Charles James Lyall

Sir Charles James Lyall, KCSI, CIE, FBA (1845–1920) was an English civil servant working in India during the period of the British Raj, and also an Arabic scholar.

Charles James Lyall was born in London on 9 March 1845. He was the eldest son of a banker, also called Charles, and his wife Harriet (née Matheson). Educated initially at King's College School and then King's College London, in 1863 Lyall went on to study Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1867 with a BA degree. He had already come first in the 1865 competitive examination for appointments in the Indian Civil Service, and after graduation he left England for India. He arrived there on 4 December 1867 and was appointed assistant magistrate and collector in the North-Western Provinces.

Lyall spent a brief period, between April and June 1872, as assistant under-secretary in the Foreign department of the British government of India. From September 1873 he was under-secretary in the department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce, He was appointed Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) in January 1880, having ended his role as under-secretary in the previous year. From 1880 he was primarily engaged as secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Assam, but also had two periods as Judge and Commissioner for the Assam valley districts and a few months as secretary in the department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce.

From August 1889 Lyall spent some time working as home secretary in the Raj government, and was also tasked with an investigation of the penal settlement at Port Blair. He and A. S. Lethbridge, a surgeon in the British administration, concluded that the punishment of transportation to the Andaman Islands was failing to achieve the purpose intended and that indeed criminals preferred to go there rather than be incarcerated in Indian jails. Lyall and Lethbridge recommended that a "penal stage" existed in the transportation sentence, whereby transported prisoners were subjected to a period of harsh treatment upon arrival. The outcome was the construction of the Cellular Jail, which has been described as "a place of exclusion and isolation within a more broadly constituted remote penal space."

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