EP 11 - What did colonial prisoners and roadworkers eat in the 19th century?

[00:00:00]This is Indian history thali by thali >> [music] >> where we ask archaeologists and historians how they know what they know about India's [music] past.

[00:00:09]In this series, we will focus on Indian history through the lens [music] of food.

[00:00:13]>> What do we know about the lives of people who worked on construction sites or those who were put into institutions such as prisons in the 19th century?

[00:00:22]These different sites were connected because their diets became a major concern of the colonial authorities in the 19th century.

[00:00:30]Let's find out why from two historians who have studied public works construction and prisons in northern India. Madhavi Ja and Rachna Singh.

[00:00:39]>> So, the kind of food really depended on the region where public works like railways, roads, dams were being built.

[00:00:47]What we do know about these food practices on these sites is actually because of the government intervention due to famine conditions. And in the normal course, of course, the laborers' diets was not something that the government or even the civil society was particularly interested in. However, in the second half of the 19th century, there were repeated famines and scarcities in almost whole of South Asia. And the government opened these government these construction work as a relief measure.

[00:01:19]This meant that whoever came on these sites to look for work had to be given a minimum wage.

[00:01:26]And this wage was calculated on basis of food. And for the government, it was important that they be given sufficient wage based on this food, the amount that was calculated, so that they do not starve because of lack of food, but also that they have enough to enough energy to work on these construction works.

[00:01:48]And some of the common things that they used was the grain, whatever local grain was being used, pulses, salt, ghee or oil, condiments and vegetables. So, this was the list that was usually used. We find that the colonial administrators themselves did not find this list very convincing. So, for example, the sanitary commissioner of Northwestern Provinces, which would roughly be contemporary with the Pradesh, uh wanted things like tobacco, dahi, which is curd, or good jaggery to be considered as part of this uh um calculation.

[00:02:26]>> What about prisons?

[00:02:27]>> Before 1836, the colonial government arranged for the feeding of prisoners by giving them a money allowance, which varied from place to place from between 2 and 1/2 pies each to 1 pie uh anna a day.

[00:02:41]And prisoners could use this money to purchase whatever ingredients they wanted to from a retail shopkeeper who was called the movie, and he could cook the food in allotted space within the jail yard or in within the jail camp, eat it singly or in groups just as he or she pleased.

[00:02:59]And in this way, the colonial state could very conveniently dodge the responsibility of regulating the dietary and co-dining norms of various caste groups and communities that were a part of the prisoner population. In 1838, there was a significant shift where the money allowance system was scrapped for a variety of reasons, and a ration system was introduced.

[00:03:23]Now, each prisoner got one seer of rice, one and a half seer of wood, one kucha of tobacco, and one pies per week for washing and shaving.

[00:03:35]There was another shift in April 1839 when the contract system for providing food was introduced.

[00:03:42]So, a contractor would provide food at a fixed rate throughout the year to the prisoner.

[00:03:48]And there was a final shift in 1841 when were issued that all criminal prisoners would be formed into messes. They would have to eat together in common messes.

[00:04:02]What the prisoner was now eating was the concern of the medical officer attached to the jail. Because it was the medical officer's responsibility to ensure that mortality levels within the jail fell and that the prisoner was physically fit enough to perform the labor that was being demanded of him by the state.

[00:04:22]>> Do we know what prisoners and workers felt about their diets and their work?

[00:04:26]>> So for instance, we know from the testimony of a worker called Maiku from 1878 from Allahabad who reported that along with his family of nine, he would typically buy items like flour, pulses, parched gram, red pepper, tobacco, and salt. So tobacco comes back again. The calculation of the tally is individual.

[00:04:51]But members of a family working in a in a construction site would pool their resources, pool the money that they got, and they would go and buy things from the market.

[00:05:06]>> So the concern about health of workers and prisoners had entirely to do with their ability to work.

[00:05:11]What kinds of work did prisoners do?

[00:05:14]>> There were two forms of labor predominantly. One was intramural labor, which could include anything from cleaning the jail, and post-1838 making carpets, making paper, making cloth for uniforms, prison uniforms, etc., etc. These were some of the forms of intramural labor that were practiced within the jail. The intramural being within the confines of the jail. And extramural labor was work on public work on public uh, work sites.

[00:05:48]Taking up roads, laying down roads, etc., etc. >> So, prison labor was profitable for the colonial state. Why would people choose to labor during times of famine?

[00:05:59]>> So, the workers were actually, one of the reasons why they were attracted to famine works and these kind of public works was because of regular payment.

[00:06:08]And, uh, this was a very crucial, which was very crucial during times of famine and scarcity.

[00:06:14]And the ability to eat every day was a very controversial question at this time.

[00:06:20]Because there was a big report called the Dufferin report, which had been instituted precisely, uh, to show that the accusations against British rule in India, that people were not able to eat even one meal per day, were wrong. And in fact, the government then carries out this survey, and ironically, this survey actually exposes the great inequalities that existed in rural India, which is where this survey mostly concentrated.

[00:06:50]>> Were prisoners also given meat?

[00:06:53]>> Meat was a routine part of jail dietaries. So, there are references to, for example, fasting periods, period of periods of religious fasts during, uh, Ramadan or the Shahada, etc., etc. And, uh, the officials offer that they shall substitute meat with arhar dal, for example, or some other vegetarian substitute.

[00:07:19]But, even in the jail dietaries, which I enumerated, which I'll come to in a minute, meat and fish are a routine part of jail dietaries.

[00:07:28]>> Where did laborers on famine works get their food?

[00:07:31]>> There was very little direct feeding on these construction sites. What was done instead was to calculate the wage to the very last pie, just as in the case of jails, and, uh, depending on the nature of work, the gender, and the age, because children were also working. They were working and non-working, independent working, and not dependent uh working children, so on and so forth.

[00:07:56]Various classifications.

[00:07:58]And, the money was calculated according to the diet of each of such classifications.

[00:08:03]And, then intermediaries, such as the green dealers, banias, etc., were invited to open shops near public work sites. So, what would typically happen is that a bazaar would soon grow around these public work sites. And, at the end of the day, the workers would go to these bazaars and get their supplies.

[00:08:22]We have various reports of disturbances that arose in these bazaars between the workers and different shopkeepers, mostly over the price of food, the the price at which they could buy the food.

[00:08:35]The workers also demanded that the time of payment of wages, and this comes from Bengal. This is the This is the This is evidence that comes from Bengal that there is demand by workers that the payment of wages should be done before sunset.

[00:08:50]So that they can go and buy their supplies while it is still light outside, and they don't they're not cheated in terms of how much they can get from the shopkeepers because of darkness. Keeping costs down was a basic objective of all prison administrators.

[00:09:09]They had a brief to minimize expenditure wherever possible. And, this is one of the reasons why the determination of the diet for the prisoner is actually picked up later by economists as a indicator of what the poverty line ought to be in various societies.

[00:09:27]>> So, entire families worked on famine works. Who took care of the children?

[00:09:32]>> There is an added added complication where children are concerned because just before the famine relief begins to get um begins to get efficient around the 1870s and 1880s, it is because the British government had got very bad press world over because of the kind of even photographs that came out of the preceding famines. And 1866 Odisha famine was the turning point.

[00:10:05]Because there were a lot of children that died of malnutrition. Uh and there was also a lot of sale of children around this time.

[00:10:14]>> How did people respond to works assigned to men and women?

[00:10:18]>> Construction work is one of those sectors where women worked in large numbers and even today they work in large numbers.

[00:10:25]And during the second half of the 19th century when what we are talking about, even more women joined this workforce because of the expansion of railways as well as the economic distress that we've been talking about.

[00:10:38]So for example, even in Michael's testimony when he says that we are a family of nine, he mentions his parents, brothers, and sisters as well as aunts as part of his family who had come here.

[00:10:51]And in that, they very forcefully, and we have evidence of women leaving jobs, women going and asking for different kinds of jobs, of putting tools putting down tools in the middle of work etc. etc. by women because they believed that this segregation of work by gender did not relate to what was to how work was actually organized on these construction sites. So they may come with their husbands to work, they may have come with their menfolk to work, but the division of work did not make much sense on ground.

[00:11:28]>> Did the question of caste figure in these work sites?

[00:11:31]>> The official records tells us that often some of the work was also given out based on caste and caste prescription prescriptions were maintained in these sites.

[00:11:41]Uh again, there were regional variations in this.

[00:11:44]Water distribution is something on relief works where we see caste really come up in a big way. Water distribution was a big thing, was a major concern for the British uh because one of the major fears on public works construction was the spread of cholera, which happened through portable water.

[00:12:06]And hence uh the British were concerned uh that public works should not become uh unattractive for people because of fear of spread of disease such as cholera.

[00:12:19]Uh and the rules that were formulated to reduce the chances of spread of cholera among relief workers also ensured the maintenance of caste prescriptions. So, there were what was called water foremen that were appointed on these relief works and uh this was to be touched the term touched is used again and again and maintained only by a few individuals. In the case of Northwestern Provinces, uh the water foreman had the responsibility of water distribution were only laid with mates, work mates who came from Brahmin or the Kahar caste.

[00:12:57]>> But it must have been different in jails.

[00:13:00]>> It's surprising that the British should be so sensitive about caste in some contexts and so oblivious to it in others.

[00:13:07]So, for example, the 1838 Prison Discipline Committee argued that uh the introduction of trades or useful crafts within the jail would shame a man of high caste. It would extend the punishment to his family. It would create resentment against the state.

[00:13:27]And uh it advocated monotonous intramural labor instead of productive labor.

[00:13:36]But when it came to advocating the messing system, it did not entertain any apprehensions about caste. From the very beginning, jails like the Alipore Central Jail, which housed life convicts, saw fierce opposition against the introduction of common messing.

[00:13:53]>> So, how did the jail diet compare overall outside jail?

[00:13:58]>> There is such a thing as famine crime, you know, which were crimes committed specifically during the period of famine to get into a jail and thus to survive hunger, etc. So, there is a solid argument that prisoners in jails were fed better than the average general population.

[00:14:17]>> We now know that there are rich historical records regarding ordinary people and their diets when they came under the eye of the colonial state in prisons or on public works where wages had to be paid. These arrangements shifted and changed over time, partly because people resisted some measures and partly because the colonial state wanted to keep costs down. Although these sources were produced by and for the colonial government, they also give us important insights into how poorer people made sense of, resisted, or shaped the conditions in which they were placed in times of distress.

[00:14:54]>> [music] [music] [music] [music]