Service, Salt and Status

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, from his base in Lahore, the great ruler of the Panjab Ranjit Singh revived prosperity and extended state patronage to build an empire across the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. With disciplined infantry and artillery at his disposal, and through the incorporation of Hindus and Muslims into a Sikh dominated ruling class, Ranjit Singh ejected a series of local leaders and established a vast military empire that, by the time he died in 1839, stretched from the river Sutlej in the south to the mountain ranges in the north – northwest of the region. In the context of the expansion of British influence across India, Ranjit Singh's death marked the beginning of the end of local sovereignty. The East India Company took advantage of a series of power struggles that erupted in the nobility, coupled with the growing influence of the army in the region, to bring forwards its ambitions for annexation. When the Lahore army crossed the Sutlej river at the end of 1845, the British claimed that it was an act of aggression and so declared war. During the military campaigns that followed, both sides suffered heavy losses, but eventually after a series of battles through the winter of 1845–1846 and into 1848–1849 (the First and Second Anglo–Sikh Wars respectively), the Company annexed the Panjab. In a single stroke, it extended its influence across north India: from Calcutta in the east to the Northwest Frontier.Footnote ⁸

At the time of annexation in March 1849, Narain Singh was an officer in the Sikh Irregular Horse under the command of the rebel governor of Multan, Mul Raj. During 1847, the British had chipped away at Mul Raj's authority and influence, eventually forcing him to resign his post. However, his troops stood to lose a great deal from this shift in power and in April 1848 they attacked and killed two British officers, Patrick Vans Agnew and William Anderson, thus manoeuvring Mul Raj into leading a revolt.Footnote ⁹ During the second half of 1848 Narain Singh was active under Mul Raj's leadership in the districts between Multan and Lahore, but in the face of a series of decisive British victories, both men surrendered in January 1849. Narain Sing claimed later that he had been led to believe that he would be ‘favourably received’.Footnote ¹⁰ However, the British placed him in custody in Lahore jail, where Mul Raj joined him a few days later.

Mul Raj was found guilty of having been an accessory to the murders of Vans Agnew and Anderson, and was transferred as a state prisoner to a disused chapel in Fort William (Calcutta) with a view to his eventual transportation to the Company's penal settlement at Singapore. At the time his health was so poor that Governor-General Dalhousie believed that he would not survive the journey. Dalhousie alluded to the cultural fear of shipboard voyages shared by people of rank from all religious communities when faced with the prospect of close physical proximity to their social inferiors – shared fetters, latrines, water pumps and cooking pots – and their common strategy of preventing cultural diminution by eating only uncooked rations. He wrote: ‘I believe that the distress on religious grounds, the agitation, the want of ordinary food, and the sea, would kill him’. Nervous that his death would arouse widespread sympathy – in Dalhousie's words ‘would give for him the pity and admiration which attach to martyrdom of any kind’ – he decided to keep him in Calcutta over the summer before making a decision on his fate.Footnote ¹¹ However, Mul Raj's health declined further, and he died shortly after the British ordered his transfer to Fort Chunar near Benares for a ‘change of air’.Footnote ¹²

In October 1849, the British Board of Administration at Lahore put Narain Sing on trial on the charge of treason. It found him guilty and sentenced him to transportation for life. Central to understanding his sentence was the claim that he had been made ‘an especial exception among the prisoners who surrendered during the war’. This was in large part because of his ‘many cruelties’, including cutting off the hands of a man who had fallen as a supplicant at his feet. He was, it was said, ‘a most dangerous man, clever and cruel’.Footnote ¹³ The first part of Narain Sing's penal journey was a march to Agra with 13 other state prisoners under the guard of the 17th Native Infantry. The commissioner of Lahore warned that Narain Sing had ‘considerable influence’, and should be well secured.Footnote ¹⁴ From Agra, Narain Sing went on to Allahabad, where he was transferred to the Kaleegunga for the journey up the Ganges to the holding jail for transportation convicts at Alipur, just outside Calcutta. Amongst the Kaleegunga convicts was another state prisoner called Golaub Sing, who had been convicted of treason in Lahore three months before Narain Sing.Footnote ¹⁵

It is clear from this brief account that Narain Sing was no ordinary prisoner, but rather a man of ‘political importance’.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, when he began his journey into transportation, officials in the Northwest Provinces were keenly aware of his social and political status. Narain Sing himself later claimed that when he was taken from Lahore to Agra: ‘I was treated and ranked as a Sirdar’. He complained that on arrival in the city his belongings – an unusually large quantity for a convict, including clothing, cloth and blankets, a range of iron and brass cooking pots and pans and even a mirrorFootnote ¹⁷ – and servants were taken away. He was, he opined, ‘in no respect better than the felon and murderer in the Jail’.Footnote ¹⁸ This sudden reduction in his social standing perhaps explains some further particulars added to his descriptive roll by a clerk. On admission to prison he was ‘turbulent abusive to jail officers’, and took off his handcuffs ‘like a pair of gloves’, throwing them at the mohurir ‘with some insulting remarks’.Footnote ¹⁹

Inspector of Prisons W.H. Woodcock reported that when Narain Sing was made over to him in Agra, he had been warned that he was ‘a desperate character . . . who would probably abuse his influence’. He requested a party of sepoys to escort him on to Allahabad. Nine of his fellow convicts were to be imprisoned in the jail there, and five, including Narain Sing, were to be forwarded to Alipur.Footnote ²⁰ But it seems that though Woodcock's warnings were heeded for part of the journey, no special measures were taken for the men's river transfer out of Allahabad.Footnote ²¹ The commander of the Kaleegunga, John Stout, stated later that he had been given no details of the convicts ‘beyond that of their being life prisoners’.Footnote ²² According to the officiating magistrate in Patna, it was the ‘gross carelessness and neglect’ in this respect that caused the outbreak.Footnote ²³ Further, it emerged later on that at times the guard had been armed with bayonets only, because most of the muskets were unserviceable and there was little ammunition.Footnote ²⁴

This failure in communication reflected a broader ambivalence on the part of the British about the appropriate treatment of Narain Sing and the other military prisoners. The superintendent of police in the Lower Provinces, W. Dampier, believed that the outbreak on the Kaleegunga was the result of ‘uncalled for degradation’. He wrote: ‘I consider that the sending down [of] Narain Sing and the other Sikh Sirdars, certainly men of some rank and Soldiers . . . chained up with Thugs and Murderers of all castes and descriptions to have been a considerable aggravation of their sentence’. To Dampier, that he had been convicted of high treason was immaterial.Footnote ²⁵ The governor general disagreed, pointing out that although convicted ‘mainly’ of treason, Narain Sing was also found guilty of robbery, cruelty and ‘every ruffainly crime’.Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, as we will see, dissenting sentiments like those of Dampier continued when Narain Sing faced trial for a second time, for offences connected with the Kaleegunga mutiny.

Engendering Mutiny

By the end of July, all the escaped Kaleegunga convicts who had survived the outbreak (24 in total) had been captured.Footnote ²⁷ Narain Sing made a statement that was corroborated by some of the guards and thus deemed ‘worthy of some dependence’.Footnote ²⁸ According to his account a convict had hidden a file and used it to cut one of the two long chains fettering the convicts together. On the day of the uprising, at some time between 4.00 and 4.30 pm, when it was time for the daily routine of going on deck to perform ablutions, the convicts on this side of the chain said that they did not want to go. The guards therefore unlocked the convicts on the other side, including Narain Sing. They went to the side of the ship – where as was normal practice convicts urinated, voided their bowels or threw overboard rag-bound packets of solid waste – and Narain Sing gave a shout, the agreed signal for mutiny. The convicts on the other (cut) chain got free, and together the men overcame their guards. It had been well organized; small groups of four or five convicts went for each guard, stealing their muskets and forcing them overboard. Another group of convicts took the spare muskets and ammunition belts. They stayed on board for a couple of hours, plundered some cloth and money, and then got into another boat, crossed the river and fled.Footnote ²⁹

Despite their initial success, it was not long before the British had captured the escaped men and moved swiftly to set up a formal committee of inquiry.Footnote ³⁰ It decided that the convicts involved would face trial in Patna, on charges of escaping from punishment and murdering three and seriously wounding one of their guards. The trial took place over 11 days in February and March 1851.Footnote ³¹ The judges of the court sentenced three of the convicts – Narain Sing, Nutha and Janna – to death, though recommended their pardon. This reflected their more general concern that it was impossible to establish that all the convicts had participated actively in the outbreak, as opposed to having been present when it took place. During the trial only Narain Sing was identified positively, and only then by the commander and first mate. Other witnesses failed to single him out during identity parades. This was hardly surprising given the pandemonium that had prevailed on the mutinous Kaleegunga; difficulties in positive identification were a common feature of mutiny investigations and trials during the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³² But the judges’ recommendation for mercy went deeper than this, for it reflected disagreements between them about the implications of the sharply differentiated social status of the convicts on board.

Sessions Judge F.J. Lougham hinted that Captain Cawley had been unwilling to name Narain Sing individually, most likely because he knew that if he were convicted he would be sentenced to death. Thus Cawley's testimony had shifted radically. Initially, he said that he had seen Narain Sing with a musket and, later, that Narain Sing had not participated in the uprising and that he could not remember if he had been armed. We need to think about Captain Cawley's changing claim in the context of his respect for Narain Sing's rank and status. When he was arrested, Narain Sing stated that he had been driven to escape by the hardship of altered treatment since his initial capture in the Panjab. His daily allowance had been reduced from 100 rupees to three pice per day, and he had been ‘chained with out castes’. Sessions Judge Lougham's opinion is worth citing at length, for it reveals something of contemporary beliefs about the social meaning of equality before the law:

Lougham disagreed with the court's recommendation that the two other convicts found guilty, Natha and Janna, should be recommended for pardon along with Narain Sing. They were ‘hardened offenders’, he argued, transported for ‘murder by thuggee’. Accordingly, he advised their execution.

Also significant in the debate about the appropriate punishment of Narain Sing was his conduct during the outbreak, which was in itself represented through the lens of colonial expectations attached to a man of his military standing. Narain Sing drew attention to his subkut o joweer nurdee, or ‘successful bravery’.Footnote ³³ Despite earlier representations of his ruthlessness and cruelty, near-romantic accounts of his honourable and gentlemanly conduct on the Kaleegunga emerged. The passengers on board included Sergeant Michael Cunningham, his wife Mary and their two children, one a babe in arms. Though there were discrepancies in their account of the mutiny – Mary spoke in court a year afterwards of how she had tried to forget about it – it seems that Narain Sing intervened against the wishes of the other convicts on board to save her life. This is what she said:

Though she could not be certain – even when the judges made him say a few words before her so that she could hear his voice – the implication was that her saviour was Narain Sing. Indeed, one of his co-defendants, convict Nutha, stated that he had seen Narain Sing prevent a third man from killing Mary Cunningham. ‘I am already involved in one trouble and now another trouble will come upon me’, he claimed he had said to the man. ‘Do not kill the Saheb and the Maam, run away’. Mary's husband Michael appeared in a much less favourable light. He testified that he had jumped overboard, leaving his wife and children to an uncertain fate. As Captain Nation put it later on, the disgrace Narain Sing's actions cast on the character of Europeans ‘is not to be contemplated without regret’.Footnote ³⁵

Narain Sing sought to distance himself from the mutiny altogether, stating in court that he had told the havildar of the guard of the planned uprising, and had only escaped because he feared that due to his rank and standing he would be held accountable. Furthermore, he claimed, he had prevented the convicts from plundering the treasure on board and from setting fire to the ships, as well as having saved the life of Mary Cunningham and her children.Footnote ³⁶ These were to be recurrent themes in his letters to government over the coming years. ‘All the convicts then got enraged with me saying that you have connived at the Saheb's escape; now we will ill treat the lady and kill her . . . I told them so long as I am here, no one in my presence will be allowed to kill her – first they must kill me then [they] can approach the lady’, he wrote in one petition of 1851.Footnote ³⁷

Narain Sing's alignment with the British vis-à-vis gendered honourable conduct went further still, as he criticized Company sepoys’ actions during the Anglo–Sikh Wars. He lamented the treatment of the women of his household by British troops during their military campaigns in the Panjab. He complained that his wife, daughter and female slaves had been treated in ‘a most disgraceful manner, which is a very shameful thing, such treatment is never allowed by any sovereign to a person faithful to his master’. And, moreover, he claimed that on learning of this the ‘enraged’ General Whish (who had led the 1848–1849 siege of Multan) ordered the women's return. His account of events substantively anticipated the colonial response to actual or threatened violence against European women by mutineer-rebels during 1857–1858, and thus reveals something of shared expectations around the protection of women in wartime. But it also drew on associated discourses and practices associated with military service. Narain Sing wrote of his bafflement at being punished: ‘when a person renders service to another nation that nation supports and maintains that person’, and: ‘I have not eaten salt belonging to the Company I have eaten [Mul Raj's] salt’.Footnote ³⁸ His words were echoed by fellow Panjabi state prisoner Ram Sing, who had served under Mul Raj and wrote in a petition seeking remission of sentence: it was a servant's ‘duty to do as he is told’.Footnote ³⁹

Government took into consideration Narain Sing's ‘position and conduct’ and decided to follow the judges’ recommendation of a commutation of the death sentence. That he was ‘a Sikh officer of rank’ sentenced for treason, and yet had been fettered with thugs and dacoits and ‘made to associate with sweepers’, informed its clemency. But of enormous relevance to its decision also was the ‘humanity’ he had shown in saving European lives. In rescuing Mary Cunningham from the convict mob, Narain Sing had demonstrated honour and courage – in stark contrast to her husband Michael, whose cowardly behaviour in the face of danger so disgraced the British. Government ordered the commutation of the other two convicts’ capital sentences too, in their case because there was no direct evidence against them.Footnote ⁴⁰ It ordered the transportation of all three men ‘with due care and precaution as regards the character and caste of the prisoners’.Footnote ⁴¹

As they awaited their transportation, the Kaleegunga convicts were kept separate from other inmates in Patna's Mithapur jail, fettered in double leg irons and handcuffs, and chained together and padlocked to a window bar at night. Narain Sing was kept in solitary confinement under a strong guard. The convicts’ spirit of resistance remained intact; an escape attempt was foiled only through the quick thinking of the turnkey, who had noticed two convicts free from irons, and so raised the alarm. It seems that the convicts had concealed files in the prison ward, and had started to knock a hole through the brickwork of the privy wall.Footnote ⁴² Magistrate Lushington reported a few months later that they continued openly to make escape plans. Thus the convicts were divided into two batches, and taken on to Calcutta separately. Lushington was especially keen to avoid complaints of ill treatment on the part of Narain Sing.Footnote ⁴³

The Politics of Punishment in Southeast Asia

As late as 1848, 20 years after the British annexed Burma, there were only 150 locally convicted prisoners in the Tenasserim Provinces. The remainder were all convicts from the Indian mainland, transported by the East India Company to clear land and build roads. They worked in labour gangs during the day, and were kept in the flimsy wooden bungalows that served as jails at night.Footnote ⁴⁴ Their numbers grew exponentially, and more permanent prison buildings were constructed. In 1856 there were 236 convicts in Mergui jail and 1460 in Moulmein; by 1858, the average daily jail population in the provinces was 2,421.Footnote ⁴⁵

As we will see, Narain Sing's experience of penal transportation was in many ways radically different to that of the convict mass. And yet he was also imbricated in a common experience, for colonial encounters like those played out in the Panjab during the 1840s and in Burma in the 1850s and 1860s became bound up with British efforts to seek social alignments with Indians of rank and status, and to punish and to reform supposedly undesirable elements of Indian society. The process of punishment and reformation was effected simultaneously through huge jail building and outdoor penal labour programmes in Bengal and the Northwest Provinces from the 1830s on, through the East India Company's continuation of pre-colonial forms of confinement in military forts and other secure locations, and through the use of penal settlements and colonies across Southeast Asia (Andaman Islands, Straits Settlements and Burma) and the Indian Ocean (Aden, Mauritius). It was connected also to broader associations between penal sanction, penal labour and the political economy of East India Company expansion: or, to put it simply, to the tangled histories of the geographies of confinement and colonization. But also significant is what Narain Sing's transportation reveals about the social alignments that the colonial administration made with its subjects with respect to shared assumptions about the nature and meaning of, and the expectations attached to, military rank, social status and most significantly masculinity and honour. I have already touched upon these in my discussion of Narain Sing's conduct during the Kaleegunga mutiny. However, they also informed some of the unintended outcomes of transportation – not as the practice of social rupture, social levelling and shame intended by the judicial authorities in India, but as a hierarchical space within and through which new culturally and otherwise ambitious identities could emerge in distant overseas locations.

The movement of prisoners and transportation convicts across the Indian mainland and around the Bay of Bengal connected Company settlements together geographically and created new social networks and routes for the flow of information. It is tempting to imply that convict mobility constituted a sort of borderless penal cosmopolitanism in this respect. But, as we will see, an analysis of Narain Sing's transportation reveals something of the multiple fractures within oft-times competing discourses around convictism in and across South and Southeast Asia, and challenges the temptation to represent Indian prisons and penal settlements collectively or commonly as a discrete colonial space. Indeed, unlike Indian jails – at least officially – Company penal settlements overseas incorporated multiple layers of social differentiation, mainly around time served and individual compliance with labour demands. Convicts could climb the rungs of the penal ladder to achieve positions of relative authority, overseeing the work of their fellow convicts. This was much to the disgust of a steady stream of colonial commentators who felt that for Indians this prospect rendered transportation preferable to incarceration on the mainland, if not easier than other forms of labour service or bondage, or even the insecurities of paid work.

Narain Sing's transportation highlights a second form of social differentiation in the penal settlements too, that produced not out of penal service but out of the status and position of individuals prior to trial and conviction. On occasion, favourable treatment such as exemption from labour or fetters was written explicitly into sentences of transportation. But it was also created out of the limited resources of Company officials in managing convicts, and their daily encounters with the felons under their charge. The differential experience of transportation convicts in this respect had much in common with the informal practices associated with the management of prisoners in Indian jails,Footnote ⁴⁶ and so reveals something of the tensions of transportation as both a cosmopolitan and an intensely local penal practice.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of transportation convicts from India were found guilty of civil offences, usually involving violence against the person or murder, but sometimes burglary, robbery and gang robbery, or forgery. Narain Sing, however, was part of a small minority of convicts who were transported within the context of violent collective resistance to the expansion of the East India Company's territorial control, or the specifically political offences of rebellion or treason. For example, at the turn of the nineteenth century, among transported convict offenders were Chuar rebels from the tribal areas of Midnapur in the Bengal Presidency, in rebellion against the British.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the south, in 1802 the Company shipped Poligar rebels overseas from Tirunelveli District to Penang.Footnote ⁴⁸ The British also shipped Konds from central Orissa to Moulmein, after military campaigns in 1835.Footnote ⁴⁹ It transported Santals to Akyab in Arakan (Burma) in the aftermath of the 1855 hul (rebellion).Footnote ⁵⁰ Of further regional significance was the shipment of Kandyan rebels from Ceylon to Mauritius after the Great Rebellion of 1817–1818, which though a colonial rather than a Company settlement was also a place of transportation for Indian convicts at the time.Footnote ⁵¹ This was the start of a close penal relationship between India and Ceylon, and Ceylon sent convicts to Company settlements into the 1840s and beyond.

When dealing with ‘political’ offenders, the British used transportation overseas alongside mainland banishment and exile. These were sanctions that dated from pre-colonial penal regimes. Simultaneous to the removal of political enemies to penal settlements across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean was the imprisonment of offenders in forts, or prohibition against their return to natal villages and towns. Thus whilst some faced transportation other Poligar rebels were banished from their home districts of Coimbatore and Madura during the early 1800s.Footnote ⁵² Santals were removed from the Santal Parganas and incarcerated in jails across the Bengal Presidency after 1855.Footnote ⁵³ Wajid Ali Shah, the deposed King of Awadh, was detained in Garden Reach in Calcutta from 1856 to 1859, after the British took the opportunity to arrest him when he fell ill in the city on the way to London to plead the case against British annexation of the state. Sentences of transportation and banishment were often viewed as more appropriate than capital punishment because they ruptured networks of political ‘intrigue’ without risking the elevation of rebels to heroic status or martyrdom. At the same time, they were one element of a colonial propaganda of merciful and benevolent government in the years before the Great Revolt of 1857–1858.

In the aftermath of the Anglo–Sikh Wars, the Company employed this sort of mixed penal economy – exile, banishment and transportation – to remove its military opponents from the Panjab. It detained some important leaders in Fort William including, as we have seen, Mul Raj, and confined others in Allahabad and Fort Chunar, near Benares.Footnote ⁵⁴ It transported more to Southeast Asia, including Narain Sing and his shipmate Golaub Sing.Footnote ⁵⁵ Preceding both men was Ram Sing, ex-wuzer (prime minister) of Nurpur, a rebel from across the Jhelum River north of Multan. He had been sentenced not to transportation per se, but to ‘life banishment across seas’, effectively the same sentence, in October 1849.Footnote ⁵⁶

Transportation overseas offered the potential for radical changes in identity, for it presented an opportunity for individuals and communities to reposition themselves according to new hierarchies, opportunities and constraints. Despite perceptions of the dangerousness and rebelliousness in India, both convicted thugs and Santals, for instance, became desirable convicts in the Burmese penal settlements. In 1839, Commissioner A. Bogle wrote that he had agreed to receive thug convicts in Arakan after his counterpart in Tenasserim had persuaded him that they were quiet and well behaved.Footnote ⁵⁷ By 1848, there were 133 thugs in the Convict Police, and they were employed as overseers, orderlies and hospital attendants.Footnote ⁵⁸ Though the privilege was initially denied to them, it was not long before the Company agreed to grant thug requests to live at large after serving sixteen years, like other convicts in Burma.Footnote ⁵⁹ Perhaps this transformation lay in the practice of thuggee as a form of criminality bound up with military practice and thus in thugs’ acceptance of a social hierarchy that was palatable to incorporative techniques of penal (as in military) management.Footnote ⁶⁰ It might also have reflected something of ordinary convicts’ views of thugs as hardened offenders not to be crossed. Santal transformations took a quite different form. This tribal community (the largest in India) became feted for its lack of caste strictures, and its associated willingness to eat all types of food and to perform all types of labour. Santals possessed what the colonial authorities referred to at the time as ‘the wisdom of the barbarian’.Footnote ⁶¹

Just as Narain Sing's experience of criminal trial and incarceration in India was atypical, his experience of transportation was quite different to that of an ordinary chain gang convict. He arrived in Moulmein in December 1851, and does not seem to have been put to outdoor labour as was the norm. He was transferred to the more southerly penal establishment at Mergui just over a year later, where he appears to have impressed the colonial establishment with his stoicism. A range of officers produced testimonials on his behalf. J. Stevenson, the officer in charge of the jail, wrote that although his lot was painful, he did not complain or show discontent. Rather, he stayed away from the other convicts, and complied with the jail rules and the orders of the jailer. D. Nicolson, who succeeded Stevenson, noted that when government refused his petition (urzee) to return to India in 1856, ‘he bore it as became a man in his position’.Footnote ⁶² Fellow Panjabi prisoner Ram Sing's health declined rapidly. He too presented a petition to government in 1856, seeking permission to live at large in Moulmein. ‘Nothing but skin and bone and breath now remain to me’, he wrote.Footnote ⁶³ But government refused to grant his request too, and he remained in jail, where he died a few months later.

Narain Sing wrote another urzee in May 1858. Describing ‘the gloom and hardships of a Prison being indeed unendurable’, and his weakening constitution and health, he asked that his ‘former circumstances, situation in Life, and manner of living’ be taken into consideration and that he be given permission to live outside the jail on parole. He added to the earlier official testimonials letters of support from E.M. Ryan, officiating deputy commissioner of the provinces, and R.C. Burn, the magistrate.Footnote ⁶⁴ There was a precedent for Narain Sing's request, for some years earlier the Panjab state prisoners confined in Fort William and Chunar had been permitted to live at large in Calcutta and Benares.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, despite Stevenson's support for Narain Sing, in mid 1858 the government of India turned his request down. By his own admission, Stevenson knew ‘very little’ of Narain Sing's ‘character and deeds in Hindoostan’, and could promise only limited surveillance over him, especially when he was out in the districts.Footnote ⁶⁶

At about the same time as Narain Sing was transported to Burma, two other Panjab rebels were sent into transportation – to Singapore – ‘Saint soldier’ Bhai Maharaj Singh and his disciple Khurruck Sing. These two men are unquestionably the best-known Indian convicts transported overseas in the years before 1857, and in popular memory today Maharaj Singh in particular is remembered as both a spiritual leader and hero of Sikh nationalism. Maharaj Sing and Khurruck Sing had led anti-British forces in the Panjab in the months after annexation in March 1849Footnote ⁶⁷ and, from their base in Lahore, they attracted wide support. Deputy Commissioner of Jalandhar H. Vansittart wrote of the moment when Maharaj Singh had been arrested and taken into jail:

Vansittart was dismayed to find that he could not treat him as an ordinary prisoner, writing: ‘I cannot contend against the religious fanaticism of a whole country’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The government was anxious about the risks involved in putting him on trial, not to mention the ‘excitement’ such a trial would cause, and so it decided to transport him overseas summarily as a ‘rebel in arms’. Maharaj Singh threatened briefly to disrupt the government's plans, refusing all food and drink for a few days. Vansittart was worried that if he starved to death, he would be ‘cherished by all posterity’, precisely the effect that he hoped safe captivity would avoid.Footnote ⁷⁰ Maharaj Sing gave up his hunger strike, and in May 1850 he was transported to Singapore with Khurruck Sing on the ship Mahomed Shaw.Footnote ⁷¹

On arrival, the men were lodged in Singapore jail, and government confiscated their personal effects, including bangles, a kirpan (dagger) and ring, as well as a conch shell, which were used by Sikhs commonly in religious ceremonies.Footnote ⁷² A few years later in 1853, Khurruck Sing expressed a desire to convert to Christianity. Despite his interest in reading and discussing the Bible, his request was dismissed as a shallow attempt at liberation, most particularly because he drew parallels between Jesus Christ and the ‘Great Seikh Gooroo’. Moreover, as Governor-General Dalhousie put it, it was hardly surprising that he could speak of Jesus – and other Old Testament figures like Moses – for any Muslim would be able to do the same. The government of India advised that Khurruck Sing be told that religious conversion would not secure his release: ‘Christian or Seikh he would equally remain in the Singapore Gaol’.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, government remained suspicious of the men, eventually prohibiting them from sending letters home.Footnote ⁷⁴

Suffering from ill health and nearly blind, Maharaj Sing – known as the Guru among convictsFootnote ⁷⁵ – died in July 1856.Footnote ⁷⁶ Khurruck Sing was then allowed to take walks outside the jail compound,Footnote ⁷⁷ and shortly afterwards to live at large under police surveillance. He moved in with a man he described as an old Parsi friend called Cursetjee Muncherjee, who had been a merchant and spice planter in Bencoolen. When news of the Indian Revolt reached Singapore in the middle of 1857, the port was in a fever. By the month of August rumours of an uprising organized by the 3,000 or so convicts then in the Straits Settlements were circulating, and the merchant community was nervous that Indian troops and the Chinese community would join them in mutiny. It found little reassurance in Governor Blundell's refusal to ban the convicts’ usual Mohurrum celebrations in the streets outside their barracks. It was in this context that Khurruck Sing – by now called the Seikh by Europeans and the Rajah by free Indians and convicts – came under especial scrutiny. Two convicts, Dimshun Jamsetjee (a Parsi) and Budoo, claimed during an interview with the Resident Councillor that Khurruck Sing intended to attack the Europeans in the settlement while they were in church, though it was far from clear that there was an organized plot. A search of his house revealed nothing. ‘Khurruck Sing is a great sensualist’, Governor Blundell wrote. ‘The consequence is that he is frequently drunk and in that state he may have given utterance to abuse and have imagined scenes where the power has changed from our hands into his’. The port's merchants were less restrained, viewing him as ‘a desperate and dangerous intriguer, bent on exciting insurrection and bloodshed’. Khurruck Sing, meanwhile, petitioned the governor, rejecting the accusations against him and asking to join the British army: ‘He has now been maintained by Government, and whose salt he has been eating for the last seven years, and for whose service he is willing to lay down his life’. The governor recommended Khurruck Sing's petition, but in order to reassure the European community he transferred him to the neighbouring island of Penang, site of an associated convict settlement. The government of India, however, thought it ‘most unwise’ to accept the services of a man ‘thus tainted’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Things were no more tranquil in neighbouring Burma. According to local commissioner A. Fytche, the Indian convicts in Moulmein were ‘extremely agitated’ about the mainland uprising. The European community fell into a panic, seeking refuge on ships in the harbour and stockpiling arms and ammunition. In July 1857, 50 Indian convicts arrived in the settlement. Though they had not been convicted of mutiny offences, they brought with them what Fytche described as exaggerated stories about events in the Northwest Provinces. Like the European population of Singapore, he was worried about the prospect of an incendiary combination between convicts, jail guards, town police, and the free Muslim community of the town. With no European infantry and only a small military force from Madras at his disposal, Fytche ordered the return of the convicts to the jail at Alipur.Footnote ⁷⁹

In the context of widespread military and civil revolt in India and fears about its spread into Southeast Asia, it is hardly surprising that Narain Sing's 1857–1858 petitions for liberation fell on deaf ears. However, in early 1860 when calm had been restored and the transfer of power from East India Company to British Crown effected, the officiating commissioner of Tenasserim and Martaban Provinces, Henry Hopkinson, recommended that Narain Sing be allowed to live outside the jail under police surveillance. He would be issued with four annas per day, the same as he was then receiving in jail. The government of India sanctioned his request. Six months later, after Narain Sing complained about the high cost of food and wages for his barber and dhobi (laundryman) in Mergui, his allowance was doubled.Footnote ⁸⁰ It was not long before Narain Sing tried once more for permission to return to India but, again, government refused his petition.

After the passing of the Indian Police Act in 1861, Commissioner of Tenasserim A. Fytche requested Narain Sing's employment in the newly reorganized establishment of Tenasserim and Martaban Provinces. The Indian authorities agreed to his request, and Narain Sing was appointed head constable, with a massive increase in salary: 65 rupees per month. By the end of 1863, 12 years after his reception in Moulmein Jail as a convict, he was in charge of the prison guards.Footnote ⁸¹ This represented an extraordinary transformation in status – from Panjabi military general to state prisoner and transportation convict, and finally police constable. This social shift was possible because Narain Sing was a man who shared with the British social and military rank and privilege, and associated expectations of honourable conduct and forbearance. He was not alone amongst men of status. Clementina Benthall, in a diary of her visit to Moulmein jail with her magistrate husband Edward, had written ten years earlier that many convicts became jail wardens: ‘the system has answered well – these being some of the best Policemen and settlers’.Footnote ⁸² But his transformation was also enabled by the opportunities presented through broader social changes associated with the Great Revolt of 1857–1858. It is to a discussion of those shifts that we will now turn.

Transformations in Identity

The transportation of Narain Sing provides a window into the punishment of ‘political’ offences during the first half of the nineteenth century, on the layered nature of penal settlements, and on shared assumptions about honourable or gentlemanly conduct between men of rank. It also offers insights into broader shifts around social identity as the British expanded into the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. Historians have shown incontrovertibly how the British drew on the Panjab during their military campaigns of 1857–1858. In the aftermath of Revolt, they used Panjabi Sikhs especially to staff the ranks of both the Bengal Army and the expanding Indian police force in Southeast Asia and East Africa.Footnote ⁸³ By the 1880s, the British viewed Panjabis favourably, representing their loyalty through a broader religious and caste-based framework that produced them in contrast to other supposedly weak and effeminate Indians – especially the somewhat ill-defined category ‘Bengalis’ – as a ‘martial race’. But we know rather less about the roots of this shift in representation – from treacherous to loyal – in the decade between war and rebellion (c. 1845–1857), when British and Indians alike made the first systematic contact with Panjabi communities. I would like to argue that jails, convict ships and convict barracks were crucial sites for this peculiarly colonial encounter. They were spaces in which men and women from a range of geographical, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds were crammed together, and forced to share the iron and brassware, gourd shells and pottery associated with the intimate bodily practices of drinking and eating. Liquid and solid waste also mingled with the fluids of sickness – vomit, sweat, blood and tears – producing confinement as one of the most intimate spaces of colonization.Footnote ⁸⁴

During the 1840s and into the 1850s British and Indians alike stood in awe of Panjabi military prowess and continuing resistance to British annexation. Their perceptions were grounded in the fierce military battles of the Anglo–Sikh Wars, and alleged Sikh ‘cruelty’, but later events were significant too. Little known historically is what even the British described at the time as a ‘massacre’ in Agra jail in April 1850, a bloody and scandalous affair that followed the incarceration in the city of a substantial body of Panjabi prisoners – over 250 – convicted in the wake of the Anglo–Sikh wars. This is what happened. A few days after the prisoners arrived in Agra, allegedly a small group of them ‘murmured’ to the jail guard about the quantity and quality of their food. The incident quickly escalated; a guard struck a prisoner, the Panjabis retaliated, and guards killed or wounded 75 prisoners, many after they had sought refuge in their cells. The investigating judge was furious about their brutal response, describing a scene of the prisoners ‘crying aloud for mercy, and cowering together, in the extremity of mortal terror, in such nooks of the ward as promised the best shelter from the murderous fire poured upon them’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The lieutenant governor accused Inspector of Prisons Woodcock of downplaying the seriousness of the event and in effect of attempting a cover-up.Footnote ⁸⁶ Together with the high profile nature of Narain Sing's escape from the Kaleegunga and tales of the ‘disquiet’ aroused by the ‘Sikh prisoners’ in Allahabad fort at about the same time, by September 1850 reports of events in Agra had even made it to the pages of The Times in London.Footnote ⁸⁷ Government was concerned that the public would form the impression that ‘Sikh prisoners are so formidable as to defy the power of the Civil Officers to keep them in custody and in due subjection’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Moreover, echoing some of the debates around Narain Sing's conduct during the Kaleegunga mutiny, that the ‘daring of a free booter as rebel’ would be ‘exalted into gallantry’.Footnote ⁸⁹

In August 1850, Inspector of Prisons Woodcock requested an increased guard to cope with the growing number of Panjabi prisoners imprisoned in the Northwest Provinces. ‘These men are muscular in their make, and bold in the learning’, the lieutenant governor of the Panjab reported at the time. ‘They are unaccustomed to strict discipline, and carry with them a certain prestige, resulting from the events of the late campaigns, which cannot be at once dispelled’.Footnote ⁹⁰ He went on to describe them as an ‘independent and warlike race’, wholly unaccustomed to British understandings of criminality. The jail guards ‘look upon them as something new and strange, and over rate their daring and their strength’. Once the Sikhs understood the extent of British power, and the prison guards saw them as ordinary prisoners, he predicted, ‘all this will soon wear off’.Footnote ⁹¹ In the meantime, Panjabi prisoners took full advantage of their fears, mounting an almost successful escape attempt from Agra jail at the end of the year.Footnote ⁹²

Of significance too in the development of views of Panjabis by colonial officials and north Indians was a ship mutiny led by convicts voyaging to the penal settlement in Malacca in 1854 on board a ship called the Clarissa. Overcrowding and a shortage of water may have provoked the uprising, though as several convicts later testified it had been planned at least a week beforehand.Footnote ⁹³ Led by convicts from the Panjab, it was extremely violent. The convicts murdered the captain, chief and second mates (all Englishmen) and over half of the crew and guards: 31 men in total. They ransacked the ship, destroying the convicts’ descriptive rolls and log book, ran the ship aground, and landed between Rangoon and Tavoy in the mistaken belief that the region was outside British control. The mutiny quickly took on the characteristics of a military campaign. Convict Soor Singh put on the captain's coat and boots, and the gold necklace, sword and sash belonging to the subadar of the guard. He armed six other convicts, calling them ‘his sepoys’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The mutinous party made its way to the ‘Burma Rajah’ with the intention of offering him their services against the British. According to convict-turned-informer Kurrim Singh:

Soor Singh was killed and, over the next few days, the authorities captured most of the remaining mutineers.Footnote ⁹⁶

The British returned the survivors (129 in total) to Calcutta to face trial in the supreme court (admiralty side), with Chief Judge Sir J. Colville declaring it the most serious case that he had ever tried.Footnote ⁹⁷ The court ordered that most of the defendants be transported to serve out their original sentence, but unlike other convicts in the Straits Settlements they would not be eligible to earn remission of sentence and would remain in the fifth class, kept at hard labour for life. Four convicts were sentenced to death.Footnote ⁹⁸ During the trial, the divisions between the convicts emerged. A minority of convicts who referred to themselves either as Bengalis, ‘Deswalees’, or Hindustanis claimed that they had nothing to do with the mutiny, and that it was largely the work of men they called ‘Sikhs’. Moreover, they said that the ‘Sikhs’ had imprisoned them below deck after the outbreakFootnote ⁹⁹ and, when the ship ran aground, they had made them carry their luggage.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The complexity of social manoeuvring on board the Clarissa ran deeper still, for I suspect that the opportunity for mutiny was created out of a fatal misjudgement on the part of the captain. One of the guards testified that he had employed one of the convicts to clean his swords and muskets. The subadar had complained, but the captain had told him ‘to hold his tongue’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This was a dreadful mistake on his part, for he had chosen a man described on his descriptive indent as a ‘desperate character’ and requiring a special guard.Footnote ¹⁰² The captain's miscalculation was almost certainly based on a sense that he had more in common with him than the usual convict shipments of ordinary Indians in their threadbare cotton dhotis and turbans. After all, he was a military man of high rank and status, dressed like his compatriots in pantaloons and a smart red jacket, or in the words of one of the sepoys on board, one of several ‘fine-looking fellows’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In May 1856, after the surviving Clarissa convicts were sent on to the Straits Settlements, Resident Councillor of Malacca H. Man reported the ‘strong clannish feeling’ and disproportionate influence of the ‘stout powerful’ ‘Lahore men’ under his charge. The presence of the Clarissa convicts – according to him ‘notoriously desperate characters’ – did not ease matters.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He had already transferred three of them to Singapore – Khan Moolla (from Peshwar), Utter Sing (Lahore) and Mahtub (Multan), claiming they had ‘a pernicious influence over those of their own nation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The Panjabis’ fearsome reputation had important implications with respect to colonial management strategies in the decades that followed. As well as employing Panjabis in the Bengal Army in large numbers, from the 1870s the British recruited them for service as policemen across the Empire. Thomas Metcalf has drawn attention to the widespread British view of the police in Southeast Asia as physically intimidating, arrogant, and overbearing, traits that according to him in no small measure assured their success. British Resident at Pahang Hugh Clifford wrote that Sikhs were ‘possessed of as absolute a conviction of his own superiority to the men of any other race – Europeans alone excepted – as is the White Man himself. He is quite frank about this opinion, and he is accustomed to act upon it at all times’. And, ‘To other Asiatics he is as arrogant and overbearing as can well be conceived, and he displays none of the tact which helps to make a European less hated for his airs of superiority than he might be’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Of particular interest is Metcalf's invocation of the changing meaning of the category of ‘Sikh’. He argues that in colonial settlements across the Indian Ocean it became a marker of particular social characteristics, most especially some degree of shared cultural values with and loyalty to the British colonial regime. As such, it had the potential to become a remarkably wide descriptive tag. This is hugely relevant to our social understanding of Narain Sing, for convict and jail records reveal that upon his conviction he had not described himself as a Sikh, but as a Hindu Brahmin, ‘in service’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Moreover, as we have seen, colonial administrators and north Indians described indiscriminately all Panjabi prisoners and convicts as ‘Sikhs’ during the 1850s, as evidenced during their recollections of the mutinies and prison unrest described above. At this time, the appellation marked a deep sense of nervousness and unease; only later on did it have more positive connotations, at least as far as the British were concerned.

High-caste Narain Sing's employment as a soldier in the 1840s Panjab was typical of the socially incorporative military regime of Ranjit Singh, in a context where religious identities were fluid. In the steady stream of petitions that he presented to government, however, markedly after the 1857 Revolt, he always described himself as a Sikh (or ‘Seik’). I see this as a deliberate and careful alignment on his part with shifting British views. In the 1860s the colonial administration viewed Sikhs as loyal colonial subjects, part of a larger discursive transformation that was effected through their role in assisting British troops during 1857–1858. The British no longer saw Sikhs (all Panjabi communities collapsed into a single category) as treacherous and cruel, but as trustworthy and faithful. Narain Sing was surely aware of this when he told the officiating commissioner of Tenasserim that he had received a letter from one of his sisters, describing her marriage to the rajah of Jheend, who had supported the British in 1857. No doubt this was part of a broader effort to provide the government with assurance of his loyalty.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

‘My Lord’, Narain Sing wrote later in 1863, ‘the Seiks, my countrymen, served the British in their greatest strait, nor is it for your Petitioner to say what the result might have been had Delhi been assaulted without their aid, or had they, like the faithless soldiery of Bengal, also turned against the British’. He went on:

The broad social transformation to which he appealed is evidenced also in the colonial administration's treatment of his relatives in India. Though it declined their first 1856 petition for relief, in the aftermath of the Great Revolt the government issued Narain Sing's father and wife with a joint allowance of five rupees per month. It based its calculation on what it viewed as their relatively humble circumstances at the time of the Anglo–Sikh Wars.Footnote ¹¹⁰