Incarceration and the Political: A Convict’s Words and the Postcolonial Afterlives of Kālā Pānī

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the shifting historical contexts in which the discourse of the “political” emerged in relation to the imagination of incarceration, focusing on a text written by a convict. Muḥammad Ja‘far Thānēsarī (1838–1905) was sentenced to penal transportation to the Andamans between 1865 and 1884. His book, Tawārīkh-e ‘Ajīb (1884/85), widely known as Kālā Pānī, was written in Urdu and has been interpreted in multiple ways: as an apolitical pro-British text, a testimony to a political Muslim movement, a nationalist work, and, more recently, as a rare “subaltern” historical source. Kālā Pānī has been republished multiple times, producing editions reflecting their editors’ perspectives. However, most historical studies rely on an English translation whose original source remains unclear, and Thānēsarī’s other writings have received little scholarly attention, limiting their contextualisation. This paper first juxtaposes Kālā Pānī and other works by Thānēsarī with contemporary administrative documents on prisons, analysing the institutional and social conditions in which he wrote. It also examines his stylistic and lexical choices in Urdu to uncover the political milieu in which this “apolitical” text emerged. Second, it traces the postcolonial trajectories of his “experiences”—how they have been retrospectively reinterpreted as “political”—by analysing the different editions and adaptations of Kālā Pānī produced in postcolonial India and Pakistan.