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In the early 19 th  century, the British colonial state in Sri Lanka embarked on an experiment in deploying convict labour for salt collecting. ‘Criminals’ from all parts of the island region convicted mainly for robbery and vagrancy and sentenced to hard labour by various courts of justice, were sent to an isolated outpost in the district of Hambantota in the deep south of Sri Lanka to labour at a naturally formed saltern known as the Maha Levaya. Executive, judicial, and administrative actors of the state played a key role in mobilising and immobilising the convicts at the saltern in order to fulfil the dual functions of punishment and profit. This paper contends that the inter-regional and local practice of im/mobilizing convicts to worksites as seen in Hambantota was a micro-spatial process of punishment, exile and labour extraction that was integral to larger processes of social control and labour coercion. However, despite the attempts at confining the convict labour force at the saltern through military and judicial means, the men condemned to labour for salt resisted the conditions of servitude through multiple strategies ranging from flight to evasion.

Working the salterns. Convict workers in the natural salt pans of Hambantota, in British colonial Sri Lanka