ABSTRACT
The chapter emphasizes that sexuality and gender relations structured the spheres of (re)production in the Andaman penal colony. A heteronormative social-sexual code underpinned the ‘disciplinary techniques’ in the colony against the coercive-repressive tactics which otherwise was characteristic of a deterrent form of punishment. Such a delicate balance was peculiar to the penal colony as punitive mechanism underwriting the judicial sentence of transportation entailed simultaneously, the imperial process of colonisation/settlement/inhabitation. Women, and more particularly, criminalized women in Andamans provided a valuable resource to the British colonial state for enforcing the ‘sexual contract’ either through tolerance of prostitution despite Victorian morality or via marriage contract in a ‘system’ wherein convicts, unlike slaves, were not condemned to the position of “civiliter mortuus” (civilly dead). It must be mentioned that convicts juridically had no rights with regard to conducting marriage during incarceration. However, in the peculiar space of the penal colony, they occupied a more grey and ambiguous space which rather encompassed and thereby, cancelled any strict division between civil and criminal jurisdictions. Such a flux lent marital norms in the penal colony often-enough open to the charge of illegality when assessed through the set standards in mainland colonial India. Also, such a scheme of the colonial state, was a source of constant tension as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ of the subject (convicted criminals) was re-defined and re-conceptualized through several contestations.
