Introduction

Contemporary observers claimed frequently that religion was an important cause of the Indian mutiny-rebellion of 1857–8. They viewed missionary activities, inappropriate legislative interventions into religious affairs, and the alleged introduction of cartridges greased with animal fat into the Bengal army as significant reasons for revolt. A number of nineteenth-century writers and historians have taken up this perspective to argue that the uprising was at least partly a cultural arena in which north Indian communities responded to perceived colonial assaults on religious practices. As we have seen, other military, social, and economic concerns fuelled and sustained widespread unrest. However, this chapter will focus on a further dimension to the cultural background to revolt: the colonial jail in north India. Accounts detailing the run-up to the mutiny-rebellion sometimes mentioned local hostility to prisons, for jails were newly constituted colonial spaces in which Indian bodies were confined, controlled, and disciplined in unprecedented ways. Penal practices often transgressed Indian social norms, particularly with regard to religion and caste. In this reading, jails both embodied and symbolized broader social fears about colonial interference in religious affairs and forced conversion to Christianity.

In the pages that follow we will examine the penal practices that invoked these concerns, discussing north Indian responses to and negotiations with colonial innovations in imprisonment during the first half of the nineteenth century. Now it is historiographically well established that prisons were sites in which essential colonial social categories were reflected, institutionalized, and embedded.