Efforts were made to find Jutta Kelling from FernUniversität Hagen in Germany who authored the below sections to request permission to publish the passages on my blog. I was not able to find any trace of her/him. However, a full citation is given at the end of this piece.
The Indian Convicts of Sarawak
In May 1866, a strange party of fifty Indian convicts arrived in Kuching. They had been travelling from Port Blair on the Andaman Islands via Rangoon and Singapore to Sarawak.
The men had been sentenced to transportation for life – for their participation in the Indian Rebellion in 1857. Some of them were former sepoys of the British Army. It may sound strange, but these rebel convicts were brought to Sarawak to serve as soldiers for James Brooke and they became an indispensable part of his military and police forces.
The Great Rebellion in India (often called the “Mutiny”) in 1857 was the result of widespread discontent with foreign rule and was brutally suppressed. The British established a new penal settlement on the Andamans, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, to receive the convicts of the Great Rebellion.
In December 1863, Rajah James Brooke wrote to the India Office suggesting the following:
“I should be glad to have 50 Sepoys condemned for the mutiny as soldiers in Sarawak. Many of the younger men, though guilty of a heinous military offence, were doubtless led on bad example rather than intentional wickedness, and it would be an act of grace, to pardon the younger and best behaved of these convicts confined at the Andamans on the condition of their taking service in Sarawak. The government of Sarawak would give pay to these men and provide them with the equipment of soldiers, and hereafter, by affording every facility to their families to join them, a useful Colony might be founded. I will only add that the men should not be Mahomedans nor Brahmins.”
18 Hindus and all 53 Muslims were prepared to do service in Sarawak and fifty men were selected from among them. (Although some authors, Margaret Brooke for example, refer to the convicts as Sikhs no evidence for this could be found in the correspondence.) They left Port Blair in January 1866 and Charles Brooke confirmed their arrival in Sarawak on May 12, 1866.
The Brookes employed the convicts in particular positions of trust. In the military forces, they were employed as private, corporal or drill instructors. Others worked as office clerks, police officers or prison warders in the government service. Charles Brooke even encouraged the convicts to bring their families to Sarawak. The former sepoy Tuffazool Hossein was accompanied by his wife and two children to Sarawak. Another three children were born in Sarawak. Ali Khan was also offered the opportunity to bring his wife to Sarawak, but he refused.
Finally in 1875, Charles Brooke recommended to the Governor General of India to pardon the remaining insurgents despite their serious offences because they had “served the Sarawak Government so well and faithfully for such a number of years”. He was fully convinced that no person had the right to condemn others to a life-long punishment without hope for forgiveness (Sarawak Gazette, 6 October 1875).
Charles emphasised that they had been working for him “for many years with exceedingly good characters, have been trusted with arms, and in important positions under me in Sarawak, where they have had entire freedom from the day of their arrival there.”
Obviously, the “Mutineers” who went to Sarawak made a good job and were rehabilitated despite their serious offences. The second last of the “50 sepoys” was Ramlogan Singh. He was in the Bengal Infantry at the time of the uprising and his regiment went to Delhi to support the insurgents. He died in 1902 in Rejang just at the time when he was finally allowed to hope for mercy on the coronation of Edward VII
Jutta Kelling is a Ph.D. candidate in history from FernUniversität Hagen in Germany. Her study explores the history of indentured labourers who were brought from South India and Ceylon to Sarawak in the second half of the nineteenth century to work on the plantation at Mount Matang.
BorneoHistory.Net
