Settling the Convict

The social history of convicts is an area of study which has hitherto remained an uncharted territory. The muted convict voice makes an ephemeral appearance in most colonial histories as ‘convict resistance’, which is seen as the sum total of the convict's life experience. On the other hand, colonial records and monographs oscillate between two extremes in the categorization of the convict's social life. There is either a romanticization of the idyllic penal colonies where the convicts have the appearance of reformed savages, peacefully going about their daily chores, no different from the Indian peasants; or the convicts are seen as conniving brutes obsessed with the idea of ‘escape’, where the state of unfreedom that they are subjected to is seen as the most defining characteristic of their life in the penal settlement. Breaking out of these moulds, this essay has used the colonial project of settling the convict in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands as an entry point...