Sentenced to Hard Labor: Public Works and the Making of New Carceral Regimes in 19th-Century Colonial North India

This study explores the establishment of prisons and the utilization of their workforce as a component of a wide range of forced labor systems accessible to the British colonial administration in nineteenth-century colonial North India. These coerced labor regimes included labor extracted from famine-struck populations, ‘criminal tribes', and ‘free’ but poor people who paid labor dues instead of monetary fines. I suggest that the introduction of the convict labor system in British India was an attempt to replicate penal systems in the metropole. By doing so, I shift the gaze away from the ‘grand’ imperial engineering projects and their principal architects and instead focus on how bodies of the impoverished ‘lower’ classes constituted the unseen foundation of Britain's celebrated contributions to Indian communication networks—namely roads, bridges, and wells.

The second section situates the functioning of the convict labor system in nineteenth-century North India during the famine years of the 1830s and 1850s. This is followed by a discussion on the lack of adequate food systems and the continued use of their labor both within and outside the prisons. Through case studies of prisoners’ pleas and medical reports highlighting high prisoner mortality rates, I offer some conclusions about how British Indian convict labor fits into the broader framework of the British Empire’s racially segregated penal system. Using a variety of archival records from the regional archives in Allahabad/Prayagraj, the West Bengal state archives, and F4 files from the India Office Records at the British Library, this paper provides a window into how different forms of penal experiments created a racialized, gendered, and socially differentiated laboring regime by the early nineteenth century in Colonial North India.