THE COLONIAL PRISON : POWER, KNOWLEDGE, AND PENOLOGY IN

NINETEENTH CENTURY INDIA - DAVID ARNOLD

The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth Century India is an article
written by David Arnold. It was published in a book of articles – A Subaltern Studies Reader, compiled
by Ranajit Guha.

This article was written in six parts along with an Introduction and a Conclusion.

Introduction:

Michael Foucault in his Discipline and Punish explains the horrific scene of public torture and
execution in Paris in 1757. Boiling oil, molten lead, and sulphur are poured onto the body of the regicide
Damiens as royal power wrecks its brutal revenge. Steel pincers pick at his flesh; horses pull apart his
half- severed limbs. Slowly Damiens dies and his dismembered body is burned to ashes. This set an
example to people that punishment is severe than penalty.

This trend was changed by 1830’s and the new penology -where target is not the body but to
‘correct, reclaim, and cure the soul’. The violent punishment on body was replaced by a punishment that
acts in depth on the ‘heart, the thought, the will, the inclinations’.

The new penology, Panopticon (1791) proposed by Bentham is like utopia. The prison cells are
individual and constantly visible. It is that kind of colonial prison where power cannot form the monopoly
of a single class or cluster of individuals.

According to Foucault, in eighteenth century, power became a part of social body.

Part –I:

Colonial Indian prisons were in complete contrast to Foucault’s view. There were revolts in the prison
and the prisoners were not docile. The resistance of the prisoners led to the evolution of Colonial
Penology. Until 1840’s prisoners were allowed to cook on their own to follow the caste system. The
premises were made dirty and there was no discipline. When the prisoners were asked to eat food cooked
by the cooks and eat with others regardless of caste, there were agitations and hunger strikes. But the
common messing system was implemented with power to inculcate discipline. By 1854, the common
messing system was implemented in 8 of the 40 prisons. In May 1846, the government decided to relax
the enforcement to common messing system in Allahabad Jail.

In April 1834, in Alipur Jail at Calcutta, prisoners brained the European Magistrate with brass lota. In
1855, Bengal’s Inspector of Jails ordered the confiscation of all unauthorized possessions, especially lotas
from the prisoners for the want of order, system and method in jail management. This was spread as an
attempt for forced conversions of the prisoners into Christianity.

In 1877, the President of the Indian Jail Conference observed that the “great practical fault of our jail
system is that orders are not rigidly carried out”. As a result, the running of the prison was almost in the
hands of the convicts. There were ill-paid and corrupt subordinates.
Part- II :

One of the ways in which the prison came to be colonized by the middle- class nationalists from the
1890s onward was through the publication of prison diaries and memoirs recounting their experiences and
struggles with the prison authorities. The letters in the article were quoted by the writer to prove that there
was resistance in Indian Prison System – a network of power and knowledge over which there was no
control of the prison authorities. Penology was a more narrowly state-centered enterprise in 19 th century
India than in Europe.

Ashis Nandy claims to have identified a colonialism that “colonizes minds in addition to bodies” and
produces “cultural and psychological pathologies” of such intensity that they have endured far beyond
the formal termination of colonial rule. By introducing the phrase “colonization of the body” into a
discussion of prisons, Arnold wants to highlight three main elements:

1. A process of incorporation by means of which the colonized were brought under various systems
of discipline and control – in the prison, as in the army and the police: in factories, plantations,
and mines: in hospitals and in schools.
2. A process of ideological or discursive incorporation, effected through that vast agglomeration of
texts, discourses, and institutional rules that concerned themselves with the physical being of the
colonized and that, consciously or implicitly, used the body as a site for the construction of
colonial authority and for the interrogation of indigenous society and culture.
3. An area of contestation between different understandings of the body, involving competing claims
to speak for the body of the colonized and for its material, social, and cultural needs.

Part – III:

The colonial prison in India helped to differentiate between the humane and rational colonial rule and
barbaric native society, where sati and female infanticide were much prevalent.

The native punishments like branding, mutilation and whipping were replaced by imprisonment, to
evoke terror in the wrong-doers. But the British claimed to have introduced more humane punishment
that India has ever previously known.

In December 1835 and 1836, Macaulay called for the appointment of a committee to investigate prison
discipline in India and it was found that India faced a Utilitarian thought of government at that time.

Part – IV:

Administrative attitudes and convict resistance were more likely causes of this failure to maintain
Benthamite institutions than was the weight of prison numbers. Nineteenth –century India’s prison
population appears – at least at first sight – to have been relatively small. There was no “great
confinement,” because there was no social or political upheaval, comparable to the Industrial Revolution
in Britain, to occasion it.

In 1838, the average prison population of British India was 56,632. During 1861-1865, the average
population only in lower Bengal was 11,349. The percentage of women prisoners was much insignificant
when compared to the male prisoners. The reason for this striking disparity between the sexes is unclear.
Perhaps an awareness of the nature of the prison conditions discouraged magistrates and judges from
sending women, especially women from the “respectable classes”. But this scenario has changed later as
an increasing number of women were sentenced to imprisonment for murdering their husbands or infant
children.

Apart from sentencing policy and the frequency of escapes and executions, two other factors governed
the size of India’s jail population during the nineteenth century. The first factor was prodigious mortality
due to cholera, malaria, dysentery and diarrhea. The second factor was effect of food shortages and
famine.

On contrary, the European prisoners were given better food and treatments because of demarcations
between race, gender and sex.

Part – V:

Productive labour became a part of prison discipline and reform. Prisoners were extensively used as
‘convict labour’ in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to avoid overcrowding in jails. Clearing
river beds, construction and repair of roads, digging irrigation canals and building their own prisons were
given as works under ‘prisoner reformation’. Indian prisoners were sent to Singapore, Andaman, as it was
hard to obtain labour there, but it was difficult to control prisoners in public places.

Jails were industrialized. Handmade products made by prisoners were sold at high rates and brought
huge income to the prisons. Though the prisoners shed their grim and sweat, they never received proper
wages. Thus, the colonial prison became a “school of industry” than as a “house of correction”.

Part –VI:

The colonial prison is an oriental model of a society constructed around an essentialism of caste and
religion. In course of time, the colonial prison had set a model for sanitation and medical science. From
1860s Prison Inspectors General were appointed from Indian Medical Service. Prisons became the
privileged sites of medical observation and experimentation. This resulted in the formation of a colonial
connection between medicine and penology. The medical officers had to decide whether the prisoners
were genuinely ill or pretending to avoid punishment. Prisons became the places to experiment with new
medicines for plague, cholera, typhoid , malaria and small pox.

In 1907, G.F.W. Braide, Inspector General of Prisons implemented quinine, as a result, the mortality
rate in prisons reduced compared to the general public. A study was conducted on the change of diet and
improvement in the health of prisoners. Jail diets were taken as a valid indication of the importance of
food rather than heredity “in the formation and development of those attributes and qualities of mind and
body that are alike the pride of the soldier and the envy of inferior races”. It seemed no more appropriate
to the physicians to read civilian health from convict physiology.

Conclusion :

Many aspects of subalternity still remain unwritten regarding the colonial prison.

Observations:
 Everyday resistance was common.
 Prison was not cut off from all contact with civil society.
 Prison has set a model for discipline and order.
 Prison set an example for how order could or could not be imposed on an indigenous society by
an alien society.
 Despite many differences, the prison remained a part of his society.
 The prisoners were disciplined- not of moral reform but of remunerative labour.

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Sources – A SUBALTERN STUDIES READER- RANAJIT GUHA.