The Female Jails of Colonial India

Satardu Sen
 Main argument
• Vocational training and segregation were two
main methods for the reformation of the female
prisoners
• Both proved to be unworkable
• Main Questions
– What do the problems encountered in the process of
this punishment reveal about the ideological anxieties
of British rule?
– What was the use of punishing women in India in the
second half of the nineteenth century?
 Introduction
• Women in prisons were seen as both by the
colonial regime
– Dangerously out of control (liable to drag others)
– Victims of the Indian society in need of protection
•
 Introduction
• Indian women functioned as a battleground
on which Indian men and British men (and
women) argued about the relative merits of
’European’ and ’Indian’ civilisation, and about
the boundaries of the colonising mission.’
 Introduction
• Women who went to jail were, in a sense, an
uncolonised population on the internal frontier of the
Indian empire, not only because they were marginal
(i.e., extraneous to the political and economic sphere
of the colonial state and the cultural sphere of
respectable native society), but also because they were
women.
• More than anything else, the punishment of women
was ’useful’ because it validated and extended colonial
rule, and functioned as a measurement of the
effectiveness of the colonial regime.
 Introduction
• Punishment in colonial India was a
continuously observed process which
demonstrated to Indians and to the British
themselves that Liberal-Utilitarian institutions
like the colonial prison were needed to cope
with certain evils in Indian society, and that
these institutions could cope with the problem
at hand.
 Introduction
• In reality, the perceived failure to reform disorderly
women, and the widespread belief that women
who emerged from British-Indian jails were even
more degraded than those who entered, were
read not only as evidence of the innate perversity
of Indian society, but also as a failure of
colonialism itself: its ability to manage non-elite
Indians, to effect reform in native society, to assert
white/male authority over native/females, and to
assert civilisational supremacy.
 The Plan
• To teach the untaught
– work, docility and gendered order
• Categories
– Vagrant and petty thieves (Andaman islands)
– Unmarried women guilty of serious crimes (were considered the
incorrigible class and sent to prison for short periods)
– Married women guilty of serious crimes
• murder or attempted murder: sometimes of husbands, lovers and rivals, but
more frequently, of children.
• This last category was the colonial project of reformation through
incarceration
• The focus on “self control” and education/training in the colonial
prisons will reform these women
 The Plan
• They were seen as not only perpetrators but also
victims
– As the Indian society had victimized them and the
women would be helped re-socialized and reformed
(training is self control) through the prison experience
• Substantially in terms of idleness, prison labour
and vocational education trained women in the
moral value of work
• Learn to submit to the authority of the Raj, the
Elite and Men
 The Plan
• Learned skills and were given jobs with small
salaries
• Ticket to leave program
 The problem
• Vocational training and education was not available
in all prisons
– Lack of facilities
• Majority of the population were short term
prisoners (the incorrigible class) and diluted the
effect of the reform efforts
• Presence of male convicts as the segregation was
not possible due to lack of funds, facilities and
faulty architecture (this is post panopticon period)
 The Horror
• If the watcher’s tower is relocated from
Bentham’s fantasy to the heart of a pre-
modern jail where nothing ’functions’ except
for the gaze of the observer in his impotent
tower, we would have a reasonable
approximation of the dilemma of the colonial
prison
 The Horror
• Segregation of men and women prisons was
not possible
– Mingling of male and female prisoners
– In some cases they used the same toiletry facilities
(shamelessness)
– Male supervision
• Segregation from the petty criminal class (the
incorrigibles) [the wrong ‘shameless’ teachers]
 The Horror
• No separate cells (barrack system)
– T.H. Thornton, a supporter of cellular prisons and
an official in the Punjab government, summarised
the barriers facing the wider adoption of an
architecture of segregation: ’First, the natural
aversion to change; secondly, the fear of expense;
and lastly, the prevalent idea that the separate
system of punishment is unsuited to the climate of
India’.
 The Horror
• Heath related issues
– Male prisoners received more food
– Diseases
– Children and mortality
• Control over motherhood (milk)
• ‘White Matrons’ female supervision not possible
– Replacement
• Male Indian subordinates
• Free Indian women
• Female convicts
 Conclusion
• These failures matter not only because they indicate the difficulties of
developing modern penal regimes in a colonial context, but also because
they represent a perceptible anxiety within British colonialism in India. It is
precisely because the discourses of social rescue, moral reform and racial-
political authority converged in the punishment of women that the lapses
in the practice of this punishment made British observers nervous. When
women prisoners mingled indiscriminately, defecated in public, quarrelled,
escaped, died, or fought with jailors over control of their children, they did
not simply ’resist’. They undermined a prestige and a confidence that were
inextricable from the spectacle of colonialism. In fact, it is fair to say that
official and unofficial observers who catalogued the problems surrounding
women prisoners were dismayed not so much by the misconduct of the
convicts (which was expected), as by the paralysis of a colonial project
(which was not). As failure reinforced failure, the female wards became
not so much reminders of the success of colonial punishment, as
embarrassing signposts of an abandoned mission.