Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia includes archival traces of Indian convicts, the so-called bandwar, while they were serving life sentences in Bengkulu in west Sumatra, Penang in present-day Malaysia, and Singapore from 1789 to 1914. Five chapters of the book delve into individual Indian convicts’ subjective experiences of forced labor in the penal settlements. These experiences, as revealed, are diverse in the three locales in specific time periods. Providing a lively portrait of the Indian convict workers’ lives, the book reveals their subjectivity, history, and agency and the associated complexities of the colonial and imperial governmentality.

Empire of Convicts engages with postcolonial criticism's question of the subaltern voice, particularly in the colonial Indian histories. As a self-defined part of such subaltern scholarship, or, to use Anand A. Yang's phrase, “a history from below” (p. 4), Empire of Convicts explicitly puts much effort into making visible and audible the criminalized and laboring subjects of colonial India. This experiment is groundbreaking, particularly in the context of the silence of colonial records about the lively and complex presence of the convicts in Southeast Asia. These convicts are the female and male Indians who disappeared off the map of Indian history after being transported to penal settlements for criminal and political offenses committed in their homeland. The Indian prisoners “mostly did not leave behind any written traces” (p. 9); “certainly not written records of their experiences—or at least none have been located to date” (p. 48). Tracing the visibility and audibility of the Indian convicts is more challenging, given that the colonial archives of the penal transportation largely privileged accounts of the expanding reach of the British Empire and capitalism across the globe.

Empire of Convicts, while writing the history of Indian penal labor in colonial Southeast Asia, constantly suggests a method of writing a history of the marginalized based on uncertainly available documentary traces, explicitly attending to discussions about how to hear and write the subaltern voice. Leading scholars of the subaltern such as Ranajit GuhaFootnote ¹ and Partha ChatterjeeFootnote ² have attempted to (re)present and (re)construct Indian subaltern subjects by way of critically rereading colonial archives that were largely “established by the powerful,” making invisible the marginalized members of society.Footnote ³ Other scholars, including Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakFootnote ⁴ and Antoinette Burton,Footnote ⁵ critically engage with personal and family writings of the Indian marginalized as a kind of archive that reveals its agency.

Amid the wide range of suggested methods of hearing subaltern voices, Empire of Convicts, in the absence of systematic records about the Indian convicts, makes the marginal as “visible as possible” in a unique, creative way: by piecing together fragments of convict lives through “piecing together archival fragments” located in India and in the Straits and other far-flung sources. For example, to tell the tale of Fateh Khan's transformation from someone “serving a life term of transportation and hard labor of murder” (p. 52) to an influential character of the colonial authority and local population in Bengkulu, Empire of Convicts relies on sources of information that are spatially and periodically disconnected. They include petitions, accounts of other convicts, police testimonies, trial transcripts, and official records generated in the period from 1900 to the mid-1920s. Accordingly, an abundance of details about the workings of coerced labor and stories about the personal backgrounds, escapes, petitions, uprising, and thriving of many of the bandwar men and women constitute a unique history of this population. This history of the “empire of convicts” from the bottom up attempts to construct stories of the Indian convicts in the way to assert their presence in the Strait as a significant episode in the expanding of the British Empire and the making of colonial states and societies across the Indian Ocean. As directly stated in the book, the Indian convicts are visible in the natural and built environment but also in the makeup of Indian communities across the Straits. Noticeably, uncertainties in this history, derived from its unconnected and scattered source, leave some room for the imagination, creativity, and speculation of the historian. Or, in the words of Yang, the accounts of the Indian convicts in each locale of the Straits are immersive because of “the archival traces available on each venue to breathe life into their stories. Historians make do with the archival hand they have been dealt” (p. 6).

Acknowledging the fragmentariness of the collected archival sources as such, Empire of Convicts tends to highlight the history of the Indian penal labor in Southeast Asia as dynamic and imaginative. This appears largely in the form of stories that detail the convicts’ subjective experiences of forced labor in the penal settlements. More importantly, appreciating documentary fragments is particularly effective in making visible and audible of the Indian convicts, those whose identities and agency are largely absent in colonial archives. Not only marginal in histories of the development of colonial India and British Empire, the Indian convicts are also marginal to histories of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia. These histories largely focus on influential members of the Indian diasporic communities over the area since the colonial period. Examples of such histories include work by Natasha PairaudeauFootnote ⁶ about Indians with French citizenship in colonial Indochina and by K. S. Sandhu and A. ManiFootnote ⁷ that includes accounts of thriving Indian communities across the region. In this context, Empire of Convicts's immersive portrait of the Indian convicts provides accounts of their critical contribution to the making of colonial societies across the Indian Ocean. Moreover, such a portrait of the ordinary Indian convicts also suggests a more historically complex and diverse picture of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia.