Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2000 - Andaman Islands (India) - 283 pages
"The penal colony in the Andaman Islands was a self-contained colonial society. Here, several thousand Indian convicts and indigenous people lived, worked, reproduced, and died under the supervision of British officers, who combined their power as jailers with their authority as colonial administrators. Ideologically and politically, however, convict society in the Andamans was intimately related to colonialism on the Indian mainland, and to British anxieties about the governability of Indian society." "The removal of criminals from Indian society, and their relocation to the penal colony, was intended to ensure that disorderly colonial subjects were comprehensively subjected to the power of the state. Over the longer term, punishment and rehabilitation in the Andamans were aimed at the creation of a society that was conducive to effective administration and control, and one that participated in its own control." "British rule in the Andamans derived from the larger project of modernity in the context of colonialism: it was part of a system designed to find, identify and study troublesome native subjects, to stabilize them so that they could be used as an economic resource, and to manoeuvre them into the political orbit of the state."--BOOK JACKET.

From inside the book

Contents

Map of Andaman Islands ii
1
Crimes and Criminals
36
Labour and Loyalty
86
Copyright

5 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2000)

Satadru Sen is at University of Washington.

Bibliographic information