Empire of convicts: Indian penal labor in colonial Southeast Asia 9780520294561, 9780520967595

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Empire of Convicts

T h e C a l i for n i a Wor l d H istor y L i br a r y Edited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed

Empire of Convicts Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia

Anand A. Yang

University of Califor nia Pr ess

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Anand A. Yang Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yang, Anand A., author. Title: Empire of convicts : Indian penal labor in colonial Southeast Asia / Anand A Yang. Other titles: California world history library ; 31. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Series: The California world history library ; 31 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020026921 (print) | lccn 2020026922 (ebook) | isbn 9780520294561 (cloth) | isbn 9780520967595 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Convict labor—Southeast Asia—19th century—Case studies. | East Indians—Southeast Asia—19th century—Case studies. | Penal colonies—Southeast Asia—History—19th century. Classification: lcc hv8931.s644 y35 2021 (print) | lcc hv8931.s644 (ebook) | ddc 365/.65089914059—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026921 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026922 Manufactured in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Con t en ts

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 2

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Across the Kala Pani: The Global and Local Contexts of Penal Transportation 11

“Bundwars, Malays, Sebundy Sepoys, and Neas Men”: The Bengkulu World of the Khan Brothers, 1797–1825 51 3

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“Kumpanee ke Noukur”: Rajas and Robbers in Penang, 1790–1870s 95

“Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath”: Convict Workers and the Making of Colonial Singapore, 1825–1870s 143 5

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Epilogue—Life after Life: The Afterlives of Bandwars in the Straits Settlements 188 Notes 211 Bibliography 255 Index 267

I l lust r at ions

Maps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Across the black waters: the Indian Ocean 10 West Sumatra in the early nineteenth century 49 Presidencies of India, 1837 50 The Malayan Peninsula, 1862 93 Captain H. R. Popham’s map of early Penang, 1799 94 Lieutenant Philip Jackson’s map of Singapore, 1828 141 George Coleman’s map of Singapore 142

Figures 1. South East View of Fort Marlborough, Benkulen, Sumatra, by Joseph Constantine Stadler, 1799 52 2. View in Pulo Penang, by Augustus Earle, 1828 96 3. Parade of convicts, Singapore, ca. 1869 144 4. Convict jail (main entrance), Singapore 145 5. Indian laborers, Singapore, ca. 1870 189

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In the course of completing this book—sidelined by administrative stints—I have put in almost enough time to add up to a life sentence, certainly by the clock that regulated convict lives in nineteenth-century colonial India, for whom sixteen years generally sufficed to earn them a ticket-of-leave or parole. My sentence, though, has been entirely of my own making, and my years of research and writing very much a labor of love. Over the course of two decades or so I have naturally incurred many debts and obligations, beginning with the instructive feedback I received on the very first presentation I ever made on transmarine convicts, in June 1995 at the World History Association meeting in Florence, Italy. Since then I have had many more occasions to engage audiences at the annual meetings of learned societies in many countries. In addition, I have also had many opportunities to try out bits of this work at universities in many lands, including, in alphabetical order, Banaras Hindu University, Binghamton University, Delhi University, Cornell University, Georgetown University, Leiden University, National University of Singapore, Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University, Universiti Sains Malaysia, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, University of Leicester, University of Texas, University of Virginia, Western Michigan University, University of Witwatersrand, and Yale University. Such forums make one appreciate the extent to which intellectual production necessarily involves sharing and circulation, participation in a gift economy in which one often receives more than one contributes. This book was conceived while I was at the University of Utah, where I benefited from having excellent colleagues and support to pursue research in

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far-flung archives. I have been equally blessed at the University of Washington, where I have been since 2002, really doubly blessed because I have a joint appointment in two units: the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, where I have inflicted my work on colleagues through its seminar series, and the History Department, where I have benefited from presenting at its monthly colloquium. At Utah I would like to acknowledge Edward J. Davies, James R. Lehning, and the late Peter Sluglett, and at the University of Washington, David Bachman, Daniel Chirot, Purnima Dhavan, Donald Hellman, Sunila Kale, Resat Kasaba, Christian Novetzke, Deborah L. Porter, Priti Ramamurthy, Cabeiri Robinson, Lynn Thomas, and Joel Walker. Sonal Khullar, an art historian and fellow South Asianist at UW, deserves a special shout-out for always being willing to traffic in ideas and prose. Many thanks as well to Lauren Kronmiller, Shruti Patel, and Catherine Warner, who took time out of their busy graduate student lives to read microfilms on my behalf. I have also benefited from many a conversation I have had over the years with Seema Alavi, Clare Anderson, David Arnold, the late Srinivas Aravamudan, Renate Bridenthal, Michael Fisher, Sandria Freitag, Beth Fuget, Christopher Hill, Ranjana Khanna, Tabitha Mallory, Patrick J. Manning, Jim Masselos, Phillip McEldowney, Dilip Menon, Thomas R. Metcalf, William Pinch, Katherine Prior, Rajesh Rai, Mahesh Rangarajan, Helen Siu, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ann Waltner, and Kerry Ward, just to mention a few who have helped steer the way forward. I am also beholden to David Gilmartin and Edmund “Terry” Burke III, my two UC Press reviewers, for their gracious and helpful critiques. Research for this project began in earnest at the National Archives of India in New Delhi in 1994–1995, thanks to a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Award. Since then I have made countless visits to the British Library, that great repository of colonial records for South Asia, many of the trips generously funded by the University of Washington, including its Hanauer Discretionary Fund; by the University of Utah; and in 2000 by a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have also profited enormously from spending time in Penang, hosted by Ariffin Omar, Syed Ahmad, and other distinguished Universiti Sains professors. In addition, I could not have completed this work without repeated visits to Singapore’s National Archives and National Library, funded primarily by the University of Washington. A huge vote of thanks to the always supportive staff of these splendid institutions!

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Finally, I am grateful to Niels Hooper at the University of California Press for believing in this work and patiently waiting for it to materialize. And to Sandrine and Simone, who always have faith: this book is for you two! Not much happens in history without the labor of many hands.

Ac k now l e d g m e n t s

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Introduction

This book is about convicts from India, or bandwars, to use a Hindustani term employed by a sepoy, or soldier in Bengkulu, to refer to his fellow countrymen in that west Sumatran settlement in the early nineteenth century. The sepoy was alluding to convicts banished to insular prisons across the Indian Ocean to serve mostly life sentences of penal transportation for their heinous crimes, not inmates lodged in jails in India. My focus is on narrating the lived experiences of these overwhelmingly male convicts housed in three penal settlements in the Indian Ocean in the long nineteenth century extending from 1789 to 1914: Bengkulu (also known as Bencoolen or Fort Marlborough) in west Sumatra, Penang (or Pulo Penang) in present-day Malaysia, and Singapore. Authorities in the Bengal Presidency, headquartered in Calcutta, along with their counterparts in the other presidencies of Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras (Chennai), also transported bandwars to other parts of Southeast Asia: to Burma (present-day Myanmar), Malacca (Malaysia), and various islands in the Indonesian archipelago that were in and out of British hands in the decades before and after the turn of the nineteenth century. Colonial authorities also made use of other imperial outposts across the Indian Ocean, that body of water generically termed kala pani or black water by many people in India, dispatching “criminal” offenders in significant numbers, particularly to Mauritius in the southwest quadrant beginning the 1810s, and to the Andamans in the Bay of Bengal, briefly in the 1790s and then again beginning in the late 1850s, when it became the principal penal depot for convicts from India. The British takeover of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1796, followed by its establishment as a Crown Colony in 1802, added another locale in the circuit of coerced labor

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from where convicts were transported across the Indian Ocean to the Straits Settlements and Mauritius. The overwhelming majority of convicts sentenced to transportation were guilty of heinous crimes: murder or other violent acts committed in conjunction with robbery, thugi (banditry accompanied by murder, often believed to involve ritual strangulation), or dacoity (armed gang robbery by five or more people). Some were also banished for political acts, typically rebellion and treason, classified as criminal offenses, in which they were generally either the instigators of small-scale uprisings or second-echelon leaders of larger insurgencies whose top brass were invariably put to death. An exception to the latter rule—although he was not categorized as a convict—was the Sikh rebel Bhai Maharaj Singh, exiled to Singapore in 1849 for his commanding role in the war against the British in the late 1840s. In other words, convicts were problematic people, deviants and troublemakers, whom the authorities in India thought best to purge the subcontinent of and cast into oblivion by deporting them to distant shores. They were also criminal bodies spared the ultimate brutality of capital punishment and granted a mitigated punishment that enabled colonial rulers to trumpet their quality of mercy and superior governance and policies. In both India and the penal settlements, colonial administrators did not envision sharp divides between convicts and the rest of their fellow countrymen and women. In their imagination, all colonized people were more or less criminal, some more evil and dangerous than others, a characterization also extended to other subject peoples, in Southeast Asia, for instance, to the Chinese, Malays, and Burmese. All these peoples embodied inferior races: they were savage and barbaric in comparison to their European rulers, who hailed from the superior and advanced civilization of the West. That is, the difference between convict and nonconvict subjects in the local populations was small, but it was vast between all colonized people and their European colonizers. Consequently, a highly racialized ideology informed colonial ideas and practices relating to crime and criminality and the judicial and penal system designed to maintain and enhance law and order. Ruling criminal and unruly subjects in colonized lands necessitated brutal and harsh regimes of discipline. In the penal colonies that meant subjecting convicts to labor regimes that exacted a pound of flesh, their work being perceived as rehabilitating them into becoming productive and pliant subjects. Penal transportation targeted both their bodies and minds, to exploit their brawn for colonial and imperial projects and to coax them into shouldering 2

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heavy workloads. Disciplinary regimes were therefore both exacting and indulgent, violence always a threat and mercy a state of exception but a possibility. Colonial rule often cloaked its iron fist in a velvet glove. Very little effort, if any, went into configuring legal and penal institutions to induce moral reform in people convicted of crimes. Bandwars thought of themselves as naukars or servants of the East India Company, much in the way that sepoys performed naukari or service on behalf of the rising British colonial state in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were convict workers, coerced labor, but men (and some women) defined not by their criminality but by their bodies, which negotiated the corrective penal violence directed at them. Indeed, a major concern of the book is to narrate their subjective experiences of forced labor in exile. In their self-perception, their labor had value, as they witnessed firsthand in building the infrastructure of the British Empire across the Indian Ocean. As convicts they did not control their labor power, but they were compensated by the local authorities for their exertions in cash and kind (food and clothing). As a result, some managed to save their meager wages in anticipation of their lives on tickets of leave (a kind of parole) and eventually emancipation. Their work alongside other unfree workers (slaves and bonded labor), and increasingly in the nineteenth century wage labor from India and China, also made them well aware of their usefulness, a labor value that colonial authorities in the insular prisons were endlessly calibrating to maximize financial profit and to justify to Calcutta and London the benefits of coerced labor at a time when the practice of enslaving people was ending. This book has grown out of research I initially pursued in the 1980s when scholars in many fields were investigating criminal justice systems and the men and women targeted by them in order to comprehend the ideologies and structures of colonial state power and control and the graphic and subtle ways in which subalterns confronted and negotiated such regimes of violence. The current work is also rooted in research I began in the early 1990s on colonial prisons in India, influenced and inspired, as many were then and are now, by the provocative oeuvre of Michel Foucault and other scholars interested in carceral regimes. That project never took off, in part because my research visa was held up, apparently by someone in some ministry in New Delhi worried that my work would fuel the controversy sparked by the 1991 Human Rights Watch report on prison conditions in India. Although I did i n t roduc t ion

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finally secure a visa—after submitting a note explaining that my study would focus exclusively on colonial prisons, be archives based, and not involve ethnographic research in contemporary jails—I had by then become intrigued by the men and women who seemingly disappeared off the map of the Indian subcontinent (and South Asian history) after boarding ships transporting them to penal settlements across the Indian Ocean. I was fortunate in that I was already familiar with some of these convict passengers, having encountered them in the records of the criminal justice system in India. Their lives beyond South Asia and across the kala pani also fitted in well with my growing absorption with world and global history, with engaging a past not spatially and thematically bound by the boundaries of nation-states but framed more fluidly by land- and seascapes connected through global processes shaped by the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas, and by the large-scale transformations wrought by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This account of convicts across the Indian Ocean is therefore very much part of a global history of coerced labor, albeit of a history from below because it narrates the lives of ordinary men and women experiencing and negotiating extraordinary events and processes, in some localities working alongside slaves and in other areas preceding and overlapping the first waves of indentured labor from India. This book could justifiably be titled “empire of labor” because convicts, together with other kinds of coerced, semicoerced, and free labor, were critical to the development of European empires and capitalism across the globe. In colonial Southeast Asia convicts followed on the heels of slaves and other forms of coerced labor and paved the way for wage labor, including indentured workers. Bandwar histories, moreover, make for fascinating comparisons and contrasts because convicts figured prominently in other transregional histories, whether of the British Empire in North America and Australia or of other imperial formations in other world regions. The coerced migration of bandwars across the kala pani also has many parallels with forced movements of enslaved peoples across other bodies of water, particularly the Atlantic and the Pacific. Convicts—along with other forms of labor and sepoys or soldiers from India—provided the muscle that enabled the East India Company to extend beyond the Indian subcontinent into insular and littoral Southeast Asia and build outposts in Penang (1786), Singapore (1819), and Malacca (1825). The company gained a foothold in the region as early as the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when it acquired territory in west Sumatra and built a 4

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settlement in Bengkulu. However, that faded in importance as the British, firmly anchored in the Indian subcontinent, expanded across the kala pani in the nineteenth century to consolidate their domination over the Bay of Bengal, including the waterway between the western edge of the Malayan peninsula and Sumatra, a key gateway or chokepoint between India and East Asia, well known today, as in the past, as the Strait (or Straits) of Malacca. To secure their economic, political, and military presence in the eastern Indian Ocean, the British had earlier sought to establish a base in the Andamans that also involved convict labor. And their takeover of Ceylon in 1796, followed by their occupation of the entire island by 1818, enabled them to stake out a western gateway to the Bay of Bengal as well as to strengthen their presence in the Arabian Sea and the southern Indian Ocean. Chapter 1 locates the phenomenon of penal transportation in India in global and local contexts. It looks at the prior experience of the British with the banishment of their subjects to North America and then, in much larger numbers, to Australia, at the same time in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that they began deploying transportation in South Asia and elsewhere in Asia. As a strategy of colonial rule and domination, this secondary punishment was considered especially effective because it deported people across the kala pani, a voyage that many but not all in South Asia were fearful of undertaking on religious grounds. Thus, transportation was perceived as a punishment perfectly calibrated for India because it inflicted the right measure of violence on the colonial body without amounting to capital punishment. It enabled colonial rulers to intimidate their subjects physically and psychically as well as to claim the moderation befitting a “civilized” regime. And it also helped prop up the growing oceanic empire beyond India by providing much-needed manpower for the outposts that the British had staked out in the littoral areas of Southeast Asia and elsewhere across the Indian Ocean. Along with tracing the spatial dimensions of penal transportation, this initial chapter also draws attention to the administrative and legal frameworks within which that punishment was devised and enacted, not only to fit the crime but also to serve the imperatives of the British Empire in India and across the Indian Ocean. Consequently, Calcutta, in consultation with Bombay and Madras, constantly tinkered with the laws relating to transportation because of changing political, economic, and social circumstances in India and the outposts of empire. In India exile and banishment was about removing and cleansing the subcontinent of dangerous people—and who i n t roduc t ion

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was deemed threatening changed over time; in the penal colonies, transportation was about acquiring much needed manpower for labor-deficit lands and increasingly convicts with particular skills. Thus, changing colonial and imperial needs and interests led to the rules of transportation constantly being remade and their implementation modified at the local level to best serve the imperatives of the penal colonies, a process of governance that accentuates the complexities of colonial and imperial governmentality. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 delve into the lived experiences of convicts by anchoring their stories in specific locales and time periods to narrate similar but also different tales about coerced labor. Viewed together, the three accounts flesh out a more immersive portrait of bandwar lives, of subaltern men and women who spent the better decades of their adult lives as the criminalized and laboring subjects of the colonial state, if they survived the first years of their captivity, during which mortality rates were extremely high. The shading of each chapter varies somewhat, in part because of the circumstances in which people found themselves at different sites, the different composition and size of the inmate and noninmate populations, the local articulations of colonial governmentality, and the archival traces available on each venue to breathe life into their stories. Historians make do with the archival hand they have been dealt. Chapter 2 focuses on the penal colony of Bengkulu between the late eighteenth century and 1825. At the centerpiece of this microhistory is a convict named Fateh Khan, who became the leader of its small local community of Indians, mostly consisting of bandwars and sepoys, and was acknowledged as such by the honorific titles sahib and sardar (head) being conferred on him. His rise to that lofty status speaks to his personal abilities and standing in the convict body but also to the local peculiarities of the disciplinary regime under which he and his fellow convicts lived and worked. That included—as it also did to some extent in Penang and to a lesser degree in Singapore—working in tandem with other types of unfree labor, chattel slaves from East Africa, especially Madagascar, and bonded labor or debt slaves from the nearby island of Nias. Coincidentally, some in the local European community also thought of themselves as living in exile on a forlorn island. In the wake of Khan sahib’s downfall in 1813, local administrators scrambled to tighten up their disciplinary system so that they could better manage their convict population of a few hundred, changes that were also configured by their understanding of penal rules and practices in Australia. The new 6

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regulations became the “Bencoolen rules” in the early 1820s, a template for other insular prisons in Southeast Asia. When Bengkulu was handed over to the Dutch in the wake of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, its convicts were relocated to Penang and Singapore, along with its disciplinary practices. As the making of these new rules reveals, the local authorities sought to combine mostly carrots with sticks to formulate policies and practices aimed at creating a more productive and pliant convict body. Chapter 3 shifts attention to Penang, which also emerged as a penal depot in the late eighteenth century and developed into the principal insular prison in the region until the 1840s. As this chapter shows, Penang acquired a sizable inmate population because its colonial administrators were intent on aggregating enough laboring hands to transform the island into a major commercial and strategic port for the British Empire in the Strait of Malacca. Neither the convict numbers nor the port buildup ever materialized, however; Penang’s fate was sealed by the emergence of Singapore in the late nineteenth century. In the absence of a need for a large convict workforce devoted to public works in a settlement perennially in budgetary shortfall, local authorities opted to reduce their maintenance costs by loaning out many bandwars as servants to government officials and private individuals, much in the way that convicts were assigned in Australia. In the early decades of the nineteenth century convicts shared the island with 73 survivors of the so-called Poligar Wars in south India, whose death sentences were mitigated to transportation. These prisoners also thought of their insular exile as emotionally wrenching, although they were exempted from the penal servitude exacted from most bandwars. No wonder convicts conceived of themselves as the East India Company’s naukars or servants. Periodically, as this chapter reveals, convicts absconded by capitalizing on the long-standing circuits of trade and shipping that connected India to maritime Southeast Asia, their escape narratives offering tantalizing accounts of convict life in Penang and the possibilities opened up by its disciplinary regimen. Their escapes also highlight the shrinking world of the Indian Ocean, as imperial networks added to the linkages that bound India to the littoral areas of Southeast Asia well before the advent of European sailing ships in the kala pani. Chapter 4 traces the rise of Singapore as the newest Sydney of Southeast Asia and its subsequent development as a major entrepôt and strategic hub in the region. One key to its growth was the effective mobilization and deployment of its sizable bandwar population, far more impressively than other i n t roduc t ion

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penal settlements were able to do. As the chapter details, convict workers remade the island’s natural and built environment by clearing its rain forests, draining its swamps, and building its communication infrastructure and major edifices. Their “public service” laid the foundations of the thriving modern city that Singapore became in the late nineteenth century. In addition, this chapter fleshes out many specifics about bandwar identities. It makes them as visible as possible by piecing together archival fragments generated by the colonial surveillance project aimed at disciplining and exploiting the convict body as cost effectively as possible. Administrators in Singapore, Calcutta, and London were always concerned with that bottom-line calculation about the advantages of forced versus free labor. Their preoccupation with calculating and documenting the productive capacity of their convict workers as a collective body and on an individual basis generated an abundance of details about the workings of coerced labor and the personal backgrounds of many of the bandwar men and women. The chapter also recounts the story of Bhai Maharaj Singh and Khurruk Singh, two Sikh rebels who were exiled to Singapore in 1850, to add texture to the exilic experiences of the island’s inmates. The final chapter (5), an epilogue of sorts, carries the stories of convicts forward into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It updates the status and condition of the several thousand surviving bandwars in the Straits Settlements in the 1860s and 1870s at the time of the disbanding of its convict establishment. It tracks some of the men and women who were pardoned and freed and their ensuing trajectories of repatriation and persistence into the early years of the twentieth century. It also touches on the contract or indentured labor that increasingly flowed into the Straits as penal transportation came to an end in the late nineteenth century. The extensive deliberations conducted at the highest levels of government in the Straits Settlements, India, and Britain, as well as at the provincial and local levels in India, to determine the status of each and every surviving convict in Penang, Singapore, and Malacca offer a fascinating window into the workings of colonial and imperial governance, a governmentality that exposes both the extent and limits of state power. This rich archive also points to, as do earlier accounts of convict life in Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ways in which bandwar men and women sought to carve out economic and social spaces for themselves even as their bodies were being appropriated for colonial and imperial projects. 8

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This concluding chapter chronicles the lives that convicts made for themselves under precarious circumstances, many eking out a bare subsistencelevel existence by relying on the skills and experiences they had developed as company servants. It also features the stories of a small handful who fared better, some in their own lifetimes and, in one case, in the postconvict generation. Few descendants of transmarine convicts today in Southeast or South Asia, however, are willing to publicize the convict pasts of their ancestors, which, as this book shows in extenso, constituted a significant episode in the making of the British Empire and its colonial states and societies across the Indian Ocean. Then, and now, bandwars, who were relegated to the margins of society, remain marginalized, even though their stories have much to tell us about the ways in which their coerced labor forged an empire across a vast swathe of the Indian Ocean. The images that adorn the cover of this book are a stunning reminder of the lives that penal transportation destroyed by wrenching people away from their families and communities to face indeterminate futures in distant penal colonies. That was in fact one of the principal objectives of the punishment. Who or what they left behind—or returned to, if repatriated—is difficult to gauge, in part because of the shortcomings of any historical archives about people on the move, particularly ordinary men and women, who mostly did not leave behind any written traces. Bhai Maharaj Singh is an exception to that rule because he was a “state prisoner,” a man of considerable political importance, and his captors maintained a voluminous correspondence about his escapades and followers right up to the moment of his capture. Furthermore, he was subsequently granted permission to write a letter to his “family,” which he did to disclose his plight in Singapore. And when he was captured in Punjab in 1849 the British official who apprehended him seized several objects in his possession, which were later handed over to the British Library by that administrator’s descendants over a century later. The objects on display here—a conch shell, a finger ring, a knife, two steel quoits, a sewing needle and thread, and a text with passages written in Gurmukhi from the Sikh holy books, the Adi Granth and the Dasam Granth—all embody the military and religious leader Bhai Maharaj Singh was when he was captured and quickly whisked off to Singapore. The stories that follow are largely about the post-India experiences of convicts and other prisoners in the penal settlements of Southeast Asia in the long nineteenth century, lives eked out under conditions of precarity.

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penal settlement

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B U R MA Arakan

Bay of Bengal

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INDIA

Delhi

Indian Ocean

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Map 1. Across the black waters: the Indian Ocean

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Across the Kala Pani The Global and Local Contexts of Penal Transportation

Empire and penal tr ansportation: the two are inextricably linked in colonial and imperial history. Hyperbole notwithstanding, there is much truth to the assertion that modern European empires invented overseas transportation and—by extension—the convicts subjected to this punishment.1 At the same time convicts, by virtue of their removal from one locale and relocation overseas, facilitated the consolidation of empire across land and water. Transportation capitalized on the spatial dimensions of empires by enabling metropoles to jettison their ordinary and political criminals, flotsam and jetsam salvaged and recycled into valuable laboring hands in their new and distant settings. Coerced or forced migrants, these men and women invariably worked terms of servitude that transformed them into much-needed labor for the empire. Metropole Britain and North American colonies perfected this dynamic in the first British Empire by sending convicts across the Atlantic Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Britain did so again, on a larger scale, during the second British Empire, when banishment “beyond the seas” meant dispatching its criminals on long journeys to penal destinations in Australia via the South Atlantic Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope to enter the southern Indian Ocean, and then east to Botany Bay in the Pacific Ocean. Much the same relationship between transportation and empire played out in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the emerging colonial state in India, which assumed the metropole role and shipped its convicts across the kala pani or black waters—that is, across the eastern and western Indian Ocean to maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, the Andaman Islands, Mauritius, and other sites.2 Although there was some return traffic from Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia—for example, convicts from Burma and the Straits 11

Settlements (an administrative unit under the East India Company between 1826 and 1867 comprising Penang, Malacca, and Singapore (and Labuan after 1848), subsequently placed under the British colonial office) were dispatched to the Indian subcontinent—the flow was primarily the other way around, involving as it did the Jewel in the British Crown, India, deporting select individuals and groups from its sizable population to people the rising outposts of empire in littoral areas of Southeast Asia, which were perennially short of labor. Convicts were also transported from Ceylon to Southeast Asia and Mauritius. Periodically, authorities in India and elsewhere broached the possibility of deployment to other far-flung destinations opened up by the expanding British Empire. This chapter furnishes the global and local contexts of penal transportation by focusing on imperial and colonial policies and practices that led to the banishment of criminal offenders and political prisoners across the black waters of the Indian Ocean over the course of the long nineteenth century (see map 1).3 It briefly rehearses the prior British experiments with and experience of transportation in North America to sketch the larger imperial context but also to underscore the adaptations made in the application of transportation to the colonial context of British India. Over its nearly century and a half existence in South Asia, transportation was designed and redesigned to fit the imperatives of empire, exigencies generated by political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics at “home” in India and “abroad” in the penal sites. Transportation, as deployed across Indian Ocean settings, defined not only a metropole-colony relationship, with India standing in as the metropole vis-à-vis the other settlements, but also interactions among different colonial outposts that strengthened the sinews of the British Empire. A key dynamic was transportation’s capacity to furnish the many outposts of empire with much-needed laboring bodies. Empires have historically wielded power by controlling and disciplining space. From the outset, European empires envisioned the “problematic of the subjugation and management of space . . . as a territorial container requiring effective occupation by a central state apparatus.”4 Indeed, state building—and the imperialism that European states extended overseas—was constructed on territorial foundations “upon which the sovereignty of the . . . [empire] could apply its jurisdiction.”5 Territorial sovereignty was spatially manifested both within and without. Within, it delineated areal units, parcels of territory carved into administrative jurisdictions that were variously designated districts, provinces, residencies, presidencies, and so on; without, it established clear-cut boundaries distinguishing one territorial unit from another and one set of people 12

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constituted within its boundary markers from another, however arbitrarily those lines were drawn by administrative exigencies. Briefly, Bengkulu and Penang were elevated to the status of presidencies, on a par with Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, but then were quickly reduced to the status of a residency subordinated to either Calcutta or Madras. Within, colonial states also created spatial order and discipline by extending their reach into the countryside, aiming their communications, transportation, and administrative infrastructure at tying people and places to central locations in the colonies and the metropole. In the penal colonies convicts shouldered much of the burden of building this infrastructure of control. As K. Sivaramakrishnan insightfully observes, colonialism “was very much about the appropriation of space by the creation of state forms that emphasized territorial forms of control.”6 Heightened notions of territory and territorial sovereignty magnified the “concept of distance” after the sixteenth century. The expanse of empires served transportation well by providing places to which criminal offenders could be dispatched. Indeed, exclusion and exile capitalized on distant spatial frontiers and the notion and practice of territorial sovereignty.7 Territorial expansion generated opportunities but also problems. Modern European empires, according to Anthony Padgen, regarded expansion as a “threat to the stability and continued prosperity of the metropolis” even as they were acutely aware of the “incomparable advantages beyond the wealth or glory it might bring.” Empires provided an opening “for military, gloryseeking activities which might otherwise lead to internal unrest. They also offered a place in which to dump the increasing numbers of mendicants and criminals who thronged the cities of Europe.”8 Penal transportation flowed from these wellsprings formed by the rise of European states and empires. It served the latter’s ambitions well because it depended on and advanced their territorial projects on the Indian subcontinent as well as across the Indian Ocean. Critical as well was the chronology of transportation, deployed as it often was in the incipient stage of empire in territorial possessions that lacked human capital: both sheer numbers of people and skilled laboring hands. For the societies from which convicts originated, distance enhanced transportation’s punitive value by removing offenders to unfamiliar places far away from their homes and families. In these distant locales, convicts faced a form of “social death” that Orlando Patterson has theorized for chattel slavery, a different fate, however, than the death penalty many were granted reprieves from when they received their life sentences of transportation and penal servitude.9 Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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Convicts were dispatched to sites that already were or later became part of Britain’s rising “imperium of manifold distant islands bound by naval might to the island metropolis.”10 Their labor, whether deployed on infrastructural projects organized by local authorities or on plantations held privately, consolidated and enhanced the building of an imperial archipelago across the Indian Ocean, particularly in maritime Southeast Asia along the sea passage connecting the Indian Ocean to the South and East China Seas—that is, in and around the Strait of Malacca, which formed a major gateway to the lucrative China trade and occupied a strategic location in the interimperial rivalries of the colonial era (see map 1). That circuit of coerced labor was extended to Ceylon and Mauritius once Britain gained control of those islands in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, convicts from South Asia, more so than those transported from Britain to North America or to Australia, were tasked with building the infrastructure of colonial rule in the outposts of empire in Asia and the Indian Ocean. In North America and Australia, by contrast, convicts were often hired out as “servants,” to private individuals and households.11 In Calcutta, as in London, authorities conceived of their island possessions as “lonely, empty, deserted, hard to reach” places.12 In other words, the islands were ideal receptacles for convicts because they would perforce be thrust into the company of strangers from whom they were separated by language and culture, would make up the numbers needed to undertake colonial labor projects, and would be relegated to distant sites relatively inaccessible from the Indian subcontinent. Such calculations failed to consider the long and continuing history of maritime connections across the Indian Ocean, particularly in the Bay of Bengal. So much for colonial ideas about casting transmarine convicts into insular oblivion, into the empire’s version of “social death.”13 Over time convicts adeptly negotiated penal colonies.: They constructed communities among themselves and their countrymen and women, some of whom were not coerced migrants; mixed and intermarried with the local population and with others forced to labor, namely slaves imported from Madagascar or east Africa or nearby islands in Southeast Asia; and realized their lives were less circumscribed than their island existence initially augured. After all, trading boats and ships from whence they had come frequented most islands in the northeastern Indian Ocean, contacts and exchanges in most instances dating far back into precolonial history. Nor did the conditions of their labor in scattered locales in the penal colonies, 14

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manned by a handful of colonial administrators and troops, allow for close supervision. As a result, prisoners in effect became “their own warders,” to use a phrase employed by one British convict official to characterize the system of penal discipline he supervised in the Straits Settlements.14 Nevertheless, colonial administrators in India and the penal colonies remained attached to their island fantasies, their notion of islands as “perfect prisons” because of their “isolation, remoteness, enclosure, and containment.”15 Periodic complaints from Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay about the laxity of the disciplinary system in the insular prisons notwithstanding, most colonial administrators in India seemed content to accept the vagaries of penal transportation because it served their principal goal of extirpating criminal offenders from their midst and relegating them to faraway places, whose very geography ostensibly made them escape proof.16 Furthermore, transportation relied on the same technological and disciplinary tools that enabled European empires to reach far-flung territories to organize, occupy, and control these new spaces and their inhabitants. The very same sailing ships that carried European settlers to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also transported convicts and African slaves. European ships of commerce that first sailed into the Pacific waters became prison vessels that conveyed convicts to Botany Bay, beginning with the First Fleet in 1786, and later negotiated the Indian Ocean when western Australia was opened up as a penal destination in the mid-nineteenth century.17 So effectively was the dynamic between empire and transportation perfected by the British Empire that one historian has claimed transportation “overseas was a feature unique to British penal culture.”18 Certainly the first British Empire utilized it to colonize “new lands” in the Americas (including the West Indies). Moreover, transportation had antecedents; it developed out of the medieval sentence of banishment and gained currency as a major form of punishment in England in the sixteenth century. The flow of convict traffic connecting Britain to the Atlantic colonies, well established in the seventeenth century, expanded in the eighteenth century as transportation became the most significant secondary punishment “in which minor criminals or those reprieved from the death sentence were banished to foreign lands as indentured labour.”19 The Transportation Act of 1718, passed by the British Parliament, extended penal exile to North America “for a range of non-capital felonies,” serving the interests of both metropole and colony. As the historian Alan Frost has observed, it made penal practice more flexible, “for hitherto there Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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had been little provision for punishments between the extremes of death, on the one hand, and branding in the hand, whipping (‘at the cart’s tail’), exposure in the pillory, fine and imprisonment on the other”; it provided colonies access to convict labor and offered offenders “a chance to reform in a new environment.” Entailing as it did banishment overseas, transportation was also a punishment that capitalized on notions of exclusion and distance. Furthermore, it stripped convicts of their right to determine “the labor of their bodies,” a scarce resource prized and eagerly appropriated by the colonies for their own projects.20 Transportation served similar ends in other European empires, especially in the initial centuries of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires. Criminal exile in Portugal entailed sending people not only to locales within the country but also into the army and to the galleys. Comparable options in the form of transportation to hulks, used particularly in the late eighteenth century, and service in the army or navy, existed for British convicts at different points in time. With maritime expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came overseas locations to which Portugal banished its “undesirables.” Between 1550 and 1750 as many as 50,000 criminals were transported to locales ranging from Sao Tomé in West Africa to colonies farther afield in India, Ceylon, Moluccas, other parts of Africa (Angola, Mozambique), and Brazil.21 Although Spain never fully developed the Americas as a penal destination, it transported some criminals to its North African presidios (garrisons or forts) beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century. Prior to this time prisoners, known as forzados, an apt term for “forced” or coerced labor, were often sent to perform hard labor in the galleys and in the mercury mines of Almaden. In the sixteenth century, transportation was developed as a punishment for nobles and rich men condemned to be desterrados (banished men) and be impressed into military service in the presidios of North Africa. Common criminals joined their ranks in the middle of the seventeenth century; their punishment, in contrast to the military service performed by the desterrados, was epitomized in their designation as presidiarios: those condemned to hard labor. After galleys were abolished in 1748, as one Spanish historian has noted, “the North African presidios became virtual penal colonies.”22 In the eighteenth century presidiarios, some from Mexico and comprising Spaniards as well as mestizos and mulattoes, were sent to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Whether sentenced to labor in galleys or in presidios, condemned men served Spain’s manpower needs associated with “war and empire” across the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.23 16

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By contrast, penal transportation in the Dutch Empire involved the exile of both its own countrymen and women and its colonial subjects. The Dutch circuit of coerced migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shuttled convicts between and among colonies in South and Southeast Asia and to settlements in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Natives of Ambon (Maluku or Molucca islands, Indonesia), Banda Islands (Maluku province), and Batavia (Jakarta) were banished to Ceylon and vice versa, as well as from the Southeast Asian colonies to the Cape; some were sent away for “political” crimes. Many convicts did “public labor” in these places.24 The expanding British Empire developed other penal options once the American War of Independence closed down the United States as a penal destination. One stopgap measure, briefly employed in the 1770s and 1780s, was the hulks system, whereby convicts were employed in naval works. Another option, broached but not fully pursued in the wake of the American Revolution, sent convicts away to other possessions, chiefly in Canada and Africa.25 Finally, with pressures mounting at home because of growing concern about rising criminal activity, the large numbers collected in jails and hulks, and the lack of penal sites, New South Wales became, to cite one historian, the last resort, last in a long line that stretched back to Maryland, Virginia, British Honduras, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Gold Coast, the Gambia and Orange Rivers in West Africa, and the southeast coast of Africa.26 Australia had the advantage of being a distant locale that was also commercially profitable by facilitating connections to Asia and stopping European rivals “from engaging in such activity.” In addition, it promised access to “whaling grounds” and “virgin lands” in New South Wales of interest to “traders and merchants. But a labor force would be required, and what more suitable work might be found for the hordes of convicts crowding the jails of England and Ireland?”27 Even as political developments in North America were closing it down as a penal site for Britain, and Captain James Cook was laying the groundwork for the colonization of Australia, the British in India were looking for destinations for certain offenders singled out by their emerging legal system. In pursuing such possibilities, the British applied a page out of their metropolitan history to the colonies. It is not surprising that the Calcutta authorities briefly considered Australia as a penal site, although they had to abandon it as an option because their superiors in England elected to preserve Botany Bay for European convicts, including those sent from colonies in Asia.28 Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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The government in India had already considered sites closer to the subcontinent before the emergence of Australia as a penal destination in 1786. As early as 1773, Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal (1772–85), discussed the possibility of transporting Indian prisoners to Bengkulu in west Sumatra, an area in which the British had secured a foothold during the late seventeenth century. Although there is some dispute about when the first Indian convicts were actually transported there—according to one source as early as 1784—an early batch was sentenced by the Supreme Court in Calcutta in 1787 and deported to Bengkulu.29 Calcutta looked into other possibilities, facing rising pressure for transportation for some of the same reasons that prevailed in Britain: lack of jail facilities, especially in its vast province of Bengal, and rising numbers of prisoners. In 1788 Governor-General Charles Cornwallis recommended transportation to Prince of Wales Island, better known as Penang, which the East India Company had acquired in 1786, or 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 the soil of Penang.30 At about the same time the British also keyed on the Andaman Islands as a penal settlement. They envisioned it, as in the case of Penang, as a trading and naval base in the Bay of Bengal and near the Strait of Malacca that would facilitate their China trade and enable them to compete with their French and Dutch rivals. Captain Archibald Blair, a hydrographer of the East India Company, and Lieutenant (later Colonel) Robert Colebrooke, the surveyor general of India, completed an initial survey of these islands in 1789. By the end of 1795 Calcutta had dispatched some 270 convicts to that settlement. The following year, however, “with a view to humanity and economy,” the government withdrew from the Andamans because of concerns about prolonged “sickness and mortality . . . and the great expense and embarrassment to government in maintaining it and in conveying to it supplies at the present period.”31 The Andamans convicts were then transferred to Penang; other convicts from India continued to be banished to Bengkulu in the 1790s.32 In the closing decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries, India also transported convicts to other sites across the Indian Ocean, including Malacca, Ambon, and Java. Singapore joined this list in 1825, its development as a penal colony all but assured by its location in maritime Southeast Asia and the timing of its acquisition: in 1819 by Sir Thomas Raffles when he was governor of Bengkulu and when British authorities in India were seeking more penal options. Additional sites opened 18

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up in the wake of the British advance into mainland Southeast Asia, specifically Arakan (Rakhine) and Tenasserim (Tanintharyi) in Burma, secured as concessions in the late 1820s. Mauritius also served as a penal depot after its takeover by the British from the French in 1810, its island address in the western Indian Ocean having the advantage of being even further removed from India than any of the penal settlements in Southeast Asia (see map 1). The maritime empire that the British constructed across the kala pani from their land empire in India over the course of the nineteenth century transformed the Indian Ocean into a “British lake.” According to one historian, it created an “India-centered imperial web” across a vast oceanic world consisting of “port cities of the Indian Ocean rim, with their hinterlands” extending “from Zanzibar to Singapore, from Durban to Basra to Penang.”33 Coerced and wage labor that moved by compulsion and choice across this vast region constituted one of the critical networks fortifying this web. Administrators in Calcutta and London periodically broached the possibility of adding Botany Bay, West Indies, Aden, and various locales in Asia to their changing roster of penal sites, but only a handful of prisoners from South Asia were ever sent, and then only to some of these places.34 Australia never became a penal destination for criminals from India except for those of European descent. Almost a century before the Immigration Restriction Act of 1900 established a White Australia policy by prohibiting non-Europeans from entering the country, that principle was effectively observed to keep out all “native” convicts from the British Empire except Europeans, who were mostly military men convicted of heinous crimes. However, colonial officials in the insular prisons of the Indian Ocean were familiar with penal ideas and practices developed in Australia and often conceived of their penal colonies as their Sydneys and Botany Bays, as the ensuing three chapters reveal. Penal transportation, as utilized by the colonial regime in India, drew on prior experiences in Britain but had little precedent in South Asian history. Although banishment was deployed to punish certain crimes in ancient India—as it was in many polities and societies—its scope was limited. According to the Manusmrti (the code of law associated with Manu) and other ancient texts, it was a substitute punishment for Brahmins whose transgression otherwise merited the death penalty or branding. It was also levied on offenders for crimes ranging from adultery to not rendering assistance to a village under attack, and on undesirable characters such as gamblers and heretics whom local rulers wanted expelled from their kingdoms. Little evidence exists about the specific areas to which people were banished. Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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Apparently the practice was simply meant to ensure that offenders left the territory that banished them.35 Transplanted to India in the late eighteenth century, transportation took root in the emerging colonial penal culture at the turn of the nineteenth century and flourished thereafter because colonial administrators viewed it as an especially suitable technology of punishment for Indian society and culture. In India, as in Britain, it was aimed at attaining the penal objectives of removing criminals from their local societies, deterring others from committing crimes, and reforming criminals. In Calcutta, as in London, authorities also viewed transportation—along with imprisonment—as the two punishments best designed to deter crime and criminality. Furthermore, much of the ideological rationale underlying the development and application of transportation in South Asia had to do with the urgency to enforce a penal regimen at a time when the British government in India was ostensibly pulling away from the harsher punishments inflicted by the previous indigenous regime. In its perception, therefore, transportation was one punishment that fit the crime, and in fact many types of crimes and criminals, because it inflicted a “just measure of pain,” to use Michael Ignatieff’s felicitous phrase to explain the emergence of the penitentiary.36 Michel Foucault’s brilliant insights into the ways in which discipline and punishment transformed and changed in the modern world notwithstanding, the continuing deployment of penal transportation in India underscores the colonial regime’s attachment to corporal punishment for its subjects well into the late nineteenth century even as it developed a more elaborate system of prisons. In other words, contrary to what Foucault suggests, the colonial state’s disciplinary efforts remained focused on the body, even as it also increasingly sought to control its human subjects through careful observation and investigation. Indeed, both in India and “abroad” in the penal colonies, carceral regimes targeted the bodies as well as the souls of people deemed criminal, and were aimed at fabricating and assembling docile and productive subjects.37 Yet even as the colonial state viewed transportation as a means of assaulting the body of the offender and instituting dread in the body politic, it also conceived of the punishment as an embodiment of its quality of mercy: transportation spared lives; it was not capital punishment. In this respect, the colonial state emphasized that its criminal justice practices were far less sanguinary than those of the Mughal Empire. The colonial administration especially liked to play up this element of mercy in its disciplinary regimen in 20

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political cases in which offenders were exiled instead of executed for treason. And in criminal cases prisoners were often awarded “a mitigated sentence of transportation for life.”38 As British law increasingly replaced or revised Islamic law on the Indian subcontinent in the initial century of colonial rule, the new regime discarded punishments it considered repugnant such as mutilation, a trend that conformed to 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 drive was to ensure the severity of punishments to facilitate the maintenance and enhancement of law and order. Many magistrates echoed this refrain in response to the inquiry instituted by GovernorGeneral Cornwallis in 1789–90 into the criminal justice system. Several advocated for more sanguinary punishments, including public hangings; some recommended transportation, a punishment conceived of as second only to capital punishment in severity.39 Jorg Fisch’s study of the colonial transformation of the criminal law in Bengal 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,” he writes, 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 behavior 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 suffering, but with much deterrent effect, and its preventive value was absolute. Transportation was seen in a similar manner. 40

Colonial estimation of the value of transportation as an effective technology of punishment drew on Britain’s long experience with it but was also sustained by a rationale believed peculiar to South Asia. Indeed, from the outset of their rule in India, British administrators advanced a cultural and Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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social justification of transportation as especially potent in inflicting the right dosage of pain and suffering. The first generation of judicial officials consulted by Governor-General Richard Wellesley at the beginning of the nineteenth century echoed this viewpoint when, almost to a man, they sang the virtues of transportation. The three judges of the Provincial Courts of Appeal and Circuit in Calcutta, for instance, reported that many people regarded transportation as more severe than capital punishment. The judge of Bakarganj chimed in to say that “natives” generally dreaded “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.”41 According to Bengal officials, criminals feared the punishment because it relegated them to not knowing “what is to befall them; [and] from the confused ideas they form of the place [the penal destination], which their imagination surrounds with horror.”42 No less terrified were people sentenced to transportation in Britain in the late eighteenth century, although colonial officials tended to characterize such fears as peculiar to India. Banishment overseas in the era before global communication was a form of “death”: Those who were literate could and did write letters back home, but for most their children would be orphaned just as surely as if they were being nailed into a wooden box and lowered into the ground. Transportation of a spouse was usually considered to be a de facto divorce as the chances of ever seeing the other person again were slim. Quite often transported felons were leaving their families to a life of penury or the workhouse; their going meant that their children would have to survive as best they could alone on the streets without income or protector. Even for those without families, in a time when neighbourliness and community were of great importance and individuality was far less prized, to be forcibly removed from family and friends was a wrenching loss of personal identity. This was just as the British government wished it to be. 43

People in India, colonial administrators believed, were susceptible to a sense of “wrenching loss” because of their deep attachment “to their families [and] the localities of their birth coupled in very many cases with a religious dread of the ocean.”44 In a similar vein a British official noted in 1801 that Hindus especially, by “religion and habits,” feared banishment to distant lands because of their abiding attachment to their “native spots” and families. 22

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Proof of the terror it evoked was the trend discerned by colonial administrators about the decline of such crimes as dacoity that were punishable by transportation. Thus, official wisdom settled on viewing that “punishment [as] peculiarly well adapted to this country.”45 The 1838 report of the Committee on Prison-Discipline, which became the textual primer for the emerging “scientific” discourse on penology in colonial India, made such thinking the raison d’être for transportation. Established at the behest of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who headed the Indian Law Commission formed in 1835 to revamp the country’s judicial system, this committee was charged with designing “good machinery for the infliction of punishment,” considered imperative for the effective functioning of the penal and criminal codes that were being developed concurrently. 46 Transportation, in the committee’s view, was “a weapon of tremendous power.” “The horror with which the people regard transportation,” its report underlined, “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.” Simply moving people to a distant place, the committee maintained, intensified the “exemplary force of punishment to a very great degree. Generally over India a sentence of transportation beyond the black water [kala pani] is regarded with indescribable horror. The effect of such a sentence on the convict is little short of the effect of a sentence of death, whilst the effect of such a sentence on the bystanders is greater than the effect of a sentence of death.”47 Unmistakable proof of the dread with which this punishment was regarded was the committee’s finding that among inmates in the Alipur jail undergoing “the tedium of perpetual confinement . . . 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” even though they were aware of the “very lax treatment of transported convicts.”48 The superintendent of this Calcutta jail added his voice to that line of thinking when he urged banishing “desperate characters” in his facility, a proposition that he considered more in accord “with the principle of punishment, and more suitable to the condition of such heinous offenders.”49 The kala pani argument about transportation remained an article of faith—a few naysayers notwithstanding—throughout much of the early nineteenth century. British administrators increasingly understood that the fear among some people of crossing the black waters was rooted not so Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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much in a “religious dread of the ocean” per se as in fears about the violation of caste practices of purity and pollution from the consumption of impure food and water on sea voyages.50 They were acutely aware of such concerns because of rumblings within their military ranks: sepoys of the Bengal Army, particularly those recruited from the north Indian areas of Bihar and the North-Western Provinces, had complained about overseas travel. Some soldiers from these areas apparently returned home by ship from military campaigns in south India to threats of ostracism in their villages for having crossed the black waters. Local-level administrators were sufficiently alarmed by reports of their “banishment” from their families and societies—all the more so because they were from one of the core recruiting areas of the Bengal Army—that officials sought the assistance of higher authorities in Calcutta, who in turn enlisted the help of the East India Company’s pandits (Brahmin scholars and teachers). Ostensibly based on the scriptural authority of the dharma shastras (manuals on dharma or conduct), the pandits issued a decree favorable to government that allowed for ocean voyages as long as appropriate precautions were taken on board to ensure the purity of food and water. Widely publicized, the pronouncement of the pandits was followed up with an additional directive enjoining local officials to punish people who disparaged sepoys for having crossed the black waters; the new order apparently was necessitated by the continuing opposition to sea voyages in some localities.51 Concerns about voyaging across the kala pani persisted into the early twentieth century, as the travelogue of a Rajput soldier from the North-Western Provinces who was part of the Indian force dispatched to China in 1900 to join the Allied Expedition against the Boxers and the Qing Empire reveals.52 Kala pani for convicts referred generically to the Indian Ocean bounding the Indian subcontinent to its east, west, and south. It applied equally to the Arabian Sea that constitutes the western part and the Bay of Bengal that forms the eastern part of the Indian Ocean, extending from Sri Lanka and India to the west to Bangladesh and Myanmar to the north to the northern part of the Malay Peninsula to the east. In other words, kala pani encompassed almost the entire oceanic world that people from India traversed when banished.53 Growing colonial understanding of caste sensitivities about kala pani and the related issue of food transactions prompted authorities from the very beginning of transportation not to enhance its “indescribable horror” by violating caste-based practices about food and water consumption in the middle 24

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passage to the penal colonies. No doubt such caution also stemmed from the government’s experiences with “diet” in prisons. As the Calcutta government learned the hard way in the 1790s, the provision and preparation of food was a contentious issue in prisons. In fact, in the months leading up to the largescale transportation of convicts in 1797, inmates in many Bengal jails made their preferences abundantly clear to the authorities in response to an April directive of the Nizamat Adalat (Criminal Court) ordering magistrates to bar prisoners serving terms of seven years or more from preparing their own food. No longer were inmates to receive money allowances to buy the food to cook their own meals. Instead cooks were specially designated to prepare their meals: Brahmins for Hindus and “Mahomedan” cooks for Muslims. Many prisons chose not to carry out this directive. A few that did experienced “riotous conduct” and hunger strikes by prisoners who challenged this innovation. With resistance growing and administrators concerned about the elaborate procedures that they would have had to devise to cater to different castes, the governor-general intervened and rescinded the order.54 Not that these lessons stayed with the colonial authorities. In the 1830s, Calcutta pushed through a rations system that ignited a firestorm of protest in many jails and violent confrontations in the 1840s and 1850s when it tried again to implement the new plan in jails across north India. In the first instance, prisoners opposed receiving food items in lieu of money allowances; in the latter case, they took up arms to resist messing, that is, their organization into messes for group dining purposes.55 Many of the principal instigators in these clashes were sentenced to transportation and ended up in the penal colonies of Southeast Asia. Prudently, the colonial government shied away from tinkering with shipboard dietary practices. The standard procedure was to provide the men and the small handful of women on board the transport ships—both the convicts and the sepoys who escorted them or were in transit to their postings in the penal colonies—with food rations to prepare as they wished. The following directive issued for the initial batch of convicts and sepoys dispatched to the Andamans in 1794 is a case in point. At the behest of the Calcutta authorities, both groups were to receive uncooked food because they “cannot be prevailed upon to eat provisions . . . dressed on board.”56 Well into the late nineteenth century, convict petitions pleading for repatriation often lamented their voyage “across the kala pani” and the urgency of returning home so that their “ashes will be properly collected and cared for.”57 As an 1858 appeal for repatriation after 38 years in the Straits put it, transportation Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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for a Hindu was “more terrible than death itself,” for which the only consolation was a return to his “native country” and death “on the banks of his beloved Ganges.”58 In other words, a return to the sacred Ganges afforded expiation for having journeyed across the kala pani. As did earlier generations of colonial administrators, the Committee on Prison-Discipline, too, saw in transportation a powerful deterrent quality shaped by its culturally transgressive design. Its unique currency in the Indian context meant that it not only possessed a higher punitive valence in South Asia than in England but also that it had to be appraised differently. Therefore, objections voiced in England by people in high positions “who have made themselves masters of the science of criminal-discipline”—presumably among them the law reformer Jeremy Bentham—and raised doubts about its merits were not deemed pertinent to the Indian penal scene.59 “Objections” germane to England and “other countries in a similar state of civilization,” moreover, did not “apply in the slightest degree to India.” On the contrary, in the committee’s reckoning, transportation was an especially apposite punishment because it fitted in with conditions and circumstances peculiar to the less-civilized state of India. 60 Its effectiveness, in fact, lay precisely in that it was transgressive, and in just the right measure. Objections applicable elsewhere were also not relevant in the Indian context because imprisonment was not the answer to transportation; both had their uses. Furthermore, in the early nineteenth century the government in India did not have the capacity to house the rising population of criminal offenders or the facilities to provide their secure confinement. Consequently, Calcutta paid little attention to the debates unfolding in Britain that increasingly turned against continuing transportation to Australia. Sir William Molesworth’s Select Committee of the House of Commons, whose 1838 report condemned transportation as “inefficient, cruel, and demoralizing,” for instance, and favored the greater use of imprisonment, elicited little response in India. Nor did its contention that transportation was an utter failure in attaining the two principal aims of penal law: “the prevention of crime by means of terror and the reformation of offenders.”61 The Committee on Prison-Discipline, which convened in India at roughly the same time as Molesworth’s Committee was meeting in England in 1837 and 1838, came to a very different conclusion about transportation. As befit its name, the committee lavished attention on prisons because it regarded imprisonment as the primary form of punishment—and there are details aplenty about the existing conditions of jails and prisoners, reform of prison 26

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discipline, and the establishment of penitentiaries. Transportation, the second most important form of punishment, took up a separate section of its report, which highlighted the existing penal system and offered recommendations for improvements and a “plan” for new ways to inflict “that punishment.”62 Transportation, in the words of the committee’s report, was “a branch of prison-discipline,” its punitive value measurable largely in terms of its effectiveness in relation to imprisonment. Whereas the committee acknowledged the value of “the temporary discipline of a penitentiary . . . 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 capital punishment it chose not to broach, at least not to consider extending its use. However, it did weigh the merits of the two, and on its scale of which people feared the most, its estimation was that transportation for life would “have a greater deterring effect” than the death penalty. From this logic also stemmed the belief that it was the tougher punishment in the eyes of those who did not consider life imprisonment “in solitude and without occupation, a punishment absolutely unjustifiable.” Therefore, the committee concluded that life imprisonment “at present . . . 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.”63 David Macfarlan was the sole dissenting voice; he took issue with his fellow committee members over their view of transportation as a dreaded punishment. He saw no factual grounds for such a belief. Rather, he claimed that he knew of criminals who preferred the punishment in lieu of confinement in the House of Corrections. Moreover, he wondered if Muslims felt that same sense of transgression, because crossing the kala pani did not violate their religious and cultural norms. 64 His stance on transportation, however, remained a minority view for much of the early nineteenth century. Dissenting opinions about the effectiveness of the punishment grew into a crescendo later in that century, but it remained on the books well into the early twentieth century. A different kind of objection—and one that dated back to Bentham in the late eighteenth century—was the concern that transportation was not a precise punishment because of “unexpected aggravations. . . . Even . . . if famine and contagious diseases be provided against, the dangers of the sea must be met, and thus capital punishment, in its most terrific form, may be Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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undesignedly inflicted.”65 The committee’s response to this concern was that no punishment could be levied without incurring some possibility of accidental danger, but in the case of transportation the sea voyage between India and the Straits was relatively smooth sailing, a point that ironically underscored the long-standing maritime connections across the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, life expectancy rates were said to be better in the Straits than among prisoners in India. With equal confidence the committee struck down other objections, summarily dismissing concerns about repatriation costs, the uneven quality of the punishment because it was ostensibly more onerous for people with friends and property than those who were poor, and its seeming lack of harshness because banishment for some was a “tour of pleasure [rather] than a penalty.” To continue in its words—and in an obvious reference to the culturally and socially transgressive nature of the punishment—the committee report noted that hardly anyone “regarded removal from home” as not punitive, and not a single person in India “out of one hundred thousand associates ideas of pleasure with any tour, however short.”66 In other words, transportation inflicted physical and psychic pain because it uprooted people who were intrinsically homebound and sedentary, a characterization in accord with the colonial state’s understanding of India as made up of “a conservative rustic population glued to its villages.”67 Nor did the committee give much credence to the familiar financial argument about high convict maintenance costs. On the contrary, it pointed to Singapore as an example of a penal colony in which inmates more than covered their cost of living. The committee also dismissed concerns about the efficacy of transportation because it inflicted its pain at a distance, out of hearing and seeing range of the rest of society. Imprisonment, its advocates claimed, offered a spectacle that acted as a deterrent, whereas transportation, as the dissenting committee member noted, shipped criminal offenders “without the gaze even of a passing stranger being directed to the spot.” The majority response to this objection—one shared by Bentham—was that the “perpetual example of a man immured in an unseen cell at home is no greater than that of a man in a convict settlement abroad.”68 The committee also advanced its brief for transportation by proposing changes in the implementation of the punishment. Its major recommendation was that “partly for reasons of a general character, and partly for reasons peculiarly applicable to this country . . . transportation ought never to be 28

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inflicted except for life.” In tightening up this aspect of transportation—that is, not allowing its use for limited terms, typically 7- or 14-year terms—its intention was to preclude the possibility of prisoners returning, a situation that critics had long lamented. As the committee report underlined, prisoners’ constant return from the penal colonies undermined “that peculiar feeling of dread which this punishment now so happily inspires in India.”69 Such rhetoric notwithstanding, the colonial authorities in India continued to transport convicts for limited terms, in part because penal colonies wanted laboring bodies. A handful returned home every so often, either because they were repatriated after completing their sentences—most chose not to leave—or escaped. Escapes always prompted the government in India to sound the alarm about the laxity of disciplinary regimes in the penal colonies, and all the more so if prisoners furtively made their way back into India. On the whole, both Calcutta and the provincial governments mostly turned a blind eye to what the penal colonies did with their convicts as long as they retained them for as long as possible. Periodically, however, they were compelled to pay attention, because of either escapes or reports about indulgences granted convicts. For instance, in 1835 the Madras government was alarmed by reports that its convicts in Malacca were not laboring in shackles and “suffering . . . no part of their sentence but that of expatriation. Others . . . ‘let out’ . . . as private servants are . . . in circumstances of much comforts, others even in offices of some trust.” Madras immediately followed up with Calcutta to insist that the government institute an inquiry and not condone the “evil” resulting from sentences not being effectively enforced. After all, transportation was a crucial secondary punishment whose “terrors” had to be preserved. Otherwise, it would lose its potency in suppressing “heinous” crimes.70 The committee also argued in favor of continuing and even expanding convict traffic by claiming that the punishment rehabilitated offenders by transforming them into productive workers. Those who were formerly “savage robbers,” its report noted, based on evidence drawn from the Straits, were in demand “as domestic servants, or make a peaceful livelihood by other honest means. It cannot, therefore, be doubted that reformation, one of the ends of punishment that has seldom been attained any where, under any system, and that has never been attained by imprisonment in India, has often been attained by the transportation of natives of India.”71 That is, hard labor made criminal bodies into more pliant and valuable colonial subjects. The committee’s “reformation” argument was a variation on a theme relating to transportation that was present from its inception. In India, as Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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in Britain, the contention was that transportation rehabilitated criminals through work, a belief that tied in well with the economic objectives of the punishment. As the Transportation Act of 1718 clearly stated, it was intended to supply “colonies and plantations in America . . . [with] servants, who by their labor and industry might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation.”72 In short, this punishment supplied labor-deficit areas with “servants.” And “servants” they were as well in Australia, where increasingly convicts were employed by private individuals and households. In fact, so much of their lives was dedicated to toil and labor that Australian scholars have insisted on renaming them “convict workers,” a description that rightly shifts attention away from the earlier emphasis in the literature on their “criminal” past even though many were sentenced for minor offenses or political reasons. Like their Australian counterparts, Indian convicts, too, led laboring lives in the penal colonies, but mostly as servants of the state. No wonder they conceived of themselves as “Company ke noukur” or servants of the company, not men and women exiled for criminal activities but in the service of the East India Company. That is, they were its servants, a locution that accurately references their daily lives of labor and also implies—to their advantage—that they were engaged in company service, much in the way their countrymen did in signing up for naukari or military service. Not a word in their self-description of being bandwars (or bandi or apradhi) or prisoners, the designation others from India applied to them.73 The “service” and economic dimensions of transportation were present from the very beginning of its deployment in South Asia. As the first Andamans superintendent of convicts remarked in 1794, two considerations were paramount in weighing its pros and cons: “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 labor constitutes the exemplary punishment, the other that the country chosen for the place of banishment is to derive benefit.” These advantages, he concluded, were realized “by the acquisition of even such bad subjects as was formerly the case in the transportation of convicts from Great Britain to its colonies in North America and at this time to Botany Bay.”74 Transportation entailed penal servitude, a type of unfree labor that recent scholarship has rightly theorized as more akin to slavery and serfdom than the kind of wage labor typically characterized as occupying the other end of the free and unfree labor continuum. Convict labor was and is a form of 30

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coerced labor, comparable in some ways with indentured labor, sharecropping, and debt peonage. And it was very much a global phenomenon related to systems of “punishment, governance, national and imperial expansion, migration, and colonization.”75 The punitive and economic objectives of transportation did not always dovetail, however. Certainly they did not always mesh well, because the primary colonial interest was in maximizing the severity of the punishment enough so that it inflicted a “just measure of pain.” Transportation destinations, by contrast, were far more invested in its labor potential, that is, in its capacity to deliver cheap and reliable labor, the greater the number and the more physically fit the better. In this respect, authorities in India and in the penal colonies emulated what Britain had done earlier. The American colonies, after all, were developed with the assistance “of thousands of convicts, and the Botany Bay colony was founded in response to the need to remove the hundreds of prisoners who were stockpiled in convict ships in the River Thames after the American Revolution.”76 Increasingly in the nineteenth century, local administrators in the penal colonies also sought skilled hands, convict artificers with knowledge and experience of certain crafts. Indeed, if one powerful set of reasons for the colonial attachment to transportation was its perceived capacity to strike terror into the hearts of its subject population, a second and equally significant set of considerations emanated from larger imperial concerns. At times one or the other set of priorities took precedence, but generally both dynamics were at work in shaping the policies and procedures relating to transportation. As a result, in Calcutta as in London, government periodically tinkered with the workings of the transportation laws, bending and altering them to fit its imperatives of rule on the subcontinent on the one hand, and the needs of its penal colonies on the other hand. Thus, changes in transportation laws reflect these different pulls exerted by local concerns and the larger imperial agenda, as the discussion later in this chapter of alterations in transportation legislation over time reveals. The many legal modifications also underscore the importance of recognizing that colonial governmentality was never monolithic; penal practices and strategies were constantly being adjusted in response to changing political, economic, and social conditions in India and in the colonies. However, the authorities at all levels of government remained steadfastly committed to enhancing penal transportation’s stringency and therefore the unrelenting push to make it a more exacting punishment. As a result, much of the initial focus in revising the punishment centered on ensuring Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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its severity, a condition only guaranteed by restricting the punishment to a long-term sentence and by stiffening the conditions under which convicts lived and worked in the penal settlements. At times the punishment was extended to additional categories of crime and criminals, the impulse for revisions stemming from concerns about overcrowding in jails and the shortage of laboring hands in the penal colonies. Regulation II, enacted in 1799, displayed this intent in sentencing those who broke out of jail to transportation.77 As a secondary punishment, it could also be applied to additional categories of criminal offenses, far more justifiably than the death penalty could be, without undermining colonial claims to administering a civilized system of criminal justice. An initial effort to uphold the severity of transportation was Regulation LIII of 1803, which curtailed its application to those guilty of heinous crimes sentenced to life imprisonment.78 In restricting transportation to offenders sentenced to life terms, 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 convicts to their native soil diminished the terror of that punishment, this regulation also instituted capital punishment for escapees. To one scholar, these changes show that government officials responded seriously to Governor-General Wellesley’s concern about returning convicts undermining “the deterrent effect” of transportation, which was primarily “based on uncertainty.”79 Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly favorable light in which most judicial authorities cast transportation and the legal measures enacted to tailor it into a more long-term and effective punishment, it was briefly abolished in 1811 with the enactment of Regulation XIV. The seemingly abrupt decision to amend the law ostensibly emanated from a concern—to use the language of the regulation—regarding the “delay experienced in carrying such sentences into execution.” Government justified its dramatic turnaround on the grounds that transportation entailed considerable expense; its reputation as a terrible punishment was compromised by the frequent return of transported prisoners; and its capacity to evoke terror was partly diminished by the laxness in treatment of prisoners, particularly those in Penang. Thus, the decision to abolish transportation stemmed partly from financial and practical considerations and partly from ongoing concerns regarding the severity of the punishment based on escapes, repatriation, and the relaxed treatment of prisoners. Penang convicts especially were said to enjoy privileges 32

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that diminished the rigors of their punishment. Moreover, government had the additional option of confining prisoners in 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 considered it better at guaranteeing the severity of the punishment because of its secure confines, in which there was the added possibility of extracting hard labor from the prisoners. 80 Regulation XIV was a momentary departure from an otherwise consistent line in favor of transportation. Not surprisingly, it was quickly reinstated with the introduction of Regulation IX of 1813. That it was abolished at all has rightly appeared puzzling, particularly given the relative absence of official deliberations over why that decision was undertaken in the first place. 81 Whatever wavering there was related not to its perceived intrinsic merits as a harsh sentence but to concerns about the lack of rigor in its implementation in the penal colonies. The timing of its reinstatement—and the language employed in that reinstatement as well as its subsequent legislative refinements—can be closely correlated with growing imperial ambitions and imperatives in the rising British Empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, political advances abroad and on the subcontinent revamped the penal discourse regarding transportation from one directed solely at weighing its severity as a punishment and its effectiveness as a deterrent 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-held areas of Asia he deemed appropriate. It also sanctioned their deployment to anywhere “within the limits of the settlement to which they shall be sent, which shall from time to time be fixed on by the local administration.”82 The new strictures were unquestionably designed to accommodate the shifting labor imperatives of the British Empire across the Indian Ocean. Labor considerations were also etched into Regulation I of 1828, the next alteration in the legal conditions of transportation. This regulation empowered the governor-general to change life imprisonment in the Alipur Jail to transportation in perpetuity to any British settlement in Asia “in certain cases,” an amendment that not only expanded the pool of eligible Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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offenders but also opened up new venues. No longer was the conversation solely about considering imprisonment as an alternative to transportation. On the contrary, this legislation allowed prisoners under life sentences to commute their sentences by opting for transportation for life, and to do so by selecting Burma or “other British settlements to which convicts are now usually transported.”83 Although the Committee on Prison-Discipline was unequivocal in its support for transportation, the government in India greeted that endorsement with caution. Its official resolution on the committee report wavered on the subject, noting that it did not possess sufficient information to reach “a satisfactory conclusion” regarding extending transportation to those sentenced to life imprisonment. The comparative advantages of the two forms of punishment, the official resolution further emphasized, could not be accurately assessed because both had deficiencies: penal settlements needed better management and prison discipline needed reform. 84 Transportation nevertheless persisted as a major form of punishment. The report of the 1838 Committee on Prison-Discipline established the parameters of penological discourse within which policy makers thereafter framed their positions, pro and con. And notwithstanding the fact that few of its recommendations were actually implemented right away, largely because of financial considerations, the die was cast. Authorities at the highest rungs of the administration continued to lend support to transportation. Governor-General Auckland’s Minute on the Prison-Discipline Committee report said as much in expressing concern about the abolition or curtailment of transportation at a time when secure prisons were few and far between. 85 The Board of Control, which presided over East India Company administration in India from London, returned a favorable opinion as well. It viewed transportation for life as a fitting punishment for heinous crimes and expressed surprise, as it had done on earlier occasions, that the Bengal authorities relied more on life imprisonment than transportation, thereby letting the latter fall into desuetude. 86 While some continued to question transportation’s effectiveness and side with the minority opinion of the committee, the predominant view, shared by the authorities in the penal colonies as well, was that it possessed a “peculiar efficacy in India.”87 According to Governor W. J. Butterworth of the Straits Settlements, he and his fellow officials, who were “familiar with the natives of India,” were well aware that the “greatest virtue” of “natives” was their “deep and earnest attachment to their families[,] especially their 34

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parents to which is added not patriotism but what is like hankering for the localities of their birth coupled in very many castes with a religious dread of the ocean.” Thus, he concluded that no punishment was a “greater preventive to crime than transportation.”88 Although authorities in both India and the penal colonies remained steadfast in their support of transportation in the 1830s and 1840s, in Britain and Australia the tide began to shift against its continuation. The opposition came not just from the ranks of the radicals in London, whose views were embodied in the recommendations of the Molesworth Committee. Colonists in Australia now joined this chorus, their stance increasingly shaped by their view that convicts were more of a liability than an asset because new arrivals were more hardened and therefore less capable of reformation, the influx of voluntary migrants also made convict labor less critical, and convict management and supervision were costly. Furthermore, in Britain, policy makers were sympathetic to the antitransportation position because they increasingly placed their faith in the efficacy of imprisonment as a punishment that could be calibrated to fit a range of criminal offenses. Beginning with the cessation of convict traffic to New South Wales in the 1840s, Tasmania in the 1850s, and finally Western Australia in the 1860s, transportation to Australia came to a complete end, the total number of transported male and female convicts adding up to a little more than 160,000. 89 Far different was the tone and tenor of the official discourse on transportation in India. Indeed, in Calcutta and London high-level administrators focused on extending, not abolishing, its use. In the decades leading up to the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, they repeatedly sought to expand its scope, including by instituting legal changes to make it more applicable to many more offenders. First they had to overcome the legal stipulation that it could only be extended to those specifically sentenced to transportation; in those instances when it was not tacked on as a sentence, it could not be applied except with the consent of the convict to be transported. The Bengal government changed these restrictions by amending the law so that transportation was automatically added to all sentences of life imprisonment. Equally eager to see its wider use was the Court of Directors, whose members reminded the governor-general that they had repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction about its declining use in Bengal and the NorthWestern Provinces, “though the law on the subject remains unchanged, and though the Prison Discipline Committee expressed an opinion strongly in favor of that mode of punishment.” In their view, it could advantageously Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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be substituted in almost every case for life imprisonment and sentences that were tantamount to a life term.90 In practice, a host of local circumstances dictated whether offenders were sentenced to transportation and then actually shipped overseas. On the whole, in the period between the late 1830s and the late 1850s, when convict traffic to the Straits Settlements was at its height—also a time when the government eagerly sought to build central penitentiaries—judicial officials were reluctant to sentence offenders to banishment. As the authorities in England observed in response to the Bengal government’s plans to construct a central penitentiary, they were not “prejudging the question of the comparative merits of imprisonment and transportation” but were “struck with the fact that terms of imprisonment for seven and fourteen years and even for life, are so frequently imposed” relative to the small numbers sentenced to transportation.91 The Bengal government countered by referring to its investigation of a five-year period between 1837 and 1841 that indicated an increasing reliance on transportation. Whereas only 11 and 9 prisoners had been sentenced to transportation, compared to 178 and 173 to life imprisonment in 1837 and 1838, in the ensuing three years the numbers were comparable: 64 sentenced to transportation versus 166 to imprisonment in 1839, 92 versus 71 in 1840, and 101 versus 120 in 1841.92 At times, judicial authorities in India used penal transportation to alleviate overcrowding in their jails. For instance, the Nizamat Adalat sought to expand the pool of eligible convicts by including offenders whose sentences were not only for life but also of limited duration, of seven years and more. The Bengal authorities disagreed with this recommendation, preferring instead to adhere to the principle enunciated by the Committee on PrisonDiscipline of not transporting anyone with less than a life sentence.93 The government in India also instituted legal changes to accommodate new penal depots opened up by the widening geography of the British Empire in the region. The British takeover of Mauritius by the close of 1810 and of Singapore in 1819 and their subsequent development as penal colonies exemplify this trend, as does the British advance into Burma in the aftermath of the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26 that led to the establishment of Arakan and Tenasserim as additional venues. Administrative exigencies also shaped the flow of convict traffic in other ways. Penang was briefly closed down as a destination in order to divert convicts to Tenasserim, newly opened up as a penal colony in the 1820s. 36

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Bengkulu, on the other hand, was shut down in 1825 when it devolved back into Dutch hands. And convict traffic to Mauritius was halted in 1836 because its government was fearful of mixing bandwars with its growing Indian population, swelled by the arrival of free laborers, many accompanied by family members.94 Across the penal colonies in Southeast Asia, however, support for the transportation of convicts principally from India but also from Ceylon remained strong in the early nineteenth century as long as the economic calculus outweighed other considerations. The first generation of British settlers and administrators in the region were quick to recognize the potential of convicts 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 of India for “one hundred coolies” because labor costs in Penang were steep. Although his request was denied, he managed to recruit 25 Bombay artificers in 1787. 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 a thousand Indian shopkeepers and “coolies” on the island. In addition, vessels from south India conveyed as many as 1,300 to 2,000 men to work every year.95 However, convicts were much more reliable and economical. Familiar as well from the outset was the understanding in Calcutta and London that European convicts from India could never be mixed in with “native” convicts or be subjected to the same labor regimen. As the first Andamans superintendent put it in 1794, they were not to be equated with “native laborers” because they were incapable of working and surviving “in such a climate.”96 A few Europeans, generally of Portuguese origin or mixed race, were occasionally sent to penal settlements in the early years. Although shipped out together with Indians, they were separately housed from their Indian counterparts and invariably placed in an overseer capacity over the rest of their fellow inmates.97 Light’s request for workers, framed in terms of the high costs of local or imported labor, became a standard refrain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Convict workers made up labor deficits, filling in admirably for what the Penang governor in 1800 euphemistically termed “public service.” That is, convicts did much of the construction work; they were centrally involved in building roads that would not have been completed except “at a most enormous expense. The roads at present are extensive, and as the cultivation and population increase they will still require to be further Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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extended, [and] this can only be done in the first instance by government, the inhabitants not having the means.”98 The Fort Marlborough resident echoed similar sentiments. In his estimation, convicts were effective and efficient because they cost less than the “usual price of labor of a Malay” and because their labor helped develop the cultivation of coffee and spices in west Sumatra in order to compete with the Dutch. The first British governor of Mauritius, Sir Robert Farquhar (1810–1823), added his voice to that chorus when he sought their assistance to develop the island’s agricultural resources. And speaking in the aftermath of the abolition of transportation (Regulation XIV of 1811), the British resident at Ambon called for its immediate reinstatement, his argument for convict labor expressed in words all too familiar in Calcutta and other locales across the British Empire. Convicts, he remarked, performed “public service” that was in the best interests of the British government to support. Such work, furthermore, enabled Ambon “natives” to adhere to “their domestic occupations” while the convicts were assigned other pressing work. In fact, he considered the needs of the newly acquired territories of Ambon and Java so critical that he requested a transfer of prisoners from Penang and Bengkulu.99 At times the demand for laboring hands was spelled out in no uncertain terms, such as in Penang’s 1796 request for skilled workers or “artificers.” Bengkulu’s 1805 plea began with a familiar lament about the high wages for coolies (15 rupees a month) and the “equally exorbitant” rates for artificers and went on to state a preference for 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.”100 Many were the entreaties as well for labor to perform agricultural work, which the British considered Indians especially suited for because of their peasant background. 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 the 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 officials increasingly perceived transportation as a punishment perfectly calibrated to rid the empire of political opponents and dangerous criminals. In other words, they viewed it as a pliable instrument of empire building, well suited to shore up the foundations of colonial rule and to enhance law and order. 38

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Among the first to whom this measure was extended were the palaiyakkarar (poligars or local lords), 73 of whom were dispatched to Penang after the Sivaganga Revolt of 1799–1801 was crushed in south India. Some of the principal supporters of the Palassi (“Pychee”) Raja, who fought against the local authorities between 1799 and 1806, including Pallur Eman Nayar of Wynad, were also transported and ended up living alongside the poligar prisoners. Briefly, authorities in Calcutta considered banishing Indian soldiers who fought pitched battles against their European officers in the Vellore Mutiny of 1806. Although not carried out, the initial plan envisioned dispersing the mutineers across the Cape, Penang, Bengkulu, and Malacca.101 After Singapore emerged as a penal colony, it became the prime destination in the Straits Settlements for political prisoners. Two notable inmates in 1850 were the Sikh rebel leader Bhai Maharaj Singh and his follower Khurruk Singh, both deported there from Punjab. However, during the Mutiny/ Rebellion of 1857 authorities across the Straits Settlements were not willing to keep their doors open for mutineers and rebels, preferring instead to limit the flow of convict traffic than to become the insular prisons for such offenders. Transportation was also a weapon in the colonial arsenal aimed at maintaining and reinforcing law and order. In the initial century of colonial rule, it targeted offenders charged with property crimes considered especially malicious—burglary, dacoity, and housebreaking—whose incidence may have increased in the wake of agrarian changes ushered in by the Britishinstituted Permanent Settlement of 1793. Regulation XVII of 1817 “for the more effectual administration of criminal justice” singled out “persons convicted of robbery by open violence,” who in certain cases were liable to be whipped as well as imprisoned and transported for life. The same punishment was awarded for burglary and theft under certain conditions.102 According to the Straits comptroller of convicts, his inmates were mostly guilty of “murder, thuggee, and dacoity” as well as “frauds and forgeries, robbery with violence, and such like misdemeanors.”103 Increasingly in the early nineteenth century, the largest numbers of convicts were lodged in Southeast Asia. At first Penang, home to Indian convicts from the late 1780s onward, housed most of them. In 1824 its total stood at 1,469, of whom 998 had been sent from Bengal; the remainder were made up of 272 from Madras, 192 from Bombay, and 7 from Ceylon. A sizable proportion of them 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 1.6 percent, were women. Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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Bengkulu in 1824, on the eve of its return to the Dutch, supported 773 convicts, a majority (579) of them from Bengal; the other 194 were from Madras. Although an initial batch of more than 100 convicts was dispatched to Malacca in 1805 to clear its Dutch fortifications, it was not fully established as a penal depot until 1825, when the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824, which transferred Bengkulu to the Dutch, turned over Malacca to the British.104 The geographical distribution of convicts changed as Singapore and Burma emerged and other settlements declined as penal colonies, a development that the Committee on Prison-Discipline noted approvingly in the 1830s.105 By 1835 Tenasserim counted 1,172 convicts, a substantial number considering the fact that this traffic had commenced in the 1820s. In the Straits, Singapore rapidly surpassed Penang and Malacca as the premier settlement for South Asian convicts, tallying 901 by the mid-1830s, at a time when Malacca only housed 284 and Penang 852. Mauritius, by contrast, reached an all-time high of 986 by 1834 before steadily losing numbers after it stopped accepting convicts in the late 1830s.106 More than 2,000 convicts were lodged in the Straits in the late 1840s, 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 legal changes instituted in the late 1840s—the total almost reached 3,000: 2,936 in 1854, to be precise. By September 1855 the number stood at 3,802, a majority of whom were in Singapore and Penang; Malacca (Melaka), by contrast, only had 388 in May 1854, although the tally rose to 735 when 347 were added to its mix in 1854/1855.107 In the late 1850s the total convict population of the Straits exceeded 4,000. The other principal destination for Indian convicts in the period leading up to 1857 was Burma. And whether they landed there or in the Straits depended on the exigencies of the day. When authorities in India ascertained shipping costs to the Straits to be more than to Arakan or Tenasserim, they halted transportation to the former area and stepped it up to the latter two sites. But when the ensuing influx led to overcrowding in the jails of Arakan and Moulmein (Mawlamyine), they redirected the traffic back to the Straits. At the same time, the Straits governor, Colonel Butterworth, informed Calcutta in December 1852 that he could easily accommodate another 500 to 600 transports.108 Yet even as the inflow into the Straits continued in the 1850s, attitudes about the convict traffic began to change, just as they had in Australia and Britain. The emergence of Singapore as a thriving port in the late nineteenth 40

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century led some of it residents to rethink its population mix. “Europeans were apprehensive,” the governor reported, that they were increasingly becoming “a tiny minority among thousands of Asians, and well-to-do merchants of all races looked with misgivings at the mass of poor, illiterate, halfstarving rootless youths who came to make their fortune. They also began to appreciate that cheap convict labor was recruited at the cost of flooding Singapore with dangerous criminals.”109 The Singapore Free Press declared that the Straits had become “the common sewer . . . for all the scum and refuse of the population of nearly the whole British possessions in the East.”110 Such concerns reached a fever pitch during the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, when Indian authorities broached the possibility of first removing prisoners from their jails to the penal colonies to make room for rebels and then adding the latter to the mix. The Bengal lieutenant governor proposed banishing to the Straits all offenders whose prison sentences exceeded three years and “whose retention in this country may, from political reasons, or from the insecurity of their jails, be deemed unadvisable.”111 Such deliberations in India provoked great consternation in Singapore. Even Governor Edmund Augustus Blundell, who had termed convicts “harmless settlers” in 1856, now joined the antitransportation camp. He spelled out his position in response to a memorial from a group of European merchants troubled by rumors regarding the imminent arrival of a large body of “sepoy mutineers” in 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 Lines and the supervision of the convicts when at work outside, is entrusted to the convicts themselves.112

Governor Blundell also expressed concern that a convict “outbreak” would ignite “the turbulent disposition of the lower classes of our Chinese population” and arouse their “passions and cupidity.” Not that the two groups would join forces; he believed that they did not have “access to each other”— that is, they could not communicate with one another—but any disruption by convicts would trigger the Chinese into action. Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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Moreover, “commercial settlements” such as Penang and especially Singapore did not need to continue as penal colonies. That role had served them well “in their infancy,” when convict labor was critical for the construction of various public works. Singapore, Governor Blundell elaborated, had become “a large commercial city . . . with a trade of ten million sterling, a harbor crowded with shipping, and large population earnestly engaged in mercantile and tradal pursuits.” Therefore, in his estimation it was no longer desirable to host offenders from India, especially former “sepoys of the Bengal army, men whose hands have been imbrued in the blood of women and children and whose hearts are full of hatred and revenge.”113 Penang sounded a similar alarm in December 1857 when 94 convicts arrived from Bombay, 78 of them “discharged sepoys.” Many of the newcomers, as the superintendent of convicts warned, were officers and “men of considerable influence.” They posed a “great danger” because they were “poisonous material” and capable of mobilizing the entire convict body because they were “far more intelligent and full of intrigue than the ordinary run of convicts . . . and . . . will doubtless be very restless under the restraint now laid upon them and constantly on the watch for a favorable opportunity of attempting to shake off the yoke they are made to bear.”114 With the Straits increasingly reluctant to accommodate additional convicts, especially those guilty of treason and sedition, the government in India scrambled to find a venue for the growing body of rebel prisoners. It briefly entertained the possibility of making room in its jails in India by shipping out to the penal colonies those inmates with three or more years remaining on their sentences. Some were sent to Arakan and the Straits, but this transfer of prisoners only provided temporary relief. Far more promising—and Governor-General Charles Canning quickly acceded to this plan—was the suggestion F. J. Mouat, the inspector of jails in Bengal, made in October 1857 as the “best means of disposing” of large numbers. He proposed establishing a penal colony in the Andaman Islands; his other recommendation was to ship them out as laborers to the West Indies, which offered the additional benefit of not having a sizable Indian population. By November 1857 Calcutta had appointed Mouat to head a committee, with G. R. Playfair and Lieutenant J. A. Heathcote as its two additional members, to investigate the Andaman Islands as a possible penal site. Rushed though their plan was, it followed on the heels of earlier government efforts to secure a foothold there because of the repeated outrages committed by its inhabitants on shipwrecked sailors. Much of the focus then centered on the 42

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creation of “a harbor of refuge on a suitable part of the coast . . . [and] the establishment of a penal settlement on the principal island.”115 By the beginning of 1858, more than sixty years after it was closed down as a penal colony, the Andamans once again became a convict depot. The governorgeneral decided that the islands were the perfect receptacle for those sentenced to imprisonment and transportation for mutiny, rebellion, and other related offenses, and in due course for all offenders “whom for any reason it may not be thought expedient to send to the Straits Settlements or to the Tenasserim Provinces.”116 By March 1858, 200 convicts were in the Andamans, shipped there under the charge of J. P. Walker, the newly appointed superintendent of Port Blair and the former head of the central jail in Agra, who brought with him three Indian subordinates, an overseer and two doctors. Shortly thereafter, Captain Henry Man, who had previously served in penal administration in the Straits Settlements and Burma, was posted there. Thus began the final chapter in the history of transportation in India.117 The emergence of the Andamans penal colony, as Straits authorities quickly realized, meant that the “total abolition” of their convict system was just a matter of time. Many local European residents welcomed the possibility. As one Singapore official opined, the “withdrawal of so large a body of malefactors cannot fail to prove highly beneficial to the moral feelings of inhabitants” and “greatly add to security of persons and properties,” as would repatriation “to places from whence they came.” Convicts had no future in a Singapore that he envisioned in the near future emerging as the hub “of all power, commercial, political, naval and military, in the east beyond the Ganges.”118 As in Australia, European settlers turned against transportation as their colonies became more prosperous; they no longer wished to accommodate convicts or depend on their labor. Most of the sepoy convicts who landed on the shores of the Straits were eventually shipped off to the Andamans.119 Thereafter, Straits administrators accepted life convicts in small numbers but not those sentenced for treason and sedition. As of July 1858, the total convict population of the Straits numbered 4,086, with Singapore housing the most, 2,139, followed by Penang and Malacca, with 1,413 and 534, respectively. A new element in the 1850s was the greater presence of female convicts. Although Malacca’s convict population was entire male, Singapore had 106 female convicts (4.9 percent of the total) and Penang 119 (8.4 percent).120 Whereas transportation to Australia, except to the western region, effectively ended in the 1850s, it persisted and even gained a new lease on life in Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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India with the establishment of the Andamans penal colony and the promulgation of the Indian Penal Code in 1860, an outgrowth of ideas and practices initially developed by Macaulay in the late 1830s. According to this code, transportation was exceeded in severity only by capital punishment and was to be imposed only for life or for any term ranging from a minimum of 7 to a maximum of 14 years. Transportation for life could be commuted to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years, and imprisonment for terms of 7 years or more could be changed to transportation for a term of not less than 7 years but not exceeding the duration of the sentence. Thereafter, convicts were to be transported primarily to the Andamans, to the area in the south known as Port Blair.121 Act XXXV of 1860 designated Arakan, Tenasserim, and Bombay Presidency as transportation destinations. Bombay’s convicts were to be sent to Port Blair, as were those sentenced in the Burmese provinces of Pegu (Bago), Tenasserim, and Martaban. Madras and Bengal convicts were likewise shipped to Port Blair but also to Moulmein in the case of the former and Akyab and Moulmein in the case of the latter. Bombay was to be a receptacle for convicts from the Straits, whence some were dispatched to Moulmein as well; convicts of Indian descent from the Straits, however, were to be sent to the Andamans or Moulmein.122 Once the panic over disciplining and managing large numbers of rebels and mutineers subsided, officials in Calcutta and the Andamans turned to developing a penal regimen to maximize “control and employment of the convicts.”123 The influential Bengal inspector-general of prisons, Mouat, who had visited and studied the Straits penal system, urged government in 1864 to introduce the “Singapore system” to the Andamans because it worked effectively in terms of “internal economy, cleanliness, and the proper regulation of prison labor,” and was furthermore “entirely self-supporting, and perfectly efficient as an instrument of punishment.” He also envisioned Port Blair as a settlement for all offenders “transported from every part of the Indian Empire, from Ceylon, and from China, and perhaps hereafter from Great Britain itself.”124 Under Colonel Man, the fifth superintendent of Port Blair in the late 1860s—he had earlier been part of the landing party that seized the Andamans on behalf of the Crown in 1858—the Andamans adopted many practices perfected in the Straits. Based on his ten years in the Straits as the superintendent of convicts, he thought “great advantages” would result from applying the Straits regulations to the penal system in the Andamans.125 44

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As in the Straits, in the Andamans, too, government authorities fretted over questions about the laxity or severity of their penal regimen. Different, however, was the framework in which they expressed their concerns, centered as they were in the late nineteenth century much more on comparing and contrasting the merits of transportation and imprisonment. Those were not the options in the deliberations of the Prison Discipline Committee in the 1830s, because imprisonment was not a viable alternative. By the 1860s and 1870s, however, India had built—or was building—many more jails, including central prisons in virtually every province. Not that the new facilities were sufficient to accommodate the rising numbers of offenders, many of whom in the early decades of the twentieth century were charged with the political crimes of sedition and treason. The Andamans context was also novel in another respect: transportation, as government officials were increasingly aware, had lost its edge as a “weapon of tremendous power.” Many more people were familiar with—and therefore less fearful of—crossing the kala pani. “[W]hen every large town in the country contains a man who can describe from personal experience what transportation beyond the ‘black water’ is,” observed one official, “few will prefer death to a voyage which they will then have discovered ends in an island in which imprisonment is but a name, and where separation from home and country is the only punishment involved.”126 Furthermore, many more people, particularly in certain regions in the late nineteenth century, had traveled to distant shores as sepoys and migrants, including as indentured laborers. Therefore, Indian authorities insisted that the punishment be for life, or long-term sentences of at least 14 years, because “every prisoner who returns from transportation detracts much from the deterrent effect of that punishment which the law has prescribed as second only to death.”127 A. P. Howell’s important memorandum on jails and jail discipline made precisely that point in the 1860s. It insisted that the transportation regimen consist of the following elements: “first, perfect security; secondly, a discipline sufficiently severe at starting to be necessary for the sake of example without being more severe; and thirdly, that they [the convicts] should be employed in such a manner as best to re-pay the cost of their maintenance.” In short, it reaffirmed the long-standing principle of having convicts be “entirely self-supporting.”128 Another new strand in an otherwise familiar rhetoric was the absence of any emphasis on rehabilitation. No lip service, in other words, was paid Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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to the value of transportation in reforming criminals through the cultivation of “industrious habits.” On the contrary, as Howell bluntly declared: “Reformation being no longer an object politically speaking, any classification [of convicts] beyond what is necessary to preserve good order would be unnecessary.”129 The Indian Jail Conference, convened in the 1870s, reached similar conclusions and recommendations. Its report also pointed out that people were no longer terrorized by transportation. In fact, inmates at the Alipur or Presidency Jail believed that convicts in the Andamans had it easy because they enjoyed “indulgences . . . forbidden in our Indian prisons; that they can engage in trade and remit the profits to their families . . . ; that they can either marry afresh, or, if they wish it, have their families sent to them.”130 Consequently, the 1877 Jail Conference reaffirmed earlier ideas about limiting transportation to life convicts. In practice, however, this principle was difficult to uphold. Andaman officials often sought exceptions to the rule in order to maximize the size and composition of their convict labor force, a dynamic between sending and receiving communities all too familiar from earlier transportation histories. As the conference report observed, Port Blair was more than willing to accept convicts with short-term sentences. For instance, the Andamans superintendent chose not to abide by the 1868 decision to reserve his penal colony for life convicts because his settlement lacked “skilled workmen, sweepers, &c” and preferred the “young and able-bodied.” Thus, Port Blair instituted a new rule in 1874 admitting one term convict for every 10 life convicts, as long as the sentence was for at least 10 years. And when that revision did not have the desired effect, the authorities eased the requirement the following year by lowering the minimum term to 7 years.131 The Andamans also differed from the Straits in another significant respect. From its very inception, it was organized to include families. “[I]n fact its success,” in the words of the first superintendent, J. P. Walker, depended on persuading significant numbers “to send for their families. . . . Convicts with families . . . are the only men who could be depended upon in time of need, as they would be the only ones who would have a real interest in the Colony.”132 To Walker the reasons to include women were “obvious,” and he sought and received approval for the appointment of two of his former Indian jail officials as “Convict Family Emigration Agents” under the supervision of the “Cooly Emigration Agent” in Calcutta. Coerced migration, in his scheme, was to be paired with voluntary migration in order to generate a 46

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tractable convict labor force, family members moving coincidentally under the auspices of the very same agency charged with directing the flow of “free” labor to the far-flung corners of the globe. Clearly, one rationale for opening up to women and children was to better control the enormous numbers of dangerous political offenders whom Walker expected to aggregate quickly— projected at one time to swell up to 10,000 in a matter of months. Under such circumstances, convicts with families made sense because they were more likely to be invested in constructing an enduring settlement in the thinly inhabited islands of the Andamans. An administrator who inspected the Andamans in March 1859 supplied another reason for encouraging families to join the convicts. Without women, the penal colony, in his opinion, would produce the same “frightful revelations” that had earlier “shocked the public mind in England, respecting the moral condition of the re-banished felons’ population on Norfolk Island.”133 In other words, in the absence of women, male convicts engaged in “unnatural crime” or same-sex relations, a charge and misrepresentation that antitransportation advocates such as Molesworth trumpeted to advance their cause in Britain and Australia.134 At its height, the Andamans housed almost 15,000 inmates, more than the total present in all the penal settlements in Southeast Asia and Mauritius put together at any moment in the nineteenth century. However, it never became the gathering place for all the convicts eligible for banishment in India, let alone elsewhere in the British Empire. On the contrary, its inmate population began to decline as fewer offenders were sentenced to transportation or were actually transported and more were sentenced to imprisonment. In the 1920s Port Blair became more of a “quasi-penal settlement” as transportation gave way to “the inward migration of convicts.” That is, as fewer offenders were sentenced to transportation, government authorities made up their shrinking numbers by retaining convicts after their sentences were completed and enticing others to come voluntarily “from the mainland jails.”135 In the Straits Settlements, the convict population peaked in the 1850s and then declined thereafter as the traffic from India was halted in the early 1860s. With new arrivals in short supply thereafter and large numbers struck off the convict rosters because of deaths, releases, and the occasional escapes, Penang, Malacca, and Singapore began to register appreciable shifts in the size of their convict populations. In 1866 the three settlements together counted 3,524 convicts (3,230 males and 204 [or 5.7 percent] females), down by more than 13 percent from the total in 1858.136 Ac ros s t h e K a l a P a n i

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By the late 1860s, London, Calcutta, and Singapore were deep in deliberations about eliminating the convict establishment in the Straits Settlements, which became a separate Crown Colony in 1867. Over the course of the 1870s the entire convict establishment in the Straits was disbanded and the surviving inmates granted permission to either return to India or stay on as “free” men and women in their former insular prisons, as chapter 5 recounts. By the turn of the twentieth century a handful of old and infirm convicts remained in the Straits. Most who had stayed on were long gone, and with their passing much of the South Asian convict past of Malacca, Penang, and Singapore faded away or was deliberately forgotten and elided, the new migrants choosing to begin anew and reconfiguring these settlements in their own image. Newcomers, even those who hailed from many of the same areas that the convicts came from, opted not to link their past and present with those who came as prisoners, even though the latter still lived among them. Nor did the convicts leave many traces, certainly not written records of their experiences—or at least none have been located to date.137 And their descendants have yet to contend with the “convict stain” that Australians took generations to overcome. Fragments of their lives can be pieced together from the colonial archives and other sources, as the ensuing chapters attempt to do to showcase convict labor and agency.

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“Bundwars, Malays, Sebundy Sepoys, and Neas Men” The Bengkulu World of the Khan Brothers, 1797–1825

“We were three brothers[,] inhabitants of Benares.” So declared Hussein Khan and Fateh Khan in the opening line of their petition to the Bengkulu authorities in 1800, the past tense presumably an allusion to an earlier and happier state of existence. Almost four years into a life sentence of transportation in that west Sumatran outpost of the British Empire in maritime Southeast Asia (map 2), they had by then experienced the death of Wali Daud Khan, their brother and fellow convict. Former residents of the north Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi), the two surviving Khan brothers implored to be reunited with their “family and children.”1 In forwarding the petition, written in Persian, to Governor-General Wellesley, Walter Ewer, who was just beginning his term as commissioner of the Residency of Bengkulu (also known as Fort Marlborough; see figure 1), elected not to support their request for repatriation. Instead, he observed the “great propriety” of their conduct and proposed the current period of “public thanksgiving” as an appropriate moment to free Hussein Khan “from a state of servitude.” About Fateh Khan he merely noted the former’s position of “distinction” in that he was “a gourdon or overseer.”2 In the ensuing years Fateh Khan capitalized on his position as an overseer and a counter in the treasury office to emerge as the “Khan Sahib” or “sirdar [sardar or head]” of the convict body, as an 1813 report observed. Appointed overseer because of his “good conduct and qualifications,” he was charged with maintaining “watch” over the convict lines at night together with three other convicts and reporting to the superintendent of slaves and convicts every morning about the previous night’s “occurrences.” In this capacity he acquired, as the Bengkulu resident noted with alarm, considerable “authority over his fellow convicts.”3 51

Figure 1. South East View of Fort Marlborough, Benkulen, Sumatra, by Joseph Constantine Stadler, 1799. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

How did Fateh Khan, serving a life term of transportation and hard labor for murder, become the sardar and sahib—the latter term an honorific generally reserved for Europeans—of the convicts and a major presence in the local community of “Bundwars [prisoners, or those locked up], Malays, Sebundy sepoys [local militia soldiers] and Neas men [slaves],” to use a phrase employed by Indian soldiers or sepoys to refer to their social universe?4 This chapter focuses on Fateh Khan and his fellow inmates to paint a portrait of their everyday lives that does not resemble the “social death” authorities in India expected transmarine convicts to experience in exile. It develops their stories as a microhistory of convicts living in Bengkulu from the close of the eighteenth century to 1825, when it was handed over to the Dutch in the wake of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London in 1824, and the bulk of the surviving convicts were transferred to Penang and Singapore.5 Fateh Khan’s story and his extraordinary standing and influence in the local community, as this chapter also emphasizes, is partly a tale about the workings of colonial governance in a penal settlement where the disciplining of convicts constituted one of the most expensive and urgent undertakings of the local administration. Convict management, as Calcutta repeatedly 52

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reminded Bengkulu, required the local authorities to be exacting, to ensure that bandwars maximized their productive capacity and minimized their maintenance costs. During Fateh Khan’s term, however, local officials sought to use convicts for their own needs and interests, and their failed experiments with company funds and personnel opened up possibilities that convicts and other local inhabitants were quick to seize on to stake out outsized roles for themselves. Khan’s rise grew out of these tensions of colonial rule, as did the 1807 assassination of Thomas Parr, the senior-most British official in Bengkulu. Crucial to the stories in this chapter are some revealing documentary fragments: a petition submitted by the Khan brothers in 1800; an account of Fateh Khan’s conflict with senior sepoy officers in 1811, as narrated by a fellow convict named Cheena Boss; the lengthy testimonies of the Khan brothers, Fateh Khan’s slave “Jenny,” and several bandwars preserved in the transcript of an 1813 robbery trial; and finally, the many convict petitions and official reports produced in the mid-1820s in connection with the Dutch takeover of the island. I particularly linger over the 1813 episode to make full use of the rich statements about convict lives generated in the course of the trial and to lead into the initiatives that local authorities took in its aftermath to reassert their control over their inmates. According to a petition submitted by the Khan brothers in 1800, they should never have been sent to Bengkulu in the first place. Established as a fortified base in the late seventeenth century, Fort Marlborough commanded a stretch of 300 miles of the southwest coast of Sumatra (see map 2). In it a garrison of several companies of either Bengal or Madras sepoys were stationed to protect and enhance British interests in competing for the lucrative pepper trade of the region. Much of this territory was thinly populated. An 1819 estimate counted 60,000 inhabitants across its entire length. A substantial proportion of them, some 10,000 to 20,000 people, resided in and around the town that sprang up around the fort in the early eighteenth century and eventually extended across 3 square miles. 6 Bengkulu was briefly made a presidency in 1760, its new administrative status placing it on a par with the presidencies of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras and elevating it from its earlier designation as a residency headed by a deputy governor and subordinated to Fort St. George (Madras). In 1785 it was downgraded to a residency dependent on Calcutta, and then further reduced to a factory in 1800, these changes in its political standing reflecting the diminishing returns on its pepper production and trade and its T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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continuing inability to become financially self-sufficient. According to one estimate, the annual deficit of the settlement was £87,000, much too much in London’s calculations to warrant its high administrative costs and its meager pepper yields.7 Although the area was removed from the major Indian Ocean trading networks and the East India Company’s ventures proved to be consistently unprofitable, the British stayed on in southwest Sumatra because of their rivalry and competition with Netherlands and France and the promise of regional and China trade. 8 However, Britain’s establishment of a settlement at Penang in 1786, followed by Singapore in 1819, meant that its interests increasingly focused on dominating the Malay Peninsula and the Strait of Malacca and safeguarding its China trade routes.9 Crucial as well to the East India Company’s control of the settlement was its ties to local elites, particularly the three or four notables it acknowledged as holding the Javanese title pangerans and others denominated adats or territorial heads and their subordinate chiefs at the village level. The British considered them “feudal chiefs,” even kings, but their ability to compel obedience from their ‘subjects’ was always problematic and therefore made accessing pepper difficult. Nevertheless, the support of these “chiefs” was critical to the flow of pepper into company hands. The Bugis Corps, originally made up of migrants from the Sulawesi area but increasingly Malay in its composition, because many Bugis men married into elite local families and many Malays joined the force, was another key ally. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Daeng Mabela, the captain of the Bugis Corps, was considered the most influential of the Indonesian chiefs in Bengkulu. And the company also had to rein in its own employees, many of whom were intent on lining their own pockets.10 The Khan brothers were formerly najibs, or militia members “in the service of Prince” Jawan Bakht Mirza Jahan Shah (1740–1788), as they declared in their petition, and claimed that they were “accustomed to amuse . . . [themselves] in the exercise of arms.”11 In 1795, however, their lives were transformed when “several malicious and evil minded persons” in their neighborhood proficient “in the use of arms, under the veil of friendship and close intimacy” implicated them in a crime because they “bore us insatiable hatred and envy.” These spiteful neighbors had planted the body of a boatman’s son in their house, they alleged, and then accused them of having murdered the boy. Surrounded, assaulted “with bricks and stones” and by men armed “with spears and swords,” they fought back, soldiers that they were, and repelled their “villainous adversaries,” even though they were wounded in the affray. 54

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When court officials arrived on the scene, the brothers willingly laid down their arms and were taken into custody by the Banaras judge. They claimed that witnesses corroborated their version of the story, though acknowledging that they did not personally hear the depositions because they were in prison at the time and therefore not in court. The “truth,” they insisted, would set them free because, in their words, they did not bear any malice toward “either the murdered boy . . . or his father,” nor were they “covetous,” as they put it, “of the 10 or 20 rupees, or the ornaments, which might have been about the youth; what then could possibly prompt us to massacre the innocent boy, particularly, when . . . we were so independent in our circumstances that we could afford to bestow that much upon the needy and distressed.”12 After a confinement of fifteen days, they were informed by the chief judge of Banaras that their case was to be settled in Calcutta. “Thither we were accordingly sent and, on our arrival there,” the petition continued, “were confined together with other prisoners . . . for several months after which, we were, contrary to everything of equity and justice put on board a ship with other prisoners, and transported to Bencoolen.” Their contention was: “We were neither cited either in a zillah [district] or a sudder [central] court, for legal investigation, and besides the testimony taken in the zillah court no further enquiry was ever made.”13 Sentenced in December 1795 to transportation for life and hard labor as well as corporal punishment (20 stripes from a taziana or whip), the three Khan brothers, all charged with murder, were sent down the Ganges River to Calcutta to start their penal sentence. Under an armed escort, they were dispatched to the jail built in 1793 in the present-day Tollygunge area of Calcutta to house criminals rounded up in the local district of 24 Parganas and neighboring areas. This jail was also a collection point for convicts from throughout Bengal, which then comprised all of present-day West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkand, Orissa, Banaras, and Bangladesh. From Calcutta, convicts were typically banished to one of the two main penal colonies in the 1780s and early 1790s: Penang, made a convict depot shortly after its acquisition in 1786, or the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, established as a penal settlement at the end of 1793.14 Calcutta was supposed to be a stopover for the Khan brothers en route to the Andamans. Instead their brief interlude there led them to a different destination, as it also did for many of their fellow inmates of the Calcutta Jail. This contingent included Sheolal Tewari, convicted in Banaras of murder T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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as well, in his case of having killed three fellow Brahmins in 1789. Initially, the Banaras authorities awarded Tewari a different punishment: the lesser sentence of perpetual imprisonment because of his status as a Brahmin. He ended up crossing paths with the Khans, however, because he received the additional punishment of transportation in 1794 for his role as “a principal ringleader” in a violent jailbreak in Banaras. In the aftermath of that incident, Jonathan Duncan, the Banaras resident, extended the practice of transportation to his area, in the belief that its substitution for perpetual imprisonment would serve as “a more salutary example than can be derived from confinement.” Furthermore, he argued, transportation would reduce crowding in the jails and “violent attempts towards forcible rescues.” In January 1795 Duncan dispatched Tewari to Calcutta to begin his sentence in the Andamans.15 Neither the three Khans nor Tewari ever set foot on the Andamans. In early 1796, before any of their sentences were enforced, the Indian authorities closed it down because of high casualties and costs and transferred its entire convict population of 270 to Penang. As for the prisoners languishing in Calcutta awaiting passage to the Andamans, their geographical fate was sealed by an outbreak in the 24 Parganas Jail in September 1796, when many of the inmates were caught red-handed attempting to escape, some with their fetters cut off. Whether or not the Khans or Tewari were implicated in that incident cannot be ascertained from the sources. Participation in the outbreak was widespread, however, and greatly alarmed the authorities because it conjured up a vision of large numbers of hardened criminals from throughout the region on the lam in Calcutta, in the very heart of the emerging empire. No wonder the governor-general directed the immediate evacuation of all inmates of the Calcutta Jail to distant shores. Either Penang or Bengkulu would do, whichever place provided the first “available opportunity.” That came up at the beginning of 1797, when ships conveying stores and military supplies to the garrison at Fort Marlborough were ready to sail. At the governor-general’s behest, the Calcutta Jail was cleared of its entire inmate population, 164 in all, including the three Khan brothers and Sheolal Tewari. An additional 36 were rounded up from nearby jails to even the total at 200.16 A first batch of 50, consisting of 35 Hindus and 15 Muslims, sailed on the Endeavour in March 1797. The three Khan brothers and Sheolal Tewari went next, part of the second 50 trailing on the London, its numbers split more evenly between 28 Muslims, 3 of whom were the Khans, and 22 Hindus. The Yarmouth cleared out the remaining 100 later that May. Thus began a 56

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series of large shiploads sailing from Bengal that delivered 1,140 convicts to Bengkulu by September 1801.17 As the backgrounds of the 200 convicts dispatched in 1797 indicate, those deported constituted a cross-section of local society. For instance, 129 (or 64.5 percent) were Hindus and 69 Muslims (34.5 percent)—the remaining 2 were of Portuguese descent—roughly paralleling the two-thirds to one-third ratio existing between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal.18 And contrary to what some scholars have suggested about Hindu convicts being disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the lowest castes, the 129 men were of a diverse mix of castes. Twenty-six of the 129 (or 20.1 percent) were clearly upper caste and can be identified as Brahmins (6, one of whom was a female named “Parbatty Kuer,” were identified as a “Brahminee”), Kayasths (12), Kshatriya (1), Rajputs (6), and Thakur (1). Forty-seven convicts (36.4 percent) were from the other end of the spectrum, their listings indicating castes later categorized as Scheduled Castes (or dalits or untouchables): Bagdi (13), Dhobi (1), Dom (21), Hari (11), and Muchi (1). The remaining 56 (43.4 percent) straddled a mix of upper and lower castes. At the higher end were those identified as Bairagis (4, religious mendicants), Sannyasis (religious ascetics; 4, 3 of whom were named Gir, a name generally associated with Brahmins), and Agrahari (1, Vaishya or trading caste); closer to the lower end were those categorized as Baurias (7, palanquin bearers and cultivators), Kaibartta (6, fishing and cultivating caste), Kasari (1, brazier workers), Khore or Khoriya (4, earthworkers), Mallahs (4, boating and fishing caste), and Tantis (3, weavers). Another 6 were of Shudra caste, the 5 identified as Goala or Ahir, a cow herding caste, and a person listed as Kumhar or potter. The caste identities of the remaining 16 are difficult to ascertain from the names ascribed to them, including those listed as “Chong” (4), “Sorrey” (1), or “Pode” (1).19 That the 129 Hindu convicts represent a range of castes is not at all surprising because of the crimes typically punished by transportation. Many offenders found guilty of murderous violence were people caught up in agrarian disputes that ended badly, and they were often from the upper and middle strata of the caste system with landholding or tenancy claims. On the other hand, there were also the usual suspects, generally the so-called professional robbers, dacoits, and thugs whom colonial authorities habitually pursued as the dangerous criminals in any locality, and these men, too, often represented a cross-section of local society.20 Although convicts from India were sent to Bengkulu prior to 1797, the transportation of large numbers on the Endeavour, London, Yarmouth, and T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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other ships established a new traffic pattern. Earlier movements, by contrast, were sporadic. As early as 1712, some offenders charged with “theft and other vile unpardonable misdemeanors” in Madras were conveyed to Sumatra at the East India Company’s expense to engage in “building and other hard labors as long as they live.” Convicts, termed “transports” in the company records—one from Madras and two from Bombay—were also on the island in 1773, reportedly at the tail end of their five-year sentences. However, Fort Marlborough was not quite ready to become a full-fledged insular prison, at least not in 1774, when it turned down Calcutta’s offer to house, on an occasional basis, criminal offenders “condemned to slavery.”21 A different view prevailed in 1797 when the Bengkulu authorities, in need of labor, agreed to open up their doors to convicts from Calcutta. They had long complained of being shorthanded because “Malays” would not work for the company, either because wages were meager or their recruitment was constrained by the labor arrangements that bound many local inhabitants to other masters. In the British perception, however, locals were by “spirit and constitution . . . neither willing or equal to any laborious work.”22 Consequently, Bengkulu recruited workers from abroad, as did many British outposts in Southeast Asia. Imported labor in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for the most part, was of the coerced kind: slaves initially and convicts subsequently. Local officials recruited African slaves, termed kafirs or “coffrees” in the region, from Madagascar and elsewhere, their shipments in the late eighteenth century often negotiated through Bombay. This connection was unreliable, however, and therefore Bengkulu turned to places closer to home, the nearby island of Nias principally, for additional slaves. However, increasingly in the late eighteenth century, authorities at the highest levels condemned the practice of slavery in their Southeast Asian outposts. Calcutta and London urged Fort Marlborough in the 1780s and 1790s to free the slaves who could support themselves—as long as they agreed to continue to work for the company—and pension off the rest. By then their numbers were in decline. Although Bengkulu’s tally of 1,121 slaves in 1788 was nearly double the 576 counted in 1766, its numbers dropped thereafter, to 368 by 1796, on the eve of the arrival of the first large convoy of convicts. Moreover, only 220 of the 368 slaves were adults (89 men and 131 women); the rest were children (68 in all; 35 boys and 33 girls) and elderly or “superannuated” (80). As the names assigned to slaves indicate, most were from “Madagascar,”

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“Mozambique,” “Angola,” “Madda [Uganda?],” and “Neas [the nearby island of Nias; see map 2].”23 Deaths and the relocation of 129 slaves to Penang, ostensibly on grounds of “humanity,” shrank Bengkulu’s “coffree” population considerably. This transfer was also an effort to reduce the settlement’s expenses and its neverending budgetary deficit. According to one calculation, 129 fewer slaves represented an annual saving of 9,288 piasters.24 Although Fort Marlborough refused to free its slaves—they were not emancipated until 1818—and the company directors in London eventually relented, local administrators were well aware that they had to acquire additional laboring hands by other means.25 Not that they were ever content with the quantity and quality of work they extracted from their slaves. A familiar complaint was the one voiced in 1786 that the cost of maintaining slaves was greater than the services they rendered. Nevertheless, as the author of this lament acknowledged, the slaves performed all of the settlement’s “laboring work.”26 No wonder an 1822 report concluded that “the best and most extensive spice plantations have been, and continue to be, cultivated almost entirely by slaves, and but for this species of labor, Sumatra would not now have to boast of one-fourth of the present extent of that cultivation.”27 Convicts were Calcutta’s response to Bengkulu’s repeated requests for “coolies.”28 They were sent there because of the meeting of minds between the governor-general, who was intent on banishing all prisoners from his metropolitan jail after the 1796 jailbreak, and Captain F. H. Pearson, who was then in Calcutta awaiting passage to Fort Marlborough to begin his tenure as its engineer. When the latter inquired about deploying convicts on his impending construction projects, the Khans and Tewari, who were heading to Penang when the Andamans was abandoned as a penal settlement, were quickly hustled on board the first available ships, which happened to be sailing to Bengkulu. What awaited them on the other end was more than apparent from Pearson’s request to R. S. Perreau, the Calcutta agent for Fort Marlborough, that the convict ships also carry 400 hoes, 50 pick axes, and 20 iron crows. Food supplies, sufficient to feed the convicts for six months, were also sent on these ships because Bengkulu did not grow its own food.29 The Khans and Tewari traveled on the London with three other men sentenced in Banaras. Sheolal Tewari knew one of them—Mulki Tewari— perhaps too intimately. Mulki Tewari was in the same boat because he had murdered one of Sheolal’s kinsmen to avenge the latter’s killing of three

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of Mulki’s relatives. The rest of the convicts on the London hailed from a number of other areas: the Bihar district of Patna and the Bengal districts of Burdwan, Nadia, Tipperah, Murshidabad, Rajshahi, and Jessore. Many of the other 46 convicts were also guilty of murder or murder committed in conjunction with dacoity or robbery or a combination of the two.30 No convicts’ memoirs exist to enable us to delve into their minds as they journeyed from their homes to Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay en route to their insular prisons in Southeast Asia. Nor did the sepoys accompanying them as guards and replacements for the regiments stationed in the penal colonies leave behind any discursive traces of that sort. However, frequent sepoy expressions of concern about crossing the kala pani are striking reminders of the anxieties that many Indians felt about overseas travel. The very deployment of transportation as a colonial technology of punishment, in fact, rested on the British assumption that their subjects in India regarded it as a culturally transgressive practice. Hence the colonial confidence in its effectiveness in punishing wrongdoers with a just measure of pain. No doubt convict and sepoy accounts, if extant, would have touched on the issue of “diet” so central to their concerns about voyaging on the high seas. As Calcutta was well aware, sepoys often voiced concern about their potential exposure to caste pollution on “sea voyages.” Consequently, the authorities were always careful about dietary measures on board ships. For instance, the officer commanding a detachment sailing to Bengkulu in 1789 was instructed to ensure that shipboard conditions were “comfortable, with a view to lessen, and if possible to remove those prejudices which the Hindoos of every description entertain against going to sea.” His subordinate, Lieutenant William McCullock, was directed to be careful about assuring “troops in general, and more particularly those of the Hindoo faith” and to be as obliging as possible “to prevent any interference with their customs.”31 Indulgences for the 70 sepoys on board the Asia meant rice, chura (unhusked rice), flour, dal (lentil), grams, ghi (clarified butter), onions, salt, sugar, and chilies. Their drinking water was also carefully prepared, filled in separate casks for Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta under the supervision of two Hindu and two Muslim soldiers.32 No dietary controversies surfaced on the store ships to Southeast Asia in the late 1790s. Soldiers and convicts received the same food on board but in different quantities; the latter received smaller portions. Their standard fare en route to Bengkulu was rice, lentils, ghi, and salt, all of these items provided in a “dry” and not “dressed” state so that they could cook their own meals. 60

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The local medical officer boarded all ships on arrival to examine the passengers before they were allowed to alight. Senior surgeon Bartholomew Hartley’s inspection of the London, the ship on which the Khan brothers traveled, led him to suspect that some of the convicts and two of the soldiers had contracted smallpox soon after leaving Bengal. He also diagnosed several convicts as “infected with leprous and other eruptive ulcerations.”33 So many convicts were unloaded in such a short period of time in 1797 and early 1798 that the Fort Marlborough authorities sought in October 1798 to restrict further shipments to 200 convicts. By then the Bengal government had already loaded 250 convicts on the Lord Duncan and was on the verge of dispatching another 72 on the Sir Stephen Lushington. It quickly scrapped the latter plan. In 1800, however, the shipments resumed, including 153 sent on the Aurora.34 Many bandwars who arrived on the Lord Duncan became part of the social circle of the Khan brothers. As with the 200 who came together with the Khans, the 250 on the Lord Duncan in 1799 were also whisked out of Bengal because of their involvement in yet another violent episode in the Calcutta Jail. On this occasion, too, inmates tried to flee the jail, their botched attempt resulting in significantly more bloodshed than before because several prisoners were killed trying to escape. Once again, the response from the highest level of government was to clear out the jail by banishing everyone overseas.35 By a remarkable twist of fate, while the Khans were in Bengkulu in 1799, their fellow London passenger and Banarasi convict, Sheolal Tewari, was back in Calcutta, almost—but not quite so—in time to be behind bars at the time of the new jailbreak. Tewari, who had gone out with the three Khan brothers, was sent back to India in early 1799, coincidentally with another set of Muslim brothers, former shipmates on the London: Mahomed Ibrahim, Mahomed Ismail, Mahomed Arhum, and Mahomed Ishuk. In contrast to the Khans from Banaras, these four brothers were from Burdwan, where they were convicted of dacoity and murder. Fort Marlborough repatriated Tewari and company because they were high caste and “strongly suspected of endeavoring to excite a spirit of mutiny amongst their comrades.” Tewari the Brahmin, in other words, was a troublemaker, not the kind of person that Bengkulu desired in its workforce. As its administrators informed Calcutta, they did not want high caste convicts whose sway “over the others may be a dangerous tendency to our little establishment.”36 When the Calcutta Jail was cleared of its prisoners in the aftermath of the 1799 escape, they were all rushed onto the Lord Duncan bound for Bengkulu, T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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except for Tewari and the four Burdwan brothers, who were sent to Penang on the Fletcher. They may have been the first convicts sent back by one penal settlement and then transported to another. Another notable first was Mussamat Subugea, one of the two or three women banished from India in the 1790s. A fellow passenger on the Penang-bound ship, her sentence was for murder and the additional crime of attempted jailbreak.37 Penang became the principal penal destination in the early decades of the nineteenth century. From the outset it was developed to handle both large numbers and difficult prisoners. By then British officials in Calcutta and London had broached but ultimately rejected several venues. To view their list of possibilities, which included Botany Bay, the Cape of Good Hope, the West Indies, and various islands in Southeast Asia, is to trace the expanding reach of the British Empire across the globe.38 Once on shore the convicts were quickly put to work. One of the first tasks that Captain Pearson assigned the Khans and their batch of 200 was to widen and broaden the ditch around Fort Marlborough (see figure 1), originally built in the 1710s to replace York Fort. They also constructed a bridge near the fort. Larger projects followed as convict numbers swelled in 1798 and 1799. Increasingly, their main task was to build a road across the settlement. Smaller groups were engaged in lesser projects, including the repair of the fort, the clearing of ditches, and the preparation of the grounds on which they were to be housed.39 The initial plan was to settle the convicts far away from where local officials resided. They ended up housed in sheds near the fort, conveniently proximate to their principal work site.40 Was it the departure of Sheolal Tewari or the particularities of the local system of convict management that launched Fateh Khan as the leader of the bandwars? No doubt the Khans’ military background and the personality of Fateh Khan, about whom we know much more than about most convicts, facilitated his emergence as a sahib. He and his brother were also advantaged by their longevity; they outlasted many who were part of the sizable first convict cohort in west Sumatra.41 The hackles that Sheolal Tewari raised during his brief tenure in Bengkulu and the many tales about laxity in disciplining convicts that filtered back to India stirred Calcutta into action. So did the much more pressing and larger concerns about the settlement’s financial and administrative viability. Thus, at the end of 1799 Bengal authorities reconfigured its administrative status, downgrading it to a factory subordinate to Calcutta and headed by an officer with the lesser rank of deputy governor. In December 1799 62

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the governor-general, at the behest of the Court of Directors in London, appointed Walter Ewer, a former director of the East India Company and high sheriff of Calcutta, to the special rank of commissioner and instructed him to investigate the “abuses and mismanagement” that had long characterized “every branch of the administration” in Bengkulu.42 Within a few months of his arrival in 1800, Commissioner Ewer found many shortcomings in the functioning of the local administration. For one, it was a place that England regarded “as a sort of forlorn hope and little better than Botany Bay.” Therefore, as Ewer put it, “very few respectable characters are sent out, the writers are chiefly half cast[e]s, or wild young men, whom their relations could make nothing of in England.” These men of little talent and character and meager salaries, who eventually became its local officials, residents, and merchants, with few exceptions acted as “petty tyrant[s],” more intent on feathering their own nests than in serving the company’s interests.43 It is ironic that Ewer considered his west Sumatran outpost a place of “forlorn hope,” a Botany Bay, which it was for the convicts he sought to aggregate in larger numbers. Certainly its distance from India meant that its local administrators often made decisions unilaterally that did not always meet with Calcutta’s approval. Ewer’s aspersions on the expatriate community in Sumatra can be contextualized, as one scholar has recently done, by acknowledging that the East India Company officials acted as “lords paramount”—a judgment initially rendered by William Marsden, a late-eighteenth-century Bengkulu administrator— but also by recognizing that they were intimately involved with local society, including through marriages with local elites and “by adjusting to the social, cultural, political and economic system they found in place.” In addition, company officials relied on “conciliating methods” to manage “natives,” to echo another characterization initially drawn up by Marsden.44 The governor-general also charged Ewer with ascertaining the size of a convict force that his settlement could “safely and usefully” employ. He was to establish rules for their “management” and compile “their names, professions, crimes, and other requisite information.”45 Note the absence of caste on this list. Calcutta made Ewer’s task of overhauling convict administration a little easier by limiting numbers in Bengkulu. The allusion—and the timing of it—was clearly a reference to the “spirit of mutiny” that had threatened to overwhelm the settlement’s “little establishment” during the brief interlude of Sheolal Tewari and the three Mahomeds. T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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From the outset Ewer reposed much confidence in the labor potential of convicts. Within a few months of his arrival, he informed Calcutta that he could comfortably utilize “any number,” an assessment that contradicted his predecessor’s policy of keeping numbers down. As long as their shipments were spaced at monthly intervals, he was willing to receive as many as “300 at a time.” With numbers, he expected to have the requisite hands to tackle infrastructural needs and relieve government of both their maintenance and shipping costs. The settlement would also have some prisoners left over to hire out to private individuals who would employ them in agricultural work and cover their living costs either by feeding them or granting them land to feed themselves. These employers, in return, would have to guarantee their safekeeping and prevent their escape. He also suggested that women accompany the convicts so that others, “when they hear they are well treated . . . [are] tempted to accompany their husbands or fathers.”46 Calcutta approved Ewer’s plans for the convicts because they reduced maintenance costs and strengthened controls over the convict body by scattering and dividing them up, but it did not send women along with the convicts. In August 1800 Ewer confidently characterized his settlement as an appropriate site for convicts, particularly because it was lightly populated and had considerable land available for cultivation. They were essential to his plans to scale down government expenses because they provided cheap labor for public projects that would otherwise require hiring coolies at much higher wages. He also had other designs on them: he expected to deploy their labor on growing pepper in the government’s plantation and utilize those familiar with cultivating “grain and such other articles . . . necessary for their subsistence.”47 Convicts, in short, would meet the labor needs of the settlement as well as more than pay for themselves. With or without additional convicts, Commissioner Ewer failed to transform the fortunes of Fort Marlborough. Founded and maintained as an entrepôt for Indonesian pepper, it consistently disappointed authorities in Calcutta and London because it never generated enough pepper for export. Year after year, as the Indian government invariably noted, it failed to supply a sufficient amount to warrant its administrative infrastructure and costs. Ewer therefore made the expansion of pepper production one of his principal objectives, doling out substantial advances to local planters and offering generous private contracts to fellow officials to take up its cultivation.48 Convicts were at the center of this new equation; as much needed labor for the public works and the plantations, their addition to the workforce of slaves 64

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enabled the company to rely on cheap labor rather than hire more expensive coolies. As the Bengkulu resident noted in 1806, a convict worker cost far less than the “usual price” of a Malay laborer: about $3.50 per month compared to $5.00 to $6.00 for the latter.49 Convict labor was also invaluable in that there was little antipathy toward it in any quarter, at home or abroad. Commissioner Ewer, for instance, opposed the “importation” of slaves who were “sold on the wharf as soon as they were landed” but ardently supported the recruitment of convicts. His brief against slaves was that their sales were “private” and involved men and women from Nias. “This traffick is horrid, all of these wretched are kidnapped, and sold to the masters of vessels. . . . The zenanas [households] of the Company’s servants are supplied with females, from . . . Neas.” Not that he was eager to emancipate slaves who were the property of the company. In his view male and female slaves were “the happiest people” even though they were “cheated by their overseers.” Nor was he keen on the local form of slavery, which he accurately characterized as involving “debtors who, by the Malay laws, become the slaves of their creditors. This . . . is liable to a great deal of abuse.”50 Critical to Commissioner Ewer’s plans for the convicts was his appointment of Robert Samuel Perreau as the superintendent of the company’s convicts and slaves and roads in November 1800. Note the prominence attached to roads in the job description, an obvious reference to the proposed convict involvement in the construction and maintenance of public works. Note also the change in title with the change in personnel: Perreau’s predecessor, Captain F. H. Pearson of the Bengal Engineers, was officially the “Engineer” and “Officer in charge of the Works.”51 The superintendent’s responsibilities, by contrast, extended to many facets of convict lives, as the following list of his duties indicates: “to attend to every quarrel and dispute among the coffrees and convicts . . . [, to] . . . be present at all punishments . . . [,] . . . to deliver them their provisions monthly to the number of 1000 persons, to watch over their conduct and prevent as much as is in his power all conspiracies amongst them.” The superintendent also “keeps all the accounts, pays them monthly, receives the hire of such as are in the service of individuals, [and] proportions their different labours.”52 The commissioner handpicked Perreau for the job because he was perceived as well qualified to carry out its duties. He had prior knowledge and experience of both Bengkulu and India. He began his career as a writer at Fort Marlborough in 1777; he moved to India three years later and remained T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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there until his return to Sumatra in 1799. For much of his Indian interlude, particularly from 1785 to 1799, he was Bengkulu’s man in Calcutta. In that capacity, he helped arrange the first large shipments of convicts in 1797 and 1798. In 1799 he accompanied the 250 convicts on the Lord Duncan, an experience that undoubtedly added to his familiarity with them. His wealth of knowledge and experiences made him, in the commissioner’s words, “conversant” in Hindustani and Malay “as well as in the character of the people from Bengal.” Perreau, too, made much of his facility with “native” languages, emphasizing it as an advantage “to approach nearer to a knowledge of their manners, customs and opinions.”53 Apparently he was one of the few Europeans on the island who spoke Hindustani, the lingua franca of a convict body that included many Bengali or Bangla speakers. Perhaps even more than his commissioner, Perreau, whose appointment Calcutta frowned upon because of his checkered past in India, pinned his hopes on a convict force large enough to undertake official projects, both public works and the cultivation of pepper and other crops. In addition, he intended to use them in his private schemes to enrich himself.54 In Perreau’s estimation as many as 1,000 convicts could easily be absorbed into the settlement, a substantial proportion in public works and the rest in the cultivation and production of pepper. No doubt both the commissioner and the superintendent were unduly optimistic about their labor potential because bandwars seemed the perfect solution to the settlement’s ongoing labor and budgetary woes. Convicts promised a double dividend: much-needed labor and a reduction in administrative costs, the first by providing cheap labor for public and private projects and the latter by relieving government of the costs of hiring coolies. Additional savings were anticipated from hiring them out to individuals who would cover their subsistence costs. Commissioner Ewer handed out substantial sums of money from the government treasury without first consulting his superiors, at a time when pepper prices were falling sharply on the London market.55 He advanced large sums of money not only to local planters but also to his fellow officials, sweetening his offers with promises of generous prices for the pepper. Consequently, he was held personally liable for the advances made, including to Perreau, whose ambitious plans included growing pepper with the assistance of Chinese laborers. Both Ewer and Perreau ended up badly.56 In June 1805 Calcutta, prodded repeatedly by its superiors in London to investigate Ewer’s failures at retrenchment and in submitting information 66

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about the settlement’s finances, terminated his appointment as commissioner; replaced him with Thomas Parr, a civil servant of “approved integrity and talents”; and subordinated Bengkulu to the control of the Board of Trade at Fort William. That October Parr took over with the rank of resident. Once again, the directive to Fort Marlborough was to set its house in order, in this case to clean up after Ewer, who had previously been instructed to do precisely that. Ewer was now the problem, and Parr was unsparing in his criticism of his predecessor. He agreed with the higher authorities that the former had increased, not decreased, administrative costs and was furthermore personally liable for the substantial shortfall in the treasury. Consequently, Ewer was not allowed to sail for England but instead was sent to Calcutta, where he was promptly jailed and later died behind bars in 1810, a different kind of convict than the ones he had once supervised. As for Perreau, his schemes for developing a substantial convict corps for his various projects—the company’s and his own—never materialized. The several hundred additional bandwars he sought never came. Although 1,140 had arrived from Calcutta by the end of 1801, the active workforce, at its height, numbered closer to 500 than 1,000. When Perreau became the superintendent of convicts in 1800, he counted 550 convicts under his charge, not all deemed fit to work. As a result, he figured his contingent was equipped only to embark on “general public duties” and a few cultivation projects. And with additions not forthcoming because Calcutta had redirected the convict traffic to Penang in the early years of the nineteenth century—only three convicts arrived between 1800 and 1805—his numbers fell precipitously as deaths, including of the oldest Khan brother; the expiration of transportation sentences; and pardons led to significant reductions. Among those freed from working for the company in this period were those who had performed military service.57 Parr briefly considered abolishing the office of superintendent of convicts because of its high costs. Instead he retained the position but replaced Perreau with Edward Atkins, a military officer, the first of many military men appointed in the penal colonies to manage convicts. He held Perreau accountable for the shortcomings of the convict management system and also criticized him for improprieties, including his practice of selling goods to the very people he was charged with supervising. Perreau’s spirited defense of his disciplinary system—really lack thereof—makes for fascinating reading because it highlights the circumstances under which Fateh Khan rose T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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to prominence. As for Perreau’s business transactions with convicts, his explanation was that he only sold goods worth less than $400 over a six-year period and only through auctions he did not personally attend. Different was his justification of the lax disciplinary regimen he had maintained during his tenure as superintendent. His claim, reproduced here at some length, was that he had inherited a laissez-faire system and done the best with it under the circumstances: I found convicts here on my arrival, and many others arrived before any charge of them devolved on me. . . . I was not the ruler of this place. No orders or rules accompanied them from Bengal, as I found people therefore, I continued to deal with them[;] the fault consequently did not originate in [sic] me. I had no place of close confinement for them, nor was it possible to confine men, employed in active labor, at miles distance from each other, as the present occupations of them prove. I could not check the propensities natural to the two sexes of mankind, which I am blamed for, and which be allowed, an opinion, was a great severity of good conduct in them, neither was I placed over them as a reference of their morals, although hopes of that reformation have been evident in many. My duty was to see them supplied with their monthly quantum of provisions to proportion their labor according to the orders I received [and] to prevent disturbances and attend to other general duties of that kind. I have heard, much of broils[,] commotions[,] depradations[,] and insubordination lately I acknowledge but I do declare that in the course of the whole time they have been under me now exactly five years, I do not remember ten instances, and the offenders seem to have been confined, within a very small number indeed, but in a body so large as 550 which . . . I first took charge of some were naturally to be expected.58

Not that Perreau and his successors did not enforce discipline. Periodically, they whipped convicts for such infractions as running away, theft, and neglect of duty. Generally the punishment was “12 rattans,” but in some instances, as many as 30. However, rarely, if ever, did they carry out the harsher sentences dictated by the pangeran’s court, particularly capital punishment, instead reducing them in “severity,” as per the governor-general’s directive.59 Parr’s efforts to tighten up the convict disciplinary system did not mean that he did not share his predecessor’s faith in the labor potential of convicts. He said as much when he characterized them as “the most useful and industrious class of people at this residency . . . [who] would in a few years be able to supply a considerable quantity of pepper at a cheaper rate than hitherto procured.”60 And he echoed earlier notions about their comparative 68

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advantage in a settlement where coolies and artificers were expensive and any kind of worker scarce. Therefore, he pressed Calcutta for an additional 300 bandwars to add to the 300 he had inherited when he took office. But he also specified that he wanted skilled convicts to work as bricklayers and carpenters to rebuild Fort Marlborough and others to serve as artificers, blacksmiths, braziers, and especially potters, all of whom were in short supply. 61 Like previous administrators, Parr was optimistic about extending pepper cultivation with the assistance of, to use his term, the convict “class.” In his calculus, each convict was capable of cultivating 2,000 vines and the entire workforce of generating enough revenue to pay for its upkeep and passage from India. The new resident’s plans to reconfigure his convict workforce never got off the ground. In December 1807 Parr was assassinated by local elites. His retrenchment efforts had won him few friends. Lady Raffles, wife of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who headed up the Bengkulu administration in the early 1820s, reported that Parr had alienated his fellow East India Company officials because he had ended their private trading privileges, other company employees because he had dismissed them as part of his campaign to reduce the “public establishment,” and above all, local chiefs because he had undermined their authority by making changes in the “native courts” without consulting them and by compelling them to cultivate coffee along with pepper. Consequently, the local elites, “resolved on vengeance,” murdered and beheaded him. 62 Ewer chimed in from jail to say that he had foretold his successor’s death. In his judgment, Parr had incurred the wrath of local society by not respecting its customs: “The Malays mistrusted his deceitful smiles while they felt the oppression of his iron arm. And not being sufficiently civilized to comprehend the duplicity of his policy, they cut off his head.”63 Ewer also made much of their policy differences by drawing up a series of stark contrasts. Whereas Parr had “degraded and insulted the chiefs,” Ewer respected and was on “friendly terms” with them, so much so that they had conferred on him the “exalted title of father of the people.” Also, at odds, he claimed, were Parr’s actions that had undermined Ewer’s achievements in developing spice plantations and trade; increasing the settlement’s revenues; and maintaining good relations with the Bugis Corps and its head, Daeng Mabela. 64 Ewer also distinguished himself from his successor by pointing to their differential treatment of convicts, the very mention of which speaks to the T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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importance local administrators attached to the latter’s contributions to the settlement. No doubt he also brought them up because one of the charges against Parr, as a visitor to the island in 1812 noted, was that he demobilized “a corps of convicts” who had served as sepoys and were involved in crushing “in a distant province a rebellion among the Malays, not without much bloodshed and hard service on their part; and, in fact, after they had conciliated the good will and confidence of all, by their services and attachment: yet they were sent back to their work as other convicts!”65 Indeed, convicts were a major part of the military force in the Muki (now Muko Muko) expedition of 1804–1805. However, after Parr took over, he discharged them because he believed they were “indiscriminately employed on the military duties of the residency.” And when they converged on his office “in a very disorderly manner, evidently with a view of intimidating . . . [him] into an acquiescence in their unreasonable demands,” he stripped them of their uniforms, which they did not wish to give up; he allowed them to retain their special food and money allowances but then locked them up, releasing them only after they agreed to accept employment with various individuals. Parr thought it best to contract them out to stop them from congregating “in any numbers where their strength might induce them to commit acts of violence.”66 Ewer, who had pressed convicts into military service and was appreciative of their sacrifices on the battlefield, believed that his successor had wronged them: Without pretending to any merit, I may safely aver, that in point of humanity, I soar sublimely superior to my successor. I found many hundreds of Bengal convicts on my arrival . . . [who] were under no restraint. I gave them land, furnished them with the day of rest from their public labors. When the war broke out again, I made soldiers of some of them, they served in the fort, when the French were before it and had besides been employed in active service, in which many of them had received wounds. I trusted them as sentries and they would have died to a man, sooner than they would have deserted me.

All that changed, according to Ewer, immediately after his departure: “I was no sooner gone, than the convicts were roughly disbanded, put in irons and sent to work on the high road. . . . When they met any captain of a ship whom they had seen with me, they held up their chains, and desired him to tell me, how my soldiers were treated; if they weren’t among the revolters, they have degenerated since I left them.” However, Parr’s successor, Richard 70

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Parry, Ewer approvingly noted, upheld his “promise of freedom to them, [and] has very honorably released them.”67 Indeed, the post-Parr administration briefly restored convicts to their former position as soldiers. W. B. Martin instituted that change when he filled in as the acting resident until a new man arrived from India. Fearful of what else the “rebels” might do, he mobilized the settlement’s European residents, urged Calcutta to provide assistance in repairing and rebuilding Fort Marlborough, and revived the convict force that his predecessor had disbanded. He also “re-embodied” the Bugis Corps, even though its captain, the influential Daeng Mabela, was suspected of having had a hand in Parr’s murder. Martin apparently did not subscribe to that theory; he described the Bugis Corps as notable for “their attachment and fidelity to the Company’s government.” Furthermore, as “foreigners,” they served as a “counterbalance” to the “native chieftains,” even though they were increasingly related to them through “inter-marriages.” Subsequently, Calcutta dispatched two companies of marine regiments to strengthen the military force at Fort Marlborough, which numbered roughly 300. 68 Once Richard Parry, the new resident, arrived, accompanied by marine battalions, the convict force was discharged. Although he did not significantly alter the Ewer/Perreau system of convict management, he instituted inquiries into its workings. As yet, there was little incentive to change, what with the convict population shrinking in size. A few numbers illustrate that trend—as well as the persistence of the generation that arrived at the turn of the nineteenth century. Perreau’s cohort of 550 convicts in 1800 shrank to 314 by 1805; his roster also included an additional 380 slaves. By mid-1807 the tally dropped to 265, down further to 216 in March 1810, a number that included 42 invalids and two certified by the medical officer as only fit for light work. No wonder the superintendent complained to Parry about not having a critical mass to undertake the regular work of the settlement, let alone embark on new projects. Without additional convicts, as he reminded his superiors, he would have to pay a lot for wage labor. 69 Parry continued the Bengkulu practice of seeking additional bandwars. In 1809 his administration compiled the first comprehensive record of the work of each and every convict. That year 161 of its 229 convicts (about 70 percent)—among them Fateh Khan—held “permanent” jobs: in the superintendent of spice’s plantations (37 convicts); in the government house (29); in the engineers’ office (28); at Mount Felix, three miles from Fort T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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Marlborough, where the resident and other Europeans lived (26); as syces for the resident’s bodyguard (24); with the superintendent of convicts (4); as hospital attendants (4); as chaukidars or nightwatchmen (4); as money counters for the subtreasurer (2); as cattle keepers (2); and as a lamplighter in the fort (1). A smaller number, 15 to be precise, were in “incidental” or “contingent employment”: on the roads in irons, that is, in shackles (8); as gourdans or overseers (3); as cart drivers (2); and as coolies (2). In addition, 40 convicts (over 17 percent) did not work because they were invalids (36), in the hospital (2), or in confinement (2). All of the previously mentioned 216 were men. Five convicts were exempted from work because they were women (3 in all, or about 1 percent of the overall population) or children (2).70 Prior to the 1809 compilation, the authorities only had fragmentary information, even though Commissioner Ewer was instructed to collect facts and figures as far back as 1800. At best they had the few little bits that Calcutta included in its lists of transports: convicts’ names, their fathers’ names, their professions and places of origin, their castes, and their crimes and sentences. So deficient were the records that inmates frequently exploited their gaps to pass themselves off as others with lighter sentences or as cases of mistaken identity. For instance, Jeram Roy petitioned in 1810 claiming that he never should have set foot in Bengkulu because he was a zamindar (landholder) from the north Indian district of Ghazipur who was wrongfully transported. In the absence of reliable records, Fort Marlborough had no recourse but to write to India for assistance, as it always did in cases of escapees also, because it did not possess reliable information regarding convict crimes or the terms of their sentences.71 The 1809 initiative to compile detailed information was a response to the resident’s complaint that the department of convicts and slaves constituted one of the most expensive parts of the government but was the one over which he had the least sway. He knew little about its workings because it issued no regular reports and did not maintain records on what convicts did and to what “advantage.” Nor did the authorities keep track of “casualties.” Furthermore, the resident believed that some convicts were not well utilized, some were released without proper notification to the police, and some were exempted from labor without appropriate authorization. Moreover, labor practices were guided by “convenience” rather than “economy.” He also condemned the lack of supervision over the “convict sepoys,” who did not have to do “public labor on account of previous military service”; the “frequent outrages” committed by convicts at night; and the escapes of six 72

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prisoners who fled in an Acehnese boat in 1809. Particularly galling was the escape of Sheolal, who occupied a position of trust as a “counter” in the Treasury office, the same position held by Fateh Khan and, coincidentally, was also from Banaras but not a shipmate. (Sheolal arrived a year later.) Thus, in the estimation of the local authorities, the system of management was riddled with “defects.”72 Furthermore, disciplinary lapses undermined productivity and therefore required immediate attention. Although the change was not implemented until several years later, Parry also began discussions about confining convicts to a single residential site rather than dispersing them across the settlement. His aim was to aggregate them in a venue where their accommodations would be “as contiguous and connected as . . . practicable” and their quarters enclosed by a trench. Similar arrangements, also unsuccessful, were extended to those working and residing in Mount Felix. More successful were the resident’s new rules restricting convicts from freely wandering around “between morning and evening gunfire.” They were to be apprehended if they did so; only “boys and the personal servants of gentlemen” were exempt.73 Violations were punishable by 40 lashes and a two-month work stint in heavy irons; repeat offenders faced a double dose of that punishment. Not much came of these new rules in 1809 because convicts were scattered all over Fort Marlborough. Monthly reports, introduced that year, sought to keep better track of their whereabouts. Their relocation to a single site, however, was a much more difficult undertaking. The local authorities made a start at the beginning of 1811 when they required the settlement’s 174 convicts to live in closer proximity to one another. Two years later, in 1813, a report indicated some positive results, but most were still dispersed across the settlement.74 Fateh Khan rose to prominence in this laissez-faire era of convict management. Capitalizing on the head start Perreau gave him by appointing him overseer in 1800, he emerged as the acknowledged sardar of the bandwars, many of whom were his shipmates or people who had arrived at roughly the same time. And with newcomers to their ranks few and far between in the first decade of the nineteenth century his generation became the veteran cohort, with several Bengkulu years behind them. By 1811 Fateh Khan’s standing among “bundwars, Malays, sebundy sepoys and Neas men,” to employ a phrase used by an Indian soldier to refer to their social world, was unrivaled. He was not only the head of the bandwars— that is, people literally under lock and key—but also a person to be reckoned T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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with among others groups they routinely mingled with: local Malays, Nias slaves, and sepoys of the local Indian military force (sebundy). In fact, he was influential enough that he played a key role in the “conviction and disgrace” of a jemadar (equivalent to lieutenant rank) named Cossim (Kasim) who commanded the resident’s bodyguard. Khan turned him in for leading a gang of robbers disguised as a Malay. Initially Fateh Khan was arrested and jailed for possession of stolen property because articles burgled from the house of Mohun Ghose, a former convict, who was a “butter” man living in Mount Felix, were “recovered” in his residence. Fortunately for him, however, a man identified as “Cheena Boss” (presumably Bose) in the records, a fellow inmate who was asked to help frame Khan, exposed the plot. Boss’s lengthy testimony, recorded in full by William Parker, the resident, makes for compelling reading. It describes a social world in which convicts and sepoys regularly interacted with one another and with local inhabitants and Nias men and women as well.75 That the authorities took the word of a convict sardar over that of a sepoy, and a senior officer to boot, shows Khan’s considerable stature in Bengkulu. And he prevailed again—although not without the timely assistance of Cheena Boss—over another highly ranked military officer. According to Boss, Sheikh Kurreem (Karim), a subadar in the sebundy corps and a friend of the cashiered jemadar, instigated a scheme to get back at the Khan sahib. To avenge his friend, Kurreem, the highest-ranking sepoy officer in the settlement, planted stolen items in Khan’s house. Initially the subadar was successful and Khan was arrested for his role in the robbery. Cheena Boss, however, turned the tables on the military officer by divulging the latter’s attempts to involve him and other bandwars in implicating the Khan Sahib. His “confession” led to the latter’s release and the dismissal and imprisonment of the subadar, who was sent back to India and prohibited from ever returning to Bengkulu. Boss received a small monetary reward for his role and assurance of repatriation once his sentence expired.76 In 1813 Boss, along with Fateh Khan, once again attracted the attention of the Bengkulu authorities, on that occasion, though, to their detriment. By then Boss was a close confidant, a friendship that reportedly grew out of their involvement in the 1811 case. He was also widely feared in the convict lines because he was known as an informer and a magician.77 Fateh Khan was not as fortunate in the 1813 incident. No one stepped in to save him, only to denounce him. Consequently, his long run as the head of the bandwars ended that year. His downfall began when he was identified as 74

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the ringleader of a robbery. The ensuing inquiry produced evidence indicating that he was widely recognized as “khan Sahib” by his fellow inmates and exerted “an insurmountable degree of authority over his fellow convicts” who believed “he was especially and publicly countenanced by government.”78 No doubt his triumph in 1811 over not one but two senior sepoy officers enhanced his standing, which Perreau had facilitated by appointing him an overseer in 1800. So prominent was he by 1813 that in the aftermath of the robbery investigation, the resident, G. J. Siddons, specifically instructed the superintendent to take steps “to efface” any lingering ideas about his special status. That is, Fort Marlborough could no longer afford to abandon the convict lines to its bandwar deputies, principal among them Fateh Khan. Faced with the “facts” of his “authority,” it had to act and it did, finally instituting some of the revisions in the system of convict management that it had first broached in 1809. Bandwars—and sepoys—also seized this opportunity to turn on their former leader. Fateh Khan’s name would not have caught the eye of the resident, let alone the government in Calcutta, were it not for his slave girl, “Jenny.” She was his undoing because she possessed inside information on him. She furnished the leads that prompted a full-scale inquiry into a “daring burglary” and the circumstances that facilitated its perpetration “with such success upon the warehouse of the residency of Bencoolen.”79 Once Jenny spoke others followed, and with their disclosures, vignettes of life in the convict lines came tumbling out in a cascade of words. Indeed, the bandwar testimonies are rich in detail and embody a multiplicity of perspectives from within and without Fateh Khan’s circle of friends and supporters. 80 I cite their statements in full in various parts of the text to evoke their Bengkulu world. The star witness, Jenny, probably did not even control her own name. In the company records she is simply identified as the “slave girl” of Fateh Khan, the alleged mastermind of the godown break-in. Initially, Jenny was only willing to implicate him in a robbery involving $200. But after the local authorities duped her into believing that a Malay servant of the magistrate was her master’s confidant, she opened up and provided additional details. To what extent she was maneuvered into this situation is evident from the official transcript of the inquiry: “The girl was now extremely confused, but still asserted she had told all she knew anything about. It was not till after a considerable time, during which her agitation gave reason to suppose that she was in possession of some particulars of importance, that she voluntarily confessed.”81 T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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Jenny then proceeded to relate the events leading up to the actual burglary. In her words, Cossinath, Cheena Boss, and Hussain Khan were at Fateh Khan’s house “late on the evening of the day during the night of which the Company’s godowns were broken open, drinking toddy and talking earnestly among themselves. Cheena Boss and Cossinath went away first, and at about 10 or 11 at night (she does not know the precise hour) Hossein Khan and Futtih Khan also left the house, she then went to sleep.” Jenny was not present at the scene of the crime; she remained in Fateh Khan’s house and woke up only when he returned home. Slave that she was, she was the one who had to get up to open the door. She recounted that her “mistress” awakened her at about 4:00 a.m. to let her master in, he (Futtih Khan) ordered her to bring him the Hoogu [hukka]; she did so and thinks that, after she had done so she did observe Azeezoolah [another convict who routinely slept in Fateh Khan’s house] sitting on a chest. She had seen her master take a bag from under his clothes, which he put down on a table. Her master then began to talk to his wife, and he narrated how a robbery, he had just been committing (sic), had been conducted. . . . 82 Not long after . . . her master took the bag from the table, tied [it] with a piece of string, carried it out to the house, and buried it in a hole which had been dug to plant a nutmeg tree near the necessary; she saw him put in the earth, and very soon after he had done so the morning gun fired. Quickly afterwards her master’s wife said “Jenny has seen you put the bag in the ground.” Upon which he came up to her (Jenny) in a supplicant posture, placing his hands together, and said should you be questioned, if you are threatened with being hanged, or with being killed do not disclose what you have seen. . . . She promised to obey his injunctions.

The quotation marks end at that point—on a promise that she obviously did not keep—presumably to indicate that her seemingly seamless narrative of that fateful day stopped there and was followed by responses to specific questions posed by the magistrate. At the conclusion of that so-called confession, the magistrate lauded “her sincerity hoping she had mentioned nothing which she would not avow anywhere, and in [the] presence of Futih Khan or his wife. She seemed much alarmed, but declared that if protected, she would maintain what she had revealed and where; she had said nothing but the truth and could not now retract.” When a search of the spot that Jenny had identified as the hiding place of the stolen money yielded nothing, the local administrators confronted Fateh Khan with Jenny in tow. He “was then brought in, and the girl was 76

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desired to recapitulate fully all she had before deposed. She did so, though she commenced evidently under much agitation, occasioned, no doubt, by the presence of the master whom she dreaded.” If the portrait of Jenny in this encounter, as represented in the colonial archives, is of a fearful but truthful witness, the characterization of Fateh Khan is of an obviously guilty person, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. In this version of events Khan Sahib is depicted as undergoing a “fall” that Jenny triggered almost instantaneously. When she first confronted him, he is shown standing tall, erect and with his arms folded on his breast; but as the girl proceeded, the Acting Resident observed that he trembled considerably [and] rubbed his face with his hands, hid it in them, then leant against the wall and joined his hands. When asked what he had to say, he came forward; stated that he had been here now about 20 years, that if the magistrate’s registers were examined, it would be found that he had never been accused of any crime, that he had eaten the Company’s salt for a long time, and had a good place as a treasury counter; that he would, therefore, rather have cut his own throat, than have broken into the Company’s godown, that he had been sentenced for murder and not for robbery, that besides it was not possible he could have done what Jenny, his slave girl, said, namely conceal two bags, each containing a thousand or six hundred dollars under his clothes. There he was corrected by being told that the girl had not said he brought two bags, and had not ventured even to guess the contents of one bag he did produce and that she must have been taught the story she told, by some enemy of his to ruin him, that Cheenee Boss and Casinath had never been at his house at all on Saturday night the 30th January, that he had not been out of his house the whole of that night; that Ameer Serang had not been to his house the succeeding morning and that he was innocent of any concern in, and knew not about the robbery at the Company’s godown. 83

See Tanjoong, identified as “the present wife of Futih Khan,” and as “Sanjoong, my wife” by Fateh Khan, corroborated her husband’s version of events. To the acting resident who recorded the entire proceedings, Sanjoong spoke “in a manner and language evidently studied and predetermined”; in other words, her assertion that Jenny’s account was “false” was suspect, as was her insistence that her husband was asleep “about 8 o’clock (herself, Jenny and Azeezoolah being in the house as usual) when the door was closed; and that no one had been in Futih Khan’s house conversing with previous to that hour, also not one of them left the house during the whole night, and the door was not opened till the next morning.”84 T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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Fateh Khan’s ownership of a slave was unusual, not because slavery was foreign to Bengkulu but because convicts were generally not in a position to afford slaves. Remarkable also was the fact that he possessed a slave even though his sentence of transportation had not expired. Moreover, he owned a slave in a society where control of bodies or “manpower” rather than land was a critical factor in production in the region. Competition and power in this area of vast forests and low population densities centered on control over people, not land, and thus wealth was embodied in the control of other human beings. 85 Less unusual but still rare among bandwars in Southeast Asia was that Fateh Khan was married to a local woman. Tanjong or Sanjoong, moreover, was apparently his second wife; his son was from an earlier marriage and lived next door in his uncle Hussain Khan’s house after the death of his mother. Jenny was the kind of slave prevalent in Southeast Asia: a debt slave beholden to Fateh Khan because of a financial obligation, in her case valued at $52. Powerful and wealthy individuals generally controlled debt slaves; in other words, people with resources often established debt bondage over others. Termed slaves, these men and women were known in the local vernacular as mengirings, literally followers of or slave-debtors, “a species of bondslaves to the creditor, who allows them subsistence and clothing, but does not appropriate the produce of their labor to the diminution of their debt.” “Their condition,” to continue in the words of a contemporary chronicle of Sumatra, “is better than that of pure slavery, in this, that the creditor cannot strike them, and they can change their masters, by prevailing on another person to pay their debt, and accept of their labor on the same terms. . . . [T]hey may obtain their liberty, if they can by any means procure a sum equal to their debt.”86 Although there is no evidence of a sexual relationship existing between Jenny and Fateh Khan—presumably if one existed, local authorities would have made much ado about it—local inhabitants, especially Chinese male migrants in the port cities of Southeast Asia, were known to buy or hire bonded women, often to serve “as cook, commercial assistant and local informant as well as sexual partner.”87 European men—there were few European women in this settlement—were involved in similar and comparable relationships, so much so that Bengkulu was widely characterized as a settlement in which there were only a handful of Europeans and many Eurasians or “gentlemen of color, from yellow to jet black—the descendants of Jews and Christians of all nations by Malay or Bengal women.”88

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Female debt slaves were typically integrated into the household of their masters, as was Jenny, a practice that the local officials sought to capitalize on to enter into the private life of Fateh Khan. In the absence of eyewitnesses to the “daring” crime, she was the best prospect for providing circumstantial and incriminating evidence. Other than Sanjoong, she was the one person familiar with the everyday workings of the Fateh Khan household. As a slave she was vulnerable, however, to intimidation by Fateh Khan and to the pressures applied by the local authorities, who were intent on transforming her into a witness for the prosecution. And the truth, literally, set her free. In return for her testimony, the local authorities offered “protection”; she was “emancipated,” and when she expressed concern about her safety and wellbeing were she to remain in Bengkulu and therefore wanted to flee north to Padang (also in west Sumatra), she received a handsome sum of $25 to help defray the costs of relocation. 89 Like most debt slaves—and in contrast to the “state” slaves—Jenny was local. State or company slaves in Bengkulen and other European enclaves in Southeast Asia, on the other hand, were primarily from Africa in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a few were from the region, typically Nias. Jenny’s subordination to Fateh Khan was unusual—I have not encountered another instance of a convict owning a slave—but not her presence in convict society. In fact, the lives of company slaves were most intimately interconnected with those of convicts. They had much in common because they worked alongside one another on behalf of their company masters, and the mutuality of their existence was recognized by their joint supervision by an administrator designated the superintendent of convicts and coffrees. Not surprisingly, bandwars, who were almost all males, often partnered with female slaves.90 Fateh Khan’s rise to prominence in the convict community dates to Perreau’s tenure as superintendent of the convicts. And he continued to prosper after the latter’s departure, even as regulations for their pubic and private employment tightened up. There was no fall until Jenny blew the whistle on him. Until then he was acknowledged as a sardar and sahib, or as Sunnoo put it, “a man of consequence and an intelligent person.” When a night watchman was asked why he did not challenge Khan when he encountered him late at night, the former explained that the latter was “the sircar [sarkar] or chief of the convict lines.”91

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By 1800, as Commissioner Ewer’s response to the petition of the Khan brothers noted, Fateh Khan was a money “counter” in the subtreasurer’s office. Thereafter, thanks to Perreau, as Khan testified, he was placed in a position of “character and consequence” in the convict lines, charged with the responsibility of selecting three convicts as night watchmen (chaukidars), regulating the “guard in the convict lines,” and preventing “disturbances.”92 Fateh Khan also owed his stature to his success as a moneylender, the resources for which came from his “high wages” as a counter and “allowances” as a convict. His list of debtors included a Malay named Tayilla, Kye Chuan who owed him 50 piasters; Tameer, 40; and Mr. Brown, 40. He also identified several people who had pledged or pawned him various articles (See Atty, a Bugis man from Sulawesi or the Celebes, cloth; Serng Serany, a belt plate and small silver tobacco box) and others to whom he was indebted, including several convicts (Ram Gholam Gourdan, Jungle Khansammah, Khyratee, Sunnoo, and Namdar). In the aftermath of the 1813 robbery, local officials speculated that his “considerable property” also came from his involvement in “innumerable petty robberies.” According to the resident, Fateh Khan also possessed an “extraordinary degree of superiority” because he was perceived to wield “influence, not only with English gentlemen but with native [Malay] chiefs, and . . . [the] power to revenge himself in the most horrible manner, on those who might excite his daily hate.” People therefore feared him and “took especial care not to offend him in the slightest degree.”93 Khan sahib, moreover, maintained the trappings of extraordinary power and influence. He owned a slave, was married to a local woman, occupied a house valued at $250 to $300 according to local officials, and had bags of money around his house, and several people were indebted to him for various sums of money. His personal possessions, furthermore, included a pistol and a sword. His network of friends and allies extended throughout the convict lines and beyond. He and his brother occupied adjoining houses. Their homes were places of shelter, assembly, and commensality for bandwars of different caste and regional backgrounds—a distribution that underlines the diverse caste backgrounds of the convict body. Some slept inside their houses, some on the outside. The people indoors at night in Fateh Khan’s house included his wife, Jenny, and two or three others, among them Azeezoolah, the “lame tailor.” His brother Hussain Khan shared his house with Fateh Khan’s son as well as “Ram Gholam a gourdan, Matadeen, Agnah, Shoodeen, and Ram 80

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Dial a Brahmin,” and slept “in an inner room divided from the hall,” his nephew in a separate small room, and all the other men, except for Ram Dial, in the hall of the house. Presumably Ram Dial stayed out by himself on the verandah because he was a Brahmin. Other convicts had similar coresidential and commensal arrangements. Leelo Carpenter lived with Huldee (Haldi), a blacksmith; Tezeram, a “free” convict, did not live there but cooked his victuals in the house. Mohun Thacoor (Thakur) was also part of this circle; at the inquiry he testified that he considered Haldi his son, and the latter called him father.94 That such dining and housing arrangements mattered in this community is suggested by the testimony of Ram Mohun, who acknowledged his familiarity with Fateh Khan but not a “friendship.” When asked whether he had ever visited the latter at his home, he emphatically replied: “Never. I have been here fifteen years [but] have never been a single time in his house. I see him frequently in the road.” His answers about the nature of his ties to Cheena Boss and Cossinath elicited a similar response. He only knew them by name, as he did most convicts, nothing more. To emphasize his point, he elaborated: “Those persons have never been in my house nor I in theirs.”95 Many convict relationships began on the voyage across the kala pani. They were forged on board the ships that initiated many of them to the high seas. Cheena Boss emphasized the importance of shipboard ties when he explained his friendship with Cossinath: “Yes we came here in the same ship together—the Lord Duncan.” As bandwar testimonies indicate, convicts frequented each other’s houses with relative ease. Their daily peregrinations often took them far afield from the convict lines, not only all over Bengkulu but also to and fro to Mount Felix, where many Europeans and their convict servants resided. They also routinely fraternized with sepoys in the military lines. Consider Fateh Khan’s Sunday itinerary as outlined in his response to a query about his activities the day after the Saturday night robbery. He said he began the morning with conversations with various convicts and free men in and around the convict lines and then in town. Thereafter, ostensibly in his capacity as gourdan, he went around making inquiries into the robbery, in the course of which he visited the resident’s house at Mount Felix and the military lines, where he stopped for a smoke with Namdar and a conversation with Subadar Husnoo, the senior sepoy officer.96 Convicts in Bengkulu had a unique history with the sepoys stationed in their settlement. They were fellow countrymen, members of a small T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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community, and shared the Hindustani language that they spoke among themselves. Furthermore, a large group of convicts had served in the militia mobilized in 1804 for the Muki expedition. After the campaign was over, “convict sepoys,” as they understandably preferred to be termed, protested their disbanding and the reduction in dietary allowances and refused to surrender their uniforms. Confined in the fort initially, they were eventually released, relieved of ever having to work for the company, and allowed to enter into the service of private employers. As many as 44 convicts were freed from public labor because of their military service, and as many as 101 convicts were apparently part of the two companies organized into a militia.97 On the basis of Jenny’s testimony, Fateh Khan, together with Hussain Khan, Cheena Boss, and Cossinath Thakur, were found guilty of having committed a robbery. In March 1813 they were relegated to road construction duty in shackles. Azeezoolah, also charged, received a lesser punishment because of his disability and was assigned to less onerous work and chained only by one leg. All five were locked in jail at night and allowed out only to work, and they were stripped of all titles and offices.98 In the aftermath of the robbery inquiry, the authorities instituted changes in the system of convict management. In February 1813 Superintendent of Slaves and Convicts T. Barnes formulated new rules to restrict the flow of bandwars into town after sunset, especially from the company’s plantation. He also ordered convicts to relocate to “a regular range of huts, surrounded by an earthen bank” and to remain there at night. Nonconvicts were no longer permitted to reside in the lines. And to prevent traffic in and out of the lines at night, a naik (corporal) and four sepoys were added to the existing force of a gourdan and three chaukidars standing sentry that Fateh Khan had once commanded.99 At the behest of the resident, the superintendent also addressed other abuses uncovered in the course of the investigation. One target was the exemptions granted convicts identified as disabled. Rather than trust their existing list, the authorities subjected all invalids to a medical exam, which led to the reclassification of many, including Hussain Khan and Ramdial, as capable of working. Local officials also reassessed the status of the convict sepoys exempted from having to perform labor. In all, 47 people were in that category, among them Cossinath, jailed for his role in the robbery. The other 46 were employed in various capacities: some as sepoys; others in the service of 82

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European masters; and still others as fish sellers, wheat grinders, cattle keepers, wood cutters, moneychangers, and cart drivers. The Bengkulu authorities also turned their attention to a third privileged category: liberated convicts, prominent among them Cheena Boss. This initiative, too, was aimed at preventing the development of future Fateh Khans, inmates with exceptional powers and benefits. With better data, Fort Marlborough intended to weed out “known bad characters” and reduce the number of “liberated” convicts by repatriating some of them. However, of the 130 offered a passage to India, only 29 (or about 22 percent) accepted, of whom 27 were allowed to return to India on the ship Clara in June 1813.100 While Fateh Khan was in jail in May 1813, his new bungalow and several adjoining huts went up in smoke, a fire that dramatically signaled the end of his reign over his fellow bandwars. The ensuing inquiry turned up no leads. No one in the convict lines or in the newly reconstituted sentry force—neither the convict night watchmen nor the sepoys on duty—heard anything or saw anybody. The local authorities predictably surmised that the blaze was “occasioned by some of those, to whom Futih Khan, when exercising this extraordinary power he had assumed among his fellow convicts, may have given offence.”101 The official report on the Fateh Khan case reached Calcutta several months later. In September 1813 the governor-general weighed in with a decision favorable to Khan but much too late to be of any use. By then, as the May conflagration demonstrated, the power dynamics in the convict lines had changed. Furthermore, the local authorities had also stepped in to assert greater control over the convict population. Bengkulu did not take up Calcutta’s response to its actions on Fateh Khan until January 1814. As per the governor-general’s instructions to restore the “guilty” parties to their former standing, the local authorities released the men. Calcutta’s decision was based on a legal technicality. In its judgment, Fort Marlborough had exceeded its authority in convening a trial that only “the recognized and existing tribunal of the pangeran’s court” could do. Thus, the ruling against Khan and his fellow bandwars was “unauthorized and unprecedented.”102 Fateh Khan was not idle while authorities in Calcutta were deliberating his fate. From jail he submitted a petition claiming his innocence, but Bengkulu chose not to respond to it until the orders came from India to free him. The local authorities had other amends to make as well. Their hands were tied; they recognized that the pangeran’s court would not support their T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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decision because it was based on a slave’s testimony against her master. Consequently, they followed Calcutta’s directives to the letter, returning Khan’s confiscated money and compensating him $52 for Jenny’s emancipation, as per the local “usages regarding slaves.” But they also took a parting shot at the Khan brothers and their friends by issuing “a solemn admonition for attention to their future conduct.” As for Cheena Boss, he was put on board the first ship sailing for Bengal.103 None of the Khan brothers are mentioned in company records after 1814, their absence presumably indicating their relegation to the rank and file. Nor do their names surface in the detailed list of convicts in 1825 when Bengukulu was handed over to the Dutch. Presumably, they had passed away in relative obscurity by then. In June 1814 the convict lines went up in smoke again. If the fire the year before, literally and metaphorically, had razed the house that Fateh Khan had built over the course of a dozen years or so, this second fire erased the last vestiges of his authority and influence and cleared the ground for Fort Marlborough to step in and assert greater control. This it did, by reconfiguring the convict lines, ostensibly in the name of preventing future conflagrations. The authorities regrouped the existing alignment of convict huts arrayed in two or three parallel ranges stretched out over a considerable distance into a more compact cluster of eight ranges of apartments organized into a square centered on a guardhouse. The apartments in each range, the distance between the ranges, and that between the ranges and the bank surrounding the lines were all carefully delineated.104 The world of bandwars that Fateh Khan knew well and dominated was also altered by the coming of newcomers, initially from Bengal and subsequently from Madras. Their arrival transformed the convict community, which had shrunk to less than 200 because of deaths and departures due to repatriation. At first only a handful came every year.105 Four new inmates arrived from Bengal on the Frederick in 1815, followed by 7 on the Northumberland, 5 on the Huddart, and 4 on the Malabar in 1816. In 1817, 10 were conveyed on the Aurora and Nearchus and another 10 on the Frederick. Thereafter, they came in larger batches: a total of 91 in 1818 and 1819.106 Many who came in the early 1820s were from south India, thus changing the convict mix of the settlement. No longer could the term “Bengalees” be indiscriminately applied as the place of origin of the convict body, a term that Europeans loosely employed to include “runaway lascars from ships, or 84

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persons who have arrived from India in the capacity of servants.”107 That appellation was always a misnomer in any case because it lumped together people who came from all over the Bengal Presidency, today’s West Bengal and Bangladesh, as well as Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and eastern Uttar Pradesh (see map 3). Bengkulu became the destination for convicts from south India because its authorities convinced the Madras government that it was more escape proof than Penang, hitherto its penal colony of choice. Desertions from there, however, were frequent, and none more alarming than the 1821 absconding of a convict named Cunden, who made his way home to Bangalore (Bengaluru) by boarding a vessel in Penang bound for Madras. When he was recaptured, the story he related of his escape and the ease with which he was able to get away on one of the many “native” boats plying the waters between Penang and south India prompted Madras to seek options farther afield. Briefly, it considered Mauritius, which was already a penal colony for convicts from India, and Singapore, which the British acquired in 1819.108 Neither made the final list. Mauritius did not make the cut even though it expressed a willingness to accommodate 500 to 1,000 convicts, because its shipping and maintenance costs were high. Singapore lost out because Bengkulu made a persuasive case in September 1821. Writing in his capacity as the lieutenant-governor of Bengkulu, Raffles—better known subsequently as the founder of modern Singapore—claimed that his island was a better match for Madras convicts because Singapore had as “extensive trade and unrestricted intercourse with native boats and vessels of all descriptions” as did Penang. Moreover, Singapore was an “infant colony,” not quite ready to make full use of convict labor. Bengkulu, on the other hand, was relatively inaccessible—few boats from India sailed into its harbor—and prepared to employ 200 to 300 convicts in “most useful and advantageous” work. They would be welcome additions to the 400 to 500 convict workers already involved in “public works” and plantations. And he pointed out that European planters were interested in hiring them and covering their monthly food and clothing expenses, amounting to $2–$3. Raffles also posited another reason Bengkulu merited consideration. Its escape rates were minimal, he claimed, because of its 1820 “Regulation for the Better Management of the Bengal Convicts”—an assertion that officials in Calcutta and London found persuasive. Developed by Raffles, the regulation aimed at generating a “reformation” in convicts by “exciting a spirit of emulation and industry so as to induce T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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them to become respectable settlers and useful members of the community” instead of a financial burden on the local government. That is, reformation was essentially about enhancing convict labor productivity and value. The path to respectability began with domestication, with having convicts marry and start families. In Raffles’s view, an unmarried convict was not reliable because “his services are rendered with so much tardiness and dissatisfaction that they are of little or no value, but he no sooner marries and forms a small settlement than he becomes a kind of colonist, and if allowed to follow his inclination, seldom feels inclined to return to his native country.”109 Ewer had entertained similar ideas at the beginning of the century when he had unsuccessfully approached Calcutta about allowing women to accompany the overwhelmingly male transports. Perreau had allowed his wards to consort with women and constitute families—as the rich testimonies from 1813 indicate about Fateh Khan and his fellow bandwars—but his policy was never part of a concerted plan to transform convict workers into settlers. Rather, as he once noted, he did not have the infrastructure to control his sizable inmate population, nor did he envision himself as the keeper of their moral life, the latter an allusion to their practice of cohabiting with local women, primarily slaves. The Raffles regulation, by contrast, deliberately set out to cultivate loyalty in convicts through their co-optation. It did so by distinguishing “between the meritorious and undeserving” and not providing “equal benefits and privileges” to everyone. In other words, it was a divide-and-rule policy that privileged some convicts over others, a colonial strategy of control and domination practiced on a larger scale in India to rule over a vast population of about 200 million and not just a few hundred or thousand. The Raffles scheme divided up the inmate population into “three classes.” The “best men” were lumped together in the first class and received extra allowances based on “their merits and services as artificers,” were allowed to live “at large in the old lines of the local corps,” and were freed “from labor and settled on lands secured to them and their progeny” as long as they had served the company for an extended period of time. They had the right to sue “as free citizens,” and their testimonies were admissible in the pangeran’s court. Overseers (gourdans) were selected from their ranks. The “middling or dubious class” formed the second group. Members of this class received the standard pay and were “employed in ordinary occupations.” The third class of “abandoned and profligate character” received the usual allowance but not money and were assigned more arduous work, locked 86

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up “at night within a suitable stockade . . . under a guard to prevent their going out,” and required to attend roll call every morning and evening. Similar principles animated the regulation’s stance on punishments. The emphasis on carrots more than sticks meant that corporal punishments were prohibited. Instead minor offenses were punished by reductions in class and allowances and severe infractions by incorrigible offenders by banishment to nearby Rat Island and a life of hard labor on a reduced diet of “only seven bamboos of rice.” The new rules also required the superintendent to maintain “character” profiles of his wards, particularly information regarding their bad behavior, if any, during their time on the island.110 Raffles’s overtures led the Madras government to commence transportation to Bengkulu in 1822. That year 36 convicts went out on the ship Perseverance, followed by 112 on the Reliance in 1823, and 20 on the Horatio in 1824. In all 167 were transported from Madras to Fort Marlborough between 1822 and 1824.111 According to the first annual report on Madras convicts, the new arrivals adapted well to the Raffles regime of convict management. There were only a few incidents of misbehavior in 1823. Ten inmates were degraded: nine to the third class and one to the second class. On the plus side, 2 convicts were excused from labor because of their service and good conduct, 20 were promoted to the first class, and 11 were reinstated in the second class for their “continued exemplary good conduct.” (All new arrivals were automatically placed in the second or “dubious” class.) The 1823 report also cited, as proof of the efficacy of the Bengkulu system, the diminution in “disputes and disorders,” particularly “petty theft and robbery.” In passing, the report also alluded to a plan to build a 12-foot-high wall around the convict lines to keep inmates in and others out at night.112 The 1824 annual review was equally effusive about the Raffles regime. It explained away the few cases of demotion of Madras convicts to third class that year by characterizing them as newcomers who did not know as yet how to conduct themselves. These men had not quite learned that the Bengkulu system incentivized good conduct, even though they, along with everyone else, were apprised about the system of “reward and punishment” as soon as they landed on the island. The authorities were optimistic, however, that they would sooner or later grasp the “merits of the rules,” most likely once they realized “from experience and example . . . the better condition and state of comfort [of] their neighbors and other convicts . . . in consequence of their industry and good behavior.”113 T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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The Bengal convicts, by contrast, as the 1824 report observed, needed no schooling in the Raffles regulation. Those who came in the late 1810s to join the Fateh Khan generation of bandwars adapted well to their regimen “by establishing and domesticating with families [and] furnishing themselves with cattle and other property.” They were reportedly aware of the fruits of “good” behavior and therefore tended not to “heedlessly risk the benefits of the[ir] ameliorated conditions.” Not surprisingly, their annual review emphasized that they were not “seduced” by the possibility of escape, as some newcomers from Madras were. As old-timers, they were also more cognizant of the difficulties of exiting the island. The report closed on a philosophical note about “human character” that echoed Raffles’s principles of convict management. “The more men have to lose, the great[er] disinclination they will ever have to change. And the more limited their means of subsistence and uncertain their prospect of establishing their families in a state of comfort and independence,” the 1824 review elaborated, “the less they will hesitate in exposing themselves to those hazards by which they may lose both the present footing and rank . . . [and] the profits derived from their industry for past years of hard labor.”114 That year the same rules applied to both Bengal and Madras convicts because Raffles had revised his earlier legislation into Regulation I of 1824, which grouped its directives about convict management into 59 separate sections. In a single document, it touched on most of the disciplinary issues that earlier administrators had sought to resolve in a piecemeal fashion. The stated purpose of the 1824 regulation was an “improved” disciplinary system that “ameliorated” convict conditions so that they would labor more “effectually and advantageously” and shy away from committing misdemeanors. Its strictures extended to virtually every aspect of convict management, from protocols about convicts once they landed in Bengkulu in irons (they were to be unshackled if they had behaved well on the voyage), to the treatment of female convicts and convict families (mostly the same rules as for male convicts), to the conditions under which “deserving” convicts were to be emancipated (for “good conduct” and if they could support themselves and remained in the settlement). Rewards came to those who behaved well and recognized the advantages of living within the Raffles regime.115 Convicts were apparently familiar with the terms of the Raffles regulation. As a petition submitted by Sheikh Buddeah and other bandwars declared, they were selected by Raffles and Watson (presumably Captain Thomas Watson, the commanding officer of the Local Corps) and grouped 88

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together with a hundred or so men deemed “good and [not] evil.” They were then recognized “as free people” and granted higher “allowances.” Their petition also referenced the “report book” on first-class convicts, which they said would attest to their good standing.116 The ink on the revised convict regulation was barely dry before the AngloDutch Treaty of March 1824 rendered it moot because Fort Marlborough and other British holdings in Sumatra were ceded to the Dutch. By the end of that year authorities in Bengkulu, Calcutta, and London were deep in conversation about the treaty’s implications for the convict population, which numbered 773 in July 1824. The overwhelming majority of the convicts, 579 to be precise, were from Bengal, the remaining 194 from Madras; 617 were under life sentences and 154 under sentences ranging between 7 and 14 years.117 Briefly, British officials considered abandoning all of them. Some administrators, however, were averse to doing that because of concerns about the Dutch willingness to continue the “humane” regimen developed by Raffles. Such talk was invariably fused with anxieties about the ineffectiveness of Dutch control over “the many desperate robbers . . . in confinement,” whose escape would undermine law and order in India were they to make their way back home.118 All these questions were put aside once Penang, Singapore, and Malacca were lined up as transfer sites. The evacuation of the bandwar population began in the early months of 1825. All the convicts, except the 200 or so “at liberty,” were put on board ships and taken off the island. The brig Horatio ferried 80 Madras convicts and 1 Bengal convict to Singapore, and the schooner Anne followed with 120 Bengal convicts shortly thereafter. Other inmates went to Penang, including 147 Madras and 15 Bengal convicts on the ship Eliza. A number of coffrees were also moved to Penang or Singapore: in all, 41, of whom 11 were men and 30 women, including one named Jenny!119 Many of the British administrators who had served in Bengkulu went on to Penang, Singapore, and Malacca. So did their system of convict management. Calcutta, in fact, encouraged Penang to incorporate the “Bencoolen rules” into its efforts to rewrite its regulations in the mid-1820s, when it also studied those in effect in New South Wales. And Singapore needed no prompting because it had to devise a system of convict management in a hurry when Bengkulu’s convicts were transferred there in 1825.120 As for the several hundred people who opted to remain in Bengkulu after the regime change—convicts especially but also sepoys and coffrees—most T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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rethought their decisions within months. As their subsequent entreaties to leave suggest, most stayed on because of the ties that bound them to Bengkulu from their many years on the island, first under the laissez-faire system of Ewer and Perreau and then under the Raffles regime. Many were old-timers, men who had been on the island for a long time or completed their sentences and were free; no women were part of any of these lists.121 Sudial Singh, a former Bihar resident, for instance, began as a lowly sepoy in Bengal under Governor Warren Hastings; rose through the ranks to become a jemadar at Fort Marlborough, where he was stationed for many years; and subsequently became the owner of a spice plantation. His “advanced” age was another reason he chose to stay on. However, his brief experience under the Dutch made him ready to seek repatriation. Abdool Majid Khan’s petition, written in Bengali and signed together with several fellow countrymen, asked for assistance to move because they had disposed their “lands, houses and estates” at a great loss and were in a “state of starvation.” Mohun Thacoor began his request, also in Bengali, by mentioning his long stint as a convict—he was part of Fateh Khan’s generation and a witness at the latter’s trial—and closed by pleading poverty because he, too, had sold all his possessions: his cattle, buffaloes, carts, furniture, houses, and compound. Other petitions, one from a group self-identified as “Bengal convicts” and another from a group headed by Sheikh Beeddeah, similarly touched on their many years on the island; to cull a phrase employed in a letter, they had “lived for many years and past many residencies.” That is, they had served their time and earned their “rewards” for good behavior. The Dutch, however, made them feel “convicted . . . twice,” as one petition put it, suspect once again and not free to pursue “their livelihood” even though they had already proven themselves.122 The “ameliorated conditions” of Mohun Thacoor and the other petitioners exemplify why 272 people, most of them former convicts, initially chose Bengkulu over leaving. They were part of a large cohort from Bengal dumped in west Sumatra at the beginning of the nineteenth century who had outlived their sentences, however long they were, or had been pardoned, and within a decade or so of their arrival had emerged as productive members of the local community. None of them became Fateh Khan; mostly they eked out modest lives of one sort or another over the years. The last Bengkulu superintendent of convicts summed up their achievements well when he characterized the bandwars as longtime residents who settled “on lands secured to them and their children” or were employed 90

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“as servants, artisans or mechanics” after their release from company work because of their “service and good conduct.”123 Many became part of the “Free Bengalees” who, as an 1822 account noted, “have amassed a little property, and live comfortably.” Many worked “as domestic servants . . . [some as] bricklayers, carpenters, washermen, tailors, and butchers” and a handful “in the spice plantations. One of them . . . is the proprietor of a very thriving spice plantation. They intermarry with women of their own cast[e], and also with the natives of the country, by whom they get families.”124 Many initially chose not to leave because the Dutch authorities refused to allow their “native” families to leave. In other words, many bandwars and sepoys were married to local women and did not wish to abandon their families. Mohun Thacoor, the father of three children, is a case in point, as are the 16 others on a list of 62 “liberated” convicts identified as having wives; 13 of them also had children.125 Indeed, many emancipated convicts were “naturalized to the place by intermarriage [and] . . . families.” In addition, they owned property, primarily houses and land, and were variously employed. “One of them is settled on a plantation [and] the other has a large concern in making bricks, lime and . . . materials . . . for construction . . . both public and private, and in establishing themselves in these modes of industry, [they] have laid out sums of money to a great or less amount.”126 At first the Dutch authorities refused to permit the ex-convicts, sepoys, and coffrees to leave, claiming that their requests were triggered by British inducements, including the dispatch of a ship to whisk them away in large numbers. That is, their “spirit of emigration” was not of “their own free will” but the result of offers of “certain advantages.” Why, otherwise, would 214 people with “houses, gardens and cattle” or employment “as laborers in different spice plantations or elsewhere” wish to leave? As much as its predecessors, the new administration in Bengkulu, too, was keen on retaining, in a thinly populated area, “the only working class of people . . . on which the substance of the spice plantations entirely rest.”127 In February 1826, 180 people were allowed to embark on the ship Mary. Thereafter, the Dutch closed down the exodus even though requests to leave were still pending.128 Thus, the Bengkulu history of bandwars who attained appreciable numbers in the closing decade of the eighteenth century came to an end in the mid1820s. Over the course of almost 30 years, these men—and a small handful of women—worked “on the public roads, spice plantations, salt works, and wharf, and in the capacity of syces and grass-cutters, and of coolies and compounders at the hospital and dispensary; a few of them are handicraftsmen.” T h e Be ng k u lu Wor l d of t h e K h a n Bro t h e r s

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Few ran afoul of the law again, although a few attempted to flee almost every year. Many accumulated small amounts “of money by keeping cows and retailing milk, and by lending money on usurious interest” and many married local and “coffree women,” but, interestingly only had “few children.”129 At least one Bengkulu convict, Kinnuck Mistree, who had been sentenced in Bengal in early 1818 for larceny, gained a measure of fame after he was relocated to Singapore in 1825, but only after he had lived and worked there for several decades.130 As for the large number of bandwars who came almost a decade or two before Mistree and had become “free people,” they were understandably reluctant to leave a place they had lived in “for many years and past many residencies.” Their lives were very much bound up in Bengkulu, where some had acquired “lands, houses and estates” and others employment in a variety of capacities. Many had also forged personal ties to the island; they had married local women and raised families and had thus become “naturalized to the place by intermarriage.” Therefore, many originally expressed no desire to follow their former British masters to a different locale. For Mistree and other inmates whose sentences were still pending, there was no other option. Shipped out of Bengkulu, their lives became part of the penal stories of Penang, Singapore, and Malacca, the first two of which are featured in chapters 3 and 4. Control of these three ports enabled the British to consolidate their control over the Malay Peninsula and dominate the Strait of Malacca, thus safeguarding their China trade and strengthening the long-standing connections between India and maritime Southeast Asia.

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Map 4. The Malayan Peninsula, 1862

Map 5. Captain H. R. Popham’s map of early Penang, 1799

Thr ee

“Kumpanee ke Noukur” Rajas and Robbers in Penang, 1790–1870s

Two men named Eyen Deen Sheikdar and Mahomed Theiant inaugurated Penang, also known as the Prince of Wales Island, as a penal colony in 1790, four years after its takeover by the British. Dispatched from Calcutta on the frigate Nonsuch, they arrived on this sparsely inhabited island with only a brief note issued by Governor-General Charles Cornwallis indicating that transportation was tacked onto their sentence of life imprisonment because of the “considerable magnitude” of their crimes. The note enjoined local authorities to employ them in any way “consistent with the security of their persons” provided they were carefully watched “at all times, so as to prevent the possibility of their escape, or, in other words, their return to Bengal.” Calcutta also informed Penang that it was responsible for their maintenance costs.1 Much to the chagrin of W. E. Phillips, a senior Penang official, some 20 years later when his settlement was establishing a disciplinary regimen for its growing convict population, the governor-general’s pithy instructions were the only written guidelines Penang had received from India, along with the protocols in place in Bengkulu and Australia. Not that the absence of specific rules and regulations—or “fixed principle[s]” as Phillips put it—prevented administrators in the insular prisons of Southeast Asia from developing their own best practices in disciplining and working their convicts and tinkering with them periodically, especially when Indian authorities chided them for allowing prisoners to escape. Other than what officials at times referred to as convict management, Penang, as Phillips candidly admitted, made no effort at all to effect that “great object of all . . . punishment[s], the reformation of the offenders.” Nor did administrators in Calcutta, Bombay, and particularly Madras, from where ships routinely sailed to Penang and back, pay much 95

Figure 2. View in Pulo Penang, by Augustus Earle, 1828. National Library of Australia.

attention to that goal. Rather, they were mostly content to receive periodic updates on their bandwars. Once convicts were out of sight, their welfare only mattered when they escaped or were eligible for repatriation because they had completed their sentences. Most convicts opted to stay put and not return at the end of their sentences even though the government in India eventually agreed to pay their passage home.2 Colonial authorities, in Calcutta as well as in London, also paid attention to transportation whenever the matter of its costs arose, specifically those of maintaining convicts in the penal settlements relative to the value of their labor output. These discussions, too, were generally expressed in terms of creating a secure and cost-effective convict management system. This chapter traces the development of Pulo (island) Penang, an area extending over 100 square miles (and Seberang Perai or Province Wellesley, a strip of coastland along the western edge of the Malayan Peninsula across from Penang; see map 4) as a major penal settlement over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It narrates this history as a story of naukari or service that the overwhelmingly male convicts performed as “Kumpanee ke noukur [Kampani ke naukar]” or servants of the East India Company, to use their preferred self-designation, which emphasized their island lives of service and not their criminal pasts.3 No doubt their choice of words was deliberate in that it appropriated a term widely used by their countrymen to refer to military service performed by sepoys in the company’s military. 96

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Naukari, furthermore, evokes what their British jailors had in mind in recruiting convicts: as cheap labor for “public service,” to use the administrative euphemism for the hard work they were compelled to undertake on infrastructural projects, initially in conjunction with, and then in lieu of, slaves. The slaves were mostly from East Africa, and their numbers shrank as the slave trade began to close down in the British-controlled settlements in Southeast Asia in the initial decades of the nineteenth century. The convicts’ status as the company’s servants therefore had the added advantage of distinguishing them from the other form of coerced labor on the island, slavery.4 The notion of naukari also drew attention away from their identity as bandwars, as prisoners, literally those under lock and key, a designation that inevitably conjured up their criminal pasts. (See Figure 2 for an 1828 portrayal of Indian workers in Penang).   Convict workers, as this chapter also underscores, were critical to the British efforts to develop Penang into a major commercial hub, a vital entrepôt in the China trade and the trade linking Southeast Asia to East Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and Europe. Colonial officials also envisioned Penang as a key military and strategic outpost in their efforts to prevail in the Bay of Bengal and the Strait of Malacca.5 The rise of Singapore by the mid-nineteenth century, however, also built up in part from the muscle power of convicts, quickly eclipsed Penang’s ambition to serve as the premier British hub in the region. And together with Malacca, acquired after the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, these three port cities in the Malayan Peninsula enabled the British to consolidate their commanding presence in the eastern Indian Ocean (see map 4). To what extent labor imperatives shaped the island existence of bandwars is further highlighted in this chapter by contrasting their experiences with those of political prisoners, specifically the 73 poligar (or palaiyakkarar or chieftains or lords) prisoners banished there in 1802 and not freed until 1820. Penang, in other words, in contrast to Bengkulu, became an insular prison for rajas or kings as well as robbers and murderers. It also became the home for many a political prisoner—for example, of the “celebrated convict Jallia” in 1810, featured later in the chapter—men of local standing whose violent resistance to colonial rule was criminalized and led to their designation as rank-and-file convicts. The island’s inmate population was overwhelmingly male; not until the 1850s were there more than a handful of female convicts, all of them sentenced for heinous crimes as well. The value of convict labor was always a topic of concern in Penang, as it also was in every penal colony. Local administrators, as this chapter reveals, R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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endlessly sought to impress the authorities in Calcutta and London about its high value, while their superiors constantly badgered them about maximizing labor output and minimizing maintenance costs associated with lodging, boarding, and clothing. These back-and-forth conversations also invariably touched on the issue of convict discipline, which in the eyes of officials in India and Britain always seemed wanting. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the chapter also underscores, convicts negotiated the disciplinary regimen under which they lived and worked differently. Their many overt and desperate acts of resistance in the first two or three decades of Penang’s existence as a penal colony gave way to a begrudging accommodation with a disciplinary system reconfigured in the late 1820s and early 1830s along the lines of the “Bencoolen rules,” which emphasized rewards over punishments and preferential treatment based on behavior and seniority. Consequently, some convicts became more privileged than others, their good conduct and longer duration on the island earning them a higher “class” status. 6 A few also gained local standing because of their religiosity or their involvement in founding or assisting at the local temple or mosque. None, however, emerged as a sardar and sahib as Fateh Khan did in Bengkulu, where the convict population was smaller and less diverse because most were from Bengal. That is, robbers and other types of criminal offenders did not attain privileged positions, and as this chapter shows, captive kings in Penang were intent on not being treated as criminals during their long sojourn on the island. Furthermore, from the 1830s onward, bandwar traffic was increasingly directed at Singapore, which led not only to a diminution in the size of Penang’s convict population but also to changes in its composition. Convicts’ behavior typically varied over the duration of their sentences. Newcomers generally were more likely to bolt almost immediately after arrival, often fleeing to another part of the settlement or into a neighboring territory, where, more often than not, they were captured and sent back by the local rulers or inhabitants. Every year a handful escaped and made their way back to India furtively, as the cases discussed later in the chapter show in some detail. However, for those who conformed to the Penang “rules,” the passing of each year without infractions resulted in fewer constraints on their movements and places of residence as long as they fulfilled their labor obligations. Over time most bandwars established roots in the area by acquiring families, property, and jobs—as they also did in Bengkulu. Not surprisingly, therefore, most elected to stay on rather than return to India when the time came for their repatriation. 98

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Few convicts reached Penang in the early 1790s, in the immediate aftermath of Sheikdar and Theiant. Among a small handful who did were several from Banaras. They were part of a cohort whose sentences of capital punishment were commuted to transportation because of their high caste status, per the December 1790 ruling of its resident, Jonathan Duncan, to exempt Brahmins from the death penalty—ostensibly to abide by the tenets of the shastras—and to banish them instead beyond Hindustan to Penang, “about a month’s distance from Calcutta.”7 In the initial years Penang’s numbers were small because most convicts were sent to the Andamans after it was established as a penal settlement in 1793. However, after the latter was closed down in 1796, its surviving prisoners, 270 in all, were whisked off to Penang. The Khan brothers, Sheolal Tewari, and others would have followed in the late 1790s were it not for the circumstances that prompted their evacuation to Bengkulu. They were among the several hundred prisoners hurriedly removed from Calcutta because of a jailbreak and rushed on board the next available ship in the harbor, which by happenstance was sailing to Fort Marlborough. While Fateh Khan, one of the Khan brothers, subsequently emerged as a sardar in Bengkulu, Tewari did not last long in that settlement because he quickly assumed a leadership role not to the liking of the local authorities. Fort Marlborough therefore sent him back to Calcutta in early 1799, along with four other men. 8 These five men returned to Calcutta at a time when authorities were intent on clearing their prisons of a sizable pool of 1,500 offenders awaiting penal transportation. By then administrators in India had decided that Bengkulu, with its limited European population and military presence, was not well equipped to manage a sizable inmate population. They sent some prisoners to the newly acquired British outposts in the Moluccas (present-day Maluku Islands), particularly Ambon. Bengal authorities were eager to jettison their growing body of prisoners in the 24 Parganas Jail and elsewhere in the region, both those sentenced to transportation and others locked up for serious criminal offenses. As they knew all too well, their city was a collection point for those sentenced to transportation across the vast presidency of Bengal and also home to the region’s central jail for offenders charged with heinous crimes. And they also believed, as did most colonial administrators, that transportation was a more severe punishment than imprisonment because it removed criminals from their familiar places and compelled them to labor on public works that most jails in India were incapable of performing because the government R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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lacked the personnel to guard prisoners outdoors, where access to relatives and friends was easy.9 Furthermore, at the turn of the nineteenth century, many more people were sentenced to transportation because Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras elected to add it to many judgments that previously only entailed imprisonment. They instituted that change partly to inflict a harsher punishment on certain categories of crime and partly to reduce the number of offenders languishing in their mostly flimsy jails. Thus, in 1797 the Nizamat Adalat in Bengal authorized courts of circuit to sentence “notorious bad character[s]” to transportation— that is, to extend the punishment to those sentenced to prison for 14 years or more, typically those charged with crimes of “magnitude” such as murder, assault, and gang robbery. District-level administrators welcomed the change because it enabled them to rid their localities of dangerous prisoners who were difficult to contain because their jails both lacked guards and were mostly thatched buildings, not constructed of brick and mortar.10 A violent and deadly attempt to escape from the 24 Parganas Jail in January 1799 that resulted in the deaths of eight inmates once again prompted Calcutta to seek the immediate deportation of large numbers of prisoners. As before, it decided to remove as many as possible to whatever sites were available: Bengkulu was one option, Penang another, and Ambon an additional possibility. Coincidentally, Tewari and the four other Bengkulu-returned convicts were back in the Calcutta Jail just in time to be added to the mix. They were not eligible to become part of the cohort of 250 people loaded onto the Lord Duncan for shipment to Bengkulu, many of whom later became centrally involved in the Fateh Khan drama. Instead the Tewari party of five, all high caste and perceived by Bengkulu authorities as too dangerous for their settlement, were shipped on the Fletcher to Penang along with 195 other convicts. Another notable passenger was Mussamat Subugea, the lone female convict, initially sentenced to transportation in Jaunpur, near Banaras, for the murder of another woman, then subsequently also charged for her solo escape attempt from the 24 Parganas Jail. Allowed to sleep on the verandah of the jail in fetters, she managed to slip off her irons and make her way out by climbing over a high wall without any assistance, according to her testimony, which her jailors did not believe.11 Six of the 200 convict passengers on the Fletcher never reached Penang because they died in transit, and 17 passed away shortly after arrival, leaving 177 survivors in all who joined the 240 convicts already living and working there. Another 29 arrived from Bombay in March 1800, 4 fewer than when 100

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they started out because 2 perished en route and 2 deserted almost immediately upon arrival. In the early years of transportation, the loss of a few lives on the passage across the kala pani was not unusual. In all, Penang was home to a convict population of 446 in 1800—up from the 255 counted in 1796, all from Bengal.12 That number, according to Lieutenant-Governor Sir George Leith, was not enough. In July 1800 he asked for another 250 to 300, so that they, too, could be “advantageously employed in the public service.” He credited his existing batch of convicts with having constructed the settlement’s “extensive” roads. Obviously pleased with their work, he sought additional hands to maintain the roads and build an embankment near the island’s premier fortification, Fort Cornwallis, and to prevent erosion of the nearby beach area. Furthermore, he described their labor as offering a significant comparative advantage: bandwars were more economical than hired help because they only cost 40 island pice or roughly 13 annas 4 pice per month, the sum they received as their subsistence allowance for their “bazaar articles.”13 By then the convicts, totaling 446 in March 1800 (417 from Bengal and 29 from Bombay), together with Chinese migrants, had cleared forests in many areas. And in the northeast extremity of the island around Fort Cornwallis they had filled in marshy lands and built roads and ghats to develop the infrastructure of the emerging capital city of George Town. A 1799 map (see map 5) identifies the structures already in place: several religious edifices (a Portuguese church, a “Christian’s place,” and two mosques, one denominated as “Chulier” or for Tamil Muslims), quarters for military and other administrative offices and officers (superintendent, “Provost’s Guard,” sepoy lines, custom house, hospital, commissary), and several buildings or areas whose names convey their use (Malay town, “coffry lines” [slave quarters], shops, lime kiln, burying ground, and a sizable tract identified as “paddy fields”). The map also demarcates several streets, three by name: Chulia Street, China Street, and Penang Road, which was the first passageway out of George Town. A fourth road, perpendicular to the Penang Road, which cut through a sizable forested area, is simply designated New Road.14 Over the course of 1800 and 1801, convicts completed several roads not identified by name on the 1799 map, specifically Church, Bishop, and Beach Streets, and constructed ghats in the adjoining areas. At least 100 of their number were also assigned to building embankments to prevent the sea from eroding the beach areas and maintaining existing roads constantly worn down by rains.15 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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Leith’s positive views on convict labor were widely shared by administrators in the penal settlements. In their reckoning, convict labor was a boon because it reduced labor costs significantly. Its advantages therefore far outweighed the few escapes they experienced every year and the occasional bouts with contentious inmates. Authorities in India, on the other hand, while appreciative of the financial benefits, fixated on the seeming laxity of the disciplinary regimes in the insular prisons, which did not exact a pound of flesh from the convicts and routinely allowed some to slip away every year. Thus, their indignant responses to reported escapes were invariably followed up with demands that penal administrators tighten up convict working and living conditions. Leith’s request for additional bandwars, coming as it did in the aftermath of an escape attempt, prompted a predictable riposte from the governorgeneral on the island’s convict disciplinary system and a question about casualty and escape rates. The response to Calcutta is revealing because it came from Captain J. Stokoe, the Penang engineer and officer directly in charge of the convicts. According to his report, when he took over in October 1796 the settlement had 255 convicts, mostly from Bengal via the Andamans, of whom 15 died shortly after their arrival. Until 1796, he claimed, there were only 6 escapes. As for those who came with Sheolal Tewari and Mussamut Subugea on the Fletcher, he noted that 6 died in transit and another 17 within a few months of arrival because they were in ill health and “past recovery.” He also explained that 2 Bombay men had fled but were likely to be apprehended soon, as most generally were within a few days. Moreover, such attempts, he added, could not be stopped entirely because inmates were lightly guarded and not locked up at night. But he promised his superiors that he would thereafter maintain careful records of escapes and deaths.16 In addition to sending the information compiled by Stokoe, Leith followed up his request for more convicts by reassuring Calcutta that his administration would tighten up security, build a jail, and seek additional troops to watch over the prisoners. Echoing his engineer’s remarks, he also emphasized—as penal settlements were wont to do every time they were reprimanded about escapes—that their insular prisons were not completely secure because convicts worked on sites scattered over vast distances, and military personnel to guard them were few and far between. Familiar also was his justification that most who fled were invariably recaptured.17 Penang’s application for additional convicts coincided with the Madras government’s deliberations about transportation venues because Ambon, 102

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where it had formerly sent them, was no longer available because of its return to the Dutch in 1802. (In fact, the Ambon convicts were relocated to Penang at the beginning of 1803.) Madras was initially reluctant to consider Penang a viable option. As one official observed, it was not an appropriate venue because of the “numerous trading vessels the property of chooleeahs [chulias or Tamil Muslims] carrying on an extensive commerce with the port of Nagore [in present-day Tamil Nadu] which may furnish them every means of returning to the place of their nativity to any of the prisoners who are fortunate enough to escape from custody.”18 However, by then 73 high-profile prisoners from Madras were already there, men inadvertently banished to Penang in the wake of the so-called Poligar Wars.19 They consisted of the surviving poligar leaders and followers, their lives spared after the principal leaders were hanged—regicides of the “little kings” that the British considered imperative to usher in “peace” and “prosperity” in the region. Government’s December 1801 proclamation said as much, insisting that it had to counter poligar resistance with violence, on the battlefield as well as by capital punishment, and by demolishing their forts, disarming the population, and transferring their estates into the hands of those loyal to the company’s government. Such measures, as senior officials in London acknowledged, were aimed at transforming “predatory poligars into quiet zemindars [landholders]” and “destroying the influence of the[ir] adherents.” They were also designed to reward loyalty and convince others that the intentions of the British government were not “to dispossess the poligars of their lands but in the necessity of introducing an efficient system of government in countries which were hitherto unsubjected to any regular administration.”20 As with penal transportation, the exile of political and military insurgents was also aimed at extirpating threats to colonial law and order by physically removing people from the localities in which they exerted control and influence. In the case of the poligars, the Madras government claimed that it resorted to force to quell their “desperate resistance” and to compel them to recognize “the danger of provoking the just indignation of the British government, and the fruitless attempt of opposing . . . the steadiness, valor and discipline of the British troops.” It justified the casualties on the battlefield and the executions of surviving rebel leaders by stating that those killed had paid a price for their criminal actions, and the “ignominious manner in which those misguided chieftains have terminated their ambitious and criminal career” was a reminder to the surviving members of their families R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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and other Tinnevelly (now Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu) inhabitants of the danger of opposing the British government.21 At the same time, though, the British also portrayed themselves as acting with “lenity and forbearance.” A sentence of exile was proof of that fact, just as penal transportation was made out to be about the beneficence of a regime that chose to employ capital punishment sparingly, particularly in contrast to what it maintained was the practice in the precolonial period. Thus, the announcement about the banishment of the surviving poligars was expressed in a conciliatory tone even as it trumpeted British military prowess and coercive power: an enduring peace was to ensue in the aftermath of the crushing military defeat of the poligars. The proclamation also underlined that the British had not appropriated the confiscated lands of the rebel poligars but reassigned them to loyal landholders, and they had disarmed the population to preserve peace and restore prosperity, not because they wished to humiliate “chiefs and hereditary landlords.” Furthermore, they claimed that under their “protection,” local inhabitants were assured of “enjoying their civil rights and the religious institution of their ancestors.” Henceforth, there was to be no more warfare and executions, only the punishment of those captured and deported overseas. To everyone else who followed “the desperate fortunes” of the rebels, government offered a complete pardon and a promise that it had no intention of prosecuting them because its demonstrations of military might and disciplinary power were aimed at impressing the local population about its overwhelming coercive power.22 In other words, once the government had eliminated the top echelon of the poligar leadership, it was willing to extend mercy to the survivors, particularly Doraiswamy, the young son of Marudu Pandyan (Maruthu Pandiyar), and the other chief rebels. Thus, it spared their lives and awarded them the milder punishment of exile, to a place far, far away. Imprisonment locally or banishment to Bengal, an option used in the case of some political prisoners, would not suffice because prisoners in their home areas often enjoyed easy access to family and friends, as was repeatedly argued to establish the advantages of penal transportation over imprisonment.23 Survivors of a brutal war in which they had witnessed the horrific deaths of their kinsmen and friends and captives whose lives were destined thereafter to unfold overseas, the 73 rebels, including Doraiswamy, Vengum Peria Wodaya Tevar of Sivaganga, Bomma Nayak of Verappur, and Dalaway Kumaraswamy Nayak of Panjalankuricci (Panchalankurichi), 104

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were understandably anxious about leaving their homes and communities behind. What their state of mind was then—or that of any person about to cross the kala pani to an unknown destination—cannot be gauged from their own statements because there are no first-person recollections of such moments. Fortunately, a British military officer named James Welsh, who fought against the poligars, was present at the scene of their departure from India. His eyewitness testimony is all the more remarkable because of its sympathetic perspective, no doubt, because of his earlier friendship with the Marudu brothers, especially Chinna Marudu, “who first taught me to throw the spear” and “never failed to send me presents of fine rice and fruit”—in other words, who always extended kingly patronage toward Welsh. Charged with consigning the prisoners to their armed escort on board the ship, he was at hand when they were about ready to sail. As he later recalled in his Reminiscences, he witnessed their emotional state as he handed over his “young friend” Dorasiwamy “into the boat; and the manly and silent misery, which his companions in affliction displayed, on quitting their dear native land for ever.”24 Welsh’s narrative adds that he had the melancholy satisfaction of lightening the chains of Dora Swamy, the younger and only surviving son of my poor quondam friend, Cheena Murdoo, a youth of about fifteen, condemned to perpetual banishment. With a mild and dignified resignation, this amiable young man bore his cruel fate without a murmur; but such was the melancholy expression in his fine countenance, that it was impossible to see and not commiserate him. As he was consigned to my personal charge, to connive at his escape was impossible; but being under the same roof with me, in the large fortified factory, I was enabled to free him from his ignominious fetters, and separate him from the mass of his former menials. His person was equally secure, in a commodious chamber, enjoying the company of his jailor and family, and fed with wholesome meals, dressed by a respectable man of his caste and religion.25

The experience of the poligar prisoners differed from the treatment meted out to convicts, many of whom trekked long distances on foot to get to the ports to board ships for Penang. In Madras that journey entailed traveling first to the port at Chingleput, which, as one Madras official pointed out, involved “great abuses” and “hardships.” In his words, some convicts experienced “corporal suffering” and some “loss of limbs, and even . . . death itself,” the hardship stemming from their having to move at a faster pace “than their health and strength can admit, that they are not allowed to lie when taken R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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ill on the road, and . . . the food afforded to them on their journey is not sufficient for their nourishment.”26 However, as with convicts in the early years of transportation, for whom penal destinations were often based on various contingencies, depending on the changing imperatives of the rising British Empire across the region and the itineraries of the ships in the harbor, the poligar prisoners, too, did not know where they were heading until they boarded the Admiral Nelson. Consider the twists and turns leading up to their voyage to Penang. The initial government decision was to ship them to the Moluccas or Spice Islands, which was then in British hands. However, with changing alignments in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, the authorities realized that Ambon was no longer a viable option in 1802 and therefore decided on Bengkulu. (By then the government in India had ruled out Botany Bay or the West Indies as penal destinations for Indian convicts.) That did not happen either because the commander of the ship chartered in Bombay refused to sail to Bengkulu but agreed to sail to Penang, a growing entrepôt for the China and interregional trade.27 The voyage to Penang was a sign of things to come for the rebel prisoners, who had once enjoyed lives of privilege and status. Not that they were treated like convicts; on the contrary, as the military officer escorting them, Lieutenant A. Rochead of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Regiment North India noted, his orders were to treat them with “every practicable degree of lenity.” Welsh, the military officer familiar with Doraiswamy, also knew Rochead and was confident that the lieutenant would accord the poligars due respect because he was “personally acquainted with the now-condemned sovereign [viz. Kattabomman] of the country,” as would Captain Lee of the Admiral Nelson, who also shared “in our feelings towards his . . . passengers, particularly the captive Prince [Doraiswamy].”28 Nevertheless, banishment understandably produced “a most galling anxiety of the mind” among the prisoners, all the more so because their voyage did not go as planned. A journey of 50 days at most became a grueling trip of almost 80 days, and with water and provisions increasingly in short supply. The young and the old, moreover, were all treated as dangerous rebels. As Rochead later explained about the casualties en route, the men he received were “handcuffed in pairs” with “light irons connecting the alternate hands of two [people],” which he did not consider it his “duty” to ease. Nor did he want to. In his estimation, his battalion of 20 men was not large enough to guard prisoners “capable of an hazardous enterprise when their liberty was 106

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the object.” Furthermore, he claimed that by the end of the voyage, almost one-third of the men were without handcuffs, beginning with the six whose irons he struck off at the very outset of the voyage because he appointed them to cook for the rest. That arrangement was to ensure that dietary infractions were not committed on the high seas, an accommodation aimed at easing the caste and religious concerns of sepoys—and to some extent, convicts— about crossing the black waters. A military escort often accompanied large shiploads of convicts, an arrangement systematized in the 1840s and 1850s in the aftermath of convict mutinies on board several ships.29 As for their condition when they arrived in Penang and the three deaths in transit, Rochead attributed these problems to the “extreme” duration of the voyage and not his actions, which he claimed conformed to the orders he was issued. Moreover, several prisoners were old, ill, or in poor health. Of the three who perished in transit, one was an old man who died of a “bowel complaint”; another died of a malady contracted on the ship, which had no medical personnel on board; and the third was an old man who fell overboard.30 Convict officials advanced much the same reasons to explain away casualties on board the ships ferrying bandwars to the insular prisons of Southeast Asia in the early years of penal transportation. Penang authorities initially received their new batch of prisoners with mixed feelings: unease about their dangerous character and concern about their physical condition because the rebels included a “captive prince” and other “respectable” men. Not surprisingly, then, Leith made sure to inform his superiors that the new arrivals were so weak that they were “unable to walk” when he first encountered them, and that three deaths had occurred in transit and the surviving 70 prisoners were in poor health because of the hardships they had endured “from want of water and to their being the whole time handcuffed.”31 At the same time, the lieutenant governor was apprehensive about having a large body of rebels in his settlement, which already housed nearly 600 bandwars. As he notified the authorities in India, his new prisoners required a different regimen because they had to be closely watched, and he was not confident that he could do so with the troops he had on the island. Therefore, he eagerly awaited the arrival of two companies of marine battalions that he believed had been dispatched from India. As an added precaution, he located his new prisoners in a house he rented beyond the pale of the burgeoning colony.32 The poligar prisoners were also treated differently in that they were exempted from manual labor. They were the company’s “captive” rebels R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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and not convicts whose sentences included penal servitude. The 772 other prisoners, by contrast, as an 1805 report details, were tasked with various chores: 80 were employed in the cultivation of the company’s plantations; 100 in making bricks for public works; another 100 in building a canal and an aqueduct in Georgetown; 60 in constructing a pier opposite the custom house and 60 in building fortifications; 50 in building the new military lines; and 20 working as scavengers, 10 in the marine yard and custom house, 30 at the government house, and 59 in making roads. Of the remaining 204, 74 were incapacitated due to old age or infirmity; 53 were in the hospital; another 34 were “convalescents”; and 43 were in shackles “for crimes on this island, confined in prison and worked by the provost, as also those who from their very bad character have never been taken out of irons.”33 From the outset the principles guiding the disciplining of convicts were shaped by contradictory impulses. On the one hand, as the governor noted in 1805, his settlement utilized convict labor in ways designed to realize “the intentions of the law, preserve order, and reform the morals of these unfortunate persons”; on the other hand, the aim was also to ensure that their output was organized to repay “government for the expenses of their subsistence.” Toward that end convicts were grouped into “companies” of 50 or 75 workers under the charge of men denominated serangs (agents or brokers, literally the boatswains in charge of lascars) and tindals (petty officers, attendants), whose jobs were to distribute convicts’ rations, watch over their health, and keep them at work between 6:00 and 11:00 in the morning and from 2:00 to sunset, with time off on all major religious holidays. Some convicts were assigned to members of the European community, who covered their maintenance costs and were required “not to ill treat them, not to allow them to leave their premises, and not to loan them money.” As one Penang official put it, “every practicable measure ought to be adopted to restrain and remove temptations to the vices and immoralities which abound, and instances of which force themselves upon my notice frequently under trials.”34 In practice local authorities in Penang, as in other penal settlements, prioritized maximizing the labor output of their convicts, a concern reflected in their fixation with optimizing the size of work units and organizing daily work schedules that were onerous but not deadly. The meticulous attention they paid to these details also stemmed from their other preoccupation: minimizing the costs of retaining a large convict body. And while they touched upon moral reform, that was mostly a rhetorical flourish, their anxieties 108

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about this issue focusing at times on preventing liaisons between male and female convicts or same-sex relations among the men. Only in one respect were the poligar prisoners lumped together with the bandwar population, at least initially. According to an 1803 statement, rebels and convicts alike received the same allowance: a seer of rice per day per person, a seer and a half each of salt and ghee per month, and one piece of cloth per annum.35 Not surprisingly, the poligar prisoners sought to change this parity. In fact, the first written statement from them that I have located in the colonial archives is Doraiswamy’s 1809 petition requesting better terms. Did he speak up then and not earlier because he had completed seven years in exile, the shortest term of transportation for which convicts were sentenced and after which they were freed? By then, he and his fellow rebel prisoners only numbered 24; 49 of the original 73 (or about 67 percent of the total) had passed away. Doraiswamy’s request did not broach the subject of freedom, no doubt because that was not in the realm of possibility. Instead it asked for better living conditions for himself, a change that presumably acknowledged his distinctive status not only in relation to bandwars but also to his fellow rebels. The Penang government agreed to make an exception in his case so that he did not have to receive subsistence in kind, the way “inferior prisoners” were provisioned. Instead he was to receive 20 Spanish dollars per month, his special treatment a reward, as one official put it, for his “exemplary conduct,” “the rank he bore in his own country prior to the disturbances,” and his “youth,” which implied that he did not play a major role in the Poligar Wars.36 His new allowance granted him ten times more than the value of the 13 annas 6 pice monthly rations of convicts. In the first seven years of exile in Penang, the poligar rebels must have noted many changes in the inmate population. For one thing, as their cohort shrank, the convict body grew in numbers—as did the men committed to Penang for political reasons. Two prominent newcomers were Kistna Iyer, the nephew of the Raja of Vitula who came from Mangalore; and in 1807, Pallur Eman Nayar of Wyand (now Wayanad, Kerala), “a man of considerable property and rank” who fought the British in the company of the Pazhassi (or “Pyche”) Raja of Malabar (Kerala), then defected to their side before returning again to join the Pazhassi Raja in 1802.37 Most likely the poligar prisoners knew Eman Nayar personally, and certainly knew of him, from before—in fact, he was believed to have been in league with them in R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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1801. And they would have been familiar with his role in Pazhassi Raja’s rebellion, which also involved a “clash of sovereignty” and began before the Poligar Wars, persisting until 1805, four years after the defeat of the Marudu brothers.38 No doubt the “little kings” stayed in touch with their “dear native land” because of the frequency of traffic between their insular prison and the Coromandel Coast. Moreover, newcomers, political prisoners especially, invariably brought updated information from home. Absent first-person reminiscences of the banishment years of the poligar rebels other than their periodic petitions—such accounts do not exist for convicts, either—I have had to depend on the colonial archives to develop impressions of their initial years in Penang and of the convicts who lived alongside them. The convict population surged during the years the poligar rebels were in Penang because successive colonial administrators advocated for additional numbers. From the time Leith took over in 1800, he campaigned for and received large numbers of bandwars. Along with his counterparts in other insular prisons in the region, he equated convicts with cheap labor, with the muscle power that he desperately needed to undertake various infrastructural projects. For him and his fellow officials in Southeast Asia, transportation mattered less as “a branch of prison-discipline”—which is what it meant for their counterparts in India, who conceived of it as a means of deterring criminals and criminality by banishing offenders to distant outposts across the Indian Ocean—and more as a source of economic benefits because it provided a public service. That is, convict labor facilitated various projects, particularly roads, that would have entailed considerable expense. And with Penang no longer in its “infancy,” its administrators were eager to develop it further by securing the island against enemy attack and developing its capacity as an entrepôt, which entailed constructing docks and roads and making other improvements, as well as expanding its spice plantations.39 Briefly, Penang officials sought to restrict the types of convicts who trickled into their settlement. Lieutenant-Governor Leith was wary of those from Bombay and Madras because the 51 convicts he received from those two presidencies in 1803, in his judgment, were “such hardened villains” that he was compelled to keep them under lock and key continually. Several of these men were sentenced for treason for their roles in uprisings in the areas of Malabar (then in Bombay Presidency) and Tinnevelly in the opening years of the nineteenth century. Consequently, Leith informed the Madras government that his settlement did not wish to accommodate additional 110

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numbers because that would lead to “serious consequences,” by which he meant that Penang would have difficulty controlling them and making them into pliable workers.40 The following year, however, Penang officials expressed willingness to receive additional bandwars from everywhere in India. In part, the change in thinking reflected a greater confidence in their ability to manage larger numbers because they had secured additional troops to keep an eye on the 73 poligar prisoners. In part, the changed outlook represented the stance of the new lieutenant-governor, Robert Townsend Farquhar, who assumed office at the beginning of 1804. For him convicts were desirable not only because they were the “best coolies on the island” but also because they were relatively inexpensive in a settlement in which labor was difficult to procure. They cost less than half what “hired” laborers did, whose monthly pay was $6. Furthermore, Farquhar and his fellow administrators could no longer depend on cheap slave labor because public sentiment in England and in the penal settlements had turned against the practice of slavery, initially against the slave trade. Farquhar, in fact, condemned slavery, spelling out his views on the subject in a statement justifying the use of slaves in the West Indies, where labor was in short supply and Africa “offered the readiest supply,” but not in the more populated land of India, where “cultivation and commerce can be carried on by free men.” As for his island’s 5,000 or so male and female slaves, he claimed he was ready to free them and abolish slavery but was held back by “the prejudices of our native subjects on the continent of Asia” who were attached to their slaves, a stance many a colonial administrator reluctant to enact abolition expeditiously assumed. Therefore, he maintained he had to proceed slowly and sought to convene a committee to look into the practice.41 Farquhar envisioned expanding his convict force significantly. In 1805 he declared he could engage as many as 1,000 convicts “in the docks only, and [more in] the other public works connected with the improvement of the island.” In all, he hoped to assemble a convict body of 2,000, enough to carry out his ambitious plan to make Penang into a “grand naval depot and emporium of the British trade.”42 In July 1804, barely six months into his first year in office at Penang, Farquhar left for Bengal and did not return until March the following year. His second stint was equally brief, long enough for him to articulate a plan for his settlement in which convicts were to play a critical role but not to implement it. As his March 1805 account of the island’s 772 convicts noted in detailing their work assignments, he needed many more hands R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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to embark on his scheme to make Penang into a military, strategic, and commercial hub. 43 The interest in expanding the workforce came at a time when the island was losing convict hands because its first bandwar cohort, mostly offenders committed for seven-year terms in the late 1790s for robbery and dacoity, were about to reach the end of their sentences. As John Dickens, the judge and magistrate at Georgetown, and uncle of the writer Charles Dickens, explained in 1805, they were to be freed, unless their conduct on the island was found wanting, in which case they were to be sent back to India.44 The 772 convicts accounted for 2.5 percent of the island’s total population of roughly 30,000 in 1805, of whom 4,000 were described as mostly “indolent and poor” Malays; 8,000 from India, primarily from Bengal and the Coromandel coast, characterized as “richer than Malays,” mostly interested in earning some money and “returning to their country the moment they have” done so; and the rest Chinese and others. The Chinese were economically the best off but said to be inclined to return home as well once they had made their “fortunes.”45 The 2,000 convicts Lieutenant-Governor Farquhar sought to amass as “free labor,” with 1,000 engaged in constructing a dockyard on the nearby island of Jerajah to serve naval ships as well as country traders, never materialized under his tenure or that of his successor, Philip Dundas, who took over in 1805 with the higher rank of governor because Penang was briefly elevated to the status of a presidency, that is, placed on a par with the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. In these initial years of the nineteenth century, new arrivals mostly came in small numbers, but occasionally in large shipments, such as in 1806 when 111 convicts came on the Perseverance and in 1809 when 52 sailed in on the Europa from Fort William. 46 Local administrators in these years also sought to move convicts around, from Penang to Bengkulu and Malacca in particular. At the same time, officials in Penang and Calcutta agreed that offenders sentenced to transportation in Penang could be sent to India: in the words of the regulation, “the natives of the Malay countries . . . to the different presidencies of India.”47 Penang’s requests for additional convict hands aligned perfectly with the intentions of administrators in India to open up convict traffic to Southeast Asia. Bombay eagerly availed itself of that possibility after Jonathan Duncan became governor in 1795. In his earlier stint as the Banaras resident he had substituted transportation for capital punishment in the case of Brahmins, as 112

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in the case of the Tewaris, who were initially banished to Bengkulu, repatriated, and then sent to Penang. In Bombay Duncan used it as an alternative to a lengthy term of imprisonment or the loss of two or even one limb and also extended the punishment to Malabar, which was then under his jurisdiction until its transfer to Madras in 1800.48 Madras authorities initially were reluctant to ship their criminals to Penang but changed their minds after the poligar prisoners ended up there and Ambon was closed down as an option after 1802. In fact, they revised their laws so that offenders charged with such felonies as larceny or receiving stolen goods were also eligible for transportation, along with those sentenced for such heinous crimes as murder and armed robbery. As a result of these changes, a woman named Betty, whose felonious act had earned her a sevenyear transportation sentence, was among the convicts shipped out in the early years of the nineteenth century. 49 In Penang, as in Bengkulu, the local authorities struggled with forging the right mix of strategies to control their inmates in the first decade of the nineteenth century, alternating heightened vigilance for short spells with laxity over long stretches. Familiar to their Bengkulu counterparts would have been their concerns about not having much background information on their bandwars. As they repeatedly noted about the convicts acquired from the Andamans, the only details they had were what they gleaned from a listing of their names, many of which were “very incorrectly spelt.”50 The local authorities also had their hands full in these early years, with desertions, thefts, and other infractions committed frequently enough by convicts to prompt the government to seek authorization to punish such offenders severely in order to preserve “subordination.” To cut down on escapes, the local government also approached neighboring rulers for assistance. For instance, it notified the Raja of Telibong (in Sabah, Malaysia) that deserters were “atrocious criminals . . . convicted of murders and other crimes” and requested his cooperation in seizing and returning them, an entreaty accompanied by gifts; in that instance, the gifts were 10 muskets, 120 ball cartridges, a piece of silk, and a gold cloth.51 In addition, Penang was alarmed by reports of thefts and violence perpetrated by bandwars in the households they were working for. To quell “insubordination,” the local government sought and received permission to whip offenders 70 stripes in cases of “neglect of duty” and 40 for “desertion,” a higher penalty for not being compliant workers than for running away, an outlook commonplace in these initial years of the nineteenth century.52 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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The local government also sought to strengthen its hand by developing more of a judicial and police infrastructure. It appointed justices of the peace, deputized European residents as “high constables,” and began developing an effective police force and constructing a House of Correction to lodge its convicts securely, many of whom were scattered across the island. In addition, it developed better regulations for managing the convict body.53 Farquhar took the lead in framing rules and regulations that would, in his words, utilize convict labor in accordance with the “law, preserve order, and reform the[ir] morals,” the moral reform at the end of that phrase more of a discursive convention than an action plan. In his formulation, they would all be required to wear a medal on their arms listing their number and company so that they were readily identifiable if they were out and about illicitly. Furthermore, he proposed organizing them into companies of 50 to 75 men, each unit headed by two serangs (head of a lascar crew) or peons and two petty officers or tindals or well-behaved convicts. In all, he expected to appoint as many as 40 native serangs and 40 tindals, the former paid $5 a month and the latter $1 each per month. In addition, two European overseers would supervise their work on public projects, and two munshis or writers, remunerated at the rate of $5 each, would maintain convict rosters and call roll every day.54 As in Bengkulu, in the early years of the nineteenth century convicts were difficult to control because they were not securely locked up, as were the poligar prisoners. Many were housed in “insecure” buildings; others were scattered across the island and lived where they worked. Local authorities did not make a concerted effort to establish separate and secure convict lines, that is, organize their huts into rows as in a military camp, until 1810, when they built a facility set apart from the rest of the town by a deep ditch and a wall and capable of housing as many as 1,000 convicts.55 As with Farquhar’s ambitious plans to assemble a large convict force of 2,000 men, his “internal management” scheme was also not realized during either his tenure or those of his immediate successors in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While the Penang government consistently apprised authorities in India of its ongoing efforts to discipline convicts more effectively—and these accounts typically evoked little response from India—its periodic reports of escapes always aroused adverse reactions. Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were especially alarmed when “notorious” criminals showed up on their doorsteps unannounced; they were often not apprehended until months or even years after their escape. In part the concern was about the leniency of penal regimes that allowed convicts to slip 114

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away, in part the alarm was about not knowing that a particular individual had fled, and in part the fear was that escapees would divulge the permissive conditions under which they lived and worked in the insular prisons. All these anxieties surfaced in the wake of several high-profile escapes in the early years of the nineteenth century. Calcutta and Bombay were alarmed in 1809 by the case of Dadabhoy Pestongee—a Parsi convicted of murder in 1804 in Pargana Bulsar (now Valsad), Gujarat, and transported to Penang— who was apprehended in Bansda in 1809, not far from where he once lived. His “confession” of how he made his way back and the conditions under which he lived and worked led the Bombay administration to express concern about the indulgences granted to prisoners. According to Pestonjee, he was only in irons for three months in Penang, after which they were removed to enable him to do “public works.” When Dundas became governor in 1805, Pestonjee reported, a man named McClean secured Pestonjee’s release and employed him for seven months. That position ended when a ship involved in the China trade came to port conveying a Parsi named Hoormujjee, who secured Pestonjee’s services by interceding with Dundas and then turned him over to another Parsi, a vessel master or nakhoda named Barzorjee, with whom he stayed for eighteenth months before obtaining passage on a ship bound for Bengal, from where he made his way back Bulsar. What led to his recapture was that the local people dreaded him, all the more so right after his return, when he kidnapped his brother’s newly married wife and did not release her until Surat officials were in hot pursuit. Rearrested, Pestonjee was initially sentenced to death, but that was commuted to another seven-year term of transportation.56 Equally disturbing to the authorities in India was the case of Moodookitty Naraina, who returned to Madras from Penang in 1808 without attracting much attention in either locale until he was apprehended in his home village in September 1810 at work on his fields. Convicted in 1804 for murder, he was serving a term of 21 years. According to his testimony, he worked in Penang for four years, then moved to Malacca for two years or so before returning to Penang, where, he claimed, he was part of a group of the 20 or 30 oldest convicts freed by Messrs. Brown and Wallace and furnished with passports and certificates of release, with which papers he boarded a vessel from the port of Nagore to return. Although the Penang authorities insisted that no convicts were ever released before the expiration of their sentences, Naraina claimed that he once had papers to that effect, but they were destroyed in the rain during his passage to Nagore, when he had to live on the deck.57 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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The following year, in 1810, Auriatwa, described as a 55-year old in poor health and “afflicted with pains in his limbs” and with a face “swelled and disfigured” on one side, escaped. One of the 73 rebel prisoners, he apparently left on a “native vessel” that plied the seas between Madras and Penang and returned to Tinnevelly. Although the local magistrate was instructed to launch a thorough search of his district, his escape did not appear to arouse any more concern than did those of most convicts, perhaps because he was old, in ill health, and not an important poligar leader. Furthermore, by then the colonial authorities had Tinnevelly more firmly in control.58 Much more worrisome for the authorities in India was the case of Jallia, who made his way back to his native Gujarat in early 1811, a few months after his transportation on the country ship James Drummond in May 1810. The Bombay authorities were troubled by his escape because he had been a thorn in their side prior to his capture, which is why he was deported. Their fear was that his return and the reputation he had earned for his daring escape from his insular prison would add to his lore and enhance his standing as a leader of “a turbulent class” of Kolis who, in the eyes of local officials, terrorized Kaira (present-day Kheda) district and threatened to undermine the “peace” of “our recently acquired territories . . . over which the British authority has not yet been completely established.” As they observed, he enjoyed considerable support in the area, as evidenced by the concerted efforts made by his followers to break him out of the jail in Kaira prior to his transportation.59 Jallia’s return, moreover, concerned the local authorities because of the story he related to his supporters. As one official put it, his standing was “likely to be considerably increased by the circumstances attending his return which will of course tend to impress upon the ignorant of his own cast[e], a superior idea of his cunning and sagacity and lead them to confide more implicitly than ever in the success of any undertaking a leader of such presence may enter upon.” According to an eyewitness the “celebrated convict Jallia,” dressed as a bairagi (religious mendicant) with a gopi chandan tilak (marking made from a particular kind of soil) on his forehead and arms, spoke of his overseas experience at a large gathering of Kolis assembled for a funeral rite of one of their members. Since this is one of the few extant “return” accounts, I cite it here in full, beginning with his description of his escape from a “very comfortable” place he “termed lunca” (lanka or island, also associated with Sri Lanka or Ceylon), where convicts were well treated and required only 116

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to wear an iron ring around the leg and that many of them, himself among others saved money from the allowance granted to them for their provisions. That after persevering for [a] time to rub the inner circle of the ring on his ankle, he so far succeeded as to be able to pass it over the calf of his leg, when covering it with his trousers, the marks of [the] bandage was (sic) no longer observable, and he obtained service on board a merchant vessel then in port, that to the period of the departure of the ship, he concealed himself as much as possible below deck, but that after they had proceeded some time on their voyage he disclosed his situation to his employer. 60

Equally compelling and unique is the escape account he narrated to the authorities after his recapture in September 1812. Sentenced in 1809 to transportation for seven years for his role in attacking the town of Dholka, he recounted that he was initially imprisoned in the Kaira fort for about four months, when his fellow Kolis attempted to rescue him. In the aftermath of that violent attack, he was quickly whisked off in chains under guard to Cambay, some 40 miles away. From there he was put on board a ship and taken south, first to the port of Surat and then Bombay, where he remained for 16 days before he was sent to Penang, a place that in his recollection took six weeks to reach. Upon his arrival an iron ring was placed on his leg and he was sent off to work, which entailed his carrying things to the fort or a bungalow on “a hill where some [European] gentlemen resided.” He was in Penang for three months, during which time he walked around town wearing lascar’s clothes[,] and one day [he] met a lascar belonging to a ship from Europe, with whom he consulted [on] how to get on board and away. The lascar asked him if he was not confined for theft [and] of course that he was, and the lascar took him on board his ship and they sailed. He first arrived at Seringapatam (he means some ports on the Coromandel coast) and from that to Madras, that he travelled thence to Hyderabad, and successively to Punderpoor, Jejaree, Poona, Kallian, Demaun, and dressed as a byragee to Broach, and from that to his native village Kavita, where he stayed one night. He joined his family in the kotur [landholding] of Khakur Khan, and was there a year, about three months ago he asked the pater [headman] of Pusodh to let him live in the village, he did so, and gave him four bigahs of land. 61

Kaira officials were concerned not only that Jallia’s return would enhance his standing in his community but that his testimony would reveal the relative ease of convict life on the Prince of Wales Island. Colonial administrators always feared that such stories would lead people not to dread transportation, their most important secondary punishment. 62 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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Penang’s explanation of how Jallia escaped is also worth recounting because it speaks to the conditions in which convicts lived and worked in that settlement. According to the superintendent of convicts, his escape was not the result of negligence but of “his extreme cunning and . . . the convict lines being under repair and consequently open in several places at the time when every possible search was made for him.” Hall further elaborated that local authorities were usually not alarmed by the periodic disappearances of convicts into the nearby hills or jungles, because hunger invariably drove them back or they were “delivered” by local Malays for the “well-known reward.” Rarely ever did bandwars make their way back to India, and therefore Penang authorities generally did not immediately notify their counterparts in India about escapes. Thereafter, Hall declared, they would do so. The superintendent also pointed out that the practice, from the very beginning of Penang’s existence as an insular prison, was to have inmates work “without irons, and only with a ring on one leg as a distinguishing mark, unless their misconduct after arrival shall have rendered such punishment necessary.” However, the Bombay convicts were treated differently; they were more closely guarded because of their notorious reputation and held “in light irons, and every customary precaution ordered for their better security in the lines, where they were kept instead of working abroad with the generality of convicts.” When Jallia escaped, together with 11 others, he was part of a group allowed into the streets as part of “a gang of dog killers.” According to the Penang authorities, they were not able to find out anything about the whereabouts of the escapees even though they actively sought to find “their retreat or the certainty of their having gone off the island.”63 The flurry of escapes and the ongoing concerns about the punitive efficacy and financial viability of transportation led the Bengal government to suspend transportation from that presidency in December 1811. Thereafter, offenders committing crimes punishable by transportation were locked up in jail and required to do hard labor in jails such as Alipur in Calcutta. The reasons advanced for the change highlight the government’s anxieties about conditions obtaining in the penal colonies. The governor-general claimed that the benefits of transportation had “long ceased to exist” because its deterrent quality was compromised by the frequent return of convicts from their insular prisons. Furthermore, with their unauthorized return came reports of “indulgent treatment”—witness the story recounted by Jallia of his insular prison time—that government believed “effectually removed the apprehensions which may have formerly been entertained regarding transportation.” 118

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Hence Calcutta’s concern about its ability to deter malicious people from committing “public offenses” because it was increasingly perceived as not as severe as imprisonment and hard labor “within the provinces.”64 Government’s reasoning in ending transportation from Bengal—it continued from the presidencies of Bombay and Madras (see map 3 in chapter 2)—was also prompted by its belief that offenders could be securely lodged in the Alipur Jail and made to engage in hard labor. This argument was a far cry from a decade or so earlier, when escapes from the 24 Parganas Jail in Calcutta prompted a rush to banish prisoners overseas. In 1811, by contrast, the governor-general was prepared to relocate offenders convicted of heinous crimes from the jails in the “interior” districts to Calcutta so that their labor could be gainfully employed in its “vicinity.” To minimize escapes, Alipur inmates would henceforth only work intramurally; they would no longer be employed on the roads. The governor-general also pointed out that imprisonment was more economical because it did away with the costs of conveying prisoners overseas: 40 rupees per head to Penang and Bengkulu and as much as 100 rupees to Ambon. 65 The change in thinking about transportation also grew out of a concern that many more people in India were familiar with the conditions obtaining in the insular prisons because convicts with short-term sentences (typically 7 to 14 years) were beginning to return from Penang and Bengkulu. The few remaining survivors of the Andamans cohort of 270 bandwars transferred to Penang in 1796 were among those eligible for release. In 1811 Calcutta initially declared that emancipated convicts would be left to their own devices because the government was not responsible for their return passage. They could, in the words of the governor-general, relocate “where they may be best able in future to earn their own livelihood.”66 But less than two years later, in 1813, he revised his stance and agreed to furnish “pecuniary aid” in the form of passage to Calcutta, a practice that he emphasized ran counter to the European practice of not providing repatriation for those transported overseas. A group of sixteen embarked on the ship Walthamstore for Calcutta, “unfortunate men,” in the words of Governor Archibald Seton, who were punished for “their crimes and are solicitous to return to their country and families.”67 Governor Seton also took a special interest in the release of other convicts, specifically a man named Akber Hawkshaw, whom he first encountered in Patna, Bihar, in 1799. A judge at that time, he sentenced the latter to imprisonment for life and transportation. In Penang he came across the latter’s case R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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in the course of familiarizing himself with many of the inmates of his island and recalled that Hawkshaw was a nineteen-year-old in 1799 when he joined a mob that clashed with a British force, resulting in the death of a lieutenant and a sepoy. Seton, who had convicted Hawkshaw of murder then, contended that the young man was “first the dupe and then the instrument” of “a very artful and a very wicked woman” named Bhagwan Kuer. He also justified Hawkshaw’s release by pointing to his “exemplary” conduct in Penang since his arrival in 1800, an evaluation reaffirmed by others, including a colonial administrator who had hired him to do clerical work in his office. The superintendent of convicts also chimed in with a favorable report about his “utmost propriety in every respect,” and Hawkshaw advocated on his own behalf by stating that he had undergone “thorough and radical reform in character.”68 Penang officials were also increasingly receptive to the entreaties of the sixteen surviving poligar prisoners, who in 1814 submitted petitions individually and collectively to draw attention to their plight. Signed in Telugu, their petitions pleaded for “emancipation and return,” a request seemingly prompted by news from the “last vessels from the coast” that many of their kinsmen in Madras had been released. 69 No doubt the comings and goings of convicts to the settlement, particularly the repatriation of those whose sentences had expired in the early 1810s, added to their hopes of deliverance, which they increasingly voiced in their appeals. The “humble petition” of Aundoo Konda Vunnam of Tinnevelly, formerly a landholder, typified the case poligar prisoners made for themselves— and for that matter, convicts, too—in seeking their release. As his statement elaborates, his exile commenced when he was only sixteen and not personally in charge of his landholding, and he had been transported together with his uncle on his mother’s side and the latter’s minister, who he suggested were the more culpable parties but were now both dead. The 2 years he was confined in Madras, followed by 13 years on the island, were “a sufficient expiation.” Moreover, he had experienced considerable suffering from “the want of relatives and friends. . . . Torn from parents, possessions, and ease in his childhood, doomed to pass his youth in exile, for what it is hard to tell,” he had little left in his life, as he could not take “pride in a wife, a child, happiness or comfort—all is far removed.” Therefore, he pressed for a return to “his parents and relations.”70 He and his fellow prisoners could rightly have added that they had survived precarious times on the island, which had resulted in the deaths of almost 80 percent of their original cohort. 120

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Penang officials forwarded these petitions approvingly, emphasizing in particular that most of the leading men were dead, and the sixteen survivors “were either dependents upon their respective chieftains, or otherwise had but an inferior share in promoting the troubles.” Moreover, “justice and humanity,” as they informed the Madras government, were on the side of these “few remaining unhappy sufferers,” whose conduct from the time they first arrived was “regular, orderly, and [of a] peaceable demeanor.” “Separated as they are, from their friends, their families and their native country,” the Penang government added, and with “their country enjoying a state of tranquility and no apprehension existing of future trouble, it is natural for them to be desirous of returning to the coast.”71 The petitions were denied, however, except for that of Kistna Iyer. The surviving poligars were not allowed to return, largely because of the response of the Tinnevelly magistrate, who recounted the violent events of the two rebellions that had led to their banishment. Although sanguine about new challenges to the authority of government, he expressed concern about the effects their return would have on the many “naturally turbulent” people who were currently without means of support and who formerly had backed the poligar rebels. He also noted—and this point was intended to be alarming—that the petitioners, if allowed to return, would be back in a district where they formerly possessed “both affluence and authority” and where they would find their lands sold or given to other poligars. In such a “degraded” situation they would, he opined, consider any alteration “advantageous and having nothing to risk but the loss of life, on which class of people set but little value, would . . . do everything in their power to set on foot another rebellion.”72 The following year, in 1815, the prisoners once again appealed, this time noting that Kistna Iyer was free and had returned to the “coast.” Their pleas also emphasized that 14 years in exile was an exacting punishment “even for atrocious crime[s].” That they spoke up on this occasion is perhaps no coincidence: 14, after all, is the number of years in exile that the well-known hero and god Rama served in the much-loved epic of Hinduism, the Ramayana, and it is also one of the longer punishments for offenders short of a life sentence. Nor is it surprising that convicts drew on the storehouse of an epic that was part of the popular religious imagination, its themes of good and evil and stories of exile and of Lanka, the island capital of the evil demon Ravana, appealing especially to people transported to different islands across the Indian Ocean. As Jallia trumpeted on his return to his many supporters, he had escaped from banishment in lanka. R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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In case release was not forthcoming, the petitioners also pressed for concessions designed to further differentiate them from the convicts. As they put it, they deserved a better stipend than the $6 per month they were receiving, which was roughly “the wages of common laborers.” In case the authorities needed reminding—and a point they restated in virtually every appeal they made—they added that they were formerly of “respectable rank and lived in their own country in ease and affluence [and] formerly received assistance and considerable remittances from their friends at Madras.”73 Subsequent petitioners continued to speak in the idiom of emancipation and concessions, with their requests initially urging the latter, perhaps because they thought those were more likely to be granted than the former, which was rejected in 1814 due to the objections of the Tinnevelly magistrate. By 1817 their repeated pleas for augmentation in their stipends—or “pensions” as they once referred to these allowances, as if they were receiving salary for prior service performed for the government—had led the local authorities to grant them a monthly stipend of $15 each. Coincidentally, their 1818 request for an increase of $1 in stipend in lieu of clothing was approved by Governor J. A. Bannerman, a Madras Army officer whom they had previously encountered on the battlefield. As governor he became a benefactor to the men he had once referred to as the “twelve polygar rajas.”74 In 1818 the surviving prisoners also encountered another person from the days of the Poligar Wars, the soldier James Welsh, who had served alongside Bannerman and subsequently escorted them to the Admiral Nelson. His account of his reunion with the “rajas” is worth reciting because it provides another revealing glimpse into the state of mind of exilees and convicts banished to distant shores: I received a sudden visit from a miserable decrepit old man: who, when . . . I demanded his name and business, looked for some time in my face, the tears ran down his furrowed cheek, and at length he uttered the word “Dora Swamy!” It came like a dagger to my heart; the conviction was instantaneous. My poor young prisoner stood before me; changed, dreadfully changed in outward appearance, but still with the same mind, and cherishing the remembrance of former days and former friendships. The casual hearing of my name had revived his affection, and, I much fear, the mistaken hope, that an advancement in rank might afford me the means of lessening his misery. He even entreated me to be the bearer of letters to his surviving family, but this I understood was contrary to the existing orders; since, though I found the Governor, the late Colonel Bannerman, my former commanding officer, kind and considerate, it did not appear to rest with him, and I was compelled to decline.75 122

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Welsh concluded his reminiscences with a plea that obviously had the backing of Penang officials. He expressed hope that his book would be read favorably by the East India Company directors and that they would alleviate “the sufferings of an innocent man” by releasing Doraiswamy because the region was “now completely settled, and [there was] no chance of any ill effects . . . likely to accrue from such a compassionate measure.”76 Even as Penang authorities were amenable to poligar requests for better terms, they faced pressure from their superiors in Calcutta and London to reduce, as the Court of Directors in London put it, “the very heavy expense” for the upkeep of convicts. In his settlement’s defense, W. E. Phillips, the acting governor, noted that each convict cost $2 and 61 pice monthly for provisions provided per government directives: 1 seer of Bengal rice per day, 1½ seer of ghee per month, 1½ seer of salt per month, and 40 pice in cash per month to make necessary purchases in the bazaar, as well as 18 cubits of linen cloth every six months. One possibility was to pare down costs by substituting cheaper rice grown locally and by having the cloth imported from Madras along with the convicts. These steps, however, would only result in a savings of about $2,000 in the overall cost of Spanish $38,842. A far better prospect, Phillips believed, was to capitalize on the labor value of convicts by tasking them to do more public work, from manning fire engines to repairing roads to “clearing away jungles, and opening new roads,” and by hiring out many more to private individuals. In his opinion, he had as many as 200 convicts “whose characters may admit of their being at large, and worthy of being exempt from imprisonment and public labor” and whose employment at $2.50 per month would result in the government receiving $6,000 per annum to offset their maintenance costs.77 In other words, as in Australia, bandwars would be leased out as servants. Bannerman, who became governor in 1817, continued these efforts to increase the cost effectiveness of the convict management system; his exertions, too, focused on maximizing convict labor and minimizing maintenance costs. He based part of his calculations on having a larger convict body, as had many of his predecessors. He proposed dividing 400 able-bodied convicts into four companies of a 100 each whose primary task would be construction work, including the opening up of new roads beyond the first range of mountains and to the western side of the island and south toward Jamestown. His plan for the rest of the convict body was to engage as many as 500 in public works of one sort or another: 200 men on the roads and manning fire engines, 50 in the council house, 45 each in the warehouse R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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and custom house, and many others attached to the courthouse, cemetery, accountant’s office, treasury office, police office, Chinese poorhouse, convict hospital, commissariat, and free school. He allotted 56 convicts to junior civil servants and another 122 to various individuals. A large contingent was not available for work, either because they were sick in the hospital (62 in that category), invalids and women (212), or deserters (54), who were in irons.78 Governor Bannerman also sought to reduce the costs by substituting cash in lieu of supplies: $1.50 per month to every convict in equal installments of 75 pice on the first and sixteenth of each month. In his opinion, the government had nothing to fear from putting money into the pockets of convicts who, he believed, sold some of their rations in the bazaar in any case. Access to money and savings from stipends or salaries convicts received enabled some to become moneylenders in later decades. Even as authorities in Penang, Calcutta, and London debated the different schemes to maximize convict labor and minimize maintenance costs, they all agreed in 1818 to release the poligar prisoners. Deliberations held at the highest level of government in London essentially sided with the claims that the “poligar rajas” had been articulating for many years: that they were young men when they were seized, they were not actively involved in the rebellion, and they were mostly of low rank. In the words of the Board of Control, the petitioners were, at the time of the uprising, under the thumb “of their parents, and could not therefore, without injustice, be considered as participating in their guilt, yet they have been subjected to the same rigorous punishment, and made, as too truly stated in the words above quoted from one of the petitions, ‘to expiate offences not their own.’” Therefore, to keep them in exile was “unjust.” The board directed that they be permitted to return home to live with surviving relatives, if any, and be granted “in land or in a pecuniary stipend . . . an allowance or provisions . . . together with any other marks of kindness . . . best calculated to fulfill the intentions we have here expressed and to demonstrate the interest we take in their misfortunes.”79 The board’s letter also referred to the recent release in Madras of relatives of Umaidurai, which in its view made it all the more difficult to justify their continuing confinement in Penang. Clearly there was no danger in allowing repatriation, no “rational grounds for apprehending that the Company’s authority would be weakened or endangered by the return of a few obscure individuals” whose conduct was “orderly, regular and inoffensive” during their years in exile. The board chose not to touch on “whether their 124

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banishment was originally just and expedient,” except to observe that their suffering “satisfied all the ends both of justice and policy.”80 Release orders for all the surviving prisoners except Eman Nayar finally came at the end of 1819, by which time the Madras authorities had concurred that it was safe to allow their return. When J. M. Coombs, the officer in charge of them since 1812, informed them of their release, “the unfortunate men received the intimation with the most grateful and respectful benedictions and thankfulness.” But they also used the occasion to seek permission to take along ten followers they had acquired during their stay. 81 In their final years in Penang, from 1814, when they first began clamoring for their return, until 1820, when they finally left their insular prison, the surviving poligar rebels encountered a steady stream of new convict arrivals. 82 The temporary suspension of transportation from Bengal between December 1811 and 1814 did not slow down the traffic from Bombay and Madras. And once the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 (Convention of London) returned Java and Ambon to Netherlands, most people sent to those settlements were moved to Penang. By 1825, when the last surviving rebels were finally allowed to return to Tinnevelly, their exilic island housed almost 1,500 convicts. This large number resulted from the inflow of bandwars beginning in the 1810s, generally a few at a time on ships bound for China. Occasionally they came in larger batches, for example, 50 from Madras in 1815 on board the Cuffnels and Royal George and 39 from Bengal in 1818 on the Mary. That pace persisted over the next five years: 124 newcomers in 1819, of whom 80 were from Bengal, 26 from Madras, and 18 from Bombay; 304 arrivals in 1820 with as many as 200 from Bengal, 57 from Madras, and 47 from Bombay; and 195, 154, and 185 in the years 1821, 1822, and 1823, respectively. In that five-year stretch between 1819 and 1823, a total of 962 convicts arrived in Penang—or an average of 192 per year—of which 642 were from Bengal, 129 from Madras, and 191 from Bombay. 83 These additions raised the total to 1,500 by 1825. That aggregate would have been considerably higher were it not for decisions to suspend, divert, or slow down traffic at different junctures during the 1810s and early 1820s, beginning with the 1811 Bengal regulation briefly halting transportation. Then came the 1815 directive to send convicts to Mauritius, opened up as a penal colony at the behest of its governor, Robert Farquhar, an administrator all too familiar with the advantages of convict labor from his tenure as the Penang lieutenant-governor in 1804–5. 84 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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Convict traffic to Penang was also slowed down in response to another round of convict desertions, especially from Madras, whose officials, together with their superiors in Calcutta and London, were always circumspect about Penang’s viability as a penal colony and sought alternative destinations in the early 1820s. Those concerns came to a head when an escapee from Penang, Cunden, who was serving a life sentence for murder, was found at work in Bangalore. As number 295 in the “Annual Return of Madras Convicts for 1819–1820” and one of 4 people marked as having “deserted” that year, his escape seemingly elicited no response in Madras when it was first reported. Nor did other aspects of that annual statement, which disclosed 44 deaths and 5 “discharged” or freed prisoners, making up a total of 53 names to be subtracted from that year’s overall tally of 387 to account for the 334 Madras convicts still living on the island that year. Presumably the Madras government did not pay much attention to the details about the four desertions because such escapes were routine and fugitives were either often quickly captured or believed to be in hiding nearby. Alarm bells only rang in India when escapes were numerous and involved dangerous criminals who had slipped back home without any warning, as the cases of Jallia and others from 1809 and 1810 exemplify. What Madras was concerned about was not only Cunden’s illegal return but also the circumstances of his escape. Cunden was transported to Penang in 1818 for murder and arson; he only mentioned the latter when he was recaptured. In early 1821 he was found working in Bangalore for Reverend H. Malkin. According to his “declaration,” he was confined in jail for five days when he first arrived on the island before he was sent to work in Fort Cornwallis as a cook for a sergeant named Watson. He said that during the two years he served in that capacity he became familiar with various traders who sold rice and other items in Penang. One of these men, named Lubay, conveyed him to Aceh, where he was briefly confined by its king but later released and allowed to board a vessel bound for Pondicherry (now Puducherry), from where he made his way to Bangalore and obtained service with its chaplain. 85 The ease with which Cunden slipped away and the seeming lack of restraint imposed on him even though he was sentenced for life troubled the Madras authorities. So did their realization that the precautions taken in Penang would never suffice to make the island escape proof, a condition that its administrators readily admitted to in noting that their settlement was within easy reach of Aceh and the Pedir Coast in northeastern Sumatra as 126

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well as the Coromandel Coast of Madras. Consequently, both the means and opportunity for escape and return existed because of the many “native vessels sailing yearly from this island to different parts on the Coromandel Coast, and also from the Pedier coast to these ports.” Furthermore, escapes were likely to persist and even increase, because Aceh’s “unsettled state” afforded a convenient place for refuge and because boat traffic between Penang and Madras was on the rise. Those concerns did not apply to Bengal because European vessels plied the Penang to Calcutta route and were unlikely to take in fugitives. 86 Penang’s explanation that Cunden-like escapes were virtually impossible to curtail prompted the Madras authorities to explore other options, in particular newly acquired Singapore and the more distant island of Mauritius. Briefly, between 1822 and 1824, they directed some of their traffic to Bengkulu, as noted in the previous chapter. Also, beginning in the late 1820s, convicts from India, including many from Madras, who otherwise would have ended up in Penang, were sent to the newly established penal colonies of Burma, initially Tenasserim and later other locales. 87 Nevertheless, Penang, characterized by a contemporary source as the “Botany Bay of India,” hosted the largest number of bandwars of any insular prison across the Indian Ocean in the 1820s. 88 An 1824 account enumerated a population of 1,469 convicts, mostly from Bengal: 998, or slightly over 67 percent, were from that presidency; 272, or about 18.5 percent, were from Madras; and 192, or 13 percent, were from Bombay. The remaining 7 were from Ceylon, which generally sent its prisoners to Malacca. Only 24, or less than 2 percent of the convicts, were women. 89 A large proportion, 962, or 65 percent, were relative newcomers, having arrived in the five years between 1819 and 1823, which made for a different kind of convict body than the one in Bengkulu in which Fateh Khan emerged as the sardar of a smaller population over an extended period of time. Of the island’s 1,469 convicts, almost half, or 731 individuals, had been there for less than 5 years, 217 for 5 to 10 years, 170 for 10 to 15 years, 252 for 15 to 20 years, and only 99 for 20 years or more. The small size of that last cohort is not surprising because most convicts, even those with life sentences, were generally released or repatriated once they had served on the island for an extended period of time. In addition, 514 convicts died between 1819 and 1823, or an average of 103 per year, presumably mostly older people. In that same period, 15 convicts deserted the island and 110 were discharged, an average of 22 per year.90 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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Few discharged or time-expired convicts accepted the return passage that Calcutta periodically provided beginning in 1812. Most apparently chose not to do so for much the same reasons articulated by their counterparts in Bengkulu. By 1824, those who had been on the island for a considerable length of time, 25 years or more, had spent much of their stretch working for “gentlemen” from whom they had earned “indulgences.” These men, in the estimation of local administrators, deserved to be “left at ease and quiet, during the remainder of their lives.” Some were known to have amassed “property, by keeping cows and by other means.”91 An 1826 profile of 22 “discharged” male convicts who elected to stay reveals additional details. All of them were sentenced two decades or so earlier—in this instance, in Bengal, some in the late 1790s, others in the opening two or three years of the nineteenth century. Over their long tenure they had acquired reputations for being “honest” or living “honestly” and for owning property and being gainfully employed. Cheytoo, for example, owned “buffaloes,” Vokilla “property,” and Mena “cattle.” Others were employed in various capacities: Allum, since his release, as a khitmagar or servant; Ramkunt as a carpenter; Gooee as a grass cutter; Nobhay as a herdsman; and Dussah as a hospital orderly. Several tended cattle and were milk sellers. A man named Baunnoo became a Hindu priest, a line of work that some convicts in every penal settlement seemingly entered into, presumably because of their high-caste status and prior experience. Musookhan was the only person in the list identified as not owning anything or being employed; his description merely states he was “very old and infirm.”92 A Malabar inmate named Syed Mustafa Idris or Syed Mustapha Mohammed, who was apparently freed after serving seven years on the island, was not on that list or other early nineteenth-century colonial rosters of “discharged” convicts but became far more famous than any of his contemporaries. In fact, a Penang shrine located in Georgetown known as Keramat Dato Koya honors his postconvict life as a mendicant and miracle worker better known as Dato Koya, a Sufi saint, who redistributed the alms he collected to needy children. Ibrahim Munshi, a Johore official who was the son of one of the most prominent men of letters in nineteenth-century Malaya, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi (the Munshi Abdullah of the Hikayat Abdullah fame), became familiar with the “beggar keramat” during his Penang trip in the early 1870s. As he recounts in his travelogue, Dato Koya spent five years before his death in the mid-nineteenth century catering to children

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and performing miraculous deeds, which continued after his death, leading people to recognize him as a keramat.93 The 1824 Penang report, obviously compiled to allay concerns in Calcutta and London about its convict management system, offers a wealth of information. Cunden’s escape, following on the heels of a long line of much publicized desertions dating back over a decade, understandably cast the spotlight on the settlement’s disciplinary regimen and its costs. What seemingly mattered most to the authorities in India was that transportation should continue to function as a severe punishment and not under the lax conditions that allowed prisoners to escape. Administrators in Penang and the other penal colonies, by contrast, focused much more on maximizing convict labor, a labor regime in which a few escapes and infractions every year were part and parcel of the acceptable costs of managing bandwars in doing “public works.” As the 1824 report makes abundantly clear, what mattered most was convict labor productivity for a price that was right. According to Penang authorities, the average cost over the 20-year period from 1805 to 1824 was roughly Spanish $40,000 or £10,000 per annum. Although they acknowledged these expenses as “heavy,” they insisted that convict labor was “productive,” as evidenced by the many “extensive roads, which intersect the island in every direction, the extensive public buildings which have been constructed, and the swamps and marshy grounds which have been drained and raised, around and within Georgetown.”94 Penang officials also pointed out that convicts were an integral part of the settlement from the very outset, serving as laboring hands and filling menial positions as syces or grooms (i.e., stable attendants) and grass cutters. Increasingly, they were also the all-purpose “coolies and servants” for virtually every department of the local administration, every public official, and some private individuals, too. The 1824 account of the work assignments of the 1,469 convicts fleshes out their “productive” service or naukari and the restraints under which they worked. The largest cohort, numbering 351 men, or about 24 percent, were employed daily (except for Sunday) from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on the roads and other public works in Penang and Province Wellesley, many in heavy irons, some with irons only on one leg, and others without any at all. Another large group, totaling 254 men, worked in menial capacities for government departments or officials, all without any irons at all. Other groups were engaged in government work or served various officials, as the following

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particulars indicate: 128 men in the botanic and hill gardens and in the military lines, very few under any kind of restraint or confinement at night; 59 men as menial servants and attendants at the hospitals; 46 men syces and grass cutters for junior civil and military officials, and not in “irons”; 38 men coolies for the engineer and not in chains but required to live in the town jail; 22 men cooks and servants for European sergeants and troops; and 16 men granted as an “indulgence” to various individuals not in the company’s service. In addition, as many as 98 men were hired out as workers to people who reimbursed the government a monthly sum of $2.50 for each man; none of them were required to wear irons. The only cohort closely guarded and confined and separated from the rest were those classified as criminal gang members or charged with committing new offenses in Penang. Seventy men were in that category and were required to work the streets and drains of the Georgetown section of town from 6:00 a.m. to noon and 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. every day in heavy irons. Unlike the large number engaged in “public” projects, these men worked an extra shift in the afternoon and were heavily chained and closely guarded. In addition, 239 men, or a little over 16 percent, did light work in the jail and wore no restraints because they were incapacitated because of old age or infirmities. The settlement’s 24 female convicts were also treated differently; they were not compelled to perform “service” of any kind and were allowed to remain in jail without doing any “regular labor.” In addition, 56 convicts acted as sardars and munshis.95 These sardars and munshis were part of an establishment headed by a superintendent paid at the monthly rate of $100 and an overseer at the rate of $60, both drawn from the ranks of Europeans. They were assisted by additional overseers charged with managing different convict teams: two were assigned to the crews working the roads and supported by two assistants, another overseer supervised the men employed on the hill, another the invalids, and yet another those working in Georgetown. There were also several others in supervisory positions of one sort or another: one was a native writer, 12 were jemadars, 12 were tindals, and 14 others were also designated as tindals but paid less. In all, the convict establishment cost Penang $523 a month, a small price to supervise almost 1,500 inmates. In assembling their report, Penang authorities were well aware that their superiors wanted convict discipline enhanced and management costs reduced. Consequently, Phillips’s 1824 report proposed a new scheme centered on definite “rules and principles” ostensibly aimed at “reformation,” 130

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an emphasis he found lacking in the existing system, which did not make convicts “sufficiently sensible of the difference between their present and former condition” or their punishment severe enough to be an “example to the rest of the community” and helpful as a “means for the amendment of the unhappy sufferers.” Although he did not identify the texts he had consulted, he said he had come up with his ideas from perusing recent publications pertaining to New South Wales. As his plan reveals, he was clearly familiar with the initiatives taken by Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), an Indian military veteran, whose tenure in New South Wales led to a reduction in convict maintenance costs and the use of corporal punishment, and a continuation of the granting of tickets of leave or permissions for convicts to live and work for their wages before their sentences had expired.96 Phillips’s new scheme sought to differentiate between “the well behaved and well disposed” and “the unawakened or refractory and hardened” convicts by treating the former “with more kindness and indulgence” and the latter “with more justice and severity.” His aim was to revamp the existing system, which did not classify prisoners based on their guilt, and apportion work and constraints “upon them, according to the temper or dispositions of the offenders” nor reward hard work and good behavior by a reduction “in punishment, or in their terms of transportation.” Unsuccessfully, he attempted to secure the authority his counterparts in New South Wales enjoyed: the power to issue tickets-of-leave and grant “conditional pardon, or local emancipation,” leaving the authority to grant “absolute pardon” and repatriation in the hands of the provincial government from where convicts had originated.97 Phillip’s scheme proposed an eightfold division of male convicts based on their “age, character, disposition, and circumstances” and a different scheme for female convicts. Along with his ambitious plans to classify all male and female convicts, he also sought to enhance the power of the superintendent of convicts, whose salary he proposed tripling to $300 instead of the existing $100 and whose authority he wanted expanded to hearing complaints regarding convict “disobedience . . . idleness, negligence or any unruly conduct” and to inflicting “moderate whipping” or “close confinement.” In addition, he proposed mustering all the convicts once a quarter and providing their children an education at the POWI Free School.98 The following year, in 1825, Penang authorities began implementing some of the provisions of the Phillips plan. In May of that year George Alexander, the Penang doctor; Captain M. A. Bunbury, the superintendent of convicts; R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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and Richard Caunter, the superintendent of police and formerly the superintendent of convicts, were constituted into a committee and charged with organizing the entire convict body into the eight classes proposed by Phillips. While the committee chose to organize eight groupings, it followed somewhat different criteria in making these classifications. In the first class were “trustworthy” convicts who provided for themselves. Men hired out or employed as servants constituted a second class. Neither of these two cohorts was required to wear irons. By contrast, the third class worked in hospitals and public offices and had to wear a small ring on one leg. New arrivals made up the fourth class, along with those who had been on the island for less than two years or had committed an additional crime on the island. This class was charged with laboring on the roads and public works beyond the town and in clearing passes on the island and in Wellesley province from 7:00 a.m. until noon and then from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. At night they were confined in the lines or secured when at work at a distance from the lines. If there were more people in that category than were needed on the public works, the “extra” hands were made available for hire at a price. The fifth class worked in double irons in and around town for longer hours than the previous class, their work day ending an hour later, at 5:00 p.m. The committee placed convicts of “atrocious and abandoned character and deserters” into a sixth class and imposed the most restrictions on them by making sure that they were nearby working on the roads, streets, and public works in and around town “in heavy irons” so that they could be closely monitored and not have easy opportunities to escape. If men in this category behaved well for five successive years, they were elevated to “a less rigorous class.” Women occupied the seventh class and were allowed to live outside the convict lines if they provided for themselves. They could also work as family servants at the rate of four rupees a month, and those who did not have such employment were expected to sweep and clean the convict lines. Female convicts sentenced for committing murder were an exception to this rule—they were not hired out or allowed to leave the lines until they had been on the island for two years. The eighth and final class consisted of invalids, who, if able bodied, were expected to do light work as servants at 2 rupees a month, and the superannuated, who were exempt from working.99 This committee also turned its attention to the “insecure” condition of the convict lines in town and in the country. It sought as well, as had Phillips, to strengthen the role of the superintendent of convicts by pointing out that he was in charge of their “internal management,” “establishment,” and 132

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“accounts.” The committee also expected him to maintain discipline; he was authorized to inflict corporal punishment, up to three dozen stripes with a rattan; to promote or demote convicts from one class to another; and to select sardars, typically recruited from the second, third, or fourth classes. In addition, the committee established a scale for food and clothing, pegging its rations for most convicts, except for those in the seventh and eighth classes, at 30 seers of rice, 1 seer of salt, and ½ seer of ghee per month along with some pice to purchase what it termed “curry stuff” and an additional quantity of pice for discretionary purchases. The second, third, and fourth classes received 15 pice for curry and 50 pice in cash; the fifth and sixth classes, 15 pice for the former but only 30 additional pice for salt or fresh fish, and not in cash. The seventh and eighth classes received a smaller quantity of rations than those in the second, third, and fourth classes but the same “substance amount” in pice. Their “provisions” only amounted to 22½ seers of rice, 1 seer of salt, ¼ seer of ghee, and an additional 65 pice, with 15 for “curry stuff” and the rest in cash. All the convicts received half a piece of coarse cloth every six months and a “country blanket” every two years, and convict sardars received a full piece every six months. The munshis and tindals who supervised the convicts were chosen from their ranks and directed to ensure that convicts did not sell or barter away their clothes and blankets. The Penang government immediately set about organizing work details in accordance with the scheme developed by the 1825 committee. A large number, 240 in all, were designated “personal” convicts, that is, assigned to various offices for their use: 60 to the Council House, mostly to work for the governor; those employed in “domestic purposes” received an additional allowance and clothing provided by the governor, and others were employed on the garden and grounds of the place. As Penang officials noted, these duties were carried out by lascars in other settlements. Another 60 were spread out evenly between the first and second council members. The remaining 120 of the 240 “personal” convicts were assigned to various administrators, ranging from the superintendent of convicts (6 convicts), to various military and civil officials (40 for senior civil servants and military officials, 4 for the military secretary, 8 for the commanding officer of the troops, and 16 for the European troops and sergeants), to medical officials (4 for the supervisory surgeon and 3 for the assistant surgeons), to the chaplain (4), to the superintendent of police (4) and a variety of other officials. Another 345 were designated “official” convicts, so called because they were assigned to various offices rather than to officials for personal use. In R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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addition, 604 convicts performed “general duties,” by which Penang meant that 260 convicts worked on the roads, including in clearing drains, cutting hedges, and other related chores; 200 on similar work in Province Wellesley along with felling timber; 60 in clearing hills “preparatory to survey”; 30 in the timber depot; 50 on the government hill; and 4 in the convalescent bungalow. As for the members of “atrocious” and “deserters” gangs, numbering 69 and 34, respectively, these men were kept close at hand and made to clean the streets in town within plain view of the authorities. Of the remainder of the 1,681 convicts on the island—up from 1,469 in 1824—69 were appointed as munshis, tindals, and sardars; 175 were hired out to individuals for a fee; 208 were invalids; and 37 were women.100 The 1825 reorganization of the convict system was Penang’s response to repeated requests from Calcutta and London to extract more labor out of the bandwars and curtail costs, which the local government sought to effect by changing convict allowances from grain to cash because of the high price of rice. The new configuration was also aimed at incorporating some of the Bengkulu rules, especially about having more convicts fend for themselves, which meant hiring them out to individuals and employing the rest as “outdoor servants and laborers” to maintain streets in town and roads in the country, in felling timber and cutting new roads on the hills, in making bricks for public works in Province Wellesley, and as laborers generally.101 London, furthermore, urged Penang to include more of the Bengkulu rules because the latter settlement’s convicts had been transferred to Penang and Singapore. Penang officials also sought to lower expenses by other means. Along with trimming provisioning costs, they reduced the outlay for clothing and the salaries of the supervisory staff, in part by decreasing the numbers of people hired to oversee convicts. Convicts, for their part, invariably resisted any and all attempts to reduce their allowances, much in the way that prisoners in jails across India violently confronted efforts to change existing practices. An attempt in 1827 to cut down allowances is a case in point because it sparked what local officials termed “convict insubordination,” with bandwars speaking out against the reduction in their rations with one voice, even those who served in a “superintending” capacity as tindals, sardars, and munshis. En masse they marched to the courthouse to meet with the judge. The apparent cause of their opposition, which officials characterized as “very serious” resistance involving a “regular combination” of convicts, was the reduction in their rations from 30 to 25 chupas of rice. When a subsequent investigation 134

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into the incident revealed that most convicts consumed a chupa of rice a day, the original rations were reinstated, except in the case of those who had led the “insubordination.”102 Penang officials continued to tinker with their management system in the late 1820s and 1830s, their efforts, as always, focused on maximizing labor output and minimizing maintenance costs. Their preoccupation with squeezing as much work as possible out of their prisoners meant that they continually shifted numbers around to meet the changing labor demands of different public works projects and government offices and sought to cut down on administrative costs by hiring out larger numbers to private individuals for use as laborers or servants, an arrangement that had the added advantage of passing on their subsistence costs to their individual employers. At no point in these deliberations in the 1820s or later did administrators call attention to the high mortality rates of convicts, even though medical reports occasionally conveyed that information. As an 1830 medical topography of the area noted, as many as 60 percent of the convicts reported sick over an eight-year period, and of that proportion 9 percent died, a “considerable” mortality rate that the author attributed to their exposure “to the vicissitudes of the weather.”103 That is, convicts were subjected to a punishing regimen of hard labor in the best and worst of seasons, escape from which lay in medical disability if bandwars could persuade the authorities of their ill health. Along with their efforts to refine their labor and management schemes, Penang administrators also turned their attention in the 1820s and 1830s to questions about the optimum size of their convict body. Writing in 1826, the superintendent of convicts advocated for “additional numbers” because of high labor costs and the pressing need for 300 to 400 men to work in the plantations at a rate of 2 rupees a month, which the government was willing to accept as long as employers also paid for their clothing and feeding.104 However, with 1,789 bandwars on the island—an unprecedented total that partly resulted from a transfer of 162 convicts from Bengkulu on the ship Eliza after that settlement was handed over to the Dutch and the arrival of several boatloads from India, including 93 from Madras via the Flora—local authorities opted to downsize the numbers.105 In June 1826 Penang informed the Bengal government that additional bodies would lead to “inconvenience” and urged that the convict traffic be redirected toward Malacca and Singapore. It made a similar plea in 1828, right after the incident of “convict insubordination,” on that occasion, however, suggesting newly acquired Tenasserim as a better penal option.106 R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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Governor Bonham articulated that point again in 1834 when he asked that convicts from the “coast,” meaning Madras, be sent thereafter directly to Singapore rather than to Penang, where “road and communications are complete.” Three years later, in 1837, he repeated that message by emphasizing that his settlement did not need additional hands because its infrastructure was in good shape, whereas Singapore lacked “public works of every description.”107 That message also signaled the growing importance of the latter settlement as an entrepôt in the China trade and a strategic hub in the Strait of Malacca, a transition that became increasingly evident in the ensuing decades. The diversion of convict traffic to other settlements in the late 1820s and 1830s led to significant changes in the size and composition of the bandwar population. Penang’s overall numbers diminished appreciably, to less than 1,000 after the 1830s, at times to well below that, and did not reach 1,000 or so until the early 1850s. By 1837 the number had dropped to 852, rising slightly to 921 the following year with the addition of a few new arrivals— smaller by far in relation to earlier totals but as yet still larger than the tallies that year for Singapore of 875 and Malacca of 255. With declining numbers came an increasingly graying population, older because so many of them had been there for extended periods of time. Of the 921 convicts in 1838, 100 had been there for more than 30 years; an additional number were listed as invalids. Only 175 men were identified as “able bodied” and working in Province Wellesley; others labored on the roads, especially those leading to the homes of the gentlemen.108 A smaller cohort, in the absence of public works, took part in a different work regimen, with many more hired out as “personal” servants. The work profile of its 1,300 convicts in 1830 is a case in point. A significant proportion, 900 or almost 70 percent, worked for various individuals, including local administrators. Of the rest, a sizable cohort was deemed old or disabled, “unproductive and unemployed” to use the official language; their “presence” added “no advantage” to the settlement, a “debit” that Penang authorities wanted attributed to their place of origin, namely Calcutta, and not its ledger.109 The trajectory of decreasing numbers became even more pronounced in the late 1840s, as the following figures highlight: 575 convicts in 1845–46, 601 in 1846–47, 646 in 1847–48, and 598 in 1848–49. Thereafter, the first significant increase occurred in 1849–50, when the total rose to 706.110 Until then, the only reason fluctuations were not more discernible was the introduction of Chinese convicts to the mix, men transported from the British 136

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outpost of Hong Kong. Without their addition, the decreases would have been more striking.111 Briefly, Penang had an opportunity to add to its numbers, not of male but female convicts, which it opted not to do. As Governor Butterworth explained in 1847, when Penang only had 601 convicts on its roster (92 of whom were Chinese), his administration did not want to accommodate women because his settlement did not have the personnel and facilities to do so. Moreover, the governor disapproved of the conditions in which the island’s few female convicts lived, by which he meant that some were involved in sexual relationships with townspeople. A sergeant who inspected the convict lines reported several women were “enceinte,” the result of their liaisons with local men made possible because their cells were not secure.112 Penang officials also chose not to alter their bandwar mix when they rejected Ceylon’s proposal to send its convicts to the island. Their reasoning was that its men were “desperate characters” and difficult to manage without “suitable overseers,” staff that the settlement did not possess. Furthermore, in their estimation, Penang was not the place for dangerous men because its inmates were mostly dispersed across Wellesley, where they worked for long stretches far removed “from severe control,” circumstances that made escapes difficult to prevent.113 In the early 1850s, Penang once again opened its doors to convicts, a decision that led to a steady rise in numbers: 913 convicts (855 males and 98 women) in 1852 and as many as 1,041 later that year; a slight decline to 977 in 1853, the result of 55 deaths, 7 escapes, and 2 releases; but 1,115 by May 1854, because of the arrival of 193 newcomers (minus 54 who died and 6 who escaped). (Contrast these numbers with the Singapore total of 1,470 convicts in 1852 and a grand total of 2,724 for all of the Straits Settlements.)114 With many more laboring hands in the early 1850s, the settlement deployed large numbers in the construction of roads and bridges. An 1851 report discloses that bandwars were at work on 20 miles of roads to the south and west, draining land, and building 20 bridges, varying in height from 10 to 22 feet. Others were engaged in repairing the convict lines.115 In the early 1850s, as in the 1840s, Penang administrators characterized their convict hands as “peaceable” and “hard working.”116 An 1852 account praised them as “quiet and orderly” although they were widely dispersed constructing “roads through cultivated and populous districts.” It also commended them for maintaining their convict lines and House of Correction in good condition and for building bridges and draining land. And within R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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the House of Corrections they quarried and broke stones for roads and also made rattan rush and coir nets and rattan baskets.117 Penang administrators attributed their success in deploying convict labor to the disciplinary system introduced in the Straits Settlements in the mid1840s, a system whose workings are examined more fully in the next chapter, on Singapore. The new disciplinary scheme was organized around rules initially formulated by Phillips in 1824 and subsequently revised with the Bengkulu rules associated with Raffles that came in the trail of the latter’s convicts in 1825. These protocols were further reconfigured in the 1840s during W. J. Butterworth’s governorship of the Straits Settlements between 1843 and 1855. Known subsequently as the Butterworth rules, the new disciplinary scheme was organized around rewarding “good behavior” and punishing “a contrary line of conduct.”118 Penang’s favorable appraisals of convict labor and behavior, intended in part as a tribute to its disciplinary scheme perfected over the course of more than half a century, gave way to a fundamentally different attitude about bandwars in the late 1850s and a shift away from a positive view of itself as a penal colony. In Penang and elsewhere in the Straits Settlements, government officials and European settlers turned away from regarding them as beneficial cheap labor and increasingly saw them as dangerous offenders and threats to the maintenance of law and order, particularly in the wake of the uprising of 1857 in India. A first step toward ending transportation to the Straits Settlements was the closing down of Chinese convict traffic from Hong Kong in October 1856.119 The following year, with the outbreak of mutiny and rebellion in India, officials in Penang, Singapore, and Malacca balked at Calcutta’s proposal to ship prisoners to their settlements: both those locked up in jails in India who were moved out to make room for huge numbers of captured mutineers and rebels and, subsequently, the mutineers and rebels themselves. Penang administrators vehemently objected to accepting any mutineers and rebels: in their eyes these “desperate characters” were dangerous men that they had consistently sought to keep away. As they informed Calcutta in no uncertain terms, they were reluctant to take in a “body of mutinous seditious sepoys” because such men exercised “considerable influence with the rest.” “[D]ischarged sepoys,” in their estimation, were especially menacing because they were “more intelligent and full of intrigue than the ordinary run of convicts” and would contaminate the minds of the convict body.120 When Calcutta insisted on sending mutineers and rebels, Penang claimed that it could only accommodate a small number—60 in all—whereas 138

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Singapore could host as many as 300. Its senior official claimed that the island was not organized “for the safe keeping of desperate men” because it had no convict guards or burkundazes, and its “petty officers,” who supervised the convict body, were drawn from the ranks of the bandwars themselves. Furthermore, they also pointed out that its convicts were widely scattered in “various works and employment.”121 That is, their settlement was not the right place to handle “desperate men” because its inmates were self-supervised, lived and worked under few constraints, and generally did not misbehave or escape even though they were barely under lock and key and guards were few and far between.122 Nevertheless, some mutineers and rebels ended up in Penang, albeit briefly. The superintendent of convicts, Lieutenant G. T. Hilliard, reported that 94 prisoners were dispatched from Bombay in December 1857, of whom 78 belonged to a dangerous “class of men,” by which he meant that they were mostly sepoys, including several with significant military rank and experience: a subadar and several havildars and naiks, “men of considerable influence with the rest and all transported for mutiny and sedition.” Within months many of them were shipped off to the Andamans, a reverse of the 1790s traffic that had led to Penang’s development as a penal colony.123 Fears in Penang—and across the Straits—ran so high during 1857–58 that its authorities also objected to Singapore’s transfer of a Sikh prisoner named Khurruk Singh, a retainer of the well-known rebel Bhai Maharaj Singh, who had fought the British to the bitter end in the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848–49 and was subsequently exiled to and died in Singapore in 1856. In 1857 Singapore decided to ship Khurruk Singh to Penang because of his undue “influence” over its convicts and because its administrators were worried that he would join forces with the newly arriving “rebels and mutineers.” In Penang, however, he would be “a perfect stranger,” incapable of perpetrating “any mischief should he feel so inclined.” Singapore officials also pointed out that a European artillery unit from China was to be stationed in Penang’s Fort Cornwallis.124 Administrators in the Straits Settlements made their case against rebels and mutineers—and political prisoners such as Khurruk Singh—by insisting that such men required special facilities and military supervision that they did not have and expressly had to acquire at the outset of the nineteenth century to watch over the 73 poligars. Moreover, as local officials maintained, their disciplinary system was designed to hold ordinary criminals and not desperate characters—whether from India, Ceylon, or Hong R aj a s a n d Robbe r s i n Pe n a ng

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Kong.125 Consequently, they worried about mutineer convicts who “could easily overpower their [special] guard of Malays,” even though the latter were armed with pistols and especially hired to monitor the new arrivals. Penang also took other precautionary measures; it sent away two men “who appeared influential amongst the body of mutineers” to other stations in the Straits and disallowed boats from traveling to the Andaman Islands, where the bulk of the mutineer convicts were housed.126 The panic ushered in by the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 and the organization of the Andamans as the principal penal settlement for convicts prompted administrators in Penang and elsewhere in the Straits to rethink their islands’ penal roles. By then Penang had already experienced the benefits of having had several thousand convicts work in different capacities on the island for over half a century, laboring lives that the bandwars themselves equated with naukari or service for the East India Company and the empire it had constructed across the Indian Ocean. Chapter 4 completes the bandwar story of naukari by detailing the penal history of Singapore, which became the primary insular prison in the Straits Settlements and not coincidentally the principal port and strategic hub in the Strait of Malacca. A follow-up discussion (chapter 5) serves as an epilogue that tracks the afterlives of convicts once the convict establishment was disbanded in the Straits in the 1860s and 1870s and their coerced labor gave way to other forms of dependent labor, needed in much larger numbers for the burgeoning plantation and mining economy of the region.

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Map 6. Lieutenant Philip Jackson’s map of Singapore, 1828

Map 7. George Coleman’s map of Singapore

Fou r

“Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath” Convict Workers and the Making of Colonial Singapore, 1825–1870s

The apprehension of Cunden in Bangalore in March 1821, more than a year after he escaped from Penang in February 1820, triggered the decision to establish Singapore as the newest of the “Sydneys of Southeast Asia.” That is, his testimony about his escape, the conditions under which he worked, and the facility with which he returned to India prompted the Madras authorities to question the stringency and effectiveness of its disciplinary regime and to seek alternative destinations for their convicts. In their estimation, local officials were not sufficiently vigilant about how bandwars worked and lived in that settlement. As they reminded their counterparts in Penang, convicts were expected to perform “hard labor in irons for life,” as long as they were healthy and strong enough to do so.1 In 1850 the government of India deemed Singapore, 25 years after its inauguration as a penal settlement, the prime location to house one of the most famous political prisoners banished overseas prior to the 1857 Mutiny/ Rebellion, the well-known Sikh rebel Bhai Maharaj Singh, and his “disciple,” Khurruk Singh. (Subsequently, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was exiled to Burma in 1858 and died there in 1862.) For his fiercely subaltern career as a political, military, and religious leader in Punjab, Bhai Maharaj was branded a “state prisoner” when he was finally captured at the end of 1849 and peremptorily banished without a trial—once Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (James Andrew Broun Ramsay) had agreed not to execute him for fear of transforming him into a martyr. Authorities at all levels of government considered Bhai Maharaj’s expulsion from his territorial base of support imperative because he was a stumbling block in British efforts to consolidate control over the Punjab, newly annexed in March 1849. By removing him entirely from India, their intention was to cast him into oblivion overseas 143

Figure 3. Parade of convicts, Singapore, ca. 1869. National Archives, Kew, Surrey, UK.

by erasing the presence of a celebrated military and religious leader who had been such a thorn in the side of the colonial government, and in the long run, any memory of him.2 More so than with criminals transported across the kala pani, the exiling of political prisoners was intended to remove people from their strongholds and the hearts and minds of the local population. This chapter examines the development of Singapore—acquired by the East India Company from the sultan in Lingga (later sultan of Singapore) and the Temenggong in 1819—as an insular prison, from when it first received bandwars in 1825 to its acquisition of the largest convict population in Southeast Asia by the time the two Singhs arrived in 1850 and its emergence as a major entrepôt in the region. My discussion focuses initially on the transportation of convicts to Singapore in the wake of Cunden’s escape to highlight the different uses and values that authorities in India, on the one hand, and their counterparts in the penal colonies, on the other hand, ascribed to transportation. Indeed, the very decision by the Madras government to suspend its penal traffic to Penang in 1821 speaks to its interest in upholding transportation as a harsh punishment that inflicted a “just measure of pain.” In its view, 144

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Figure 4. Convict jail (main entrance), Singapore. National Archives, Kew, Surrey, UK.

it was incumbent on penal colonies to enforce the sentences, which spelled out varying degrees of constraints and time periods of labor for the convicts. These conditions, moreover, required penal administrators to exercise a level of supervision and vigilance that was seemingly absent in Penang, as evidenced by Cunden’s decampment, but seemingly more effective in Bengkulu, where Madras convicts were sent beginning in 1822. The chapter also highlights the ways in which the penal regimen in Singapore grew out of protocols developed in Bengkulu and Penang and fit into a larger system of colonial control and domination organized around managing the island’s multiethnic and multicultural population with a limited number of European officials and a modest military and police force. Over time, Singapore’s convict regulations amplified and refined earlier rules to match its labor imperatives centered on mobilizing and taming convict bodies to perform naukari or service. As elsewhere, penal discipline in Singapore was primarily aimed at exploiting convict labor, the results of which this chapter traces by documenting in extenso the convicts’ handiwork over time. While it touched on their reformation—paid lip service to Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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it, I would argue—its primary emphasis was on maximizing labor output and minimizing maintenance costs, an overriding concern that shaped the disciplinary system under which they lived and worked. Corporeal violence, severe when inflicted, was played down in the name of taming convict bodies into becoming productive workers. Discipline was enforced through practices that differentiated and categorized convicts according to their willingness to become laboring bodies in exchange for the promise of some degree of freedom in the future, as the next chapter further develops. As in Penang, their exertions enabled Singapore to clear its thickly forested lands and build an infrastructure vital to its development as a major colonial port city in the late nineteenth century. Nowhere in the Straits, however, was convicts’ coerced labor more effectively and massively deployed than in Singapore, where they transformed the island into a major entrepôt and strategic hub for the British Empire in the Indian Ocean.3 And nowhere did local authorities make more of a concerted effort to compile information on each and every convict, a surveillance project aimed at making criminal offenders into pliant workers but also having the unintended consequence of making them more as visible as people. Far different was the regimen imposed on Bhai Maharaj Singh and Khurruk Singh, who were “closely and carefully watched.” Housed in the “upper rooms” of the newly constructed jail on Pearl’s Hill, they were physically separated from the convict body, even more so than were the 73 poligars in Penang earlier in the century, and were only allowed visits from the sheriff, the assistant resident, and the surgeon, all three European officers. Their “custody” instructions directed authorities to post a special military guard and designate a “trustworthy non-commissioned European officer or government servant” to keep an eye on them, with the latter instructed to see them “at least twice every day.” The directives also emphasized that Bhai Maharaj was a “state prisoner” who was not to be “treated with any unnecessary rigor,” that is, not manhandled as bandwars routinely were. Their “liberal” rations and privileges also set them apart; they had better food than their fellow inmates, exemption from the manual labor required of all able-bodied convicts, and even a cook to prepare their food. On one occasion in 1853, they were even granted permission to write “home,” a concession not afforded convicts who were only authorized to receive letters through the superintendent.4 The men’s letters make for fascinating reading because they offer a rare glimpse into exilic minds “near China beyond the seas far far distant from 146

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Juggernath,” as Khurruk Singh put it in mapping his geographical coordinates for his epistolary recipient in Punjab, acknowledging the island’s considerable Chinese presence. Unfortunately, except for the occasional petition pleading for emancipation from penal servitude and repatriation and the equally rare escape accounts recounted in the previous chapter on Penang, comparable traces for transmarine convicts do not seem to exist. Thus, to highlight the lived experiences and thoughts of the Singhs is to underline the extent to which bandwar lives were different because they centered on coerced labor and yet similar in terms of the wrenching emotional loss experienced by men and women banished across the kala pani. While Singapore did not object to hosting political prisoners—prior to the arrival of the two Sikh rebels a handful every year were transported for political crimes—a few administrators expressed caution about allowing a high-profile prisoner such as Bhai Maharaj Singh to take up residence on the island ostensibly as a “convict,” which they rightly emphasized he was “not.” Their preference was that he be shipped to Moulmein because they feared that he would eventually end up a free man in Singapore by demanding “a writ of habeas corpus, which would have resulted in his being set at liberty.”5 Seven years later, in 1857, the European community spoke up en masse against Calcutta’s proposal to transport rebels and mutineers to the Straits Settlements, their concerns increasingly leading many to conclude that the price of remaining a penal colony was much too high. In Singapore—and later in Penang—the alarm in 1857 was exacerbated by the perceived role of Khurruk Singh, who was released from jail after Bhai Maharaj Singh’s death in July 1856, in agitating convicts to take up arms against the local British authorities. Singapore emerged as a destination for convicts in the aftermath of Cunden’s escape, when Madras officials sought other venues for their criminals. Initially they sent prisoners to Bengkulu, even though they were aware that Singapore was willing to host and its “eastern” location made it a less “easy” place from which to escape. 6 The traffic to Bengkulu was short lived, however, because the settlement was turned over to the Dutch. Thereafter, in 1825, British officials moved quickly to relocate Bengkulu’s 773 convicts, briefly advocating leaving them in place before opting to transfer them to Singapore and Penang along regional lines, so that all the Madras convicts, mostly recent arrivals, were kept together at one site.7 Before Singapore and Penang had an opportunity to respond to the plans advanced by authorities in Calcutta and Bengkulu, however, Bengkulu’s Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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convicts were shipped to both venues. In the ensuing scramble, the best laid plans of keeping Bengal and Madras convicts apart and relocating each group en masse to one or another locale fell by the wayside. As a result, Singapore ended up receiving both Bengal and Madras bandwars even though the latter were originally intended for Penang; Kinnuck Mistree was part of the former batch. In March 1825 the brig Horatio evacuated 81 convicts (80 from Madras and 1 from Bengal), arriving in Singapore on April 18 with one less person than it started with: 73 males, 1 female, and 6 additional male prisoners on short-term sentences. Later that month the schooner Anne conveyed another batch from Bengkulu; its 122 convict passengers, all originally from Bengal, disembarked at Singapore on April 18. Of that number, 89 (88 males and 1 female) were serving life and 33 were serving short-term sentences.8 Thus, Singapore emerged as a penal colony much in the way that Penang did, through the transfer of inmates from another insular prison, in the latter’s case from the Andamans when that settlement was abruptly shut down in 1796. Singapore was more than ready to capitalize on its first group of bandwars. As local authorities reported, they had convict lines in place, capable of housing as many as 600 to 700 people and of expanding to accommodate a larger population of 1,200 to 2,000 people. Furthermore, they were familiar with deploying coerced labor, having briefly experimented with their local prisoners. In October 1822 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who was back in Singapore from Bengkulu, directed his subordinates to employ their local inmates to “public advantage,” by which he meant having them construct roads under the supervision of Lieutenant Phillip Jackson, the island’s assistant engineer and executive officer and surveyor of public lands. These men were expected to toil on the roads from 6:00 to 11:00 a.m. and then again from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m., in lieu of “hired laborers,” who were difficult to procure on the island.9 (See Lieutenant Jackson’s 1828 map to view the streets that convicts had constructed by 1828). Within months of their arrival in Singapore convicts were at work, mostly building roads and repairing streets. A statement compiled at the end of 1825 notes that 147, or almost three-fourths of the 195 able-bodied men, were engaged in public projects of one sort or another; an additional 29 were assigned to various individuals who, in return for employing them in various capacities, were required to feed and clothe them. Those on the government payroll, 168 in all, cost 3 rupees 6 annas per person per month. Six of the 201 convicts were subtracted from the overall total because 2 were women (one each from Bengal and Madras) and therefore exempt from hard labor, and 148

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4 died in the interim, reportedly of old age. As the other penal colonies did, Singapore organized its inmates into three classes.10 The island’s 201 convicts in 1826 accounted for about 1.5 percent of the island’s overall population of 12,855, in which Malays (5,697 people); Chinese (4,229); and Bugis (1,442), inhabitants of the southwestern peninsula of Sulawesi, predominated. People from India, other than those in the convict body, were divided up into “natives” of the Coromandel Coast (605) and Bengal (384) and constituted another significant group; Europeans (111), by contrast, represented a tiny fraction or 0.8 percent of the total.11 Thereafter, the bandwar population grew steadily, newcomers trickling in mostly a handful at a time but on a few occasions in larger cohorts. Twelve convicts arrived at the end of 1825 on the heels of the initial 201. They, too, were from Bengkulu but reached Singapore via a much more circuitous route. Originally part of a larger group of 20 Madras convicts who fled Bengkulu just prior to its assumption by the Dutch, they escaped eastward to Palembang, in Sumatra, from where they were seized by the Dutch and eventually handed over to the British. En route to Singapore, the 20 men were initially held in Bangka, an island off the eastern coast of Sumatra (see map 2 in chapter 2), where 8 died in December 1825.12 Penang’s decision in 1826 to urge India not to send any more convicts to that island but instead to Singapore and Malacca and to remove some of its existing population to those two sites expedited the buildup of convicts in Singapore. In 1826 it transferred 81 convicts to Singapore via the Esperanza: 23 from Bengal (all males), 27 from Madras (26 males and 1 female), and 32 from Bombay (31 males and 1 female). Consequently, Singapore’s total shot up to 388 by October 1827, a spurt resulting from groups arriving on different ships from different places, including two sizable cohorts in June and July 1827, a batch of 41 on the Hero of Malown from Calcutta, and another 70 from Penang on the ship Mellish.13 Many more followed in the ensuing months. Sixty-five came from Bengal on the Hercules (25) and Berwickshire (40), followed by another 23, also from Calcutta, on the Marquis of Huntley, and 12 from Bombay on the Mountstuart Elphinstone. By October 1828 the island was home to 561 transmarine convicts—565 including four convicts sentenced by local courts. Of this overall number, 284 or 50 percent were from Bengal, 199 or 35 percent from Madras, and the remaining 79 or 15 percent from Bombay, an area from where fewer ships sailed “east.” More than 350 convicts or over 60 percent were engaged in public works, a different distribution than at Penang, where Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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a large contingent worked as servants for individuals; only 9 or less than 2 percent of the total were women.14 (see map 6, Lieutenant Jackson’s map to view the roads already built by convicts by 1828). The growth in numbers meant that convicts constituted a significant proportion of the population: about 3 percent of the overall total of 18,819 people in the late 1820s. As with the tallies from earlier in that decade, most inhabitants were Chinese (7,575 or 40 percent) and Malays (5,750 or 30 percent), with “natives” from India, divided up into those from Bengal (455) and from the Coromandel Coast (1,440), accounting for another sizable cohort (1,895 or a little over 10 percent). Three other groups registered appreciable numbers: Bugis (1,360), Javanese (634), and Europeans (122 or 0.6 percent of the population).15 Convicts, in other words, were almost twice the number of Europeans on the island in 1825 and almost five times as many by the end of that decade, as well as a little over one-fifth of the overall total of those from India. In these initial years the bandwars were housed in an “open shed, or godown” in the heart of town (near Pearl’s Hill, see maps 6 and 7) under the charge of “four free petty officers, or ‘peons,’ natives of Chittagong [Bengal]” and were lightly managed. According to one source, their supervision entailed a police officer stopping by periodically to call “the roll in order to report to Government that all were present.” Finding them productive and “well behaved,” S .G. Bonham, during his tenure as resident councilor in the early 1830s, discharged the peon officers and replaced them with convict warders, ten in all: five each from Madras and Bengal. In the words of a penal history of the Straits written by a former comptroller of convicts, this “system of convict warders . . . [was] possibly the first venture of the kind made in any penal establishment.”16 Singapore’s convict population multiplied in the 1830s and 1840s, quickly approximating and then surpassing that of the more established penal settlement of Penang. By February 1830 the total had swelled to 628, thrice the number in 1825 at the time of its inauguration as a penal colony. Furthermore—and an aggregate that was even more consequential to the local authorities—almost 75 percent of the total or 460 men were certified as able bodied, a figure revised downward to 420 because 40 were deemed too ill to work. Singapore officials had ambitious plans for the 420 available hands. They proposed assigning 70 to 100 convicts to the cantonment lines to clear the nearby jungle and drain and level its grounds, including cutting down the jungle in nearby Pearl’s Hill, and 100 men to the superintendent of lands to 150

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maintain and build roads, as well as to assist in the clearing and preparation of new grounds. Specifically, they tasked the latter group with clearing the area by the Malay kampong (village) between Flint’s Hill and the Rochor River as well as the river itself and adjoining areas. Another 60 to 70 men were attached to the engineering department of public works, also to do construction, and a group of 25 were sent to build an embankment on the riverside. The remaining prisoners worked in and around the town building roads and streets and keeping the drains clean.17 With numbers on the rise and public works projects ranging far and wide across the settlement, Singapore introduced regulations in 1830 to better manage the convicts. Its administrators essentially adapted rules already tried and tested in Penang and Bengkulu, a change that the first governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Robert Fullerton (1826–1830), readily embraced because of his familiarity with them from his stint in Penang between 1824 and 1826. As in the other Straits penal colonies, convicts were organized into six classes, their assignments partly based on their penal time on the island and partly on their behavior. The Singapore version, however, set a higher bar for admission into the first class and also revised the perks of the second class to 4 rupees a month in lieu of supplies. In other respects, the regulations were identical with those of Penang, with convicts classified and assigned work (or not) according to the category they were assigned. At the two extremes of the classificatory system were a first class of convicts considered the most trustworthy, allowed to provide for themselves and live effectively on their own, and a closely guarded sixth class of “atrocious and abandoned characters and deserters.” In between was a second group of men and women whose conduct was deemed good enough for employment in private service and who were typically hired out to individuals or permitted to work in hospitals and public offices. A third class, who constituted the largest cohort, were entirely male and made up much of the workforce. The fourth class performed similar labor but for an hour more each day than the third class, the additional time marking their status as newcomers or former “atrocious” group members whose improved behavior had led to a promotion or former second-class members demoted for their bad conduct. The fifth category lumped together female convicts with those male bandwars certified as “superannuated” by a medical committee. The “invalid” male convicts, if capable of labor, were expected to do light chores.18 As in other penal settlements, in Singapore, too, manual labor was the exclusive domain of male inmates—in any case, there were never enough Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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women to constitute a separate workforce. Instead the female convicts were assigned “domestic” work, usually confined to the convict lines, and lumped together with the superannuated or invalid males. Local administrators also sought to restrict their movements because they did not want them mingling freely with their male counterparts for fear of sexual liaisons resulting from such interactions. These regulations remained on the books as convict numbers grew in the 1830s. By 1837, Singapore’s total of 875 convicts surpassed Penang’s tally of 852, which had declined from the 1,300 enumerated in 1830. Singapore acquired the larger population because Straits administrators were in agreement, as they were in 1826, that it was the best venue for additional convicts; its labor needs were more critical than those of Penang and Malacca, where public works were “nearly complete.” In Singapore, by contrast, roads and public works were much in demand, including, to cite an 1831 wish list, a courthouse, a church, markets, a Chinese poorhouse, and reinforcement of the convict lines.19 Consequently, when Madras proposed sending 81 convicts on the barque Louisa to be distributed between Penang and Singapore, Governor Bonham diverted the entire batch to the latter settlement because their labor was “more required” there than at other locales, “where from their earlier formation, the road and communications are complete.”20 Singapore made a case for itself as well by insisting that it was optimally positioned to capitalize on the convicts’ services, a sentiment repeated throughout the 1830s when officials across the three settlements agreed that “public works of every description” had yet to be built in Singapore, while Penang did not have pressing labor needs.21 Governor Bonham also advocated on behalf of Singapore when authorities in India sought to redirect convict traffic away from the Straits and toward Burma, specifically to Moulmein and Tenasserim. The Madras government proposed that change because it had received reports about a lax disciplinary system in the Straits, especially Malacca.22 It also briefly entertained the possibility of removing a portion of the Madras convicts already in the Straits to Burma, a request that Singapore flatly rejected after claiming that it had never received that notification. Moreover, as the Straits governor noted in 1837, Singapore could use another 500 convicts. In the end, Madras decided to continue the traffic to Singapore but not to Penang and Malacca. It also instituted a rule whereby all offenders sentenced to transportation by local courts (faujdari adalat) were sent to Singapore, and those sentenced by the Supreme Court to Burma.23 152

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Sir John Peter Grant, a senior Bengal official who visited the island as a member of the 1836 Prison Discipline Committee (he was secretary of the Indian Law Commission) also wrote a brief on Singapore’s behalf; his statement is well worth parsing for the details it offers about the workings of penal labor. Singapore, he wrote, was home to 901 convicts who were mostly not in chains because their irons were generally removed if they behaved well in their first six months. He also mentioned their “abundant” rations and monthly allowance of 1 rupee. Of the overall number, he wrote, 46 collected no support from the government because they fended for themselves, their different status acknowledged in the complete absence of any restraints placed on them. An additional 51 were in private employment, “either old servants of private persons, or in the service of public officer,” their costs assumed by their employers, who were required to pay 4 rupees a month and whatever else they chose to give the convicts. Another cohort, numbering 49, served as peons or sweepers or were charged with superintending the work of other convicts. Invalids and women, numbering 56 in all, constituted another group, all exempt from hard labor. The remaining 672, or nearly 75 percent of the overall number, were “able men” working “on the roads.”24 The convicts employed as “servants” by various individuals—51 (or 5.6 percent) of the total 901 in 1836—apparently did relatively well financially because of the “liberal wage” they received on an island where labor was scarce. As a result, some of the “old convicts” had acquired “considerable sums of money” and “landed property in the town,” as some of their counterparts had also managed to secure in Bengkulu and Penang.25 Much more telling is Sir John’s observation about the “legal” and “rational” conditions under which convicts labored; that is, the overwhelming majority, at least 75 percent (or 672 men of the 901), engaged in “public works.” As he approvingly noted, they were “reduced to a state of slavery, and treated as slaves ought to be treated,” adding that they were “sufficiently fed, clothed, and housed, sufficient labor exacted from them, and no hardship or suffering imposed upon them that is not necessary to the exaction of that labor, and preventing the possibility of their escape or of their disturbing the peace of settlement they are sent to.” Their regimen, he elaborated, was rigorous: The convicts are marched out from their place of confinement before daybreak, in a body amounting to about 400 to a distance at present of about 7 miles, where they are employed in . . . forming a road and drains through a jungle. They are left the free and entire use of their limbs wholly unbound and Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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unfettered, and no way to be distinguished from other laborers except that they work with greater silence, and have a greater cast of gravity over their countenances and manner. They appeared to me to do more work and with a greater constancy of labor than ordinary Bengal free laborers, no scourges and no threats nor indeed any audible fault-finding appeared to be used or necessary. One unarmed (at least apparently unarmed) European, such as would be employed in England to overlook and direct laborers at any public work, governed the whole body which was divided into gangs of a moderate number, each gang being under the charge of a promoted convict also unarmed.26

As this description underscores, the overwhelming majority of convicts were employed in public works in the 1830s, as they had been from the very outset in 1825. And they were so in a greater proportion than at Penang because Singapore restricted the number who were working for individuals in a private or public capacity. Consequently, most able-bodied men were deployed in and around town building roads and clearing and draining marshes to form “regular streets.” In 1831 and 1832 they constructed 10 miles of roads and streets along with a navigable canal. Large numbers toiled on the roads into the “interior” that local authorities deemed critical to extending the government’s reach into areas where Chinese “squatters” were believed to be numerous and violent. In the words of a colonial administrator, convicts constructed “commodious roads” across the settlement to address the “great evil” posed by Chinese migrants who flocked to the island, many venturing into the “interior” to pursue agricultural ventures of one sort or another. In addition, convict workers also laid out plots of land for building purposes, blasted rocks at the mouth of the Singapore River, and assisted in fighting fires.27 By 1837 one-third of the island’s 30,000 inhabitants were Chinese, mostly males, and regarded by colonial officials as “infinitely less tractable and more difficult” to manage “than ten times the same number” from India. In fact, local administrators often voiced more concern about the Chinese than about the bandwars. The former were said to be “docile” in their own country, where they feared its “rule and [system of] immediate corporal punishment,” but were not so in “civilized” Singapore, “whose principles they do not comprehend and whose cautious delays [they consider] . . . as symptoms of weakness,” and where they were freed of “the severe restraints of their own government and its summary infliction of punishment. Many of them [, moreover, are] of the most abandoned character and [are] nearly all arriving in a state of nakedness and absolute starvation.” Whether in Southeast or South Asia, colonial rulers operated on such assumptions about the 154

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barbarism and backwardness of their subject populations in relation to their own civilized regime. Local administrators contended that the Chinese were especially troublesome because they lived in remote areas where the “clearest ground does not in any direction extend above 2½ miles from the town; and there commences an almost impenetrable jungle affording a convenient shelter during the day for vagabonds of every description who come down in gangs to plunder the inhabitants at night.” Consequently, a strong police presence and good lines of communication were imperative to “restrain” them, the latter facilitated by the exertions of convict workers, whose network of roads extended the government’s reach into the “interior” by forging connections to the colonial “town.” (See maps 6 and 7 for layout of the colonial “town” in the early nineteenth century.) At times, local authorities thought of their bandwars as men they could use to control their unruly Chinese population. Local officials also emphasized that Singapore differed from India, where people were more familiar with British rule from having experienced it for a longer period and were “surrounded on all sides by others equally settled and where the great mass of population have from long habit become submissive and easily managed by a few.”28 When Governor-General Auckland (George Eden) visited the “Eastern Settlements” in 1837 he, too, singled out the convict management system for praise, especially its effectiveness in deploying bandwars on public projects. Noting that the settlement was still “in its infancy,” he lauded the great headway it had made in building roads through “impenetrable forests” and in draining “marshy forest soil,” all executed through their labor. He was especially effusive about the guiding hand of G. D. Coleman (1795–1844), the superintendent of lands, public works, and convicts, in exacting “a proper degree of useful labor” from the convict workforce. In that respect, he characterized Coleman—the island’s first superintendent of convicts and public works in 1833, who retained that office until his departure for Europe in mid-1841—as far more successful in managing them than his counterparts in Penang and Malacca, where that responsibility was handled by resident councilors, the principal administrators of those settlements. In addition, the governor-general pointed out that convict labor was far less expensive in Singapore than in Penang, even though the former housed a larger number of inmates, as the overall costs of 20,414 versus 30,834 rupees per annum for food and clothing indicate. That bottom-line calculation always entered into deliberations about the value of convict labor, and all the more so in the Straits Settlements, whose finances were always problematic because of their Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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“deficient revenues, their anomalous and expensive judicial establishment, their objectionable system of finance, . . . [and] their backward cultivation.”29 The cost effectiveness of convict labor in Singapore was one of the few bright spots in the finances of the Straits administration. Most officials attributed its growing financial viability in the 1830s to Coleman’s success in managing the convicts effectively through “a strict but by no means painful discipline.” To cite Grant again—who based his impressions on making the rounds with Coleman—local authorities subjected bandwars to a regimen perfectly calibrated for staying healthy in the tropics, in that the latter ended their workday in the early afternoon after marching a total of 14 miles back and forth from town to their workplace and were not locked up in “solitary confinement.” He also pointed out that they were disciplined through inducements and penalties, namely, the possibility of “eventual promotion” from one class to another for “good conduct” and “the certainty of severe punishment for misconduct.”30 Acts of violence were severely punished, including by the death penalty, and serious infractions by floggings, rarely administered but severe “when inflicted.”31 Most officials also credited Coleman, in his capacity as superintendent of convicts and public works, with shaping the built environment of Singapore in the nineteenth century. He began his architectural practice there in 1825 and designed many of its iconic buildings—before that he had worked in Calcutta and Batavia—and continued doing so during his tenure as superintendent. As Governor Bonham acknowledged in 1841, Coleman not only built much of the early infrastructure of Singapore over the course of his long career as architect but also designed and constructed many prominent buildings, endowing them with a “creditable appearance.” In addition, as superintendent he was involved in surveying several parts of the island; “laying out the town”; and building many of the streets, canals, and bridges completed in the 1830s. In the governor’s estimation, he organized convicts “into a perfect state of discipline” by extracting from them “useful work.”32 Convicts, in other words, did much of the actual labor attributed to Coleman. Coleman’s major projects in the early 1830s included several thoroughfares aimed at creating a new spatial order linking the “town” to its “interior,” including the North and South Bridge Roads, extending northward from the sepoy lines adjoining Pearl’s Hill south of the Singapore River toward the Rochor River after passing through the heart of the colonial town where Europeans resided, worked, and attended church (see map 7). His convict workforce also built the Armenian Church, the first Christian church on 156

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the island, in 1835, completed even as some of the men were employed in finishing up their own jail, specifically in building a wall around their Bras Basah prison quarters.33 (See figure 4 for a late nineteenth century photo of the Bras Basah jail.) To ensure that his work would continue after his departure, Coleman compiled a list of projects that he believed any “steady industrious person” could execute after his departure. These included the construction of new streets of roughly two and a half miles in length along with bridges and canals and housing plots for 1,306 buildings along these proposed streets, and a road along the north side of the Bukit Timah canal. To undertake these and other projects, one senior administrator envisioned a replacement ideally recruited from the ranks of the military, preferably familiar with Hindustani and Tamil, and with “a tolerable acquaintance” with the Malayan language—that is, proficiency in all the languages necessary to communicate with the convict body and the larger “native” community in Singapore. By then many convicts hailed from south India, from the Tamil- and Teluguspeaking areas of the Madras Presidency. Furthermore, the new person would also need to enjoy the confidence of the authorities; know how to settle disputes on the spot, whether involving convicts or people with claims to land through which roads were being built; take responsibility for inflicting corporal punishment on “misbehaving convicts”; assure the authorities that he could keep the convicts under control and useful to the community “instead of a nuisance”; and also be a “gentleman of certain weight in society”—specifications that point to the duties and responsibilities of a job that entailed managing a sizable convict body, building public works, and being a respectable member of the local European community. Straits officials initially settled on Captain John Mann of the 25th Regiment, Madras Native Infantry, as Coleman’s successor.34 That colonial officials conceived of military officers as best suited to supervise convicts and public works reflects their interest not only in ensuring discipline in the convict ranks but also in serving the military and engineering needs of the settlement. Indeed, military men often held key administrative positions in the Straits, at the highest rungs of government and also in directing public works and convicts. In fact, the first British resident of Singapore from 1819 to 1823 was Major (later Major-General) William Farquhar (1774–1839), a military officer, as were General William J. Butterworth, the long-serving Straits governor between 1843 and 1855; Colonel Sir William Orfeur Cavenagh, the last India-appointed governor, who served between Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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1859 and 1867; his successor, Major General Sir Harry St. George Ord, whose term extended between 1867 and 1873; and successive convict superintendents in the 1840s and 1850s in the wake of Coleman, including Lieutenant (later Captain) Henry Man of the 49th Regiment, Native Infantry, Madras, who assumed that position in 1842.35 Singapore was home to a modest military force that dated back to 1819, when Raffles transferred 150 men of the 20th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry from Bengkulu. Although not sizable enough to counter a concerted attack by another European force, namely the Dutch, the contingent was effective in guarding against minor incursions and protecting British interests in the China trade. Fortunately for the British, the Dutch threat diminished significantly in the wake of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, which settled the territorial and commercial differences between the two powers in South and Southeast Asia in time to facilitate Singapore’s rise as a major entrepôt, its strategic location at the south end of the Malayan Peninsula (see map 4 in chapter 3) providing it with an “incalculable advantage” in guarding steam navigation to and from East Asia and India and Europe. “With the Strait of Malacca in her possession,” one writer anticipated, “and with Singapore as a half-way house to provision, recruit, and repair her expeditions, Great Britain is sure of ascendancy in the Far East.”36 Established as a free port by Raffles, Singapore rapidly acquired the welldeveloped “regional trade of Riau and South Sumatra . . . [and] a large part of Penang’s commerce and attracted shipping from Siam, Cambodia, and Cochin-China as well as European shipping from India.”37 By the midnineteenth century its trade surpassed that of Penang, and it was by far the principal British base for trade from India to China and for the protection of British shipping into the South China Seas. It was also a vital way station for Britain’s India-based troops en route to campaigns in China. And proximity to India meant that its “vast military resources” could be mobilized in times of need.38 In the mid-nineteenth century Singapore was home to about 400 soldiers, part of the 1,000 sepoys of the two regiments of Madras native troops stationed across the Straits, with another 400 in Penang, and 100 each at Malacca and Labuan. In Singapore the soldiers were mostly “ornamental guards to the treasury, the Government offices and other public buildings.” Administrators and local European residents alike did not conceive of the military as a safeguard against “internal revolt or disaffection,” although they deployed it against Chinese rioters in 1854.39 158

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Coleman’s instructions for his successors did not have to spell out that “cheap” labor was essential to the completion of public works. At the close of 1840 he supervised 1,152 convicts, a significant proportion of whom were organized into “an orderly and wholesome” workforce. His “body of men” built roads in the trading area of town south of the river, where the land was marshy and required extensive preparation because it was inundated with water three-and-a-half feet deep in the spring (see map 7). Moreover, as colonial administrators were fond of emphasizing to commend themselves, their convict workforce was effective even though the overwhelming majority of the convict body—90 percent of the 1840 population—were guilty of such heinous crimes as murder, arson, dacoity, and thugi, which were liable for capital punishment in other countries.40 That is, their “civilized” disciplinary regime was effective in managing “natives,” even the most atrocious criminals, not that heinous offenders in the colonial imagination were all that different from those not charged with criminal behavior. Under Coleman and his successors, the convicts’ numbers continued to grow in the 1840s and 1850s, an increase that also entailed a change in their regional composition. By 1845 the convict population totaled 1,489, with newcomers increasingly from Madras and Bombay. By the beginning of 1840 the number of Bombay convicts was already 299, the result of several groups arriving in 1839 on the ships Victoria (43 convicts), Adelaide (10), Resolution (16), Mahomoodie (20), and Gleneig (99).41 Local authorities made good use of their expanded workforce. By the time Colonel Butterworth of the Madras Infantry became governor in August 1843, Coleman and his successors had constructed roads measuring 31 miles and 6 furlongs over the course of the previous decade or so, among them Serangoon (7 miles, 0 furlongs), Bukit Timah (9 miles, 4 furlongs), Orchard (3 miles, 4 furlongs), River Valley (3 miles), Tulloh Blangan (Telok Blangah; 4 miles, 4 furlongs), Tanglin (2 miles), and Gaylang (2 miles, 2 furlongs). The first three roads were completed during Coleman’s tenure as superintendent, and the last four were built partly or entirely by his successors. All the roads were conceived of as thoroughfares into the “interior” from the “town” centered on the mouth of the Singapore River. Many of the “new” roads retraced paths carved out by Chinese migrants inhabiting the “interior.” In following their lead, local administrators sought to build a network of roads that extended their reach into areas settled by people perceived as threats to law and order and also to facilitate the island’s agricultural development. A contemporary topographical account described Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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the island, whose total area encompassed a little over 1.4 million acres and circumference measured about 60 miles, as “hills and dales covered with dense forest,” inhabited by Chinese settlers, and “little known” to Europeans.42 According to J. T. Thomson (1821–1884), who became the superintendent of roads and public works in 1844, Coleman constructed Serangoon Road “through alluvial plains” as a “service to the sugar cane planters and gardeners” who had settled there. Similarly, the purpose of Bukit Timah Road was to create a line of communication across “an extensive swamp” that had been transformed into “dry ground, planted with fruit trees, vegetables and other products,” and toward fields covered with nutmeg trees and pepper and gambier plantations farther afield. Orchard Road, too, led into fields, in that case of nutmeg and clove trees. By contrast, as Thomson observed, the only reason for constructing Tulloh Blangan Road, which wended through “a very poor district,” was “to bring a village of Malays more under the eye and control of the police as the inhabitants . . . were well known for their predilections to the pursuit of piracy.” He did not provide a rationale for the shorter roads, the River Valley or Tanglin Roads, which extended toward the Tanglin district and beyond.43 In the early 1840s, first under Captain Stevenson and then J. T. Thomson, an engineer who was the government surveyor of Singapore in 1841 and subsequently its superintendent of roads and works, local authorities also turned their attention to connecting the “town” to the eastern and northern parts of the island. They did so by constructing roads extending across 17 miles and 3 furlongs, specifically the Pyah Laebar (Paya Lebar), Tannah Merah, and Siglap Roads, which stretched beyond the Kallang and Geylang districts; Changi in the Geylang area; and to the north, the Kranji and Buloh (possibly Sungei Buloh). As the routes established in the previous decade and a half did, the new lines toward Kallang and Geylang sought to facilitate the agriculture of the island by linking up with the “eastern part” where settlers had started coconut and sugar plantations. And the roads northward were perceived as links to “fertile soils and jhills [marshy or inundated lands]” that were “covered with plantations of gambier and pepper” and, in some locales, sugarcane. Local administrators also conceived of the northern route as connecting Singapore and Johore, meaning that it led to the “Old Straits of Singapore” or Tebrau Straits, better known today as the Strait of Johore or Johore Strait, separating Singapore from mainland peninsula Malaysia (see map 4 in chapter 3). And the Serangoon and Changi Roads were conceived of as links to the north and the eastern edges of the island, from where “piratical 160

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sampans were formerly fitted out to attack Cochin China on the way to the Singapore harbor.”44 Over the course of 1843–1844, 60 convict laborers were solely employed in repairing old roads. Other groups worked on the Bedok, Paya Lebar, Siglap, and Tanah Merah Roads, which together extended over 10 miles and 2 furlongs in the central eastern part of the island. By then, Captain Stevenson estimated that its public roads measured about 60 miles in all.45 In 1844 Thomson submitted plans to build additional roads to access “fine lands,” ostensibly to enhance the island’s agricultural production. He suggested lines northward to the Johore Strait, much along the course of Kranji, but east of it toward the Sembawang and Seletar districts. That initiative led to the building of the Teah Pyah (Toah Pyoh), Chink Kinee Chow Chin Kang (Chan Chu Kang), and a connecting branch road to Seletar. He also proposed roads west of Chinatown into the “river valley” and the areas of Pandan and Peng Kang, ending up in Tanjong Gul. He expected these routes also to connect the “town” to the “interior” and have the added effect of hiking up the price of government lands in the town. To expedite construction, Thomson proposed contracting Chinese “coolies,” who he believed would cost less and work faster than convict laborers. By his calculations, a single Chinese coolie was capable of handling the work of two bandwars in road building and laying 1,000 bricks for every 600 a convict could do in a single day. Furthermore, he believed that Chinese workers would free up convicts to labor in and around town, where they were much needed in constructing streets and buildings. And he intended to deploy them on building crossroads between major routes once their work in town was done. 46 The idea was not to give up on cheap convict labor but to divert bandwars to other projects while Chinese labor expedited the completion of much-needed “public works.” Governor Butterworth forwarded Thomson’s plan with his endorsement and sought Calcutta’s approval for a new round of road building in Singapore. In part the governor’s willingness to hire additional labor was to prioritize road networks that would open up police and administrative access to the “interior,” particularly the southwestern coast and the southeastern and northeastern extremity of the island, and capitalize on the agricultural productivity of the lands in the outlying areas. Since his arrival in August 1843 to assume the Straits governorship, his Singapore administrators had worked on the Serangoane Changu (presumably meaning Changi) and Kranji Roads, the first of which they had completed and the second of which they were Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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about to finish. He argued for the importance of crossroads in enhancing the agricultural prosperity of the island, specifically proposing to undertake work on four such roads. His plan was to have much of the construction done by Chinese contract labor.47 Once Calcutta signed off on hiring Chinese workers, Thomson began in earnest in October 1845 to finish the four roads: the Chan Chu Kang (11 miles), a crossroad from Seletar (2–14), a road to Soongie Bruas (8¼), and another to Tanjong Goah (12½ miles). By January 1848 the resident councilor declared that Chan Chu Kang, as local Chinese inhabitants termed the route, was complete and to be renamed Thomson Road to honor the superintendent. The newly christened road extended from Serangoon and Garden Roads for 12 miles in a northerly direction toward the Johore Strait; from St. Andrew’s Church in the heart of the town it covered a distance of 14½ miles and was 30 feet wide. He also announced that the Seletar crossroad that branched off from the Chan Chu Kang between the sixth and seventh miles in the direction of the Seletar River was also done and 2 miles in length. Like other roads constructed in that period, these new lines served a dual purpose: to assist Chinese planters who inhabited the “interior” and “to check crime, and materially contribute to facilitate the apprehension of violators of the law.” As the resident councilor noted, the area of Chan Chu Kang and the nearby Seletar River was once frequented by pirates and “other questionable characters,” including the “notorious Meo Yang Kwan . . . implicated in the atrocious attack, murder and pillage at Galang” in July 1847.48 At the behest of Calcutta, Governor Butterworth also turned his attention to refining the Straits system of convict management. In 1845 he proposed new regulations to replace the existing rules in place since 1830. The following year the “Butterworth rules” were implemented under the supervision of the superintendent of convicts in Singapore and his counterparts in Penang and Malacca.49 In contrast to his “mother country,” where Butterworth believed prison discipline had attained “such perfection,” he perceived the Straits system as different but well suited to the “character” of the people of India, whose principal attribute was “indolence.” Therefore, local administrators had to ensure that penal exile entailed “hard labor,” which he claimed helped in “the moral improvement of the prisoners.” In his estimation, Coleman understood that dynamic perfectly during his tenure as superintendent between 1833 and 1841 when convicts, the governor emphasized, citing Grant, were “reduced to a state of slavery . . . [and] sufficient labor exacted from them.”50 162

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In the governor’s opinion, the achievements of the local authorities in the Straits were all the more commendable because the local inhabitants, mostly Malays and Chinese, were the “most depraved” people he had ever encountered. And transmarine convicts, while also degenerate, were capable of productive labor if managed effectively, as Coleman had demonstrated by maintaining “excellent order” through “firm consistency and uncompromising spirit.” By contrast, the governor regarded Captain Stevenson, his superintendent in Singapore in 1845, as wanting because the latter’s “loose and unsatisfactory” regime afforded inmates “more leniency” than was “expedient,” proof of which were the Christian, Muslim, and Hindu holidays he allowed convicts to take off from work, irrespective of their religion, caste, country, or gender. In Butterworth’s eyes, Stevenson’s leniency was all the more surprising because the latter was aware that a group of convicts had plotted to murder him. The Butterworth rules ended some of the practices permitted by Captain Stevenson, not only with respect to holidays but also allowing convict families to move into the lines and male and female convicts to mingle freely. The new regulations also proposed limiting, with the intention of terminating outright, the custom of loaning convicts out to private individuals as servants. Earlier administrators, the governor noted, had permitted that arrangement partly because it relieved the government of their maintenance costs by passing those on to their private employers. In his opinion, however, the practice “demoralized” all servants in the Straits because convicts corrupted their “free” counterparts. Moreover, he lamented the way in which they were recruited: not because of their “good behavior” but because of their “smartless” character, implying that those selected were simple minded and easily molded into the type of help their masters desired. Nor was he pleased with the extra wages they earned as servants, over and above the 4 sicca rupees per month that “able bodied convicts” were granted when hired out through the superintendent.51 Governor Butterworth, a former military man, also took issue with a proposal submitted by Lieutenant H. Man, the Singapore superintendent of convicts, urging that political offenders and sepoys charged with mutiny be separated from the rest of the convict body and utilized as peons by local administrators. To the governor that seemed much too indulgent toward soldiers guilty of a “grave” offence. His directive therefore was to leave political offenders in with the rest of the convict body and subject to the same arduous labor regimen.52 The only exception he made—actually Calcutta made that decision—was the special status accorded the two Sikh rebels who arrived in 1850 as state prisoners. Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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The governor’s new regulations preserved the sixfold classification system in place in Singapore since 1830 but altered the stipulations under which male and female convicts were grouped into each category. The first class was made up of “trustworthy convicts” and not offenders of the “worst description,” who were shackled and housed “in a separate jail and never allowed to move out without being watched,” as had been the case in the earlier scheme. Butterworth’s first class was akin to the fifth class of the previous regime, whose members were allowed “out on security” and only required to be present at the monthly muster. (See figure 3 for an 1869 photo of a convict muster.) In the new formulation, by contrast, convicts were ranked in the first grouping only after they had been on the island 16 years and were certified to have behaved well by the superintendent, a very different standard than the earlier rules for the equivalent fifth class. Under the previous regulations, convicts entered the ranks of the “trustworthy” after a year or two on the island, a period during which Butterworth envisioned inmates undergoing “every hardship short of inhumanity” so that they would not become “indifferent to their exile.” In addition to imposing a 16-year minimum, the governor also revised the frequency of the muster from monthly to every 15 days. Furthermore, any misbehavior by first-class convicts led to their immediate relegation to a different class. As before, “trustworthy” convicts fended for themselves and lived wherever they chose to do so as long as they appeared for their muster. The new second class—the equivalent of the fourth class in the previous regulations—consisted of convicts entitled to serve as petty officers (tindals), orderlies, and peons in public offices, including the convict department. However, none were ever involved in guarding the Sikh rebels. Local administrators preferred having convicts watch over their fellow inmates because the latter were said to be “less open to bribery and corruption than free men, as detection would ensure them corporal punishment and degradation to the lowest caste with the loss of money allowance.” Male and female convicts of the second class were also employed in hospitals and other public offices. When not at work, they were expected to spend their nights in the closest convict lines. The Butterworth rules also specified that convicts in the second category had to have been on the island for 5 years if their sentence was for 7 years, seven if their sentence was 14 years, and 10 years in case of a life sentence. Their perquisites included a monthly stipend of 5½ rupees in lieu of rations and clothes, a change from the earlier scheme under which they received provisions, clothing, and $3 per month. 164

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The third and fourth classes constituted a majority of the convicts and much of the workforce on the roads and other public projects. The two groups corresponded with the second class of the previous regulations that had accounted for 1,002 (or 75 percent) of the 1,319 convicts in Singapore in 1845. The new system divided up the old second class into two categories on the basis of time served on the island. That is, the third class consisted of those on the island for at least 1 year if their sentence was for 7 years, 3 years if 14, and 5 years if a life sentence. The fourth class, by contrast, consisted of the new arrivals, the cohort from which most escapees typically came. This category of prisoners remained in the fourth class until they had served the time to enter into the third class. Under the new rules, members of the third class were expected to work from 6:00 to 11:00 a.m. and then from 1:00 until 4:00 p.m., or from 5:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m., during which time the men were unshackled; at night, however, they were “properly secured.” In addition to rations and clothes, they received a monthly allowance of Rs. 1-1-7 or 1 rupee 1 anna and 7 pice (1 rupee equals 16 annas, 1 anna equals 12 pice or pies), ostensibly to purchase condiments. The fourth class, who were guarded more closely, labored primarily in and around town, were restrained by “light double irons,” and worked from 6:00 to 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. They received rations and clothing but no money allowance until their second year on the island. Butterworth’s newly constituted fifth class was identical to the first class under the previous regulations. Numbering 123 in 1845 (or 9.3 percent of the total), this cohort consisted of the “worst description of offenders,” who were subjected to the harshest regimen: the same work hours as those of the fourth class but in “heavy irons” and locked up at night, and provided with no monthly allowance, only rations and clothing. The sixth and final class consisted of invalids capable of doing only light work as sweepers or in breaking stones for the roads. It also included the superannuated and female convicts not included in the second class. Women in this grouping were generally tasked with sweeping and cleaning the convict lines and at times with heavier chores, such as the mixing of chunam or lime plaster or other forms of hard labor, in case of misbehavior. To enhance discipline in the convict body, Governor Butterworth also urged his officials to assemble detailed information about the inmates. In his view much of their information was “defective” and needed to be revised and augmented by the collection of facts and figures on each and every bandwar in the three penal settlements, particularly relating to their sentences Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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(crimes, dates), classification (which class, beginning when, and why), and work assignments. He also wanted all punishments inflicted in the Straits documented (what punishments and why), a record he expected officials to consult when making their reclassification decisions. Furthermore, he asked that corporal punishment exceeding 24 lashes not be administered without a doctor present. His rules also prohibited convicts from selling or bartering their clothes or blankets and restricted holidays to particular groups and times: none for fourth- and fifth-class members, two days each for Holi and Dashera for Hindu convicts in the third and sixth classes, and four days for Muharram for Muslims in these same two groupings.53 The new rules restricted festival attendance by religion even though people from all communities had long participated in these celebrations. The Butterworth rules organized Singapore’s 1,425 convicts in June 1847 into six categories: 194 (191 men and 3 women, or 13.6 percent) were placed in the first class, 101 (or 7 percent) in the second, 918 (or 64.4 percent) in the third, 110 (or 7.7 percent) in the fourth, 25 (1.7 percent) in the fifth, and 77 (or 4.7) in the sixth (38 men and 39 women). (An additional 6 convicts from Hong Kong increased the tally to 1,431; and 124 men sentenced to hard labor by local courts were added to the mix to make a total of 1,555 convicts in the settlement.) Per the new directives, the 194 first-class members were self-supporting; that is, they provided for themselves. The second-class members conformed to specifications as well. The 101 male convicts worked in various capacities, including as duffadars (petty officers in charge of laborers), tindals (petty officers, attendants), peons, and orderlies in the Convict Department (70 men), orderlies to the head of the Convict Department (2), and various service roles (29 in all): in the offices of the governor (1 person), resident councilor (1), courthouse (2), recorder (1), St. Andrew’s Church (3), institution (2), lockup house (1), flag staff government hill (4), flag staff Mount Faber (3), European hospital (4), convict hospital (4), lunatic asylum (2), and local coalshed (1). As for those assigned to the third, fourth, and fifth classes, that is, the overwhelming majority of the convict body, they made up the workforce on the roads and other public works, albeit with different levels of supervision and restraints. In all, 959 men from these three groups, or 67 percent of the overall total of 1,425, were engaged in “public” work, ranging from building and repairing roads (Bukit Timah, Teluk Blangon, River Valley, Tangling, Gelang) and bridges (on River Kellang, Rochor), cutting grass (in 166

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the Esplanade, burial grounds), clearing the jungle at various sites, filling swamps (behind Government Hills, the Botanical Garden), and breaking chunam, to tending to tree plantings, among other tasks. Not all the convicts were at work, because 96 people were sick and hospitalized. That was not unusual. Generally, a tenth or so of the convict body at any given time were ill and excused from work. In addition, 65 men were classified as invalids and thus employed in light work, as were the female convicts; another 12, also listed as invalids, were listed as much too old to work.54 The governor’s injunctions against loaning convicts out to individuals for private service notwithstanding, 20 men, part of the 194 categorized as first class, did precisely that kind of service, including 5 who worked for him. The remaining 15 were assigned to 13 individuals, notably 5 employed by Lieutenant Man, the superintendent of convicts; 2 each by Dr. Thomas Oxley, the government surgeon, and J. F. Burrows; and 1 each for the rest, who included Thomas Church, the resident, and the Reverend B. P. Keasberry, a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The information compiled in 1847 is also instructive in charting the changing regional origins of the inmate population: 50 percent from Bengal, 35 percent from Madras, and 15 percent from Bombay in 1828. However, with newcomers in the 1830s and 1840s mostly hailing from the latter two areas, by 1847 only 138 or a little less than 10 percent of the overall total of 1,425 convicts were from Bengal, whereas Madras and Bombay tallied 755 (almost 53 percent) and 532 (37 percent) convicts, respectively. (Coincidentally, migrants from southern India, mostly Tamil speakers, increasingly constituted the overwhelming proportion of the Indian population.) Roughly 3 percent, or 42, were women, a surprisingly large number given Butterworth’s opposition to admitting them into the Straits. He characterized his opposition in moral terms: he did not want women and men to mix and preferred keeping them apart through solitary confinement. Otherwise, most women “soon after their arrival,” he claimed, are “enceinte . . . [from] means . . . too disgusting to mention.” Therefore, he wanted the Madras government to fall in line with the Bengal government and not send female convicts to the Straits but to ship them to Tenasserim.55 Briefly, the convict traffic to Singapore slowed down in the closing years of the 1840s because authorities in India redirected it to Arakan and Tenasserim in 1847, when they ascertained shipping costs to be cheaper to those two locales than to the Straits. However, they resumed it in 1851 when the Commissioner of Arakan requested that convicts not be sent to his division Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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because his jails were completely full; he also proposed transferring life convicts in his jails to the Straits to ease the overcrowding.56 In the interim Straits administrators entertained the possibility of hosting convicts from other areas, specifically from Hong Kong and Ceylon, whose British officials sought overseas destinations for some of their criminals. The Straits government did not reject either overture outright, although Penang made it clear that it did not want any Chinese convicts, whereas Singapore and Malacca suggested that Tenasserim and Sind in India were better locales for them and Malacca better than Singapore for Ceylonese convicts because steamships from Ceylon called at Singapore but less so at Malacca.57 Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century a British imperial circuit of coerced labor linked Sind in western India and Mauritius in the western Indian Ocean with Ceylon at the gateway of the eastern Indian Ocean and the Strait Settlements at the Strait of Malacca leading into the South China Sea and Hong Kong. Bhai Maharaj Singh and Khurruk Singh arrived during the slowdown in convict traffic—also a time when Chinese convicts from Hong Kong were added to the mix. When the two men set foot on the island in June 1850 it housed 1,402 bandwars, a slightly smaller population than the tallies recorded in the late 1840s. In 1847–1848 the count was 1,414; it was 1,448 in 1848–1849 and reached 1,492 in 1849–1850 before falling to 1,402 (which included 6 convicts from Hong Kong) in 1850 after 50 Bombay convicts were transferred to Penang, 63 died, and 47 newcomers arrived.58 By mid-1851, the total had declined to 1,379, a number that included 25 male convicts from Hong Kong. Once the convict traffic was resumed in 1851, the bandwar population steadily increased, attaining new heights in the years that the Singhs were on the island. Bhai Maharaj Singh died in 1856, and Khurruk Singh was transferred to Penang in the midst of a panic triggered by the outbreak of the Mutiny/Rebellion in India in 1857. The growth resulted from Singapore’s willingness to take in convicts, with Governor Butterworth announcing at the end of 1852 that the island could accommodate an additional 500 men. He also informed Madras that Penang needed more workers, and therefore future shipments could alternate between those two settlements. He repeated that request in December 1854 when he asked for 200 convicts for Singapore and 300 to 400 for Penang, citing the pressing need for labor for public projects and the availability of newly built barracks in the former settlement.59 With both Singapore and India willing to step up the traffic, the bandwar population soared in the 1850s, first reaching 1,500 before surpassing the 168

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2,000 mark in 1857. The specifics of this surge can be pieced together from the annual comings and goings of convicts. In 1851–1852, 190 convicts arrived, hiking the total up to 1,575. Although the tally dropped to 1,470 (of whom 23 were from Hong Kong) by mid-1852 because of 80 deaths, 14 escapes, and 11 releases of time-expired convicts, it grew to 1,503 by the end of 1852, of whom 209 were from Bengal, 707 from Madras, 552 from Bombay, and 35 from Hong Kong. An additional 85 local prisoners rounded out the entire body to 1,588. In the ensuing months additional newcomers increased the total to 1,630 in mid-1853, followed by 1,888 in April 1854. By May 1855 the tally dropped to 1,755 because of the demise of large numbers and the paucity of new arrivals, but then rose again because of the inflow of large numbers, including 109 women, who grew the total to 1,839 by May 1856 and then 2,193 at the end of April 1857. (Many newcomers, listed as coming from Bengal, were actually from Punjab and the North-Western Provinces, although they arrived on ships from Calcutta, as did the two Sikh rebels from Punjab.)60 The Singhs, who were not allowed to fraternize with anyone other than British officials and were confined in the Pearl’s Hill Jail (built by convict labor at the end of the 1840s) away from the convict lines at Bras Basah (see figure 4 for a photo of the Bras Basah jail) on the other side of the Singapore River, were undoubtedly aware of the sizable inmate population on the island, but not much more. Certainly they did not have access to the details local officials were increasingly accumulating about convicts because Governor Butterworth’s documentation project had stepped up surveillance to demonstrate the “success” of his new regulations in disciplining the convict body to produce “important and multifarious works.” Some bits of information generated were familiar and routine, others less so, and all of it was extremely instructive. 61 So are the details about the two “state prisoners” whom the authorities watched much more closely and reported on much more frequently than any other convicts. An official or two visited and interacted with them regularly, seemingly without a translator present, which suggests that their meetings were conducted in Hindustani, a language widely spoken across north India and in the convict and sepoy communities in Southeast Asia and familiar to some Straits officials whose prior administrative careers were in India. These interactions produced an extensive paper trail because visits were invariably followed up with reports on their mental and physical health, transmitted to the Straits governor and his superiors in Calcutta. By contrast, convict reports, while written for a similar administrative hierarchy, mostly compiled Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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facts and figures annually with the intention of furnishing a cost-benefit analysis of maintenance costs relative to labor productivity value. Consider the following characteristics about the 1,354 convicts on the island in 1851, gleaned from the reports compiled by Thomas Church, the resident councilor, and Captain H. Man, the superintendent of convicts, the two officials most directly involved with convict management. Per the Butterworth rules, the convict body was organized into six categories: 227 in the first class, 106 in the second, 753 in the third, 101 in the fourth, 19 in the fifth, and 78 in the sixth. The remaining 95 were listed as sick in hospital. By place of origin, the smallest percentage, 7.8 percent or 108 individuals, were from Bengal; the highest percentage, 52.9 percent or 716, from Madras; and the remaining 39.2 percent or 532, from Bombay. Only 49 or 3.6 percent of the 1,354 were women, of whom 1 was from Bengal, 27 were from Madras, and 21 were from Bombay. The 1851 reports also identify convict sentences and crimes. All 49 women were under life sentences, as were 1,229, or 94 percent, of the 1,330 male convicts. Of the rest, 14 men were serving a 15-year term; 25 a 14-year one; and 1, 47, and 14, 12-, 11-, and 7-year sentences, respectively. In other words, per the intention of government officials on both the sending and receiving ends of transportation, the overwhelming majority of transmarine convicts were under life sentences. Equally revealing are the specifics about their crimes. By far, most of the 1,354 bandwars—male and female—were indicted for two kinds of serious offenses: robbery with violence and murder. A total of 561 individuals (or 41.4 percent) were charged with the former and 448 (or 33 percent) with the latter offense. Among women the number transported for murder was higher: 43 of the 49 were charged with murder, and only 1 with robbery with violence; the other 5 women were guilty of “cutting and wounding” (2), “assault common and aggravating,” (2), and “offences not specified and miscellaneous” (1). Male convicts were also sentenced for other infractions, namely treason (133), larceny (48), arson (37), and cutting and wounding (37). An additional 10 were transported for “mutiny,” a relatively small number but not in conjunction with the 133 punished for “treason.” That is, a little over 10 percent of the convicts in Singapore were exiled for overtly political crimes, men whose insurgent acts were criminalized but whose actions and status did not warrant the close and costly supervision that the two Singhs required. There were also 10 men sentenced for manslaughter and 6 for escaping and violating their transportation sentences. 62 170

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Especially valuable in the 1851 data is information about literacy rates, a statistic rarely collected on convicts. Apparently, only 100 of the 1,354 convicts (or 7.3 percent) were capable of reading and writing “with accuracy” and an additional 59 “imperfectly”; that is, a total of 159 individuals were literate, to one degree or another, or roughly 11.7 percent of the convict body, a number that is comparable to the 9 percent and 10 percent literacy level recorded for males in India in the 1881 and 1891 censuses, respectively. 63 Both Singhs were literate, as their letters home in 1853 indicate. Instructive as well is the singling out of 17 convicts as having a “military” background, presumably men drawn from the ranks of those sentenced for mutiny. Captain Man’s 1851 report understandably has much to say about convict work. Over the course of 1850–51, his men were engaged in keeping the “interior” roads in good order by executing minor repairs and improving their drainage to prevent flooding. They were also involved in lowering hills and raising valleys, metaling slopes, laying gravel on road surfaces, and planting trees along major thoroughfares. In addition, they undertook several projects that Man specifically identifies: clearing work around Bukit Timah Road, including the building of a nearby canal; similar efforts in the Paya Lebar swamp area, including the construction of various bridges; a ghat near the end of High Street so that boats could land at the Kampong Glam side of the river and a stone wall 850 feet long by 17 feet high fronting Boat Quay; and various efforts to secure water for the town from the springs at the foot of Pearl’s Hill. They also built new barracks for themselves because the old lines were in “ruinous condition.” When completed, the new quarters were expected to house 300 men, particularly those in the fourth and fifth classes, and women. 64 In far more detail than in any previous reports, Captain Man’s account enumerates the “aggregate value” in rupees of convict labor, itemized either by projects or the groups undertaking them, namely, road work, service performed by second-class convicts and the “permanent detachment” of convicts, miscellaneous works, sea wall, cement kiln, boat quay wall, and laterite work. That list is followed by particulars—material and labor costs—about each and every project carried out over the year, 44 in all, ranging from work on major roads (Bukit Timah, Geylang, Kranji, River Valley, Serangoon, Telok Blangah, and Thomson, among others) and town roads, to raising embankments and sweeping in and around town, to building the embankment at Rochor Canal, to repairing the road near the vestry in the English church, to filling up the hollows on the Esplanade, to sloping the hill near the new sheriff’s jail. Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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Both Church and Man also made a point of challenging the perennial lament about whether convict labor was “remunerative to the state” because they believed that such accounting failed to compute the savings accrued from convicts serving as petty officers in various government offices, including the Convict Department. Furthermore, they added, Singapore was among the most expensive places across the Indian Ocean to hire free labor, except perhaps for Mauritius, and therefore what the local administration received in kind was far more valuable than Calcutta and London estimated. The 1851 reports also touch on an aspect of convict labor that increasingly fixated local officials, namely, bandwars with “knowledge of all the necessary trades” or training to acquire those skills. Many penal settlements lacked the variety of artisans that provided essential goods and services in most communities in India. Hence the high praise for inmates from Madras, who excelled as stonemasons, blacksmiths, bricklayers, brickmakers, and rock blasters, and Bombay men, who served as carpenters and painters and did other kinds of work. Understandably, Straits officials increasingly sought men with expertise as “artificers” to reduce the high costs of hiring skilled hands. 65 Finally, Captain Man’s report is also valuable for what it reveals about manumitted convicts. Many former bandwars became herdsmen, that is, owners of cows, which enabled them to work as milkmen. According to the superintendent, that was an easy transition because many were formerly cultivators and therefore more familiar with dairy cattle than most of their “seafaring” fellow inhabitants. Other emancipated convicts drew on their experience as drivers of hacks and bullock carts to become hack syces or cart drivers once they were on their own. Still others became bricklayers, and some even entered the police force, a line of work that local administrators such as Captain Man considered suitable for men with experience as peons and orderlies, the jobs generally held by inmates of the first class. 66 To many a colonial administrator, only a fine line separated convicts from nonconvict subjects. There is much to glean from the 1852 report as well, which is not only equally rich in details but also in aggregate data about all the bandwars sent to the island between 1825 and mid-1852. Over that 27-year stretch Singapore received 3,512 individuals, of whom 595 were from Bengal, 1,695 from Madras, 1,190 from Bombay, and the remaining 32 from Hong Kong. In other words, of the 3,480 sent from India, 17.1 percent were from Bengal, 48.7 percent from Madras, and 34.2 percent from Bombay, a regional breakdown that contrasts with the 1851 cohort of 7.8, 52.9, and 39.2 percent from those areas, respectively. As these two sets of figures indicate, the number from Bengal 172

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declined appreciably, while that from Madras increased over time, a trend that changed in the ensuing years of the 1850s, when many more came from the former area. Informative as well is the comparison the 1852 report offers between the single- and multiyear cohorts relating to crimes and sentences. Most of the 3,480 bandwars, as in the case of the 1851 cohort, were transported for murder and robbery with violence: 1,459 (or 41.5 percent) and 930 (or 26.4 percent), respectively. In addition, 320 (or 9.1 percent) were transported to the island for treason and rebellion, 25 for mutiny, and 19 for sedition. (Two who obviously do not show up in that column are Bhai Maharaj Singh and Khurruk Singh.) As many as 364 of the 3,480, or a little over 10 percent, were transported for political crimes, or roughly the same proportion as in 1851. Burglary (913) and larceny (210) are two other crimes that accounted for large numbers. The long-range data also elucidate why the mid-1852 tally stood at 1,470 even though 3,512 individuals were sent to Singapore over a 27-year period. A shrinkage of almost 60 percent resulted from the demise of 1,355 individuals, or almost 40 percent of the overall number; the transfer of 186 to Malacca and 125 to Penang, for a total of 311 people or almost 9 percent; the release of 225 people or a little over 6 percent; and the escape of 82 individuals or a little over 2 percent. In addition, 26 people never made it ashore because they perished in transit, 12 were not landed (for reasons unspecified), 11 committed suicide, 10 were murdered, 4 were executed, 3 drowned, and 3 were killed by tigers. 67 Focused on recounting the comings and goings of convicts, their laboring achievements, and their deaths by one means or another, these reports say little about their mental well-being other than to note whether the bandwars in general, each of the six classes specifically, and the “security men” or the convict peons and orderlies entrusted with watching over their fellow inmates behaved themselves. When these statements acknowledge their “exceedingly satisfactory” behavior, as the 1849–50 report does, the remarks are about their “quiet,” “orderly,” and “diligent” demeanor.68 Other than such assessments, there is precious little personal information about the men and women incarcerated on the island, except in instances of escapes, as in the case of Cunden, when personal details were essential to facilitate recapture. The occasional medical review or two of prisoners, such as Senior Surgeon J. Rose’s “Report on the Jails and Jail Hospitals of the Straits Settlements” for 1857–58, provide insights not available elsewhere. As his account reveals, a high percentage of Bengal convicts died over the course of that Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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year, a staggering 11 percent of its 890 bandwars, a far higher proportion than the casualty rates for prisoners in jails in Madras (4.7 percent) and Bombay (2.7 percent). The surgeon sought to explain away their deaths by emphasizing that most were recent arrivals and many “old and sickly” to begin with, not the “strong able bodied men” that Singapore sought for its extensive construction projects. He also approvingly cites his predecessor, Thomas Oxley, who attributed the high mortality rates to a “change of diet” for the “up-country men,” who were not accustomed to the rice-heavy meals served in the settlement and preferred “a mixed diet, with fresh vegetables.” Rose’s report also touches on a subject rarely broached in official reports: the mental state of convicts, or their “health and spirits,” as he put it. The newcomers, he writes, suffered high casualties because they were of high caste and love “their native country . . . and the idea of never again seeing their homes, their old and sacred places, the monotony of their prison life, and loss of caste, act powerfully both on mind and body.” Consequently, “they become careless and indifferent about themselves, their food in particular, and some obstinately refuse to eat at all: emaciation sets in, and death by inanition closes the scene.”69 These observations clearly identify one set of responses that many prisoners of all backgrounds had to their exile across the kala pani, including Bhai Maharaj Singh. While Senior Surgeon Oxley’s 1853 “mortality” report justified the deaths of a staggering 96 bandwars by advancing the reasons noted by his successor, including by reiterating that most were “up country” men from the drier climate of Peshawar and Punjab who suffered because of the hot and humid temperatures of the island and an unfamiliar diet, he also mentioned other reasons that are well worth citing for what they disclose about the convicts’ mental health and working conditions. He wrote that the newcomers were in a bad state because they toiled in “sun and rain,” at times waist high in water, after a long journey “under unfavorable circumstances” across the kala pani. Moreover, he added that these men were of “a higher class” and therefore much more affected by “the moral effects and restraints of transportation than those of a lower grade in civilization.” Consequently, many of these men—and he emphasized that he had never encountered this before—became “totally indifferent to their lives and health” and “terribly reckless . . . and care not what they suffer from disease provided they can escape from the degradation of work, many of them have put their eyes out by the application of lime.”70 Bhai Maharaj Singh also turned to using lime, although in his case not because he was attempting to evade manual labor, which he did not have to undertake. 174

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Such accounts of “health and spirits” by the local surgeon were the rule rather than the exception in the case of the Sikh rebels, as evidenced by the reports routinely submitted by their official visitors. In January 1851 Thomas Church, the resident councilor, accompanied by his assistant, A. Hammond, visited what he described as the “very comfortable apartment allotted to the two state prisoners.” He recounted that he sat on a chair close to the bed on which Khurruk Singh was and informed the two inmates that they were in “safe custody” at the behest of the government of India, and that the governor-general had directed Singapore officials to extend them “every reasonable indulgence.” Khurruk Singh’s behavior, on that occasion, was “unbecoming” as he responded with “violence” and “angry” words. Church wrote that he told Khurruk Singh not to ask for things not readily available; he also reported that the latter’s manner was “most disrespectful,” with Singh interrupting several times and demanding “proper food” and a princely sum of a “thousand rupees a day” when asked what he really wanted. The resident councilor reiterated that his conduct was violent and his “use of terms extremely offensive” and “galling,” particularly because they were made in the presence of sepoys. Therefore, he concluded that “coercive measures [were] indispensable” to correct Khurruk Singh’s behavior.71 Local officials continued to monitor the two men closely. An August 1852 update pronounced Bhai Maharaj Singh in “good health” but “emaciated” and largely silent, as he had been from the time he arrived on the island. As the resident councilor put it, “he seldom speaks even when questioned by the visiting officer.” (He was not forthcoming in December 1849 either when he was captured in Punjab, and briefly went on a hunger strike.) As for Khurruk Singh, he apparently toned down his outbursts but not his “disrespectful” stance toward his jailors.72 Over the ensuing months, as follow-up visits by officials reveal, Bhai Maharaj Singh’s health deteriorated, while his companion remained in the “best of health” and “in good spirits.” An early 1853 visit led to the finding that the former had fever attacks and stomach and bowel irritations; the following year the assistant resident surgeon reported that he was blind from a cataract and had “no prospect of cure’; and by early 1856, almost five years into his exile, the Sikh leader was described as “perfectly blind and incapable of moving about unaided.”73 While Bhai Maharaj Singh rarely uttered a sound in the meetings and Khurruk Singh always had much too much to say, as far as British officials were concerned, both men opened up in their letters “home” in 1853, Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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first-person epistolary statements of exilic life across the kala pani that I have not located for other inmates of the insular prisons of Southeast Asia, neither those of their generation nor the several thousand who preceded them. The former began his tale of woe by recounting his disastrous dietary experiment and the loneliness and helplessness he felt that made his life verge on “destruction”: I drank “neem” three years my eyes cannot see. Kurruck Singh continually forbade me to drink neem but I did not leave it off. You have told me that a dog even will not befriend me. So not a single dog has been of any service to me. I had no idea then that what you said was true. I have now become well aware of it. . . . Many were friends in prosperity but no one befriends in adversity. . . . Come to my aid. Oh Lord now that I am on the eve of destruction. . . . Deprived of all power placed in confinement, there is no remedy (for me). Rughoo Nath is the only support who vouchsafes assistance in time. Power is restored I am set free every remedy is at hand. All blessings I received at your hand the moment you come to my assistance.74

Khurruk Singh’s missive strikes a more defiant tone, as he also did in his meetings with his jailors, and even alludes to the possibility of imminent release or escape: There is news of these slaves [convicts?] being set free. We will present ourselves before you . . . . Save me oh lord now that I am lying helpless at your door. Now that being helpless I have thrown myself on the mercy of the lord it rests with him to save or destroy me. Furreeda at the door I saw the ghuryal. They beat innocent, what is to become of us guilty. They beat it every ghurree and chastise it every pukar. There is no rest (oh my heart) to the ghuryal all night long.75

Khurruk Singh concludes his petition cryptically first by naming Singapore; then alludes to a measurement of “15 wide by 20 long” that may have represented the dimensions of his jail “apartment” and postmarks his letter the “26th day of the month of Asarh”; and ends with a few lines, including “we will come within one year send us your hookunnamah (reply)” and a drawing of two figures, one representing a ship and the other the island of Singapore. He also adds a request for medicine. In July 1856, when Bhai Maharaj Singh was clearly ailing and had been completely blind for some time, Singapore officials inquired about the possibility of granting their two state prisoners “a change of air” by providing 176

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them a ride in a gharry or horse-driven cart “a few miles into the country, twice or thrice a week.” They were to be escorted by reliable jail officials tasked with ensuring that they had no contact with any “strangers.”76 The trips never materialized, however, but had the Sikh rebels undertaken them, they would have become better acquainted with their fellow inmates and all that the latter had built or touched in one way or another: roads, vast areas cleared of their rain forests, carts usually driven by them, and the many public projects they had constructed across the island. Bhai Maharaj Singh died three days after the local authorities proposed “a change of air,” and with his passing ended the urgency to maintain an elaborate surveillance protocol. Consequently, they informed Khurruk Singh that he was free to leave the jail but not the island (a stipulation also made to tickets-of-leave convicts). As the “disciple” he was not considered much of a threat, and he was also granted a generous allowance of 60 rupees a month, an amount roughly 15 times what it cost to maintain a convict.77 Thus, the realms of state prisoners and convicts, so scrupulously cordoned off by government until July 1856, came into contact with one another, with Khurruk Singh literally forging a link between the two, his authority and influence no doubt stemming from his prior career as a rebel and his status as a state prisoner. His standing with his fellow inmates was presumably confirmed and enhanced by the first group of Sikh prisoners who set foot on the island in 1854. Almost immediately upon leaving his special jail, which he did in early 1857, Khurruk Singh, described as on “parole” in the words of an official report, “formed association[s] with and obtained influence over the convicts,” an alliance that prompted worried administrators to remove him to Penang, “where he would be a perfect stranger, and . . . unable to perpetrate any mischief should he be inclined.”78 Even before Khurruk Singh sought to join forces with the convicts and the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 threatened to dump mutineers and rebels in the Straits, local officials and their fellow European residents had begun to question the value of remaining a penal colony. By May 1, 1857, on the eve of the mutiny/rebellion, Singapore had accumulated a total of 2,193 (109 women or almost 5 percent) convicts, a substantial increase over the 1,839 enumerated in May 1856. And with the arrival of 517 in the ensuing 12 months from Bengal (361), Madras (56), Bombay (56), and Hong Kong (24), that number would have swelled to 2,356 were it not for the fact that in that same period 154 died, 3 escaped, 5 had their terms expire, and 1 was repatriated to Bengal, lowering the tally to 2,193.79 Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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While local authorities remained appreciative of the convicts’ labor value, they increasingly fretted about having so many criminals in a settlement with a limited military and police presence. The Straits administration report of 1855–56 articulated these conflicting views in characterizing convicts “as an unnecessary evil, entailing heavy expense on this government and polluting the country by their presence” but also “of vital interest” because of their “cheaply obtained” labor at minimal maintenance costs. 80 What was new in these calculations about the “polluting” convict presence was the growing recognition in the European community of Singapore as a major entrepôt whose prosperity could be undermined by “dangerous” bandwars or disturbances involving the sizable convict population. Thus, local authorities vehemently opposed taking in mutineers and rebels, as they previously had other risky groups. For instance, in 1854 local administrators were concerned about the arrival of a “new description of criminals,” namely thugs from Punjab and the North-Western Provinces, who they worried would corrupt other prisoners, particularly local Malays “whose character for treachery leads to the belief that they would become apt and willing scholars in the art of thugism.”81 The newcomers included a group of Sikhs who rioted almost immediately upon arrival. Fortunately for the authorities, some fourth-class convicts helped contain that “serious outbreak.” Curiously, government officials did not associate the Sikh newcomers with their fellow religionists, Bhai Maharaj Singh and Khurruk Singh, perhaps because the two state prisoners were safely lodged behind bars in a separate facility. In 1855 European officials and residents were up in arms about the arrival of a single male convict named “Thom,” short for David Pitcairn Thomas. What alarmed them was not the fact that he had murdered his wife but that he was a European. Within a few hours of his landing, the European community submitted a written protest objecting to “a fellow countryman working in irons, on the public road,” much in the way natives did, which they claimed Europeans could not manage in the tropics. 82 But what really exercised them was their concern that his presence would “lower and degrade the European character in the eyes of the natives and with only a small body of two or three hundred Europeans in a population of upwards of fifty thousand composed for by far the greater part of very turbulent materials it might ultimately be productive of serious consequences.”83 They were also worried that Thom was a “forerunner” of other European convicts because Australia was no longer an option. 178

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Local officials also pleaded their case by emphasizing that they did not have the personnel to manage European inmates, noting that they made do with a single European overseer and a handful of convict petty officers in their management of a sizable bandwar population. Nor did they have, they insisted, the proper quarters for Europeans, who could not possibly be housed with “natives.” Oxley, the surgeon, stated on behalf of several officials that they already had “far too much of the convict element amongst our native population and shudder at the idea of its being introduced among the European part of the community.”84 In other words, they did not want criminality associated with Europeans in a penal colony where that designation primarily applied to the Indians, Chinese, and Malays, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. Across the Indian Ocean, penal transportation and the coerced labor it generated for colonial settlements were sustained by a racist ideology that construed colonized subjects as inferior and degenerate beings whose principal value and redeeming quality was their laboring bodies. For a different set of reasons, Straits officials were also displeased about the 35 female bandwars who arrived with Thom. As they pointed out, they had consistently opposed adding women to the convict mix, in part because they did not have the accommodations to house them in the new lines because its capacity of 20 had already been exceeded by the 25 women residing there. Local officials also noted that three of the new arrivals were blind, a few partially so. European women in the community briefly fixated on one of the female newcomers, their “sympathy and compassion” aroused because she was “young, educated, and a Christian, [and] yet . . . mixed up with heathen females.”85 Nor were local authorities receptive to the Chinese convicts from Hong Kong who began arriving in the Straits in 1847, after they were first transported to Sind in northwestern India in December 1846. In 1856 the authorities finally managed to halt the traffic after 145 were sent to Singapore and 243 to Penang. 86 Nevertheless, although Straits administrators regarded Chinese convicts as more difficult to manage than bandwars, they also thought of them more favorably in some respects. Governor Blundell said as much in characterizing them as “able bodied, intelligent men without prejudice of caste . . . whose habits of life have always been such as to render a change of country a matter of comparative indifference” in contrast to the bandwars, who were mostly “cast down by the voyage and by the change of scenes and habits incident Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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to transportation.” But he also noted that the Chinese prisoners were more escape prone, surrounded by their fellow countrymen, and “objects of interest to the secret society that exist among them,” a charge that local administrators invariably touched upon in making their case against hosting them in the Straits. 87 Furthermore, local officials contended that the Hong Kong convicts were “daring and desperate,” mostly people convicted of piracy and other crimes who, more so than their counterparts from India, required “constant watching and a higher degree of vigilance.”88 That concern was heightened by a violent mutiny on board the General Wood en route to Penang from Hong Kong in January 1848, in which its Chinese convicts seized the ship and killed many of their fellow passengers, including the captain. The ensuing trial in Singapore of 48 of the convict passengers confirmed for Straits officials and residents the urgency of halting the traffic from Hong Kong. 89 European officials and residents alike also worried about adding “desperate characters” to their Chinese population, which constituted about 50 percent of the overall total in 1840—and rose to over 60 percent by 1860—and was believed to be contentious and difficult partly because of the constant struggles between and among secret societies. Over the course of the late 1840s and early 1850s, Singapore experienced three so-called secret society riots—the 1846 Chinese Funeral Riots, the 1851 anti-Catholic riots, and the 1854 Hokkien-Teochew riots—with the 1854 episode involving significant fighting, looting, the deaths of several hundred people, and the burning of several hundred houses. Although the attacks were confined to the Chinese community, the local government found itself unable to contain the violence, which only ended when the factions chose to stop fighting. As recent scholarship indicates, these major civil disturbances grew out of not only power struggles between different secret societies or ethnic groups, namely the Hokkiens and Teochews, but also “a many-faceted economic conflict” that pitted “laborers and capitalists; . . . different revenue-farming syndicates; . . . as well as between Europeans and Asians; and finally between adherents of conflicting views of the economic order.”90 The presence of a substantial bandwar population also began to weigh heavier on the Singapore administration in the 1850s, in part because of the “public nuisance” they had to contend with every year during the Muharram and Dashera celebrations. In 1857 government fears reached a fever pitch prior to the advent of Muharram in September because the festival came on the heels of the uprising in India that had erupted in early May. What added to their apprehension was their long-standing policy of 180

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allowing these festivals to play out year after year, particularly Mohurrum, in which celebrants marked the tragic martyrdom of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad on Ashura, the tenth of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, by processions, majlises (mourning service sessions), and passion plays. Although venerated by the Shi’a Muslim community, the festival was widely commemorated in India in the nineteenth century, including by Hindus and Sunni Muslims, especially of the Hanafi school; throughout the Straits; and elsewhere as well because migrants carried those practices with them wherever they settled around the world.91 In the Straits, as in India, government officials were generally on high alert during these festivals, typically more on the occasion of Muharram than of Dashera because the former involved 10 days of public celebrations, whereas the latter, although also 10 days long, entailed only one or two public gatherings, typically at the end of the 10-day period. In Singapore, year after year bandwars, accompanied by “overseers and peons,” marched through town during Mohurrum carrying taboots (tabuts) or symbolic coffins representing the Karbala martyrs. As local administrators admitted, the crowds at these gathering usually were “extremely well behaved and obedient,” and therefore they had not previously considered shutting down the celebrations, opting to handle, on a case-by-case basis, the occasional flare-ups in the early 1850s.92 The superintendent of police, however, wanted to prohibit these gatherings, which he termed “intolerable nuisances.” He especially objected to the Mohurrum processions that convened convicts together with “the lowest of the Kling people” and rendered many of the thoroughfares in town “almost impassable from [the] goings of people parading the streets with noisy and discordant instruments and dressed up in all sorts of fantastic and often indecent costumes. These processions are kept up till a late hour at night and nearly always end in some disturbance and breach of peace.”93 After convict celebrants clashed with police during the 1852 Mohurrum, Singapore officials established new protocols. While they reaffirmed a commitment to their stated policy of noninterference in the religious traditions of local communities, they introduced new rules for the convicts, soldiers, and townspeople who celebrated Mohurrum by marching through town with taboots in hand. Thereafter, Mohurrum and Dashera festivities were to be confined to the convict lines, cantonment, and temples, a policy that apparently resulted in not a single case of “disorderly conduct or drunkenness” occurring for a while.94 Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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Singapore officials also imposed additional restrictions. In the wake of the 1852 Mohurrum clash, authorities banned fourth- and fifth-class convicts from joining the public festivities associated with Mohurrum and Dashera. They also attempted to regulate participation by religious affiliations; only Muslims were allowed to attend Mohurrum festivities and Hindus Dashera, even though the practice in Singapore, as in India, was for members of all faiths to engage in both celebrations. Furthermore, the new rules restricted the number of days convicts were allowed off for the celebrations: two days for Hindus of the second, third, and sixth classes for Holi and two for Dashera, and four days for Muslims of these same classes for Mohurrum. According to the resident councilor, these new rules ensured that not a single instance of “public nuisance” occurred during Mohurrum in 1855, celebrated by almost 1,000 people.95 However, in 1856 bandwars chose not to abide by the new regulations, engaging in “violent and shameful conduct,” as the governor put it, including not confining themselves to the convict lines and spilling out into the streets “bearing a Taj [taboot].” To make sure that there was no recurrence of what had transpired that year, the governor reiterated that the policy was not to have groups wander the public streets and roads “fantastically dressed, dancing, beating tom toms.” He also personally visited the convict lines to reprimand the inmates for violating the new regulations.96 In prisons in India as in the penal colonies, convicts always challenged colonial attempts to change existing practices, particularly if those entailed restricting what they once enjoyed. Writing in January 1857, Governor Blundell informed his superiors in Calcutta about the urgency of establishing a police force in a Singapore “fast rising to be one of the great cities of the East,” with trade and shipping “second only to those of Calcutta,” but home to “a more turbulent and ill-affected mob than is to be found in Indian cities, and above all, a mob distinct and separate in language, habits, and character, from the classes out of which the police can be entertained.”97 His concerns were not only about the majority population of Chinese and their periodic violent actions but also about the growing number of bandwars on his hands. The mutiny/rebellion in India greatly intensified these concerns. Once news of the uprising reached the Straits, government administrators and the local European community quickly moved to halt the annual Mohurrum festivities. The “Christian inhabitants of Campong Bengkulu and adjoining campongs” submitted a memorial prior to the September Mohurrum dates, 182

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urging that convicts not be allowed to convene that year because they could not be trusted to limit themselves to the convict lines in the Bras Basah area and were likely to march into the nearby areas of Victoria, Queen, Church, and Bengkulu Streets in the heart of town. The petitioners also used the occasion to condemn the entire penal system as “rotten to the very core. The system requires complete reorganization, if it is to be continued, which we hope not, as the time has now come when they have become an incubus on the settlement. We are no longer an infant colony—that state has been passed when convict labor is either desirable or necessary.” Their petition added that convicts enjoyed “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.”98 (See Figure 4, Convict Jail in Bras Basah area, which was finally completed in 1860). Underlying the anxieties about Muharram in 1857 was the fear rife in the European community that they were about to be overrun by rebel and mutineer prisoners from India. When Calcutta informed the Straits government that it intended to clear its jails of prisoners, particularly the Alipur Jail, and send them to the Straits to make room for the huge inflow it expected of men charged with mutiny and sedition, and then follow up by transporting some of the mutineers and rebels as well, the outcry from officials and members of the European community in Singapore and across the Straits Settlements was vociferous. They objected on the grounds that their penal colonies did not have the facilities to manage convicts who were well-trained military men charged with the murder or the attempted murder of their European officers. They claimed that they lacked the space to accommodate additional offenders, especially in Singapore and Penang, and a system of convict management capable of keeping “desperate characters . . . in safe custody.” There was no mention of their experience in handling “state prisoner” Bhai Maharaj Singh, although that only entailed keeping a close watch over two individuals and not a large group of mutineers and rebels. They also pointed out that the mercantile community resented having their settlement treated as a depot for “dangerous convicts” and urged that mutineers and rebels not be sent to the Straits. Some voices also asked that transportation be “wholly discontinued.”99 Governor Blundell joined the opposition to housing any mutineers in the Straits. He articulated his case by first distinguishing between convicts and mutineers: the former were from different areas, “unknown to each other, Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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speaking different languages and brought up in different habits and pursuits,” while the latter were “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.” His government had a disciplinary system in place for the former but not the latter, whose control required a “physical” or military force that did not exist in the Straits.100 Moreover, the governor was concerned that “dangerous” criminals would ignite the “turbulent disposition of the lower classes of our Chinese population.” While he did not think that bandwars would join forces with the Chinese community—he was well aware that they could not communicate with one another—he worried that the ensuing “tumult and disorder” from a “convict outbreak might . . . rouse the passions and cupidity of the lower classes of Chinese and the result would be very awful.”101 Thus the governor, in a compete about-face from his earlier position, contended that convicts were no longer essential to the workings of the Straits Settlements. They were critical during “their infancy” but not in a Singapore that was a commercial hub “with a trade of ten million sterling, a harbor crowded with shipping, and a large population earnestly engaged in mercantile and tradal pursuits.” And it was especially not an appropriate receptacle for former sepoys “whose hands have been imbrued in the blood of women and children and whose hearts are full of hatred and revenge.”102 While the events of 1857 made Straits administrators—and the local European community— adamant about not accepting mutineers and rebels and heightened their opposition to remaining a penal colony, the government in India did not halt the traffic until the early 1860s. In fact, bandwars continued to arrive in the late 1850s: 183 in 1857–58, increasing the April 1857 total of 2,193 to 2,376, before deaths, transfers, and releases lowered the tally to 2,139 in May 1858; and 473 in 1858–59, raising the count to an all-time high of 2,612, before falling to 2,330 in May 1859. Only thereafter did numbers begin to fall, slowly at first; after 1860, when traffic from India was almost completely halted, the decline was eased somewhat by arrivals from Ceylon and transfers from other penal settlements. The following figures plot that trend: a slight reduction from 2,330 to 2,275 (of whom 124 were women) in May 1860, 2,173 (124 women) in May 1861, 2,055 (120 females) in May 1862, and 1,964 (118 females) in May 1863, with a slight increase to 1,995 (118 females) in May 1864 because convicts were shipped in from Ceylon in 1863–64, then falling to 1,870 in 1865 and 1,793 in 1866 (112 females).103 184

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These numbers meant that Major McNair, who became executive engineer and superintendent of convicts in the Straits in December 1857 (and remained in office until 1881), still had a sizable convict body to do his bidding. There were enough inmates that during the governorship of Sir Orfeur Cavenagh they undertook a number of projects, as a “progress” report of “civil” and “military” work between 1859–60 and 1866–67 indicates: Civil. St. Andrew’s Church, General Hospital, Pauper Hospital; Lunatic Asylum, Apothecaries’ Quarters and Dispensary, Central Police Office, (including Courts for the Magistrate and the Commissioner of the Court of Bequests), Collyer Quay and Sea Wall, Campong Malacca Quay and River Wall, Campong Malacca Canal Bridge, Ordnance Bridge, conversion of old Court-house into a Post Office, Harbour Light, Masonry Beacons on the several shoals in the vicinity of New Harbour, and at the entrance to Singapore river, Police Stations at Tulloh Blangah, Passir Panjang, Tanjong Karrang, Kranjee, Salitar, Changhie, and Serangoon road, Peons’ barracks at Campong Glam Station, Steam Saw Mill, Work Sheds and Apothecary’s Quarters Convict Lines, Overseer’s Quarters and Store-room Campong Krabow, Changhie Bungalow, Court-house, extensive works for the introduction of a supply of pure water into the town, and a Public Racket Court. Military. Fort Canning, including the requisite accommodation for two garrison batteries of Royal Artillery, a Grand Magazine and several Expense Magazines, the Arsenal and Commissariat Store and Office, Pearl’s Hill, Barracks at Tanglin for European Infantry, Staff Sergeant’s Quarters, Apothecary’s Quarters, Cook-rooms and other Out- offices, Native Infantry Lines, Barracks for Ordnance Lascars, Conductor’s Quarters, Barracks and Guard-rooms at Forts Fullerton and Palmer, Quarters for the Garrison Sergeant-Major and School-master Sergeant, and Wharf, with 8-ton crane, for the use of the Ordnance and Commissariat Departments.104

Two projects that stand out in the “civil” list are St. Andrew’s Church and the courthouse—both iconic colonial-era monuments extant today. The former, better known as St. Andrew’s Cathedral, was consecrated in 1862 and completed under McNair’s direction on the premises of an earlier church also built by convicts; the latter, designed by McNair, was approved in 1855 but not completed until 1867, also by convict hands, and was subsequently known as the Empress Building before becoming the home of today’s wellknown Asian Civilisations Museum.105 The so-called courthouse took longer to build because a sizable proportion of the convict workforce was otherwise engaged, deployed 500 to 600 strong at a time in constructing the fortifications and “field redoubts” intended Con v ic t Wor k e r s a n d t h e M a k i ng of S i ng a p or e

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as the secure venues for the European population “in the event of a native rising” that the government of India considered imperative for all major settlements. Captain George Collyer of the Madras Engineers, who was dispatched to Singapore in January 1858 to plan and execute these additions and became chief engineer in August 1858 (and remained until February 1862), directed “skilled and ordinary” convicts in building “a powerful battery” on Government (later Fort Canning) Hill and extending and widening of the battery at Fort Fullerton. His men also constructed other military installations, including “batteries, redoubts, barracks, [and] magazines.” In his estimation the bandwars worked more effectively than “free Chinese labour.”106 The bricks, lime, and cement used in both the civil and military projects were also produced by convict labor, manufactured in the government kilns on Serangoon Road manned by them.107 During Cavenagh’s tenure in office the convict workforce also constructed more than 14 miles of new roads, 13 miles of metaled roads, and several bridges, including the iconic Elgin Bridge across the Singapore River. A select number were also recruited to rid the island of its tiger population. After all, bandwars and Chinese settlers were the two groups most likely to encounter these animals, the former because they worked on the roads and cleared jungles in the “interior” and the latter because they cultivated the gambier and pepper plantations beyond the precincts of the “town.” Reports dating back to the 1840s indicate that convicts killed or were killed by tigers almost every year. The casualties among the Chinese were much higher. According to Governor Cavenagh, tigers at one time killed as many as 200 people a year, mostly Chinese settlers. When Superintendent McNair informed him that some bandwars were good marksmen, the governor armed two groups of eight inmates each and sent them into the jungle, where they remained for extended periods, “merely coming in to attend the monthly muster, so long as they succeeded in destroying a tiger every three months, [and] they . . . [were] at the same time allowed to receive the government reward as a stimulus to their exertions. The number of tigers soon diminished.”108 (See Figure 3, for an 1869 photograph of the monthly muster or parade of convicts). In the late 1860s, in the waning years of the convict establishment, bandwars, working under the direction of Major McNair, embarked on what was their final major project: Government House (now known as Istana, the official residence of the president of Singapore) near Mount Sophia, abut two miles from “town,” originally intended as a residence for Colonel Sir Harry St. George Ord, the first governor (1867–73) under the Crown after 186

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the Straits Settlements was transferred over from India on April 1, 1867. Convict workers began in 1868 and finished up in December 1869; their work, as detailed by McNair, included much of “the brick work, exterior plastering, and most of the flooring and interior work” as well as the manufacture of all the bricks and much of the lime and cement used.109 Government House was the last hurrah of Singapore’s bandwars, their final major public undertaking after almost 50 years of hard labor. From the moment they first set foot on the island in 1825, convicts were charged with constructing roads and public buildings, including several of the first houses of worship; draining marshes and clearing the forests for dwellings and cultivation; and generally engaging in a variety of projects to make the island inhabitable. Their monumental efforts over the ensuing four decades led to the development of Singapore as a key strategic economic, political, and social hub for the British Empire in the Strait of Malacca and the eastern Indian Ocean. Its emergence enabled the British to consolidate their domination over the kala pani surrounding their vast land empire in the Indian subcontinent, enhance their control over the Malayan Peninsula and a region of Southeast Asia that included Burma, and strengthen their access to and command of the China trade. Their success in part resulted from their effective handling of coerced labor in Singapore, where they aggregated a large enough convict body and organized a productive enough workforce to strengthen the sinews of the rising British Empire in the Indian Ocean. Although convicts were subjected to a harsh and demanding regime, most survived their decades of naukari to create new lives for themselves in the Straits Settlements. Others, a much smaller cohort, eventually were granted permission to return to India, some among them better off financially than they once were. The next chapter takes up their stories after convict traffic was suspended in the 1860s, when the Straits Settlements was separated from India and transferred over to the Colonial Office in Britain in 1867 and all the surviving bandwars were emancipated in the 1870s and early 1880s.

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Five

Epilogue Life after Life: The Afterlives of Bandwars in the Straits Settlements

“Many years ago,” began a story in the Straits Times in 1899, “it used to be customary to transport convicts from India to this Colony.” That lead into an account of an incident in the Assize Court harked back to an earlier time because the two men involved, as this Singapore-based English-language newspaper reported with some amusement, were extremely old ex-convicts who had opted “to settle their slight differences” with violence, resulting in the “junior” of the two having “both his arms broken.” Both men, identified as Hindus, had been banished to the Straits about 70 years earlier; by the time of their scuffle, the senior of the two was over 100 years old and apparently very much looked the part—a “decrepit-looking specimen of humanity” to cite the newspaper—and the second man was not much younger.1 Popular reminiscences of the Straits Settlements, written in English in the early years of the twentieth century, often noted that convicts from India were once a conspicuous presence, their handiwork visible everywhere, particularly in the built environment of Singapore, where they had been extensively involved in the construction of its roads and buildings and a lot more. However, they were rapidly becoming a distant memory, because very few were still alive. Thus, the Straits Times seemed to find it entertaining that two relics of the settlement’s past appeared on a public stage in Singapore and engaged in fisticuffs, behaving in a way that evoked their criminal past, their advanced age notwithstanding. An 1898 report counted only 28 “pauper invalid convicts” in the convict lines in the Balestier Plain in Singapore, another 19 in Penang, and 6 in Malacca. In addition, 16 tickets-of-leave convicts lived outside the lines, fended for themselves, and did not receive any government rations. In 1901 the residents of the convict lines totaled 19, a number that fell to 13 by the end 188

Figure 5. Indian laborers, Singapore, ca. 1870. National Museum, Singapore.

of 1902 because 6 died during the interim, and there were only 8 tickets-ofleave men. A 1907 report counted 12 convicts in Singapore and 7 in Penang, a tally that fell to 7 in Singapore by 1911, of whom 6 were invalids and only 1 able bodied, requiring no subsistence allowance, whereas Penang was down to its last survivor. By the end of 1913 only 3 convicts were still alive, all in Singapore, of whom 2 received an allowance and 1 did not.2 This final chapter, an epilogue of sorts, tracks the afterlives of bandwars. It describes the postconvict lives they fashioned for themselves after their life sentences were over in the Straits Settlements, either because they were granted tickets-of-leave status or were completely freed to live on their own, a status they generally acquired once they had been on the island for at least 16 years and had maintained a consistent record of good behavior. That is, they had not only behaved well but also had performed yeoman service or naukari in their penal colonies for an extended period of time and survived against all odds to carve out an afterlife. The focus here is particularly on the last decades of the nineteenth century, after the suspension of convict traffic to the Straits in the early 1860s was followed by the disbanding of the E pi l o gu e

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convict establishment in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore in the early 1870s. Thereafter, most prisoners were pardoned, some allowed to return to India; others, the overwhelming majority, remained in the Straits, either because they opted to do so or were initially denied permission to leave. The pardoning of the convicts in the 1870s came on the heels of a protracted discussion between and among officials in the Straits Settlements, India, and Britain. In 1867 authorities in India broached the possibility of transferring convicts with life sentences to the Andamans when the Straits Settlements became a Crown Colony and was placed under the charge of the Colonial Office in London instead of Calcutta. That plan never fully materialized, however, because Singapore, Calcutta, and London had different ideas about how to proceed, with Straits administrators inclined to offer convicts repatriation and Calcutta and London balking at unconditional pardons because they would entail the possibility of a return to India. Whereas Singapore believed that convicts deserved special consideration because of their long years of service in the penal colonies, the view from the other shore could not look past their prior criminal profiles in India. In other words, the Straits perspective was a diachronic one, emanating from an appreciation of convict histories in the insular prisons; the other side, by contrast, adhered to a synchronic view, fixated on their pre-Straits criminal records and the judicial sentences that had led to their transportation. This chapter opens by examining the voluminous correspondence between and among officials at the various levels of colonial administration over the issue of pardoning convicts once the penal establishment was disbanded. It does so because their exchanges generated a substantial body of information, with Straits authorities providing details casting convict working lives and behavior in the penal colonies in a positive light and officials in India highlighting their horrific crimes, and because their dialogue exposes the cracks in colonial governance. And because both parties agreed to grant remission on a case-by-case basis, they came forth with individualized information on the Straits present and the Indian past of each and every prisoner. Particularly illuminating are the details about convict labor—the work bandwars performed in the course of serving hard time and the jobs they held—and the lives they fashioned for themselves in the Straits. Adding to the richness of this archive are the many petitions submitted by the convicts themselves, and their friends and relatives in India, all intent on securing reprieves at a time when deliberations were underway in multiple locations about the pardoning of men and women in the insular prisons of 190

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Southeast Asia. An early example of such requests is the plea collectively submitted by 22 male and 7 female convicts in 1869 asking that their “last days” in Penang not be “embittered . . . [because] they cannot re-visit their native homes.” They claimed that some were on the island as early as 1821, others in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s; had undergone “the severe ordeals of convict life”; and were now “all aged people.”3 Many convicts clearly never abandoned the prospect of return. J. F. A. McNair, the comptroller of convicts in the Straits, was not sympathetic to the Penang petition, a stance he would reverse in a few short years when he took the lead in championing clemency for all the convicts in the Straits. In 1869 he opposed repatriation for the Penang bandwars, seemingly in part because he and other Straits officials were still committed to the possibility of maintaining and utilizing a convict workforce and in part because he thought, as did his fellow colonial administrators, that certain criminals were “habitual” and “incorrigible” and therefore beyond redemption.4 He also claimed that most convicts were “indifferent” about returning home, in part because “prejudices” in the “native” community meant that they had lost caste by virtue of their transportation across the kala pani; only those of the “lowest class” could recover their standing in their family and community if they went back. In addition, he expressed concern about most returnees being “too old to work,” in which case they “would perforce return to their old profession, principally thuggee, and if not able to take an active part in crime, would become advisors, instigators, etc.”5 McNair also contended that most convicts were not interested in returning because they had established viable lives in the Straits. They had succeeded in doing so because the Straits system provided a convict “after a few years of probation advantages which even a native emigrant does not enjoy; he looks to the government for his support, and, if well behaved, is able upon the attainment of his ticket-of-leave to start in business for himself, having been furnished with resources held out to him while a petty officer in the prison.”6 Therefore, his stance on unconditional pardons in 1869 was that the Straits government was not “breaking faith” with its inmates if it turned down the Penang petitioners but pardoned them on condition that they remain on the island.7 Except during the panic resulting from the Mutiny/ Rebellion of 1857, local authorities were generally keen to expand their laboring population, both those capable of doing manual labor and proficient in skilled work. Cheap labor was always in short supply, and having a surplus of laboring hands was an effective way to keep wages down. E pi l o gu e

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The interest in retaining convicts and the lives some of them fabricated for themselves can be discerned from an 1869 report compiled for the secretary of state in London to account for the cost-benefit ratio of convict labor. Of the 2,000-odd convicts in the Straits in the late 1860s, 315 of the second class (15 percent of the convict body) were employed as “petty officers over working gangs”; 196 of that same class were “government messengers” working for various public departments, including the hospital and lunatic asylum; 192 first-class and 97 second-class convicts were laboring as “masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, brick makers, stone cutters, painters, and other trades”; and the largest number, 1,287 (more than 60 percent), drawn from the third, fourth, and fifth classes, were involved in manual labor of one sort or another. (See figure 5 for photo of manual laborers, ca. 1870.) There were also 145 convicts of the sixth class described as “partially effective or invalids.”8 The comptroller of convicts and his fellow Straits administrators assumed a very different stance in 1872 when the issue of pardons came up again during deliberations about completely disbanding the convict establishment and transferring the bandwars to Port Blair, the main settlement in the Andamans. On that occasion, McNair’s brief embodied the Straits position, urging the government in India to treat the “great majority” with “special consideration” because of all they had done for their penal colonies—as the previous three chapters have documented in extenso—particularly early on when they were “virtually employed as police in the country districts, [served] as builders of nearly all the public buildings, and [were] the pioneers in the construction of almost every road and canal throughout the three settlements.” They also held “positions of trust and responsibility . . . as attendants at the various government establishments and in . . . the household of the several governors who have administered the government here from time to time.”9 Moreover, as McNair elaborated, the costs of managing the convicts were minimal because they were largely “self controlled” over a 45-year period. Or to cite a phrase he employed to title his 1899 book, “prisoners [were] their own warders,” a characterization to which he added that they invariably “conducted themselves well, and when on tickets-of-leave . . . behaved themselves as good citizens” and therefore merited “special consideration” from a government that had sentenced them “for life without even that period of remission which European convicts in similar circumstances have been led to hope for and by good conduct to earn.” Furthermore, in his estimation, by the 1870s most surviving bandwars were old and infirm and unlikely to do 192

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harm. To make the final determinations about repatriations, he urged that India send a special officer to examine those eligible for pardons.10 According to the Straits governor, Sir Harry St. George Ord (1867–73), Malacca, Penang, and Singapore together housed 1,713 bandwars and 597 tickets-of-leave men and women (or a total of 2,310) at the close of the 1860s, many of whom were married and property owners. He briefly broached the possibility of retaining them, if that was an option, and even of taking in a few more, if Calcutta were willing to transport additional numbers. Increasingly, however, Straits authorities advocated closing down the entire convict establishment by April 1, 1873, pardoning those whose sentences had not expired by then and allowing those who wished to return to India to do so.11 That Straits plan elicited little immediate response from India until Governor Ord brought up the issue again in mid-1872, when he reiterated his intention to shut down the convict establishment by April 1873 and outlined the following steps to effect that closure: (1) a “liberal use of the power of pardon” for convicts whose crime and character warranted it; (2) an agreement to leave pardoned and time-expired bandwars “unmolested” in the Straits; (3) the awarding of tickets-of-leave status to those whose sentences were to expire within 12 months of the April 1873 date; (4) a one-time permission to tickets-of-leave convicts to transfer to Port Blair; (5) the removal of all remaining convicts to Port Blair; and (6) the maintenance of all “pauper convicts” in the Straits after April 1, 1873, with the government of India subsidizing their living costs at the rate of $30 per annum.12 By then the bandwar population had shrunk to 1,918 people, of which 1,482 (424 in Penang, 866 in Singapore, and 192 in Malacca) were eligible for tickets-of-leave status by April 1, 1873. Another 149 (Penang 49, Singapore 100) were to receive that status by April 1, 1874, and yet another cohort of 192 (Penang 26 and Singapore 166) by April 1, 1875. In addition, 82 bandwars (Penang 28, Singapore 54) were not eligible for tickets-of-leave by April 1, 1875, of whom 21 were from Burma. There were also 13 term convicts (Penang 1, Singapore 12) entitled to receive that status before April 1, 1873.13 While the governor-general agreed with most of Governor Ord’s recommendations, he opposed a blanket pardon and instead suggested a “conditional” one based on emancipated convicts remaining in the Straits and not returning to India. (He proposed a similar arrangement for Indian convicts in Burma: pardons without repatriation.) Furthermore, those guilty of such heinous crimes as thugi, dacoity, and robbery “by administering poisonous drugs, or other forms of organized crime, or mutiny and rebellion E pi l o gu e

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accompanied with murder” were not to be granted any concessions. As for the 82 whose terms still had several years pending, the governor-general advocated sending the 21 from Burma to Madras and Bombay and the other 61 to the Andamans to serve out the remainder of their sentences. And for the 61 to be dispatched to Port Blair, he sought additional information regarding their crimes, sentences, conduct in the Straits, familiarity with handicrafts, and physical condition (“robust or weak”).14 To make the final determinations, the government in India sought the assistance of its local officials, who were asked to weigh in on each and every repatriation case. Straits administrators, for their part, were expected to provide details about convict work histories and conduct records. That same two-step consultative practice was employed in the case of the 73 poligars whose return to Madras was held up for several years by local authorities unwilling to see them back in their old haunts, even though Penang was more than willing to send them home.15 The different approaches to handling pardons came to a head again in December 1873 when the Straits comptroller of convicts submitted a list of 85 bandwars deserving of “indulgence” because of their “good conduct” and the likelihood of their behaving themselves “to the satisfaction of the authorities” if allowed to return home. The government of India took its time to respond, and when it finally did in mid-1875, almost 18 months later, it deemed only 26 eligible for both a reprieve and repatriation; of the rest, it pardoned 41 on the condition that they remain in Singapore and refused to pardon the remaining 7. (One person had died in the interim.) Calcutta’s decision to limit its reprieves, according to McNair, “depressed” many of the convicts because it dashed their “long cherished hopes.” Furthermore, many had directly petitioned the government for clemency and repatriation.16 All seven who were denied repatriation—two from Madras, one from Bengal, and four from Punjab (all women)—were rejected because their local governments were unwilling to forgive their “heinous” crimes. Vanddaree Balaramiah of Rajahmundry (in present-day Andhra Pradesh) was turned down because he had murdered a person in 1857—his partner in crime was the other Madras convict denied a pardon but who died before the government acted on their cases—and because his ticket-of-leave status was considered enough of a reprieve. The Bengal government rebuffed Bhagbut Surrieda because he was part of a gang of six men who had beaten a person to death in a “deliberate and most cruel” manner. And the Punjab government recommended against further clemency for the four women convicts because 194

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they were all murderers: Mussamut Rabain from Jullundur had killed her child to please her lover because the latter would not accept her with child, and she also had tried to escape from jail; Mussamat Bhagbaree of Multan had murdered her husband to be with her lover; Mussamat Shabi of Leia district had killed her illegitimate child; and Mussamat Kishno of Jullundur had murdered her husband by administering poison.17 In the wake of Calcutta’s refusal to grant some individuals reentry into India, Ameer Khan, a friend of Kazum Khan, a convict who had been in the Straits for 20 years and was denied repatriation, wrote on the latter’s behalf to request his unconditional pardon. The former emphasized that his friend was in poor health; only had one relative left, a sister, who had petitioned earlier in February 1875; and wished to return to live out “his days amongst his only relative and others who are interested in his behalf.” The petitioner first traveled to Singapore to seek his friend’s release and then to Calcutta to plead with the viceroy after he was told that only the Indian government could grant permission to return home. Ameer Khan also noted that his friend had always behaved well in the Straits, a point he backed up with three “testimonials” from Singapore officials about the latter’s “satisfactory” work as a punkahwallah or a fan puller.18 In response to Ameer Khan’s petition and the concerns expressed by the Straits officials that selective and conditional pardons represented “a breach of faith” toward the convicts, Calcutta emphasized that its judgment was not solely based on their conduct in the Straits, implying that Singapore’s was, but rather on the “nature and gravity of their original crimes.” Furthermore, it insisted that its decision was based not on “how a convict’s restoration to liberty would affect the convict himself ”—a bias that it discerned in the “liberal” position on pardons—but “the effect of such restoration in India.”19 To take a measure of that “effect,” the government in India requested its local officials to fill in details on the backgrounds of the 85 bandwars on the initial pardons list: the “circumstances” leading up to their sentences and the “state of crime” in the localities where their offenses had occurred. It also asked local administrators their opinion about pardons, which the latter mostly opposed because they did not wish to offer reprieves to convicts with life sentences. A few were willing to make allowances for “extenuating circumstances,” by which they meant either the young age of an offender at the time of the crime or the lengthy sentence already served by a convict. But in these cases, too, most officials were only willing to grant clemency if it did not entail repatriation. The Madras government, for instance, E pi l o gu e

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took exception to having its life convicts return, insisting that these men were sentenced for “murder, often with aggravating circumstances, such as torture and robbery. If it is thought their good behavior under prolonged confinement entitles them to pardon, it is suggested that it should be on the express stipulation of their remaining in Singapore.”20 Others worried, as did a Bombay official, that repatriation would diminish transportation’s “deterrent effect” and rob it “of the mysterious dread which surrounds it in the eyes of the masses.”21 Government concerns about diminishing the “dread” factor were heightened by return stories such as that of Issurre Singh, who in 1860 was transported to the Andamans for rebellion for a term of 14 years. Two years into his sentence, he was recruited to serve in that penal colony’s police force, in return for which his term was reduced by a fourth. In 1866 he was part of a group of 50 mutineers transferred from Port Blair to Sarawak to serve on its police force, for which he secured another remission, this time of three and one-half years. In 1871 he was back home in Bundelkhand, in central India, where he cut a very distinctive figure, dressed in a Sarawak police uniform, hardly looking, as the local political agent pointed out, like someone who had just completed an extended penal stint. On the contrary, he appeared “in these backward parts rather as a traveler of note, who has seen the world and prospered in it,” and not “as a returning culprit, penitent and mindful of the clemency of government. He gives a somewhat glowing account of his circumstances when away, saying his pay was twenty dollars a month, and that he had learnt drill and parade duties; so that, in fact, his story is calculated rather to give a favorable impression of transportation than to exercise a deterrent effect on the ill-disposed.”22 Many officials in India agreed that the very potency of transportation lay in its “apparently irrevocable character when a man is carried over the unknown seas, and is never seen or heard of again”—a “social death” of sorts. Therefore, they were reluctant to allow the return of even those granted clemency in the Straits and insisted on severely punishing those illegally returned from the penal colonies. The Bengal lieutenant governor summed up that line of thinking in explaining why his government rejected convict petitions in the early 1870s for remission of life sentences and repatriation. Transportation, he believed, would lose its “deterrent” quality were “old men who have served a long time, and perhaps made much money . . . allowed to return to their villages.”23 Indeed, many ex-convicts were believed to have amassed some assets. 196

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With both Calcutta and Singapore standing their ground on the issue of pardons, the two sides agreed that the way forward was to follow up on Comptroller McNair’s suggestion about deputing a special official from India to investigate the case of each and every convict pardoned by the Straits authorities but denied repatriation by the government in India. Calcutta selected Maynard Brodhurst, the civil and sessions judge of Banaras, to serve as that “special officer.”24 He arrived in Singapore on May 11 and was back in India on July 25, 1876, after spending about two months in the Straits reviewing pardons. A week after his return Brodhurst submitted a lengthy report that opened with an assessment of the Straits system of convict management. As did his Straits counterparts, he acknowledged the significant convict contribution to the penal colonies; to use his succinct phrase, “their services had been turned to account.” He also echoed the Straits view that the bandwars were “tractable and well-behaved,” especially in comparison to Malay and Chinese prisoners, but added an inference not generally emphasized by other administrators, namely, that their coerced labor kept wages down in the region.25 In part, Brodhurst made that point to explain why European residents were favorably disposed toward their inmate population. Convicts were not only a source of cheap labor but also kept wages low and were relatively pliable. And they were manageable, he argued, because they received more “indulgences” than “less heinous offenders” in jails in India were afforded. Although sentenced to hard labor “in irons for life,” they suffered mostly “trivial” punishments and did not remain in fetters for long. Nor, in his estimation, were they subjected to “onerous or degrading” work. On the contrary, they were employed in tasks that “men of good character and high caste in India frequently search for in vain, e.g., that performed by clerks and chupprassees [messengers or orderlies].” Moreover, many were permitted to marry within a year or two into their sentences, others to send for their wives and families from India. He also noted that convicts received a money allowance from the moment they began their time on the islands, and that female convicts were permitted after three years and male convicts after 16 years to live freely “on tickets-of-leaves, and many of them by trade or other employment have been enabled to live in far greater comfort than they ever did in India, whilst a smaller number have succeeded in amassing wealth. One convict, . . . it is said, [has] . . . left to his heirs a fortune of 40,000 dollars or about £9,000.”26 E pi l o gu e

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Access to money enabled some bandwars to develop a “lucrative” moneylending business—as Fateh Khan did in Bengkulu in the early nineteenth century—much to the chagrin of some members of the local European community who were offended by the fact that bandwars routinely used the legal system to prosecute their “delinquent debtors” and often ended up with the “jewelry and valuables” pledged in return for loans made at exorbitant interest rates. These critics wanted to see the moneylending business regulated, with a register kept of all convict-owned property, proof of their ownership, and the goods they received from their creditors.27 The “considerable property” that some convicts accumulated surfaced as an issue in the mid-1850s when Straits administrators recognized that their rules prohibited convicts from becoming embroiled in civil disputes either as defendants or plaintiffs. Although bandwars could not sue or be sued, they were “free men” once they had completed 16 years of their sentence, much in the way that convicts in Australia were granted a ticket of leave or were freed after a certain period. This status only required them to check in with the authorities periodically and gave them, in every other respect, rights “undistinguishable from free men.” That is, they enjoyed a certain measure of “civil rights” in that they could own property.28 As British officials on both sides of the pardons debate noted, convicts were allowed to wed and raise families. Brodhurst, in fact, alluded to their marital status in part to highlight the permissiveness of the Straits system and in part to indicate that many convicts were already sufficiently pardoned in that they lived with their families. Straits officials likewise referenced the “married” and “settled” status of particularly the tickets-of-leave men to emphasize that they were property owners and therefore law-abiding residents. According to information compiled by Straits officials—collected only partly for the 1,918 male and female convicts in 1872—of the 866 Straits life convicts eligible to receive tickets-of-leave on April 1, 1873, 179 individuals, or a little over 20 percent, were married, some to one another, and in many cases they also had children. (The Malacca count reveals a higher percentage; 50 of its 192 bandwars, or 26 percent, were married.) Neither the Straits officials nor Brodhurst acknowledged that having convicts marry had long been a strategy employed in the penal colonies to minimize escapes and held out as “encouragement” to regulate and reform behavior. Raffles had made that point in Bengkulu as early as 1821, when he observed that married convicts tended to work more efficiently. Unmarried convicts were generally tardy and performed labor “of little or no value,” in 198

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his estimation, but when married and having a family a convict “becomes a kind of colonist, and if allowed to follow his inclination, seldom feels inclined to return to his native country.”29 Furthermore, in Singapore marriage was incentivized for female bandwars, in that they were let out of “penal servitude” after two years if they agreed to wed their fellow inmates.30 Brodhurst also alluded to marriage to make a different point. He noted—with incredulity—that women who had murdered their husbands with the assistance of their paramours often ended up living with the latter in the penal colonies. To him that was another indication that the Straits system treated prisoners with far more indulgence than they had the “right to expect. A large proportion . . . have committed capital offences; some . . . were originally sentenced to be hanged; and with regard to others, it is, in the absence of the record, difficult to understand why they were not capitally sentenced.” And he reiterated that they did not have to endure the “continuous hard treatment” that was supposed to be an integral part of their sentences. Moreover, he insisted, indulgences were premised on the recognition that “life-convicts would end their days in transportation”; that is, they would never be freed. As proof he cited Comptroller McNair’s directive accompanying the convict rules of management that justified the “over-indulgence” of prisoners by emphasizing that transportation led to their “hopeless separation for ever from . . . [their] friends and country” and their critical role in the building of infrastructure “in a comparatively new colony where the market rate of labor is enormous,” thereby resulting in a system that “combines proper penal discipline with useful labor at but little cost to the state.”31 According to Brodhurst, convicts behaved well because of the incentives they enjoyed and the lack of alternatives to act otherwise. He believed that they generally shied away from committing crimes because they could not easily escape detection, living as they did “amongst people of other nations,” presumably meaning that the Chinese, Malays, and other people would turn them in. Nor could they get away easily because they were in insular prisons, escaping from which entailed “considerable risk and difficulty.”32 Brodhurst also played up the “over-indulgence” of the Straits system by noting that prisoners sentenced to transportation in his Banaras Central Prison complained of unfair treatment because they were locked up in jail rather than shipped overseas. That is, his former inmates wished for transportation because they were aware that transported convicts enjoyed “easier and pleasanter lives” than those behind bars in India.33 E pi l o gu e

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Having spelled out his position on pardons and his understanding of the Straits disciplinary system, Brodhurst then proceeded to discuss the cases he had been sent to adjudicate, involving 1,335 convicts, of whom 833 were housed in Singapore, 362 in Penang, and 140 in Malacca. Of that total he focused particularly on 683 convicts recommended for unconditional pardon by the Straits government, of whom 393 were in Singapore, 253 in Penang, and 37 in Malacca. (He added one more to that tally to raise the total to 684.) Of the rest, 652 were not eligible for pardons under one or the other of the government of India’s criteria of not granting clemency to prisoners charged with certain kinds of violent crimes (499 convicts) or having criminal or unsatisfactory conduct records in the Straits (153 convicts, later amended to 152 because one case was moved over from the other list). He divided the 684 into three groups: those pardoned and permitted to return, those pardoned but denied repatriation, and those whose cases needed further investigation in the localities of their origin. At the same time, he recognized that all 1,335 convicts were essentially on tickets-of-leave status, and that his recommendations against repatriation meant that he was approving their “free pardon” but “conditional” on remaining in the Straits. Whom Brodhurst chose to pardon unconditionally and why can be discerned from the extensive paperwork he submitted regarding his decisions— an archive that is also revealing about convict lives in the penal colonies. In one batch of 49 convicts he granted 16 unconditional pardons, 29 conditional pardons, and 2 outright denials, and he sought additional information on the remaining 2. His remarks on the 16 unconditional pardons suggest that he paid considerable attention to the age at which offenders had committed their crimes, granting reprieves to those who were 21, 19 or younger, and 16, in the case of a female bandwar. He also keyed on the severity of their offenses, freeing a couple of offenders because their crimes no longer warranted severe punishments and others who had already served lengthy terms on the islands. Among the nine from Bombay he granted unconditional clemency to one prisoner who had been in the Straits for 33 years, to another for 32 years, and to a Madras convict who had already undergone 42 years and seemed to be in his seventies or eighties.34 Brodhurst’s findings indicate that his determinations were also partly based on convict records of good behavior and service in the Straits. Thus, he granted a reprieve to a Bombay man named Limjee Eduljee whom the colonial secretary described as “of very good character, and . . . very useful to this Government during the late disturbances,” a reference to the 1875 200

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outbreak of Chinese convicts in Singapore in which bandwars helped contain the escape attempt of their fellow inmates. He also granted a reprieve to a Madras convict named Sadasoo Rao who had spent 27 years in banishment for his act of “malicious wounding,” the last 13 in the capacity of a munshi (writer or secretary) in the Convict Department at a salary of $12 a month. Brodhurst described him as “a respectable looking man” whose conduct was “very good.”35 Another set of prisoners that Brodhurst considered favorably were those who had been on the islands for an extended period of time and had good records of behavior. Following are a few examples of those he recommended for repatriation from among Bombay, Madras, and Bengal cases: 67-year-old Bhowanee from Konkan district, sentenced for aiding and abetting in a murder, who had spent 37 years in transportation; Mussamut Savitree of Pune, charged in the concealment of her husband’s murder, who had completed 29 years and was married to a Bombay term-expired convict with whom she had had five children at Singapore; Sangenah of Chicacole (Srikakulam) district in Madras, sentenced for murder who was originally in Bengkulu before his transfer to Singapore and had experienced 53 years of banishment; Mussamut Nayoo, alias Meenatchee, guilty of attempted murder, who had been in transportation for 37 years; and Sheikh Roheema, alias Mahomed Roheem alias Rahmut, sentenced for a murder in 1825, who had survived “almost a life-time in banishment” or a staggering 51 years.36 By contrast, Brodhurst did not approve repatriation for Ganesh Pooree of Banaras, a person he described as “an immensely powerful man” in appearance and financially well off; he had amassed a small fortune of 5,000 to 7,000 rupees during his ticket-of-leave years. In Brodhurst’s estimation, Pooree had already received “great clemency,” implying that he had been allowed to accumulate a considerable sum of money through moneylending, enough of a “fortune” that he did not wish to have “this still robust murderer” return because it “would have a bad effect . . . [at] home.” Nor was he willing to amend the conditional pardon for Mussamut Mottee, whose sentence stemmed from her role in a jewelry theft and a murder attempt, seemingly taking umbrage at the fact that she, a Muslim, had left a husband and two children behind in India, married a Hindu man, also a convict, in the Straits, and then taken to calling “herself a Hindu.” He was particularly troubled by her desire to return to India, even though her new husband, a Madras Hindu life convict, was only awarded a conditional pardon, which Brodhurst interpreted as meaning that she was prepared to abandon her E pi l o gu e

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second husband as well. “She appears to be indifferent both to religion and morality,” he insinuated, “for she expresses her willingness to live in future either with her Hindu or Muhammadan [Muslim] husband.”37 Of the 684 cases Brodhurst dealt with—that number eventually grew to 733—221 were “absolutely released”—that is, pardoned and allowed to return home—at the beginning of 1877 when London issued orders to release a certain number of prisoners from every province in India and other colonies elsewhere to commemorate Queen Victoria’s assumption of the title of Empress of India on January 1, 1877. Among those granted clemency for the first time were those sentenced for their involvement in the “troubles” of 1857–58, that is, the mutiny/rebellion, except for those charged with “murder or other acts of violence, or . . . engaged in aiding or abetting such crimes.”38 Brodhurst proposed a conditional pardon for 405 individuals, that is, based on their remaining in the Straits, and no further concessions to 39, and he sought further investigation into the criminal histories of 68. As his long list of pardons without repatriation suggests, he denied return to those guilty of heinous crimes—mostly murderers of one sort or another, many involved in crimes of passion in which a wife, with the connivance of her lover, killed her husband—or of robbery accompanied by force, including instances in which a man or a woman killed someone, often a minor, to steal a child’s jewelry; as well as to a mother who had killed her child born out of wedlock.39 In the aftermath of Brodhurst’s recommendations, accepted in their entirety by the government of India, Comptroller McNair followed up in November 1878 to press again for unconditional pardons for those denied full pardons. Writing on their behalf, he pointed to their long years in the penal colonies, many for extended periods of 35 to 40 years, and their “satisfactory” behavior, except for occasional minor misdemeanors. While he agreed with Brodhurst that most bandwars held “positions of trust,” enjoyed steady incomes, and were comparatively better off than they would have been in India, he took issue with the former’s conclusion that they should therefore be left in place in the Straits. On the contrary, McNair asserted that these men and women lived “under certain disabilities” in that they could never regain their status in the “native” community, “restored to full favor,” as he put it, and that “those of any caste are completely lost of his friends and relations.” He also urged immediate action, noting that many petitions for “free” pardons were from aging applicants in ill health, and 117 were in the invalid lines.40 202

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In September 1880 McNair forwarded another round of requests for full pardons, a list of 26 people previously denied repatriation because their heinous crimes involved thugi, dacoity, and robbery by administering poisonous drugs or other forms of organized crime for which the government of India had insisted that clemency was not possible under any circumstances. Nineteen of them had been in the Straits for over 30 years; one individual, Rujjub Shaw Dungoon Shaw, convicted of highway robbery, had been there for 59 years, having commenced his sentence in 1820. On this occasion, the comptroller’s plea assumed a different line of reasoning: these convicts also deserved a full pardon because without a “ray of hope,” as he put it, they would become a “dangerous class of hopeless men believing themselves to be unjustly treated” and presumably a threat to law and order in the Straits. Therefore, he wanted a relaxation in the rules about full pardons for offenders charged with heinous crimes.41 Most officials in India who were consulted on McNair’s requests were open to some loosening of the rules but drew the line at professional or hereditary dacoits, especially those sentenced for administering poisonous drugs. They believed that those types of criminals were more than likely to be incorrigible. However, they also recognized that the offenders charged with these crimes were a mixed bunch, some guiltier than others of terrible crimes. Thus, the Bengal inspector general of jails, A. S. Lethbridge, proposed distinguishing between thugs and professional poisoners who did not deserve a “full pardon,” on the one hand, and dacoits, on the other hand, who did, except for those who were members of “criminal tribes.” He pointed to the many instances of dacoits who had served dependably as convict overseers in jails in India, very few of them “returning to jails as re-convicted prisoners. Indeed, I feel disposed to go further,” he elaborated, “to say that it is almost unknown. I personally know of only one such case.”42 No one commented on the fact that 15 of McNair’s 26 new pardon cases were men charged with treason: a group of 12 for aiding and abetting in an incident dating to 1839; another for “treasonable conspiracy to overthrow British authority” in the well-known Coorg insurgency in 1837; and two for “treason and rebellion” in 1837. All had been transported from Madras.43 The Madras authorities were no less receptive to easing the rules, their outlook shaped by their experience with repatriated bandwars. As the inspector-general of police testified, returnees had “given very little trouble. There have been some exceptional cases of course, but as a rule—either because they have had enough of it, or because they are so closely watched E pi l o gu e

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or both—returned transports do not relapse into crime but turn to peaceful pursuits.” As evidence, he referred to the gangs of “daring dacoits” who had terrorized Cuddapah (Kadapa, Andhra Pradesh) district in the early 1860s but behaved well once they came back. In fact, he thought of their presence in the area as instructive; to use his words, “the hoary-headed criminal who returns after twenty-five years’ exile is more likely to be a ‘frightful example’ to others than to encourage them in crime; though it would doubtless be a still stronger example that the ‘black water’ should be closed behind him like a grave without the possibility of return.”44 Once local officials in India expressed a willingness to consider unconditional pardons for some offenders charged with heinous crimes, Calcutta agreed to modify its rules. It decided to differentiate between those sentenced for crimes “technically termed dacoity” and those deemed “professional or hereditary” dacoits, a revision that enabled additional bandwars to become eligible for repatriation if their conduct on the islands had been uniformly good and their penal time added up to at least 30 years in the Straits (or in Burma) or 25 years in the Andamans. As before, in every case, releases were coordinated with local officials, who were required to furnish information on the convicts’ crimes; their status (or lack thereof) as “hereditary” or “professional” criminals; their living family members, if any; their former occupations; and the “police surveillance” arrangements in the localities to which they were to return. As the unconditional pardoning of five Madras convicts in 1882 and of six Bombay convicts in 1883 reveals, the government in India signed off on approvals as long as local officials cleared the convicts for return and assured Calcutta that the officials had made the necessary arrangements, including police surveillance and whatever other restrictions were deemed necessary at the convicts’ proposed places of residence. 45 With more and more of the convict body old and graying, and many among them incapable of supporting themselves financially, the government of India also expected local authorities to provide information on whether relatives or friends were willing to support these remaining survivors if they were repatriated. 46 Convicts, for their part, also campaigned on their own behalf, submitting petitions by the dozens or having friends and family members intercede at their behest. Many were not successful right away but did not relent. For instance, Buggeeha of Singapore requested the release of her parents in 1881, initially to no avail; Kawnah sought the same for his uncle Baswa, alias Tooty, in 1885, from Penang, a petition that the government of India rejected more than once; and Boiharee Bind, alias Badjoree, a life convict at 204

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Singapore, petitioned on his own behalf but did not win the Bengal government’s approval until much later. Nor was permission forthcoming for Mussamut Beylassee from the North-Western Provinces, whose requests were repeatedly denied.47 All these individuals were eventually released—Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in February 1887 led to another round of pardons—although some died before they received a favorable response from the government. Mussamut Beylasse and Boiharee Bind were among those who waited a long time; in fact, the paper trail of the former disappears, presumably because she passed away in the interim, while the latter was finally released in early 1888.48 A few convicts who went back to India in the 1880s returned to the Straits shortly thereafter. For example, Jheetoo Peadah, who received his unconditional pardon at the beginning of 1887 and went “home” to the 24 Parganas, returned to Singapore a few months later, thus violating the terms of his clemency. His reason for returning was that he wished to reunite with his family, who did not accompany him to Bengal. Veeruzlal, alias Chanchal Gooroo, also came back, in his case in early 1888 after going to India in June 1887 following his release in December 1886. A very old and infirm man, he opted to live in Penang on pauper rations. These two men were part of a larger cohort of bandwars over the years who went to India after their lengthy penal stints only to find conditions “so uncongenial” that they returned to the Straits and, as McNair writes, “settled down as shopkeepers, cowkeepers, cartmen, etc., and most of them sought and obtained employment either with private individuals or in the Public Works Department. Several of the skilled artificers, who had been petty officers,” he added, “were employed as sub-assistant overseers and gangers on public works, where their services proved to be of great utility, their prison training having rendered them much more to be relied upon than free men, and, as far as we have been able to ascertain, none of them have been reconvicted.”49 Many never left because they did not seek repatriation. For instance, of the 303 convicts offered releases in the Andamans in 1877, 170 accepted but 117 declined; the rest were not present or were in the hospital when that offer was made. Among those who refused unconditional pardons were older inmates, who “stated that they were quite incapable of supporting themselves . . . whilst a few, being petty officers, preferred to remain convicts and continue to earn their subsistence in that grade to attempting to support themselves as cultivators.”50 E pi l o gu e

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Such cases of convicts rejecting repatriation and choosing to remain in the penal colonies were not unusual. In 1813 only 29 of 130 bandwars in Bengkulu accepted the offer of a return passage to India, of which number the authorities allowed 27 to leave on the ship Clara. In 1824 Govind was “discharged” at the end of his sentence in Penang but elected to continue in his capacity as a syce rather than return to his “native country.” And in 1826 only 5 of 27 accepted the government offer of a return passage; the other 22 decided to remain in Penang.51 Many “free” men who stayed on, as Captain Man’s Singapore report from the early 1850s reveals, continued to ply the “trade” they had engaged in during their transportation years. Thus, some ex-convicts became herdsmen, that is, owners of cows and milkmen; others capitalized on their experience as drivers of hacks and bullock carts to become hack syces or cart drivers; and still others became bricklayers. A few, who were in the first class and worked as peons and orderlies, even entered the police force. A “liberated” Bengali convict named Kinnuck Mistree—identified in one newspaper as Kanakay Maistry—did exceptionally well, at least financially. In 1858, as a 70-year-old, he unsuccessfully petitioned the lieutenant-governor of Bengal for repatriation to his “native country” after a banishment of 38 years. As his plea details, he began his life sentence in Bengkulu in 1818, was transferred to Singapore in 1825, and was granted a ticket-of-leave in 1846. As an inmate he apparently worked as a dresser in the convict hospital, and he parlayed that as a free man into becoming a native doctor or kaviraj. When he died in July 1865, coincidentally in Campong Bencoolen (or Bengkulu), he left an estate worth about $50,000 to his sons.52 Mistree-like convict success stories, however, were very much an exception. Most former inmates, as a newspaper reported in 1884, were “cart owners, milk sellers, [and] road contractors,” that is, involved in the kinds of work that they had performed prior to their release.53 Many, particularly the large cohort of bandwars from South India, also blended in with the newly arrived and arriving migrants and became part of the local population of men and women from Madras or “Klings” that McNair characterized as mostly “decent people,” primarily laboring as “agriculturists or herdsmen.” Others were “artizans, cow keepers, cart drivers and the like.”54 A small number remained attached to the government because they had no means of supporting themselves or were too old to work. The Straits authorities initially sought funding from the government in India for precisely such individuals, but the latter refused to subsidize pardoned convicts 206

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who stayed on rather than return to India. Thus, Singapore had to fund those who needed food and shelter so that they would not end up begging “in the streets.”55 In the late nineteenth century labor from India increasingly came in the form of mostly voluntary migrants. In the aftermath of the 1867 transfer of the jurisdiction of the Straits Settlements to London, the flow of people briefly slowed down, in part because Calcutta imposed restrictions on overseas labor migration. Those regulations were eased in the early 1880s, leading to large numbers flocking to the Straits for work in the burgeoning plantation economy of the Malay states. From a little over 5,000 in 1880 the annual total of migrants grew to more than 18,000 by 1890 and more than 20,000 by 1896. By 1911 the total from South India alone exceeded 100,000.56 By contrast, only a handful of convicts were still alive at the turn of the twentieth century, almost 40 years after the end of the convict traffic to the Straits. A 1911 report counted seven in Singapore, of whom six were invalids, whereas Penang was down to its last survivor.57 A few years later a person writing under the pseudonym “Phoenix” offered “a few reminiscences” on convicts who had once inhabited the Straits. Understandably, the author highlighted their role in constructing public works, including the Horsburgh and Raffles lighthouses and the “beautiful straight country roads outside the municipal limits, namely, Gaylang to Changi and Newton to Kranji.” The article also referenced a “fairly wealthy” Penang ex-con who had become a government contractor and helped build the settlement’s prison and later its first steam tramway, while in Singapore convicts founded the Hindu temples on Orchard and Serangoon Roads.58 By the time Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), the founder of a prominent business family, arrived in Singapore in 1916, bandwars mostly existed in people’s memories, although their passing was recent enough that many were familiar with the convict lineage of some of their contemporaries. As Jumabhoy noted in an oral history interview conducted in 1981, “outlaws and banishees from India” built much of Singapore’s infrastructure, including several of its well-known landmarks (St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Mariamman Temple, and Government House [Istana]). He recalled as well a “banishee” named “Harumalph,” whose son, a “Mr. Sompath,” was prominent in the Indian community, had many grand- and great-grandchildren, and left a “vast estate” in Changi known as Sompath Estate and another tract of land in Serangoon when he died in 1919. In Jumabhoy’s retelling, Sompath and unnamed other convict descendants were well off financially because they E pi l o gu e

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had acquired land with the “government grants” they had received at the expiration of their sentences. As the previous chapters on Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore have shown, however, the government covered the subsistence costs of penniless bandwars and little else. Those who succeeded in doing well financially—and a tiny fraction did—did so because they capitalized on the service positions they held in the convict management system and the latitude they enjoyed as tickets-of-leave inmates to amass money and land before they attained a full pardon. The “Mr. Sompath” (or Hunmah Somapah, to use a contemporary spelling of his name) of Jumabhoy’s fond recollection may have benefited from the head start his convict father provided him. When Sompath died in January 1919 at the age of 55—he was born in 1864—his obituary noted that he left behind a son, two daughters, ten grandchildren, and “considerable land and house property” in Singapore. His wealth apparently came from investments he had made while working as a cashier for the Singapore Municipality. His son, Soma Basapa (1893–1943), from whom the well-known Basapa family name comes, testified in court that his father’s estate, once valued at $4 million, was only worth $1 million in 1934.59 Soma Basapa, who later added William Lawrence to his name and was a leading member of the Indian community—known for his wealth, his active role in community affairs, and his astonishing collection of animals, which eventually became the Punggol Zoo and later the world famous Singapore Zoo—and his descendants insist that their family arrived in Singapore as migrants and were originally from the North-Western Provinces or Punjab and once bore the family name Singh. 60 To them the convict origin story is a tale concocted by their enemies. 61 As Jumabhoy’s testimony suggests, the convicts’ presence in Singapore was still tangible in the early decades of the twentieth century, visible not only in the impressions left by their coerced labor on the island’s natural and built environment but also in the makeup of the Indian community. Whether Bhai Maharaj Singh lived on in the memories of the local Indian population in Singapore at the turn of the twentieth century, by contrast, is difficult to document. To date, I have not encountered any written evidence that suggests his memory was publicly acknowledged let alone preserved in the immediate aftermath of his death, either by the local Indian community in Singapore or by his fellow Punjabis in India. The colonial records are also largely silent; no triumphalist account exists of his death in captivity and seeming obscurity, in contrast to the exultation with which his capture in 1849 was reported. The 208

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official correspondence takes note of his passing but says little else; his presence in Singapore is not mentioned in the penal history of the Straits written by the former superintendent of convicts, J. F. A. McNair, whose office, in any case, was not directly involved in the supervision of a “state prisoner.”62 Perhaps the arrival of Sikhs as policemen in Singapore in the 1880s— some two decades after their countrymen came as convicts in the early 1850s—followed by the in-migration of other members of that community, ensured his memory and history on the island in the late nineteenth century. According to Choor Singh Sidhu (1911–2009), a judge of the Supreme Court of Singapore and a historian of his community, Sikh policemen in 1922 informed him that a tombstone in the General Hospital grounds had once been at Outram Road, where Bhai Maharaj Singh’s prison was located and where he was believed to have been cremated just outside the prison. After World War II, Tamils began to place flowers at the foot of the tombstone, and Sikhs followed suit, as did Muslims in the belief that it was a saint’s shrine (kramat). At some point local Sikhs built a structure over the tombstone, installed the Granth Sahib, and built a gurdwara (temple), all of which was subsequently moved to Silat Road in 1966. Today his shrine, the Memorial Gurdwara of Bhai Maharaj Singh, adjoins the main place of devotion known as Silat Road Gurdwara Sahib. Before visiting the main gurdwara, worshippers typically visit his shrine, which is held “in great reverence . . . [because it] earns the devotee great merit. It is believed that prayers recited sincerely from the heart are answered and vows have been fulfilled when a devotee worships at this shrine. This is the only Gurdwara Sahib in Singapore where langgar is prepared and served everyday round the clock if necessary.”63 As in his heyday, he is revered today as a “miracle” bhai. He also lives on in regional and nationalist historiography, celebrated in Punjab and India since the 1960s as a “saint-revolutionary,” a “rebel,” and an early nationalist, as well as by Sikh communities everywhere. Exile was but a momentary rupture in the life and history of Bhai Maharaj Singh. Far different today is the memory of transmarine convicts in the Straits Settlements. Public acknowledgment of their handiwork barely exists, forgotten with the passage of time and elided by many in the Indian community, who would rather not trace their origins to bandwar ancestors, and by the postcolonial government in Singapore, which would rather not see its shining modern city and state tainted by a colonial past shaped by the coerced labor of convicts. As for the roads, bridges, buildings, and other constructions they made as the East India Company’s “servants,” many have E pi l o gu e

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lost their connections to that past or been leveled to make room for the monuments of the new generations. Nor have the postindependent states that have emerged in what were once penal colonies sought to preserve the convicts’ memory. One of the few public acknowledgments of their significant historical contributions are the three bricks on display in the National Museum of Singapore, a paltry yet concrete reminder of their handiwork in building the infrastructure of the British Empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean. Fortunately the newly opened India Heritage Center, also in Singapore, has made more of an effort to recognize the island’s penal past, dedicating part of a floor to recounting the convicts’ role in the making of the Straits Settlements. Only time will tell if convict descendants will be willing to look back in appreciation at the histories that this book has narrated in some detail. Convicts once had a significant hand in forging empires across the Indian Ocean, and their present-day counterparts, prisoners in an era of mass incarceration, continue to function as captive populations in many parts of the world, particularly the United States. Their labor is exploited by structures and practices of power and domination in states and societies considered relatively free and democratic.

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Not es

Chapter 1. Across the K ala Pani 1. China had a long tradition of banishing ordinary criminals and political prisoners to the peripheries of its empire. Beginning in the eighteenth century, criminal exile meant resettlement in the “new territories” of Xinjiang, 3,000 miles northwest of Beijing. Joanna Waley-Cohen, Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). See also Andrew A. Gentes, Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), regarding the Russian state’s practice of deporting people to the extremities of its land-based empire; and Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels and Slaves (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–28. 2. European convicts from India followed a different trajectory: they were sent to Australia, which Britain decided early on to preserve for Europeans only. For an initial formulation of the ideas presented in this chapter, see Anand A. Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14 (2003):179–208. 3. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004). According to the historian E. J. Hobsbawm, the “long nineteenth century” was the period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, coincidentally also the era during which the colonial state in India transported people to British outposts across the Indian Ocean. 4. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3, 1. See also Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, “Introduction: Critical Histories of Geography,” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 1–8, for the importance of recognizing the links between geography and empire and the tendency in the historical scholarship to think about “empire as an historical more than a geographical question.” 211

5. To adapt a phrase applied to nationalism. See also Jean Gottman, The Significance of Territory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 95; and Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2010), for a thoughtprovoking interrogation of the notion of sovereignty as implying control over territory and borders. 6. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 81. See also my Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5–12, for Europeans’ notions of themselves as civilized and the “‘other”‘ as uncivilized, as belonging to another time. One element of that imagined backwardness was an image of India as a settled agricultural and peasant society. Those who led pastoral or nomadic lives, either by choice or by virtue of being cast out of the realm of rural society by the upheavals resulting from the new disciplinary regime of the emerging colonial state, were often regarded with suspicion and later targeted as “criminal tribes.” 7. Gottman, Significance of Territory, 96. 8. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 103–4. 9. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Patterson’s study conceives of slavery as “one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave” (1). It also emphasizes that slavery “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (13). See also John Bodel and Walter Scheidel, eds., On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016). 10. David Lowenthal, “Islands, Lovers, and Others,” Geographical Review 97 (2007): 203. See also J. Edward Chamberlin, Island: How Islands Transform the World (Katonah, NY: BlueBridge, 2013). 11. Morgan and Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World, 1–4. The demographic mix differed from that in Southeast Asia in that migrants, also from Britain, quickly surpassed and overwhelmed convict numbers. 12. Lowenthal, “Islands, Lovers, and Others,” 203. 13. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 7–9, conceives of “natal alienation” as creating a rupture in “social relations,” of severing ties to “living and blood relations” and future claims to “social relations.” 14. J. F. A. McNair (assisted by W. D. Bayliss), Prisoners Their Own Warders: A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits Settlements Established 1825 (Westminster, UK: A. Constable, 1899). See also Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). A growing body of writings emphasizes the long-standing interconnectedness of settlements across the Indian Ocean. See, for example, the works discussed in Nigel Worden, “Writing the Global Indian Ocean,” 212

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Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 145–54; and Nile Green, “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123 (2018): 846–74. 15. Lowenthal, “Islands, Lovers, and Others,” 215. 16. This and the two previous paragraphs draw on the insights of Lowenthal, “Islands, Lovers, and Others,” 202–29. 17. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Clare Anderson, “Global Mobilities,” in World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present, ed. Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 169–95. 18. Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989), 285; and J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1984), 66–67. 19. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 285; and Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 66–67. See also Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery, Serfdom and Other Forms of Coerced Labour: Similarities and Differences,” in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush (London: Longman, 1996), 19, for a description of convict labor as stemming from “a behavior-induced loss of rights.” 20. Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question, 1776–1811 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 9–10. 21. Timothy J. Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Frost, Convicts and Empire, 33. 22. Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 43. 23. Presidio sentences became the principal form of punishment after the abolition of the galleys in 1748. Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, xii–xiii, 145. 24. Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 25. See Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain’s Convicts after the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), for an excellent study of British convicts dispatched to West Africa after the closing of the American colonies and before the establishment of Botany Bay. 26. A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 5. 27. Con Costello, Botany Bay: The Story of the Convicts Transported from Ireland to Australia, 1791–1853 (Cork: Mercier Press, 1987), 16; and Wilfrid Oldham, Britain’s Convicts to the Colonies (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1990). See also Bruce Buchan and Mary Heath, “Savagery and Civilization: From Terra Nullius to the ‘Tide of History’,” Ethnicities 6 (2006): 5–26, for the British notion of Australia as terra nullius or “unowned land” because its “savage” indigenous people lacked “civil property rights and sovereignty.” No t e s

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28. Extract from Judicial Letter to Bengal, June 30, 1802, Board’s Collections (hereafter cited as BC), vol. 142, 1803–4, nos. 2481A to 2496. 29. Jorg Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law 1769–1817 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), 53. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 4, considers 1787 the starting date from when prisoners were transported to that place. 30. BC, 1825–26, refers to the 1790 dispatch of convicts. See also Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 132–33. 31. Minute by the Board, Bengal Public Consultations (hereafter cited as BPC), Jan. 4–Feb. 22, 1796, Feb. 12, no. 5; and Frederic J. Mouat, Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), ch. 1. 32. “A.D. 1799. Regulation II,” Harington’s Regulations; and “List of convicts . . . on board the ship Endeavour,” “List . . . on board the ship London,” BPC, May 3–29, 1797, May 3, nos. 125, 127; and Board to Major McDonald, Supt., Prince of Wales Island (hereafter cited as POWI), Mar. 11, 1796, BPC, Feb. 29–Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 14, no. 40. 33. Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9. See also Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, 6–31. 34. Extract Judicial Letter, June 30, 1802, BC, 1803–4; and Foreign Political, 1839, regarding the establishment of Aden as a penal colony for Indian prisoners. Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 2, The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 1; and John Mulvany, “Bengal Jails in Early Days,” Calcutta Review n.s. 6, no. 292 (1918): 297–98. H. Shakespear, Secy., to Secy., Fort Cornwallis, no. 942, Apr. 10, 1828, Bengal (Criminal and) Judicial Consultations (hereafter cited as BCJC), Apr. 2–May 1, 1828, Apr. 10, no. 8. 35. Ram Mohan Das, Crime and Punishment in Ancient India (with a particular reference to the Manusmrti) (Bodh Gaya: Kanchan Publications, 1982), 40–41; and Sukla Das, Crime and Punishment in Ancient India (c. A.D. 300 to A.D. 1100) (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977), 74–75. 36. Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 37. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1977). Foucault has surprisingly little to say about transportation other than it was “a rigorous and distant form of punishment” of “no real economic importance” (272, 279, 32). See also Bernard S. Cohn’s brilliant investigation, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), regarding the different “modalities” that shaped colonial knowledge and practices in India. 38. “The Case of Moobaruck Wullud Oomer Seedee, and two others,” in Report of Criminal Cases Determined in Court of Sudder Foujdaree Adawlut of Bombay, comp. A. F. Bellasis, vol. 1 (Bombay: Government Press, 1849), 134–39. Moobaruck 214

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was originally sentenced to death for his role in killing the husband of the woman he was involved with. See also the excellent essays in Carolyn Strange, ed., Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment and Discretion (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996), on the use of mercy and forgiveness in criminal justice systems. 39. Their statements are recorded in BRC, Dec. 3, 1790; and Fisch, Cheap Lives, 38–41. 40. Fisch, Cheap Lives, 131–32; and Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (Hassocks, Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1979), 137–38. 41. “Answers to the Interrogatories of the Governor General; and New Systems of Revenue, and Judicial Administration (1801),” Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers 9, 1812–1813, esp. 9, 45, 115. 42. “Answers to the Interrogatories of the Governor General,” 159, 225. 43. Christopher, Merciless Place, 31. 44. W. J. Butterworth, Governor, Singapore, to A. R. Young, Undersecy., GOB, no. 154, Nov. 12, 1847, Indian Criminal Judicial Consultations (hereafter cited as ICJC), July 1 to Dec. 30, 1848, Oct. 21, no. 1. 45. “Answers to the Interrogatories of the Governor General,” esp. 9, 45, 115, 159, 225. 46. Minute of 14 Dec. 1835, in Lord Macaulay’s Legislative Minutes, selected by C. D. Dharkar (N.p.: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1946), 278–79. See also Anand 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, on the workings of this committee. 47. India, Committee on Prison-Discipline, Report of the Committee on PrisonDiscipline (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1838), 86, 97. Hereafter cited as PDC Report. 48. PDC Report, 86. Of the 800 to 1,000 prisoners with life sentences at Alipur jail at any one time, no more than 48 a year (or about 6 percent) sought to have their sentences commuted to transportation. Regulation I of 1828 allowed prisoners this possibility. 49. J. H. Patton, Supt., Alipur Jail, to R. D. Mangles, Secy., Government of Bengal (hereafter cited as GOB), in PDC Report, appendix no. 4, 301. His position was partly based on his assessment of jails as lacking in severity. 50. Some Hindu scriptures prohibit travel across the black waters; other texts primarily express concern about ensuring the purity of food and water on board ships. The Laws of Manu belong in the first category, the dharma shastras in the latter. See Michael Pearson, “Across the Kala Pani,” Himal 23 (2010): 27–31. 51. G. H. Barlow, Subsecy., to J. Lumsden, Judge, June 18, 1793, and attached opinion of pandits of the Sadr Diwani Adalat, BCJC, July 5–26, 1793, July 5, no. 27. See also Kaushik Roy, War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740– 1849 (New York: Routledge, 2011), 56, regarding high caste Brahmin and Rajput soldiers of the Bengal Army who resisted overseas service because of fears of losing caste; and Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture, India, 1770–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), regarding the complex relationship between the company and its Indian interlocutors, the pandits. No t e s

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52. See my edited volume on Gadadhar Singh, Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World, trans. Anand A. Yang, Kamal Sheel, and Ranjana Sheel (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), 36–38. See also M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (New York: Dover Publications, 1983), ch. 11, about his Modh Bania caste’s decision to outcaste him in 1888 because of his plan to travel overseas to England. 53. See Amrith, Bay of Bengal, 24, for a notion of the Bay of Bengal as a “fierce unbounded sea.” 54. Governor General’s orders; A. Seton, Magte., Behar, to J. H. Harington, Registrar, Nizamat Adawlat, June 16, 1796, BCJC, May 6 to July 29, 1796, June 24, no. 21; and Extract from a Circular Letter from Nizamat Adawlat, April 23, 1795, BCJC, Jan. 15 to Apr. 29, 1796, Apr. 29, no. 13. Convict ships going to Bengkulu were also loaded with provisions for an additional six-month period so that new arrivals would not tax its limited food supply. Fort Marlborough authorities sought and secured this additional stipulation because their settlement did not grow enough food. 55. See Anand A. Yang, “Disciplining ‘Natives’: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India,” South Asia, n.s., 10 (1987): 485–505. 56. A. Kyd, Supt., Andamans, to Edward Hay, Secy., BCJC, Feb. 10 to Mar. 31, 1794, Feb. 14. 57. For example, see Petition of Ram Singh, Rangoon, to GGIC, India Judicial Consultations (hereafter cited as IJC), Apr.–Aug. 1872, June, no. 47. 58. See Humble Petition of Kinnuck Mistree, National Library, Singapore (hereafter cited as NL) 108, Governor: Letters to Resident Councillors, S 26, 1858. 59. J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 10–14, regarding Bentham’s antitransportation views; see also John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of a Historian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 61–65, on Bentham’s influence on Macaulay. 60. PDC Report, 86. See also the essays in Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann, eds., Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem, 2004), on British assumptions about their superiority and civilizing mission in India and other nonwhite colonies. 61. See Letter of Sir William Molesworth with Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Transportation (London: Henry Hooper, 1838), iv. Absent also in the deliberations in India is any mention of “unnatural crime” or homosexuality, which Molesworth referred to in lurid detail. In part, authorities in India were less concerned about it in the early nineteenth century because convicts were not housed together in barracks as they were in Australia, and in part. many local officials condoned and even encouraged convict marriages. 62. PDC Report, 3. 63. PDC Report, 94, also 80–81. See also Clive, Macaulay, 447, for the claim 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.”

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64. “Minute by Mr. Macfarlan, on the question of transportation,” PDC Report, appendix C. See also Pearson, “Kala Pani,” regarding Islam’s “schizophrenic attitude towards sea travel.” 65. PDC Report, 81. See also Hirst, Convict Society, 10–14, on Bentham’s view that transportation was an imprecise punishment and therefore an ineffective deterrent because people were most likely to be deterred by punishments that were clearly spelled out and precise. 66. PDC Report, 82. 67. See my Bazaar India, 10. 68. PDC Report, 89, app. C. 69. PDC Report, , 81. See also Kenneth Morgan, “English and American Attitudes towards Convict Transportation 1718-1775,” History 72 (1987): 422–23. 70. J. F. Thomas, Registrar, Foujdari Adalat, to Chief Secy., no. 154, Aug. 22, 1835, ICJC, Sept. 7-Dec. 28, 1835, Sept. 14, no. 2. 71. PDC Report, 97. 72. David Meredith, “Full Circle? Contemporary Views on Transportation,” in Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, ed. Stephen Nicholas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 14. 73. See chapter 3. 74. A. Kyd to Bengal, Nov. 20, 1794, BPC, Jan. 2 to Feb. 27, 1795, Jan. 19, no. 3. 75. Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 5. See also Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García, On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden: Brill, 2016); and Taylor C. Sherman, “Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean,” History Compass 7 (2009): 659–77, on the importance of considering the complex dynamics underlying colonial punishment and violence and their wider “political, administrative, social, economic and cultural” contexts (670). 76. See also the classic work by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1939] 2003), which correlates imprisonment and unemployment rates and conceptualizes houses of correction as institutions that fused together the principles of the poorhouse, workhouse, and penal institutions to capitalize on the labor power of people. 77. “A.D. 1799. Regulation II,” Harington’s Regulations; and “List of convicts . . . on . . . the ship Endeavour,” “List . . . on . . . the ship London,” BPC, May 3–29, 1797, May 3, nos. 125, 127. See also Board to Supt., POWI, Mar. 11, 1796, BPC, Feb. 29– Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 14, no. 40. 78. “A.D. Regulation LIII,” Harington’s Regulations; and Mulvany, “Bengal Jails,” 297–98. The section in Regulation II of 1799 extending transportation to escaped prisoners was rescinded. Fisch, Cheap Lives, 3–4. 79. Fisch, Cheap Lives, 78, 62; and “Regulation LIII.” 80. “Resolutions,” G. Dowdeswell, Secy., GOB, BCJC, Nov. 26–Dec. 10, 1811, Dec. 10, no. 2; and “A.D. 1811. Regulation XIV.” See also Chitra Joshi, “Fettered

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Bodies: Labouring on Public Works in Nineteenth-Century India,” in Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories: Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009), 3–21, on convict labor regimes in India. 81. Fisch, Cheap Lives, 78, attributes the abolition to three reasons: the building of a new jail at Alipur, the frequent delays experienced in carrying out transportation, and its expense. 82. “A.D. 1813. Regulation IX.” 83. “A.D. 1828. Regulation I.” 84. “Resolution,” Legislative Dept., Oct. 8, 1838, in PDC Report. 85. “Minute by Governor General,” Sept. 14, 1838, BC, 1838–39, no. 47. Lord Auckland, also known as George Eden, was the first Earl of Auckland. 86. No. 19 of 1839, Oct. 30, 1839, India and Bengal Despatches, Aug. 7 to Nov. 27, 1839. 87. “Resolution,” Dec. 30. 1842, ICJC, July 1–Dec. 30. 1842, Dec. 1, no. 1. 88. Butterworth to A. R. Young, no. 154, Nov. 12, 1847, ICJC, July 1 to Dec. 30, 1848, Oct. 21, no. 1. 89. David Smith, “The Demise of Transportation: Mid-Victorian Penal Policy,” Criminal Justice History 3 (1982): 21–45; and Martin Gibbs, “The Archaeology of the Convict System in Western Australia,” Australasian Historical Archaeology 19 (2001): 60–72. Although transportation to the east coast of Australia was stopped in 1840, it continued to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) until the early 1850s, when the traffic shifted to Western Australia until the 1860s. 90. Court of Directors to Governor General, Judicial no. 12 of 1842, and F. J. Halliday, Secy., GOB, to Nizamat Adawlat, Dec. 2, 1842, BCJC, Feb. 27– Mar. 27, 1843, Mar. 6, nos. 55, 52. 91. “Proposed Construction of a Central Penitentiary,” no. 11 of 1841, India and Bengal Despatches, Sept. 8–Dec. 31, 1841, C. 3176. 92. “Statement of Prisoners,” BCJC, Feb. 27–Mar. 27, 1843, Mar. 6, no. 49. 93. Halliday, Offg. Secy., Government of India (hereafter cited as GOI), to Secy., GOB, Apr. 17, 1843, and Registrar, Nizamat Adawlat, to Halliday, no. 398, Mar. 31, 1843, BCJC, Apr. 3–26, 1843, nos. 18 and 17. 94. H. Shakespear, Secy., to Supt., Alipur Jail, BCJC, Feb. 14–28, 1828, Feb., 28, no. 49; G. F. Dick, Colonial Secy. to Secy., GOI, Apr. 29, 1841, and G. W. Anderson, et al., Bombay, to Court of Directors, May 22, 1841, ICJC, July 5 to Sept. 27, 1841, July 19, no. 9. 95. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 47. 96. A. Kyd to Bengal, Nov. 20, 1794, BPC, Jan. 2 to Feb. 27, 1795, Jan. 19, no. 3. 97. Extract Judicial Letter to Bengal, June 30, 1802, BC, nos. 2481A to 2496. Also BCJC, Jan. 6 to Apr. 28, 1797, Feb. 24, no. 2, for a list of transportees that includes Portuguese convicts. 98. Letter from Governor, POWI, May 31, 1800, Extract BPC, July 10, 1800, BC, 1803–4.

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99. “Extract from proceedings in the Colonial Dept.,” June 5, 1813, BCJC, June 26–July 24, 1813, July 24, no. 18; and extract of a letter from the Resident, Fort Marlbro, to Board of Trade, Fort William, Aug. 5, 1806, in BC, 1808–9. See K. Hazareesingh, History of Indians in Mauritius, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1977), 4–9. In 1815, 700 prisoners were sent from Bengal to work in Mauritius. 100. Resident, Fort Marlborough, Nov. 30, 1805, and J. Taylor, Richard Becker to Sir George H. Barlow, Nov. 18, 1806, in Sumatra Factory Records (hereafter cited as SFR), 1799–1808, Nov. 30, 1805; and BPC, Feb. 29–Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 7, no. 6. 101. “Extract letter from Governor General to Secret Committee,” Dec. 20. 1806, BC, 1808–9; “Seizure and Trial of the Rebel Yeman Nair,” BC, 1809–10; “Extract Military letter from Fort St. George,” May 9, 1803; and Lt., 2nd Battalion, 6th Regiment, N.I., March 8, 1803, to Chief Secy., Govt., Fort St. George, BC, 1803–4. 102. “A.D. 1828. Regulation I”; John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 75–76; and his “Bengali Bandits, Police and Landlords after the Permanent Settlement,” in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Anand A. Yang (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 26–47. 103. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 11. 104. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 132–33; Chief Secy. Bayley’s memo re: convicts at Bencoolen, Nov. 1824; T. S. Raffles, to Joseph Dart, Secy., East India Company, Apr. 5, 1824, in BC, 1825-26; Bombay Castle to Court of Directors, May 22, 1841, BCJC, July 5–Sept. 27, 1841, Aug. 16, no. 9; and C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988, 2nd ed. (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), 46. 105. Colonial Secy. to Secy., GOI, June 13, 1848; and Committee to Governor, July 20, 1847, ICJC, July 1–Dec. 3, 1848, Aug. 19, no. 14. 106. Colonial Secy. to Secy., June 13, 1848; and Committee to Mauritius, July 20, 1847, ICJC, July 1–Dec. 3 1848, Aug. 19, no. 14; PDC Report, 73–74, 77, 101; “Abstract . . . of Madras convicts,” Oct. 17, 1837, BCJC, Nov. 13–Dec. 29, 1837, Dec. 18, no. 7; and Secy. to Fort Cornwallis, no. 942, Apr. 10, 1828, BCJC, Apr. 2– May 1, 1828, Apr. 10, no. 8. Most of these 418 were old and infirm, and some among them had been on the island for over 30 years. The numbers for Mauritius are 750 in 1837, 603 in 1840, 406 in 1845, and 418 in 1847. 107. Governor to GOI, no. 106, Aug. 20, 1855, and Malacca to Secy., ICJC, Oct. 5–Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 16, nos. 13, 16; Singapore to Governor, Apr. 7, 1846, Singapore to GOB, no. 154, Nov. 12, 1847, ICJC., May 30–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; and GOB to GOI, no. 2310, Oct. 31, 1853, ICJC., Oct. 5–Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 23, no. 13. See also Clare Anderson, “The British India Empire, 1789–1939,” in Anderson, Global History of Convicts, 211, for an estimate that between 1789 and 1839 “at least 108,000 Indian, Burmese, Malay and Chinese convicts” were transported to settlements across the Indian Ocean, including to prisons in India. 108. A. W. Russell, Undersecy., GOB, to J. W. Dalrymple, Undersecy., GOI, no. 2310, Oct. 31, 1853, ICJC, Oct. 5–Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 23, no. 13.

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109. Turnbull, History of Singapore, 55. 110. Cited in Turnbull, History of Singapore, 55. 111. C. T. Buckland, Junior Secy., GOB to C. Beadon, Secy., GOI, IPC, July– Aug. 1857, Aug. 28, no. 39. 112. E. A. Blundell, Governor, to C. Beadon, Secy., GOI, no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857, ICJC, Jan. 1858, Jan 8, no. 7. 113. Blundell to Beadon, no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857, ICJC, Jan. 8, 1858, no. 7; and Charles Burton Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965), 657. 114. G. T. Hilliard, Supt., to R. C., POWI, IJC, Feb. 1858, Feb. 12, no. 16. 115. Mouat, Adventures and Researches, 44; Beadon, GOI, to Mouat, Playfair and Heathcote, no. 2436, Nov. 20, 1857, and Mouat to Buckland, GOB, no. 3128, Oct. 24, 1857, IPC, Jan. 1858, Jan. 15, Judicial, no. 16 and no. 273. 116. Beadon to Capt. H. Man, Executive Engineer and Supt., Convicts, Moulmein, no. 87, Jan. 15, 1857 (sic), IPC, Jan., no. 21. 117. A. P. Howell, Note on Jails and Jail Discipline in India 1867–68. Selections from the Records of the Government of India, Home Department, no. LXXII (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1869), 71; and GOI to Govt. of Bombay, Jan. 12, 1858, IPC, Jan. 1858, no. 13. 118. Sir B. B. McCausland, Recorder, Singapore, to Blundell, Jan. 29, 1858, ICJC, Mar. 1858, Mar. 26. 119. One group of mutineers ended up in Sarawak, where they became part of the police force of its “White Raja,” James Brooke. 120. India, General Report on the Administration of the Several Presidencies and Provinces of British India, during the Year 1858–59 (Calcutta: Home Secretariat, 1860), 54. 121. Howell, Note on Jails and Jail Discipline, 71; and Clive, Macaulay, 447–48. The one exception was that convicts from Burma were sent to Bombay because the Andamans offered them easier opportunities for escape. 122. “Act XXXV of 1860, relating to the transportation of convicts,” India Judicial Proceedings, (IJP) 1860, Sept. 12, no. 66. 123. Beadon, GOI, to J. P. Walker, Supt., Port Blair, ICJC, June 1858, May 7. 124. Extract from report of Inspector General of Prisons, ICJC, Jan.–July 1855, Feb., no. 77. 125. Col. H. Man, Supt., Port Blair, to E.C. Bayley, Secy., GOI, ICJC, Aug.– Dec. 1869, Aug. 7, no. 19. 126. C. B. Thornhill, IG, Prisons, NWP, to G. E. W. Couper, Secy., NWP, no. 107, Oct. 10, 1859, IJP, 1860, Apr. 20, no. 5. 127. Howell, Note on Jails and Jail Discipline, 71–75. 128. Howell, Note on Jails and Jail Discipline. 71-75. 129. Howell, Note on Jails and Jail Discipline, 74–75. 130. Report of the Indian Jail Conference assembled in Calcutta (Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press, 1877), 28. 131. Report of the Indian Jail Conference, 25–28. 220

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132. Walker to Beadon, no. 16, Apr. 6, 1858, ICJC, May 1858, May, no. 25. 133. “Report by Dr. G. G. Brown on the Sanitary state of the Andaman Islands,” Mar. 1859, India Judicial Proceedings (hereafter cited as IJP), Sept.–Dec. 1858, July, no. 51. 134. Such misrepresentations were widely used in the campaign against transportation to Australia in the 1840s and 1850s. See Tim Causer, “Transportation, ‘Unnatural Crime’, and the ‘Horrors’ of Norfolk Island,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 14 (2012): 130–40. 135. Aparna Vaidik, Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 177–85. See also Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 136. Straits Settlements, Annual Report on the Administration of the Straits Settlements for the Year 1862–63 (Singapore: Government Press, 1864). 137. The lone exception is the remarkable Urdu narrative Tavarik-I ‘ajib (Black waters: The strange history of Port Blair), titled in Hindi Tarikh Port Blair, by Mohamed Jaffer (Maulana Muhammad Jafar Thanesari), about his 18 years in the Andamans beginning in the late 1860s. See Satadru Sen, “Contexts, Representation and the Colonized Convict: Maulana Thanesari in the Andaman Islands,” Crime, History and Societies 8 (2004): 117–39. See also Lucy Frost and Hamish MaxwellStewart, eds., Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), for the rich variety of epistolary sources available by and on Australian convicts.

Chapter 2. “Bundwars, Malays, Sebundy Sepoys, and Neas Men” 1. “Translation of an arzee [petition] from Hussien [Hussein] Khan and Futteh [Fateh] Khawn convicts at Bencoolen,” 1800, with W. Ewer, Fort Marlborough, to Marquis Wellesley, GGIC, BPC, Dec. 4–30, 1800, Dec. 4, no. 5. The original transportation roster lists Hussein and Wali Daud Khan as having the same father, Deria Khan; Fateh Khan’s father is identified as Bairam Khan. “List of Prisoners sentenced to . . . transportation,” BCJC, Oct. 7 to Dec. 30, 1796, Oct. 2. “Translation of an arzee [petition] from Khan.” 3. G. T. Siddons, Acting Resident, to T. Barnes, Supt., Slaves and Convicts, Feb. 26, 1813, SFR, Jan.–March 1813, Feb. 4. Statement of Cheena Boss, recorded by Resident, SFR, July–Dec. 1811, Oct. 5. A classic in microhistory is Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1980). See also his “Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 10–35; Francesca Trivellato, “Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory,” French Politics, Culture and Society 33 (2015): 122–34; and John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories No t e s

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of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 87–109, regarding microhistory’s emphasis on “scale and point of view” to depict the practices of everyday life and to endow human subjects with agency. 6. W. R. Jennings, J. Lumsdaine, and E. Presgrave, “Report on the Population, &c. of the Town and Suburbs of Marlborough, in the Island of Sumatra,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany, 14 (1822): 427–35; and Walter Hamilton, The East-India Gazetteer, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London: W. H. Allen, 1828), 596. The sepoys stationed at the fort numbered roughly 300 in the early nineteenth century. 7. Court of Directors to Bengal, Aug. 31, 1801, in John Bastin, The British in West Sumatra (1685–1825) (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965), 122–23. To reduce costs, the East India Company directors ordered the withdrawal of administrators from all but two outstations. 8. Alan Harfield, Bencoolen: A History of the Honourable East India Company’s Garrison on the West Coast of Sumatra (1685–1825) (Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire, UK: A&J Partnership, 1995); R. J. Wilkinson, “Bencoolen,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 16 (1938): 125–26; Bastin, British in West Sumatra, xxvi–xxvii; and E. Ulrich Kratz, “Like a Fish Gasping for Water: The Letters of a Temporary Spouse from Bengkulu,” Indonesia and the Malay World 34 (2006): 247–80. 9. Elsbeth Locher-Schoolten, Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830–1907 (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2003), 51–55; and Dianne Lewis, Jan Compagnie in the Straits of Malacca, 1641–1795 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1995), 124–26. 10. J. Kathirithamby-Wells, “A Survey of the Effects of British Influence on Indigenous Authority in Southwest Sumatra (1685–1824),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Vokenkunde 129 (1973): 239–68; Bastin, British in West Sumatra; and Kerry Ward, “Blood Ties: Exile, Family, and Inheritance across the Indian Ocean in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 45 (2011): 436–52. 11. “Translation of an arzee [petition] from Khan.” The prince, the eldest son of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, settled in Banaras in the 1780s. Raghubir Sinh, ed., Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. 10, 1786–1788 (Delhi: Government of India, 1972), 706–7; and G. N. Saletore, gen. ed., Selections from English Records No. 1, Banaras Affairs (1788–1810), U.P. State Records Series, vol. 1 (Allahabad: Government Central Record Office, 1955), i–v. 12. “Translation of an arzee [petition] from Khan.” 13. “Translation of an arzee [petition] from Khan.” The Bengkulu Commissioner was informed about the terms set for the Khans by the Nizamat Adalat (NA), the chief criminal court in Calcutta. See “Extract from the proceedings of the Nizamat Adalat,” BPC, Dec. 4, 1800, no. 13. 14. Extract from proceedings of governor-general, Dec. 6, 1793, BCJC, Nov. 1 to Dec. 27, 1793, Dec. 20. 15. J. Duncan, Resident, Banaras, to J. Champain, Magte., 24 Parganas, and Duncan to G. H. Barlow, Jan. 16, 1795, BCJC, Jan. 2 to Feb. 20, 1795, Jan. 30, nos. 2 222

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and 3; and Duncan to GGIC, May 22, BCJC, June 6 to July 25, 1794, June 6, no. 3. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the other member of this trio was Mulki Tewari, who had killed Sheolal’s brother-in-law in 1794 to avenge the latter’s murder of his relations in 1790. See Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89–90, 101–3, regarding the British acceptance of the Banaras practice of exempting Brahmins from capital punishment and mitigating their sentence to transportation. 16. J. Smith, Magte., 24 Parganas, to GGIC, Sept. 7, 1796, BCJC, Aug. 8 to Sept. 9, 1796, Sept. 23, no 72; resolution of deputy governor, BCJC, Jan. 6 to April 28, 1797, Feb. 10, no. 7; and BCJC, Oct. 7 to Dec. 30, 1796, Dec. 2, no. 1, resolution. 17. A. Macklen, Magte., 24-Parganas, to J. Shore, Secy., Marine Board, BPC, Sept. 2 to Oct. 17, 1801, Sept. 9, no. 36; “List of convicts,” with J. B. Smith, Magte., 24-Parganas, to V.P.I.C., March 28, 1797, BPC, May 3–29, 1797, May 3, no. 125; and “List of convicts . . . Yarmouth,” BCJC, May 5 to July 28, 1797, May 8, no. 4. 18. Late nineteenth-century census data suggest that Muslims were probably about one-third of Bengal’s population in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when that presidency included today’s West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, Orissa, and Jharkhand, and about one-half of Bengal proper without the last three areas. C. J. O’Donnell, Census of India, 1891, vol. 3, The Lower Provinces of Bengal and Their Feudatories: The Report (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893), 144. 19. Calculated from a Nizamat Adalat list that names convicts, their fathers, place and date of sentence, period of transportation, and sect or caste. This information was partly gathered to prevent violent confrontations in local jails over caste conventions about food consumption. Hunger strikes and “riotous” behavior erupted in Bengal jails in the 1790s when colonial authorities changed the practice of allowing inmates to cook for themselves and instead employed a single Muslim and a single Hindu cook to prepare meals for Muslims and Hindus, respectively. Many prisoners insisted on having multiple cooks to serve different caste groups. See letters from district officials to H. St. G. Tucker, Subsecy., in BCJC, May 6–July 29, 1796, May 27, no. 7, June 10, nos. 20, 22, 30. See also my “Disciplining Natives” on castes and prison outbreaks in the nineteenth century. 20. Resolution, BCJC, Jan. 6 to Apr. 28, 1797, Feb. 24, no. 4; Smith, 24 Parganas, to Tucker, Subsecy., Mar. 10, 1797, and Smith to VPIC, Mar. 14, 1797, BCJC, March 13, no. 2; and Mar. 24, no. 39. See, for instance, Clare Anderson, “Convict Passages in the Indian Ocean, c. 1790–1860,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 130, for the argument that “low-caste Hindu and tribal communities made up the largest percentage” of convicts sent to penal colonies in the Indian Ocean. See also Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Delhi: Primus Books, [2007] 2014), 107–9, on the diverse caste backgrounds of thugs. 21. Letter to Court of Directors, in Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. 7, 1773–1776, ed. R. P. Patwardhan (Delhi: National Archives, 1971), 271, 300; and SFR, 1773–74, Dec. 18; and Harfield, Bencoolen, 65. “Malays” and others from No t e s

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British settlements in the region were occasionally sent to India in the eighteenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British administrators at times equated penal servitude with slavery, in that both were forms of coerced labor. However, as recent scholarly writings have rightly emphasized, there are both similarities and differences. See, for example, Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García, Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden: Brill, 2016). John Mulvany, “Bengal Jails in Early Days,” Calcutta Review, n.s., 6, no. 292 (1918): 297, states that the Supreme Court at Calcutta began deploying transportation as early as 1787. 22. Bengkulen to Bengal, SFR, 1786–87, Oct. 8. 23. “List of the Hon. Co’s Slaves,” SFR, 1781–98, 1782; and “Account of Hon. Co’s Coffrees,” 1796, SFR, 1796–97, Mar. 1797. 24. Fort Marlbro Consultations, SFR 1786–87, SFR 1796–97, SFR 1788; and Bastin, British in West Sumatra, 88–89, xiii, 11. A piaster or a Spanish dollar was roughly worth about five shillings sterling or two rupees. 25. Fort Marlborough to Court of Directors, Nov. 30, 1787, SFR, Sept. 1783– Sept. 1791; and Bastin, British in West Sumatra, 89. Bengkulu authorities refused emancipation on grounds that “freedom . . . would be fraught with most pernicious consequences . . . and probably be the means of very serious disturbances.” 26. From J. Crisp, SFR, 1786–87, Feb. 21. 27. Jennings, Lumsdaine, and Presgrave, “Report on the Population,” 433. For a similar view articulated by European planters, see the accounts of the “Botany Bay” plantation in Letters from Bencoolen, 1823–1828: Thomas Day and William Day, with an introduction by James Trelawny Day (Kilerran, Scotland: Hardinge Simpole Publishing, 2008), 123–45. 28. Earlier Fort Marlborough had requested and received lascars or “native” sailors to meet its labor needs. 29. Extract of letter from R. S. Perreau, Feb. 19, 1797, BCJC, Jan. 6 to Apr. 28, 1797, Feb. 24, no. 4; Deputy Governor, Council, SFR, Aug. 19, 1796 to Sept. 6, 1797, June 7 1797; and Fort Marlbro Consultation (Public), 1790–94, Nov. 30, 1791. See also Robert James Young, “The English East India Company and Trade on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1730–1760” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970), 44, 193. Captain Pearson, who served in Bengkulu in the 1780s before transferring to Bengal, died at Fort Marlborough in December 1800. Harfield, Bencoolen, 356. 30. “List of convicts . . . on board the ship London,” BPC, May 3 to 29, 1797, May 3, no. 127, enclosure. 31. To Lt. William McCullock, Feb. 13, 1789 and to Captain R. Hamilton, officer commanding troops at fort Marlborough, SFR, 1789, Feb. 18. 32. Edward Hay, Secy., government, to J. Mongguch, Lt. Adjutant, Sept. 29, 1792, SFR, 1792–93, Oct. 3. As shipboard “diet” rules (and precautions) and passenger lists show, colonial administrators catered to a broad cross-section of castes for 224

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whom the ingestion of cooked and uncooked food had to conform to their purity and pollution practices. 33. B. Hartley, Senior Surgeon, Bengkulen, June 13, SFR, Aug. 19, 1796 to Sept. 6, 1797, SFR, June 14, 1797. 34. C. R. Crommelin to W. Ewer, Commissioner, Aug. 7, 1800, SFR, Jan. 29– Dec. 23, 1800, Sept.; and Resolution, BCJC, Oct. 17 to Dec. 19, 1799, Dec. 5, no. 1. 35. Smith, 24 Parganas, to J. H. Harington, Registrar, N.A., Jan. 3, 1799, BCJC, Jan. 4, Mar. 29, 1799, Jan. 25, no. 16. 36. Extract from Public Department, BCJC, Apr. 5 to June 28, 1799, Apr. 19, no. 4. 37. Harington, Acting Registrar, to G. H. Barlow, Secy., Aug. 23, 1799, BCJC, July 4 to Aug. 29, 1799, Aug 29, no. 4. 38. C. Chapman, Contai, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy., BOR, Feb. 6, 1798, BCJC, Sept. 7 to Dec. 31, 1798, Oct. 12, no. 37; and Harington to Barlow, Secy., May 24, 1799, BCJC, Apr. 5 to June 28, 1799, June 17. Occasionally, political offenders were sent to other venues. For instance, Babu Jaggat Singh, implicated in the Vizier’s rebellion in Awadh, was sent to St. Helena. To R. Brooke, Governor, St. Helena, from Fort William, Oct. 18, 1799, BCJC, Oct. 17 to Dec. 19, 1799, Oct. 24, no. 1. Convicts were sent to Ambon and Java when the British briefly held these islands in the early nineteenth century. 39. F. H. Pearson, Engineer, to government, Nov. 28, 1798, SFR, Sept. 8, 1797 to Jan. 20, 1799, Dec. 5, 1798; and Letter from Pearson, Nov. 6, 1797, SFR, Sept. 8, 1797 to Jan. 20, 1799, Nov. 10. See also SFR, Jan. 18, 1799 to Jan. 29, 1800, passim; and Bastin, British in West Sumatra, xxiii 40. Minute by Mr. Edward Coles, Oct. 4; and Pearson, Captain, to Secy., Oct. 17, 1799, India Home Miscellaneous Series (hereafter cited as HM), vol. 115, 1799, Oct. 41. See chapters 3 and 4 on the high casualty rates of convicts in Penang and Singapore as well. 42. Governor General (GG) to Walter Ewer, Dec. 17, 1799, BPC, Dec. 4 to 30, 1800, Dec. 4, no. 12. 43. Ewer to GG, July 4, 1800, BPC, Feb. 26 to Mar. 13, 1801, Nov. 6, no. 10A, and enclosures. Ewer arrived in Fort Marlborough in January 1800. See Bastin, British in West Sumatra, 96. For a similar viewpoint of Bengkulu as “little better than banishment,” see The Journal of Thomas Otho Travers 1813–1820, ed. John Bastin (Singapore: Government Printer, 1960), 125. 44. W. Marsden, The History of Sumatra (London: Thomas Payne & Sons, 1811), 169–83; and Kratz, “Fish Gasping for Water,” 250–51. 45. GG to Ewer, Dec. 17, 1799, BPC, Dec. 4, 1800, no. 12; Bastin, British in West Sumatra, xxvii–xxviii. 46. Ewer to GG, July 4, 1800, BPC, Nov. 6, 1800, no. 10A; GG to Ewer, Dec. 17, 1799, BPC, Dec. 4, 1800, no. 12; and Bastin, British in West Sumatra, xxvii–xxviii. 47. Ewer to Dundas, Aug. 6,1800, in Bastin, British in West Sumatra, 108. See also Letters from Bencoolen, 20, on the price of convict labor. No t e s

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48. Unfortunately, Ewer made financial commitments without consulting his superiors, and the extra amounts of pepper he generated through these arrangements came at a time when pepper prices had declined significantly. The East India Company held him accountable for the money advances he had made and imprisoned him in Calcutta when he was unable to repay them or the funds missing from his treasury. Bastin, British in West Sumatra, xxvii–xxix. 49. Extract from letter from Resident to Board of Trade, Aug. 5, 1806, SFR, 1799–1808. See also Letters from Bencoolen, 20, for an 1823 estimate that convicts, at 5 rupees a head per month, were “the cheapest labor procurable.” 50. Resident to Board of Trade, Aug. 5, 1806. Ewer portrayed African slaves as “always merry. . . ; some of them purchase their freedom, but they generally prefer remaining as they are.” 51. Harfield, Bencoolen, 356, 371. 52. Ewer to GG, Oct. 21, 1801, SFR, Jan. 14 to 28, 1801, Jan. 28. 53. Perreau to Ewer, Jan. 16, 1804, SFR, 1804, Jan.; Perreau to T. Parr, Resident, Feb. 22, 1806, SFR, Jan. to July 1806, Feb; and General Letter to Bengal, SFR, Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, 1800, Aug. 25. See also Ewer to GG, Oct. 21, 1801, BPC, Jan. 14–28, 1802, on there being no one else on the island among the Europeans who understood “the Hindostan sufficiently”—presumably meaning the language as well as the people and culture. 54. A Calcutta contemporary of Perreau accused him of being “a much greater thief and scoundrel than either his father or his uncle, both of whom were hanged at Tyburn” and of “cheating every person he knew in Calcutta, and then absconding to Bencoolen.” Perreau fled without paying his debts and was said to have been responsible for a “deficiency” in the insurance company he worked for. See Memoirs of William Hickey, vol. 4, (1790–1809), 4th ed., ed. Alfred Spencer (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1925), 324. See also Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) regarding the sensational 1775 case involving his father and uncle. 55. Bastin, British in West Sumatra, xxviii–xxix. Ewer also sought to retrench by abolishing some outresidencies and downsizing the size of his administration. See “Court to Bengal, 31 August 1801,” in Bastin, British in West Sumatra, 121–22, for the complaint that Bengkulu annually cost the company a loss of 87,000 pounds. Ewer’s term in office abruptly ended in 1805. He died a pauper in prison in Calcutta in 1810. T. Parr, Resident, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy., Apr. 3, 1806, HM, vol. 228, Aug.–Dec. 1806, Aug.; and Perreau to Parr, June 5, 1807, HM, vol. 229, June–Aug. 1807, June. 56. Perreau died in 1811 with unpaid debts in both Bengal and Bengkulu—over $90,000 in the latter place. “Perreau’s Debts,” SFR, Jan.–June 1811, appendix. See also Elizabeth Perreau to W. Parker, July 3, 1811, SFR, July–Dec. 1811, July, on her impoverished state because of her husband’s debts and her four young children. 57. Dowdeswell to Parr, Apr. 3, 1806, SFR, Aug.–Dec. 1806, Aug. Because of Parr’s concerns, Calcutta ordered that convicts pardoned by Ewer because of their military service be subjected to “constraints” again and be “compelled to labor.” It 226

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also directed the resident to stop the local practice of farming out convicts to work for individuals. 58. Perreau to Parr, HM, vol. 229, June 1807. This description calls into question the slave-like and “social death” conditions under which convicts labored in Bengkulu at this point in time. 59. Slaves and sepoys were subject to much the same punishment for their offenses. Dowdeswell to Parr, Jan. 1, 1807, and “Report of persons apprehended in town . . . ,” SFR, Jan.–Apr. 1807. See also John Ball, Indonesian Legal History: British West Sumatra, 1685–1825 (Sydney: Oughtershaw Press, 1984), 169, 217–20, on the pangeran’s court sentencing Bengal convicts to hanging in 1801 for “serious crimes” and for the British understanding that their administrators had the authority to punish summarily but only up to a point, up to a dozen or eighteen “rattans” or a couple of days in the stocks. 60. Parr to President and Board of Trade, Nov. 30, 1805, SFR, 1799–1808, Nov. 30, 1805. 61. Bengkulu’s convict population numbered 314. Parr to Dowdeswell, Apr. 3, 1806, HM, vol. 228, Aug.–Dec. 1806, Aug.; Perreau to Parr, June 5, 1807, HM, vol. 229, June 1807; and Macklen, 24 Parganas, to Shore, Marine Board, Sept. 3, 1801, BPC, Sept. 2 to Oct. 17, 1801, Sept. 9, no. 36. 62. Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: John Murray, 1830), 301–2. 63. Ewer to Court of Directors, Aug. 8, 1809, with Bengal Public Letter, Sept. 1809, BC, 1809–10, 6486. 64. Ewer to Court of Directors, Aug. 8, 1809. 65. Benjamin Heyne, Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India; with Journals of Several Tours through Various Parts of the Peninsula: Also, An Account of Sumatra, in a Series of Letters (London: Robert Baldwin, 1814), 388. 66. Parr to Board of Trade, Nov. 30, 1805, SFR, Nov. 30, 1805. 67. Ewer to Court of Directors, Aug. 8, 1809 68. Bengal Military Collection no. 7, BC, 1812–13; and Bastin, British in West Sumatra, 102–3. 69. E. Atkins, Supt., to R. Parry, Resident, Mar. 24, 1810, HM, vol. 236, Jan.– Mar. 1810, Mar.; Atkins to Parr, June 1, 1807, SFR, May–Aug. 1807. 70. “Report of Convicts for March 1809,” HM, vol. 233, Jan.–Apr. 1809, Apr., appendix. The list identifies 221 convicts in all. There are no details on the remaining 8 who made up the 229 convicts. 71. “Humble Petition of Jeyram Roy,” Apr. 14, 1810; and Atkins to Parry, Apr. 26, 1810, HM, vol. 237, Apr..–June 1810, Apr. The standard practice in ascertaining a convict’s identity was to question him about his crime, sentence, the name of the judge or magistrate who had sentenced him, the ship he came out on, and the names of his shipmates who could vouch for him. 72. Siddons, Secy., to Resident, Jan. 24, 1809, HM, vol. 233, Jan.–Apr. 1809. 73. Parry to Atkins, Supt., Slaves and Convicts, Jan. 28, 1809; and Parry to H. Heath, Acting Magte., Jan. 28, 1809, HM, vol. 233, Jan.–Apr. 1809. No t e s

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74. SFR, Jan.–Mar. 1813, Feb.; HM, vol. 239, Apr.–June 1811, May, Appendix. 75. “Statement of Cheena Boss.” As the names and places of origin of the men implicated in the 1813 incident suggest, Fateh Khan and others were Hindustani speakers from north India and Ghose, Boss, and other Bengali speakers. But they appear to have communicated with one another and with their convict officials in Hindustani. 76. Statement of Cheena Boss. 77. Siddons, Resident to Barnes, Supt., Feb. 26, 1813, SFR, Jan.–Mar. 1813, Feb. (hereafter “Trial of Fateh Khan”). See also Statement of Cheena Boss; and Dowdeswell, Secy., Fort William to W. Parker, Resident, SFR, Jan.–June 1812, June. 78. Siddons to Barnes, Feb. 26, 1813. 79. C. M. Ricketts, Secy., Govt., to Siddons, Sept. 24, 1813, SFR, Jan.–Mar. 1814. 80. Unless noted otherwise, information about the godown break-in is drawn from the lengthy transcript of the ensuing inquiry as recorded by G. J. Siddons, the Acting Resident (hereafter referred to as the Siddons transcript). See also J. S. Miles, Alphabetical List of the Honourable East India Company’s Bengal Civil Servants for the Year 1780 to 1838 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, 1839), 462–63, for additional details about Siddons. 81. Jenny’s testimony was recorded and transcribed by the acting resident. This testimony is the first document in the file and is followed by the interrogation of others involved in the case. 82. I have skipped over the next few lines of her testimony about what her master told her about breaking into the godown and prying open a chest filled with money. 83. At this point in the company’s records the long narrative ends and is followed by a series of interrogations of various men and women. First up following the confrontation between Jenny and her master was the testimony of a man who stated that Jenny had been under his care since she had first turned in her master and that no one had attempted to tinker with her story or to tell her what to say. 84. Siddons transcript. 85. See Jennings, Lumsdaine, and Presgrave, “Report on the Population,” 433, regarding slaves as “the chief part of the riches of the wealthy families” of Sumatra. 86. Marsden, History of Sumatra, 252. See also Jennings, Lumsdaine, and Presgrave, “Report on the Population,” on “mengheering debtors” being “an essential part of the property of the natives.” 87. A. Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 26. 88. Heyne, cited in Bastin, British in West Sumatra. See also Letters from Bencoolen, 40–42, regarding William Day informing his father about his “native” woman and the daughter he had from that relationship, as well as others in similar situations. 89. Charles Holloway, Magte., to Siddons, Acting Resident, Apr. 8, 1813, SFR. 90. According to Raffles, female “coffrees” or slaves were “dissolute and depraved” and lived “in promiscuous intercourse with the public convicts for the 228

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purpose (as I was informed by the superintendent [of convicts]) ‘of keeping up the breed’.’” See T. S. Raffles to Court of Directors, Apr. 10, 1818, SFR, 1818–21. 91. “Testimony of Sunnoo Hooqu-Burdar” and “Examination of Ramkaunt and Sahd Mahomed Meer,” chaukidars, in Siddons transcript. 92. “Testimony of Futih Khan,” in Siddons transcript. 93. “Particulars relative to Futih Khan,” in Siddons transcript. 94. “Examination of Mohun Thacoor,” in Siddons transcript. 95. “Examination of Ram Mohun,” in Siddons transcript. 96. “Testimony of Futih Khan.” 97. J. W. Hull, Garrison Staff, Supt., Convicts, to E. Presgrave, Offg. Secy., Apr. 30, 1825, BC, 941, 1827–28. The issue of convicts who had served in the militia surfaced in 1825 because the prize money for the capture of Muko Muko some 20 years earlier was finally available for distribution. 98. Acting Resident, Siddons, SFR, Mar.–July 1813, May. 99. Siddons to Barnes, Feb. 26, 1813, SFR, Jan.–Mar. 1813, Feb. 100. Order of govt., Fort Marlbro, June 15, 1813; and List of Convicts whose periods of transportation have expired, Mar. 1813; SFR, Mar.–July 1813, June, appendix; Mar., appendix. Two of the 29 were not allowed to leave because they still had outstanding debts. 101. Siddons to Holloway, May 25, SFR, Mar.–July 1813, May. 102. Ricketts to Siddons, Sept. 24, 1813; Siddons to Holloway, Jan. 16; Holloway to Siddons, Jan. 17; SFR, Jan.–Mar. 1814, Jan. See also Ball, Indonesian Legal History, 217–20, on whether local authorities had the right to punish convicts and slaves summarily without the approval of the pangeran’s court. Calcutta informed them that they could independently inflict minor punishments, such as twelve to eighteen “rattans,” but not severe ones, such as those imposed on Fateh Khan. 103. SFR, Jan. 1814. 104. Lewis to Siddons, June 2; Inglis to Siddons, June 7; SFR, Apr.–June 1814, June; Siddons to Messrs. Elphinstone, Steele and Garling, July 25, SFR, July–Sept. 1814, July. 105. A. Trotter, Acting Secy., to Fort Marlborough, Jan. 26, 1815, and Trotter to Fort Marlborough, Apr. 18, 1815, HM, vol. 267, Letters from Bengal to Fort Marlborough. In 1816, on the eve of the return of Batavia and other areas in Indonesia to the Dutch, the British government in Batavia approached Bengkulu about sending four hundred to five hundred convicts from Java to Bengkulu. The offer was rejected on the grounds that such a large number would overwhelm the settlement, which mostly housed Bengal convicts. Bengkulu also noted that convicts from India were “more easily managed than . . . the natives of bad character from Malayan Islands.” See also C. Assey, Secy., Batavia to Siddons, Acting Resident, Nov. 27 1816, and Siddons to Assey, Dec. 5, 1816, HM, vol. 246, Oct.–Dec. 1816, Dec. 106. Compiled from SFR, Jan.–Mar. 1815; SFR, Jan.–Feb. 1816, SFR, May–June 1816, SFR, Sept.–Oct. 1816; and SFR, Apr.–June 1817. See also HM, vol. 267 A, Public Letters to Fort Marlbro, 1816–25, about the 91 convicts who came in 1818–19. 107. Jennings, Lumsdaine, and Presgrave, “Report on the Population,” 428. No t e s

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108. D. Hill, Secy., Madras, to Registrar, Faujdari Adalat, Apr. 10, 1821, Madras Judicial Consultations (hereafter cited as MJC), Feb. 20–Apr. 17, 1821, Apr., no. 16. Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 (London: Macmillan Press, 2000). 109. Raffles to D. Hill, Secy., Sept. 4, 1821, MJC, Sept. 21–Nov. 2, 1821, Nov., no. 1; and G. A. Barry, Chief Secy., Mauritius, to Hill, Secy., Nov. 14, 1821, MJC, Jan. 1–Feb. 26 1822, Jan. 18, no. 1. 110. Raffles to Hill, Sept. 4, 1821, MJC, Nov. 1821, no 1. See also Eric Miller, “Extracts from the Letters of Col. Nahuijs,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 19 (1941): 169–209, esp. 173–74, for an 1823 Dutch account of the threefold division of “deportees” and its parallels to the system in place in Australia. 111. J. W. Hull, Lt., Supt., Convicts, Fort Marlbro, to E. Presgrave, Acting Secy., Jan. 1, 1823, Madras Public Consultations (hereafter cited as MPC), June 22–July 30 1824, July 16, no 8; MJC, Oct. 3–Dec. 26, 1823, Dec., no. 1. 112. Hull to Presgrave, Jan. 1, 1823. 113. Hull to Presgrave, Jan. 25, 1825, Bengal Judicial Consultations (hereafter cited as BJC), Mar. 24–Apr. 14, 1825, Apr. 4, no. 5. 114. Hull to Presgrave, Jan. 25, 1825. 115. Raffles to Dart, April 5, 1824, BC, 1825–26. 116. “Humble Petition of Shaik Buddeah and accompanying convicts of first class . . . .”“ The petitions were from people who initially elected to stay on after the Dutch takeover. Within months, however, they were pleading with the British authorities for a passage out of Bengkulu. 117. Chief Secy.’s memo re: convicts at Bengkulu, with W. B. Bayley, Chief Secy., Fort William, to J. Stokes, Secy., Madras, Jan. 13, 1825, MJC, Jan. 4–Feb. 11, 1825, Feb. 4, no. 3. A few more from Madras were added to this total because they arrived after the July 1824 count. 118. Chief Secy.’s memo re: convicts at Bengkulu. 119. J. Crawfurd, Resident, Singapore, to Bayley, Chief Secy., Nov. 1, 1825, MJC, Feb. 1–Mar. 17, 1826, Feb. 10, no. 3; J. Poynton, Supt., Convicts, to Captain P. P. Hodge, Executive Officer, Fort Cornwallis, June 3, 1827, Straits Settlements Factory Records (hereafter cited as SSFR), Apr. 12–Aug. 16, 1826, June; List of Individuals formerly in the Hon. Company’s service at Bengkulu, BPC, Mar. 1–Apr. 12, 1831, Mar. 8, no. 48. 120. “Minute by the President, W. E. Phillips,” Penang, SSFR, Jan. 8–May 27, 1824, Apr. 15. 121. A handful of British settlers also stayed on but later regretted their decision. See Letters from Bencoolen, 42–97. 122. See petitions with letter of W. T. Lewis, BJC, Aug. 17–24, 1826, Aug. 17, no. 19. 123. Chief Secy.’s memo re: convicts at Bengkulu. See also Miller, “Letters of Col. Nahuijs,” 174, regarding Nahuijs’ observation that first- and second-class “deportees” enjoyed “a certain amount of prosperity” because of their “orderliness 230

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and thrift.” He also notes that convicts hoarded money and loaned it out at “usurious rate of 25% per month.” Many possessed one, two, or three cows, and some as many as 11 or 12; and they sold milk and butter to European settlers. 124. Jennings, Lumsdaine, and Presgrave, “Report on the Population,” 429. A practice also followed by many Europeans, as previously noted. 125. Compiled from “List of Convicts and Bengallese,” and “List of Sepoys,” W. T. Lewis, Mar. 8, 1826, BJC, Aug. 17–24, 1826, Aug. 17, no. 19. 126. Hill to Presgrave, BJC, Apr. 4, 1825, no. 5. 127. Copy of translation, Verploegh, Resident, to J. Prince, late Acting Resident, BJC, Dec. 7–21, 1826, Dec. 21, no. 31. 128. Copy of translation, Verploegh; and Petition, with Prince, Late Acting Resident, to C Lushington, Chief Secy., Sept. 28, 1826, BPC, Apr. 2–24, 1828, Apr. 17, nos. 5, 6. 129. Jennings, Lumsdaine, and Presgrave, “Report on the Population.” This report also notes that repatriated convicts returned home “often much richer than they came.” See also Miller, “Letters of Col. Nahuijs,” 172, for a description of Marlborough’s “broad and beautiful” roads maintained “in the best order” by convicts. 130. Petition of Kinnuck Mistree, NL 108, Governor: Letters to Resident Councillors, S 26, 1858.

Chapter 3. “Kumpanee ke Noukur” 1. Cornwallis to Light, Mar. 11, 1790, with Minutes by President, Report of a Committee and other proceedings, BC, 1825–26; Letter of Captain Light, Apr. 26, 1790, HM, vol. 194, Public. See also the essays in Muhammad Haji Salleh, ed., Early History of Penang (Pulau Pinang: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2012), on the precolonial past of Penang and Seberang Perai and the developments that led to their “separation” from the Kedah Sultanate and their takeover by the British. 2. Minute by Mr. Phillips, Nov. 1809, SSFR, July 6 to Dec. 28, 1809, Nov. 30. In Australia the British government did not pay for repatriation of its subjects. 3. See Minute by W. E. Phillips, Acting Governor, Penang, SSFR, Jan. 8 to May 2, 1824, Apr. 15, regarding convicts insisting on calling “themselves by way of distinction, Company’s servants or Kumpanee Ke Noukur.” Emphasis in original. 4. See, for example, Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García, “introduction,” in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery, ed. Van der Linden and García (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1–7, for one attempt to locate convict labor along a continuum of free and unfree labor—namely, between wage labor at one extremity and chattel slaves at the other. See also Clare Anderson, “Introduction: A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies,” in A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, ed. Anderson (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1–35. 5. Ooi Keat Gin, “Disparate Identities: Penang from a Historical Perspective, 1780–1941,” Kajian Malaysia 33 (2015): 27–52. See also Andrew Barber, Penang under the East India Company 1786–1858 (Kuala Lumpur: AB&A, 2009), 13–15, on British No t e s

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efforts to develop Penang as a trading hub in the northern waters of the Malacca Straits and a strategic base to counter French and Dutch initiatives in the region. 6. The better-off convicts constituted an “aristocracy,” much in the way some industrial workers were part of a “labor aristocracy” with advantages and benefits that set them apart from the rest. See J. M. Barbalet, “The ‘Labor Aristocracy’ in Context,” Science and Society 51 (1987): 133–53, regarding the history and problematics of this notion initially formulated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, among others. Whether these convicts—or those workers—developed a different consciousness is difficult to discern. 7. J. Duncan, Resident, Banaras, to G. H. Barlow, Subsecy., Dec. 28, 1790, BCJC, Jan. 7–Feb. 25, 1791, Jan. 7, no. 3. Before Francis Light established a British presence in Penang in July 1786, the island was home to several hundred inhabitants: some Malays and a larger cohort of Chinese migrants. Light, often identified in colonial sources as the “founder” of the settlement, recognized early on that convict labor was critical to building the infrastructure of the island, including a fort, subsequently named Fort Cornwallis. See Barber, Penang under the East India Company , 52–55. 8. Extract from Proceedings in Public Dept., BCJC, Apr. 5–June 28, 1799, Apr. 19, no. 4; and A. Kyd, Supt., Andamans, to Barlow, May 13, 1796, BPC, May 2– June 27, 1796, May 23, no. 30. See also Sir Home Popham, A Description of Prince of Wales Island, in the Streights of Malacca (London: Geo. Cawthorn, 1799), 33, for a proposal to recruit 500 to 600 British convicts as soldiers to serve in Penang because many among them were “bred mechanics” or artisans who could help build it as a commercial and military port. 9. Resolution, Vice President in Council, BCJC, Jan. 5–Apr. 27, 1798, no. 5. See also Chitra Joshi, “Fettered Bodies: Labouring on Public Works in NineteenthCentury India,” in Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009), 3–21, on convict labor regimes in early nineteenth-century India that made productive use of their laboring bodies and shamed them by displaying their fettered bodies. 10. Charles Blunt, Acting Deputy Registrar, to Barlow, Apr. 13, 1797, BCJC, May 5–July 28, 1797, May 8, no. 25. 11. J. H. Harington, Acting Registrar to Barlow, Aug. 23, 1799, BCJC, July 4– Aug. 29, 1799, Aug. 29, no. 4; and A. Welland, Magte., Jaunpur, to Harington, Feb. 26, 1799, and translation of proceedings of Jaunpur Magte., Feb. 20, 1799, BCJC, Jan. 4–Mar. 29, 1799, Mar. 25, no. 24. 12. J. Stokoe, Captain, Engineer, in charge of convicts, to W. E. Phillips, Secy., Oct. 25, 1800, BC, 1803–4, 2489. Scholarly attempts to compare different forms of coerced labor touch on many of their similarities (and dissimilarities), including the arduous middle passage, in the case of the former from Europe and Africa to the Americas. See the essays by Emma Christopher and Clare Anderson in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), chs. 6 and 7. 13. Letter from Governor, POWI, May 31, 1800, BC, 1803–4, 2489. 232

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14. Stokoe to Phillips, Oct. 25, 1800; and Letter, Mar. 21, 1803, Public Dept., BC, 1803–4, 2489. 15. Letter, Mar. 21, 1803, BC, 1803-4. See also Municipal Commissioners vs. George Peile Tolson, Before Sir Wm. Hackett, Judge of Penang, June 8, 1872, in Straits Settlements, Straits Law Reports, being Report of Cases decided in the Supreme Court of the Straits Settlements, ed. Stephen Leicester (Penang: Commercial Press, 1877), 323–36. The case involved a dispute over the ownership of ghat areas in Georgetown. 16. Stokoe, with LG, POWI, Aug. 21, 1800, in BC, 1803–4, 2489. 17. Extract of Letter, Governor, Oct. 25, 1800, in BC, 1803-4, 2485. 18. Letter from Fort St. George (Madras), Aug. 27, 1802, in BC, 1803-4, 2609; Wellesley et al. to Lord Clive, Governor, Madras, Aug. 17, 1802, BC, 1803–4, 2607– 72, 2609; and Leith to T. Philpot, Secy., Govt., Nov. 25, 1802, BPC, Nov. 25–Dec. 31, 1802, Dec. 18, no. 17. The convicts from Ambon were sent to Penang. 19. The poligars refused to accept the company’s sovereignty over their little kingdoms. Veerapandiya Kattabomman, one of the last holdouts, was executed in 1799. Thereafter, his surviving relatives, including his younger brother, Umaidurai, were locked up in the fort of Palayamkottai, whence Umaidurai escaped in February 1801, marched on and captured his former domain in Tinnevelly District, and joined forces with the Marudu brothers of Sivagangai. In October 1801 they were finally defeated; all the main leaders were hanged and their fort razed to the ground. Thus ended the so-called Poligar Wars and almost 50 years of armed resistance in the area. For additional details, see my “Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 66 (2007): 881–96. 20. East India Company, “Report on the Origins, Progress and Termination of the Poligar Wars in the Southern Provinces,” 1807, Ms., Cleveland Public Library. 21. See my “Bandits and Kings,” 881–96. 22. “Fort St. George, 1 Dec. 1801, Proclamation,” in Bishop R. Caldwell, A History of Tinnevelly (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, [1882] 1982), 226–28. 23. “Fort St. George, 1 Dec. 1801, Proclamation”; and Extract Judicial Letter to Bengal, June 30, 1802, BC, 1802, no. 2489. 24. James Welsh, Military Reminiscences: Extracted from a Journal of Nearly Forty Years’ Active Service in the East Indies (London: Smith, Elder, 1830), 134, 130. 25. Welsh, Military Reminiscences, 133–34. 26. W. Oliver, Registrar, Faujdari Adalat, to Secy., Govt., June 16, 1814, MJC, June 10 to July 1, 1814, July 1. See also Clare Anderson, “Convict Passages in the Indian Ocean, c. 1790-1860,” in Passages, ed. Christopher, Pybus, and Rediker, 136–37, for an argument that deaths in the “middle passage” were relatively few because vulnerable convicts were more likely to die awaiting transportation and sick ones were held back. By contrast, mortality rates on the Atlantic crossings of African slaves to the Americas were high. 27. “Report on Poligar Wars,” 1807. See also the essays in Yeoh Seng Guan, Loh Wei Leng, Khoo Salma Nasution, and Neil Khor, eds., Penang and Its Region: The Story of an Asian Entrepôt (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), on Penang’s development as a trading hub. No t e s

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28. Welsh, Military Reminiscences, 133–34; and Rochead letter, Extract Fort St. George Military, BC, 1803–4, 2737. 29. See Anderson, “Convict Passages,” 129–49, for an important study of “convict revolts” onboard mostly private trading vessels, beginning with the one on the ship Constance, sailing from Bombay to Mauritius in 1827, followed by another on the Catherine en route from Bombay to Penang and Singapore in 1838. 30. Rochead letter, Mar. 8, BC, 1803–4. 31. Leith to govt., Oct. 1, 1802, BC, 1803-4, 2737. 32. Leith to govt., Oct. 1, 1802. 33. R. T. Farquharson, LG, POWI, to J. Lumsden, Chief Secy., Fort William, Mar. 15, 1805, BPC, May 16 to June 6, 1805, May 16, no. 16. 34. Stanley, Recorder, to Gov., POWI, May 11, 1806, SSFR, Jan. 5 to June 29, 1809, May 11. 35. Leith, LG, POWI, to T. Philpot, Secy., Govt., Feb. 8, 1803, BPC, Feb. 3 to Mar. 3 1803, Feb., 10, no 16. In all, convicts and rebels added up to 650 in 1803, a number that shot up considerably after convicts were transferred in from Ambon. By 1805 the tally was 772. A seer equals .93 kilogram or a little over 2 pounds. 36. Minute by Mr. Philips, SSFR, July 6 to Dec. 28, 1809, Nov. 30. 37. Kistna Iyer arrived in 1801. Initially confined in Madras, he and his father, together with other “rajas,” were sent to Penang from the Coromandel Coast. As his petition requesting a return “to the arms of his family and native country” put it, his father died in exile and left him “alone to expiate for a crime not his own.” He came as a 15-year-old and spent 13 years on the island. Humble Petition of Kistnen Iyer to Hon. W. Petrie, MJC, Feb. 25 to Mar. 22, 1814, Feb. 25. 38. Margaret Frenz, From Contact to Conquest: Transition to British Rule in Malabar, 1790–1805 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also N. Rajendran, Establishment of British Power in Malabar (1664 to 1799) (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1979), 259–65, regarding the Pazhassi Raja Kerala Varma, a member of the Kottayam royal family, who clashed with the British in Malabar. In 1805 or 1806 he was joined by Palore Emmen Nayr, a Malabar “man of considerable property and rank” who was “unfortunately persuaded or rather compelled to join a Maratta prince named Palachee Karala Valama . . . in hostilities against the English government . . . was made prisoner by the English, and afterwards condemned by the British court of law at Seringapatam to be sent into exile.” He wanted to return along with the Poligar prisoners. Humble petition of Palore Emmen Nayr to J. J. Erskine, MJC, Feb. 25 to Mar. 22, 1814, Feb. 25. 39. Minute of Governor General, Nov. 5, 1804, BPC, Oct. 5–Nov. 15, 1804, Nov. 15, no. 3. 40. Leith to Philpot, June 22, 1803, MPC, Oct. 21–Nov. 11, 1803, Oct. 21. 41. R. T. Farquhar, “On Slavery at Prince of Wales Island,” Dec. 17, 1805; Farquhar, LG, to J. Lumsden, Chief Secy., Fort William, Sept. 27, 1804, SSFR, Sept. 20–Nov. 8, 1805, Dec. 17 and Oct. 4; and Farquhar to Govt., Mar. 15, 1805, BPC, May 16–June 6, 1805, May 16. See also R. T. Farquhar, The Abolition of the African Slave Trade, for Supplying the Demands of the West Indian Colonies with Agricultural 234

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Labourers (London: John Stockdale, 1807), about using Penang as a collection point from which to ship Chinese workers to the West Indies. 42. Farquhar to Govt., Mar. 15, 1805, BPC, May 16, 1805. 43. Farquhar to Lumsden, BPC, May 16, 1805. 44. J. Dickens, Judge & Magte., Nov. 22, 1805, to W.C. Philips, Acting Supt., Convicts; and Philips to H. S. Pearson, Secy., Govt., Nov. 15, 1805, SSFR, Nov. 12– Dec. 30, 1805, Nov. 22. The classic British “convict” novel is, of course, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, written in the late nineteenth century. An excellent recent novel about an illegal returnee is Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). I have yet to come across any fictional accounts of Indian convicts in Southeast Asia in any language, although they lurk in the backdrop of The Straits Quartet, a four-volume historical romance authored by Dawn Farnham and set in nineteenth-century Singapore. 45. Report of late LG (Farquhar), SSFR, Nov.–Dec. 1805, Dec. 17, Appendix. 46. Pearson, Secy., to T. Brown, Acting Chief Secy., Fort William, May 2, 1806, BPC, June 5 to 26, 1806, June 5, no 8; and J. Douglas, Europa, to Raffles, Oct. 22, 1809, SSFR, July 6 to Dec. 28, 1809, Oct. 26. 47. J. C. Lawrence, Asst. Secy., Penang, to Brown, Chief Secy., BPC, Oct. 1–28, 1808, Oct. 28, no. 11; and W. Farquhar, Captain, Commanding Malacca, to Raffles, Secy., Govt., Jan. 14, SFR, Jan. 5 to June 29, 1809, Jan. 26. 48. J. Duncan and others, Bombay Castle, to Sir John Shore, GG, Apr. 3, 1798, and A. Clarke and others to Duncan, May 4, 1798, BPC, Apr. 3–June 26, 1798, May 15. 49. S. D. Totton, Clerk, Madras, to G. G. Keble, Secy., Apr. 26, 1806, MPC, Apr. 15–May 13, 1806, May 6; and Farquharson to Lord W. Bentinck, Governor, Jan. 10, 1805, BPC, Jan. 5–18, 1805, Jan. 11. 50. H. E. Phillips, Supt., Convicts, to Secy., SSFR, Jan. 9–July 25, 1806, Mar. 13. 51. Col. Macalister, Governor, to Rajah of Tellibong, July 14, 1808, SSFR, July 7 to Dec. 29 1808, July 14. 52. J. Hall, Supt., Convicts, to Raffles, Secy., SSFR, Jan. 2–June 30, 1808, Mar. 3. 53. E. Stanley, Recorder, to Governor, May 11, 1809, SSFR, Jan. 5–June 29, 1809, May 11. Light had earlier appointed kapitans or headmen to manage the settlement’s different ethnic communities. Apparently he first designated an Indian Muslim trader as Kapitan Kling, or the head of the Indian community. The term kling refers to settlers originating from the southeastern area of India known as Kalinga. See C. M. Turnbull, “Penang’s Changing Role in the Straits Settlements, 1826–1946,” in Penang and Its Region, ed. Guan et al., 32. 54. “Regulations and Establishment,” SSFR, Nov. 12–Dec. 30, 1805, Dec. 17. At various times in the nineteenth century, government thought of and utilized tattooing or godna as a way to distinguish and identify convicts. See Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (New York: Berg, 2004). 55. Hall, Supt., to Raffles, Apr. 16, 1810, SSFR, Jan. 4 to June 14, 1810, Apr. 19. 56. “Confession of Dadbhay Pestonjee,” SSFR, Jan. 5 to June 29, 1809, June 5. No t e s

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57. F. Gahagan, Secy., FSG, to Raffles, Aug. 31, 1811, SSFR, July 4 to Dec. 26, 1811, Sept. 19. 58. T. Raffles, Secy., to A. Falconar, Chief Secy., FSG, Mar. 3, 1810, MJC, Feb.– Mar. 27, 1810, Mar. 23. 59. Bombay Council to A. Seton, Governor, Fort Cornwallis, Aug. 5, SSFR, July 4 to Dec. 26, 1811, Oct. 24. See also Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 31–32, on Koli attempts to defend their “privileges and legitimacy” in Kheda against efforts by the British to impose their system and ideas of governance. The British considered Kolis “turbulent” and “predatory.” 60. “Verbal Information of Roijee Theobundass cusba Pallel, communicated to Rowles at Hoondhee,” July 22, with E. Ironside, Registrar, Kaira Adawlut, to Francis Warden, Chief Secy., Bombay, July 23, 1811, SSFR, July 4 to Dec. 26, 1811, Oct. 24. 61. “Verbal Information of Roijee Theobundass cusba Pallel.” Jallia’s itinerary would have taken him from Hyderabad in central India through the towns he listed, in today’s Maharashtra and Gujarat, before he reached his home village of Kavitha in Borsad taluka near Kheda district. 62. Ironside to Captain J. R. Carnac, Resident, Baroda, in SSFR, Oct. 24, 1811. 63. J. Hall, Supt., Convicts, to W. A. Clubley, Acting Secy., Oct. 31, 1811, in SSFR, July 4 to Dec. 26, 1811, Oct. 31. 64. “Resolution,” Dowdeswell, BCJC, Nov. 26–Dec. 10, 1811, Dec. 10, no. 2. 65. “Resolution”; and Dowdeswell to Acting Registrar, Nizamat Adalat, BCJC, Feb. 10–18, 1812, Feb. 18, no. 5. 66. Dowdeswell to Raffles, June 8, 1810, SSFR, June 22 to Dec. 29, 1810, Sept. 13. 67. Minute by Governor, A. Seton, SSFR, July 2–Dec. 31, 1812, July 18; and G. Dowdeswell to W. A. Clubley, Secy., SSFR, Apr. 1 to June 24, 1813, Apr. 1. 68. Petition from Hawkshaw, Sept. 24, 1812; Testimony of Hall, Supt., Convicts, July 15, 1812; and Seton to Dowdeswell, Sept. 24, 1812, SSFR, Jan. 7 to Mar. 27, 1813, Jan. 7. 69. “Aundoo Conda Vunnian of Yail Avium Punnah Pollum, Ramaswamy Naiker Samy Jemadar Coltore, Naker Vaulawsamy Naicker, Kisten Iyer Vitula Jemmadar; Panjalum Rumaswamy, Puly Addee Paya Thavan,” Petitions and Minute by W. Petrie, Feb. 4, SSFR, Jan. 6 to Apr. 30, 1814, Feb. 5. 70. “Aundoo Conda Vunnian of Yail Avium Punnah Pollum.” 71. Clubley to G. Strachey, Feb. 5, 1814, MJC, Feb. 25 to Mar. 22, 1814, Feb. 25. 72. R. H. Young to Govt., Feb. 25, 1814, MJC, Apr. 22 to June 7, 1814. 73. Petitions, Apr. 11, 1815, SSFR, Apr. 6 to July 12, 1815, Apr. 21. 74. Minute by Gov. Bannerman, Sept. 7, 1818, SSFR, July 6 to Sept. 28, 1818, Oct. 7; and D. Hill to Clubley, Sept. 9, 1817, SSFR, Sept. 11 to Dec. 27, 1817, Sept. 25. 75. Welsh, Military Reminiscences, 135. See also chapter 4 for the letters that Bhai Maharaj Singh and Khurruk Singh, two Sikh “state” prisoners in Singapore, sent to their “homes” when they were granted a special dispensation to do so. 76. Welsh, Military Reminiscences, 135. 236

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77. W. E. Phillips, Minute, Jan. 23, 1817; and Clubley, Secy., to W. B. Bayley, Secy., Nov. 22, 1816, SSFR, Jan. 2 to Apr. 12, 1817, Jan. 23. 78. Minute by the governor, J. A. Bannerman, SSFR, Jan. 3 to Apr. 3, 1818, Jan. 22. 79. Extract Judicial Letter to Madras, BC, 1818, Mar. 4, 17224. 80. Extract Judicial Letter to Madras, BC, 1818, Mar. 4. 81. Coombs to govt., Dec. 10, SSFR, Aug. 26 to Dec. 23, 1819, Dec. 23. According to the Malabar magistrate, Eman Nayar was a “treacherous” person of “daring courage” whose return would mobilize “many disaffected people.” Therefore, he opposed the request. Shortly thereafter, Nayar died in Penang. J. Vaughan to Govt., June 3, 1819, BC, 1823–24. 82. See my “Bandits and Kings,” on the complex negotiations involved in poligar relocation, first to sites other than Tinnevelly and then finally home in 1825, almost a quarter century after their transportation. By then, only 5 of the 73 were still alive. 83. Minute by W. E. Phillips, and attachments, SSFR, Jan. 8 to May 27, 1824, Apr. 15 (hereafter cited as Phillips Minute). See also J. H. Symons, Supt., Police, Madras, Aug. 6, 1814, MJC, July 5 to Aug. 26, 1814, Aug. 13; and Bayley, Secy., Govt., to Clubley, Sept. 11, 1818, SSFR, Sept. 5 to Oct. 29, 1818. 84. J. Eliot, Magte., Calcutta, to Bayley, Acting. Secy., BCJC, Aug. 30–Sept. 13, 1815, Sept. 13, no. 28; Symons, Supt., to Secy., Govt., Aug. 2, 1813, MJC, July 23– Aug. 17, 1813, Aug. 17. 85. “Declaration of Cunden a convict deserted Prince of Wales Island,” with W. Ormsby, Supt., Police, Madras, to Secy., Govt., MJC, Feb. 20 to Apr. 17, 1821, Apr. 10. See also Elijah Hoole, A Mission to the South of India from 1820 to 1828 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Greene, 1829), 62, 64, 207, regarding W. Malkin, the chaplin of Bangalore. 86. Clubley to D. Hill, Secy., Madras, June 30, 1821, MJC, Aug. to Sept. 18, 1821, Aug. 14. 87. See chapter 2. Raffles divided up the convicts in Bengkulu into three “classes” based on their “reputed character” rather than the severity of their crimes. See also Stephen White, “Criminology: Alexander Maconochie and the Development of Parole,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 67 (1976): 72–88, regarding Maconochie’s role in the development of parole and tickets of leave, practices that were already in place in Australia before he went there in the late 1830s. 88. T. M. Ward and J. P. Grant, Official Papers on the Medical Statistics and Topography of Malacca and Prince of Wales’ Island and on the Prevailing Diseases of the Tenasserim Coast (Penang: Government Press, 1830), 25. 89. Phillips Minute. 90. Phillips Minute. 91. Phillips Minute. 92. “List of Discharged Convicts,” W. T. Lewis, Supt., Convicts, to J. Anderson, Dec. 14, 1826, SSFR, Jan. 2–Feb. 15, 1827, Jan. 2. 93. The Voyages of Mohamed Ibrahim Munshi, trans. Amin Sweeney and Nigel Phillips (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), 97–98. See also “He Was No t e s

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Like Christ to Children,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, May 11, 1936, 6, about the annual Dato Koya mosque and festivities celebrating an “Indian wish granter”; and Khoo Salma Nasution, The Chulia in Penang: Patronage and Place-Making Around the Kapitan Kling Mosque 1786–1957 (Penang: Areca Books, 2014), 168–71. I am grateful to Ms. Nasution for drawing my attention to the fascinating figure of Dato Koya, who is also known for his miraculous escapes from confinement and for improving the condition of convicts. His miracles and saintly life are still celebrated, as they were in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 94. Phillips Minute. 95. Phillips Minute. 96. Phillips Minute. Macquarie was also more open to admitting deserving exconvicts into local society, a stance that prompted inquiries into his administration in the early 1820s. Tickets of leave, introduced in Australia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, permitted convicts to earn their own livelihood and reside on their own prior to the expiration of their sentences. 97. Bayley, Chief Secy., GOB, to R. Ibbetson, Secy., POWI, Aug. 26, 1824, SSFR, Sept. 14 to Dec. 16, 1824, Dec. 16. 98. Phillips Minute. 99. G. Alexander, M. A. Bunbury, R. Caunter, to J. Anderson, Acting Secy., May 10, 1825, SSFR, May 3 to June 10, 1825, May 19. 100. Minute by R. Fullerton, July 17, 1825; “Census of the Population of Prince of Wales Island,” June 30, 1825, SSFR, June 10 to Aug. 4, 1825, July 29. The 1,681 convicts added up to 3.1 percent of the overall Penang population of 53,334 (35,995 in Penang and 17,339 in Province Wellesley). Fullerton’s list only accounts for 1,678 of the 1,681 convicts. 101. Extract General Letter from Penang, Oct. 14, 1825, BC, 1827–28. 102. A chupa or coconut shell amounted to about 2½ pounds. M. A. Bunbury, Captain, Convict Committee, to John Anderson, Secy., Govt, SSFR, Nov. 15– Dec. 27, 1827, Nov. 20. See also my “Disciplining ‘Natives’: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India,” South Asia, n.s.,10 (1987): 29–45, on prisoner resistance to new disciplinary regimes in jails in India. 103. Ward and Grant, Official Papers on the Medical Statistics and Topography, 25, also emphasizes the “dissipated and irregular” lives of convicts seemingly to justify their high mortality rates. 104. W. T. Lewis, Supt., Convicts, to W. S. Cracroft, Secy., Aug. 19, 1826, and G. W. Brown to Lewis, SSFR, Aug. 21 to Oct. 26, 1826, Aug. 21. 105. Secy., FSG to Penang, Penang Consultations, Oct. 1824–Apr. 1825, Apr. 26; SSFR, June 10 to Aug. 4, 1825. More than 200 convicts from Bengkulu were transferred to Singapore. H. Shakespear, Secy., Bengal, to Cracroft, Secy., no. 1290, June 29, 1826, SSFR, Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 1826, Nov. 13. 106. J. Anderson Secy., to Shakespear, Acting Chief, Mar. 20, 1828, BC, 1830–31; and Shakespear to Cracroft, no. 1290, June 29, 1826. 107. S. G. Bonham, Governor, to H. Chamier, Chief Secy., MJC, May to June 27, 1837, June 9; Bonham to Secy., Madras, no 16, Nov. 19, 1834, MJC, Dec. 5–16, 1834, 238

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Dec. 5, no. 2; Bonham to Chamier, Apr. 18, 1837, SSFR; and Governor: Miscellaneous Letters (Out), vol. 6, Aug. 1833–Mar. 1837, NA 1777, vols. 6–9. 108. Bonham to W. R Young, Commissioner, Eastern Settlements, Jan. 6, 1838, BC, 1840–41; Bonham to Chamier, June 9, 1837. The 921 convicts in the late 1830s represented about 2.2 percent of the island’s 1840 population of some 40,000 people (40,499 in 1842). See Gin, “Disparate Identities,” on population figures: 43,143 in 1851, 59,956 in 1860. 109. R. Ibbetson, Resident, Singapore to J. Pattullo, Dy. Secy., Apr. 27, 1831, BPC, Aug. 5 to Sept. 30, 1833, Aug. 19, no. 6; and R. Fullerton, Chief Commr., Singapore, POWI, & Malacca, to Lord Bentinck, GGIC, Nov. 13, 1830, BPC, Mar. 1 to Apr. 12, 1831, Apr. 12, no. 5. By then, local authorities had already reduced convict maintenance costs from 4 rupees 15 annas 3 pice in the 1820s down to 3 rupees 12 annas, that is, by almost 25 percent. 110. W. Grey, Undersecy., GOI, to J. W. Dalrymple, Undersecy., GOB, Apr. 19, 1850, NL 87, vol. S. 16, 1849, 1850, Governor’s Letters from Bengal, NL. Between 1847 and 1853 India diverted a significant number to Burma, in part because it was cheaper to ship them there than to the Straits. See A. W. Russell, Undersecy., GOB, to Dalrymple, no. 2310, Oct. 31, 1853, ICJC, Oct. 5–Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 23, no. 13. 111. Yue-shan Chan, “A Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong, 1844–1858” (PhD diss., University of Hong Kong, 2006), 107. The initial batch of Chinese convicts from Hong Kong was sent to the Straits Settlements in 1847. 112. W. J. Butterworth, Governor, to A. R. Young, Undersecy., GOB, No. 154, Nov. 12, 1847, ICJC, July 1 to Dec. 30, 1848, Oct. 21, no. 1, ICJC, 1848. 113. S. Garlin, R.C., Penang, to Govt., no. 226, Apr. 11, 1846, ICJC, May 30 to Oct. 17, 1846, June 13, ICJC 1846. 114. Butterworth to Secy., GOI, no. 76, Aug. 22, 1854, ICJC, July 7 to Dec. 22, 1854, Sept. 22, no. 14; E. A. Blundell, Offg. Governor, to Secy., GOI no. 75, Aug. 8, 1853, ICJC, July 1–Dec. 30, 1853, Sept. 2, no. 4. Penang had 913 convicts on April 30, 1853; with an infusion of 128, the total rose to 1,041 but then went down to 977 because of the deaths of 55, escape of 7, and release of 2. By May 1854 the number had increased to 1,115 with the arrival of 193 newcomers minus 54 who had died and 6 who had escaped. 115. R. Macpherson, Lt., Supt., Convicts, to R.C., Penang, May 1, 1851, and Blundell to Butterworth, BC, 1852–53. 116. Coleman to Bonham, BPC, Jan. 6 to June 30, 1841. 117. E. Blundell, R.C., to Governor, no. 431, ICJC, Aug. 27–Dec. 22, 1852, Aug. 27, no. 5. See also McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 24, regarding convict involvement in the sale of “Penang lawyers,” heavy walking sticks said to be used at times to settle differences. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle refers to these “club-like walking” sticks n his short story “Silver Blazes” and in The Hound of the Baskervilles. 118. Under the new scheme 12 were trained to be carpenters and 20 to be bricklayers. Female convicts were involved in making cement, brick jelly, and brooms for use in the lines. Macpherson, Supt.. Convicts, to R.C., Penang, May 1, 1851, and No t e s

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Blundell to Butterworth, BC, 1852–53. Lieutenant H. Man, the superintendent of convicts in Penang in the late 1840s who subsequently headed up the Andamans penal settlement, also claimed credit for having devised these rules. 119. Chan, “Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong,” 108. 120. Lt. G. T. Hilliard, Supt., Convicts, to R.C., no. 56, Dec. 14, 1857, ICJC, Feb. 1858, Feb. 12, no. 16. 121. Blundell to Secy., GOI, Sept. 11, 1857, NL 268: Governor Letters to Bengal, 1852–53, 1856–57, 1857–58. 122. Collection no. 8, nos. 76–77 of Jan. 1860, HM, vol. 528, 1856–59. 123. Some from Penang were sent to the Andamans—83 convicts in mid-1858. See GOB to R.C., Penang, June 6, 1858, no. 27, HM, vol. 536, Jan.–Nov. 1858, June 12, no. 29. 124. Narrative of Proceedings of Straits Settlements, 1857, collection. 7, nos. 7 and 8 of 1857, HM, vol. 528, 1856–59; HM, vol. 535, July–Nov. 1857; see also HM, vol. 536, Jan.–Nov. 1858. 125. HM, vol. 535, July–Nov. 1857; HM, vol. 536, Jan.–Nov. 1858. 126. Narrative of Proceedings of Straits Settlements, nos. 47–48 of Apr. 1858, HM, vol. 528, 1856–59. Penang also faced a serious outbreak by its Chinese population in 1857 and was concerned about being overwhelmed by two different groups. See HM, vol. 534, Jan.–June 1857; and HM, vol. 580, Andaman Papers, Home, May 7, 1858.

Chapter 4. Near China beyond the Seas 1. “Declaration of Cunden,” MJC, Apr. 10, 1821, no. 15; W. Oliver, Registrar, FA, to Secy., Judicial, Apr. 15, 1821; and D. Hill, Secy., Govt., to Major Farquhar, Apr. 27, 1821, MJC, Apr. 18 to July 3, 1821, Apr. 21, no. 4; Apr. 27, no. 9. 2. See my “‘Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath’: The Mid-Nineteenth Century Exile of Bhai Maharaj Singh in Singapore,” in Exile in Asia, ed. Ronit Ricci (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016), 71–93, for additional details about his campaigns in Punjab and the events leading up to his capture in 1849. 3. See also my “Mobilizing Convict Bodies: Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States, ed. Renate Bridenthal (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 123–48, regarding disciplinary practices employed in different penal settlements in the region. 4. F. J. Halliday, Offg. Secy., GOI, to W. J. Butterworth, Governor, May 7, 1850, in Governor’s Letters from Bengal, vol. S 16, 1849 and S 17, 1850, NL 8; and F. L. Playfair, Acting Secy., to R.C., Penang, NL 104, Letters to Resident Councillors, vols. U 34, U 35, U 36, U 37, U 38, U 36, Sept. 1858–Mar. 1859. 5. The Singapore Press and Mercantile Advertiser, Aug. 30, 1850, 3. Legally, Bhai Maharaj Singh, who was sent to Singapore as a “state prisoner,” was not sentenced by the Supreme Court and could have been set free by it. 240

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6. Oliver to Secy., Apr. 15, 1821; Hill to Farquhar, Apr. 27, 1821, MJC, Apr. 21, no. 4; Hill to G.A. Barry, Chief Secy., Madras, Jan. 18, 1822, MJC, Jan. 1 to Feb. 26, 1822, Jan. 18, no. 2; and Charles Burton Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965), 69. 7. W. B. Bayley, Chief Secy., to J. Stokes, Secy., Madras, Jan. 13, 1825, MJC, Jan. 4 to Feb. 11, 1825, Feb. 4, no. 3. 8. Bayley to Prince, June 29, 1825, BJC, Sept. 22 to 29, 1825, Sept. 22, no. 2. See also J. M. Macleod, Secy., Madras, to J. Crawfurd, Resident, Feb. 10, 1826, MJC, Aug. 21 to Oct. 26, 1826, Aug. 21, regarding the Madras government’s surprise that its Bengkulu convicts were in Singapore. Major J. F. A. McNair, assisted by W.D. Bayliss, Prisoners Their Own Warders (Westminster, UK: A. Constable, 1899), 38–39. Another 307 were shipped to Penang. Initially, 272 chose to remain in Sumatra. 9. Raffles to J. L. Johnston, J. P. Maxwell, and D. J. Napier, Apr. 1823, in Raffles: Letters from and to Singapore, vol. L, Jan.–June 1823; L. N. Hull, Acting Secy., to Lt. Col. Farquhar, President, Jan. 29, 1823, NL 58, in Raffles: Letters from and to Singapore; and Buckley, Anecdotal History, 104, 180. 10. Crawfurd, Resident, to Bayley, Chief Secy., Nov. 1, 1825, MJC, Feb. 1 to Mar. 17, 1826, Feb. 10, no. 3. 11. S. G. Bonham, Acting Resident, Singapore, to C. Lushington, Secy., Calcutta, Feb. 5, 1826, BPC, Apr. 26 to May 4, 1826, Apr. 26, no. 9. 12. Bonham to J. Anderson, Secy., Madras, Nov. 8, 1826, SSFR, Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 1826, Dec. 18. 13. H. Shakespear, Secy., Calcutta, to W. S. Cracroft, Secy., Fort Cornwallis, June 29, 1826, SSFR, Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 1826, Nov. 13; From R.C., Penang, July 25, 1827; Diary of Proceedings of R.C., Singapore, June 30, 1827, SSFR, June 23 to Dec. 27, 1827, June 30, July 27; S. G. Bonham, Supt., Convicts, to Anderson, Secy., Govt., May 21, 1827, SSFR, May 8 to June 22, 1827, May 25; and McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 41. 14. Monthly report on convicts, Singapore, Oct. 1828, Sept. 1828, SSFR, June 7 to Dec. 31, 1828, Oct. 3 & 4, Sept. 8 & 9; SSFR, June 7 to Dec. 31, 1828, passim. Women were rarely sentenced to transportation, and few penal colonies were keen to house them. 15. Bonham to R.C., Feb. 6, 1829, SSFR, Jan. 2 to June 30, 1829, Feb. 7. 16. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 39–40; see also “Bras Basah: Convicts, Converts,” Singapore Monitor, Aug. 19, 1984, 1. Bengkulu did not designate any convicts as “warders” but had Fateh Khans in various supervisory positions managing their fellow bandwars. 17. Minute by President, and K. Murchison, R.C. to R. F. Wingrove, Acting Supt., Convicts, Mar. 18, 1830, SSFR, Jan. 1 to June 30, 1830, Mar. 12, Mar. 18. 18. Murchison to Wingrove, Mar. 24, 1830, SSFR, Jan. 1 to June 30, 1830, Mar. 24. 19. R. Ibbetson, Resident, to J. Pattullo, Deputy Secy., Govt., Apr. 27, 1831, BPC, Aug. 5 to Sept. 30, 1833, Aug. 19, no. 6. No t e s

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20. Bonham, Acting Governor, to Madras, no. 16, Nov. 29, 1834, MJC, Dec. 5–16, 1834, Dec. 5, no. 2. 21. Bonham to H. T. Prinsep, Secy., Calcutta, Jan. 25, 1835, ICJC, Dec. 1834 to Mar. 5, 1835, Mar. 5, no. 7; and Bonham to H. Chamier, Chief Secy., Madras, Apr. 15, 1837, MJC, May to June 27, 1837, June 9, 1 & 2. 22. Extract Judicial General Letter from Madras, Dec. 8, 1835, no. 14, BC, 1836–37. 23. Extract from Adalat, July 1837, no. 223, MJC, Aug. 11 to 29, 1837, Aug. 22, no. 24; W. Douglas, Registrar, to Chief Secy., Madras, no. 172, May 24, 1838, MJC, June 5 to 22, 1838, June 12, no. 3; Bonham to Chamier, Apr. 18, 1837; Bonham to Mangles, Oct. 17, 1837, ICJC, 1837, Nov. 13–Dec. 29, 1837, Dec. 18, no. 2; and Bonham to Chamier, Apr. 15, 1837, MJC, June 9, 1837, 1 & 2. 24. PDC Report, 75; and Bonham to Mangles, Oct. 17, 1837, ICJC, Nov. 13 to Dec. 29, 1837, Dec. 18, no. 2. See also Bonham to Chamier, Apr. 18, 1837, SSFR, no. 45. As Singapore officials informed Calcutta, their practice was to keep the men in chains until they had been on the island for a year, after which the irons were taken off so that the prisoners could work with ease on the roads and canals and make the ten mile round-trip trek to their construction site. Some men of “reformed character” were allowed to fend for themselves; a certain number of the fifth class were hired out, an arrangement that saved the government maintenance costs. See Bonham to Govt., Bombay, Apr. 26 1837, SSFR, no. 48. 25. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 39–42. Some of those listed as living on their own, an additional 46 (or 5.1 percent) of the 901, were possibly among the “old convicts” said to be doing well. 26. Remarks by Sir John Grant, in PDC Report, 76. 27. Church to Governor, Sept. 22, 1837, Govt., Singapore, Singapore: Letters to Governor, Jan.–Dec. 1837, AA 8; and McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 42. 28. R. Fullerton, Chief Commr., SS, to Lord Bentinck, GGIC, Nov. 13, 1830, Mar. 1 to Apr. 12, 1831, Apr. 12, no. 5. 29. Minute by GG, Lord Auckland, Feb. 9, 1837, BC, 1840–41. 30. Remarks by Grant, in PDC Report, 77. See also G.D. Coleman to Bonham, Governor, Nov. 14, 1840, BPC, Jan. 6 to June 30, 1841, Jan. 20; and Governor to R.C., Singapore, 1840, Letters from Governor, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1841, about the possibility of promoting a person at each monthly muster to sixth class, as another way to encourage compliance in the convict body. 31. Remarks by Grant, in PDC Report, also characterized Coleman as an exemplary official who devoted considerable time to convict workers, remaining “with them as long as he considers necessary . . . , and [walking] among them unarmed without fear or any appearance of distrust,” even though in one instance “a man with a hatchet aimed at him but missed.” Such stories of British officials fearlessly working alongside dangerous inmates or blithely employing them in domestic service is a familiar trope in colonial writings. Incidents of convicts attacking their supervising officials were not unknown, although these were frequently directed at their fellow inmates who had become their “warders.” 242

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32. Bonham, Governor, to G. A. Bushby, Secy., Govt., Fort William, Nov. 15, 1840, BPC, Jan. 6 to June 30, 1841, Jan. 20, no. 12. See also T. H. H. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore, Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Monograph no. 15 (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1986). 33. Michael Mark Chrimes, “Architectural Dilettantes: Construction Professionals in British India 1600–1910; Part 1, 1600–1860: The Age of the Dilettante,” Construction History 30 (2015): 15–44. Military engineers were instrumental in the construction of many major public buildings, both civil and religious, in the early nineteenth century. S. G. Bonham, during his tenure as resident councilor (1833–36), apparently moved the convicts into “temporary buildings,” essentially sheds constructed out of attap palm leaves and fronds, near the Hindu temple located by the Bras Basah Canal. 34. Bonham to Bushby, no. 15, 1840; and Coleman to Bonham, Nov. 14, 1840, BPC, Jan. 20, 1841, no. 12. See also Chrimes, “Architectural Dilettantes,” 15–44. 35. Governor to Bushby, June 1, 1842; H. Chamier, Chief Secy., FSG, to H. N. Bayley, Deputy Secy., GOB, June 29, 1842, BPC, Jan. 5 to June 29, 1842, June 29, nos. 10–11. Captain John Fraser Leslie was briefly the assistant in charge of convicts and public works, but he died in May 1842 and was followed by D. H. Stephenson of the 12th Regiment. 36. John Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), 245. 37. Christopher Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 6. 38. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 239; and Malcolm H. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from the First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2004), 43–65. 39. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 239, 242. The aim was to make Singapore “a military stronghold” by strengthening its fortifications at Fort Canning, Fort Fullerton, Fort Palmer, and Fort Faber. Its “modern defence” was developed in 1857 at a time of local Chinese disturbances and rebellion in India. 40. Bonham to Bushby, Nov. 15, 1840; and Coleman to Bonham, Nov. 14, 1840, BPC, Jan. 20, nos. 12, 13. 41. Butterworth to A. R. Coleman, Undersecy., Bengal, no. 186, Dec. 9, 1846, NL 72; and Governor’s Letters to Bengal, Vol. R 14, Nov. 1846–July 47, R 15 Jan. 1847–Apr. 1851, R 6 July 1847–Apr. 1848, R 17 Apr.–Dec. 1848, July 15–Aug. 5, 1840, July 15, Annual Return of Bombay convicts, January 1, 1840. Bengal convicts, by contrast, in this period were mostly sent to Penang, regarded as their “chief depot.” 42. Report on the Medical Topography and Statistics of the Northern, Hyderabad and Nagpore Divisions, the Tenasserim Provinces, and the Eastern Settlements, comp. from records of the Medical Board Office (Madras: Vepery Mission Press, 1844), 227. 43. J. T. Thomson, Offg. Supt., to Butterworth, Governor, Dec. 30, 1844, BC, 1846–47, 106581. Colonial administrators and the local European community had high hopes, especially early on in the nineteenth century, of developing the No t e s

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island’s agriculture, which the Chinese settlers had taken the lead in by growing fruits and vegetables and cultivating gambier and nutmeg. See Report on the Medical Topography, 227; see also J. H. Moor, Notices of the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries (London: Frank Cass, [1837] 1968), 270, about how little of the island was known to Europeans. A newspaper editor, Moor writes that few roads extended into the interior in 1825, making a trip to Bukit Timah, seven to eight miles from “town,” a more difficult journey than a voyage to Calcutta. 44. Butterworth to C. Beadon, Undersecy., GOB, Jan. 13, 1845; and J. T. Thomson, Offg. Supt., to Butterworth, Dec. 30, 1844, BC, 1846–47. The Changi road connected up to Serangoon. 45. D. Stevenson, Captain, 12th Regt. MNI, Supt., Convicts, to R.C., n.d., with R.C. to Governor, Apr. 19, 1844, BCJC, June 3 to 27, 1844, June 3, no. 101. Bedok is on the southeast coast of island. 46. Thomson to Butterworth, Dec. 30, 1844, BC, 1846–47. 47. Butterworth to Beadon, Jan. 13, 1845, BC, 1846–47. See also J. T. Thomson, “General Report of the Residency of Singapore,” Journal of Indian Archipelago 3 (1849): 747, regarding their effectiveness as contract labor when directed by a Chinese overseer. 48. Governor to Beadon, Undersecy., Jan. 26, 1848, BC, 1850–51. See also Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge, 2006), 90, regarding Neo Liang Guan (or Meo Yang Kwan), who led secret society men from the Seletar area of Singapore on a vicious raid on the nearby island of Galang, killing a hundred people and destroying 28 plantations. 49. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 62–63, describes the Butterworth rules as “the most complete code of rules.” In effect until the end of transportation in the Straits, the rules were cobbled together from “all that had been previously issued, together with those that subsequent experience had shown to be necessary,” and grew out of principles established by Sir Stamford Raffles in Bengkulu. 50. Butterworth to A. Turnbull, Undersecy., GOB, Feb. 26, 1846, and Turnbull to Butterworth, Sept. 17, 1845, no. 1990, MJC, May 19–June 30, 1846, May 29, no. 13. This correspondence also includes “Rules for the Management of Convicts at Prince of Wales Island, Singapore, and Malacca.” Captain Man cites Maconochie and his penal practices in Australia as one of his influences. 51. Butterworth to Turnbull, Feb. 26, 1846, MJC, May 29, 1846, no. 13. 52. Governor to Young, GOB, Dec. 9, 1846, BCJC, Jan. 6 to 27, 1847, Jan. 27, no. 172. 53. Governor to Young, GOB, Dec. 9, 1846. 54. Classification of convicts, June 1847; no. 2, Abstract of the Distribution of Convicts; no. 3, Second-class convicts were employed in different government offices; and A. Statement shewing extent of work performed by convicts, June 1847, NL 579, Singapore: Letters to Governor, AA 12, Jan. 1841–Dec. 41; AA 18, Jan.– Dec. 1847; AA 21, Jan.–Dec. 1850; no. 1. 55. Butterworth to Sir H. C. Montgomery, Secy., Madras, no. 4, Feb. 4, 1850, MJC, Feb. to Mar. 26, 1850, Feb. 12, no. 23; and Rajesh Rai, Indians in Singapore, 244

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1819–1945: Diaspora in the Colonial Port City (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27. Among Indian migrants, women added up to 3 to 16 percent of the total “civilian” population between 1821 and 1860. 56. A. W. Russell, Undersecy., GOB, to J. W. Dalrymple, Undersecy., GOI, Oct. 31, 1853, ICJC, Oct. 5 to Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 23, no. 13. 57. Butterworth to Turnbull, Undersecy., no. 64, May 5, 1846, and T. Church, R.C., Singapore, to Governor, Apr. 7, 1846, ICJC, May 30 to Oct. 17, 1846, June 13, no. 22. 58. Church to GOB, May 11, 1850, NL 580, Singapore: Letters to Governor, AA 21, Jan.–Dec. 1850; AA 22, May 1850–May 1852; AA 26, July 1852–Dec. 1852; AA 22. See also Yue-shan Chan, “A Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong, 1844–1858,” PhD diss., (University of Hong Kong, 2006), 113, 131, 144, about Hong Kong convicts who first arrived in the Straits in the late 1840s. Between 1844 and 1858, 555 Chinese were transported from Hong Kong to various penal destinations, of whom the largest percentage, 70 percent or 389 individuals, were sent to the Straits, 145 to Singapore, and 243 to Penang. A group of 25 (24 Chinese) were sent to Singapore in mid-1850 on the Sir Edward Ryan (131). 59. E. A. Blundell, Offg. Governor, to Secy., Madras no. 5, Mar. 21, 1853, MJC, Apr. 15–May 30, 1853, May 3, no. 3; Butterworth to Secy., Judicial, Madras, Dec. 17, 1854, MJC, Jan. 5–30, 1855, Jan. 9, no. 1; Butterworth to T. Pycroft, Secy., Madras, no. 31, Oct. 25, 1851, MJC, Feb. 1851, Dec. 23, no. 14; and Russell to Dalrymple, Oct. 31, 1853, ICJC, Nov. 23, 1855, no. 13. 60. Blundell to C. Beadon, Secy., GOI, no. 136, Oct. 30, 1855, ICJC, Jan. 5– May 30, 1856, Jan. 12, no. 29, NL 581. In addition, in February 1854 152 convicts were shipped in from Akyab in Arakan province, where they had been serving life sentences (HM no. 531, Jan.–Dec. 1854). See also India Public Narrative, BC, 1857–58; NL 74, 581. 61. T. Church, R.C., to Butterworth, Aug. 7, 1851, and Captain H. Man to Church, Aug. 1, 1851, in BC, 1852–53, 144695. 62. As the case of Jallia in Penang suggests, some political acts of violence were simply listed as criminal offenses and not as political actions. 63. J. A. Baines, Census of India, 1891: General Report (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1893), 214. 64. Captain Man, Supt., Convicts, to Church, R.C., Aug. 1, 1851, BC, 1852. 65. Beginning in May 1853, local authorities sought to assemble “a useful and economical body of artificers” to do “public works.” Their aim was to have a workforce supervised by “skilled European foremen” to take on projects requiring “very considerable skill,” such as the building of a lighthouse, waterworks, and other “important” works such as batteries, magazines, and barracks. Convict workers built the battery at Fort Fullerton, Raffles Light House, and their convict lines. For a similar initiative in Indian jails, see my “The Prison Handicraft Complex: Convict Labor in Nineteenth Century Colonial India,” paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies meeting, New Delhi, July 4, 2018. No t e s

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66. Captain Man, Supt., Annual Report, no. 18 of 1850, Singapore: Letters to Governor, 1850, 1851–52, 1853, AA 21, Letters, Jan. 1850–Dec. 1850. 67. Church to Offg. Governor, Aug. 10, 1852, BC, 1852–53. Over the 27-year period, 283 Bengal, 643 Madras, and 422 Bombay convicts died. Deaths and subtractions due to other causes explain why only 222 (or 37.3 percent) convicts were still alive from the 595 Bengal convicts sent to the island, 724 (or 42.7 percent) of 1,695 in the case of Madras, and 501 of 1,190 (42.1 percent) in the case of Bombay. The 1852 data also furnish enough information to trace the regional backgrounds of the offenders involved in each and every category of crime and the terms of their transportation sentences. As in Penang, convicts died in large numbers and within a relatively short time of their arrival on the island. 68. RC to Governor, Aug. 17, 1850, Singapore: Letters to Governor, 1850, AA 21. 69. “Report on the Jails and Jail Hospitals of the Straits Settlements by Senior Surgeon J. Rose for the Official Year 1857–58,” in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941, vol. 1, 1855–1867, ed. Robert L. Jarman (Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK: Archives Editions, 1998), 133–34. 70. T. Oxley, Senior Surgeon, “Special Report on the Mortality among convicts for six months ending 31 Dec. 1853,” ICJC, Jan.–June 1854, Mar. 17, no. 5. 71. Church to Governor, no. 10, Jan. 23, 1851, AA 21, S: Letters to Governor, May 1850–May 1852. Anoma Pieris, in Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 138–41, suggests that the references to ghuree or clock at every pukar or call/sound suggests hourly or repeated beatings of Khurruk Singh because of his surly behavior. 72. R.C. to Offg. Governor, Aug. 28, 1852, AA 26, Singapore: Letters to Governor, July–Dec. 1852, no. 164 of 1852. 73 R.C. Church to Secy. to Governor, Jan. 12, 1856, BC, 189635; Assistant Resident Surgeon to R.C., Governor: Letters to Resident Councilor, vols. U 26, Nov 1853–May 1854; U 27, May–Sept. 1854; U 28, Sept. 1854–Feb. 1855; U 29, Mar.–Aug. 1855, NL 102; and R.C. to Offg. Governor, Jan. 14, 1853, AA 27, S: Letters to Governor, Jan.–June 1853. 74. Translation of Letter from Maharaj Singh to Bhai Jaswant Sing, Naurangabad, near Bygyrowal, pargana Tarn Taran, Amritsar, Asadh 1853, in BC, 1853–54. The leaves and flowers of the neem tree are bitter but are consumed in various ways for medicinal purposes. 75. The reference is either to convicts who were emancipated or fellow Sikh rebels in India who were released then. See my “‘Near China Beyond the Seas.’” 76. R. Church, Secy. to Governor, to R.C., no. 247, July 2, 1856, S: Letters from Governor, vol. Z 29, May–Oct. 1854, Z 32, July–Dec. 1856, Z 32. 77. E. F. Edmonstone, Secy., GOI, to E. A. Blundell, Governor, Aug. 31, 1856, and Secy. to Governor to R.C., Feb. 7, 1857, and Secy., GOI, to Governor, no. 1935, Apr. 28 1857, Singapore: Letters from Governor, vol. Z 33, Jan.–June 1857; Z 34, July–Dec. 1857; Z 35, Jan.–June 1858, NL 177.

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78. Narrative of the Proceedings of the Govt. of the Straits during second half of 1857, HM, vol. 528, 1856–59, Narrative of Proceedings of SS. See also HM, vol. 535, July–Nov. 1857, for similar concerns expressed by the mercantile community. 79. Chan, “Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong,” 113, 131, 144. See also “Report on the Straits Settlements during the Year 1856–1857,” in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941, vol. 1, 1855–1867, ed. Robert L. Jarman (Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK: Archives Editions, 1998), regarding the 20 convicts shipped from Malacca to Singapore as a result of an administrative decision to relocate all long-term prisoners in the Straits to Singapore and all short-term convicts to Malacca. Governor Blundell did not want long-term convicts, whom he described as “the scum of the Presidency towns,” stationed in Malacca. Blundell to Secy., GOI, no. 25, Mar. 28, 1856; and C. Beadon, Secy., GOI, to Blundell, no. 129, Jan. 31, 1856, MJC, May 27–June 14, 1856, June 24. Penang in Apr. 1857 had 1,358 bandwars, Malacca 648. 80. “Report on the Administration of the Straits’ Settlements, During the Year 1855–56,” in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941, vol. 1, 1855–1867, 27. 81. Butterworth to Secy., GOI, Aug. 22, 1854, ICJC, July 7–Dec. 22, 1854, Sept. 22, no. 14. AA 31. 82. Blundell, Governor, to Secy., GOI, no. 82, July 12, 1855, ICJC, July 6 to Sept. 28, 1855, Aug. 31, no. 10. Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Delhi: Primus Books, [2007] 2014), 228, writes that as many as 909 of the 1,562 thugs tried between 1826 and 1835 were sentenced to transportation. However, as was often the case, not everyone sentenced to transportation was actually banished overseas. 83. Oxley and others to Blundell, June 1, 1853; and Blundell to Beadon, Secy., GOI, June 1, 1853, ICJC, July 6 to Sept. 28, 1855, July 27, no. 7. 84. Oxley to Blundell, June 1, 1853, and Blundell to Beadon, June 1, 1853, ICJC, July 27, 1855, no. 7; and Buckley, Anecdotal History, 621. 85. Blundell to Beadon, June 1, 1853, ICJC, July 6 to Sept. 28, 1855, July 27, no. 7. See also ICJC 1855 and ICJC 1852. 86. Chan, “Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong,” 107, 113. 87. Blundell to Beadon, no. 160, Dec. 8, 1855, ICJC, no. 7. 88. T. Church, R.C., to Capt. R. Church, Secy. to Governor, no. 291 of 1855, ICJC, Jan. 5 to May 30, 1856, Feb. 8, no. 8. 89. Buckley, Anecdotal History, 476–82; and Chan, “Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong,” 134–39. Some local officials, such as Captain Man, thought of convicts as an “auxiliary” force that could be utilized alongside of the police and military to assist in emergency situations such as “the extensive disturbances among the Chinese during the May [1854] riots.” Letters to Governor, Aug.–Dec. 1854, AA 31. 90. Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1990), 83.

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91. Reza Masoudi Nejad, “The Muharram Procession of Mumbai: From Seafront to Cemetery,” in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Peter van der Veer (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 89ff. 92. Collection no 27, HM, vol. 525, 1851–54, Narrative of Proceedings of Govt. of Strait of Malacca. 93. R.C., Singapore, to Secy. to Governor, SS, Oct. 21, 1855, no. 269 of 1855, BC, 1857–58. See also R.C. to Lt. Col. Peley, commanding the troops, Oct. 24, 1855, no. 104C of 1855, in same collection. 94. R. Church to Offg. Governor, Nov. 19, 1852, Singapore: Letters to Governor July–Dec. 1852, AA 26. 95. R.C., Singapore, to Governor, SS, Oct. 21, 1855. 96. To R.C., no. 13, Nov. 1855, HM, vol. 533, Jan.–Dec. 1856, abstracts of proceedings of E. A. Blundell, Governor of Straits; From R.C., Sept. 12, no. 190, HM, vol. 533, Jan.–Dec. 1856, proceedings of Blundell, Governor; and R.C., Singapore, to Secy. to Governor, SS, Oct. 21, 1855. See also R.C. to Peley, Oct. 24, 1855. According to the governor, convicts were led astray by their petty officers (daffadars). 97. Blundell, Governor, to Secy., GOI, no. 6, Jan. 10, 1857, India Public Consultations (hereafter cited as IPC), Jan.–Mar. 1857, Mar. 27, no. 9. 98. “Respectful Memorial of Christian Inhabitants of Campong Bengkulen and Adjoining Campongs,” to Blundell, Gov, IPC, Sept.–Oct. 1857, Oct. 2, no. 77. See also petition from Davison, Spottiswoodie, and others about not allowing convicts to participate in processions because many of them were political offenders. 99. Davidson, Spottiswoodie, et al. petition. Only a few mutineers and rebels were sent to the Straits. On December 1, 1857, the government in India issued a directive that no person convicted of mutiny, desertion, or rebellion and sentenced to imprisonment and transportation was to be sent overseas. IPC, Nov.–Dec. 1857, and IPC, Jan. 1858. At the same time Calcutta opted to make the Andaman Islands the principal destination for convicts from India. Senior colonial officials, particularly the highly influential inspector of prisons, F. J. Mouat, urged the Andamans to use the Singapore system of convict management. See ICJ 1866; HM, vol. 535, July–Nov. 1857; and HM, vol. 536, Jan.–Nov. 1858. 100. Blundell to C. Beadon, Secy., no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857, ICJC, Jan. 1858, Jan. 8, no. 7. 101. Blundell to Beadon, Secy., no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857. 102. Blundell to Beadon, Secy., no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857. 103. Numbers compiled from Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941, vol. 1, 1855–1867. Many bandwars left the convict lines in these years because they obtained tickets of leave. For example, in 1864–65 as many as 338 males and 107 females were granted that status. In 1860–61 no one came from India; there were 14 newcomers from Burma (9) and Penang (5), and a fifteenth person was a reapprehended convict. Only 98 came in 1859–60. Thereafter, increases were the result of convicts being shipped from Ceylon: 141 arrived from Ceylon in 1863–64, raising

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the total to 1,756 in 1865. See E. H. Lushington, Secy., GOI, to Governor, Apr. 30, 1866, Governor’s Letters from Bengal, 1866, vol. S 35. 104. General Sir Orfeur Cavenagh, Reminiscences of an Indian Official (London: W. H. Allen, 1884), 272–73; and Sir Orfeur Cavenagh, Report on the Progress of the Straits Settlement, from 1859–60 to 1866–67 (Singapore: Straits Government Press, 1867). See McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 52–53. 105. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 73–74. The success in completing different construction projects in the late 1850s and early 1860s led some Europeans to regret their opposition to penal transportation because it deprived them of their “best workmen.” See Overland Singapore Free Press, Nov. 23, 1863. 106. “Annual Report on the Administration of the Straits Settlements during the year 1858–59,” in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941, vol. 1, 1855–1867. See also Murfett et. al., Between Two Oceans, 96–98. 107. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 75ff. 108. Cavenagh, Report on Progress of Straits Settlement. See also “Annual Report on the Administration of the Straits Settlements during the year 1860–1861” and “Annual Report on the Administration of the Straits Settlements during the year 1862–1863,” in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941, vol. 1, 1855–1867, regarding the introduction of weaving in the jail, which led to the making of towels for sale and of clothes worn by the convicts. Convicts were also engaged in these years in establishing a printing press, clearing jungle, building a sea wall and public works, and working with the brick kilns. 109. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 101–2.

Chapter 5. Epilogue 1. Straits Times, Nov. 18, 1899, 3. A later story in the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, Dec. 13, 1899, named the two combatants as Kalu and Ranjan. 2. “Singapore’s History,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, Jan. 30, 1919, 69; “Convict Department,” Straits Times, July 8, 1899, 2; Straits Times, July 9, 1910, 6; “Indian and Ceylon Convicts,” Straits Times, Apr. 4, 1914, 8; and “Annual Report on the Indian and Ceylon Convicts for the Year 1911,” NL. See also an article in the Straits Times, Dec. 14, 1911, about the demise of Penang’s last convict, an old woman named Jumna who lived in Tupai, Perak. 3. “The humble petition of the undersigned Indian convicts at Penang,” with J. Magalhaens, Asst. Colonial Engineer and Comptroller, Convicts, Penang, IJC, Jan.–Apr. 1870, Feb. 5, no. 2. See also Memo, J. F. A. McNair, Comptroller, Convicts, SS, Oct. 22, 1869, IJC, Feb. 1870. 4. “Extract from Report of the Inspector General of Prisons, Lower Provinces,” F. J. Mouat, IJC, Jan.–July 1866, Feb., no. 77. 5. Memo, R. Macpherson, Colonial Secy., Oct. 20, 1869, IJC, Jan.–Apr. 1870, Feb, no. 2.

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6. Memo, McNair, Oct. 22, 1869. 7. Memo, McNair, Oct. 22, 1869. 8. Report, Office of Colonial Engineer and Comptroller, Convicts, no. 11, Feb. 15, 1869, Straits Times, Mar. 27, 1869. 9. Major McNair to Colonial Secy., SS, no. 947, May 25, 1875, IJC, 1875, Oct., no. 16. 10. McNair to Colonial Secy., SS, no. 947, May 25, 1875. See also “The Convict Question,” Straits Times, Oct. 15, 1870, 1, for the widely held European view about convict labor being more economical than “free labor” and comparable in productivity. The concern was that without an additional influx of convicts, the Straits would end up with mostly “aged and infirm prisoners” and their maintenance costs. 11. See “Proposed Removal of the Indian Convict Establishment,” India, Political and Secret, 1869, collection 217/2 and returns attached to J. Birch, Colonial Secy., Straits to Secy., GOI, Home, June 20, 1872, IJC, Sept.–Dec. 1872, Oct., no. 101. 12. Birch to GOI, June 20, 1872, IJC, Oct. 1872, no. 101. Not everyone in the European community supported freeing the convicts. Many wanted a continuation of “rigid scrutiny” and careful surveillance if they were to be freed and expressed concern about a “dangerous class of men” being allowed “to mingle in the community, and to enjoy the privileges of free men” before the expiration of their terms. See “Penal Discipline,” Straits Times Overland Journal, June 3, 1870, 2. 13. Birch to GOI, June 20, 1872. 14. H. L. Dampier, Offg. Secy., GOI, to Colonial Secy., SS, no. 2333, Dec. 30, 1872, IJC, Sept.–Dec .1872, Dec., no. 258. 15. M. E. Grant Duff, Undersecy., India, to R. H. Made, Undersecy., Colonies, Apr. 21, 1873, IJC 1873, July, nos. 248–50. 16. McNair to Colonial Secy., no. 947, May 25, 1875. 17. R. Thompson, Secy., GOB, to A. P. Howell, Offg. Secy., GOI, no. 4166, Nov. 16, 1874, IJC, 1875, Jan., no. 90; Howell to Colonial Secy., SS, Apr. 29, 1875, IJC, 1875, Apr., no. 248; C. M. Rivaz, Offg. Undersecy., Punjab, to Secy., GOI, no. 3483, Sept. 24, 1874, IJC, Jan. 1875, no. 86; and Brodhurst to Offg. Secy., July 31, 1876, IJC, 1877, Jan., nos. 52–74. 18. Petition of Ameer Khan, Rawalpindi district, to Major McNair, July 14, 1875, IJC, 1875, Oct., no. 94. See also E. Thornton, Commr., Jhelum Division to R. Montgomery, Judicial Commr., Punjab, no. 46, Feb. 22, 1856, and Col. O. J. McL. Farrington, Commr., Rawalpindi, to Rivaz, Undersecy., no. 2956, Sept. 16, 1874, IJC, Jan. 1875, no. 87, for details about the crime. A report from Rawalpindi Division in Punjab details that Kazum was a guard (barkandaz) who was involved with 16 others in a highway robbery leading to the murder of five men. He was considered one of the three principal instigators. In Singapore he worked for some time as a government messenger in the court and public offices. 19. A. Howell, Offg. Secy., GOI, to Colonial Secy., Straits, no. 1586, Oct. 18, 1875, IJC, 1875, Oct., no. 97. 250

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20. D. F. Carmichael, Acting Chief Secy., Madras, to Secy., GOI, no. 1675, Sept 9, 1874; and J. Nugent, Acting Under Secy., Bombay, to A. C. Lyall, Secy., GOI, no. 2054, Apr. 9, 1874, IJC, 1875, Jan., nos. 85, 78. 21. Nugent to Lyall, no. 2054, Apr. 9, 1874. 22. J. P. Stratton, Political Agent, Bundelkhand, to Agent, Central India, no. 207, Oct. 9, 1871; and C.A. Elliott, Offg. Secy., NWP, to Bayley, Secy., GOI, no. 2092, Dec. 2, 1871, IJC, Jan.–Mar. 1872, Jan. 30, nos. 71 and 72. On Brooke’s recruitment efforts, see Rajah C. Brooke to Private Secy., Viceroy, Sept. 1, 1870, IJC, Sept.–Dec 1870, Sept., no. 86. 23. A. Mackenzie, Offg. Secy., GOI, to H. L Dampier, Offg. Secy., GOI, no. 5506, Dec. 13, 1872, IJC, 1873, Jan., no. 29. 24. A. P. Howell, GOI, to M. Brodhurst, no. 589, Apr. 15, 1876, IJC, 1876, Apr., no. 130. See also C. A. Elliott, Secy., NWP, to Howell, no. 343A, June 11, 1874, IJC, 1874, July, no. 70, for details about Brodhurst’s career. He arrived in India in 1850 and was employed in Bengal and Bihar before moving to the North-Western Provinces in 1858. He attained the rank of magistrate and collector in the early 1860s, officiating judge in 1870, and then puisne judge of the High Court of Judicature. 25. Brodhurst to Offg. Secy., GOI, July 31, 1876, IJC, 1877, Jan., no. 52 (hereafter cited as Brodhurst report). Brodhurst regretted the absence of McNair, who was on leave during Brodhurst’s time in the Straits. 26. Brodhurst report. 27. “Penal Discipline,” Straits Times Overland, June 3, 1870, 2. 28. “Civil Rights of Convicts,” Extract Public Narrative, 4th quarter 1855, Mar. 23, 1857; W. T. Lewis to E. A. Blundell, Governor, Oct. 30, 1855; and Blundell, Governor, no. 141, Nov. 3, 1855, BC, 1857–58. See also John Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), 90–107, for an oftenrepeated story in colonial circles about a convict named Tickery Bandah from Ceylon, who became a “notability” of Malacca, “a most useful man” as a shopkeeper, scholar, and legal adviser on all kinds of matters. J. F. A. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders (Westminster, UK: A. Constable, 1899), 113, also recounts the story. 29. Raffles to Hill, MJC, Nov. 2, 1821, no. 1. 30. Theodore Walrond, ed., Letters and Journals of James, Eight Earl of Elgin (London: John Murray, 1873), 189. 31. Brodhurst report. Emphasis in original. 32. Brodhurst report. 33. Brodhurst report. Prisoners in Alipur Jail apparently had similar impressions and asked to be sent to the Andamans instead of imprisonment. In the late nineteenth century, administrators increasingly worried that transportation was losing its fear factor. Once it had involved “banishment” and “mystery,” in that it removed a convict “from all his former surroundings” and “the neighborhood of his relations and friends” and relegated “his future as [if] it were an inscrutable mystery.” Henry Beverley, cited in India, Report of the Indian Jail Conference Assembled in Calcutta, Jan–March 1877 (Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press, 1877), 28. 34. Brodhurst report. No t e s

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35. Brodhurst report. 36. “List of Indian Life convicts . . . recommended for pardon with permission to return to their homes,” IJC, Jan. 1877, no. 292. 37. Brodhurst report. 38. “General Amnesty to the leaders of revolt in 1857,” Howell, GOI, to Secy., Bombay, nos. 51-1624–31, Oct. 17, 1876; and “Release of prisoners on the occasion of the assumption by Her Majesty of the Title of Empress of India,” Resolution, Jan. 1, 1877, IJC, 1877, Jan., nos. 309–10. 39. See list of life convicts not pardoned because of their “heinous” crimes, Jan. 1877, no. 304, IJC. The list includes such individuals as Rujubsa of Broach district, who murdered a person with a knife, and Mussamut Guzzi, who helped kill her husband by dropping a large stone on his head. 40. Comptroller to Colonial Secy., Straits, no. 192, Nov. 20, 1878, IJC, 1879, Dec., no. 192. 41. McNair to Colonial Secy., no. 1852, Sept. 10, 1880, and C. Grant, Secy., GOI, to various local governments, nos. 5-388 to 397, IJC, 1881, March, nos. 128–29. 42. A. S. Lethbridge, IG, Jails, Bengal, to Secy., GOB, no. 2941, Apr. 30, 1881, IJC, Nov. 1881, no. 152. Emphasis in original. 43. McNair to Secy., no. 192, Nov. 20, 1880, IJC, Mar. 1881, nos. 128–29. 44. Colonel C. S. Hearn, IG, Police, Madras, to Chief Secy., Madras, no. 1963, Mar. 31, 1881, IJC, Nov. 1881, no. 148. 45. Bombay to Colonial Secy., no. 1361, Oct. 9, 1883, IJC, Jan.–June 1883, Sept., B, no. 31, regarding six Bombay convicts released conditional on “police surveillance” and “restrictions as to residence as local government see fit to prescribe”; and Circular letter to local governments and administrations, nos. 5-288-97, Mar. 18, 1881, IJC, Nov., no. 165. 46. See release of Ramdoollub, Gopee, and Truck Bagdee, IJC, Jan.–June 1883, Apr., B, no. 305; May, B, nos. 183–85, regarding convicts Ram Chunder Laloo, Govind Maniah, Bheemand Hergapa, Gangia bin Bhagool, and others; and “Sanctioning release of five convicts,” to Colonial Secy., IJC, Sept.–Dec. 1882, Dec., B, nos. 154–55. 47. These petitions are in IJC, Jan.–Aug. 1881, Aug., nos. 222–23; B Proceedings; IJC, July–Dec. 1883, Aug., no. 1; and IJC, Jan.–June 1880, B Proceedings, passim. 48. IJC, July-Dec. 1883, Aug., B; IJC, July–Dec. 1887, July; IJC, Jan.–June 1888, Mar. B, nos. 119–22 49. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, 145. 50. Captain M. Protheroe, Offg. Chief Commr., Andamans, to Offg. Secy., GOI, no. 1142, Feb. 27, 1877, IJC, 1877, Apr., no. 2. 51. W.T. Lewis, Supt., Convicts, to Secy., Penang, Nov. 29, 1826, SFR, Nov. 2– Dec. 22, 1826, Dec. 7. 52. Humble Petition of Kunnuck Mistree, Governor: Letters from Bengal, NL 108, 1864, 1865, 1858; and Singapore Free Press, July 27, 1865. 53. “Major J. F. A. McNair C.M.G.,” Straits Times, Oct. 4, 1884, 11. 54. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders, vi; Major Fred McNair, Perak and the Malays: “Sarong” and “Kris” (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1878), 447. Both books 252

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are by the same author, although McNair published the latter book under a different first name. 55. Colonial Secy. to Offg. Secy., GOI, no. 2806, June 1, 1881, and Secy., GOI to Colonial Secy., no. 1150, Sept. 6, 1881, IJC, Sept.–Dec. 1881, Sept., nos. 1 and 2. 56. Rajesh Rai, Indians in Singapore, 1819–1945: Diaspora in the Colonial Port City (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 68–79. 57. “Singapore’s History,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, Jan. 30, 1919, 69; “Convict Department,” Straits Times, July 8, 1899, 2; Straits Times, July 9, 1910, 6; “Indian and Ceylon Convicts,” Straits Times, Apr. 4, 1914, 8; “Annual Report on the Indian and Ceylon Convicts for the Year 1911,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, March 7, 1907, 153. 58. Phoenix, “Early Days: The Indian Convicts in the Straits; A Few Reminiscences,” Straits Times, Oct. 3, 1914, 2. 59. “Mr. Basapah Denies Loan of $5,000,” Straits Times, Oct. 10, 1934, 13; and “Obituary,” Malaya Tribune, Jan. 29, 1919, 4. 60. One notable visitor to the Zoo was Albert Einstein! As a young man—before he converted and added his Christian forenames—Soma Basapa was embroiled in a sensational murder case in which he and a friend named Buddah Singh were charged with the killing of his brother-in-law, Ram Mohan Singh. Their disputes over his father’s will, which divided up a vast estate among three different parties, apparently led to a split with his sister’s family. See “Peculiar Murder Case: Indian Merchant Stabbed to Death,” Straits Times, Nov. 18, 1919, 7; and “Owen Road Murder,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, Dec. 10, 1919, 6. See also “The Late Somapah’s Estate: Family Squabbles end in Tragedy,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, Nov. 19, 1919, 6. 61. The names associated with the Basapa family, however, suggest a different place of origin. Harumalph and his son, Hunmah Somapah, however mangled the anglicized spellings of their names are, are not familiar Hindustani names; neither is Soma Basapa. That may explain why recent descendants have claimed that their ancestor was actually called Bheem Singh. Having examined the names of every single surviving bandwar in the Straits in the 1870s, I am reasonably confident that if Harumalph or Hannummapah was a convict, most likely he is the one identified in an 1873 list as Hummapa od Vencapa, sentenced in Bombay Presidency on May 30, 1843, who reached Singapore on January 13, 1844, and was slated to receive his ticketof-leave status on April 1, 1873, by which time he would have been on the island longer than the mandated 16 years to acquire eligibility for release. However, he did not secure his “release” on October 1, 1859, when he would have qualified; neither did 16 others on the Bombay list. An April 1874 list spells out his full name as Hanumapa bin Venkapa, the Arabic word “bin” indicating that he was the son of Venkapa; he was convicted in Solapur district and sentenced for life in 1843 for “willful murder.” By the 1870s he was “a very old man,” “well behaved,” and a petty officer (tindal) in the jail, a position that would have given him and his descendants a head start on his postconvict life. For an online history of the Basapa family, see “The Family’s Roots,” n.d., http://www.singaporebasapa.com/the%20family%27s%20roots.html. No t e s

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There is also an online history of the family descended from Soma’s sister, that is of the seemingly estranged in-laws’ family, now no longer available. See also “Nominal Roll of Indian Life Convicts in the Straits Settlements,” with Birch to GOI, June 20, 1872, IJC, Oct. 1872, no. 101; and “List of Indian convicts on tickets-of-leave in Singapore,” IJC, 1875, Jan. See also J. Nugent, Acting Undersecy., Bombay, to Offg. Secy., GOI, no. 791, Feb. 9, 1875, IJC, Apr. 1875, no. 247, on the government’s change in allowing repatriation for Hanumapa, one of the 23 granted that permission; 12 were not. 62. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders. 63. His importance in Singapore is commemorated in Central Sikh Gurdwara Board, Bhai Maharaj Singh Ji 150th Anniversary 2006 (Singapore: Central Sikh Gurdwara Board, 2006), which includes a chapter (ch. 2) adapted from Choor Singh Sidhu’s book Bhai Maharaj Singh Ji: Martyr of the Sikh Faith (Singapore: Central Sikh Gurdwara Board, 1999). He is also venerated and remembered in other ways: objects preserved in the British Library that are reproduced and circulate widely online, as do photographs and paintings purportedly of him; many books written about him; and most recently a documentary film, The Saint Soldier—Uncovering the Bhai Maharaj Singh Story (Singapore’s 1st Sikh).

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I n de x

A page number followed by an f indicates a figure. A page number followed by an m indicates a map. Abdullah, Munshi (Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir), 128 Aceh, 49m, 126 Acehnese, 71 Act XXXV (1860), 44 Aden, 10m, 19, 214n34 Africa, 17, 79, 111, 217n75, 232n12; East Africa, 14, 97; North Africa, 16; South Africa, 17; West Africa, 16, 213n25 Agnah, 80 Alexander, George, 131–32 Alipur Jail, 23, 33, 118–19, 183, 218n81, 251n33; proposed clearing of convicts from, 182 Ambon, 10m, 17–18, 38, 99–101, 106, 113, 119, 125, 225n38, 233n18, 234n35; return of to the Netherlands, 125 Amrith, Sunil, 212n14, 216n53 Andaman Islands (the Andamans) penal system, 1, 11, 37, 41–47, 55–56, 59, 99, 101, 113, 119, 139–40, 148, 190, 192, 194, 196, 204–5, 239n118, 248n99, 251n33; convict population and housing of, 47; convicts of transferred to Penang, 18; difference of from the Straits Settlements, 46; introduction of the “Singapore system” to, 44; proposal to establish a penal colony in, 42–43

Anderson, Clare, 213n17, 217n75, 219n107, 223n20, 224n21, 230n108, 231n4, 232n12, 233n26, 234n29, 235n54 Anglo–Burmese War (1824–26), 36 Anglo–Dutch Treaty (1824), 7, 40, 52, 89, 97, 125, 158 Anglo–Sikh War, 139 Angola, 16, 59 anti–Catholic Riots (1851), 180 Arakan (Rakhine), 19, 36, 40–41, 44, 167, 245n60 Arson, 126, 159, 170 Atkins, Edward, 67 Atlantic Ocean, 16, 233n26 Auckland, Governor–General George Eden, 34; visit of to the “Eastern Settlements,” 155 Aundoo Konda Vunnam, 120 Australia, 4, 6, 7, 30, 40, 43, 95, 178; campaign against transportation in, 221n134; colonists in, 35; transportation to, 218n89; Western Australia, 35; White Australia policy, 19 Azeezoolah, 80, 82 Banaras, 50m, 51, 55–56, 59, 61, 73, 99–100, 112, 197, 199, 201, 222n11, 222n15 Banaras Central Prison, 199; jailbreak in, 56

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Banda Islands, 17 bandwars (Indian convicts), 1–2, 30, 53, 61–62, 66–67, 69, 71, 73–75, 78, 79–84, 86, 88, 89, 90–92, 109, 113, 136; access of to money, 198; afterlives of, 189–90; conduct of in Singapore, 182; establishment of roots in Penang, 98; evacuation of the bandwar convict population, 89; female bandwars, 179, 199; heinous crimes committed by, 2; history of in Bengkulu, 91–92; increased population of bandwars in Singapore and India, 168–69; lived experiences of, 6; as longtime residents of Bengkulu, 90–91; Madras bandwars, 148; marriages of, 91, 198–99; occupations of former bandwars, 172; population of in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore (1867–1873), 193; rare return of to India, 118; repatriated bandwars in Madras, 203–4; self– perception of as naukars (servants of the East India Company), 3, 7, 30; social circle of among the Khan brothers, 61; specific crimes of, 170; specific number of bound for China, 125; tickets of leave obtained by, 248–49n103; transportation of to Port Blair, 192. See also convicts; penal transportation Bangladesh, 24, 55, 85 Banishment, overseas, 22, 87, 104–7, 110, 121, 125, 201, 206, 211n1, 212n11, 225n43, 251n33; within India, 104. See also exile Bannerman, J. A., 122, 123–24 Barzorjee, 115 Basapa, Soma, 208, 253n60, 253–54n61 Basapa family, 253–54n61 Batavia (Jakarta), 10m, 17, 156; return of to the Dutch, 229n105 Bay of Bengal, 1, 5, 10m, 14, 18, 24, 50m, 55, 97, 216n53 Beeddeah, Sheikh, 90 Bengal/Bengal government, 36, 40, 44, 55, 88, 170; and the Court of Directors, 35; Muslim population of, 223n18; suspension of penal transportation by, 118, 119; and transportation law, 35–36; West Bengal, 55 Bengal Engineers, 65 268

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Bengal Presidency, 1, 50m, 53, 85, 112 Bengkulu (also known as Bencoolen), 1, 5, 18, 40, 89, 95, 100, 147–48, 224n25; Campong Bengkulu, 182; “coffee” population of, 59; conditions under which convicts labored in, 227n58; Indian convicts, 229n105; new administration of, 91; number of slaves in, 58; as a presidency, 13, 53–54; repeated requests of for “coolies,” 59. See also Bengkulu, penal colony of; Fort Marlborough Bengkulu, penal colony of, 6, 51–91; as the destination for convicts from south India, 85; history of Bengkulu convicts with sepoys, 81–82 Bentham, Jeremy, 26, 27, 28, 216n59, 217n65 Bhagwan Kuer, 120 Bihar, 24, 55, 60, 85, 90, 119, 223n18 Blair, Archibald, 18 Blundell, Edmund Augustus, 41, 42, 182, 247n79; opposition of to housing mutineers in the Straits Settlements, 183–84 Bombay (Mumbai), 1, 5, 19, 41, 44, 58, 60, 95, 100, 106, 110, 114, 170; as a presidency, 50m, 53, 110, 112, 119 Bomma Nayak, 104 Bonham, S. G., 136, 150, 152, 156, 242n24; 243n33 Boss, Cheena, 53, 74, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84 Botany Bay, 11, 15, 17, 19, 30, 62, 63, 106; founding of, 31 Brahmins, 19, 24, 25, 56, 57, 61, 81, 99, 112–13, 222–23n15 Brazil, 16 British Empire, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 19, 33, 187; and the colonization of “new lands,” 15; establishment of a settlement at Penang (1786), 54; expanding reach/widening geography of, 62, 211n4; imperatives of, 38–39; in North America, 4 Brodhurst, Maynard, 197, 198, 201–2, 251n24; on the issue of convict pardons, 200–202; and the “over–indulgence” of the Straits system, 199–200 Bugis, Corps, 54, 69, 71; people, 54, 80, 149, 150 Bunbury, M. A., 131–32

I n de x

Burdwan, 60, 61 Burdwan brothers, 62 burglary, 39, 75–76, 173 Burma (present–day Myanmar), 1, 187; British takeover of, 36 Butterworth Rules, 170, 244n49 Butterworth, William J., 34–35, 40, 137, 157, 162, 163, 167–9, 170, 244n49; urging of his officials to assemble detailed convict information, 165–66 Calcutta, administration of/as the seat of government, 5, 8, 18, 19, 20, 25, 35, 37, 89, 190; blind eye turned to the penal colonies, 28; concern of over “public offenses,” 119; “constraints” of put on convicts pardoned by Ewer, 226–27n57; and the development of Penang, 96; encouragement by of the “Bencoolen rules,” 89, 98; financial and administrative viability of, 62–63, 124; insistence on sending mutineers and rebels to Penang, 138–39; on the issue of convict management, 52–53; response of to Bengkulu’s request for “coolies,” 59; rulings of on emancipated convicts, 119 Calcutta Jail, 23, 55, 56, 100, 119; clearing of prisoners at after the 1799 escape, 61–62 Canada, 17 Cape of Good Hope, 11, 17, 62 Caribbean Sea, 16 Caunter, Richard, 132 Cavenagh, William Orfeur, 157–58, 185, 186 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 12, 14, 16, 127, 139, 168; British takeover of, 1, 5; establishment of as a Crown Colony (1802), 1; proposal by to send its convicts to Penang, 137 China, 3, 14, 24, 44, 139, 143, 146, 158, 211n1; trade with, 18, 54, 92, 97, 106, 115, 125, 36, 158, 187 Chinese Funeral Riots (1846), 180 Chinese people, 2, 112, 179; concerns of over the Chinese joining forces with bandwars, 184. See also migrants/migration Chingleput, 105 Christopher, Emma, 213n25, 223n20, 232n12 Chulia (Tamil Muslim), 101, 103 I n de x

church, Armenian, 156; Portuguese, 101 Church, Thomas, 167, 170, 172, 175 civilized/civilization, colonial notions of, 2, 5, 26, 155, 174, 212n6; in Australia, 213n27; and the criminal justice system, 32, 159; India as less civilized, 26; in Singapore, 154 coffrees, 58, 65, 79, 89, 91, 224n23, 228–29n90 Colebrook, Robert, 18 Coleman, G. D., 155, 156, 162, 242n31; instructions of to his successors, 159; major projects of, 156–57 Collyer, George, 186 Committee on Prison–Discipline, 26–27, 28–29, 34, 35–36, 40, 45, 153; Minute on the Prison–Discipline Committee, 34; “reformation argument” of, 29–30; report of (1838), 23, 34 convicts, 88–89, 229n97, 234n29; archives of convict labor,190–91; “aristocracy” among, 232n6; caste designations of, 57; chaining of, 242n24; children of, 22, 58, 72, 90, 91, 92, 131, 198, 201; convict pardons/repatriation, 192, 194–97, 200–201, 231n129; convict sardars, 130, 133, 134; deaths of, 246n67; diet and food issues of, 60–61, 224–25n32; different treatment of Bombay convicts, 118; division of convicts into three classes by Raffles, 86–87, 88–89; emancipated convicts, 119–20; establishing convict identities, 227n71; female convicts, 35, 43, 88, 97, 109, 130, 131, 132, 137, 151–52, 163–65, 167, 191, 197, 198, 239n118; Hong Kong convicts, 245n58; lack of utilization of, 72–73; as a labor force, 64–65; “official convicts,” 133–34; petitions of, 120–22, 204–5; punishment of, 229n102; repatriation of, 8, 25, 28, 32, 43, 51, 74, 84, 90, 96, 98, 119, 120, 124, 131, 147, 190–91, 193–97, 200–2, 204–6, 231n2; road building of, 101; second– class convicts, 244n54; status of convict sepoys, 82–83; success of specific convicts after their release, 128; training of to be carpenters and bricklayers, 239n118; wages of convict labor, 65

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Cook, James, 17 Coombs, J. M., 125 Coorg insurgency (1837), 203 Cornwallis, Governor-General Charles, 18, 21, 95 Coromandel Coast, 110, 112, 117, 127, 149, 150, 234n37 Cossim (Kasim), 74 Cossinath Thakur, 76, 77, 81, 82 criminal tribes, 203, 212n6 Cuddapah (Kadapa. Andhra, Pradesh), 50m, 204 Cunden, 85, 143, 173, 145; escape of, 126–27, 129, 143, 144, 147, 173 dacoits/dacoity, 2, 23, 39, 57, 60, 61, 112, 159, 193, 203, 204 Dalaway Kumaraswamy Nayak, 104 Dalhousie, Governor-General Lord (James Andrew Broun Ramsay), 143 Dashera, 166, 180, 181–82 Dato Koya, 128–29, 237–38n93 debt bondage, 6, 78, 79 desterrados (banished men), 16 Dial, Ram, 80–81 Dickens, Charles, 112, 235n44 Dickens, John, 112 Doraiswamy, 104, 105, 106, 109, 123 Duncan, Jonathan, 56, 99, 112–13 Dundas, Philip, 112, 115 Dutch Empire, 17, 40, 53, 89, 103; and the administration of Bengkulu, 91 East Asia, 5, 97, 158 East China Sea, 14 East India Company, 3, 12, 18, 24, 30, 34, 54, 58, 63, 69, 96, 123, 140, 209; acquisition of Singapore by, 144–45; importance of convict labor to the establishment of, 4–5; “servants” of, 209–10 Eduljee, Limjee, 200–201 Einstein, Albert, 253n60 Eman Nayar (also Palur Eman), 39, 109–10, 125, 237n81 Empress Building, 185 Europe, 97 Europeans, 19, 43, 52, 179, 186, 197, 198, 212n6; European convicts from India, 270

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211n2;; European settlers to the Americas, 15; European view of convict labor, 250n10 Ewer, Walter, 51, 63, 65, 72, 225n43, 226– 27n57; appointment by of Samuel Perreau as superintendent, 65; as superintendent the East India Company’s convicts, slaves, and road construction, 65–66; differences between Ewer and Parr, 69–70; financial commitments of, 226n48; investigation of Ewer’s failures by London, 66–67; overhauling of the Calcutta convict administration by, 63–64, 226n55; response of to the petition of the Khan brothers, 80 exile, 2, 3, 5, 7, 103, 104, 109, 120, 121, 122, 124, 139, 162, 164, 174, 175, 204, 209, 240n2; in China, 211n1; and distance, 13; of Emperor Bahadur Shah, 143; European feeling of exile in Bengkulu, 63; in Dutch Empire, 17; to Lanka, 121; to North America, 15; petitions for return from exile, 234n37, 234n38; in Portuguese Empire, 16; and “social death,” 52. See also banishment Farquhar, Robert Townsend, 38, 111–12, 125, 157; ambitious plans of to assemble a large convict force, 114–15; rules of concerning convict labor, 114 First Fleet, 15 Fisch, Jorg, 21, 214n29 Fort Canning, 243n39 Fort Cornwallis, 101, 126 Fort Faber, 243n39 Fort Fullerton, 243n39 Fort Marlborough, 56, 61, 64, 71–72, 73, 83, 99; refusal of to free slaves at, 59; southeast view of, 52f Fort Palmer, 243n39 forzado (forced labor), 16 Foucault, Michel, 3, 20, 214n37 Fullerton, Robert, 151 geography, 15; links between geography and empire, 211n4; widening geography of the British Empire, 36 Georgetown, 108, 112, 128, 129, 130

I n de x

gourdans (overseers) 72, 81, 82, 86 Government Hill (later Fort Canning Hill), 34, 166, 186 Government House (now Istana), 186, 187, 207 Grant, John Peter, 153, 156, 161–62, 242n31; on the regimen of convicts in Singapore, 153–54 Great Britain, 8, 30; metropole Britain, 11. See also British Empire; London, as the seat of government Great Expectations (Dickens), 234n44 Guan, Neo Liang (Meo Yang Kwan), 244n48 Gurdwara, of Silat Road, 209 Hall, J., 118 Hartley, Bartholomew, 61 Hastings, Warren, 18, 90 Hawkshaw, Akber, 119–20 Hilliard, G. T., 139 Hindus, 25, 56, 60, 181; caste designations of Hindu convicts, 57; Hindu scriptures, 24, 215n50 Hindustani, 1, 66, 82, 157, 169, 228n75, 253n61, history, global and world, 4; microhistory, 6, 52, 221–22n5 Hokkien–Teochew Riots (1854), 180 Hong Kong, 10m, 137, 139–40, 168, 169, 172, 179–80; Hong Kong convicts, 136–37, 138, 166, 168, 169, 171, 177, 179–80, 239n111, 245n58 Hoormujjee, 115 Howell, A. P., memorandum on jails and jail discipline, 45 Huldee (Haldi), 81 Ibrahim Munshi, Mahomed, 128 identity 22, 71, 97, 227n71 Idris, Syed Mustafa (Syed Mustapha Mohammed), 128 Ignatieff, Michael, 20 imprisonment, 16, 18, 43, 123; life 18, 32–33, 35–36; in relation to penal transportation, 20, 26–27, 29, 34–36, 44–45, 56, 95, 100, 104, 113, 119, 251n33; and unemployment, 217n76 I n de x

India, 1, 3, 8, 16, 26, 34–35, 40, 45, 106, 168; designation of Singapore as a penal settlement by, 143–44; exile and banishment in, 5–6, 22; and funding for the Straits Settlements, 206–7; North– Western provinces of, 24; people in as susceptible to “wrenching loss” due to banishment, 22–23; and the potency of transportation, 196; presidencies of (1837), 50m; prison conditions in, 3; south India, 7; transfer of the jurisdiction of to London, 207. See also Calcutta, administration of/as the seat of government Indian Jail Conference, 46 Indian Law Commission, 23, 153 Indian Ocean, 1, 9, 10m, 14, 18, 19, 33, 110, 127, 168. See also kala pani (black water) Indian Penal Code, 44 Indonesia, 17, 229n105 Indonesian, 54, 64 islands, as distant, isolated places, 14–15; as insular prisons, 43; as lankas in convict perceptions, 121; network of in British Empire, 14, 62 Iyer, Kistna, 109, 121, 234n37, 236n69 Jackson, Phillip, 141m, 148, 150 Jail, 24 Parganas, 55–56, 99–100, 119 Jallia, 97, 116–18, 121, 126, 236n60, recounting of his prison time, 118–19 Java, 18, 225n38; return of to the Netherlands, 125 Jenny (slave of Fateh Khan), 53, 80, 84, 89; as a debt slave, 78; subordination of to Fateh Khan, 79; as a witness against Fateh Khan, 75–77, 82, 228nn81–83 Jessore, 60 Jharkand, 55, 85, 223n18 Jheetoo Peadah, 205 Joshi, Chitra, 217–18n80, 232n9 Jumabhoy, Rajabali, 207, 208–9 Jungle Khansammah, 80 Kaira (present–day Kheda), 116, 117, 236n59 kala pani (black water), 1, 4–5, 7, 11, 19, 23, 27, 81, 101, 144, 174, 187; caste sensitivities concerning, 24–25; concerns about

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271

Kaira (present–day Kheda) (continued) voyaging across, 24–27, 60, 105, 147, 191, 217n64; as referring generically to the Indian Ocean, 24 Kampong Glam, 171 kapitans (community headmen), 235n53 Kattabomman, Veerapandiya, 106, 233n19 Kazim, 250n18 Keasberry, B. P., 167 Khan, Ameer, 195, 250n18 Khan, Fateh, 6–7, 51–53, 67–68, 71, 73, 82, 98, 99; access of to money, 198; arrest of, 74; as the “Khan Sahib,” 51; end of his long run as head of the bandwars, 74–76, 86; as a Hindustani speaker, 228n75; official report on the case of, 83; petition of, 83–84; power and influence of, 80; prominence of, 73, 79; as a sardar or sahib, 79, 99, 127; standing of among the bandwars, 73–74; stature of in Bengkulu, 74; Sunday itinerary of, 81. See also Jenny (slave of Fateh Khan); Tanjoong See (wife of Fateh Khan) Khan, Hussain, 51, 76, 78, 80, 82 Khan, Kazum, 195 Khan brothers, 59, 61, 62, 84, 99; Ewer’s response to the petition of, 80; failed transportation of to the Andamans, 55–56; as formerly najibs (militia members), 54–55; sentencing of to hard labor, 55; and the social circle of bandwars among, 61; transportation to the Calcutta Jail, 56–57 Khoo, S. Nasution, 237–38n93 Khyratee, 80 Kinnuck Mistree, 92, 148, 206 Kirchheimer, Otto, 217n76 Kolis, 116, 117, 236n59 Kurreem (Karim), Sheikh, 74 labor, bonded, 3, 6; coerced, 9, 14, 16, 31, 97, 140, 146–48, 168, 179, 187, 197, 208, 209, 217n75; free and unfree, 231n4, indentured, 4, 31; relation to convict and other forms of labor, 4, 6, 8, 30–31, 223–24n21, 250n10; wage, 1, 4, 19, 30, 71, 231n4 lascar, 84, 108, 114, 117, 133, 185, 224n28 Lawrence, William, 208. See Basapa, Soma. 272

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Leelo Carpenter, 81 Leigh, George, 101, 107; campaign of for more bandwars, 110; positive views of convict labor, 102; request of for additional bandwars for road building, 102; wariness of concerning prisoners from Bombay and madras, 110–11 Lethbridge, A. S., 203 Light, Francis, 37–38, 232n7, 235n53 Lingga, 144 London, administration of/as the seat of government, 8, 20, 89, 190; anti– transportation position of, 35; and the development of Penang, 96 Mabela, Daeng, 54, 69, 71 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 23, 44, 216n59, 216n63 Macfarlan, David, 27 Maconochie, Alexander, 237n87, 244n50 Macquarie, Lachlan, 131, 238n96 Madagascar, 6, 10m, 14, 58 Madras, administration of/as seat of government, 5, 44, 58, 87, 88, 103, 105, 116, 121, 195–96; concerns over Penang’s viability as a penal colony, 126, 127; decision of to continue convict transfer to Singapore, 152; experience of with repatriated bandwars, 203–4; initiatives of to maximize convict labor and reduce convict maintenance costs, 124; as a presidency, 53, 119; release of Umaidurai’s relatives by, 124–25; reluctance of to send convicts to Penang, 113; suspension of penal traffic to Penang by, 144 Mahomed Arhum, 61–63 Mahomed Ibrahim, 61–63 Mahomed Ismail, 61–63 Mahomed Ishuk, 61–63 Malabar, 109, 110, 113, 128, 234n38 Malacca (Melaka), 1, 4, 8, 12, 18, 40, 43, 48, 89, 127; population of bandwars in (1867–1873), 193, 200; redirection of convicts from Penang to Malacca, 135–36, 247n79. See also Strait/Straits of Malacca Malay, 38, 66, 69, 112; language 66, 157; people 2, 38, 58, 66, 68–70, 73, 75, 112, 179; prisoners 197, 219n107

I n de x

Malay Peninsula, 5, 24, 54, 92, 93m, 96, 97, 158, 160, 187 Malaysia, 1,113, 160 Maluku province, 17 Man, Henry, 43, 44, 158, 163, 170, 239n118; reports of, 172–73; on the value of convict labor, 171 Mann, John, 157 Manusmrti (code of law associated with Manu), 19–20 Mariamman Temple, 207 Marsden, William, 63 Martaban, 44 Martin, W. B., 71 Marudu (Maruthu) brothers, 104–5, 110, 233n19 Matadeen, 80 Mauritius, 1, 2, 10m, 11, 12, 14, 19, 37, 38, 40, 47, 85, 125, 127, 168, 171; British takeover of, 36; convicts in, 1, 2, 11–12, 14, 19, 40, 125, 219n106 McCullock, William, 60 McNair, J. F. A.,185–87, 191, 194, 202–3, 205–6, 209; on the costs of managing convicts, 192–93; on the issue of convict pardons, 192, 194–97, 203 mengirings (debt slaves), 6, 78, 228n86, relation to other forms of coerced labor, 31 Mexico, 16 Microhistory 6, 52, 221–22n5 Middle Passage, the, 232n12 military engineers, 243n33 Mohun Thacoor (Thakur), 81, 90, 91 Mohurrum, 166, 180–83 Molesworth, William, 26, 47, 216n61; Molesworth’s Select Committee of the House of Commons, 26–27, 35 Moluccas Islands (present–day Maluku Islands), 10f, 16, 17, 99, 106 Moodookitty Naraina, 115 Mouat, F. J., 42, 44, 248n99 Moulmein, 40, 44, 147, 152 Mount Felix, 71, 73, 74, 81 Mozambique, 16, 59 Muki (now Muko Muko) Expedition (1804), 70, 82 munshis, 114, 130, 133, 134, 201 I n de x

murder, 2, 39, 52, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 71, 77, 97, 100, 113, 115, 120, 126, 132, 159, 162, 163, 170, 173, 185, 194–95, 216n63, 222–23n16, 250n18, 253n61, 253n60; of husbands, 195, 199, 201–2; of infants, 195, 202 Murshidabad, 60 Muslims, 25, 27, 56, 60, 166; Hanafi school of, 181; Muslim population of in Bengal, 223n18; Shi’a Muslims, 181; Sunni Muslims, 181; Tamil Muslims, 101, 103 Mutiny/Rebellion (1857), 41, 138–39, 140, 143, 168, 177, 181, 182, 191, 202, 248n99 mutiny/sedition, 39, 61, 63, 163, 170, 171, 173, 180, 193. See also Mutiny/Rebellion Nadia, 60 Nagore, port of, 103, 115 Nahuijs, Colonel, 230n123 Namdar, 80 naukari, 3, 30, 96–97, 129, 140, 145, 187, 189 Nayoo, Mussamut, 201 New South Wales, 17, 35, 89, 131 Nias, 6, 58, 59, 65, 74, 79 Nizamat Adalat (Criminal Court), 25, 36, 100, 222n13, 223n19 North America/American colonies, 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 30; development of with the assistance of convict labor, 31 North-Western Provinces, 35, 169, 178, 205, 251n24 Ord, Harry St. George, 158, 186–87, 193–94 Orissa, 55, 85, 223n18 Oxley, Thomas, 167, 174 Pacific Ocean, 4, 11, 15 Parker, William, 74 Parr, Thomas, 53, 67; differences between Parr and Ewer, 69–70; plans of to tighten the convict disciplinary system, 68–69; post-Parr administration, 70–71 Parry, Richard, 70–71, 73 Patna, 60, 119 Patterson, Orlando, 13, 212n9, 212n13 Pazhassi (or Palassi or “Pyche”) Raja, 39, 109–10, 234n38 Pearl’s Hill, 146, 150, 156, 169, 171, 185 Pearson, F. H., 59, 62, 65

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Pedir Coast, 126, 127 Pegu (Bago), 44 penal colonies/prisons, 14–15, 29; escapes from, 29; harsh discipline in, 2–3, 27; lack of discipline in, 15. See also convicts; penal transportation; specifically listed individual penal colnies penal transportation, 2–3, 13–14, 20–21, 31–32, 96, 100, 247n82; to Australia, 43–44; to Bengkulu, 216n54; of Bombay’s convicts, 44; colonial estimation of the value of, 21–22; decision of to abolish, 32–33; early years of, 106; ending of transportation to the Straits Settlements, 138; in India, 43; kali pani argument concerning transportation, 23–24; new traffic patterns developed as a result of the large numbers of convicts transported, 57–58; as not representing a precise punishment, 27–28; and penal servitude, 30–31; redirection of from Penang to Malacca and Singapore, 135–36; spatial dimension of, 5–6; suspension of by the Bengal government, 118, 119; transportation of convicts from India and Ceylon, 37; transportation destination, 31; as a “weapon of tremendous power,” 23. See also empire, and penal transportation; penal transportation, sailing ships involved in penal transportation, sailing ships involved in: Adelaide, 159; Admiral Nelson, 106, 122; Anne, 148; Aurora, 84; Catherine, 234n29; Constance, 234n29; Cuffnels, 125; Endeavor, 58; Europa, 112; Fletcher, 62, 100–101, 102; Flora, 135; Frederick, 84; General Wood, 180; Gleneig, 159; Horatio, 148; Huddart, 84; James Drummond, 116; London, 56, 58, 59, 61; Lord Duncan, 61–62, 100; Louisa, 152; Mahomoodie, 159; Malabar, 84; Nonsuch, 95; Northumberland, 84; Perseverance, 112; Resolution, 159; Royal George, 125; Sir Stephen Lushington, 61; Victoria, 159; Walthamstore, 119; Yarmouth, 56–57, 58 Penang (Pulo Penang; Prince of Wales Island), 1, 4, 7, 8, 12, 38–39, 40, 48, 89, 116, 121; account of work assignments 274

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(1824), 129–30; added number of female convicts to, 137; adjustments to the management system at, 135; administration of, 95–96; alarm of concerning thefts and violence of bandwars, 113; alarm of over possible escapes from, 115; arrival of new prisoners at, 107–8; attempts to lower the cost of convict care at, 134–35; attempts to redirect penal transportation from Penang to Malacca and Singapore, 135–36; average cost of convict retention over a 20-year period (1805–1825), 129; as the “Botany Bay of India,” 127; characterization of its convicts by Penang administrators, 137–38; as a “commercial settlement,” 42; convict population of, 99, 101, 110, 112, 127, 136, 137, 200; convicts workers as critical to the development of, 97; decreasing number of convicts transported to (1840s), 136–37; development of, 96; disciplining of prisoners at, 108; early Penang, 94m; exile of poligar prisoners in, 109–10; expansion of the convict workforce in, 112; and the expense of convict upkeep, 123–24; formal possession of, 37; internal report (1824) concerning convict management, 129; insistence by Calcutta on sending mutineers and rebels to Penang, 138–39; maximizing of convict labor output at, 108–9; payment of convicts at, 109; penal colony of, 95–140; as a presidency, 13; population of bandwars in (1867– 1873), 193; as the principal destination of penal convicts, 62; reorganization if the convict system at (1825), 134; replacement of as superintendent of convicts, 67; request of for additional convicts, 102–3; request of for skilled workers of “artificers,” 38; slowing of convict traffic to, 126; struggle of local authorities in with strategies to control their inmates, 113; success of in deploying convict labor to a disciplinary system introduced in the Straits Settlements, 138; value of convict labor in, 97–98; view of, 96f; willingness of to receive additional bandwars, 111 I n de x

penitentiary, 20, 27, 36. See also imprisonment Permanent Settlement (1793), 39 Perreau, R. S., 59, 65, 226n56; accusations against, 226n54; attempts of to secure additional bandwars, 71–72; discipline of convicts enforced by, 68; financial dealings of, 66; personal intentions of as superintendent of convict labor, 66, 67, 68; shrinking population of convicts under his control, 71; as superintendent the East India Company’s convicts, slaves, and road construction, 65–66 Pestongee, Dadabhoy, 115 Phillips, W. E., 95, 123; committee formed to implement the Phillips plan, 132–33; plan of for an eightfold division of male and female convicts, 131–34; report/ scheme of on new “rules and principles” for convict management, 130–31 Pieris, Anoma, 146n71 pirates, 162 plantations (private and East India Company’s), 85, 108, 135; convict work on, 14, 30, 64; of gambier, 160, 186, 243–44n43; of nutmeg, 160; of pepper, 160, 186; of spice, 59, 69, 71, 91, 110; of sugar, 160 Playfair, G. R., 42 poison/poisoners, 42, 193, 195, 203 Poligar Wars, 7, 104–5, 109, 122 poligars (palaiyakkarar (or local lords), 103, 104, 107–8, 233n19; exile of poligar prisoners in Penang, 109–10; experience of poligar prisoners, 105–6, 109, 120; 39; “poligar rajas,” 124; release of, 124 Pooree, Ganesh, 201 Port Blair, 10m, 44, 46, 43–47; transportation of bandwars to, 192, 194. See also Tavarik–i ‘ajib (Black waters: The strange history of Port Blair) Portugal/Portuguese Empire, 16 Portuguese convicts 37, 57 presidios/presidiarios, 16 Prince of Wales Island, 18, 95, 117 Province Wellesley (Seberang Perai), 96, 129, 132, 134, 136, 137, 238n100 Provincial Courts of Appeal and Circuit (Calcutta), 22 I n de x

Puerto Rico, 16 Punggol Zoo, 208, 253n60 punishments: branding, 16, 19; capital (death penalty), 2, 5, 13, 19, 20–22, 27, 31, 32, 44, 68, 99, 103, 104, 112, 156, 159, 199, 216, 222–23n15; torture, 21; whipping/ flogging, 6, 16, 21, 39, 55, 68, 113, 131, 156. See also imprisonment Punjab, 39, 143, 147, 169, 174, 175, 178, 194, 208, 209 Queen Victoria, 202; Jubilee of, 205 Rabain, Mussamut, 195 Raffles, Lady, 69 Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 69, 85–86, 148, 158, 198, 228–29n90; annual review of, 87; division of convicts into three classes by, 86–87, 237n87 Raffles Light House, 245n65 Rai, Rajesh, 244–45n55 Rajshahi, 60 Ram Gholam Gourdan,, 80 Ram Mohun, 81 Ramayana, 121 Regulation for the Better Management of the Bengal Convicts, 85–86, 88–89; stated purpose of, 88 Regulation I (1828), 33–34 Regulation II (1799), 32 Regulation IV (1797), 32 Regulation IX (1813), 33 Regulation XIV, 32, 33 Regulation XVII (1817), 39 rehabilitation, 45–46 robbers/robbery, 29, 57, 74, 89, 95, 97, 98 Rochead, A., 106–7 Rose, J., 173, 174 Roy, Jeram, 72 Rujjub Shaw Dungoon Shaw, 203 Rusche, Georg, 217n76 same-sex relations, concerns about, 47, 109, 216n61 Sangenah, 201 Sao Tomé, 16 sardars, 51, 130, 133, 134 Savitree, Mussamut, 201

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Second Anglo-Sikh War, 139 sepoys, 1, 4, 89; of the Bengal Army, 24; concerns of in crossing the kali pani, 60; history of with Bengkulu convicts, 81–82; marriages of to local women, 91; punishment of, 227n59; status of convict sepoys, 82–83 Seton, Archibald, 119–20 Sheikdar, Eyen Deen, 95, 99 Shoodeen, 80 Siddons, G. J., 75 Sidhu, Choor Singh, 209 Sikhs 139, 143, 147, 164, 169, 175, 177, 178, 209, 236n75, 246n75, 254n63 Sind, 168, 179 Singapore, 1, 4, 7–8, 12, 40, 48, 54, 89, 127, 187; Chinese inhabitants of, 154–55; “civilized” Singapore, 154; as a “commercial settlement,” 42; convict jail of, 145f; convict population of, 148, 149–51, 153, 159, 167, 168, 172–73, 177, 180–81, 200; convict regulations of, 145–46; convict traffic to, 167–68, 188; convicts in the Balestier Plain of, 188–89; convicts employed as “servants” in, 153; cost effectiveness of convict labor in, 156; decision by colonial officials that military officers were best suited to supervise convict labor, 157–58; demand for roads and public works in, 152, 245n65, 249n105; development of, 144–45, 187; emergence of as a penal colony, 39, 143–44; establishment of as a free port, 158; hosting of political prisoners by, 147; housing of convicts in, 150; incentivizing of marriage for female bandwars, 199; Indian laborers in, 189f; labor of convicts at, 148–49, 151–52, 153–54, 159–60, 249n108; maps of, 141m, 142m; military force of, 158; as the newest “Sydneys of Southeast Asia,” 143; organization of Singapore’s convicts per the Butterworth rules, 166–67; parade of convicts at, 144f; population of bandwars in (1867–1873), 193; penal colony of, 143–87; as a prime destination for convicts in the aftermath of Cunden’s escape, 147; redirection of convicts from 276

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Penang to Singapore, 135–36; restrictions placed on Muslim festivals in, 181–183; secret society riots in, 180; sixfold classification system of, 164–65; specific roads constructed with convict labor in, 159–62, 171; Supreme Court of Singapore, 209; “violent and shameful conduct” of bandwars in, 182 Singh, Babu Jaggat, 225n38 Singh, Bhai Maharaj, 2, 8, 9, 39, 139, 143, 146–47, 168, 170–71, 173; commemoration of, 254n63; death of, 177; deteriorating health of, 175, 176–77; handling of as a “state prisoner,” 183; letters of, 175–76; Memorial Gurdwara of Bhai Maharaj Singh, 209; update on the health of, 175 Singh, Issurre, 196 Singh, Khurruk, 8, 139, 143, 146–47, 168, 170–71, 173, 175; beating of, 246n71, influence of among convicts, 177; letters of, 175–76; “unbecoming” behavior of, 175 Singh, Sudial, 90 Singha, Radhika, 222–23n15 Sivaganga Revolt (1799–1801), 39 slavery/slaves, 78, 97, 111, 153, 162, 212n9, 228–29n90; condemnation of, 58–59; debt slaves, 65, 78–79; punishment of slaves, 227n59 “social death,” 13, 14, 52, 196, 212n9, 227n58, Somapah (or Mr. Sompath), Hunmah, 208, 253n60, 253–54n61 South Asia, 4, 5, 9, 12, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 30, 97, 154 South Atlantic Ocean, 11 South China Sea, 10m, 14, 158, 168 Southeast Asia, 2, 7, 12, 37, 62, 98, 154, 187; British advance into, 19; convict traffic to, 112; littoral Southeast Asia, 4; mainland Southeast Asia, 11; number of convicts lodged in, 39 sovereignty, 12–13, 110, 212n5, 233n19 Spain/Spanish Empire, 16 Spice Islands, 106. See also Moluccas St. Andrew’s Church (later Cathedral), 162, 166, 185, 207 Stevenson, D., 160, 161, 163

I n de x

Strait/Straits of Malacca, 5, 7, 10m, 14, 18, 49m, 54, 91, 97, 136, 140, 158, 168, 187 Strait of Johore (Johore Strait or Tebrau Straits), 160, 161, 162 Straits Settlements, 8, 11–12, 36, 39, 42, 151, 152, 187; administrative arguments of against accepting rebels and mutineers as prisoners, 139–40, 183–84; as an administrative unit under the East India Company, 12; attitude of toward Chinese convicts, 179–80; continual arrival of bandwars in, 184; convict population of, 43, 47; convict traffic into, 40–41, 188; as a Crown Colony, 190; discussions to eliminate the convict establishment in, 48; displeasure of with female bandwars, 179; ending of transportation to, 138; problematic finances of, 155–56; rebels and mutineers sent to, 248n99. See also “Report on the Jails and Jail Hospitals of the Straits Settlements” (Rose) Subugea, Mussamat, 62, 100, 102 Sumatra, 5, 10m, 53, 54, 58, 59, 66, 78, 89, 149, 158; northeastern Sumatra, 126; west Sumatra, 1, 4, 18, 38, 49m, 51, 62, 63, 79, 90, 149 Sunnoo, 80 Surrieda, Bhagbut, 194 “Sydneys,” penal colonies in Southeast Asia as, 19, 143 Syed Mustafa Idris (Syed Mustapha Mohammed). See also Dato Koya. Tanjoong, See (wife of Fateh Khan), 77–78 Tavarik–i ‘ajib (Black waters: The strange history of Port Blair), 221n137 Telibong, Raja of, 113 Temenggong, 144 Tenasserin (Tanintharyi), 19, 40, 44, 127, 135, 152, 167, 168

I n de x

Tewari, Mulki, 59–60, 222–23n15 Tewari, Sheolal, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62–63, 73, 99, 100, 102 Tezeram, 81 Theiant, 99 Thomas, David Pitcairn, 178 Thomson, J. T., 160, 162 thugs/thugi, 2, 39, 57, 159, 178, 191, 193, 203, 223n20, 247n82 tindals (petty officers), 108, 114, 130, 133, 134, 164, 166 Tinnevelly (now Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu), 104, 116, 120, 121, 122, 125, 233n19 Tipperah, 60 transportation. See penal transportation Transportation Act (1718), 15–16, 30 treason/sedition, 2, 21, 42, 43, 45, 110, 170, 173, 203, 216n63 Trocki, Carl A., 244n48 Umaidurai, 124 Vanddaree Balaramiah, 194 Vengum Peria Wodaya Tevar, 104 Vitula, Raja of, 109 Wagner, Kim A., 223n20, 247n82, Walker, P. J., 43, 46–47 Wellesley, Governor–General Richard, 22, 32 Welsh, James, 105, 106, 122–23 West Asia, 97 West Indies, 15, 19, 42, 62, 106, 111, 234–35n41 women, 2–4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 17, 25, 30, 39, 42, 46–48, 58, 61, 64, 65, 72, 74, 78, 86, 90, 91, 92, 124, 132, 134, 147–48, 150–53, 165–71, 173, 177, 179, 184, 190, 193–95, 199, 202, 206. See also female convicts zamindars (landowners), 72

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T h e C a l i for n i a Wor l d H istor y L i br a r y Edited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed 1. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards 2. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian 3. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho 4. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf 5. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker 6. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt 7. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall 8. Island World: A History of Hawai‘ i and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro 9. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz 10. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro 11. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay 12. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle 13. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914, by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi 14. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, by Marcello Carmagnani 15. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900, by Julia A. Clancy-Smith 16. History and the Testimony of Language, by Christopher Ehret

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