When the story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib broke, many were surprised that the American military had chosen to take over a prison complex at a time when libraries, museums, hospitals and weapons depots were unguarded. But this focus on incarceration has a long pedigree in the history of European–and specifically English–military expansion. It goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when, as now, there was an enormous growth in domestic prison populations; in Britain at that time, as in America today, many soldiers and sailors lived in the shadow of new penal institutions. For many there was little difference between jail and military service. “No man will be a sailor,” said Dr. Johnson, “who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.” The growing number of prisoners was vital to the process of expansion, since it provided both a pool of recruits for military service and a population that could be used to settle overseas colonies.
In India too, the British conquests of the eighteenth century led to a rapid growth in the prison system. By the latter half of the century the British were transporting Indian prisoners to a chain of penal colonies on islands across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean: Penang, Ramree Island near Burma, the Andaman Islands, Mauritius and Bencoolen off the coast of Sumatra. These were the ancestors of Guantánamo Bay.
Not the least of the many continuities between Abu Ghraib and British prisons in India lies in their obsessive fascination with observing and marking prisoners’ bodies–stripping prisoners naked, as it were, in order to remake them. Indeed, some of the Abu Ghraib images are eerily reminiscent of photographs taken by British prison officials in Asia in the late nineteenth century. In these too, the prisoners are naked, men and women, and they stand with an arm outstretched and their genitals facing the camera; although their clothes have been removed, many wear fetters and chains. The difference is that these pictures were taken for officially sanctioned projects of documentation, and the jailors were absent from the frames.
In early nineteenth century India, convicts destined for transportation were often branded with tattoos. Apart from identifying the prisoners, these marks also served the purpose of humiliation. In precolonial India, where, as in North Africa and parts of the Arab world, tattoos were an adornment more for women than men, marking the bodies of prisoners was intended as a symbolic emasculation, not just of the convicts but of the society that produced them. Although it is unlikely the prison guards at Abu Ghraib were aware of this precedent, a similar intent was clearly at work in their actions.
Another continuity lies in the marriage of incarceration and cultural theory. The methods employed in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay are said to have been informed by the ideas of anthropologists like Raphael Patai, who, in his notorious 1973 work The Arab Mind, wrote at length about Arab conceptions of sexuality, honor and masculinity. British prison officials in India were also careful to target what they thought were deep-rooted fears and taboos. They believed, for instance, that Indians dreaded sea voyages more than death itself: This was, in their eyes, one of the great advantages of island prisons.
One distinctive feature of Indian jails was that the convicts would often find refuge and consolation in informal networks of family and village, caste and community. The Abu Ghraib pictures suggest a similar dynamic. In some of them the prisoners seem almost to be reaching out to one another, as if in support. It is easy to imagine that this was a source of intense annoyance for guards who had graduated from the American prison system. In their previous jobs they would not have had to play a major role in brutalizing prisoners: The convicts would have done the job for them. In Abu Ghraib they found themselves dealing with a prison population that did not know the drill. This perhaps is why some of the guards wear expressions of exasperation in the Abu Ghraib pictures: It is as if they are irritated at having to teach these convicts something they should already have known. Look, say their faces, this is how it’s done.