The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (review)

For many Indians, both those in prisons and those outside them, these institutions formed sites of contestation against British colonial interventions into Indian social and cultural orders. Such contests emerged repeatedly over the early nineteenth century, but their scale reached unprecedented levels in 1857-8. During this uprising, Indian sepoys (soldiers) in particular conducted jail-breaks, that is, they broke into jails to liberate prisoners with whom they identified and also used other prisoners as sources of labor and information. British suppression of this insurrection produced a penal crisis which led, inter alia, to the establishment of the notorious Andaman Island prison complex. By drawing acutely on accounts and other evidence produced both by Indian prisoners and also by British officials, including by reading British documents against the grain, Clare Anderson convincingly demonstrates the trajectory of nineteenth century Indian penal history, centered on the transformative events of 1857-8.

Incarcerated Indians, even more than sepoys, were subject to regulation by the colonial state. Indian prisoners and their British jailers clashed over issues such as diet and dress, as the colonial state imposed a culture of confinement new to India. British classification of prisoners—ethnographically by religion and caste, by relationship to the state as political or criminal, and by class and gender—increasingly provoked Indian resistance but also consolidated Indian identities. Over the early nineteenth century, Indian prisoners increasingly opposed these colonial interventions into their moral and social orders, apprehending their degradation and forced conversion to Christianity. These confrontations peaked during 1857-8.

As the British administration and Bengal Army—the main regulating and coercive branches of the colonial state across north India —shattered during 1857-8, prisons emerged as crucial centers of conflict. Over forty prison breaks occurred, mainly when Indian soldiers assaulted their walls, killed or drove off their British wardens, and released some 23,000 Indian prisoners. Prisoners and their liberators destroyed criminal records and other symbols of the colonial state, but they also used the weapons and fabric of the prison for practical purposes. Anderson does well in keeping clear the complexity of motivation and of community formation.

Complicating the sometimes supposed solidarity of prisoners, between them and their liberators, Anderson argues effectively for cross-cutting identities. Many of these sepoys sought to liberate prisoners of their own social classes, often small landholders of Rajput and other upper-ranking castes, freeing them from the insulting policies of their British jailers. Lower-ranked prisoners often ended up as laborers, transporting the possessions of the sepoys. Some freed prisoners served as local guides while those from afar spread news of the fighting when they returned to their homes. Thus, while fellow prisoners shared some solidarity, they also divided along social and cultural lines and developed different attitudes toward the fighting of 1857-8.

As the British brutally suppressed the insurrection, they not only recaptured some proportion of these liberated prisoners, they also seized many of the approximately 100,000 Bengal Army sepoys who had deserted and/or fought against them. The British feared confining this unprecedented number of male, militarily trained "mutineers" in India or in their extant prisons in the Straits Settlements or other overseas colonies. Instead, they reconstituted their Andaman Island prisons where evidently hostile indigenous peoples and the surrounding seas would provide most of the confinement. Anderson shows just how deadly being sentenced to the Andamans was, with death rates that shocked even the British Government of India.

Throughout this fine volume, Anderson portrays how Indians perceived colonial prisons quite differently from the British. In particular, she uses two convict narratives: the Arabic poem of Fazl-i Haq Khairabadi (1797-1861) and the Urdu poem of Sayyid Ismail Husain Shikohabadi (1819-81). Each of these stresses the cultural cost of imprisonment in the Andaman Islands, often as an unintended consequence of British penal policies and practices. Reading the behavior and attitudes of other prisoners from official records, she proves just how important these prisons appeared to many Indian convicts and their caste-fellows...