Organizer: Satadru Sen, University of Washington
Chair and Discussant: Thomas Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
The definition, identification, isolation, and correction of disorder have been central to the modernization of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Colonial constructions of crime, and systems of punishment, have sought to order the political and moral allegiances of Indians by creating a centralized locus of authority, and channeling loyalty towards this center. Refusal to acknowledge this central source of legitimacy has been constructed as deviance, and rendered criminal, marginal or both.
Throughout this process, the initiator and primary agent of change has been the colonial state, and state-affiliated disciplines such as penology, medicine and psychiatry. The state’s encounter with crime has been marked by the deployment of systems of coercion, especially police agencies and prisons. Nevertheless, these systems and the discourse of crime and coercion have also been shaped by the responses of the criminals and the coerced. In each case, those subjected to the punitive machinery of the colonial regime have been able to negotiate with the state over their official and actual status, and to influence the conditions of their punishment.
The papers on this panel examine the interplay between colonial punishment and the Indian response, in the middle- and late-nineteenth century. Satadru Sen looks at the development of the convict family in the Andaman Islands. Anand Yang examines prison disturbances in Bihar. Shruti Kapila analyzes the links between colonial psychiatry and constructions of criminality.
Alienist Assumptions and Alien Territories: The Arrival of the Criminal Insane, Bombay Presidency, 1849–1921
Shruti Kapila, University of London
The aim of this paper will be to establish the nexus between penology and colonial psychiatry. The central issue will be a discussion on the location and agendas of colonial psychiatry which was implicated not just in a contestation with the juridical authorities but was necessarily informed by it.
Colonial psychiatry asserted its autonomy and hegemony via the doctrine of "alienism" which at once believed in the dichotomy between the mind and the body and in the corporeality of the mind. This assertion affected a new manner in which societal aberrations could be explained in the idiom of objectivity and scientific rationalism. The mind-body dichotomy was discursive to the neighboring category of "crime." The purposive strategy was to carve out an autonomous domain for psychiatry to classify descriptive elements of mental and social "pathology" as they manifested in individuals. The aim was to demystify the horror of crime and criminals and to bring them under the observational, classifying, regulatory and ultimately the domesticating gaze of psychiatry and on the other to "scienticise" crime. Further, this "objective" idiom was interlaced with anthropological constructs.
The interlocking of crime and insanity ensued a contestation between the medical and juridical authorities over issues of cognitive supremacy and jurisdiction. However, the contestation was an in-house debate over the constitution of the "criminal insane," and was facilitated by a shared norm of "public order."
Caste, Religion, and Prisons in North India: The Lotah Emeute of 1855
Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
This paper focuses on the so-called "lotah emeute" that erupted in the jails of Arrah and Muzaffarpur in Bihar in 1855. My aim is to sort through the colonial archival ‘negatives’ of this event to develop a series of snapshots regarding the event itself as well as to organize these individualized portraits into a montage that represents and evokes the larger picture of the colonial system of discipline and punishment and of the resistances directed against that regime and regimen. This montage will also depict the place and fit of the prison in indigenous society, a picture that has much to reveal as well about mentalitiés regarding the colonial state in the mid-nineteenth century, on the eve of the mutiny/rebellion of 1857.
The Match-Maker State: Convict Marriages and the Colonial Indian Prison
Satadru Sen, University of Washington, Seattle
Even as the modernizing discourse of nineteenth-century punishment insisted upon the isolation of the criminal from family and society, the colonial state in India tried to recreate the family within the prison. This paper examines the efforts that were made in the Andaman Islands penal colony in the second half of the nineteenth century to provide wives and families for transported criminals, and the ways in which the convict family both furthered and compromised the agendas of punishment and rehabilitation. Women and marriage were presented to male convicts as rewards for cooperation with the penal regime, and the convict family was intended to function as a containing mechanism, within which disorderly women and men could be effectively managed and rehabilitated. At the same time, in the process of assembling families in the penal settlement, the regime was forced to approach convicts, especially women, as a supplicant. This gave female convicts a unique bargaining position in their dealings with the punishing state, and the power to manipulate the terms of their punishment.