Saanika Patnaik

The nineteenth century was a time of great movement and migration across the Indian Ocean. It was the century marked by a sustained increase in the flows of South Asian populations from coast to coast, especially guided by British regulation of three networks of transportation—of soldiers, of laborers, and of convicts. Melaka, a tiny state in south Malaysia, was one such coast that received an abundance of all three. The state had played an active role within the Indian Ocean space since the 1400s. Over the years the dynamics it shared with other Indian Ocean polities, as well as its own position within the human world of this water body had significantly shifted. These shifts had a profound impact on the kinds of people who visited and settled in Melaka, and by the nineteenth century, the population comprised people of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English origin. These included sailors, traders, laborers, shopkeepers, scribes, prisoners, etc., from a host of communities who had different kinds of interactions with each other on a day-to-day basis because of their occupations and lifestyle. It is within this context that this essay situates the arrival of convicts from South Asia to better understand their position, life histories and impact.  

Since its founding in the beginning of the fifteenth century, Melaka underwent four major transformations: from an Islamic Kingdom to a Portuguese base, to a Dutch colony, and finally, a British Settlement clubbed alongside Penang and Singapore. Hence, this region has lived through a complex and rich history. Yet, it has never been the primary focus of any historical study. Any scholarship on Melaka between 1400 and 1795 has approached it from a wider perspective of studying the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal or South East Asia. Relevant titles include the works by K.N. Chaudhuri, Sunil Amrith, M.A.P Meilink-Roelofsz, and Anthony Reid. The focus of these works has primarily been trade, although they allude to the people who made the long, often arduous, journeys. These histories nevertheless provide a helpful context to situate pre-modern Melaka, pointing to the networks it sustained with other regions, and the kinds of people who could be expected to arrive and survive on it. In general, there is a lacuna of literature for Melaka dealing with the eighteenth century, while scholarship for the nineteenth century and after, largely studies it alongside Penang and Singapore, which together become the British colony of the Straits Settlements. Hence, the general neglect of Melaka in historical scholarship, especially for the modern period cannot be denied. This essay responds to this neglect by attempting to fill a particular void about the social history of Melaka. It centrally locates Melaka within the Indian Ocean world by studying the ties it shared with South Asia in terms of convict transportation. Furthermore, it analyses how these inflows altered the very dynamic of the nineteenth century social landscape of Melaka.

The Journey Overseas

In the British Empire, the punishment was mainly enacted through imprisonment and overseas transportation. A series of penal settlements were established across the Indian Ocean. There were certain main routes for convict transportation. First was from Britain and Ireland to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Western Australia, Gibraltar, and Bermuda. Then, there was a network from Mauritius, Cape Colony, and Seychelles to Robben Island and Australia. Third, and the focus of this essay, was the route from mainland South Asia to Burma, the Malay peninsula and Aden. Melaka started receiving convicts from 1805 when some prisoners from Penang were transferred. Thereafter, convicts arrived from India and other British colonies. Convicts arrived at Melaka from nearly all parts of India, thereby representing a large number of communities like “Benares Brahmanas, Sikh and Dogra Kshatriyas, Chettiars, Bengali and Parsi financiers, ryots (farmers) and untouchables.” The language spoken predominantly among these convicts was Hindustani. Later, convicts started arriving from Hong Kong and Rangoon as well. Convicts from Ceylon were sent to Melaka from 1846. In 1855, when transportation to Australia stopped, European convicts also started being transported to Melaka.

An overwhelming majority of transportation convicts were serious offenders; the crimes ranged from fraud and robbery with violence to dacoity, thuggee, and murder. The British also shipped pirates, political prisoners, and those involved in regional, peasant, and tribal rebellions. These criminals were specifically chosen as they were perceived as anti-colonial threats, who had to be subdued by being shipped overseas, where they would be anonymous and isolated. Transportation resulted in the animosity between prisoners and authorities being translated as rebellion and violence on the ships, which was later extended to overseas prisons. Convict mutinies were, hence, very common on vessels transporting prisoners to foreign locations. These uprisings were usually quelled through brutality, engendering further tensions between convicts and penal authorities. Imperial opposition, however, was not the only provocation in inciting convicts to rebellion, whether in prisons or on ships.

For Indian convicts, imprisonment was more than just a legal punishment. Prisons brought together people from different ages, social standings and political ideologies, and forced them to share a single space and life behind bars. Convicts decreed the punishment of overseas imprisonment had to undergo this experience twice: first on the ship, and then behind bars. This situation often resulted in unrest and rebellion from prisoners who feared that they would lose their faith or caste by being in proximity with others from lower social categories. Imposition of activities such as common messing, the act of eating together within a confined space, were often reasons for unrest among prisoners. Imprisonment, in this way, reasserted caste and religious consciousness, making prisons locations of both legal and social punishment. In addition, life on the ship entailed joint chaining and messing, whereby water, foods, vessels and utensils were all shared regardless of social status; hence, higher caste prisoners on board often refused food. Furthermore, religious ceremonies for the dead were ignored, and prisoners were simply thrown overboard if they died. Hence, transportation over the sea was dreaded, and the sea was reimagined as kala pani, the black water that enforced caste and religious transgressions, and made people lose their social distinctions.

To the native of India it meant even a severer punishment than to the European, for to be sent across the "kala pani," or "black water," in a convict ship or "jeta junaza," or "living tomb" as they called it, meant, especially to a man of high caste, whether of the right or left-hand section, the total loss to him of all that was worth living for. He could never be received in intercourse again with his own people, and so strong are the caste ideas of ceremonial uncleanness that it would be defilement to his friends and relations even to offer to him sustenance of any kind, and he was in point of fact excommunicated and avoided.[1]

A more physical discomfort was experienced in the form of conditions on board, characterized by food shortages and lack of hygiene, resulting in a large number of deaths owing to malnutrition, dysentery and gangrene. Prisoners were provided only a single set of clothes and assigned a limited physical space, often not large enough to even lie down. The depression combined with social anxiety, and the poor traveling conditions, were factors common in all ships carrying convicts for overseas imprisonment, regardless of the destination.

Life in the Prison

Melaka only took in term prisoners, while lifers were sent to Penang and Singapore. The prison in Melaka not only held overseas convicts, but also the local prisoners from within the population. As compared to Penang and Singapore, the prison population in the Melaka jail was quite small. This population kept decreasing through the years. Furthermore, the convict population in Melaka was predisposed to adjustments because of discharges, deaths, escapes, and transfers to Penang and Singapore.[2] In 1857, the convict body in Melaka numbered 605. In 1858, this was 584, in 1860, 532, and after the closure of transportation from India in 1861, the number of convicts was 502.[3] Further, Melaka received only two female convicts over the course of its penal life. Perhaps, owing to the relatively low prisoner population, one crucial feature of the Melaka jail was the absence of separate quarters based on gender and ethnicity. The lack of gender and ethnic segregation proved to be cost-effective, but the absence of women’s quarters caused problems on some occasions. For instance, a certain Eppagey Christiana, transported from Ceylon in 1859 was compelled to live entirely among men, and required both a guard and a cook to wait on her when punished to solitary confinement. This proved to be too heavy of a burden for the Melaka prison authorities, and she was transferred to Singapore within six weeks.

Hard labor in public work was a requisite part of the punishment for the convicts and largely contributed to the development of the Straits Settlements—as Melaka, Penang and Singapore were collectively called—over time. Convicts in Melaka were put to work on several public works projects involving clearing land, quarrying, road and bridge building, brick making, and other construction and repair work.[4] Hence, convict labor served the dual purpose of punishment and urban development. Labor was especially stressed given that the penal commissioners and superintendents in the Straits were all colonial engineers, who were interested in urban planning. This was in contrast to places like India and Burma, where the post was filled by men from the medicine field. The administrative view of labor in the Straits differed from other penal settlements. In South Asia, Ceylon and Burma, the British saw physical labor merely as a disciplinary measure; however, in the Straits Settlements, it was perceived as a part of the reformation. Labor was said to possess the potential to transform convicts into better people. Hence after 1827, workshops for industrial and craft training were introduced in great measure to turn prisoners into productive members of society. In Melaka, for instance, convicts were trained to make carts, work iron and wood for bridges, roof timber for public works, turn and fit metal, etc.[5]

Linked to the conduct of labor was the institution of an incentive program to keep prisoners motivated to work. Prison authorities divided convicts into six classes. Labor output and behavior were monitored through a point system that allowed convicts to progress through these classes. The first class of prisoners were awarded tickets of leave to settle outside prison within the civilian population; they merely had to appear in prison during the monthly muster. This was the ultimate reward for good convict behavior. The second class worked as convict overseers, peons, hospital staff and public officers. The class below this was delegated outdoor labor; these convicts were divided into gangs, and provided their own accommodations outside the prison lines near their place of work, which were guarded by officers. The huts of these convict laborers were situated in farms or villages termed as commands, each supervised by a convict warder. The fourth level, made up of newly arrived convicts, the fifth, of serious offenders, and the sixth, of invalids, were confined to the prison day and night. A distinctive feature of the Straits penal establishments was the introduction of a system whereby warders were raised from within the prisoner population. These convict warders, identified as tindals or sirdars, were usually prisoners belonging to the second class of prisoners. They were mostly in charge of commanding the gangs of convicts assigned to outside labor, such as repair of roads or stone quarrying.[6] The system was necessitated by the general lack of warders at the settlements which was becoming a security issue.

The system of convict classes helped keep particularly ‘dangerous’ convicts in check, as they were denied the right to progress to a higher class. For example, rebels of the 1857 revolt, and Punjabi convicts of the Anglo-Sikh war, were not allowed to progress through the penal classes. On the other hand, the rigorous training aided the prisoners in entering society after the period of imprisonment since they were capable of finding employment. The system hence facilitated a sort of bridge for the prisoners into civilian society. It also enabled a certain attachment of the prisoners to these overseas destinations. In fact, authorities observed, that once these prisoners married within the Straits they seldom showed interest in returning to their home country. These marriages with the local population added to the Jawi-Pekan or Indo-Malay community. The prisoners given tickets of leave entered civilian society even earlier while still carrying the identity of a prisoner.

Most convicts comprised cultivators, rural migrants and the urban poor from India. On release, or with tickets of leave, a majority of them were eager to stay on, and as a result, a large number entered the urban industrial sector to provide productive services. This desire is also evident through how prisoners married into the local population and also bought property that was passed on to future generations. On release, former ryots (farmers) found occupations as herdsmen or community traders. Others bought bullock carts and palanquins to becomes hack syces or cart drivers. Yet others enlisted in the police or served in other public departments. Some of the Indian convicts were expert shikarris (hunters) and would train dogs to hunt deer and wild boar, whose flesh they sold to Chinese shopkeepers in the town.[7] Hence, after completing their terms in prison, most convicts became productive members of society, gradually transitioning into long-term settlers. As a result, the Straits Settlements in the nineteenth century was a mélange of civilians, half-prisoners and convicts, who got opportunities to interact with each other through work and social activities. This dynamic is what characterized the population of nineteenth century Melaka.

However, not all prisoners showcased a willingness to work. This can be seen in the case of the Kandyan rebel, Tikiri Banda, who was transported from Ceylon to Melaka in 1848. Tikiri often neglected the tasks assigned to him, displayed aversion to labor, and had to be reappointed on five occasions. For instance, he was often absent from his duty at Kepang, and the superintendent of Melaka, Captain Man, dispatched him to Ayer Panas, where he was assigned to manual labor, and other ‘demeaning’ tasks such as cleaning the superintendent’s horse. These were aimed at humiliating Tikiri into compliance. On another occasion, Tikiri absconded to a constables’ plantation while on the duty of supervising men felling timber. Such examples of disobedience likely stemmed from the unwillingness to work for a government whom these convicts had formerly been rebelling against. This was commonly seen among Ceylonese prisoners who had to be appeased through additional benefits like allowances and offers of reduced sentences.

As an educated prisoner, Tikiri Banda penned several petitions complaining about his status as a third class prisoner. Tikiri’s aversion to labor was also fueled by his clandestine project of illegally building a school; once caught, he lost his position as overseer of other laborer convicts. It was at this point that Tikiri penned a petition alleging excessive violence by the Superintendent for working on building a school. This engendered a profusion of official paperwork, which stand out in the archive, making Tikiri Banda one of the most popular convicts of Melaka. Tikiri saw imprisonment merely for what it was and did not gain much from the industrial training as a prisoner; rather, upon his release in 1864 he used his prior education in law to become a writer and provide legal advice in Melaka. He later repatriated to Ceylon. Similar to Tikiri’s escapades, one reads of other incidents like when a gang of laborers escaped inland while clearing land for a lighthouse in Cape Rachado, owing to ill-treatment from the overseer.[8] In this case, however, nothing is known about the convicts themselves, except that they were later returned with the help of Malay chiefs in the countryside. In general, occasions of rebellion against the penal authorities are shrouded by silence in the archive given the largely illiterate nature of convicts, who were marginalized as a collective in the larger colonial discourse.

A Place in Society

Convicts were viewed through a racial lens that deemed them intellectually inferior and incapable of perfectly reforming their soul. According to the prison commissioner of the Straits, Major McNair, confinement did not impact the soul of the non-European prisoner, who suffered from an “absence of moral perception and absence of thought.” This was unlike the European prisoners, who when left to themselves, were thought to be capable of reflection and remorse. Identity of the Indian convict was contained within the identity of the non-European collective, enacted through racialized penal labor. One blatant manifestation of this was the segregation between European and non-European prisoners, according to which the former were not expected to work. Penal authorities, although careful of Indian convicts, in general viewed them as a collective, who were harmless in their new isolated surroundings. European convicts, on the other hand, were not perceived with such anonymity, and rather as cunning and intelligent who could not be corrected simply through geographical separation and physical labor. Hence, the supervision was relatively lax for the Indian convicts, who were allowed more freedom of mobility expressed through outdoor labor and religious liberties, like celebrating Muharram or Dussehra outside prison lines.

The non-European population, comprising Malays, Indians, Chinese and other ethnicities, was both excited by and dreaded the arrival of convicts. Many of them perceived the convicts as agents and informants for the colonial government, and hence, chose to maintain their distance. This was because ‘rogue’ activities of the government that were perceived as below the dignity of Europeans were usually allotted to convicts. For instance, in the Naning War of 1831, fifty convicts were employed as soldier-bearers and coolies. Similarly, during riots in the 1850s and 1860s, convict prisoners were accorded police duty, and were used to pursue and disperse rioters. Furthermore, convict peons were engaged in arresting robbers and pirates in the town.  Penal status allowed convicts the opportunities to become contractors, caretakers, police and scavengers for the government, and enter civilian society through these roles.  Nevertheless, despite instances of tensions because of their role as government servants, convicts were not entirely shunned by the local population, who often joined the former in the celebration of religious festivals such as Muharram and Dussehra.

Such acceptance, however, was completely missing in the case of the English residents, who perceived the convicts, whether civil or political, as bandits and murderers. They especially feared the arrival of thugs, who hailed from communities of hereditary killers. This panic was perhaps not unfounded given that the Straits annually received a large number of ‘anti-colonial threats’, many of whom had been involved in violence and widespread rebellions like the Anglo-Sikh war and the Kandyan rebellions in Ceylon. One such rebel was Tikiri Banda, who proposed to publish a work about the Kandyan rebellion, implying that he could still assert influence over other Kandyan transportees at Melaka. He was also once caught committing highway robbery. Such reports of cases of crimes by convicts circulated widely among white civilians.

Second was an anxiety against prisoners abounded over the mostly unsupervised celebration of Muharram and Dusserah by Indian convicts. The European and the Anglo-Indian community were opposed to the convicts being allowed to process outside the prison lines onto the road leading to the seashore. This was a liberty awarded to all classes of prisoners, and these processions were joined by civilians from Indian, Malay and Chinese communities. Finally, this general dissatisfaction with the existence of prisoners heightened in the context of the news of the 1857 revolt in India. Melaka did not have a steady garrison to guard more prisoners but Indian convicts kept being transported. These former rebels were at liberty to interact with both fellow inmates and other residents of Melaka during labor assignments and festival celebrations. The European community was concerned that the government was acting too weak, and would eventually fall to an outbreak by the prisoners. It was further anxious at the prospect of rebel convicts being joined by Malays, Chinese, and men on tickets of leave to wreak havoc in the settlement.

In 1858, the penal settlement on the Andaman Islands was established, and a large number of convicts, especially the 1857 rebels, were shifted there, providing some respite to the fears of the government and the white residents, who were in panic after the Mutiny the previous year. Nevertheless, the feeling of indignation at the Straits ports being used as penal stations continued to fester among the Europeans. Consequently, the British government stopped the transportation of convicts from India to the Straits Settlements from September 1860, although the convict prisons continued to function till 1873. The reaction of the government shows its dual attitude towards the convicts. On the one hand, it found them requisite for labor, while on the other, in the same vein as English residents, it was insistent on suppressing them into negligibility. Hence, convicts were simultaneously marginal and central to the project of Straits governance. While the convict population was both a sign of colonial authority and subjection to it, it also troubled  bourgeois ideas of morality and urban democracy, as an uneasy signifier of the colony’s racial politics and as a threatening presence within the community.

The history of incarcerated populations has been written by several esteemed scholars like Clare Anderson, C.M. Turnbull, Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold, whose work has helped map the movements of convicts and their experiences in the Indian Ocean. These narratives have aided the inquiry of this essay since the South Asian penal history of Melaka fits into these frameworks in a variety of ways underlined above. Yet this essay also moves beyond those narratives to perceive these actors as more than just convicts. It tries to situate them as residents of the place where they are transported. Consequently, this essay suggests that convicts were more than just incarcerated beings. They were individuals who actively interacted with living societies and lived significant lives beyond the space of the prison. In this pursuit, the essay relies on the methodology applied by Anoma Pieris, who focusses on the convicts and their life in Singapore. Finally, this essay approaches convicts through a third angle. It tries to understand them as integral elements in the creation of an urban space. Through acts of rebellion, social interaction, work and exclusion, as narrated above, it is evident that the convicts from South Asia contributed towards community formation and town development in Melaka.

The overseas convicts need to be seen as an additional ingredient in the profile of the population of Melaka in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, they constituted the third form of immigration by South Asian into the town as laborers and soldiers. Convicts were sent to Melaka for banishment, to dawn new masks of anonymity, in environments where they were likely to be unimposing. They were forced to end ties with their home, property, family and community. However, these filial relations were replaced by new associations based on collective labor overseas; the freedom of mobility strengthened such associations. The common experience of shipment and imprisonment engendered solidarity among prisoners, while work and social celebrations allowed avenues of interaction with the local population, who while somewhat fearful of convicts, in general were never averse to them. Given this impact on the population of Melaka, the presence of convicts, symbolized by their fettered mobilities yet incarcerated liberties, cannot be historically neglected.

Archival and Primary Sources

Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements, 1855-1900. Created by Robert L. Jarman. Cambridge: Archive Editions, 2014. https://dlib-eastview-com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/browse/books/1670?set=101#/

McNair, J.F.A. Prisoners Their Own Warders. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1899. https://archive.org/details/prisonerstheirow00mcnarich

Notes 

[1] J.F.A. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1899), 9, https://archive.org/details/prisonerstheirow00mcnarich

[2] Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements, 1855-1900, created by Robert L. Jarman, (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 2014), 124, 154, 233, https://dlib-eastview-com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/browse/books/1670?set=101#/

[3] Annual Reports, 124, 154, 233.

[4] McNair, Prisoners, 29.

[5] McNair, Prisoners, 29.

[6] McNair, Prisoners, 19.

[7] McNair, Prisoners, 30.

[8] McNair, Prisoners, 29.

Saanika Patnaik is a student of history, soon to start doctoral research at Ashoka University. She is interested in urban landscapes and coastal societies within the exchanges of the Indian Ocean world and will be conducting PhD research on the nature of port cities situated on the north Coromandel and Konkani coasts in the early modern world. She received her BA in History from Ashoka University, and her MA in Colonial and Global History from Leiden University, where she wrote her dissertation on the social landscape of nineteenth century Melaka.