Dehradun Jail: Blood, Tears & Greater Good



“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As an urban township, Dehradun was a rather late phenomenon. The genesis for it was due to the efforts of the Udasi institution, the Darbar of Guru Ram Rai. A distinguished spiritual head of the Udasi order, Ram Rai, came to Dehradun in 1676 and a form of urbanisation in the late medieval style influenced by Mughal and emerging Sikh styles in architecture was used. However, this urbanisation was spread across a limited area around the Darbar and a few neighbouring streets, auxiliary establishments to the Darbar.

The next significant step towards the gentrification of Dehradun took place a decade after the British East India Company annexed Dehradun to its dominions in 1815-16 displacing with difficulty the Gorkhali occupation of Uttarakhand and Himachal and parts of United Provinces, Bihar and Bengal.

Both, Guru Ram Rai in the late seventeenth century and the British administrators of Doon in the early decades of the nineteenth century faced a similar problem but addressed it differently. The Doon Valley was uninhabited when the Udasi Guru came here and he had to rely on his devoted followers from Delhi and Kiratpur to settle in Doon on favourable terms and to also provide voluntary free labour which was a tradition in the Sikh Panth. The British, on the other hand, had a more challenging situation to resolve. In the preceding decades, the Valley was open to Sikh marauders from across the Yamuna. Even though they spared the Darbar complex due to its sanctity, they nevertheless ravaged the countryside. A little later, the Gorkha occupation of the Doon and its severity meant that the Valley became depopulated and it was so when the British annexed Dehradun.

Post annexation of Doon, the British realised the daunting reality of an under-populated district spread from Jaunsar Bawur to Rishikesh. Besides, its ecosystem was uncongenial to habitation and agriculture on account of the peculiarities of the geography: swamps in the eastern part and densely forested, deep gorges that drained the high volume of water that flowed from the mountain streams beyond the use of people except those who lived along the streams on narrow strips of land. Thus, for almost a decade, no British administrators came to live in the Doon. They just camped for a day or two and returned to Saharanpur which had nominal control of the district.

The western part of the Valley had much land but was granted in perpetuity to the Darbar of Guru Ram Rai.

In this difficult time, a twenty-three year old magistrate, Frederick John Shore, was posted here and he courageously decided to settle down permanently in the Doon and administer the District.

He drafted a plan for developing the town. He decided to have a Kuchehri (court-house), a bungalow for himself, and outhouses, roads suitable for wheeled carts, a road through the Mohand Pass being a critical passage to Saharanpur and Delhi and a pucca drinking well yet unknown in the Valley. From his drafting table, how was he to implement the construction when no labour was available?

He decided, with no contractor at hand, to supervise the work himself and requested the Calcutta office of the Directors to bring in over a hundred convicts from Saharanpur so as to avail their labour for his projects. The district was one known for its low crime rate and only petty offences were noticed. He had been allocated only Rs 50 a month to arrange a jail on hire! But no structure existed that could serve the purpose. Dungeons and dilapidated forts were usually used to hold convicts but in the Doon Valley even this was a far-fetched possibility. Shore decided to keep the Rs 50 with him, take a loan from his Calcutta agent and use the arriving convicts from Saharanpur to build a jail house adequate for 120 inmates.

The inmates were treated fairly in the four Jail wards built across the Kuchehri on a slightly upraised land to avoid flooding in the monsoons. Elsewhere in India, convicts were provided one set of dhoti, shirt, pugree and a blanket. They slept on the floor. Shore ensured his convicts got charpoys to save them from the dampness of the Valley. In October, an extra blanket was also provided.

The jail toilets were quickly arranged to avoid the convicts being taken to a distance for morning ablutions which reduced their working hours.

With these well looked after convict labour parties, the Mohand Pass causeway was built, assisted by able labourers hired temporarily. Over fifty miles of roads were built in a method discovered only three years ago in England, the macadamized roads. This was appreciated by the Calcutta office and some finances were also provided.

A pucca brick lined well dug deep down to over two hundred feet was planned and, after failures it too was finished – designed by Shore himself. He motivated landowners to dig such wells at Dharampur and Ajabpur to avoid usage of canal and pond water for drinking.

“Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die!"
- The Bible.

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