Sivaganga

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Sivaganga, also known as Sivagangai, is a Historic place.It is the present capital of sivaganga district

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Sivaganga District has been carved out from composite Ramnad District as per G.O. MS. No. 1122 Rev. Dept. Dated. 6.7.84 and the District was functioning from 15.3.85 as per G.O Ms.No. 346 Rev. dept. Dated: 8.3.85.

THE HISTORY OF SIVAGANGA: The Kingdom of Ramnad originally comprised of the territories of Ramnad, Sivaganga and Pudukottai of today. Regunatha Sethupathy alias Kilavan Sethupathy, the 7th King of Ramnad reigned between 1674 and 1710. Kilavan Sethupathy, came to know of the bravery and valour of Peria Oodaya Thevar of Nalukottai, 4 Kilometres from Sholapuram near Sivaganga.

The King assigned to Peria Oodaya Thevar of Nalukottai a portion of land sufficient to maintain 1000 armed men. Vijaya Regunatha Sethupathy became the 8th King of Ramnad in 1710 after the death of Kilavan Sethupathy. The King gave in marriage his daughter AKILANDESWARI NACHIAR, to Sasivarna Thevar, the son of Nalukottai Peria Oodaya Thevar. The King gave Sasivarna Thevar lands as dowry, free of taxation, sufficient to maintain 1,000 men. He placed him in charge of the fortresses of Piranmalai, Tiruppathur, Sholapuram and Tiruppuvanam as well as the harbour of Thondi. Meanwhile Bhavani Sankaran, the son of Kilavan Sethupathy conquered Ramnad territory and arrested Sundareswara Regunatha Sethupathy, the 9th King of Ramnad. Bhavani Sankaran proclaimed himself as the Rajah of Ramnad. He became the 10th king of Ramnad and he reigned from 1726 to 1729. He quarrelled with Sasivarna Peria Oodaya Thevar of Nalukottai and drove him out of his Nalukottai palayam. Kattaya Thevan, the brother of the late Sundareswara Regunatha Sethupathy fled from Ramnad and sought refuge with the Rajah of Tanjore Tuljaji. While Sasivarna Thevar was passing through the jungles of Kalayarkoi, he met a Gnani (sage) named Sattappiah, who was performing Thapas (meditation) under a jambool tree near a spring called `SIVAGANGA' . The deposed king prostrated himself before him and narrated all the previous incidents of his life. The Gnani whispered a certain mantra in his ears (Mantra Opadesam) and advised him to go to Tanjore and kill a ferocious tiger which was kept by the Rajah especially to test the bravery of men. Sasivarna Thevar went to Tanjore. There he became acquainted with Kattaya Thevan a refugee like himself. Satisfied with the good behaviour of Sasivarma Thevar and Kattaya Thevan, the Rajah of Tanjore wanted to help them to regain the States again, ordered his DALAVOY to go with a large army to invade Bhavani Sankaran. Sasivarna Thevar and Kattaya Thevan at once proceeded to Ramnad with a large army furnished by the king of Tanjore. They defeated Bhavani Sankaran at the battle of Uraiyur and captured Ramnad in 1730. Thus Kattaya Thevan became the 11th King of Ramnad.

Ist RAJAH SASIVARNA THEVAR (1730 - 1750 ) Kattaya Thevan divided Ramnad into five parts and retained three for himself. He granted the two parts to Sasivarna Thevar of Nalukottai conferring on him the title of "Rajah Muthu Vijaya Regunatha Peria Oodaya Thevar".

2nd RAJAH - MUTHU VADUGANATHA PERIA OODAYA THEVAR (1750 - 1772).
Sasivarna Peria Oodaya Thevar died in or about the year 1750. He was succeeded by his only son Muthu Vaduganatha Peria Oodaya Thevar. He was the second Rajah of Sivaganga. His wife Rani Velu Nachiar acted as "friend, Philosopher and guide" to him. Tandavaraya Pillai was the able minister of Sivaganga country. Muthu Vaduganatha Peria Oodaya Thevar granted commercial facilities to the Dutch only after the English rejected a similar offer, made to Colonel Heron. Further the aim of the English was to oblige the ruler of Sivaganga to serve the Nawab or to pay tribute to him or to dissuade them from establishing relations with foreign powers like the Dutch. A two pronged offensive was made by the English. Joseph Smith from the east and Benjour from the west invaded Sivaganga Palayam in June 1772. The country was full of bushes of cockspur thorn, though there were villages and open spaces here and there. Rajah Muthu Vaduganatha Thevar, in anticipation of the invasion, erected barriers on the roads, dug trenches and established posts in the woods of Kalayarkoil. On the 21st of June of 1772 the detatchment of Smith and Benjour effected a junction and occupied the town of Sivaganga. The next day, the English forces marched to Kalayarkoil and captured the posts of Keeranoor and Sholapuram. Now, Benjour continuing the operations came into conflict with the main body of the troops of Sivaganga on the 25th June 1772. Muthu Vaduganatha Rajah with many of his followers fell dead in that heroic battle. The heroic activities shown in the battle field by Velu Nachiar is praised by the Historians. The widow queen Velu Nachiar and daughter Vellachi Nachiar with Tandavaraya Pillai fled to Virupakshi in Dindigul. Later they were joined by the two able Servaigarars Vellai Marudu and Chinna Marudhu.

3rd RANI VELU NACHIAR (1772 - 1780) Rani Velu Nachiar and her daughter Vellachi Nachiar lived under the protection of Hyder Ali at Virupakshi near Dindigul. Frustrated by the joining of forces against him, the Nawab ordered that Velu Nachiar and Marudhu Brothers were permitted to return to Sivaganga and rule the country subject to payment of Kist to the Nawab. Abiding by this Order, Rani Velu Nachiar accompanied by Marudu brothers and Vellachi Nachiar entered Sivaganga. An agreement was reached where by Rani Velu Nachiar was permitted to govern the Sivaganga Country and Chinna Marudu, the younger was appointed her minister and the elder Vellai Marudu as the Commander-in-chief. Thus the widow Queen Velu Nachiar succeeded her husband in 1780.

The Queen Velu Nachiar granted powers to Marudhu Brothers to administer the country in 1780. Velu Nachiar died a few years later, but the exact date of her death is not known (it was about 1790). Marudu brothers are the sons of Udayar Servai alias Mookiah Palaniappan Servai and Anandayer alias Ponnathal. They are native of Kongulu street of Ramnad. They belonged neither to the family of the ancient poligars nor to their division of the caste.

Servaikaran was the caste title and Marudu the family name. The Marudu Brothers served under Muthu Vaduganatha Thevar. Later they were elevated to the position of Commanders. Boomerangs are peculiar to India. Two forms of this weapons are used in India. These weapons are commonly made of wood. It is cresent-shaped on end being heavier than the other and the outer edge is sharpened. Their name in Tamil is VALARI stick. It is said that Marudu Brothers were experts in the art of throwing the valari stick. It is said that Marudus used Valari in the POLIGAR wars against the English. The Marudu brothers with 12,000 armed men surrounded Sivaganga and plundered the Nawab's territories. The Nawab on the 10th of March 1789 appealed to the Madras Council for aid. On 29th April 1789, the British forces attacked Kollangudi. It was defeated by a large body of Marudu's troops. He was in close association with Veera Pandiya Kattabomman of Panchalankurichi. Kattabomman held frequent consultations with Marudhus. After the execution of Kattabomman in 17th October 1799 at Kayattar, Chinna Marudhu gave asylum to Kattabomman's brother Oomadurai (dumb brother). He issued an epoch-making Jumboo Deweepa proclamation to the people in the island of Jamboo the peninsular South India to fight against the English whether they were Hindus, Mussalamans or Christians. At last the Marudhu Pandiyars fell a victim to the cause of liberating the motherland from the English supremacy. Marudu Pandiyan the popular leader of the rebels, together with his gallant brother Vellai Marudu were executed on the ruins of fort at Tiruppathur in SIVAGANGA District on 24th October 1801. They showed their determination and spirit at the outset of the final struggle of 1801 by setting their handsome village Siruvayal on fire to prevent its being made use of by the English forces.

Marudu brothers were not only warriers and noted for bravery, but they were very great Administrators. During the period from 1783 to 1801, they worked for the welfare of the people and the Sivaganga Seemai was reported as fertile. They constructed many notable temples (i.e Kalayarkoil) Ooranis and Tanks.

After, so many successions of legal heirs ruled the estate, lastly, Sri D.S. Karthikeya Venkatachalapathy Rajah succeeded to the estate of late Sri. D. Shanmuga Rajah and he was the Hereditary Trustee of Sivaganga. Devasthanam and Chatrams consisting of 108 temples, 22 Kattalais and 20 Chatrams. Sri. D.S. Karthikeya Venkatachalapathy Rajah passed away in 30.8.1986 leaving a daughter named Tmt.. Maduranthagi Nachiyar as his heir. At present, Tmt. Maduranthagi Nachiyar is administering the Sivaganga Estate , Sivaganga Devasthanam and Chatram of Sivaganga Royal Family now. Based on the "District Gazette" 1990 of Ramanathapuram, and the history of Sivaganga maintained by Samasthanam, Sivaganga District has been formed mostly with an area of entire Sivaganga Zamin and part of Ramnad Zamin.
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SIVAGANGA , town of British India , in the Madura district of Madras , 25 M. E. of . Pop. (1901) 9097. It contains the residence of a zamindar
, whose estate covers an area of 168o sq. m. and pays a permanent land revenue of 20,000.
The succession has been the subject of prolonged litigation.

Maruthupandiars were the erstwhile rulers of Sivagangai land in Tamil Nadu during the 18th century. That period was called the 'The Golden Age of Sivaganga Kingdom'. According to the Indian history, the ruler had issued a proclamation against the British Rule in India which was called the `Thiruchirapalli Proclamation' and which emphasised that the British rulers should quit India. Maruthu brothers organised a disciplined movement against the British Government. They collected various kings of south India and organised a rebellion. The British troops started war against the brave brothers on 28.05.1801. The Maruthu brothers carried out guerrilla attacks against them. The war did not end as per the expectations of the British rulers. Because of their brave fighting, the war went on for 150 days. The Marudhu brothers continued guerrilla attacks against the British Army. A prize money was announced by the British Army for giving information about Marudhu brothers. It worked out. The Marudhu brothers were arrested and imprisoned. Finally, they were hanged with their associates in the ruined fort of Thiruppathur, Sivaganga District, Tamil Nadu, on 24.10.1801

Two hundred years ago...Veerapandiya Kattabomman and the early challenges to British Rule...

"Despite the size, wealth, historical contribution and contemporary importance of Tamil Nadu, its colonial history remains relatively unexplored. There are few substantial works on Tamil Nadu's social, economic and political history in the British period. While some pioneering studies of Tamil Nadu have been contributed by scholars from abroad, few researchers have chosen to tread the path of the history of nationalist politics; consequently, large tracts of nationalist history in Tamil Nadu are yet to be written..... Our understanding of the evolution of nationalism in Tamil Nadu has been further complicated by the emergence there of social and political movements, at times overlapping, which questioned aspects of nationalist politics and goals. With the emergence of the Justice Party in the second decade of the twentieth century, polemics would enter the discussion of Tamil Nadu's nationalist traditions, and perhaps serve to obscure the past.

Whatever the reasons, historians have generally bypassed the history of the nationalist movement in Tamil Nadu during the crucial years 1905-1914. Yet it was this period which saw the emergence of such major political figures as G. Subramania Iyer V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and Subramania Bharati. (Even today, Bharati continues to be a favourite for his captivating nationalistic writings and social radicalism.)...

...A basic premise of this study is that the nationalist movement in Tamil Nadu, a movement of richness and historical depth, merits as close attention as have nationalist movements in other parts of India. Its starting point is the late eighteenth century. Chapter 1 traces early manifestations of anti-colonial feeling in Tamil Nadu: the rebellions led by the poligars of Tirunelveli and Shivagana, and the sepoy revolt at Vellore in 1806. The factors behind the uprisings are analysed and their fallout discussed. Attention then turns to the nineteenth century social reform movement, which in Tamil Nadu, as elsewhere in India, preceded the establishment of provincial political associations. As will be seen, issues of social reform would generate tensions and divisions within the political associations as they took shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century....

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Freedom Struggle

Peasant Revolts

Excerpted from In the Wake of Naxalbari by Sumanta Banerjee, Calcutta 1980

The early years of British rule in India were marked by widespread peasant rebellions. Long before the Sepoy Rebellion -- often regarded as the first war of Indian independence -- hungry peasants of Bengal and Bihar, victims of a terrible famine (1770) rose in revolt against the East India Company, which had been exacting money and crops from them. This was the famous Sannyasi rebellion. A large number of sannyasis and fakirs who were being fleeced by the British rulers through various forms of exactions, played an important role in organizing the peasants and hence the name --Sannyasi Rebellion. Along with the peasants and the sannyasis and fakir, there were also village artisans -- the famous silk weavers of Bengal, who had been made to slave for the British merchants -- and the thousands of unemployed soldiers from the disbanded Mughal army. Led by Majnu Shah, Bhabani Pathak, Debi Chaudhurani and a host of heroic figures, the rebellion continued till the beginning of the 19th century and was marked by daring attacks on the East India Company's offices in different parts of Bihar and Bengal, killing of notorious Indian landlords and money-lenders as well as of oppressive British traders and army officers, and both guerilla and positional warfare against the British army.

The chieftans' uprising of peasant rebels spread all over South India from 1800-1801, against the British soldiers and Indian feudal princes. The rebels under the leadership of Marudu Pandyan of Sivaganga, Malappan of Ramnad, and several other chieftans -- all men of the masses -- succeeded in forming a Peninsula Confederacy all over South India, and after having defeated the British army in different parts of South India, established their sway over a large number of villages, where people's committees were formed and villagers refused to pay taxes to the East India Company. [South Indian Rebellion -- First War of Independence, 1800-1801 by K. Rajayyan, 1974].

The challenge posed by the rebels was so serious that the British had tomarch detachments from Ceylon, Malaya and England on an emergency basis to crush the rebellion. But "more than what the English did, the decisive factor that rendered the rebel fortunes unsustainable was the hostile attitude of the princes. The devoted service rendered by them not only made the power of the English formidable, but crippled the will of the patriots and excited dissension within their ranks." [ibid]

In 1820, the Ho tribal peasants of Chhotanagpur in Bihar, rose against the British rulers and the local money-lenders and zamindars. The establishment of British authority in the area, had led to dislocation in the socio-economic living pattern of the Ho people. A large number of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh traders and money-lenders had come and settled among them. Their lands were being occupied by these outsiders through contracts enforced by courts of law. Widespread discontent ensued among the Hos. The first Ho uprising of 1820 was suppressed soon by the British. But the Hos rose again in 1821. This time they were well-organized and strong enough to besiege the fort of Chinepoor, and had the entire Kolhan area at their mercy. The zamindars and the Rajah of Porahat appealed to the British for help, and the Ho uprising was ruthlessly crushed.

In fact, the Chhotanagpur area remained a centre of turbulent uprisings throughout the 19th century. The Oraons -- another tribal communityrebelled in 1820, 1832, 1890. The Kol tribals organized an insurrection in 1831-32 which was directed mainly against Government officers and private money-lenders. The Mahajans extracted 70 per cent or more interest and many Kols became boded labourers for life. The immensity of the Kol rebellion could he gauged from the fact that troops had to be rushed from far off places like Calcutta, Danapur and Benaras to quell it.

Another important rebellion of this period was the Wahabi uprising in Bengal under the leadership of the famous Titu Meer in 1831. What began as a religious reform movement soon turned into an armed revolt against orthodox mullahs, feudal landlords and British soldiers. Although Titu and his peasant followers who fought their last heroic battle from within a bamboo fortress in a village called Narikelbaria, were defeated by the British in course of the insurrection, Titu had managed to oust the British through successive operations from several villages in South 24-Parganas, Nadia and Jessore, where he established a parallel authority and collected taxes from zamindars.

But a more stirring source of inspiration for future agrarian struggles ws the Santhal uprising of 1855-57. The Santhal country extended from Bhagalpur in Bihar in the north to Orissa in the south, the centre being Damin-i-koh (meaning the skirts of the hill), situated near the Rajmahal Hills, stretching from Hazaribagh to the borders of Bengal. The Santhal tribes reclaimed from wild jungles every square foot of arable land, where they cultivated and lived peacefully till the arrival of Bengali and other traders and merchants. The latter persuaded the Santhal peasants to buy luxury goods on credit, and later at harvest time forced them to pay back the loans along with interest. The balance against the Santhal in the mahajan-cum-trader's book increased year by year, till the poor peasant was compelled to give up, not only his crops but gradually his plough and bullocks, and finally his land, to meet the demands of the traders. As the debt, lying like an incubus upon the landless Santhals, daily grew upon them, many were reduced to bond-slaves pledging their future descendants to the service of the creditors' families.

The leaders of the Santhal rebellion were two brothers - Sidu and Kanu of Bhagnadihi. Organized on a vast scale, it swept across the entire Santhal region from Bihar to Orissa. Frustrated in their repeated attempts in the past to seek justice from courts and minions of the law, the peasants raised the cry -- "Death to the money-lenders, the police, the civil court officers and the landlords !" It thus took on in effect the nature of an anti-feudal and anti-state movement. Within a few months the tables were turned. The whirlwind fanned up by the money-lenders swept down upon them without pity or remorse. Notorious landlords, traders and mahajans were selected and killed. Later historians expressed their shock at the "brutalities" committed by the rebels, but chose to ignore the years of grinding brutality that the peasants had to suffer at the hands of the landlords and traders. The Santhal rebels were joined by poor and landless peasants of other lower castes and village artisans. They defeated the British troops in several encounters, forcing the colonial administration to declare martial law over a vast expanse from Birbhum and Murshidabad in Bengal to Bhagalpur in Bihar --the area where the rebels succeeded in destroying all semblance of British rule. The Santhal rebellion was finally crushed by the British troops. About 10,000 rebels perished in the unequal fight between peasants armed with bows and arrows on the one side and soldiers equipped with firearms, on the other.

Sporadic peasant revolts found their culmination in the 1857 uprising, which besides being a mutiny of sepoys and a putsch by the ex-rulers of the country had, as an important component, thousands of spontaneous peasants' jacqueries all over North India. Although bourgeois historians have glossed over the role of the peasantry in the 1857 uprising, contemporary records provide ample information to help us measure the extent of peasant participation. A British eye-witness account, according to one historian, admits : ".. .in Oudh the whole population was up in arms; every village was fortified, and everyman's hand was against us. As an example it may be pointed out that out of the 40,000 men who besieged Lucknow, 20,000 went away to sow the fields." [The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857, R.C. Majumdar, Calcutta, 1963]. In February 1858, in the battle that took place at Miagunj, between Lucknow and Kanpur, among the 8,000 rebel soldiers that fought the British, only 1,000 were sepoys, the rest being peasants from adjacent villages.

Within a few weeks of the uprising, British rule was almost demolished all over northern India. In a bid to establish some sort of people's rule, the rebels set up a "Court of Administration" with elected representatives from the sepoys and other sections of the population. The rest of the story is well known.

Even after 1857, and the consolidation of British rule in India, the ferment of unrest among the peasants burst forth periodically into revolts. The peasants of Bengal, forced to cultivate indigo under a life-long bondage to the British planters who exported the blue dye to Britain to feed the requirements of the growing cotton industry there, rose in a rebellion in 1850, and succeeded in putting an end to the hated system.

Under the leadership of Birsa, the Mundas of the Ranchi area fought the Hindu landlords in 1895. In the princely states of Rajasthan, the traditionally militant Bhil and Meo peasants fought against the local money-lenders and landlords. In the south, the Moplah peasants of Malabar rose against feudal extortions and oppression.

Two major peasant uprisings that occurred in India in more recent times were, the Tebhaga movement in undivided Bengal in 1946, and the insurrection at Telengana from 1946-51. Unlike the usually sporadic and spontaneous peasant revolts of the past, both the two developments were politically inspired and had a firm organizational basis and practical programme. The then undivided Communist Party of India played a leading role in both the events. The Tebhaga [three parts] movement, as its name indicates, demanded the reduction of the share of the landowners from one-half of the crop to one-third. Peasants, under the leadership of the Communist Party dominated Kisan Sabhas, cultivated the fields and took away forcibly two-third of the harvested crops to their granaries. The landlords attacked the peasants with the help of mercenary toughs and the police, and bloody clashes ensued. The movement spread from village to village, from Dinajpur and Rangpur in North Bengal to 24-Parganas in the south of the province. Although primarily launched on economic demands, the rebellion in some areas led to the flight of landlords leaving the villages at the mercy of the peasants, who often virtually turned them into 'liberated areas' administering affairs in the villages through the Kisan Sabha. For various reasons, the The Tebhaga movement finally petered out.

THE TELENGANA LIBERATION STRUGGLE

The insurrection at Telengana was of a more lasting value, both because of its achievements and its military organization. Telengana was a part of the former Hyderabad State in South India. It was the biggest princely state in India with 17 districts and a population of 17 million at that time, ruled by the Nizam. The Telegu-speaking Telengana region occupied half the area.

The peasant struggle in Telengana which began in 1946, was against forced labour, illegal exactions, evictions by feudal landlords and oppression by village Patels, among other things and later developed into an agrarian liberation struggle to get rid of feudal landlordism and the Nizam's dynastic rule in the state. The struggle continued even after the Nizam's rule ended with the entry of Indian troops in September 1948 and the merger of the Hyderabad State into the Indian Union. From elementary self-defence with lathis and slings against the landlords' hired hoodlums and police, the struggle evolved into a full-scale armed revolt against the Nizam and his army, and later against the offensive of the Indian troops.

By 1947, a guerilla army of about 5,000 was operating in Telengana. During the course of the struggle which continued till 1951, the people could organize and build a powerful militia comprising 10,000 village squad members and about 2,000 regular guerilla squads. The peasantry in about 3,000 villages, covering roughly a population of three million in an area of about 16,000 square miles, mostly in the three districts of Nalgonda, Warangal and Khammam, succeeded in setting up gram-raj or village Soviets. The landlords were driven away from the villages, their lands seized, and one million acres of land were redistributed among the peasantry. As many as 4,000 communists and peasant activists were killed, and more than 10,000 communist and sympathizers were put behind the bars, initially by the Nizam's government, and later by the armed forces of the Indian Government.

Describing the strategy and tactics adopted by the rebels during the anti-Nizam phase of the struggle, i.e. before September 1948, one Communist leader who was also a participant in the struggle wrote : "It was felt that we could not resist the raids of army, police and Razakars* without well-trained guerillas. The initial prerequisites were collection of arms and formation of guerilla squads. All the previous struggles were of an economic nature and in self-defence. Although they were politically significant they were not products of the slogan of political liberation. Consequently future struggles had to be planned with the slogan of political liberation unlike in the past. The Communist Party and Andhra Mahasabha [the mass front from behind which the illegal Communist Party had to work] jointly gave a call for collection of arms and formation of guerilla squads. A directive was issued for sudden raids in the night on homes of landlords and seizure of their weapons on a fixed date ... Guerilla squads were formed with young men who could devote all their time. This was the first type of squad. A second sort of squad for village defence was organized with such men who could not devote all their time to guerilla squads. The third category 'of squads was composed of those who destroyed the communication and transport lines of the army and razakars.... Some comrades who had formerly worked in the army imparted training in tactics of warfare. After some time there emerged instructors 'among our workers. This was a consequence of continued battles and expansion of squads." [Heroic Telengana by Ravi Narayan Reddy, 1973]

Describing the administration of the villages from where officials and lordlords fled, the writer said : "Lands enjoyed by the landlords with false revenue certificates were taken over and distributed. A ceiling on landlord's holding was fixed and the rest distributed among the people, particularly among agricultural labourers and the landless poor. All the lands, implements and cattle of landlords who were allies of the enemy were taken over and distributed. Documents of debts with money-lenders and landlords were destroyed and such debts made infructuous. Hundreds of quintals of foodgrains were taken over from the godowns of traitors and given away to the people. Wages of agricultural labour were raised." [ibid]

By September 1948, when the Indian Army moved in, about one-sixth of the region had passed over to Communists, who had started re-distributing land confiscated from the landlords, among the peasants. But differences developed among the CPI leaders of Telengana in 1948, after the entry of the Indian Army. Finally, in 1951 the Communist Party asked its followers to surrender arms and withdraw the movement.

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Veerapandiya Kattabomman & the Poligar rebellion

In Tamil Nadu, as in other parts of India, the earliest expressions of opposition to British rule took the form of localised rebellions and uprisings. Chief among these was the revolt of the palayakkarargal (poligars) against the East India Company in 1799.

The poligari system had evolved with the extension of Vijayanagar rule into Tamil Nadu. Each poligar was the holder of a territory or palayam (usually consisting of a few villages), granted to him in return for military service and tribute.

Where circumstances allowed, the poligars naturally tended to place less emphasis on performing their duties and more on enhancing their own powers. Given their numerical strength, extensive resources, local influence and independent attitude, the poligars came to constitute a powerful force in the political system of south India. They regarded themselves as independent, sovereign authorities within their respective palayams, arguing that their lands had been handed down to them across a span of sixty generations Such claims of course were to be brushed aside by the East India Company...

The East India Company, eager for revenue, opposed the manner and scale in which the poligars collected taxes from the people. The issue of taxation?more specifically, who was to collect it, the traditional rulers or the rapacious new collectors from overseas ?lay at the root of the subsequent uprising. As one British Collector noted:

I again repeated that. . . unless the poligar were deprived of his power, and my recommendations went to the fullest extent of the measure, the Company's investment would be materially checked, the weavers residing in the Panchalamkurichi palayam would be stripped off their property, and the largest part of the advances made to them by the commercial resident exposed to considerable danger.

...The early struggle between the poligars of south and East India Company, although essentially a battle over tax collection, had a strong political dimension. The English treated the poligars, perceived as a rival power, as their inveterate enemies, allowing their hostility full expression in their accounts...

When in 1799 the poligars of Tirunelveli District rose in open rebellion, the East India Company took all possible measures to check the spread of the uprising. A detachment of Company troops was speedily deployed against the Tirunelveli poligars, while dire warnings were issued to poligars in other parts of the south not to join the rebellion. The Company, which regarded the poligars as the 'scourge of the country', determined to deprive the ringleaders of their palayats and punish them in an exemplary fashion.

Collector Jackson singled out Kattabomma Nayak of Panchalamkurichi as the main leader of the rebellion. That came to be known as the First Poligari War was declared on 5 September 1799. Although Kattabomman managed to escape from the field of battle, he was captured a month later in Pudukottai. After a summary trial, he was sentenced to death by Major Bannerman, Commander of the East India Company troops. He was publicly hanged near Kayattar Fort, close to the town of Tirunelveli, in front of fellow poligars who had been summoned to witness the execution.

Subramania Pillai, a close associate of Kattabomma Nayak, was also publicly hanged and his head was fixed on a pike at Panchalamkurichi. Soundra Pandian Nayak, another rebel leader, was brutally done to death by having his brains dashed against a village wall.

Despite the exemplary repression of 1799, however, rebellion broke out again in 1800, this time in a more cohesive and united manner. Although the 1800-1801 rebellion was to be categorised in British records as the Second Poligari War, it assumed a much broader character than its predecessor. It was directed by a confederacy consisting of Marudu Pandian of Sivaganga, Gopala Nayak of Dindugal, Kerala Verma of Malabar and Krishnappa Nayak and Dhoondaji of Mysore. The insurrection, which broke out in Coimbatore in June 1800, soon spread to Ramanathapuram and Madurai. By May 1801, it had reached the northern provinces, where Marudu Pandian, Melappan and Puttur provided the leadership. Oomathurai, the brother of Kattabomma Nayak, emerged as a key leader. In February 1801, Oomathurai and two hundred men by a clever stratagem took control of Panchalamkuriclli Fort, in which Oomathurai's relatives were imprisoned.

Its fort now re-occupied and reconstructed by rebel forces Panchalamkurichi became the nerve centre of the uprising. British dismay was boundless. As one eyewitness put it,

' . . . to our utter astonishment, we discovered that the walls, which had been entirely levelled, were now rebuilt, and fully manned by about fifteen hundred poligars.'

Three thousand armed men of Madurai and Ramanathapuram, despatched by Marudu Pandian, joined up with the Panchalamkurichi forces. However, British military superiority having just destroyed the far more formidable challenge posed by Tipu Sultan in Mysore, quickly asserted itself. The poligar forces based at Panchalamkurichi were crushed and, by the orders of the colonial government, the site of the captured fort was ploughed up and sowed with castor oil and salt so that it should never again be inhabited.

The colonial forces quickly overpowered the remaining insurgents. The Marudu brothers and their sons were put to death, while Oomathurai and Sevatiah were beheaded at Panchalamkurichi on 16 November, 1801. Seventy-three of the principal rebels were sentenced to perpetual banishment. So savage and extensive was the death and destruction wrought by the English that the entire region was left in a state of terror.

The suppression of the poligar rebellions of 1799 and 1800-1801 resulted in the liquidation of the influence of the chieftains. Under the terms of the Carnatic Treaty (31 July, 1801), the British assumed direct control over Tamil Nadu. The poligari system, which had flourished for two and a half centuries, came to a violent end and the Company introduced a zamindari settlement in its place.

While it is obviously premature and misleading to attach the term 'nationalist' to the struggle of the poligars, or to portray it as some kind of mass movement, the uprising does appear to have attracted some popular support. In subsequent years, a good deal of legend and folklore would develop around Kattabomman and the Marudu brothers. Long after Kattabomman's execution, Kayattar, his place of death, remained a place of political pilgrimage. In his Tinnevelly Gazetteer of 1917, H. R. Pate notes the presence in Kayattar of 'a great pile of stones of all sizes, which represents the accumulated offerings by wayfarers of the past hundred years'. Folk songs recalling the heroism of the poligar leaders remain alive in Tamil Nadu to this day..."

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Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Anand A. Yang
University of Washington

Convicts transported from South Asia to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were part of a global system of forced migration. Along with the convicts sent to Australia from Britain and Ireland, they were, as scholars of transportation have rightly insisted, 1

part of a larger international and intercontinental flow of forced migration including ... French, Spanish and Russian convicts, and "bonded" Indian and Melanesian contract labour. After 1820 a quarter of a million convicts were shipped across the world's oceans to colonise Australia, New Caledonia, Singapore and French Guiana, and to meet labour demand in Gibraltar, Bermuda, Penang, Malacca and Mauritius.... Transportation, like the recruiting of slaves and the contracting of bonded workers, was complementary to the international migration of free European peoples before 1914. Convictism was a labour system existing in many countries of the world in the nineteenth century.1
Indeed, the history of transported convicts can be located "within the comparative literature of international 'unfree' labour migration" and tied to 2

such "mainstream" topics as: the slave-trade from Atlantic and Indian Ocean Africa; the Trans-Saharan slave-trade; the international migration of indentured labourers from South and East Asia; the large-scale mobilization of various kinds of 'unfree' migrant labour within colonial Africa and South Asia; the migration of indentured servants from Britain to North America and the Caribbean; and the uses made of all this vast and varied flow of humanity on the one hand and its own historical agency, lived experience and cultural history on the other, in destinations around the world.2
The flows of convict workers between 1787 and 1920 involved significant numbers, especially to Australia. The traffic from Britain?extensively studied because of its centrality in the peopling of Australia?involved as many as 80,000 to New South Wales between 1788 and 1840; 67,000 to 69,000 to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) between 1801 and 1852; and two smaller cohorts of 3,000 and 9,700 people during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. These forced migrations followed on the heels of the transportation of some 50,000 convicted felons from Britain to North America, principally to Maryland and Virginia, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Smaller in scale and far less known are the movements of convicts from South Asia to Southeast Asia. India dispatched 4,000?6,000 convicts to Bengkulen between 1787 and 1825 and 15,000 to the Straits Settlements between 1790 and 1860. Another 1,000?1,500 were transported from Ceylon to Malacca in the Straits Settlements between 1849 and 1873, and several thousand more were sent to Burma and to areas outside of Southeast Asia, principally Mauritius between 1815 and 1837 and the Andaman Islands after 1857.3 3
This paper tracks the history of convicts from South Asia to their Southeast Asian penal destinations in order to assess their roles as "convict workers." That is, it examines their roles as members of a labor force that was recruited and organized to service the projects of the emerging British Empire in the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 4
My use of the term "convict workers," derived from the revisionist scholarship on Australian convict history, is deliberate. As in that literature, so too here it is intended to underscore their roles as productive laborers and to shift attention away from their criminal pasts, which previously misled considerations of their potential and effectiveness as workers. Nor did the earlier generation of writings in Australian history apparently plumb deeply enough into the criminal and personal backgrounds of the offenders. Instead it wrongly assumed that the convicts were "professional and habitual criminals" whose character and criminality destined them to become inefficient workers. The notion of "convict workers" therefore tilts against "the received interpretation ... [that] has emphasised male convicts as hardened and professional criminals, females as prostitutes and convictism as a brutal and inefficient system of forced labour."4 5
The new emphasis on convicts as workers is also directed at relocating the scholarship on convict transportation within the comparative literature of " 'unfree' labor migration." Such a global perspective moves away from the earlier insistence on viewing the phenomenon of transportation solely within national histories and toward understanding its comparability with other forms of forced migrations and its direct connections to these other flows, as this account of their experiences in Southeast Asia will indicate. 6
Although the discussion here is centered on Indian convicts, it recognizes that they were part of a larger traffic pattern in South and Southeast Asia that transported different peoples in different directions across these regions. "[N]atives of the Malay countries" were transferred to India, Chinese from Singapore and Hong Kong were exiled to India and from Hong Kong also briefly to the Straits Settlements, and convicts from Ceylon and Burma were dispatched to these venues as well.5 In 1853 the convicts lodged in the Straits were described as of a "most heterogeneous nature, comprising individuals not only of all the tribes of Asia from the Punjaub to Ceylon, but also men from many of the provinces of China, Jews, Parsees[,] Seedi Caffers and Malays, and the House of Correction ... held of late not a few Europeans ..."6 7
Indian convict transportation to Southeast Asia provided much needed labor in the rising outposts of the British Empire in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Important in this historical context is an understanding of the conditions and circumstances that generated a pressing need for their labor as well as of the roles these convicts played?literally and figuratively?in establishing and consolidating the foundations of colonial rule. Significant also to this study is the larger framework of labor in all its more coerced and less forced varieties ranging from slavery and serfdom that "have generally been permanent conditions" to "unfree labor" that is essentially temporary. Convict labor falls into the latter category, as does "indenture, military service, debt peonage, and apprenticeship, as well as the systems used to enforce types of agricultural and mining labor in various parts of the world." Slavery, by contrast, is generally not "limited in duration" and often entitles "the rulers having the right and ability to exploit labor and to control not only the serf or slave, but also their off spring."7 Labor in Southeast Asia tended to be organized by slavery, bondage, and dependency. In the words of one scholar, "the labour system of Southeast Asia through most of its recorded history ... [was] based on the obligation to labour for a creditor, master or lord."8 8
Although the prevailing Southeast Asian labor system decisively shaped the colonial framework in which Indian convict labor became imperative, it was rarely factored into the British discourse about labor. Official discourse, in fact, shied away from highlighting the ties that bound together the different systems of coerced labor, almost as if colonial administrators were fearful of their advocacy of convict labor eroding the high moral ground that they had claimed by advocating the abolition of slavery in the region. The two forms of labor were nonetheless closely interrelated: the closing down of the slave trade (banned in theory by the British parliament in 1807) and the subsequent abolition of slavery in many areas of the region exacerbated labor shortages. So did local labor systems by virtue of their networks of bondage and obligation that discouraged the growth of a labor market. "Southeast Asians," notes one writer, "themselves appear to have continued to regard wage labour as alien and demeaning."9 9
Implicit here but not developed in any detail is my larger argument made elsewhere about convicts characterizing themselves as Company ke naukar (servants of the company). Indian convicts, in other words, opted to define themselves as workers, as men who were engaged in the service of the East India Company rather than as bandwars (prisoners, literally means those locked up). The idea of naukar or retainer, an offshoot of the term naukari or service, stemmed from the precolonial concept of "honourable service in the warband, the retainership of the lord's companion, hence employment." Whereas today it implies menial service, it meant something quite different in the colonial era when it alluded primarily to "long distance service as a retainer, for instance in the British East India Company's army" or as migrant labor.10 10
Whether the notion of the transportation experience as naukari or service arose exclusively out of the convict roles as workers overseas or grew out of the labor regimens that some prisoners in some prisons in India followed prior to the development of transportation cannot be clearly ascertained. However, it is highly unlikely that the term sprang up on Indian soil in conjunction with the incarceration experience because prisons were a relatively new phenomenon in the late eighteenth century, and relatively newer was even the possibility of employing prisoners to engage in manual labor. Indeed, the practice of organizing prisoners to perform manual labor did not become a systematic or widespread practice until the beginning of the nineteenth century. By then, the term naukars (or retainers or servants), which convicts applied to themselves, was already in usage. The use of the term naukari may have also emerged as an apposite self-designation because long-distance service was central to the transportation experience.11 11
Convicts, furthermore, increasingly defined themselves as part of an "Indian" community that emerged in these outposts of empire as a result of the mixing and melding of different groups of people from the South Asian subcontinent. This community consisted of transportees and sepoys (soldiers), as well as a number of other groups, including indentured laborers who began to trickle in toward the middle of the nineteenth century and then stream in much greater numbers later that century. Convicts developed a more encompassing identity through their shared experiences as laborers, subject positions that enabled people drawn from different regions of the Indian subcontinent and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to forge a sense of a wider Indian community.12 12
The identities of Indian convict workers were also shaped by their encounters with other ethnic groups. For instance, in Bengkulen in the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, they lived and labored alongside the East India Company's other major coerced labor group, African slaves who had been brought in primarily from Madagascar. Indian convicts and "kaffirs"?as African slaves were called in this region?worked so closely together that they were jointly supervised by an officer designated the superintendent of "convicts and coffrees [kaffirs]." Work and residential associations also issued out of and resulted in their teaming up sexually and permanently, arrangements that typically involved Indian convicts who were overwhelmingly male pairing up with African slaves who were predominantly female. In addition, Indian convicts were involved in liaisons with Malay women. All these relationships were further complicated by the fact that Malay women also consorted with Indian soldiers, thus further consolidating the social and personal ties that often formed among all the different groups of Indians who were thrown together in the foreign lands across the black waters. In some localities Indian convict workers also labored side by side with imported Chinese workers and some local Malay men.13 13
Indian convict workers forged ties to Indian indentured workers as well and to the rest of the Indian community by adapting to a variety of roles, both when they served in the capacity of unfree labor and when they stayed on as free labor in the penal colonies. My argument about the development of an "Indian" community also entails extending the connections between slavery and bondage on the one hand and forced convict labor on the other hand to encompass indentured labor. My contention is not that indentured labor represented "a new system of slavery" or was, by contrast, a labor migration of opportunity. Rather it insists on linking the two, on establishing the connections between the earlier forced migration of convicts and the later streams of Indian migrant labor that gained in size and momentum by the 1840s. By the 1880s Indian indentured laborers numbered over 10,000 a year.14 14
I will focus first on highlighting the dynamics that led Indian convicts to become part of a global system of forced migration and part of a productive labor force in the enclaves of the rising British Empire in Southeast Asia. Part of the discussion here is centered on unraveling the contradictory policy impulses of the colonial authorities in South and Southeast Asia. The Indian government was primarily concerned with the penal aspects of transportation while the administration in the latter sites were principally interested in the labor utility of the able-bodied men they had acquired. My discussion will then shift attention to the convict workers themselves and their activities in the Southeast Asian penal colonies. Their story ends in the late nineteenth century, when the major penal sites in the Straits Settlements, specifically Singapore, refused to accept any more convicts from South Asia. 15
Developing out of the medieval punishment of banishment, transportation had been in existence in England since the sixteenth century, and it became more widely used in the late seventeenth century when North America was opened up to receiving convict traffic. In the eighteenth century it was by "far the most important of all ... secondary punishments ... in which minor criminals or those reprieved from the death sentence were banished to foreign lands as indentured labour. Transportation overseas was a feature unique to British penal culture."15 16
Transplanted to India in the late eighteenth century, transportation took root in the emerging colonial penal culture of the early nineteenth century and flourished because colonial administrators viewed it as an especially suitable technology of punishment for Indian society and culture. In India, as in England, it was aimed at attaining the penal objectives of removing criminals from their local societies, of deterring others from committing crimes, and of reforming the convicts.16 And in India it was believed to have the added virtue of being a transgressive punishment, that is, it transgressed indigenous notions about the religious and cultural dangers of crossing the kala pani or the "black waters." 17
Thus, British officials considered transportation to be "a weapon of tremendous power. The horror with which the people regard transportation is a feeling born with them, and the questions whether it be a wise or a foolish feeling, whether it be a just deduction from true premises or the result of ignorance and superstition, are nothing to the purpose."17 In other words, transportation was said to pack an extra punitive punch because of its negative cultural and religious implications. Furthermore, because of the peculiarly Indian cultural currency of this punishment, it was to be appraised differently in India than in England. Therefore the objections of the "many persons of very high authority ... who have made themselves masters of the science of criminal-discipline" (presumably among them the law reformer Jeremy Bentham) and who raised doubts about its merits were not pertinent to the Indian penal scene.18 18
Transportation, as utilized by the colonial regime, had little precedence in Indian history. Although banishment existed as a punishment for certain crimes in ancient India, its scope appears to have been limited. According to the Manusmrti (the code of law associated with Manu) and to other ancient texts, it was a substitute punishment for Brahmins whose transgressions otherwise merited the death penalty or branding. It was also levied on offenders for crimes ranging from adultery to not rendering assistance when a village was being plundered, and on undesirable characters such as gamblers and heretics that the authorities wanted to expel from their kingdom. Little evidence exists as to the specific areas to which people were banished. Apparently, the practice simply was to ensure that offenders left the state or the kingdom that banished them.19 19
The British interest in utilizing this "weapon of tremendous power" was enhanced by their preoccupation with the deployment of punishments that inflicted a "just measure of pain." Ironically, this emphasis meshed uncomfortably with their rhetoric that sought a moral high ground by espousing the replacement of harsh Islamic laws with the civilized and civilizing regime of colonial discipline and punishment. Indeed, colonial law increasingly replaced or revised Islamic law in the initial century of the Raj, discarding particularly those punishments the British considered repugnant such as mutilation?a trend that conformed with the European tendency to shift away from torture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But this represented one trend at a time when the overall emphasis was on ensuring that the severity of punishments was not undermined and that appropriate punishments existed to facilitate the maintenance and enhancement of law and order. 20
Jorg Fisch's study of the British transformation of the Bengal criminal law between 1769 and 1817 has judiciously extricated the seemingly "humanitarian" strands of legal changes from the larger fabric with its clear-cut sanguinary design. 21

Punishments more or less familiar from Europe were hardly ever questioned, flogging included, while capital offences were much more frequent in English than in Islamic law.... Crime had to be fought in the interests of the state and of society. This led to deterrence and prevention as the most important means. Almost every measure was justified if it contributed to them....
British administrators ... did not want to revenge, to retaliate or to impose suffering for its own sake. The ultimate goal of the punishment was not the body of the criminal but rather the impact on society and the future behaviour of the offender. Within this framework, mutilation was of doubtful use. It caused much and long suffering, while its deterrent effect was limited, and it encouraged rather than prevent the commission of further crimes by the punished person. Capital punishment, on the other hand, excellently fitted in with the British needs: it could be administered with comparatively little physical suffering, but with much deterrent effect, and its preventive value was absolute. Transportation was seen in a similar manner ...20
Central to the colonial preoccupation with transportation was the British belief in the unusual "power" that it exerted over indigenous minds. And many colonial administrators continued to repose their faith in the "horror" of the punishment, even in the face of growing evidence to the contrary over the course of the nineteenth century. Such conviction grew out of the long-standing belief that Indians regarded the punishment with dread and out of the rising colonial state's desire for balancing and even vitiating "humanitarian" reform by perfecting a suitable technology of punishment for India and Indians. This framework guided colonial administrators from the very outset of their attempts at "reforming" Indian laws and punishments. Consider the responses of magistrates to the inquiry instituted by Governor-General Cornwallis into the criminal justice system in 1789 and 1790. An underlying tone in these deliberations was a concern about the lack of severity in punishments applied by the new colonial legal system. Several administrators therefore urged the establishment of more sanguinary punishments, including public hangings; some recommended the imposition of transportation.21 22
Much the same tenor is discernible in the responses that Governor-General Wellesley elicited from his subordinate officers when he sought out their views on the prevailing judicial and penal systems. In fact, the official voices were even more insistent on this occasion that transportation be deployed as the "weapon" of choice against certain kinds of criminals. Once again the accent was on the "horror" that the punishment evoked among Indians. The three judges of the Provincial Courts of Appeal and Circuit in Calcutta, for instance, reported that transportation was "considered by many as more severe than death." The judge of Bakarganj chimed in that "natives in general dread it more than hanging; and persons under that sentence have repeatedly requested me to get their sentences changed to death in preference." The judge and magistrate of Hughli lamented that it was not utilized more extensively because it was "held in such terror."22 23
The 1838 report of the Committee on Prison-Discipline, which became the textual primer for the emerging "scientific" discourse on penology in colonial India, echoed these sentiments. Charged with designing a "good machinery for the infliction of punishment"23?a machinery that was to work in tandem with the new penal code that the Law Commission was formulating?the committee found transportation to its liking because of its "horror" and "terror" potential. Although imprisonment received the most extensive coverage in the report because it was considered the primary punishment, transportation was singled out as the second most important form of punishment. A "distinct" section of the report highlighted the "system under which that punishment is now inflicted, with a few recommendations of improvements ... and our plan of a new system under which we recommend the future infliction of that punishment."24 24
Transportation, to use the words of the Committee on Prison-Discipline report, was "a branch of prison-discipline," its value as a punishment measurable largely in terms of its effectiveness in relation to imprisonment. Whereas the committee acknowledged that "the temporary discipline of a penitentiary has great advantages over the temporary discipline of a penal settlement," it was decidedly in favor of transportation for life, which it considered a highly reliable form of "criminal discipline." The subject of capital punishment it chose not to broach, at least not to consider extending its use. However, it did weigh the merits of "whether death or transportation were [sic] the most awful to the people" and found "that transportation for life would generally, in India, have a greater deterring effect than this most grievous infliction." Transportation, according to the committee report, was also the tougher punishment in the eyes of those people "who do not consider imprisonment for life, in solitude and without occupation, a punishment absolutely unjustifiable." From this line of reasoning followed the conclusion that "at present imprisonment for life is universally considered as the milder, and transportation for life as the severer punishment. In fact the permanence of the effect in both punishments is equal, and the intensity of the effect of the latter in India, is incalculably greater than that of the former."25 25
Transportation was intensely feared by the people in India, the committee maintained. Unmistakable proof of this attitude was its finding "that even under the present very lax treatment of transported convicts, out of those who are actually experiencing the tedium of perpetual confinement in Allipore Gaol, to whom if to any native the idea of novelty and release from the walls of a prison would be agreeable, few comparatively have petitioned to have their sentences commuted to transportation."26 The superintendent of this Calcutta jail offered his support for this belief when he urged that the "desperate characters" held in his facility be banished overseas, "a plan" that he considered "more consonant with the principle of punishment, and more suitable to the condition of such heinous offenders."27 26
From the outset transportation was also developed as a punishment in India?as it had been in England?to serve economic objectives as well. The latter intention was clearly spelled out in the Transportation Act of 1717, specifically in its wording that "in many of His Majesty's colonies and plantations in America, there was a great want of servants, who by their labour and industry might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation."28 In short, this punishment had the added advantage of supplying "servants" to labor-deficit areas that were vital to the project of the British Empire. 27
From the outset, the colonial decision to extend transportation to India was made with an eye to realizing both the penal and economic objectives. Certainly well aware of these dual goals was the superintendent of the Andamans, the first systematic major penal settlement for convicts from South Asia. Writing in 1795, he insisted that "in all cases of transportation two points must be established[:] the one that there is strong local attachment from habit, possession of fixed property; ties of consanguinity or affection, the dissolving of which with condemnation to hard labour constitutes the exemplary punishment, the other that the country chosen for the place of banishment is to derive benefit ..." He added that this advantage was attained "by the acquisition of even such bad subjects as was formerly the case in the transportation of convicts from Great Britain to its colonies in North America and at this time to Botany Bay." Furthermore, he emphasized that European convicts were not be added to the "native labourers" because they were incapable of working and surviving "in such a climate."29 28
In the initial years of transportation of convicts from South Asia to Southeast Asia, a few Europeans were transported along with Indians, and they were invariably treated differently. In fact, on the few occasions that European convicts?mostly Portuguese?were shipped out together with Indians they were housed separately and eventually placed in an overseer capacity over their fellow convicts from India. Generally, however, Europeans convicted of transportable offenses were dispatched to Australia. Furthermore, early on the authorities in London decided not to send any Indian convicts to Australia but to preserve it as a place for Europeans only.30 29
The punitive and economic objectives of transportation did not always dovetail, however. Certainly, they did not mesh well when the primary colonial interest in inflicting this punishment was in capitalizing on its severity and its capacity to deliver a "just measure of pain." By contrast, the transportation destinations were far more invested in its labor value, that is, in the promise of its capacity to provide a cheap and reliable pool of convict labor, the greater the number and the more physically fit the better. At times, these conflicting pulls, emanating largely from the sending and receiving ends, led to seemingly contradictory shifts in colonial policies about transportation. 30
The subject of transportation was broached in India as early as 1773, when Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, recommended banishing prisoners to Bengkulen (also known as Fort Marlborough) in West Sumatra. Although sources differ on when the first Indian convicts were actually transported there?according to one account as early as 178431?an early batch was sentenced by the Supreme Court in Calcutta in 1787 and deported to Bengkulen. Thereafter, other destinations were sought and developed because of the lack of jail facilities in Bengal and the increasing number of prisoners. In 1788 Governor-General Cornwallis recommended transportation to the Prince of Wales Island, better known as Penang, which
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6 months ago mmvchild 0 [good] [bad] [good] [bad]
a very good writeup about the historic place and region
congratulation.
the person is welcome to inform his identy
5 months ago yasar +6 [good] [bad] [good] [bad]
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இந்தியாவில் 60 வது சுதந்திரத்தைக் கொண்டாடுகின்ற இவ்வேளையில் இந்திய சுதந்திரத்திற்கு தனது சதவிகிதத்தையும் மிஞ்சும் விதத்தில் உயிர்களையும், உடமைகளையும் தியாகம் செய்த இஸ்லாமிய சமுதாயத்தின் தியாகத்தை மறந்திருந்தாலும் மன்னித்திருக்கலாம்... ஆனால் பாவிகள் திட்டமிட்டே அல்ல