ABSTRACT
From the late eighteenth century, as the British made incursions into India, they established a series of penal settlements for the reception of South Asian convicts. Bencoolen (Sumatra) was the first destination, from 1773. It was later joined and eventually replaced during the first half of the nineteenth century by convict settlements in Prince of Wales’ Island (Penang), Singapore, Malacca, the Tenasserim and Martaban Provinces (Burma), Mauritius and Aden. In the wake of the 1857 Uprising, the British further settled the Andaman Islands as a penal colony, situated in the Bay of Bengal, 900 miles east of continental India. Within ten years the Islands had become the sole destination for Indian transportees. Transportation was a punishment that removed offenders from society, isolated them in distant settlements overseas (islands or mainland areas often surrounded by hostile landscapes and populations) and put them to work. At the same time, during the early years of transportation, colonial officials believed that the journey across the ocean (‘black water’, or kala pani) threatened convicts with loss of caste and hence social exclusion. This created a powerful colonial representation of transportation as a punishment Indians feared as much as death.
