Arup K. Chatterjee: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I am joined by my comrades Dr. Amit Ranjan and Dr. Nasruddin Khan. Nasir has joined us all the way from Silchar in Assam, where he teaches, and he is a historian. He is a professional historian, I must add, because nowadays there are many kinds of historians. So Nasir is going to talk about something very serious, but hopefully in an extremely accessible grammar, and we would like to address how prisons were in the past, how prisons were born in the nineteenth century, how the idea of prisons emerged since the Middle Ages, especially after Jeremy Bentham’s conception of the idea of the panopticon, and what was the social role that prisons played in our imagination. So I am guessing we would hear a lot about the Indian context mainly, but also about certain other global contexts and even about prisons in the modern era. And I am also joined, as in the previous episode, by Amit Ranjan. So Amit will also have very insightful remarks on the history of prisons. I give it over to Nasruddin. Nasruddin, what do you have for us today
Nasruddin Khan: Thank you, Arup. Hello Arup. Hello Amit. So it is nice to be here with you.
Amit Ranjan: Hello. Hello, Khan sir. How are you
Nasruddin Khan: Yes, I am fine, thanks. So anyway, the idea was like, in the last podcast, your first podcast, I heard two, three words. So I was very intrigued by those words. Like, for example, there was this word called phrenology and the other was eugenics, right. So usually when we talk about crime, criminology, when we talk about histories of crime, narratives of crime, then we usually talk about race, we usually talk about social Darwinism. And then in the larger nineteenth century thing, when we think of prison, then we not only see prisons as spaces of control, but rather more than spaces of control. My interest in prison came from my father’s involvement with Tihar Jail. He was in the paramilitary. So he was posted in Tihar Jail. So he used to tell me about how torture used to happen. So it fascinated me all the time. It was only when I started reading Foucault during my PG days that I got to know about prisons, to understand prisons, and there are other few books anyway. We will not go deep into histories. So I believe my thing was to start with Jeremy Bentham. Maybe we can discuss Jeremy Bentham a little bit and his panoptic writings in particular. So the thing was like how prison emerges as a space in the nineteenth century, and especially in the context of Britain and India. What we see is that it develops from simply a barrack system to a more refined cellular jail kind of system. So how does it happen. So one of the leading roles was played by Jeremy Bentham, I think. What do you think
Amit Ranjan: Yeah. I mean, of course Jeremy Bentham is seminal to discussion of prisons and to all modern surveillance systems, where you are seen by nobody but you are always seen. The design of the panopticon is a tower with cells all around it. So even if somebody is not sitting, it sort of acts as a deterrent. The prisoners will always think that someone is seeing them. So this technology has multiplied manyfold since then, technologically as well, but the core philosophy of surveillance remains the same. Even now you have a lot of empty shells for CCTVs and there are warnings that you are under surveillance of CCTV, which probably means that there is no CCTV over there, but you should be afraid that somebody is watching.
Nasruddin Khan: So I think the idea was to create, instil fear in the prisoners and now society at large. Amit, you are right, it was also a kind of uncertainty and this uncertainty in a way produces self-regulation, so the idea was like prisoners were always visible, but they were never certain when exactly are they being watched, right. But they had this idea that they were being watched, so it was perhaps a kind of self-regulation, I believe.
Amit Ranjan: Yes, to induce and it is what Althusser calls interpellation in the 1980s, that it is willing for the feature of your agency in that matter, and it is with Foucault that we see that this surveillance kind of thing becomes power.
Nasruddin Khan: It is like Foucault’s reinterpretation of panopticon in Discipline and Punish, wherein panopticon becomes a metaphor for the modern society as a whole and individual becomes, you know, docile bodies. So which I seriously doubt. Like when I think of spaces like Cellular Jail in India, Cellular Jail was one experiment, as we all know, of this kala pani thing, so it was an experiment of transportation essentially. So prisoners were transported from the Indian prisons, particularly it happened in the eighteenth century, that is why the long nineteenth century. And then finally after 1857, we see most of the prisoners from the various prisons, these mutineers, these prisoners were being transported to the Andamans. So in the process what we see is during this transportation process, we see that they were initially put in barracks. It is only with the turn of the twentieth century, 1905, 1906, that we see that Cellular Jail was built. So where we see watchtowers in between and then flanks of cells, individual cells, so they do not become docile bodies. I think, and what I have been arguing through my work, is that individuals do not become docile bodies in prisons like Cellular Jail, but there are ways of resisting, even though the colonial power was very mighty, there were various ways of resisting, to bring in like Scott, James Scott, everyday kinds of resistance, for example. So they were not mere docile bodies, I believe. They were not only disciplining themselves, but they were also resisting in their own way. So what do you think, Arup
Arup K. Chatterjee: My knowledge regarding prisons is somewhat confined to the Cellular Jail. In fact, the history of the prehistory of the Cellular Jail. The Andamans were being, to my knowledge, cultivated as a penal colony since the late eighteenth century, and I think they were successful only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was also doubling up. The penal colony, convict colony would be an overstatement, but the penal colony was doubling up as a site of anthropology. Surely this is something that is way beyond my wheelbarrow, but at the same time I find it very interesting how a penal settlement can double up for other scientific or other governmental purposes. So anthropology becomes a part of the colonial state and collecting anthropological information about the Andamans becomes, you know, a kind of a day job for the people of the Andaman Jail. And this is also the time when the British are very keen. Late nineteenth century is a time when the British are very keen on driving a narrative that the Andamans are very lethal people. They use poisoned arrows and they have other kinds of supernatural tricks, which are by the way very lethal for colonial forces. All that is proven to be absolutely false, and you mentioned docile bodies taken from Michel Foucault, that the Andamans are revealed to be literally docile people. So I wanted to ask, rather than making any insights, I simply wanted to understand from you, is there any knowledge that you can share regarding how the panopticon can facilitate institutions other than the jail. The panopticon is mainly used to facilitate an imprisonment facility. It is also today in the twenty first century, it also is used for surveillance capitalism, to use Shoshana Zuboff’s phrase. But in your knowledge, is there any parallel to the Andaman experiment where a jail doubles up as a quasi scientific or an anthropological institution
Nasruddin Khan: Yes, definitely. Recently I have been working on asylums, right. So what we see in asylum is a very interesting thing, Arup. When we talk about asylums here in the nineteenth century, especially in the nineteenth century, then asylums become very interesting spaces where there is this intersection of law, there is intersection of history, there is intersection of power, there is intersection of many things which are going along. So there is medicine also, right. There is medicine also, there is secretary also, and they are in various spaces. So there are gender spaces also, for example let me give you an example. So there were prisons in Assam. So let us talk about one asylum. So there were many asylums, there were native asylums and there were non native asylums, right, okay. So in the native asylums, like the Indians were there basically. For example, Ranchi was one asylum. In the case of native asylums, it was this space for asylum which shows a native asylum, where we see that such spaces, like the space we are talking about, that this idea of gaze is there. So there is this prison and near the prison or within the vicinity of the prison, sometimes within the prison, there was this space which was meant out for these asylums. So asylums developed near prisons and these asylums were closely watched by the army. They were closely watched by the police. So there were jailers also and in between there were doctors also, right. So many times the superintendent, they doubled up as, they were both prison administrators as well as many times they were also doctors, professional doctors or psychiatrists. So what we see is a very interesting hybrid kind of space which developed eventually in the nineteenth and the twentieth century, asylums like Tezpur is one important example. And there were experiments which were going on, anthropological experiments as you argue, and then in the case of and also what we see is anthropological experiments were happening and there were botany experiments that were also happening simultaneously. So there were many species which were being zoological species that were being discovered in the late nineteenth century. So many times you will find many articles in Lancet and other medical journals also regarding this.
Amit Ranjan: Yeah. It is very interesting. From my knowledge of the nineteenth century, which is largely the newspapers, because my research was in John Lang, is that there is deep interest in phrenology, which is one of the most vicious nineteenth century anthropological experiments, let us say, as you would understand. The study of skulls was interesting, so this was the bulwark of social Darwinism by differentiating between men and women, whites and blacks. That is simple. But the most interesting skulls were obviously of two kinds of people, geniuses and criminals. So we see this spill over into the twentieth century as well, where famous musicians’ bodies are exhumed from their graves and so on. But the phrenological route is very interesting. It is one of the most globalised routes. It starts in Tasmania, because most of the convicts, the prisoners from England who were sent to do hard work in Australia and they would run away and be imprisoned again. And most of these people, you would understand, were spoon thieves or lace thieves who were sentenced to death and then it was commuted to hard labour in Australia. There they would run away again and be imprisoned. So their skulls would be transported from Tasmania to mainland Australia to India to London to Philadelphia, where Philip Morton was the head of the gang of doctors who controlled this entire business of phrenology. So as the skull would be traded from Tasmania, it would start at ten dollars and then stories would be added, thief. This guy would turn out to be a cannibal and there would be a story of how he ran away from the prison and ate his fellow inmate and he was found with a hand and then the story would grow in Rome till he became, you know, a cannibal and animal leader and everything else till the skull reached Philadelphia and the price would increase accordingly from ten dollars to, in the end, ten thousand dollars also in the middle of the nineteenth century. So it was fascinating how there is a lot of concoction and storytelling along with what was considered high science at that time and turns out to be a complete pseudoscience. So that is one aspect of these criminals. The other interest was in tribals of Polynesia, what their skulls look like, because it was known that they are ancient civilizations predating all the sort of civilizations that we knew of. Now we know Australia is around thirty thousand to fifty thousand years old, the original people. So all these islands nearby Tuvalu, Vanuatu and so on, these were depopulated. The people were kidnapped and killed for their skulls during this period and again traded across the same route, India and London and Philadelphia and so on. So you also see great euphoria amongst doctors of London. They wanted the best criminals’ skulls, so to say. And so there would be, there are various records of riots outside the prisons for the skulls, where the families would get into a serious fight with the doctors who would have paid the jailer a certain sum for the skull of a hanged man. So all these very interesting stories from the nineteenth century where prisoners were used for, and I think also a lot of this is my conjecture, this enterprise of thuggee or thug, as we know, now we know that a lot of it is concocted, that it does not have roots in reality, but a lot of it may have been manufactured by the British to obtain the skulls of interesting so called notified tribes or criminals with whom they were interested.
Nasruddin Khan: There are two things, like I would like to bring over here. So one is the idea of criminal tribes act.
Arup K. Chatterjee: The legislation was passed around 1871.
Nasruddin Khan: Yeah. Yeah. 1871. Yeah. So one was criminal. One was criminal tribes. One was this idea of criminal tribes and the other was this, because we are talking about eugenics, we are talking about phrenology and we are talking about skulls. So we have to talk about this school called the positive school in criminology, wherein there is this person known as Cesare Lombroso. So he talks about the idea that there were born criminals. Criminals were born, so criminal assumed that all the traits are there in you, genius criminal parts of your skull. If it is too big, you are a criminal and so on. Yeah. So you have thick lips and you have long hands and you have a certain face cut. So you are a born criminal apart from other traits. So this is one thing that I wanted to think about, and the other was this idea of criminal tribes. So criminal tribes is very central to what we are talking today. Like for example, we are talking about disciplining, we are talking about control, we are talking about spaces of control, we are talking about spaces of confinement. So here, when we talk about these things, obviously this particular thing emerges out like what to do with this, why criminal tribes. So one thing about criminal tribes is like when you are talking about criminal tribes, you are basically talking about control, you are talking about disciplining the Indian population. So 1871, this law as we all know comes out. This criminal tribes thing comes out and there were many communities like for example the Sansi community, the Bawariya community, the Banjara community and in western India there was the Ka community. So there were many tribes that were termed as tribes. They were criminalized and the point is by this thing, like these ideas of criminal tribes was basically rooted from these pseudoscientific ideas, like social Darwinism and European criminology for that matter, this idea that hereditary criminals are there, born criminals are there. So when you, for example, in this act, there would be a notification of tribes wherein certain tribes will be deemed as criminal tribes. So there will be compulsory registration for members. They have to carry passes. There will be restriction on their movement. There would be surveillance and policing. There will be roll calls. There will be fingerprinting and monitoring by the police. And then it did not go. And the other thing that I would like to place over here is that this act basically reflects what Foucault later on calls disciplinary power. So surveillance was constant. Disciplinary power, so surveillance was constant and normalized. Control was just not operated through prisons but through proper documentation, proper categorization and restriction on mobility. So there were settlements also. Entire populations were turned into objects of control and knowledge, creation of knowledge.
Amir Ranjan: Yeah. So this is interesting to see how this has lingered on in pop culture, especially American pop culture in Hollywood, with movies like Natural Born Killers, where, and there are many movies like this, which assert that criminals are naturally born.
Nasruddin Khan: And there is a series, a Netflix series, Orange Is the New Black, for example. So Orange Is the New Black is another important prison series that talks about this, again it is a setting, and the thing is like gender comes in and we see that there are guards, there are inmates, there are female inmates, and it also talks about, like architecture is not important, what is more important now is social dynamics. So unlike the architecture as thought by Jeremy Bentham, what we see over here is that in this new interpretation social dynamics are more important. So surveillance exists but power is very, very informal. So there are guards, there are inmate hierarchies, for example even in Cellular Jail also, Arup, as you will remember, that there used to be, the inmates used to act as guards. They were called tindals. T-I-N-D-A-L-S. Tindals. And this series, Orange Is the New Black, basically shows how inmates internalise discipline. So what do you think?
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yeah, I just wanted to add to Amit’s point about Tasmanian skulls. The same thing was happening in the Andamans. And that is exactly why I had asked that question. I may have heard about this story from Amit, but maybe too many years ago for me to immediately remember. But skulls were themselves being sent to the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, the same, and in the late nineteenth century two British anthropologists, this was Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman, they had already disrupted the theory that the Andamans were cannibals, that they used poisoned arrows, that they were born criminals and all the associated theories, because as you get more information you sort of start busting the mythologies that the colonials had spun for all these years.
Amit Ranjan: The only known cannibals were surely only the white people on ships who ran out of steam.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yeah. So anyway, it was so interesting to see those parallels between Australia and, and by the way, do you remember Magwitch from Great Expectations? Do you remember the character of Magwitch. So he was sent to the penal, the convict colony of Australia.
Amit Ranjan: Talking of Australia once again, I will have to bring John Lang, who was, poor guy, imprisoned two times, once in Kolkata and once in Vienna. So very briefly, I will not go into the details of the case. He won the case of Lala Joti Prasad and got him thirty six lakh rupees against the East India Company, and the interesting thing about him was that he fought cases only of Indians against the East India Company. So the British were determined to teach him a lesson, and they found a case of libel against one Colonel M. T. Oat, who was part of the jury, and Lang had said in the court that this man is a coward, and he had proved also how he was a coward, that in 1824, in a war in Kota, this Colonel MacTier had run away, and now he was in the jury and so on. So he was jailed for libel, four months in Kolkata, from where he ran a newspaper. So that is the important part, that at least white prisoners had rights like that, that they could not just read but they could also write and disseminate their views in public as editor of a newspaper. So that is very interesting, what kind of rights prisoners have and which kind of prisoners have what kind of rights. In the nineteenth century, in Vienna, of course, he was suspected to be a spy. He was writing in code words the things about his newspaper in telegram, and that was all considered that he was a spy. So he was jailed there also for a few days. But interesting that this man took on the establishment head on in all his three careers, as a lawyer, as a journalist, as a writer, and he collected gossip from military wives and sold it back to the military and made a lot of money, was only jailed twice. So that is good in terms of a career record, I think.
Arup K. Chatterjee: But Nasir, it was great to hear you, Professor Khan, because you sort of, yes, Khan has sort of created a bridge which is not very intuitive. It is slightly counterintuitive because between the nineteenth century and the current day prisons also serve a capitalist purpose besides the carceral purpose. So you have been, master, you have sort of opened our eyes to how prisons were even back in the nineteenth century also capitalist enterprises, also information and data.
Nasruddin Khan: Yeah, Arup, when you are bringing the economic angle, time and again, for example in the case of Andamans and in the case of other jails also, there is this obsession, obsession is not the right word, the colonial administrators are always interested in finances and they wanted to make this space basically, in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, the Andamans as more economically viable. Like for example, they wanted more money to come from it and they were talking about the utility of continuing this penal settlement. Why to continue this. So they were often asked questions why should we involve ourselves into this penal settlement, why should we have so much costs that are piling up. So economic viability was a very important question. So you are right, capitalism does play a role in Andamans.
Amit Ranjan: Khan sir, I have a question for you. Being a historian, why were Bahadur Shah Zafar and Wajid Ali Shah transported, one to Rangoon and one to Kolkata. Why were they transported. Why were they not killed. What was the need to imprison them. Their sons, Bahadur Shah’s sons were killed right away. But why were these two figureheads then imprisoned in far away lands
Nasruddin Khan: Yeah. So this is a very interesting question. Again it is conjecture. It is like why did this happen. So one explanation, rather I would like, I am not talking about Bahadur Shah Zafar. I will not be talking about the Mughals because I am basically focused more on modern, as you know, Amit. But one is Bahadur Shah Zafar, the other, who was the other figure that you are talking about?
Arup K. Chatterjee: Wajid Ali Shah
Nasruddin Khan: Okay. So I have no idea about Wajid Ali Shah in detail. But when we talk of Bahadur Shah Zafar, then what I think, in the course of the nineteenth century and transportation especially, let me think with this. I am bringing one example. There was this Raja of Puri, if you remember, Amit, because you have been to Orissa. So there was this Raja of Puri who was convicted in a murder case. I do not remember his exact name in the second half of the nineteenth century and he went to Andamans and he served in Andamans as a prison inmate. So the thing was that he was accused of killing the pandit, killing the priest over there, and then he was transported to the Andamans. So the point is why did they do that. So how would we answer. So one answer would be like obviously in the case of Raja of Puri, because I will not be talking about Bahadur Shah Zafar. In the case of the Raja of Puri they were removing the Raja of Puri from the site, so probably from the site as in from Puri, and they were placing him in Andamans where he was completely irrelevant. And there are many scholars and many administrative writers and many narrative writers who talk about this poor fellow, this great Raja, who was being reduced to almost a mad man.
Amit Ranjan: And why not hang. My question is why not hang these people. Is it because there is some sort of movement in Europe against death sentences by this time or what.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Zafar’s sons were hanged openly, massacred in Old Delhi.
Amit Ranjan: They were killed right away. But he himself was transported. So is this some kind of a demonstration of justice by the state, that we are not that cruel as you think us to be.
Nasruddin Khan: This could be. But apart from that this could be one thing, but I also think that there was this question of legitimacy also, political legitimacy also. For example, I am just thinking in the case of Bahadur Zafar, he had this political legitimacy, he was the Mughal emperor, he was the, like now we think of him as the last Mughal emperor. So in the case of Raja of Puri also he was a Raja, right. So probably they did not want to play with this question of legitimacy, political legitimacy, because questioning political legitimacy, they did not want to be like the French and kill kings and queens.
Amit Ranjan: The British wanted to show they were more civilized than the French.
Nasruddin Khan: Maybe, why not. So this is, I think, one, that is why they did not kill the Raja of Puri. They did not hang the Raja of Puri for killing one person. They could have easily hanged him. They could not have, like, they would not have transferred him to, transported him to Andamans. And same with Bahadur. They could have hanged him properly, as in properly hanged him, but they did not do that.
Arup K. Chatterjee
That is too much schadenfreude, Nasir. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed listening to us today, and I hope you join us soon. And thank you so much, Amit, Dr. Amit Ranjan, thank you so much Nasir, thank you so much, your new name. I hope that, Professor, thank you sir, thank you for joining, and dear audience, until next time.
Arup K. Chatterjee 