‘The Most Desperate Characters in all India’? The Origins of Transportation in the South Asian Context

Abstract

The idea of transporting Indian convicts overseas from the Bengal Presidency began to gain ground with the legal reforms of Governors-General Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis (1772–93). The judges of the provincial courts in the districts and Nizamat Adalat (Supreme Court) in Calcutta were first directed to use it as a punishment in 1773. After this date, it was ordered that every prisoner sentenced to hard labour or imprisonment for life was to be transported to the East India Company’s settlement at Bencoolen instead. Between 4,000 and 6,000 convicts were subsequently sent.² In 1789, swiftly following on from the resumption of transportation from Britain to the new penal settlement at Botany Bay (1787–8), an entrepreneurial free settler in Bengal, Julius Griffith, was permitted to transport 20 life prisoners to Prince of Wales’ Island (Penang) for his own profit, on the condition that he provide their rations, treat them ‘reasonably well’ and did not exact ‘excessive’ hard labour. Though Penang’s penal origins were strongly reminiscent of the private convict leasing system used to transport felons from Britain to North America, Penang quickly became an East India Company penal settlement. Subsequent directives recommended that gang leaders, life prisoners and those sentenced to mutilation be transported there to work on public works projects.