This extract from the descriptive list of thirty-eight convicts embarked from Calcutta to Port Louis on the ship Ruby in 1817 records Dullah's penal transportation to the island of Mauritius. He had been convicted of robbery and murder in concert with two other men, Addeyah and Gheessah. They were fellow ahir caste peasants, sentenced in Etawah in the west of the Bengal presidency on the great River Yamuna. Like Dullah they were in their early to mid-twenties. There were significant penal connections between India and Mauritius at this time, with about 1,500 convicts transported to the island during the period 1815–37. When transportation to Mauritius ceased, convict numbers began to dwindle. In 1853, after consultations with their Indian counterparts, local government liberated the few who remained on the island, though they were not given permission to return home.

This book explores fragments from the lives of socially marginal men and women who were associated with Indian Ocean penal settlements and colonies in the nineteenth century. It interrogates colonialism from a subaltern history perspective, and places penal transportation in a broad global context. It takes a life-writing approach, weaving together biographical snapshots of convicts – ordinary Indians and Eurasians; African slaves, apprentices and ex-slaves; indentured labourers; soldiers and rebels – with the lives of sailors, indigenous peoples and the ‘poor whites’ of Empire. Subaltern Lives brings into focus convict experiences of transportation and penal settlements and colonies, as well as the relationship between convictism, punishment and colonial labour regimes. It also cuts a slice into society and social transformation in the nineteenth century, analysing the making of colonial identities, the nature of social capital in the colonial context, and networks of Empire across the Indian Ocean and beyond.

There was an intricate web of British penal settlements and colonies in the nineteenth century, which together received at least 300,000 convicts. It is well known that during the period 1788 to 1868 convicts were shipped from Britain and Ireland to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia, and to Gibraltar and Bermuda. But, significantly, there were also substantial convict flows between British colonies at this time. For instance, from 1815 to 1825 the colonial authorities in Mauritius, the Cape Colony and the Seychelles transported convicts to Robben Island. Subsequently, they shipped them to the Australian colonies, which also became the destination for convicts from the Caribbean. From the 1790s the British transported Indian convicts from mainland South Asia to penal settlements across the Bay of Bengal in Burma and Southeast Asia, and also further afield to Mauritius and Aden. Felons convicted in Southeast Asia and Ceylon were transported to these destinations too, as well as to mainland South Asian jails. After the great Indian revolt of 1857, the British largely replaced these settlements with a single penal colony in the Andaman Islands, and this remained in service until the Second World War. There was, then, a pan-imperial traffic in convicts, which stretched from Britain, Ireland and Gibraltar to India, Aden, Southeast Asia and the Bay of Bengal, southward to Australia, around the Cape Colony to Robben Island, and across the Atlantic to Bermuda and the Caribbean islands.

The theatre of the new cities

The culture of the great metropolises of nineteenth-century India, foremost amongst them the colonial harbour cities of Calcutta and Bombay, produced a new kind of theatre which played itself out on a stage meant to replicate real life, as it claimed to present real situations, real history and even real gods. It catered to the middle classes, themselves in a formational stage, and was clearly a configuration of parts that had heterogeneous origins. But to the progenitors of this new culture, playwrights, actor-managers and critics no less than audiences, operating under colonial rule in constant interaction with a dominant, still very foreign culture with which it was also essential to establish equivalences, it was of vital importance to stress the indigenous origins of this new theatre and the classical tradition to which it declared itself heir. And if Western orientalists were most often quoted as authorities as to what constituted this classical tradition, their views were adapted by Indians to suit increasingly nationalist purposes.

William Jones, the first high-standing civil servant to write at any length on such matters, in the preface to his translation of Kalidasa's fifth-century Sanskrit drama Shakuntala (1789), had also been the first to announce the sensational new discovery of the national drama of the Hindus to the Occident. ‘Dramatic poetry must have been immemorially ancient in the Indian empire’, he had speculated.

Caste in India has been inextricably linked to the politics of caste from at least the late nineteenth century onwards. Since then, like religion, caste has gone through an identity-building process overdetermined by considerations of power. Like religious identities, caste identities are not ‘given’ but produced according to social cum political strategies and the contexts – often regional – in which they are evolved. In the following pages, I shall focus on the way lower castes' identities have been shaped and infused with new meanings according to an ethnicization process that was largely due to ideologies of autochthony (indigeneity), electoral politics and public policies such as state programmes of positive discrimination.

The transformation of caste during the British Raj

The caste system relies on hierarchical principles that Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) has defined very perceptively in terms of ‘graded inequality’ (see below): the Brahmins (the literati or priestly caste) come first in what is known as the first of the four varna (literally meaning ‘colour’), whereas the Untouchables (technically avarna, or outside of the caste schema) lie at the bottom of the social pyramid, and between these two extremes one can observe a clear-cut social hierarchy: the Kshatriyas (the warrior castes, former rulers and today largely made up of small and big landowners) and the Vaishyas (the merchants and traders) take the second and third positions respectively, but are still upper castes (the ‘twice-borns’) like the Brahmins, whereas the Shudras (cultivators, herdsmen and artisans) are situated between the twice-borns and the Untouchables.

Driving in eastern Bangalore beyond the Intermediate Ring Road, I pass a roadside temple dedicated to Shiva and his holy family; it is guarding the entrance to the old village from which Marathahalli Road, the local name for Airport Road in this area, derives its name. While the road has become more congested, and the village has been incorporated into the city, the temple has nevertheless been embellished over the last three decades, most recently with a new coat of paint and a patio marking its perimeter. Further down Airport Road's intersection with the Outer Ring Road near Brookefields, a banner advertises the ritual consecration of a large new temple dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba, a relatively modern holy figure. Indian cityscapes have long made space for the celebration of ‘the sacred’ or ‘the religious’ in a wide array of forms, and public life itself is interlaced with religiosity in at least three significant ways.

First, there has been a proliferation of new temples, religious buildings and altars of various scales and genealogies. These include fixed ones such as roadside temples, vernacular shrines in market places, taxi stands, exterior walls of homes, or within the courtyards of apartment complexes. In urban Goa, wayside shrines alter the centuries-old religion of Goan Hindus and Catholics by allowing devotees to worship saints and deities outside what might have been their own parochial religious associations. On a grander spatial scale, there is also the model of ‘the religious campus’.

On 25 February 2008 a group of student activists, accompanied by a camera crew, charged into the office of the head of the history department at Delhi University demanding that a particular text be removed from the syllabus of an undergraduate course on ancient Indian history. The activists belonged to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), part of a larger Hindu-nationalist group of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. The text in question was A. K. Ramanujan's ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, an essay that documents the array of tellings of Valmiki's great Sanskrit epic, The Ramayana. By detailing five of these alternative Ramayanas, the essay brings to life different interpretations of characters and alternative narratives of the epic itself. Ramanujan (1929–93) was a translator, poet and scholar who for many years taught at the University of Chicago. In the essay in question, he writes with genuine reverence of how the ‘number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing’. He goes on to list the numerous languages in which the Rama story can be found, including Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai and Tibetan –

Not long ago, in Khairlanji, a nondescript rural town in the western Indian state of Maharashtra's Bhandara district, often called the state's ‘rice bowl’, Surekha Bhotmange, a Dalit woman in a neo-Buddhist household was getting ready to cook dinner for her family. Her husband, Bhaiyalal, was due to return from the paddy field on which he toiled each day. Her three teenage children, Priyanka, Sudhir and Roshan, were studying nearby, a sight that must have been a source of daily cheer for Surekha. She herself had studied up to the ninth standard and had taken to heart Dr B. R. Ambedkar's call for the Untouchable castes to educate their children. Priyanka cycled to her college in a nearby town. The previous year she had topped her class in the tenth standard. But that evening, on 29 September 2006, Surekha and Priyanka were anxious about an unspoken horror hovering on their threshold. While they had over the years grown immune to the everyday taunts of their upper-caste neighbours, they found that they could not ignore the crescendo of threats that had descended upon them in recent days. At 6.30 p.m. their worst fears came true. A truck came to an ominous halt in front of their home and sixty-odd villagers including women, armed with cycle chains, knives, sticks and axes, got out. They rushed in to drag Surekha and her three children from their home.

The Bengali novel originated in the nineteenth century as a product of the colonial encounter, though it drew upon a multiplicity of literary traditions, indigenous as well as foreign. Like its counterpart in Europe, it is linked to the social, domestic and intellectual aspirations of a new bourgeoisie, the spread of print culture, the growth of urban centres and the formation of a middle-class readership hungry for novelty and diversion. But the conditions for its inception and development in colonial Bengal are clearly distinct from those of eighteenth-century Europe, making the novel both witness to and participant in the creation of a distinctly Indian modernity. In its representational function, it records not just the self-imposed compulsions of this process, but its fissures and uncertainties, opening up a space for moral, emotional and intellectual debate. At the same time, it becomes the site for an entirely new set of experiments with literary language and the techniques of representation.

Print, the public sphere and public culture

The coming of print and the consequent opening up of the public sphere is clearly the inaugural moment of this history. The first Bengali typefaces precede the novel by little more than half a century, with the publication of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's A Grammar of the Bengal Language at Hooghly in 1778, using moveable metal type designed by Charles Wilkins. From 1800 onwards, missionary activity at Serampore and the establishment of the College of Fort William make printing in Bengali a necessary part of the colonial project, and contribute to the development of discursive prose through early narratives such as the Raja Pratapaditya Charitra (1801) composed by Ramram Basu for his students at Fort William.