and Singapore and especially the latter, should
no longer be used as penal stations. So long as these settlements were in their
infancy, a body of convicts proved beneficial in the formation of roads, digging
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21
canals, &c., but now . . . a large commercial city such as Singapore . . . with a trade
of ten millions sterling, a harbor crowded with shipping, and large population
earnestly engaged in mercantile and tradal [sic] pursuits, is no longer a proper
place for the reception of criminals of India and most especially for that of the late
sepoys of the Bengal army, men whose hands have been imbrued [sic] in the blood
of women and children and whose hearts are full of hatred and revenge. 70
Thus, the Straits options for Indian convicts came to an end. Briefly, some
inmates of the Alipur jail were sent on to Arakan to make room for incoming
rebel prisoners. But this only provided temporary relief. Far more promising
was the suggestion—and one that Governor-General Canning quickly
acceded to—proposed in October 1857 by [End Page 206] F.J.Mouat, inspector
of jails in Bengal. His recommendation for the “best means of disposing” of
large numbers was to reestablish a penal colony in the Andaman Islands or to
ship them out as laborers to the West Indies, which was said to possess the
additional benefit of not having an Indian population. By the beginning of
1858 government had settled on the Andamans as the principal
transportation destination. In the words of the governor-general, these
islands were to serve as “the reception in the first instance of convicts
sentenced to imprisonment, and to transportation, for the crimes of mutiny
and rebellion and for other offences…, and eventually for . . . all convicts . . .
whom. . . it may not be thought expedient to send to the Straits Settlements or
to the Tenasserim Provinces.” 71 By 10 March 1858, a batch of 1,000 convicts
arrived in the Andamans and ushered in a new chapter in the history of
transportation in colonial South Asia in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. 72
As long as India’s “offscourings” were pliable and productive as convict
workers, the “whole convict system” was considered an asset to the British
Empire in Southeast Asia. But as soon as convicts grew in numbers and
became engaged in the life of the multiethnic communities that sprang up in
the once “infant” colonies, their reputation as “harmless settlers” began to
change. Especially dramatic was the shift in attitudes that occurred in
Singapore in 1857––58 when it was confronted with the possibility of hosting
a new wave of convicts, this time people drawn from the ranks of sepoy
mutineers and peasant and other rebels. Nor were local authorities eager and
willing to mix these newcomers in with those other newcomers who were
beginning to make their way into these settlements as indentured laborers. 73
Convicts they were in South Asia and convict workers they became in
Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because
the penal societies that received them desperately needed their labor power.
And they too keyed on this identity as workers—as [End Page 207] Company
ke naukar, or servants of the Company to be precise—in defining themselves
in terms of their labor service and utility and not in terms of their punishment
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22
or exile. This dynamic worked well for both parties as long as convicts
seemed malleable and valuable as workers. But as soon as the government in
India threatened to dump its mutineers and rebels on the Straits Settlements
in the aftermath of the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, the local administrations in
the penal colonies were no longer willing to host any more transportees.
Thus, the flow of convicts from South to Southeast Asia, which was part of a
global system of forced migration, came to an end, its termination ushered in
by the political threat that the latest batch of convicts posed to the
effectiveness of the existing system of convictism.
Notes
1. Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, “Unshackling the Past,” in
Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, Stephen Nicholas, ed.
(Cambridge, 1988), p. 7. This entire volume champions the revisionist
notion that transportees be viewed as “convict workers” who “were part
of a global system of forced migration” and not a “distinct class” of
“professional and habitual criminals.”
2. Ian Duffield and James Bradley, “Introduction: Representing Convicts,” in
Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration,
Ian Duffield and James Bradley, eds. (London, 1997), pp. 1––2.
3. Nicholas and Shergold, “Transportation as Global Migration,” in Convict
Workers, p. 30; Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An
Introduction (Madison, 1986), p. 121.
4. Nicholas and Shergold, “Unshackling the Past,” pp. 3––13.
5. Bengal Public Consultations (BPC), Oct. 1––28, 1808, Oct. 28, no. 12; and
June 9––July 27, 1830, July 27, no. 10; India Criminal Judicial Consultations
(ICJC), July 5––Dec. 20, 1845, Sept. 20, no. 13; and June-Sept. 26, 1856.
Penang, Malacca, and Singapore were collectively administered as the
Straits Settlements beginning in 1826; Singapore became its capital in 1832.
6. ICJC, Jan. 7–June 24, 1853, and July 1–Dec. 30, 1853.
7. Stanley L. Engerman, “Introduction,” in Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom,
and Free Labor, Stanley L. Engerman, ed. (Stanford, 1999), p. 4.
8. Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian
History,” in Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia, Anthony
Reid, ed. (New York, 1983), p. 36.
9. Reid, “Introduction,” p. 34. See also David Northrup, Indentured Labor in
the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995).
10. Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military
Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 20, 76;
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Anand A. Yang, “Peasants on the Move: A Study of Internal Migration in
India,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979):38–45.
11. See my “Slave/Convict/Laborer, Indian/Malay/Chinese,” Association
for Asian Studies, San Diego, 9–12 March 2000, on the meanings of this
self-designation. Public labor in India typically involved prisoners who
were sentenced to work on the roads. G.H.Bar low, Subsecty., to Magte.,
Patna, Bengal Criminal Judicial Consultations (BCJC), P/128/21, June 12–
July 10, 1795, June 26, no. 25.
12. The term “Indian” in this paper is used primarily to denote convict place
of origin and not to assume the existence of a national identity. However, I
have argued elsewhere that convicts forged a transregional identity as a
result of their experiences as convict workers in Southeast Asia in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See my “Slave/
Convict/Laborer.”
13. Ibid., and my “Convicts, Cannibals and Colonial Rule: India, the
Andaman Islands and Asia,” 4th Annual International Conference of the
World History Association, Florence, Italy, 22–25 June 1995.
14. See K. S. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and
Settlement (1786–1957) (Cambridge, 1969).
15. Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England
(London, 1989), p. 285; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–
1750 (London, 1984), pp. 66–67.
16. David Meredith, “Full Circle? Contemporary Views on Transportation,”
in Convict Workers, p. 14.
17. Report of the Committee on Prison-Discipline (PDCReport) (Calcutta, 1838), p.
97.
18. J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales
(Sydney, 1983), pp. 10–14; and John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the
Historian (New York, 1973), pp. 61–65, on Bentham’s influence on Macaulay.
19. Ram Mohan Das, Crime and Punishment in Ancient India (with a Particular
Reference to the Manusmrti) (Bodh Gaya, 1982), pp. 40–41; Sukla Das, Crime
and Punishment in Ancient India (c. A.D. 300 to A.D. 1100) (New Delhi,
1977), pp. 74–75.
20. Jorg Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the
Bengal Criminal Law 1769–1817 (Wiesbaden, 1983), pp. 131–32. See also
Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe
(Hassocks, Sussex, 1979), pp. 137–38.
21. Bengal Revenue Consultations (BRC), Dec. 3, 1790; Fisch, Cheap Lives,
pp. 38–41.
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22. “Answers to the Interrogatories of the Governor General; and New
Systems of Revenue, and Judicial Administration (1801),” Parliamentary
Papers 9 (1812–13), esp. pp. 9, 45, 115.
23. Minutes of 14 Dec. 1835, in Lord Macaulay’s Legislative Minutes, selected by
C. D. Dharkar (n.p., 1946), pp. 278–79; Anand A. Yang, “The Voice of
Colonial Discipline and Punishment: Knowledge, Power and the
Penological Discourse in Early Nineteenth Century India,” Indo-British
Review 21 (1995):62–71.
24. PDC Report, p. 3. Much of this report focuses on existing conditions of jails
and prisoners, reform of prison discipline, and the establishment of
penitentiaries.
25. PDC Report, pp. 94, 80–81. Clive, Macaulay, p. 447, states that “Macaulay’s
code was based upon what were for the time rather advanced
humanitarian principles. Thus, the death penalty was reserved for murder
and for treason, the highest offenses against the state . . .”
26. PDC Report, p. 86. Of the 800–1000 prisoners with life sentences at Alipur
jail at any one time, apparently no more than 48 a year ever sought to
have their sentences commuted to transportation. By Regulation I of 1828,
prisoners were allowed to do so.
27. Suptd., Alipur jail to GOB, in PDC Report, appendix no. 4, p. 301. The
superintendent was also reacting to the lack of severity in jail discipline.
28. Meredith, “Full Circle,” p. 14.
29. A. Kyd to Bengal, 20 Nov. 1794, BPC, Jan. 2–Feb. 27, 1795, Jan. 19, no. 3.
30. Extract Judicial Letter to Bengal, June 30, 1802, Board’s Collections (BC),
F/4/142, nos. 2481A to 2496. Also BCJC, P/128/32, Jan. 6–April 28, 1797,
Feb. 24, no. 2, for a list of transportees that includes Portuguese convicts
transported to Penang from India.
31. Fisch, Cheap Lives, p. 53. Some 270 convicts were banished to the
Andamans by the end of 1795. The following year government, “with a
view to humanity and economy,” withdrew from this penal settlement
because of “great sickness and mortality . . . and the great expense and
embarrassment to government in maintaining it and in conveying to it
supplies at the present period.” Minute by the Board, BPC, Jan. 4–Feb. 22,
1796, Feb. 12, no. 5. These convicts were later transferred to Penang, also
known as the Prince of Wales Island (POWI). Major J.F.A. McNair,
Prisoners Their Own Warders (Westminister, 1899), p. 4.
32. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 132–33.
33. Extract judicial letter, June 30, 1802, BC, F/4/142, 1803–4; Foreign
Political, 1839; Nicholas Tarling, ed. The Cambridge History of Southeast
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Asia, vol. 2, The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 1;
John Mulvany, “Bengal Jails in Early Days,” Calcutta Review n.s. 6, no. 292
(1918):297–98. Briefly, the British also held Java and other former Dutch
possessions.
34. “A.D. 1799. Regulation II,” Harington’s Regulations; “List of convicts . . .
on . . . the ship Endeavour,” “List . . . on board the ship London,” BPC,
May 3–29, 1797, May 3, nos. 125, 127. See also Board to Suptd., POWI,
Mar. 11, 1796, BPC, Feb. 29–Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 14, no. 40.
35. “A.D. Regulation LIII,” Harington’s Regulations; Mulvany, “Bengal Jails,”
pp. 297–98. The section in Regulation II of 1799 extending transportation
to escaped prisoners was rescinded. Fisch, Cheap Lives, pp. 3–4.
36. Fisch, Cheap Lives, pp. 78, 62; “Regulation LIII.”
37. “Resolutions,” BCJC, Nov. 26–Dec. 10, 1811, Dec. 10, no. 2; “A.D. 1811.
Regulation XIV.”
38. Fisch, Cheap Lives, p. 78, attributes the abolition to three reasons: the
building of a new jail at Alipur, the frequent delays experienced in
carrying out transportation, and the costs incurred.
39. “A.D. 1813. Regulation IX.”
40. “A.D. 1828. Regulation I.”
41. Letter from Governor, POWI, May 31, 1800, Extract BPC, July 10, 1800, BC,
1803–1804, F/4/152.
42. “Extract from . . . the Colonial Dept.,” June 5, 1813, BCJC, June 26–July 24,
1813, July 24, no. 18; extract from Fort Marlbro to Fort William, Aug. 5,
1806, in BC, 1808–1809, F/4/259. K. Hazareesingh, History of Indians in
Mauritius (London, 1977), pp. 4–9. In 1815, 700 prisoners were sent from
Bengal to work in Mauritius. 43. “Extract letter from Governor
General…,” Dec. 20, 1806, BC, 1808–1809, F/4/245; “Seizure and Trial of
the Rebel Yeman Nair . . . ,” BC, 1809–10, F/4/268; “Extract. . . from Fort
St. George,” May 9, 1803; Lt., 2nd Battalion, 6th Regt., N.I., March 8, 1803
to Fort St. George, BC, F/4/55, 1803–1804.
44. “A.D. 1828. Regulation I”; John R. Mclane, Land and Local Kingship in
Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 75–76; and his “Bengali
Bandits, Police and Landlords after the Permanent Settlement,” in Crime and
Criminality in British India, Anand A. Yang, ed. (Tucson, 1985), pp. 26–47.
45. McNair, Prisoners, p. 11.
46. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 132–33; Chief Secty’s memo, Nov. 1824; T.
S. Raffles to Secty, April 5, 1824, in BC, 1825–26, F/4/825; Bombay to
Court of Directors, May 22, 1841, BCJC, July 5–Sept. 27, 1841, Aug 16, no.
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9; C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819–1988, 2nd ed. (Singapore,
1989), p. 46.
47. PDC Report, pp. 73–74, 77, 101; “Abstract . . . of Madras convicts. . . ,” Oct.
17, 1837, BCJC, Nov. 13–Dec. 29, 1837, Dec. 18, no. 7; Committee to
Mauritius, July 20, 1847, ICJC, July 1–30 Dec. 1848, Aug. 19, no. 14; Secty.
to Fort Cornwallis, no 942, April 10, 1828, BCJC, April 2–May 1, 1828,
April 10, no. 8.
48. Mauritius was phased out as a penal colony and its convict traffic stopped
in the late 1830s. Colonial Secty. to Secty., GOI, June 13, 1848; and
Committee to Governor, July 20, 1847, ICJC, July 1–Dec. 3 1848, Aug. 19,
no. 14.
49. Governor to GOI, no. 106, Aug. 20, 1855, and Malacca to Secty., ICJC, Oct.
5–Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 16, nos. 13, 16; Singapore to Governor, April 7, 1846,
Singapore to GOB, no. 154, Nov. 12, 1847, ICJC, May 3o-Oct. 17, 1846, June
13, no. 22 and Oct. 21, no. 1; Governor to GOI, ICJC, July 7–Dec. 22, 1854,
Sept. 22, no. 14; GOB to GOI, no. 2310, Oct. 31, 1853, ICJC, Oct. 5–Dec. 31,
1855, Nov. 23, no. 13. Whether convicts were sent to Burma or to the
Straits depended at times on the exigencies of the day. When the costs of
shipping them to the Straits was ascertained to be more than to transport
them to the Arakan or Tenasserim, transportation to the former area was
halted. But when the ensuing influx into Burma produced overcrowding
in the jails there, traffic was redirected to the Straits. The then-governor of
the Straits, Colonel Butterworth, proposed to take in as many as 500 to 600
additional convicts.
50. Sandhu, Indians, p. 47.
51. BPC, Feb. 29–Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 7, no. 6.
52. Resident, Fort Marlborough, Nov. 30, 1805, in G/34/24, Sumatra, 1799–
1808, Nov. 30, 1805.
53. J. Taylor, Richard Becker to Sir George H. Barlow, Nov. 18, 1806, G/34/24,
Sumatra, 1799–1808, Nov. 30, 1805.
54. Sandhu, Indians, p. 47.
55. Minute by Governor, G/34/65, Jan. 3–April 3, 1818, Jan. 22.
56. Minute by President, POWI, G/34/8, Jan 8–May 27, 1824, April 15.
57. Ibid.
58. PP, XL, (1862), paper no. 12, pp. 32–33.
59. Fort Cornwallis to Capt Bunbury and others, Nov. 6, 1827, BPC, Sept. 15–
Oct. 15, 1830, Sept. 15, no. 12. In Penang in the 1850s, convicts were also
put to work in “industrial employment,” including “rattan work,” the
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manufacture of chairs, baskets, and other items that were produced for
public consumption. McNair, Prisoners, p. 19.
60. Yang, “Slave/Convict/Laborer.” Those convicts who performed military
service were initially reluctant to return their uniforms or to accept a
reduction in their food allowances.
61. McNair, Prisoners, p. 18.
62. Foujdari Adalat to Chief Secty., Madras, Aug. 22, 1835, BC, F/4/1628,
1836–37, no. 65135.
63. K. S. Sandhu, cited in Sharon Siddique and Nirmala Puru Shotam,
Singapore’s Little India: Past, Present, and Future (Singapore, 1982), p. 9.
64. Turnbull, Singapore, p. 55.
65. Cited in ibid.
66. C. B. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (Kuala Lumpur,
reprint [1902] 1965), pp. 575–631; Hong Kong to GOI, no. 786, Oct. 28, 1856,
India Public Consultations (IPC), Jan.-Mar. 1857, Jan. 9, no. 7; Governor to
GOI, no. 60, June 1, 1853, ICJC, July-Sept. 28, 1855, July 6, no. 6.
67. GOB to GOI, IPC, July-Aug. 1857, Aug. 28, no. 39.
68. “Respectful memorial of Christian inhabitants . . . ,” ICJC, Sept.-Oct. 1857,
Oct. 2, no. 77.
69. Buckley, Anecdotal History, p. 657.
70. Blundell to GOI, no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857, IPC, Jan. 1858, Jan. 8, no. 7.
71. GOI to Suptd., Moulmein, no. 87, Jan. 15, 1858, IPC, Jan., no. 21.
72. Howell, Note on Jails, p. 71; GOI to Bombay, Jan. 12, 1858, IPC, Jan. 1858,
no. 13. An excellent study of this penal colony is Satadru Sen, Disciplining
Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Oxford,
2000).
73. Secty. to Suptd., Alipur Jail, BCJC, Feb. 14–28, 1828, Feb. 28, no. 49;
Colonial Secty. to GOI, April 29, 1841 and Bombay to Court of Directors,
May 22, 1841, ICJC, July 5–Sept 27, 1841, July 19, no. 9. The decision to halt
penal traffic to Mauritius was based in part on the fear that a continuing
infusion of Indian convicts would unduly influence the island’s growing
Indian population. Once the convict traffic was stopped, free laborers and
their families were brought in. See also Clare Anderson, Convicts in the
Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (London,
2000).
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