ABSTRACT
The English East India Company had originally arrived in South Asia as a trading body, but by the mid-nineteenth century it presided over a mammoth Anglo-Indian empire. Historians differ in their interpretations of this metamorphosis, but almost invariably acknowledge the complex role of the company state in organizing the realms of social and economic life, political thought, law, governance and punishment (Marshall 1976; Bayly 1983, 1988, 1999; Cohn 1987; Marshall 1987; Subrahmanyam and Bayly 1990; Alavi 1995; Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998; Singha 1998; Travers 2007; Stern 2011). Jails and dungeons had existed as places of detention and confinement under pre-colonial regimes also, mostly for persons awaiting trial or execution and sometimes for political prisoners. But by and large, these regimes preferred less capital-intensive modes of punishment such as fines, flogging, branding, mutilation, tashir, impaling, stocks, blowing from a gun, hanging and drowning (Bannerjee 1963; Singha 1998; Sen 2007). As the English East India Company consolidated its empire in South Asia, the nature and scope of imprisonment was completely transformed. Imprisonment emerged as the punishment of first resort. As T. B. Macaulay, the key figure in the first Prison Discipline Committee (1836–1838), aptly stated, imprisonment was to be ‘the punishment to which one must chiefly trust’, to be ‘resorted to in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred’, and therefore it had to be made a ‘terror for wrongdoers’ (Sen 2007: 40).
