Rulers of India: The Earl of Mayo

by William Wilson Hunter

CHAPTER IX

THE END

One branch of the internal administration in which Lord Mayo took a deep interest was prison discipline. The subject had come prominently before him when Secretary for Ireland, and his Indian diaries contain valuable remarks and suggestions noted down after inspecting the local jails. He found a chronic battle going on between the District Magistrate, who was ex officio the head of the District jail, and the Medical Officer who was responsible for the health of the prisoners. The District Magistrate was determined that prison should be a distinctly uncomfortable place for the criminal classes within his jurisdiction. The Medical Officer was equally determined to bring down the terrible death-rate which obtained in Indian jails. Indeed, the more enthusiastic doctors would have liked to dismiss every convict at the end of his sentence, weighing several pounds heavier than when he entered the prison gates.

Lord Mayo had therefore to deal with the opposite extremes of severity and leniency. On the one hand, he was resolved that the discipline of Indian jails should be a really punitive discipline. On the other hand, he wrote, 'You have no right to inflict a punishment of death upon a prisoner who has only been sentenced for a term of years or for life,' by keeping him in a disease-stricken jail. Among the most distressing and clamant cases which came before him was the great Convict Settlement in the Andaman Islands, in which the mortality amounted in 1867 to over 101 per thousand. The measures taken by Lord Lawrence and Lord Mayo, had by 1870 brought down the death-rate to 10 per thousand. But the inquiries made by Lord Mayo disclosed a laxity of discipline productive of scandalous results. In 1871 a cruel and mysterious murder committed in the Penal Settlement, and which had been somewhat slightly reported on by the responsible officers, forced on Lord Mayo's mind the necessity of a complete change in the system pursued.

He found that a few English officials with a handful of soldiers were holding down, in an isolated island group, 600 miles across the sea from Bengal, the 8000 worst criminals of Northern India. Many of them came from the fierce frontier races; most of them were life prisoners, reckless, with no future on this earth. The security of such a settlement depends on clear regulations, exact subordination among the officials, and strict discipline among the convicts. The inquiries conducted under Lord Mayo's orders in 1871, disclosed the absence of every one of these essentials of safety. He found dissension and disobedience among the authorities; and a state of discipline that allowed a convict to accumulate a practically unlimited store of liquor, with which to madden himself and his comrades to further crime. It was a murder committed after a general debauch of this sort that led the Viceroy to reconsider the constitution of the Settlement.

The work occupied Lord Mayo's thoughts at Simla during the early half of 1871. He found that he had to create a government for a Colony 'which, assuming that only life-prisoners were sent, would ultimately contain 20,000 convicts.' In the first place, therefore, he had to put together an administrative framework of a texture that would withstand severe strain, and ensure the safety of the isolated handful of Englishmen in charge of the islands. In the second place, he desired that the new constitution of the Settlement, while enforcing a stricter surveillance and discipline, and increasing the terrors of transportation, more especially to new arrivals, should eventually allow of a career to the industrious and well-behaved; and as it were open up a new citizenship, with local ambitions and interests, to the exiles whose crimes had cut them off alike from the future and the past in their native land.

He resolved, in the third place, to establish the financial arrangements of the Colony on a sounder basis; and he hoped that the measures which raised the convicts out of criminal animals into settlers would also tend to render them self-supporting. A Code of Regulations was drawn up under his eye, and revised with his own pen; and true to his maxim, that for any piece of hard administrative work 'a man is required,' he sought out the best officer he could find for the practical reorganisation of the Settlement. He chose a soldier of strong force of character and proved administrative skill, and in the summer of 1871 sent him off with the new Regulations to his task.

'The charge which Major-General —— is about to assume,' wrote Lord Mayo in a Viceregal Note, 'is one of great responsibility. In fact, I scarcely know of any charge under the Government of India which will afford greater scope for ability and energy, or where a greater public service can be performed. I fully expect that under his management the Andamans, Nicobars, and their dependencies, instead of being a heavy drain upon the Government, may at no distant period become self-supporting. The charge of the Colony to the Indian Exchequer has averaged £150,000 a year; each transported felon costs the country more than £1 12s. a month' [the average monthly cost in Bengal jails being then 11s. 5d. per man].

Lord Mayo then points out in detail the means by which he hoped this change would be effected, 'by a proper system of rice and pulse cultivation'; by breeding goats, and a more economical meat supply; by the adoption of jail-manufactured clothing, and the growth of cotton and flax; by using the 'timber grown on the islands instead of imported timber'; 'by substituting Native troops for free police,' and by 'more economical steam communication' with the mainland. The immediate saving from these measures was estimated by the proper authority at £30,000 a year. The Viceroy next comments on the recent reports 'that there is no system of supervision or discipline.' He then sets forth, in a well-considered summary, the points to be attended to in this important branch of the ordering of a convict colony.