Bamar Convicts in Indian Jails, 1885–1905: The Making of a Racist Capitalist Strategy of Management in Colonial Jails

After the conquest of Upper Burma in the Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885, British officials transported 3000–4000 Bamar prisoners of war (POWs) to jails in Bengal, Madras and the North-Western Provinces. This article situates this unexamined episode in relation to the literature on Indians transported to Indian Ocean locations explored by Anand Yang and Clare Anderson. The experience of Bamar convicts in Indian jails shows that racial logics must be sought behind the quantitative logics of transportation foregrounded in the colonial sources. Through their industrial work and appointment to offices of convict self-management, the Bamar emerge as the subject of a particular paternalist discourse that valued their supposed psychological and moral qualities above those of other Indians. Literature on racial slavery and management in the Black Atlantic helps to tease out the dimensions of this experience, leading towards a higher conception of the role of the prison in constitution and differentiation of colonised peoples in modern India and Burma.