Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 1850-1945

by Satadru Sen

Overview

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843311782
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	08/01/2005
Series:	Anthem South Asian Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Satadru Sen teaches South Asian history at Washington University in St Louis. His research interests are in colonial India, the history of discipline, the history of youth and issues of race and identity.

Read an Excerpt

Colonial Childhoods

The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850â"1945

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By Satadru Sen

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Satadru Sen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-178-2

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CHAPTER 1

STATE OF THE EXPERIMENT: EXPERTS, PARENTS AND THE REFORMATORY

At present it must only be regarded as an experiment, though an experiment with a very fair chance of success, and one in which a little success will counterbalance many failures.

Bengal committee on reformatory schools, 1874

Expertise and experiments, rather than reformed children, were the prized products of the colonial reformatory. Not long after the initiation of the reformatory project in India, a curious assortment of career jailors, modernizing bureaucrats, native authority figures, women social workers, capitalists and religious colonizers had gathered under the umbrella of juvenile reform. As a group, they were similar to the 'voluntary empire' that Patricia Barton has identified in early twentieth-century entrepreneurial oversight, but not identical or coterminous, being much more closely affiliated with the state. Simultaneously, the increasing significance and authority of the 'professional' had expanded and complicated the qualifications that were required of the supervisors of institutionalized children. Under the circumstances, expertise and authority were not stable in their disciplinary, racial, geographical and gendered locations. They were contested continuously between 'qualified' professional and 'unqualified' worker, expert and expert, scientist and bureaucrat, birth parent and surrogate parent, European and native, metropolitan specialist and colonial improviser, institutional patriarch and female interloper.

This instability increased in the closing years of the nineteenth century as middle-class Indians became more assertive in the reformatory, because these men (and eventually women) brought with them their peculiar political imperatives. The criminality that European observers might locate in the nature of the native, middle-class Indians tended to locate in the nature of the child, or in the nature of the marginal. By the 1920s, this contest had undermined — but not fully transformed or destroyed — the nature of expertise itself, as correction overflowed the reformatory into legislative chambers, courts and mechanisms of parole and extra-institutional monitoring that were largely in the hands of Indians. The child in a racially charged colonial society thus provided a specific site where the substantive content and the political significance of expertise could be articulated and evolved.

The colonial reformatory was a legal experiment: a series of investigations of the legislative expertise of the state, and of the extent to which the Macaulayan legal project might anticipate and encompass native society. Extrapolating from Peter Fitzpatrick's analysis of the writings of Francisco Vitoria in the early Spanish empire, it might be posited that while the Indian reformatory was undergirded by a legal universalism, the experiment itself constantly produced peculiarity (savagery), undermining the universal nature of humanity and justifying the denial or postponement of the sovereignty of colonized populations. The fitness of colonial law could ultimately be investigated only through the resistance of those subjected to the law, but resistance also proved the unfitness of the native for universalistic institutions of law, correction and government. These investigations show a pervasive pessimism on the part of colonial administrators, with few exceptions. Pessimism may appear to be at odds with a project driven by expertise. Nevertheless, it is consonant with the nature of expertise in a colonial environment, because the pessimism of the expert is itself rhetoric of discovery — the discovery, for instance, of racial difference that is beyond the transforming power of colonial law, and that must be allowed to persist if colonialism is to continue as an encounter with inferiority. When the law and the reformatory were perceived as having failed, a greater failure was typically identified in the native child and its parents. Thus, like colonialism itself, the reformatory and its legal structure were self-limiting experiments, in which 'success' — the wholesale expansion of the experiment beyond the institutional enclave — was not seriously imagined, and in which the discourse of 'failure' was actually a validation and a valid product.

The experiments and arguments of the juvenile periphery were enabled by the peripheral nature of the colony: the child, the punisher and the reformer in India existed at a productive distance from the discourses and procedures that surrounded the 'known' metropolitan child. The periphery is not, however, an empty space inhabited only by experts and their subjects. It is politically meaningful and productive because even on the margins of the metropole, the performer of expertise could imagine an audience that might praise or criticize, restrain or facilitate. This audience was sometimes imagined as a generic metropolitan 'public', or the same repository of opinion that sustained various other kinds of political discourse in nineteenth-century India. At other times, and especially in the eyes of Indian child correction professionals, the public that might judge the experiment became unstable and potentially national/Indian, claiming the child and the experiment even as it was claimed by the expert.

The audience thus signified the professional, national, racial and gendered locations of the expert. Experiments in the juvenile periphery were typically conducted with one eye on metropolitan discourses of delinquency and punishment, and Marriott (following Cohn's lead) has described the racialization of delinquency in the colony and metropole as simultaneous developments in a 'unitary field' of power-knowledge. The unitary field, however, was not without its fissures. Colonial experts did not seek simply to imitate the metropole, or to close the gap that they perceived between colonial practice and metropolitan recommendation. The discrepancies were worthy of preservation and even exaggeration, because articulating them allowed jailors, administrators, educators and doctors to insert themselves into the desirable cores of professionalism and, of course, race. While universalistic rhetoric closed the civilizational gap between the Indians and the whites, the colonial and the metropolitan, and so on, particularistic discourses such as race and 'orthodoxy' could be deployed strategically to widen the gaps, including those between competing groups in Indian society. For Indian experts, in general, explicit comparisons between metropolitan and colonial reformatories carried the implicit accusation that the hegemonic universality of the European model was actually fraudulent and that white administrators were making illegitimate distinctions between institutionalized English children (that were plastic and in school) and native juveniles (hardened, quasi-adult and in jail). The space between the center and the periphery produced the peculiarities of native children that validated the peculiar expertise of colonial experts, white as well as native, and provided a forum upon which Indians could address wider issues of injustice in colonial society.

The expert, the experiment and the experimental child in the juvenile periphery were thus simultaneously particular and universal. The tension between particularity and universality, and the frequent attempts by colonial professionals to cross-reference Indian practice against metropolitan precedents and models, stemmed from the reality that whereas English mechanisms for identifying and punishing juvenile delinquents had moved progressively away from mechanisms for adults, India had witnessed a convergence between models of adult and juvenile punishment, even as the child was increasingly recognized as a separate entity. This was due, in part, to a generalized inclination towards institutional architectural modernization that affected children and adult offenders in ways that were more similar than different. It was due also to the peculiarities of the colonial vision of adult delinquency, which was based on conceptions of 'native nature'. Differentiating between juveniles and adults, and between the parent and the child, thus presented greater challenges in India than it did in the metropole.

Native parents and families, in fact, occupied ambiguous positions in the colonial reformatory, not least because it remained uncertain whether they were 'in' the reformatory (defined as the broad project of professional child correction) or beyond its limits. Colonial administrators of juvenile punishment saw native families as a moral and political challenge to their authority and their vision of correction, and as factors in the criminality of Indian children. They were, however, far from being uniformly hostile to native parents. Motivated by sentimental Victorian formulations of familiality, they hesitated to disrupt irreversibly the 'natural' relationship between parent and child, or to endorse their own colleagues' speculation that the reformatory was better equipped than the family when it came to preserving the malleable, innocent period in the life of the individual native. The parent-child bond was, in fact, seen by many colonial experts as being more vital to the nature of the native child than of the European, and the increasingly medicalized expert in child correction was impelled to attach to it a positive, if qualified, evaluation.

In the new century, additional factors reinforced the native parent as a tangible presence at the edge of the reformatory. Negotiating the rights, responsibilities and limits of the parent became inevitable when the child was redefined as having rights, which flowed not only from an old presumption of dependence but also from a new assumption of autonomous claims upon the state. This was not a recession of the parent before the expanding construct of the child. The parent, too, had expanded as a discursive and legal entity, acquiring a measure of individuality, new responsibilities and duties, and new areas of specialized authority and expertise.

The idea of the native parent should not be taken literally. Indian adults who participated in conversations about juvenile reform spoke not only from assumptions of expertise but also from their adoption of the role of national parents. The juvenile offender was thus contested by more than one set of surrogate parents. For Indian surrogate parents, the institutionalized juvenile from the margins of colonial society was hardly a child that could be embraced without reservations. Also, middle-class children were generally not a part of the debate, protected as they were by an extension of the domestic walls that Chatterjee has noted in his well-known formulation of nationalism and Indian women. In the limited context of the reformatory that had been constructed with explicit reference to race, however, the abstracted and incarcerated native child could and did represent a politically useful alternative self for middle-class Indians, and the reformatory itself came to represent a tool of colonial oppression.

Expertise in the Periphery

The men who supervised Indian juvenile wards and reformatories in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly 'amateurs'. They were not specialists in the sense in which Walter Crofton in Ireland, Frederic-Auguste Demetz in France, or even Mary Carpenter 'specialized' in the new field of child-correction, and few were securely rooted in the disciplinary soil that Garland has described. Early Indian reformatories, like large prisons and lunatic asylums, were headed by military doctors who had no particular training in the treatment of children, but who might be broadly knowledgeable about the subjection of bodies to what, Ignatieff reminds us, was intended to be a 'just measure of pain'. Beyond this limited expertise, superintendents of juvenile wards were career jailors who had hitherto managed adult convicts, and had then been put in charge of children and told to do their best. Their own superiors were usually bureaucrats with even less experience in the 'science' of juvenile delinquency and its treatment. Well into the interwar years, the colonial reformatory was run by makeshift personnel, with uneven levels of commitment to modern ideas of punishment and rehabilitation.

There can be little doubt that amateur status on the margins of metropolitan expertise gave administrators of juvenile punishment a discursive space within which they could construct their credentials as men who were both colonial pioneers and members of a disciplinary field centred on the metropole. As Governor of Madras in the late 1860s, Lord Napier best exemplified this type of amateur expert, using his privileged positions in the colonial administration and white society as launching pads for forays into experiments with the modern possibilities of empire, from architecture to child correction. He maintained a keen interest in the Sassoon Reformatory in Bombay, was a vocal partisan of building a wider network of reformatories in India, and was one of the first officials to use the expression 'juvenile delinquency' in the Indian context. While he cannot be seen as the originator of a discourse of delinquency and correction in colonial India, he was very much in the vanguard of a movement that constructed the incarceration of native children as a self-conscious exercise in the ordering of knowledge, authority and institutional space.

In 1867, Napier and his allies in Bombay launched a powerful governmental and rhetorical initiative aimed at persuading the Government of India to create what eventually became the Reformatory Schools Bill (henceforth, RS Bill or Act). In the process, he collected and forwarded a substantial body of statistical information about criminal convictions involving juveniles in British India (especially Madras), and the incarceration of children. While the exercise in colonial record-keeping established the reality of the juvenile delinquent, Napier's own role as the collector of records and assessor of their significance established his expertise, no less than the pointed references that he made to his sponsorship of a new reformatory in Madras.

Napier made no bones about the experimental character of the juvenile archipelago that he envisioned in 1867. Aware that his opponents in Lord Lawrence's administration saw reformatories as an extravagant solution to a relatively small penological problem, he told the Viceroy that the limited numbers of children ought to be regarded as a fortuitously limited opportunity:

The experiment can now be made on a small scale on parties carefully selected, with a view to their character and position. The Magistrates would for the most part continue their present practice, only sentencing to confinement in the Reformatory the offenders who may appear peculiarly susceptible to improvement, or peculiarly devoid of all protection or control in regard to their family relations. I have not yet contemplated more than an experimental institution of the simplest kind as an accessory to the Madras Penitentiary and the nearest Jails of the Tamil country, adapted for thirty or forty inmates. The subsequent course of Government would be regulated by the success or failure of the first Establishment. If it succeeded, it would be expanded, and three or four others, answering to the geographical and ethnological divisions of the Presidency, would be founded. If it failed, the scheme would be abandoned without any discredit.

By implying that all the empire was a laboratory, Napier located the experimental reformatory within the ethnographic state. He did not neglect to add some pragmatic points of consideration — reformatories would eventually prove themselves 'profitable to society' by reducing property crimes and eliminate the need to modify existing prisons 'for the discipline and training of juvenile offenders'. The competitive civilizational urgency of the project remained in focus: 'it is an expenditure which every civilized Government in the world, except that of British India, is undergoing for the benefit of its subjects,' Napier wrote, adding, 'I include the Government of Pondicherry.'

The new expert in child correction, situated at the leading edge of this civilized and civilizing enterprise, remained in focus as well. Napier did not call for professionals in the specialized sense of the word. Nor did he call for a supervisory corps that was exclusively or even substantially white. Europeans and Eurasians who might be available to direct colonial juvenile wards and reformatories were 'altogether unfitted for such a task,' he wrote, urging that it would be better to 'associate Native intelligence and Native sympathies with the exertions of Government in initiating a social amelioration so interesting and important'. The correction of female children might be entrusted to 'some Christian lady — a Missionary's widow, or a member of some Roman Catholic Order of Mercy — who, in some place apart, would undertake the duties of restraint, reformation, and education for the love of God'. Napier's vision of expertise thus had considerable space for the experienced amateur, and for evangelical women like Mary Carpenter. The preference for native officers was both ideological and practical: Indian adults of the right sort might be better suited as role models for native children, they would not come burdened with the moral-racial baggage of Eurasian identity, 18 and they would be cheaper than whites of a comparable level of respectability. Napier's vision represents an emergent discipline in search of a well-equipped laboratory, enthusiastic researchers and political-bureaucratic blessing. Not surprisingly, his 1867 missive to Lawrence has the flavor of an application for a research grant.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. State of the Experiment: Experts, Parents and the Reformatory; 2. The Nature of the Beast: The Content of Instiutionalized Childhood; 3. Experimental Childhoods: Pain and the Reformatory; 4. Gendering the Reformatory; 5. Masters and Servants: School, Home and the Aristocratic Childhood; 6. The Politics of Deracination; Conlusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index