Juvenile Offenders in Colonial India

A Separate Punishment: Juvenile Offenders in Colonial India
Author(s): Satadru Sen

Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 81-104
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
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A Separate Punishment:
Juvenile Offenders in
Colonial India
SATADRU SEN
IN 1853 CHARLES HATHAWAY, inspector general of prisons in Punjab

to the provincial government outlining the peculiar problems po
offenders within and without the colonial prison. The system curr
the punishment of child criminals, Hathaway wrote, was a dism
vagrants and thieves drifted in and out of British-Indian jails, re
becoming progressively more delinquent with each visit. Under su
the inspector general asked, "how is his chance of reformation bettere
Hathaway's alarm illuminates a vexed debate about the punishm
of juveniles in India in the second half of the nineteenth century
early 1870s, approximately four hundred children under the age
through the courts and jails every year (Pr. LGP, 9.18.1872, file
1875). In Madras Presidency of the 1890s, an average of seven hund
convicted annually, mostly of theft (HJ, 4.4.1868, files 4D-4F). T
numbers; certainly they do not suggest an epidemic of juven
Nevertheless, the study of incarcerated populations in colonial Ind
about a few thousand unfortunates who were locked away in a new ty
It is a critically important part of the larger subject of disciplin
discourses, and institutions in the context of the post-Mutiny ye
istrators' anxiety about the uncontrolled pockets of native society
metropolitan interest in a more humane colonialism, and the des
professionals for laboratories in which they might construct their ow
converged in a flowering of new mechanisms for the control of de
rebels, "criminal tribes," vagrants, prostitutes, lunatics, and the co
colonial encounters with various categories of adult deviants hav
detail by Anand Yang (1985), Sumanta Banerjee (1998), James
others (see also Arnold 1993; Sen 2000), the invention and treatm
delinquency-based on a hope that children, being morally, physi
"soft," might be relatively amenable to colonizing intervention by the
have received almost no attention from scholars. Alone in this pic
Gautam Chatterjee's Child Criminals and the Raj (1995), which has
Satadru Sen (ssen@artsci.wustl.edu) is Assistant Professor of History a

versity, St. Louis.
The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (February 2004):81-104.

? 2004 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.
81
82 SATADRU SEN
ambitions and does not adequately ground juvenile punishmen

disciplining colonialism.
Because of the works of David Arnold (1993, 1994) and W
2001), we are familiar with the shortcomings of colonial mo
prison was not Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon or even Michael Ign
and we should not expect the child inmate to become "a host
(Bentham 1995, 85-86). Nevertheless, taking their cue fr
scholars of disciplining institutions have generally made two
that nineteenth-century modernity was essentially optimistic abo
managing disorderly populations by subjecting the individual
doses of discomfort. The other is that this modernity was marke
incomplete, withdrawal from the deliberate infliction of phy
1978, 5-26). Both of these assumptions, although not incorrec
settings, must be treated with caution. Early Victorians tende
preferable to the penal transportation of child criminals, and
remained a feature of metropolitan pedagogy long after Arnoldia
had become commonplace (Walvin 1982, 44-47, 56-60). In the
modernity of the juvenile institution failed to generate convictio
buildings, cells, and classrooms. Moreover, it did not necessari
that might signal an ideological shift away from physically p
fact, the punishment of juvenile offenders in British India
expectations that usually accompany the new prison: here, t
punishments, especially flogging, actually expanded alongside mo
A rough periodization illustrates the problem. Before the 186
by British-Indian courts were typically incarcerated with ad
without cells. This led some metropolitan observers and colon
entirely separate juvenile reformatories. Although a pat
reformatories began to take shape quite quickly, a larger appa
probation, and age-graded institutions for juvenile offenders
Great War. Calls for reform, unsatisfactory experiments wit
children's wards, and an increasing reliance on the whip marked
Modern punitive techniques, particularly cellular conf
consistently utilized in colonial India because they were incom
assumptions about the nature of Indian children, includin
delinquency in the European sense might not exist in India.
undermined by the politics of the juvenile ward, by whi
fluctuating contests involving British prison administrators,
Indian jail employees, unofficial observers, and, of course, chi
all British administrators engaged in combating juvenile delin
convinced that the reform and rehabilitation of "bad" childre
few retained the hope that reform-the conversion of idle, disord
children into productive and disciplined native subordinates-co
Indian conditions. It was generally agreed that reform require
the separation of child criminals from their families, from adult
each other. Yet, this consensus was superficial, and below the
disagreements about the degrees and conditions of what
punishment. Under the circumstances, those officials who saw a m
regime as the solution to the problem of child offenders bec
'For more on the Panopticon and Pentonville, see Ignatieff 1978,
JUVENILE OFFENDERS IN COLONIAL INDIA 83
their ability to sustain multiple segregations over the duration of an extended period
of institutionalization. This eroded their faith not only in the broad principle of
locking up child offenders but also in the efficacy of reforming institutions.
What developed as a consequence was both an enduring reluctance on the part
of the government to incarcerate children and an increasing reliance on corporal
punishment. The Whipping Act, which colonial administrators and jailors (including
Hathaway) greeted in 1864 as an attractive alternative to reformatories (HJ,
4.23.1864, files 47-51), retained its relevance even as juvenile delinquency became
increasingly complex and internally differentiated, and remained relevant after the
creation of a body of laws and institutions geared toward young criminals: the
Reformatory Schools Acts of 1876 and 1897; the Children Acts of the 1920s; the
large reformatories in Calcutta, Hazaribagh, Chingleput, Jabbalpur, and Bareilly; and
the "experiments" with Borstal Schools for adolescent offenders in the 1930s. I shall
focus in this article on the period preceding the legislative and institutional
specialization, when colonial jailors first articulated the concepts and problems that
shaped those later efforts.
Locating the Colonial Delinquent
The idea that disorderly children constituted a public problem was well
established in metropolitan Britain by the middle of the nineteenth century. Although
juvenile courts did not emerge in England until 1908, a network of reformatories and
industrial schools had taken shape by the 1850s. The mid-nineteenth-century
reformatory was based on the idea that juvenile offenders were especially amenable to
correct socialization if they could be removed from criminalizing influences, equipped
with basic literacy skills, exposed to religious influence, trained to work, and given
an interest in their own obedience (Carpenter 1872/1967, 1-22). Above all, as George
Behlmer has pointed out, an abiding faith in careful classification undergirded the
Victorian goal of correction (Behlmer 1998, 255). The reformatory was expected to
reform by giving the criminal the incentive-and the opportunity-to determine the
bureaucratic class in which he or she was placed. What was emerging in England was
a broadly aimed disciplinary apparatus that targeted not only the children of the
working poor and the "dangerous classes" but also homeless children who apparently
had no families apart from their peers and whose status in the eyes of middle-class
Victorians was not very different from that of stray animals. The discourse of
colonialism permeated this metropolitan anxiety; it is not accidental that street
children were described interchangeably as "savages" and "Arabs" (Carpenter 1868,
2:193). This discourse was then reflected back to colonial India, where savages of all
ages were abundant.
This reflection was not true to the English prototype because institutional and
ideological problems developed in India that were less pronounced in England. The
men who supervised Indian juvenile wards and reformatories were not specialists in
the sense that Walter Crofton in Ireland, Frederic-Auguste Demetz in France, or even
Mary Carpenter "specialized" in the new discipline. Early Indian reformatories-like
large prisons-were headed by military doctors who were qualified by their medical
authority; colonial magistrates and prison inspectors widely believed that scientific
knowledge of the human body would enable them to discover the "childhood" (that
is, confirm their status as children) of natives whose actual ages were otherwise
84 SATADRU SEN
unknowable (Pr. Leg. Dept., March 1897, files 87-136). Beyond

expertise, the superintendents of juvenile wards were career jailors who
in charge of children and told to do their best. Their own superiors
bureaucrats who had even less experience with the "science" of juven
and its treatment. This is not to say that the individuals concerned were
many were eager to experiment with techniques that were being trie
and to see how well metropolitan models worked when applied to na
My point, rather, is that like the colonial lunatic asylum, which was run
who typically had little formal training in psychiatric medicine (Mil
the colonial reformatory was run by makeshift personnel with un
commitment to modern ideas of punishment and rehabilitation.
The peculiar nature of colonial modernity compounded the
nineteenth-century India, the ideal of reform and rehabilitation could n
as it was in England because in India the need to preserve the racial d
the civilized and the savage severely complicated the ideological loc
reformed criminal and, consequently, the meaning of reform. In additio
deeply entrenched notions about the incorrigibility of certain subg
criminals, especially those who had been convicted of crimes against priv
(see Sen 2000, 51-54). Because juvenile delinquents in India frequent
the supposedly incorrigible and hereditary sections of the criminali
the ideological and institutional contingencies added up to a fundamental
about how the children should be treated and what could be exp
treatment. There were persistent disagreements about whether children
demarcated as criminal societies should be admitted into the refor
colonial observers saw such children as peculiarly suitable for institution
C. Hervey, superintendent of the Department for the Suppression o
Dacoity in 1863, was convinced that the institutionalization of children f
collectives was vital to preventing the reemergence of thuggee (HP
files 13-19).2 Yet, their colleagues saw the same children as impossible to
as a corrupting influence and preferred to keep them out of the reform
Dept., March 1897)-an inclination that became more pronounced as
wore on, exposing penologists to investigations of racial biology (Bat
inherited-through nurture or nature, or a nurture that had harden
a precocious resistance to new impression, the hereditary juvenile
typically relegated to the fringes of a childhood and children's institutio
on impressionability.
The parameters of juvenile delinquency in India were both narrow
than those that applied in the imperial metropole. While the English str
an urban phenomenon, Indian delinquents were rural as well as urba
delinquents gradually displacing the rural from the professional c
jailors as cities such as Calcutta, Madras, and Rangoon came to repr
anxieties about population control, in both senses of the term (HJ, J
107-12; AAR, 1891-1909; Report of the Committee on Juvenile Del
Burma, 1928). Urban delinquency, in India as in the England of Charl
Mary Carpenter, was primarily a class phenomenon: Victorian obse
children either as the detritus of shattered families or as having origina
2The fantasy that India was inhabited by vast secret societies of Thugs, or
robbers motivated by religion, developed in the 1830s and remained an enor
discourse within colonial criminology and popular culture (Sleeman 1839;
2002).
the waterline of respectability that they had never known patriarchal control
such urban children, the colonial state could attempt to step into the place of
parents and exercise a lapsed authority. The older phenomenon of rural delinq
was an artifact of racial and cultural exoticism. British observers widely believed t
the Indian countryside contained large numbers of children who were criminal bec
they were controlled by criminal adults (Carpenter 1868, 2:168). Child crimin
rural areas frequently came from these "wild" groups; their convictions in
reflected not so much a particular criminal act as a criminalized social identity
was related to but not coterminous with the discourse of the criminal tribe (F
1985; Singha, 1998, 168-238). Here, state intervention was geared not to
vacuum of authority, but to colonize by actively displacing a perverse fami
influence.
The British discourse of delinquency had an established place for female childre
who were seen occasionally as the victims of adult/male lust but more often
agents of sexual corruption (Gorham 1977). Anxiety about (female) child prosti
was especially intense in London in the 1880s, when many believed that the precoc
sexuality of delinquent females represented a more serious threat to civilizatio
did delinquent boys (Horn 1997, 181). Accordingly, a range of legal and institu
approaches was created in Britain to deal with girl offenders: the age of conse
sex was raised, reform schools multiplied, and attempts were made to inter
medically against sexually contagious diseases in children. Indian child crimin
the other hand, overwhelmingly were boys (Pr. Leg. Dept., March 1897). This
not mean that the British did not "see" girl criminals in India. Juvenile prosti
provided a context for debates on childhood, culture, and culpability (HJ, Jan
1875, files 48-67), and females under the age of sixteen did occasionally come
the courts on charges ranging from theft to murder and infanticide. When convic
these girls were punished with prison terms that varied from a few days in the lo
female jail to life in penal transportation; some even went to the lunatic asylum (M
2000, 97-100; Sen 2002). The relatively young were sometimes sent to the And
Islands, where the regime encouraged them to marry male convicts (Sen 199
Nevertheless, in spite of pressure from evangelical activists to establish a syst
female reformatories, girls were conspicuously exempted from the Reform
Schools Acts and, except in Madras, kept out of the reformatory. The justif
concern-not universally shared but powerful enough to prevail-was that nat
opinion would not tolerate the institutionalization of girls under the contro
unrelated men at the precise age when they might find husbands.3 Most co
administrators shared the conviction that rehabilitation for Indian girls me
marriage and generally conceded that incarceration ruined the marital prospe
Indian females on the mainland (Pr. Leg. Dept., March 1897).
Although this study draws conclusions broadly about British India, I have focus
primarily on the juvenile wards and reformatories of Punjab, with occasional g
at other provinces. The territorial emphasis on Punjab does not significantly skew
analysis because the period under study reflects the growing uniformity in Br
Indian punishment that resulted from the oversight of the Governor-General's Co
and the implementation of the Indian Penal Code in 1860 (Singha 1998, 120).
the involvement of the civil service in shaping penal policy and the inte
consultative and reactive nature of colonial penology ensured that individual p
3In Madras Presidency, Christian girls were exempted from this anxiety and occasi
institutionalized.
86 SATADRU SEN
makers and professionals were influential beyond any single province. Th

variations in penal practice on the mainland at this time were withi
among, the provinces: urban prisons were often quite different fro
counterparts, large jails different from makeshift lockups, and go
different from privately run institutions such as the Sassoon Reformato
of whether the prison was in Bengal, Bombay, or Punjab.
The Troubled Regime: Segregation, Education,

and Prison Labor
An obsession with segregation-that is, the separation of the child from the adult,
the redeemable from the incorrigible, and the reformed from the corrupting--drove
the reformatory as it developed in the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, when
British observers declared that colonial reformatories were failing to reform their
inmates, their observations were underpinned by a perception that it was segregation
that had substantially failed. To understand this perception, we should briefly examine
the evolution of juvenile punishment in India. Beginning shortly before the mid-
nineteenth century, the colonial government initiated a process that constructed the
juvenile offender as a legal category bounded by age. Act XIX of 1850 allowed
magistrates and justices of the peace to "apprentice" children between the ages of ten
and eighteen to private "masters," who might put them to work and discipline them
physically. Although the law was explicitly intended to train orphans and poor
children as workers, this was still a premodern approach to dealing with criminals,
with the state delegating the right to punish even as it asserted its authority. In 1861
the Criminal Procedure Code gave judges the discretionary power to send convicts
under the age of sixteen to reformatories instead of jail. In the absence of any
infrastructure, the law was largely a dead letter. It was revived and refined in 1876
by the Reformatory Schools Act, which confirmed the judges' discretion to send
juvenile convicts to the reformatory for periods of two to seven years and called for
the building of new state-run reformatories (Pr. Leg. Dept., March 1876). In 1897
the act was amended, raising the minimum sentence in the reformatory to three years
and lowering the age limit to fifteen; the idea behind the last change was that sixteen-
year-olds were too hardened in their ways to be reformed (Pr. Leg. Dept., March
1897).
In its intent, this lengthening of the sentence might be seen as the creation of
what Jacques Donzelot, in the context of French juvenile delinquency, has called "a
mechanism of interminable investigation, of perpetual judgment" (1979, 108-9,
110). Clearly, there is a convergence here between the management of native children
and the optimistic, Benthamite agenda of modern punishment. There is also, however,
a stutter between metropolitan intent and colonial practice. For example, French
Indochina saw the coexistence of bold plans for agricultural communes for child
offenders and the disheartening reality of juveniles imprisoned with adults in common
jails (Zinoman 2001, 208n50). In India, the Reformatory Schools Acts were only
partially implemented. For the administrators who controlled the purse strings of the
colonial regime, not enough children were serving long sentences in existing
reformatories to justify the expense of new institutions (RIPP 1873). Also, although
colonial administrators from the 1860s onward were willing to accept a limited degree
of quasi-parental responsibility for native children, there was a lingering ideological
resistance to any kind of state activism that might be construed as charity.4 The
numbers of children convicted for long sentences remained low because there were
few specialized reformatories to receive them. In the 1890s, when the Legislative
Department began its deliberations on amending the Reformatory Schools Act, the
original law had not yet been implemented in Punjab. Here, as in much of British
India, the institutions that the law envisioned had simply not been created. What
had been built, instead, were halfway measures in the form of juvenile wards attached
to large prisons, which were not significantly different from the juvenile wards of the
1850s, 1860s, and 1870s.
These were significant setbacks, especially since the case for a comprehensive
reformatory regime in India had been made as early as 1853. Charles Hathaway, who
proposed the idea of such a regime, had put forward a detailed plan that combined
vocational training and finely judged levels of punishment and reward within the
institution, with elaborate schemes for the probation, rehabilitation, and long-term
control of prisoners released from the reformatory. For repeat offenders, Hathaway had
recommended a strict program of solitary confinement, silence, and general
deprivation-a vision of correction that is easily recognizable as the Pentonville model.
Even as he echoed the confidence and enthusiasm of his metropolitan colleagues,
however, Hathaway had anticipated failure, admitting that his plans "may ... appear
Utopian" in the Indian context (RIPP 1853). This fear was an accurate forecast. The
methodical classification upon which Hathaway's scheme was based was never
systematically attempted, since most convicts on the Indian mainland, children
included, served sentences that ranged from a few days to a few months (RIPP 1853).
When they arrived at institutions with significant juvenile populations, such as jails
in Gurdaspur, Lahore, and Calcutta, newly convicted children were not separated into
distinct classes because the reforming movement from class to class was not feasible
in the short period of their incarceration. Some juvenile prisons, such as Gurdaspur,
made an effort to separate younger children from teenagers, but that was the extent
of the classification (SRJP 1872).
To understand the difficulties of enforcing a comprehensive segregation within
the institutions that developed between the 1850s and the 1870s, we should look
briefly at Gurdaspur. The Gurdaspur reformatory had originated as the children's
wing of the Sialkot jail in 1862 (Report on Jails and Jail Discipline in India, 1867-68,
HJ, 1.9.1869, file 49). Taking on an institutional identity of its own, the wing had
soon relocated to Gurdaspur. It typically (but not consistently) had the largest
population of juvenile offenders of any prison in Punjab, averaging at any given time
between forty and ninety boys. Gurdaspur's inmates were not local youths; they came
from all over Punjab. Also, they typically stayed longer than juveniles in other jails:
only boys with sentences of six months or more were sent to Gurdaspur. The
reformatory shared a compound with a prison for adult convicts, but a measure of
segregation was nevertheless maintained. The boys worked in their own manufactory
yard, attended classes separately from adults in the daytime, and slept in their own
barracks at night (RIPP 1867). To prevent sexual contact, boys under the age of
twelve (there were twenty-two in 1870) were required to sleep in separate barracks
from the older children (SRJP 1870).
4Acceptance and resistance are both evident in the Punjab government's hesitant move to
fund the institutionalization of famine "orphans" in 1861-62. The link between orphans and
juvenile delinquents was best manifested in the orphanage at Sikandra. Many of its over six
hundred inmates were sent there by magistrates who had convicted them or their parents of
famine-related crimes (HP, 12.4.1861, files 4-9, 4.15.1862, files 17-36).
88 SATADRU SEN
In some ways, the arrangement seemed to work: A. M. Dall

of prisons in Punjab-very much an enthusiast of mode
approvingly in 1867 that the children "appeared clean and quiet, a
conduct" (RIPP 1867). At the same time, frustrations develo
faded. Quite early in his tenure as inspector general of prison
discomfort with the fact that the Gurdaspur reformatory
compound: "I do not think that a reformatory of this kind sh
occupied by adult prisoners," he wrote in 1863. "The great ob
boys from all influences of a criminal character; if they be i
criminals, it will be found impossible to isolate them" (RIPP
sense that segregation was not what it should be remained a
Dallas's reports about Gurdaspur. In 1870 he noted that the
compelled to labor in the adult work yard and also complain
dormitories were much too close to the adult barracks (SRJ
had not improved two years later when Dallas discovered that boy
were working with adult prisoners (SRJP 1872).
These failures were all the more demoralizing to prison ad
the larger reformatories were intended to function as t
transportation for children. This intent was not universal: some
as E. C. Bayley and Lord Lawrence, believed that native chil
incapable of surviving relocation to an unfamiliar soil and clim
natal province (HJ, 4.4.1868, files 4D-4F). Their anxiety was
determination of other officials (such as Lord Napier and Dall
from the social environment of their crimes. British penal profe
the Gurdaspur institution favorably because of its isolated locatio
railway line that facilitated the importation of child convicts
not coincidental that in 1866 a ten-year-old boy who ha
transportation for life was initially sent to Gurdaspur. Dallas
Andaman Islands in order "to give him a chance there of lead
1866). Like transportation to the Andamans, incarceration in
(as opposed to a local jail) made sense in the context of a nativ
supposedly rooted in social associations. It promised to disru
discourage the reemergence within the prison of the associ
Because it isolated the convict from the comforting and corrupti
the reformatory was simultaneously punitive and reforming.
Charles Hathaway, who was appalled by what he saw in t
jurisdiction, explicitly acknowledged that this plan for i
floundering in Punjab. He complained to the provincial gover
What character but a "bad character" can remain to a boy of fourte

has been first corrupted by the scenes he witnesses during his
servitude, and the crimes of lying and thieving he is forced to com
task-masters his lot has placed him under? When committed to P
with grown-up criminals seven times more wicked than himself. He
he comes out a thief; when released, what is he to do? He has no
subsistence. If he migrates to another station, he is a vagabond. If
is, he is a Jail Bird.
(RIPP 1853, emphasis in original)
Hathaway's remarks show a sympathetic understanding of h

produced criminals in the discursive sense as well as in the pr
corruption. Training in crime, however, was not the only danger that awaited
who were forced to share prison wards with adult convicts: practically eve
critic of Indian jail regimes in this period had apparently witnessed or had hea
a "frightful demoralization" in the wards, by which they meant sexual contac
adult and juvenile convicts as well as the sexual abuse of younger childr
older boys (RIPP 1864). Like girl delinquents in England, boys in the India
were almost universally regarded as precociously sexualP and therefore danger
only to themselves and to easily tempted adults but also to the idea of ref
We could reasonably propose that the fear of juvenile homosexuality in p
driven by the peculiarities of colonial gender: young boys epitomized the effe
sexually immature native male who might ensnare the manly and the m
including, potentially, the white man (Nandy 1983, 1-63; Sinha 1995, 1-
larger prisons, various measures-cages, uniforms, extra lighting, and
barracks-were used in experiments to manage boys who were apparently
to "unnatural crime"; these methods proved so unreliable in practice that
who could be identified early were banned altogether from transportat
Andaman Islands (HPB, May 1880, files 1-3; Sen 2000, 172-74, 214-15
Although adult-child contact in the wards triggered the most visceral
from critics of the colonial prison, it was also recognized that child offenders
be separated from their families, including their parents. In this case, the
of juvenile delinquency in India diverged from English practice. George Be
noted that, in spite of a widespread concern in England that poor parent
factor in delinquency, magistrates in the metropole preferred to work wit
when it came to disciplining children who broke the law, and were generally r
to remove juveniles from their families for extended periods (1998, 235-3
British discourse of juvenile delinquency became less grounded in class a
focused on an indictment of childhood itself, the culpability of parents in the
of their children diminished further. In colonial India, where pockets of nativ
remained suspiciously marginal to the moral and political circle of British rule
was no corresponding movement away from the vision of a criminality that w
in readily identifiable cultural units, including the family. Parents were co
implicated in their children's disorder, and penal professionals of the mid-nin
century saw the separation of child offenders from their families as essential to
reform. A. M. Dallas was explicit in his perception of the problem: "In most in
the children concerned in the crimes are not the only persons to blame
urged on to them by their parents. Until, therefore, they can be for a le
period removed from these pernicious influences, it is vain to hope that th
deterred by punishment, whether it be whipping or imprisonment,
committal of crime" (RJP 1871).
Dallas was convinced, also, that the families of criminal children active
any good that the British might do with their reformatories. Regarding one b
had become a skilled net-maker during a six-month incarceration and was
be released, Dallas remarked: "From what I hear of his relatives, it is safe
that he never will choose to live honestly" (RJP 1871). In other words, a
reformatory regime in the Indian cultural environment required not only a co
segregation of juveniles from families and adult criminals but also a con
'Prison inspectors routinely noted that Indian children reached puberty earlier
ropeans and acquired a precocious knowledge of the facts of sex (Pr. Leg. Dept., M
HJ, January 1875, files 48-67).
90 SATADRU SEN
prolonged separation during which the colonial state could bring its influ
upon its prisoners without competition from native adults with diffe
political agendas. Yet, this was precisely what the early Indian reform
constant ingress and egress of delinquents and its inability to mainta
authority over boys who had been released, failed to deliver.
Faced with an institutional environment that rendered extended
segregation exceptional rather than normal, officials such as Dallas b
not only about the possibility of reform but also about the effectiv
conditions of reforming techniques such as prison education and sup
They made critical compromises that only added to their sense of fa
prisoner who entered and left the prison with no recognizable skills coul
a ticket of leave, a form of parole (conceptually similar to work rel
critical to the colonial regime's attempt to control former prisoners
109). A released delinquent without a ticket of leave and a state-ap
likely to return to his "criminal" family and occupations, erasing the be
of his erstwhile isolation.
In its content as well as in its essential rituals, prison education promised multiple
benefits to British penal professionals who worked with children in India, who saw it
as a source of moral inspiration and an aid in the Victorian project of character building
(Collini 1985), which in this context meant overwriting the "natural" unreason of the
native with the ability to control unreasonable impulses. It was also a means of
inculcating the ethos and skills of state-approved labor, training in the discipline and
the hierarchy of the classroom, and a practical punishment for a population that
apparently found schooling "extremely distasteful" (RIPP 1863). Gauri Viswanathan
has outlined the use of morally charged education as a colonizing strategy (1987, 1-
22); a different curriculum utilizing not Shakespeare but work, docility, and
subordination was deployed in those sites of power where the poor and the marginal
were concentrated (Foucault 1979, 135-69). In spite of an apparent consensus on the
desirability of these ends, serious tensions developed within prison schools. These
involved the specifics of what children were taught and a persistent conflict between
education and labor.
The basic structure of prison education in Punjab, especially for child convicts,
developed in the early 1860s; Hathaway appears to have taken the lead in pushing
the provincial government in this direction (RIPP 1862, 1863). As part of these
reforms, schooling in Punjab's jails and reformatories was placed under the supervision
of the Department of Public Instruction, and the curricula were brought in line with
those already in use in district schools. The Department of Public Instruction provided
teachers and inspectors, and prisons were required to conduct classes daily in reading,
writing, arithmetic, and geography. Although most of this instruction was in Urdu
and Hindi, Dallas reported in 1867 that several of the inmates of Gurdaspur had
"made progress in English" (RIPP 1867). Typically for a regime which was already
uneasy about its ability to manage-that is, to impress-all but a limited segment
of criminalized native children, prisoners whose sentences were shorter than six
months and those who were determined to be physically, mentally, or tempera-
mentally "incapable of learning" were excluded from classes (RIPP 1863).
This education, however, was not all that juvenile convicts were expected to
absorb in the course of their imprisonment. Book learning took a back seat to
vocational training, which was frequently a euphemism for labor that generated
revenue for the prison administration. Boys at Gurdaspur were put to work spinning
twine, weaving, manufacturing carpet, making pottery, and-playing havoc with
gendered labor-knitting (RIPP 1867). Prison administrators saw this training as

essential to the boys' reform, not only because it trained them for honest occupations
but also because it might impart a tolerance for the idea of regular, repetitive work.
Even those observers who conceded that spinning twine in prison did not constitute
vocational training accepted the labor regime as educational. After all, Dallas pointed
out, "it is work that can be easily learnt, and performed profitably by boys" (RIPP
1863). The profits, he made clear, should accrue to the institution, not the children.
The problem, however, was that labor and education in the reformatory did not
always reinforce each other. Because work took time away from reading and writing,
classes were irregular and brief. This was true of nearly every juvenile prison in India:
in Calcutta's Presidency Jail, children were made to labor for ten hours every day and
studied only at night and when they were allowed to take a break from work (Report
on Jails and Jail Discipline in India, 1867-68, HJ, 1.9.1869, file 49). In Punjab, even
Dallas, who was typically upbeat in his assessment of progress in the classroom, noted
that some prison administrators were "disposed to view the education of prisoners as
a waste of time" (RJP 1870). Textbooks were nonexistent. Conceding that education
in the conventional sense had not "taken the position it ought," Dallas explained that
the reason was the overwhelming emphasis that was placed on "teaching trades" (RJP
1870). British readings of Indian culture, including a sympathetic adoption by prison
administrators of the prejudices of elite Indians, also undermined the education of
delinquent children. Dallas cited the example of one boy who had been excused from
school "because he was a sweeper" and another because he was "employed on a certain
kind of work in the manufactory" (SRJP 1870). In this case, the defining occupations
of Indian children-decided by jailors with reference to indigenous concepts of caste,
social status, and appropriate work--determined their position within the reformatory
and made some inmates appear unsuited for book learning.
An unreservedly critical appraisal of prison education came from R. Grey, who
temporarily replaced Dallas as inspector general of prisons in 1869. Grey declared
that prison schools had failed altogether and that students had made minimal progress.
He blamed overcrowded classrooms and a general paucity of the "right sort" of teachers
(RIPP 1869; SRJP 1869). Some British observers-notably Mary Carpenter-wanted
Indian reformatories to employ European instructors, who might forcefully impress
their moral and racial selves upon material that had been stamped with a native
criminality but was still soft (1868, 2:169). More typically, colonial jailors and
bureaucrats recognized that respectable whites would demand respectable white
salaries and would generate peculiar ideological problems as surrogate parents for poor
native children. They preferred elite but adequately subordinated Indians who might
provide delinquent children with a model of respectable native adulthood that did
not encroach upon British cultural and political prerogatives (HE, 11.25.1859, files
1-3; HJ, 4.4.1868, files 4D-4F). The racial identity and social location of the teachers
mattered because prison education was itself a process of segregation-that is, a
technique of isolating juvenile delinquents from the society of criminals in the present
and in the future. The teachers, therefore, had to be sufficiently distant from the
delinquents and the British themselves in terms of their place in the colonial order.
What Grey saw in several Punjab prisons was child convicts being instructed by
elderly burkundazes (guards) who doubled as teachers in exchange for two or three
extra rupees every month (SRJP 1869). Jail inspectors in Bengal and Mysore noted
that convicts themselves were frequently employed as teachers of imprisoned children
(Report on Jails and Jail Discipline in India, 1867-68, HJ, 1.9.1869, file 49). In
other jails, the teachers came from outside the prison establishment, but their
92 SATADRU SEN
positions were neither stable nor remunerative. They tended to resig

bringing classes to a standstill. Their salaries were pitiful: between seven
rupees monthly. Such instructors could hardly be expected to functi
agents of social relocation. With some exceptions, British observers had s
for the men who taught child convicts in Indian jails, seeing them as
and indifferent to their task (SRJP 1869). Dallas remarked upon the d
saw in the classroom at the Sirsa prison and added that the teacher "had
to keep [the students) quiet" (RJP 1870).
The advanced age of burkundaz teachers-an ubiquitous phenomeno
such instructors were used in Punjab jails-is worth remarking u
surmise that, in a social relationship that required close contact between
low-status native men, this arrangement was calculated to reduce the cha
abuse. Age would also have widened the generational distance betwee
students, allowing teachers to function, theoretically, as surrogate grand
is ironic, considering that the juvenile-delinquency establishment in
an explicit preference for younger supervisors, believing them to be
understanding the needs of the child (Behlmer 1998, 263-64). In In
British had convinced themselves of the Oriental reverence for age,
seen as the more suitable guardians.
The Politics of the Early Reformatory: Outside

Support, Inside Resistance
Nonofficial British observers and sections of the Indian elite confirm

pessimism about the status and the future of the colonial reformat
prominent nonofficial to take an interest in juvenile delinquency in
Carpenter. Carpenter belongs to a genre of Victorian social workers
Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, Emily Hobhouse, and Jane Ad
driven by middle-class anxieties about urbanity and colonialism. Arm
religious and cultural confidence, an expansive notion of women's
willingness to take on entrenched bastions of male authority in assorted
they were at the forefront of a wave of legal and institutional reform t
England the 1830s and lasted into the Progressive Era in America.
such, both reactionary in their attitudes toward the poor, the foreig
and the nonwhite as well as subversive in their willingness to critique th
and practices of their own social milieux (Walkowitz 1992, 41-80; B
91).
Carpenter was a pioneer of nineteenth-century institutional refor
The daughter of a Unitarian minister, she was deeply committed to
maintained a catholic interest in other faiths; this reflected not only a v
about why their adherents refused to convert but also her fascination w
Roy, whom she had known in Bristol in 1830 (Sargant 1987, 11-27;
34-38). This childhood encounter (Roy had died in the care of her fat
an adult, to befriend elite Indians-especially Brahmos-who traveled
and to assert a privileged status as a living connection to Roy.
Contact with Indians intensified her anxiety about their moral condit
sailed to India in 1867 with a well-defined agenda of reform. She mad
of the country, visiting a large assortment of colonial and native institu
prisons, lunatic asylums, and private homes--observing, conducting interv

recording what she saw and heard. Her primary mission was to solicit supp
elite Indians, the Anglo-Indian community, and ultimately the colonial go
for a school headed by European women that would train Indian women a
(Ghose 1998, 107-26; Strobel 1991, 49-71). At the time, Carpenter wa
established as an authority on child criminals and their rehabilitation, having
extensively with the children of the English and Irish poor and particularly w
children in Bristol. In India she hoped to persuade the colonial governmen
the building of reformatories where convicted child criminals as well as nonco
delinquents could be held for extended periods of time in lieu of their bein
ordinary jails. Her two favorite projects-the normal school and the refo
were closely related: they both aimed to expose the elusive, uncolonized ar
native family to the moral searchlight of middle-class colonialism. Carpenter's
evangelical view of her mission should not obscure the fact that she was very
believer in modern punitive strategies: a firm opponent of corporal punish
admired Walter Crofton's Irish system, which required incarcerated chi
progress through several grades of rehabilitation by demonstrating their a
of the discipline of the reformatory (Carpenter 1872/1967, 1-22).
Carpenter discovered that existing reformatories in India were a far cry fr
ideal that she had in mind, and she made sure that her findings were rep
breathless detail) in the British press (Edinburgh Courant, "The Jails of India,"
15, 1867). She discovered also the frustrations of lobbying the colonial go
to build a more satisfactory set of juvenile institutions. Prison administr
government officials were frequently hostile to Carpenter, not only beca
resented her interference in their male professional domain but also beca
believed that she had no understanding of the peculiarities of Indian crim
criminalized children, especially their immunity to shame and lack of a re
plasticity (HJ, 1.18.1868, files 21-22, 1.9.1869, files 55-72). E. C. Bayley d
that Carpenter had failed to grasp how "ancestral pursuit"-by which he
"caste"-erased the imprints of punishment upon the released child offen
1868).6 The erudite F. J. Mouat, then inspector general of prisons in lowe
remarked that aging Indian penal institutions might be dysfunctional b
popular Benthamite standards but were nevertheless better than English pr
been in the time of John Howard and "monuments of the humanity, intelligen
advanced views of those who then had charge of the judicial administration of
(Pr. Home Dept. 1866-76). At the same time, the colonial government
unmoved by her visit. "Progressive" administrator-penologists such as Lor
and Mouat (who had once accepted the Whipping Act as a suitable mecha
child management but had become enamored of the Mettray reformatory regi
a meeting with Frederic-Auguste Demetz) approved of Carpenter's dema
changes that would render corporal punishment obsolete (HJ, 4.4.1896, fi
Report on the Jails of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, Pr. Hom
1868), and her tour pushed the colonial government into initiating the interpr
dialogue that led, after many hiccups, to the 1876 law (Report on Jails a
Discipline in India, 1867-68, HJ, 1.9.1869, file 49). Carpenter also ma
engage in a lively conversation about reformatories with elite Indians in B
6Well into the new century, reformatory administrators clung to this theory
why few released children actually took up the occupations that they had been tau
institution.
94 SATADRU SEN
Ahmedabad, and Calcutta and to elicit their support for her plans. Parsis,
native Christians, and Jews demonstrated a particular eagerness to participate
conversation. Partha Chatterjee's assertion that elite Indians shut the colo
out of the nation's collective home does not quite work when the home in
belonged to the marginal classes or to rival groups within Indian society (C
1993, 5-6, 116-34). Each group agreed with Carpenter that sophisticated ref
regimes were urgently needed in India. In the process, they competed for the
of civilization and modernity with each other, with British critics o
civilization, with the negligent colonial state, and with the "unenlightened
natives. Carpenter, for her part, was able to enlist their authentic voices in su
her projects.
Carpenter's encounter with Bombay's Jewish community is especially p
here. Like the Parsis, Indian Jews were able to use the delinquency of oth
as an opportunity to underline their own "foreign" origin and articulat
outlook that was aligned with that of the colonizer. In concrete terms, th
community could show Carpenter something that the Parsis, Brahmos, an
Christians could not: a reformatory of their own. The David Sassoon reformat
been founded in 1857. It was not entirely a new institution but, rather, the ad
by the Sassoons of the Bombay School of Industry, which had been set up seve
earlier by the provincial government to deal with children arrested by the po
to facilitate the apprenticeship of poor children. When the institution
financial difficulties, the Sassoons provided the money and the new name
given a measure of control over the administration (HE, 2.12.1858, files
1867 the board of the reformatory included Parsis and Englishmen as well as m
of the Sassoon family-juvenile delinquency was not only a forum of elite comp
but also one of strategic alliances. A semiprivate institution such as Sassoon
to go further than the juvenile wards of Punjab jails in developing mecha
segregation, education, and long-term control. Nevertheless, as in gover
prisons, these mechanisms were handicapped by the inmates' resistance to disc
tactics, frequent breakdowns in the system of extramural supervision, and th
difficulties of segregating children from unacceptable influence in t
environment of colonial India.
The inmates of the Sassoon Reformatory were not themselves Jewish or Parsi, just
as the boys in Gurdaspur were not British. This was not coincidental, of course:
juvenile delinquency in the colonial context was always a moral flaw in the Other and
a civilizational boundary between the observer and the observed. Broken down by
religion-which the delinquents inevitably were in the records and eyes of British
observers-the children in Sassoon represented roughly equal numbers of Hindus and
Muslims, with a sprinkling of Christians (Carpenter 1868, 2:180-81). They came
from all over the Bombay Presidency. In this sense, the institution functioned
similarly to Gurdaspur, concentrating the refuse of a wider criminal geography. There
were, however, significant differences between Sassoon and Gurdaspur. Sassoon sought
to retain juvenile offenders well beyond the terms of their sentences; during this
period, when the reformatory had no legal authority to compel the children to stay,
the children were "apprenticed"-that is, put to work within and without the institu-
tion as carpenters, metal workers, cooks, and gardeners. Delinquency, understood as
the possibility of relapse, was thus extended into boundaries of reform. Boys who had
reformed to some degree were recruited as teachers of the other children. Inmates of
Sassoon were regularly sent to work at the locomotive workshops of the Great Indian
Peninsula Railway; others worked in privately owned cotton mills (Carpenter 18

2:180-81).
The artisans (as apprenticed boys were called) received small stipends for their
work, and they were fed and clothed at the expense of the reformatory. Clearly, some
children and parents saw this as an economic arrangement that suited their needs; as
James Mills has pointed out, Indians confronted with colonial institutions of
incarceration sometimes co-opted the institutions for their own purposes (2000, 132-
44). In addition, escapes-"desertions," in Carpenter's narrative-were common, as
was theft (1868, 2:179-89). We should remember that the politics of juvenile
delinquency were not simply an internal debate within the penal bureaucracy or a
struggle by British administrators to control indifferent native subordinates. The
reformatory was contested also by the children who were incarcerated there, who left
no written records, but who "spoke" by running away, returning unreformed,
comforting or brutalizing each other, stealing, and generally confounding the
architects of reform.
When boys whose sentences had expired ran away from Sassoon, typically the
authorities could legally do nothing, unless a case of theft or vagrancy could be made
against the child. When the deserter violated an apprenticeship, however, the
reformatory would try to use other forms of pressure (not necessarily legal) to force
the child to return. Other children, relatives and friends of the runaway, and employers
were all expected to participate in these recaptures. Carpenter describes the recapture
of an inmate named Girdhur, who was apparently "one of the best of boys" but who
had committed the "exceptional misconduct" of running away (1868, 2:186-87). He
had, however, been quickly discovered and retrieved with the help of his patron.
We could reasonably conclude that at Sassoon a well-developed labor regime
substituted for the prison walls of Punjab's centers of juvenile detention. This was a
more sophisticated reformatory regime than Gurdaspur because even as it exploited
the apprentices, it made a serious effort to provide vocational training and strictly
supervised work to children whose criminality lay precisely in their supposed aversion
to labor and supervision. The system of apprenticeship did provide a measure of
surveillance and control beyond the delinquent's term of incarceration, an advantage
that was sorely missed by A. M. Dallas and Charles Hathaway in Punjab. E. Pratt,
who sat on the board of directors at Sassoon, could express the hope that the inmates
were being "gradually trained in habits of self-command and self-reliance" (Carpenter
1868, 2:189), which is a more upbeat assessment of institutional performance than
what we find in fully government run reformatories. Not surprisingly, Sassoon served
as an ideological staging ground for enthusiasts for reformatories in India, and in
1867 the directors of the institution were actively involved in an extraordinary (albeit
not immediately successful) effort of the government of Madras to persuade the viceroy
to sanction the building of large state-run reformatories in the provinces.7
Mary Carpenter should have been pleased with what she saw at Sassoon. She was
not. She disliked the idea of criminals teaching other criminals, which reduced the
moral distance between teacher and learner. She disliked the absence of an explicitly
moral education, and she regretted that the managers of the reformatory "had not had
the benefit of European experience" (Carpenter 1868, 2:172). She was especially
7The Bombay government, which backed Madras's campaign, forwarded the annual re-
ports from Sassoon to Madras, and several administrators (including Napier) wrote detailed
memos to the Indian government, citing their experience at Sassoon as the source of their
authority (HJ, 4.4.1868, files 4D-4F).
96 SATADRU SEN
distressed with the frequency of desertions and with what she saw as the weaknes
legal provisions for the recovery of those who escaped. Overall, like Gurdaspur, Sa
had too many missing pieces. Carpenter's observations satisfied her only that "juve
delinquency exists in India" (2:169). They did not satisfy her that the colonial Briti
were capable of dealing with the problem. I would like, at this point, to note D
complaint about Gurdaspur: "It is incorrect to call this a reformatory; it does
answer to any one of the requirements of such an institution" (SRJP 1872). To a le
extent, the same could be said of Sassoon.
Cell versus Whip
Disappointment with existing juvenile institutions led colonial administrato

evaluate two options that were seemingly located on opposite poles of the disc
of modern punishment. One, flogging, was emblematic of the physical tortur
limited ambitions that Michel Foucault indicated are jettisoned on the ro
modernity (1979, 3-31). The other, solitary confinement, is the quintessent
modern punishment in which the criminal is deprived of society and left to r
endlessly, so that he might be tormented internally by his own demons and refor
in the process. Corporal punishment and solitary confinement coexisted in the col
prison as two parts of a single, albeit not seamless, punitive strategy. The ideo
tensions between the two approaches to punishment, which are not irreconcila
begin with," were partially muted here in the process of a pragmatic search for s
term control. This tension allowed for simultaneous experiments with cells an
flogging post, and for the hope that either of these could solve the problem
plagued juvenile institutions.
Solitary confinement was, in a sense, the "great white hope" of professionals w
wanted a modern reformatory regime in India and who saw the project found
on the rocks of apathy, resistance, and cultural peculiarity. There was a practical s
to their enthusiasm: these professionals understood that the central government m
refuse to sanction juvenile reformatories that were fully separate from jails (and
expensive) and that placing children in cells within existing prisons would be cheap
(Report on the Jails of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, Pr. Home D
1868). The compromise allowed them to retain the identity of the modern profess
because the reforming effects of isolation in cells also had impeccable Bentha
credentials; the idea is at the heart of the English penitentiary and its vari
institutional cousins. In India, however, the cellular prison-that is, the archite
of solitary confinement-was a relative latecomer. Although proponents of ce
jails, such as F. J. Mouat, sought to bolster their case by pointing out that
Macaulay himself had called for such prisons as early as 1838 (Report on the J
the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, Pr. Home Dept. 1868), the first
scale cellular institutions began to appear in India only at the end of the 1800
a century after the building of Pentonville and nearly a century after the buildin
William Blackburn's penitentiaries in Gloucester. Nevertheless, colonial adm
istrators who encountered juvenile convicts called early for a system of sol
incarceration. Charles Hathaway included it in his plans for repeat offenders
8We could argue that modern penal techniques based on medical supervision and di
deprivation are also forms of corporal punishment (see Sen 2000, 131).
1853). Some officials saw solitary confinement as a practical method for isolating boys
from sexual contact with adult prisoners: in 1869 the sole juvenile inmate of
Gujranwala jail was rarely allowed to leave his cell (SRJP 1869). R. Montgomery, the
judicial commissioner of Punjab, sought to describe a scene in which cells were
unavailable: "The physical, moral and social effects of such a system are truly
deplorable. The ribaldry, obscenity, and the gross wickedness which goes on among
masses of oriental criminals so congregated, can be better imagined than described.
They forget for the time their punishment; they harden each other in sin and vice"
(RIPP 1864).
Montgomery believed that all prisoners-including juveniles-who had been
sentenced to rigorous imprisonment should spend some time alone. He saw solitary
confinement as a viable alternative to long prison terms, effectively substituting a
brief, intense period of isolation for an extended and unreliable segregation (RIPP
1864). He found support in the office of the lieutenant governor of Punjab, who
agreed that all new jails should have cells for at least 50 percent of its inmates and
declared that "there is no description of punishment whatever, that can compete in
effectiveness with [solitary confinement] in the case of the boys of the classes [that
view crime as their profession]" (RIPP 1864). In 1871 the Punjab government noted
that forty new cells had been built in the province's jails over the past year, and
another one hundred had been commissioned. In the same breath, the government
conceded that the numbers were "far below the requirements of several jails" (Pr.
LGP, 10.18.1872, file 3102).
On the surface, this would seem to be a fairly consistent endorsement of the
utility of cells. On the contrary, existing cells were underutilized when it came to
incarcerated children. Hathaway observed that "solitary cells are in nearly every Jail
kept empty, or used only for those awaiting to take their trial for murder, and other
heinous offences" (RIPP 1853). The problem, therefore, was not simply one of
unavailable architecture; it was also a fundamental ambivalence on the part of colonial
jailors about the appropriateness of solitary confinement in the case of Indian
criminals, especially juveniles. A. M. Dallas, for instance, was a determined opponent
of placing children in solitary cells (RIPP 1864). Even a believer such as R.
Montgomery agreed that the idea might be better suited to England, Ireland, and
America than to India. His pessimism stemmed partially from his doubts about the
racially determined capacity for reform in "oriental criminals," but there were
additional and equally powerful reasons to be skeptical about cellular reformatories
in India. There was the northern Indian climate: many jailors worried that cells became
too hot in the summer and cold in the winter (RIPP 1863). This was not merely
frustration with the weather or simply another manifestation of what Mark Harrison
and Peter Redfield have identified as the intersecting discourses of climates and
racialized bodies within colonial institutions (Harrison 1999, 1-24; Redfield 2000,
49-108). It was implicitly related to the politics of the colonial prison because,
although cells could be heated in the winter, the expense could not be justified in the
context of "native institutions" in which the actual reform of the children was
doubtful.
Montgomery understood that his arguments in favor of cells would be weighed
against this pervasive skepticism. As he outlined his plans for a more perfect solitary
regime, he conceded that "such a system can only be carried out with a very superior
and trustworthy Jail establishment, such we cannot command at present" (RIPP
1863). Solitary confinement was not simply a matter of leaving the prisoner to rot in
a cell; it was an elaborate tactic of isolation, surveillance, persuasion, and calibrate
98 SATADRU SEN
deprivation. As such, it required not only a modern jailor but also m

staff that would not allow the prisoner to leave his cell, have visit
confinement, waste his time, feign sickness, become sick, or die. In the c
none of this could be taken for granted because, as David Arnold has not
most energetic administrator had to contend with Indian subordinate
fully share the reforming agenda of their British superiors, and who
in the prison regime was sporadic and perfunctory (1994, 148-87).
Other prison administrators emphasized problems which had to
children themselves. Children in cellular prisons sometimes co-opte
structure of punishment and thus diluted its punitive content. Charl
strong proponent of solitary confinement, noted with chagrin that I
desired rather than dreaded the solitary cell, as a result of which "our sys
confinement does not seem to have that wholesome effect which is
(RIPP 1862). He shared the opinion of jailors who were convinced tha
a little too comfortable with the idea of a cell of their own, where they
the rigors of rigorous imprisonment. J. S. F. Mackenzie, the first ass
tendent in Coorg, explained: "Solitary confinement [is] more suitable to t
than the Native, whose natural disposition prevents his feeling the fu
intended punishment" (HJ, 2.13.1869, files 11, 12-32).
Quite separate from native perversity was the issue of whether solitary
was actually helpful in the treatment of juvenile offenders. Dallas was co
it was not, yet Dallas was not opposed to the basic principle of solitary c
he supported its use with adult convicts. In his mind, there were tw
locking up juveniles in solitary cells, both of which derived from th
children were more amenable to reform than adult criminals. First,
that placing children in cells wasted an infrastructural resource th
reserved for adults. Second, he thought that the best way to reform
through selective contact, not complete isolation. From his perspect
sense to lock children away in cells, where they would have little commu
those who might mold them morally (RIPP 1864). Dallas was hardly
thinking was very much in line with the visitation schemes that w
Victorian campaigns aimed at the dangerous classes and which Mary C
(unsuccessfully) to encourage in India. Even Pentonville, for all of it
isolation, encouraged contact between convicts and those who might exer
influence (Ignatieff 1978, 5-26).
Given these various concerns, solitary confinement remained unde
a punitive technique in the colonial arsenal. Rattan and birch, on t
were used often and with gusto. As a policeman in Burma in the ea
century, George Orwell could caricature the British nostalgia for the day
sent disobedient servants to the local station house with a note sayin
the bearer fifty lashes" (1962, 38). Yet, there is no evidence for a sig
in the frequency of corporal punishment in British Indian jails in the lat
century. In fact, it is evident that direct attacks on the bodies of co
became more common in this period. Flogging remained a persisten
colonial punishment, and many prison administrators remained convince
the one punishment that Indian criminals truly dreaded (HPB, Decem
59-61).
In the case of juvenile offenders, flogging was both widespread an
On the one hand, many in the colonial government and within prison ad
saw the cane as an indiscriminate approach to punishment and,
metropolitan counterparts, useless. As one police officer wrote in his diary: "These
juvenile offenders are getting rather numerous, and a few stripes do not seem to deter
them much" (SRJP 1872). Some prisons, such as Sialkot, did not use the cane at all
on juvenile inmates but focused instead on dressing them in special uniforms and
putting them to work in the jail garden-the idea being that cultivation was both
morally and occupationally rehabilitating (RIPP 1862). In 1864 the office of the
lieutenant governor of Punjab took the position that "as regards boys of the classes
professionally engaged in the commission of crime, [floggingj is almost wholly
inoperative" (RIPP 1864). The memory of the pain faded too quickly, and the ritual
gave the boys an opportunity to defy the state physically before the admiring eyes of
their peers. In fact, the memo continued, to punish such boys with flogging (instead
of imprisonment) would be to "afford a premium on crime."
In spite of such reservations, however, the benefits of corporal punishment were
self-evident to bureaucrats such as E. C. Bayley and Arthur Howell, who were
instrumental in overruling Mary Carpenter, Lord Napier, and others who called for
the whip and the cane to be replaced with fully segregated juvenile reformatories. In
that debate in the late 1860s, Bayley and Howell made two related arguments which
might be considered as the conservative position against new-fangled experiments
with juvenile institutions. The first was that juvenile delinquency-understood also
as a set of flaws in the child that might be corrected through institutionalization-
did not exist in India, in spite of Carpenter's insistence to the contrary. Indian
children, parents, and societies were fundamentally different from their European
counterparts (although not necessarily inferior), the conservatives implied, and
reformatory enthusiasts-who assumed that delinquency, childhood, and children
were essentially the same everywhere and who prescribed universal institutional
responses-were mistaken. Howell wrote in 1868:
India is not yet sufficiently civilized to breed up the large vagrant population, the
offspring and heirs of poverty and crime, that . . . infest most of the large cities of
Europe. The lowest classes in this country are probably very superior in the scale of
humanity to the similar classes in England. An ignorance of these facts has induced
philanthropic persons, fresh from the experience of Mettray and similar institutions
in Great Britain, to advocate the introduction by Government of measures almost as
unsuited to the circumstances of this country as a thuggee school of industry or a
zenana mission would be in England.
(Report on Jails and Jail Discipline in India, 1867-68, HJ, 1.9.1869, file 49)
The second argument, which Bayley made forcefully, derived from the conviction that
since most juveniles convicted by Indian courts were not delinquent at all, it was
better to flog them and return them to their parents than to introduce them to the
moral cesspool of a penal institution. Rejecting the Madras government's plea for a
reformatory, Bayley wrote:
The proper object of Reformatories ... is rather to save, from growing up in a course
of crime, children who, from vicious disposition and teaching, or from gross and
palpable neglect, are in danger of becoming habitual criminals. Thus, a Magistrate
might send to a Reformatory a ragged boy caught picking-pockets, and shown to
have been abandoned by his parents, or to have become an inmate of a notorious
thieves' resort; but he certainly would not so treat a boy, the son of honest or
respectable parents, if brought before him for some trifling offence committed,
perhaps more out of frolic than wickedness.
(HJ, 4.4.1868, files 4D-4F)
100 SATADRU SEN
There were serious political problems, however, with whipp

children of respectable parents. Even as Bayley and Howell ma
discussion was underway between the provinces and the centr
the propriety of using the Whipping Act against people whose cla
recovered from the vengeful aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny. The
Northwest Provinces noted: "The object of the [Whipping Act]
to deal effectually with reckless offenders or persons belongi
criminal classes, who are not deterred from crime by a short imp
therefore needlessly crowded the jails, and . . . it was not intended
of inflicting a specially degrading penalty on [those] whose case is
... imprisonment" (HJ, 4.11.1868, files 14-22). The implica
institutions were for the relatively decent, and the whip for
Although this is the opposite of Bayley's expressed desire to flog
was room for agreement. Both agreed that some children must be
keep them apart from those who must be locked up. In 1864 th
had expressed its preference for an approach that distinguished b
of hereditary criminals and the children of respectable peasan
end of the decade, it had become clearer who were to be
institutionalized. What emerges is a bifurcated and hierarch
delinquency and punishment that reproduces the colonial en
criminals: prolonged confinement, redemption, and rehabilitation
incorrigibility, flogging, and short sentences for another. T
decided to turn away the novices as well as the most disorderly
boys after imprinting upon them-albeit temporarily-the mar
the state's authority.
The inclination to keep juvenile habitual offenders out of t
flogging them instead indicates a reluctance on the part of
bureaucrats to admit the full connotations of delinquency-w
criminal behavior and a more expansive concept than guilt-i
were only sporadically under their control. After 1875, when
other Bengal officials shifted the focus of the debate to urban de
explicit parallels between Calcutta and London (HJ, January 18
1875, files 107-12), Howell and Bayley gave in to the call for se
but they did not accept the reformers' demand that first-time of
(unconvicted) children be institutionalized as they were in Eng
nature and scope of the colonial inmate population, the reformato
itself, long after the expression "juvenile delinquent" was emb
and Lord Napier, who derived their terms of reference d
(President's Minute, Sassoon Reformatory, 11.3.1867, HJ 186
metropolitan concept of the juvenile delinquent could, ho
convincingly in India only if it could be reproduced by colonial in
insisted that the concept existed in India only because she had wit
at Sassoon.
With the delinquency of the native child and the modernity of the state-run
colonial reformatory both restricted by skeptical bureaucrats, the discomfort of
flogging became tolerable. Given the difficulties experienced with cellular confine-
ment, corporal punishment was an attractive option, and even progressive officials
such as Hathaway urged its continued use (RIPP 1853). Specifically, Hathaway
believed in flogging first-time offenders and then letting them go. This scheme reflects
a broader debate among juvenile delinquency experts in colonial India regarding
sentencing and the actual effects of incarceration. For the most part, officers such as
Hathaway and Dallas accepted the idea that sentences of two years or more were
necessary for effective reform. At the same time, they knew that without compre-
hensive classification and segregation within the juvenile population, a long stint of
incarceration could be more corrupting than reforming (Pr. LGP, 12.14.1871, file
1748). It was also apparent that the great majority of children who passed through
colonial prisons did not stay for extended periods. Flogging, under these circum-
stances, emerged as both an alternative to a long but damaging incarceration and a
way of making short periods of imprisonment more punishing.
In many prisons in Punjab, the cane was used simply because other methods of
punishing children had not been developed adequately. In Montgomery Jail, for
instance, Dallas noted: "There were no special arrangements for boys in the Jail; when
juvenile criminals are committed, the Deputy Commissioner states that they are
almost always sentenced to whipping" (RIPP 1867). The use of flogging to
compensate for infrastructural shortcomings became more regularized in the late
1860s and 1870s because the Punjab government found it cheaper than sanctioning
the construction of new cellular facilities. In 1870, for instance, the provincial
administration declined to make available the funds for a new, improved reformatory
in Gurdaspur and instructed magistrates to sentence children to whipping whenever
they could. This policy was then justified with the observation that flogging was "a
more appropriate punishment than imprisonment in jails with no special
accommodation, and where children cannot be altogether removed from contam-
inating influences" (Pr. LGP, 12.14.1871, file 1748). Because flogging often
substituted for imprisonment, it allowed the Punjab administration to claim a
measure of success in the campaign against child criminals. Between 1870 and 1871,
the number of child convicts in three prisons-in Delhi, Lahore, and Amritsar-fell
by nearly 50 percent (RJP 1871). This fall in numbers allowed the government to
justify its decision not to fund the new reformatory in Gurdaspur. A disappointed
Dallas, who had pushed hard for the new institution, was convinced that the decision
was rendered because increasing numbers of children were simply being caned and
released (RJP 1871).
Conclusion
Between the 1850s and the final years of the nineteenth century, administrators
at the local levels of the colonial penal bureaucracy understood that convicted children
posed a peculiar problem in their jails: the sentences were too short, and t
segregation regimes were vastly imperfect. The modernizers, who wanted an entirely
separate system of juvenile reformatories, were thwarted by skeptical colleagues a
superiors and by their own doubts about whether Indian children would respond
the reformatory in the same ways as European children did. When the reformato
seemed to falter before the ideological, political, and practical realities of colonialism,
the delinquency of the native child became open to question. Because only a moder
child could be delinquent, the modernity of the reforming project was undermine
allowing-and requiring-the persistence of tactics such as corporal punishment.
The colonial state's initial experience with juvenile delinquency is very much
part of the larger history of British-Indian prisons and punishment, and the sam
problems unsurprisingly afflicted the two projects. In both cases, the mode
102 SATADRU SEN
expectation of self-command and self-discipline-for convi

employees-was incompatible with a political system in which
be commanded by colonizers. Nevertheless, in both cases,
modernity were made, complete with terms such as "juvenile delin
atory," and "solitary confinement." These gestures had real conseq
of Britain's colonial subjects, but the consequences were not qu
had intended. When Indians gestured back, through disorder, escap
even cooperation, there was a perceptible dissonance between call a
the circumstances, the pervasive reliance on the cane becomes
In spite of its unreliability as an instrument of reform, floggi
physical pain that it caused) was a brief moment of truth, when t
to punishment much as he was expected to respond. In a poli
which long-term control and transparency were uncertain, the
best for which colonial administrators could hope.
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Juvenile Offenders in Colonial India

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A Separate Punishment: Juvenile Offenders in Colonial India

Author(s): Satadru Sen

IN 1853 CHARLES HATHAWAY, inspector general of prisons in Punjab

Satadru Sen (ssen@artsci.wustl.edu) is Assistant Professor of History a

The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (February 2004):81-104.

ambitions and does not adequately ground juvenile punishmen

'For more on the Panopticon and Pentonville, see Ignatieff 1978,

Locating the Colonial Delinquent

unknowable (Pr. Leg. Dept., March 1897, files 87-136). Beyond

makers and professionals were influential beyond any single province. Th

The Troubled Regime: Segregation, Education,

In some ways, the arrangement seemed to work: A. M. Dall

What character but a "bad character" can remain to a boy of fourte

Hathaway's remarks show a sympathetic understanding of h

gendered labor-knitting (RIPP 1867). Prison administrators saw this training as

positions were neither stable nor remunerative. They tended to resig

The Politics of the Early Reformatory: Outside

Nonofficial British observers and sections of the Indian elite confirm

prisons, lunatic asylums, and private homes--observing, conducting interv

Peninsula Railway; others worked in privately owned cotton mills (Carpenter 18

Cell versus Whip

Disappointment with existing juvenile institutions led colonial administrato

deprivation. As such, it required not only a modern jailor but also m

There were serious political problems, however, with whipp

expectation of self-command and self-discipline-for convi

ANNUAL ADMINISTRATIVE REPORTS (AAR) ON THE CHINGLEPUT

(Pr. Home Dept.), 1866-76. Home Department of the Government

SINGHA, RADHIKA. 1998. A Despotism of Law: Crime and justice in E

SPECIAL REPORTS ON THE JAILS OF PUNJAB (SRJP), 1869-72. National Archives

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