Prisons in India have evolved from ancient forms of confinement and punishment to modern institutions influenced by colonial legacies, indigenous legal traditions, and contemporary political questions. Ancient India had various methods of punishment and confinement, including imprisonment, fines, exile, and corporal punishment, as outlined in ancient legal texts such as the Manusmriti and Arthashastra. Prisons, known as "bandi grihas," or "bandi khana," were used to detain criminals, political dissidents, and prisoners of war. However, these early forms of incarceration were often rudimentary and lacked the structured systems seen in modern prisons.
The Mughal Empire (1526-1857) introduced centralized administrative structures that included the establishment of "dungeons" or "qilas" for imprisoning criminals and political opponents. These facilities varied in conditions and management, with some known for their harshness and lack of basic amenities.
During British colonial rule, the Indian penal system underwent significant transformations influenced by Western ideas of punishment, deterrence, and ostensible rehabilitation. The British introduced modern penitentiary concepts, such as the separation of prisoners based on offenses (developed elsewhere in another British colony, Ireland) and the construction of structured prison buildings. Saumya Dadoo argues this classification system was instrumental not only in the development of prisons, but in the ‘classificatory logics’ that structured British colonial rule through race and gender. “Central to the rise of the colonial prison regime was the enforcement of classificatory logics, i.e.: defining, ordering and dividing the prison population. Anxieties around “moral contamination”, enmeshed with Victorian era evangelical Christian ideals of morality and discourses around health and hygiene, made the classification of prisoners an essential feature of prison discipline. Classificatory logics were not only a means of managing deviancy and crime but also an end in themselves… used to control and disciplining the native population as a whole.” (Dadoo, Colonial Carcerality: Classificatory Logics and Gender in the Prison Regime of Colonial India, 2019).These prisons were “paradigmatic products of colonial modernity,” in that they were informed by Enlightenment notions of reason and order, and were systems for the control of what the British saw as an unruly and disordered population “predisposed to crime” by way of their race (Waits in ‘Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73,’ 2018). For a brief but comprehensive timeline of Indian incarceration, see Raju's 'Historical Evolution of Prison System in India', 2014. For more on how this played out in colonial Bengal, see Sen 2007.
One of the earliest modern prisons in India was the Cellular Jail in Port Blair, Andaman Islands, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But while construction didn't begin until 1896, the Andaman Islands had been used as a penal colony by British colonial authorities since at least 1857, when, in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857 (known variously as the First War of Independence, the Indian Insurrection, Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, or the Revolt of 1857), over two hundred rebellion participants were exiled there (Anderson 2014). Many famous revolutionaries and independence activists were held on the island and later in the Cellular Jail, including Sardar Singh Artillery, Diwan Singh Kalepani, Yogendra Shukla, Batukeshwar Dutt, Shadan Chandra Chatterjee, Sohan Singh, Vinayak Savarkar, Hare Krishna Konar, Shiv Verma, Allama Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, and Sudhanshu Dasgupta. In bringing together those considered dangerous by the British state, this prison (and the Indian prison system more broadly) inadvertently functioned as an incubator for the revolutionary thought and revolutionary groups, much like its counterparts in Vietnam, The United States, and parts of Latin America and Africa, which would produce the national movement for independence. The Cellular Jail symbolized the harshness of British colonial rule and became a symbol of resistance and sacrifice in the Indian freedom movement. It is now a memorial and tourist site.
After India gained independence in 1947, efforts were made to reform and modernize the country's prison system. The Prisons Act of 1894, inherited from British colonial rule, was amended and updated to reflect contemporary legal and human rights standards. Indian prisons today operate under the guidance of this act, which outlines regulations for the management, treatment, and rehabilitation of prisoners. As elsewhere, we should always look at legal discourse as potentially different from what's happening on the ground. As of 2019, its total imprisoned population was roughly 478,000, with 4.1% being women, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau (see also the World Prison Brief's entry on India, and keep in mind that India's NCRB uses a different notation system for numbers).
Further scholarship on Indian incarceration may look at the role of caste historically in incarceration on the peninsula and at women in Indian prisons (see Cherukuri 2008 for a treatment on both these topics), as well how current president Narendra Modi uses imprisonment and criminalization to target the muslim population in the interests of his Hindu nationalist program. Notably, the Prison Statistics India 2016 report, the first produced by the National Crime Records Bureau under Modi, was the first of its kind to not report the ethnicity, caste, or tribal affiliation. This obfuscated, according to Mrinal Sharma, the vast overrepresentation of Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis in the prison system, and in pre-trial detention especially (Sharma 2019). This changed in the 2019 report.