Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons:

Author:

Waits Mira Rai1

Affiliation:

1. Appalachian State University

Abstract

Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. Informed by the extension of liberal political philosophy into the colony, the development of the British colonial prison introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. Unlike prisons in Europe and the United States, where moral reform was cited as the primary objective of incarceration, prisons in colonial India focused on confinement as a way of separating and classifying criminal types in order to stabilize colonial categories of difference. In Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73, Mira Rai Waits explores nineteenth-century colonial jail plans from India's Bengal Presidency. Although colonial reformers eventually arrived at a model of prison architecture that resembled Euro-American precedents, the built form and functional arrangements of these places reflected a singularly colonial model of operation.

Publisher

University of California Press

Subject

History,Visual Arts and Performing Arts,Architecture

Reference109 articles.

1. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference and Yale University's Modern South Asia Workshop. I wish to thank the organizers of those events and the participants for their engagement. I am also indebted to Swati Chattopadhyay, Keith Eggener, Nuha Khoury, Patricia Morton, Sudipta Sen, and the anonymous reviewer for JSAH for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The staff at the British Library deserves special thanks for their assistance with research materials and the images appearing in this article.

2. On the Mughal judicial system, see Niharkana Majumdar, Justice and Police in Bengal, 1765–1793: A Study of the Nizamt in Decline (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1960).

3. Even as late as 1919, jail officials from India traveled to Britain and the United States to inspect metropolitan prisons and bring back ideas for the colony. IOR/L/PARL/2/4074, Report of Indian Jails Committee, 1919–1920, vol. 1 (Simla: Government Central Press, 1920), 25–28. (All citations of IOR refer to the India Office Records held in the Asia Pacific & Africa Collections [formerly Oriental and India Office Collections], British Library, London.)

4. On the connection between Western prison architecture and moral reformation, see Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2008); Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

5. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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