Colonialism and patriarchy have silenced the voice of women in the penal history of India. This historiographical silence may be attributed to multiple causes:

1. a. Female criminality never struck public imagination as a dangerous phenomenon.

2. b. Female crimes formed a negligible portion of the overall crime rate, thereby resulting in a scholarly neglect.

3. c. Colonialism bore an administrative diffidence towards gender issues.

This place of women inmates in history, or rather the lack of one, cannot be understood in vacuum. It must be located within the context of ancient, medieval, and colonial judicial system in India and various penal reforms that have had only a ritualistic acknowledgement towards women offenders. These reforms are a self-perpetuating exercise with few results. Women simply become another insignificant category in reform literature. The discussion in the following pages addresses:

1. a. The history of penology in India. This discussion addresses the judicial systems that existed in ancient and medieval India. This discussion is relevant since it not only provides the context for the historical understanding of crime and punishment in India but also the way women fit in this discourse.

2. b. The colonial foundations of the Indian penitentiary. The history of the contemporary penal regime in India begins with the colonial foundations of the criminal justice system. The imperatives and conditions which formed the basis for the evolution of the criminal judicial system were strongly colonial. It is interesting to notice that what seemed to be simple colonial imperatives could adapt traditional intransigence as well as the modernist progressive pretense as regards gender and other inequities.

3. c. Penal Reforms. One after the other these reforms have reproduced the earlier findings.