The rise of British authority and power in India coincided with the emergence of new philosophical ideas of punishment in late 18th and early 19th century England, ideas which made it ‘just, reasonable, and humane to immure prisoners in solitary cells, clothe them in uniforms, regiment their day to the cadence of the clock, and “improve” their minds with dosages of scripture and hard labor’. Between 1770 and 1840 this form of carceral discipline ‘directed at the mind’ replaced a cluster of punishments ‘directed at the body’–whipping, branding, the stocks, and public hanging’.
Transplanted to India–although in a highly selective way because the idea of inflicting pain to the body continued to be an important operating principle–these conceptions of punishment were incorporated into a larger structure of colonial administration and rule. That is, the new science of punishment constituted part of a larger package of changes introducing penal and criminal codes, and establishing more effective mechanisms of control, particularly the formation of an organized and professional police force. These changes were designed not only to enhance and consolidate the rising power of the colonial state by creating a more complete infrastructure of control but also to augment the authority of the Raj by appropriating for the state the power and influence necessary to become the ‘ultimate source for norms, and definer of what was appropriate [behavior]’.
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