Opening Keynote: The Inscription of the Social in the Carceral: Criminology, “scientific penology” and social engineering, India 1889–1925

I propose to explore the political conjunctures, the institutional impulses and the public forums which, from the early twentieth century, put the colonial regime in India into episodic engagement with trans-national currents of positivist criminology and a “scientific” penology.

The context was one in which the colonial regime faced the political and ideological challenge of demands for self –government and for economic and cultural infrastructures which would support nationhood. In particular, the consignment of educated and socially “respectable” political activists to jails, or their transportation to the Andamans penal colony forced European officials to defend the colonial carceral regime against charges of backwardness and brutality. In response, the government pushed back by questioning the representative credentials of nationalist opponents, arguing that their caste exclusiveness precluded them from the voluntary activity required to bring stigmatised and criminally -inclined elements into mainstream society. Supplementing this critique, the government took a pointedly sympathetic stance to competitors of the Congress-led national movement who on political platforms for “non-Brahmins”, the “depressed classes” and “labour” argued that without social reconstruction any advance in political representation would benefit only upper-caste educated Indians.

In turn, the Government sought to shape their own agenda to impart a social and moral dimension to carceral institutions. Officials began to use the grammar of a rehabilitative penology to grapple with crises which erupted at sites along the archipelago of confinement. A comprehensive instance of this tendency is to be found in the report of the Indian Jail Committee set up in 1919-20 as one of the blue prints for the reconstitution of colonial legitimacy in the stormy aftermath of World War One. The report’s turn towards a rehabilitative penology is routinely dismissed for achieving very little on the ground. In fact it laid out a path whereby Indian leaders and Indian publics could work with colonial infrastructures of rule to assume a position of tutelage at the penal and policed fringes of society. Such authoritarian but benevolent forms of guidance exercised through official agencies and philanthropic social workers were expected to shape shiftless, disorderly and sometimes ritually stigmatized lower orders into orderly political constituencies and productive labour forces. Positivist criminology and a "rehabilitative" penology offered room for such ideas. At the same time educated Indians continued to demand classical legal principles of "due process" and proportionate punishment, buttressed by judicial autonomy and the curtailment of executive discretion for themselves. There emerges in the tension and torsion amongst these drives intimations of the terms within which the social could be inscribed within the carceral.