Raj
Page 25
The Raj always insisted on prompt payment of taxes. Its demands for immediate quittance created an annual crisis in millions of ryots’ households. In some desperate instances, it was resolved by the sale of seed corn, cattle, household utensils and clothes. More commonly, the ryot plunged himself and his family into debt. Borrowing to settle a tax bill was the only alternative to eviction, but it placed a ryot and his descendants in permanent bondage to moneylenders of one kind or another. The rates of interest were savage; typically, a patel or village moneylender might loan cash at between 12 and 18 per cent interest, although rates of up to 25 per cent were not exceptional.19 Huge sections of the rural population were shackled to steadily accumulating debts without any hope of ever paying off the original loan. If they defaulted on the interest, moneylenders foreclosed using distraints obtained from the growing number of British courts: 2,900 ryots were sued in the Ahmadnagar court in 1835, over twice that number four years later.20
Investigations of rural indebtedness in Awadh during 1868–69 revealed that in most districts between 60 and 80 per cent of peasant families owed money. In some areas the total was as high as 90 per cent, and many debtors were compelled to surrender their surplus crops as interest payments.21 The average ryot holding was between three and four acres and the burden of tax and interest payments ruled out investment in extra land, stock and tools. Again, the courts were the handmaidens of the usurers. In the Punjab 45,000 were arrested for debt and 5,000 locked up between 1880 and 1884. In the latter year, there were 103,000 recovery suits brought by moneylenders against peasants. It was calculated that one in twenty families was embroiled in debt litigation.22
Agricultural stagnation, investment paralysis and social tension were the direct results of the Company’s land taxation. By taking an excessive cut from the farmer’s crops, the government was starving rural communities of capital which could have been used to increase production, particularly improvements in irrigation. It was noticed that in the Coimbatore district, where the ryotwari assessment was relatively low, farmers had spare cash for irrigation projects and the population rose. Economic growth generally was stifled because anyone with capital channelled it into high-interest loans to the poorest classes who were unable to pay their taxes on time.
Peasant riots and uprisings were an unavoidable result of the system. They were sporadic and localised outbursts of desperate rage, often first triggered by drought and religious and ethnic tensions. The Muslim Mapillas were at the bottom of the social and economic pile in Malabar, and their intermittent, violent protests against the predominantly Hindu landlord class had a sectarian edge. After an outbreak of disorder in 1851, a local magistrate discovered that a holy man had promised Mapillas ‘religious merit’ if they murdered a Hindu landlord who had evicted a poor tenant.23 There was also a desire to lash out blindly against moneylenders. During the 1854–55 uprising by the Santals of the Midnapur district, insurgents hacked off the limbs and head of a zamindar moneylender, chanting ‘Four Annas’, ‘Eight Annas’, ‘Twelve Annas’ and, at the final stroke, ‘Farkatti [quittance]’.24
These rural jacqueries presented very few problems for the authorities. In 1833 Company forces easily overcame a millennialist, anti-zamindar and anti-government revolt in the Sherpur district of northern Bengal. The rebels were armed with spears, bows, poisoned arrows, a few matchlocks and the belief that if their faith in their messianic leader was strong they would be immune to musket balls.25 No doubt the many casualties were warriors of shallow convictions. Troops deployed against the Santals in 1855 were moved for part of their journey by the new railway line between Calcutta and Burdwan, and help was forthcoming from local landowners, including the Raja of Murshidabad, who loaned transport elephants. This co-operation was a reminder that men of property would rally to the government whenever the social order was challenged. Loyalty was always well rewarded; a landowner who helped in the suppression of the 1838 Coorg revolt was given a remission of taxes.26 It is not known whether he passed on his good fortune to the local ryots.
The many faults in the tax system were recognised by those responsible for its everyday operation. Collectors expressed their misgivings, suggested adjustments and sometimes offered relief on their own initiative. After severe flooding in the Guntur district in 1849 and 1850, Mr Stokes the collector admitted to the ryots that he had been unduly strict and made concessions of up to two-thirds on the demands for 1851.27 This sort of tinkering with the machine was frowned on by the Company; in 1805 the Madras government turned down pleas from subordinate officials for tax reductions during a famine on the grounds that it might be interpreted by Indians as weakness.28
Whenever major alterations to the tax system were proposed, expediency overruled compassion. The Company could not afford to change the system: like the Mughal empire, it rested on the exploitation of India’s main source of wealth, the land. There were no comparable alternate sources of income. The 1813 and 1833 India acts had imposed prevailing free-trade doctrines on the Company, which compelled it to relinquish most of its commercial monopolies. For the same reason, the Company abolished internal tariffs that had once been a standby for the Mughals. Besides, a fundamental reorganisation and rationalisation of the land-tax system might antagonise the princes and zamindars who enforced and often profited from it. Responding to a critic of the system in 1837, Lord Auckland told him: ‘Were you yourself to become a real autocrat of India, you would of course not endanger so vital a portion of its existing resources as is the land resource.’29 There was, however, some lowering of the proportion of their income extracted from the ryots, largely because of pressure from London, where commercial lobbyists were anxious not to deprive potential Indian consumers of the wherewithal to buy British goods. By 1856, the average rate lay somewhere between 50 and 60 per cent, but it was not universal and in many regions the ryots’ liabilities stayed unrealistically high.
III
Stiff taxes which fell heavily on the poorest were defended on the grounds that the payers got public order and personal security in return for their outlay. In peace, as in war, the Company’s self-image was one of a bringer of peace to a country that had hitherto been convulsed by chronic disorder and crime. As the agencies of the law extended into the Indian interior, underworlds of crime were exposed just beneath the surface of societies which appeared tranquil. Officials began to discover what they imagined to be castes of bold, resourceful and ruthless professional criminals who roamed the countryside, preying on its inhabitants. These robber bands were, one civil servant wrote in 1855, ‘like an infernal machine beneath the keel of the good ship government’ and they had to be extirpated.30 There were other, equally disturbing revelations of crimes that were part of religious rituals and social customs, including the sacrifice of children by the Konds and the burying alive of lepers by their kinsfolk.31
As the Company’s servants accumulated intelligence about the nature of Indian crime and attempted, in the manner of bureaucrats, to classify it, they came to believe that they were exploring a hideous moral wilderness. They were penetrating what an army doctor and forensic pathologist, Major Norman Chevers, called in 1854 the ‘darker recesses of the Bengali and Hindustani nature’. Once this had been understood, ‘an European can learn how strange a combination of sensuality, jealousy, wild and ineradicable superstition, absolute untruthfulness, and ruthless disregard of the value of human life, lie below the placid, timid, forbearing exterior of the Indian’.32 The old racial stereotype of the docile Indian gave way to a new one, of a creature whose mildness was a façade behind which lay a morally flawed character. He was, in short, a natural deceiver.
Deception was the trade of India’s most notorious criminals, the thagi (thugs). Since 1810, the British had collected fragments of intelligence about bands of criminals who murdered and robbed travellers in central and northern India. Their activities came into sharper focus when William Sleeman, the magistrate at Nursingpur, gathered confessions from thugs bet
ween 1822 and 1824. This trickle of information became a torrent during the next dozen years, revealing the existence of between forty and fifty gangs who were calculated to be killing between 20,000 and 40,000 victims each year.
Perhaps the most vivid insight into the secret world of the thugs comes from the confessions made to James Paton, the assistant resident at Lucknow, during the autumn of 1836. The principal informer, Rumrati, had grown up in the Awadh village of Kothdi, the home of at least eighty thugs who, in return for a cut from their spoils, enjoyed the protection of the local zamindar. As a youth he was introduced into the fellowship of thugs by his uncle and, at some date between 1829 and 1834, joined a 24-strong expedition. It started with a sequence of purification rituals in which the thugs fasted, washed themselves and their clothes, consecrated their strangling cloths and the pick that was used to dig their victims’ graves. Then a goat was beheaded as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali, the thugs looking closely at its head to see if its mouth was open. It was and this was a good omen, indicating Kali’s blessing on the enterprise. Other portents were needed before the thugs set off. An ass braying on their left was a good sign, someone sneezing foretold misfortune, as did the cries of kites, owls and partridges. Given the numbers of these birds in rural India, thousands of expeditions must have been called off at the last moment.
Heartened by favourable omens, Rumrati’s party moved southwards, once meeting another gang of thugs. After thirteen days, they encountered four palanquin bearers with two bullocks travelling northwards to Lahore, and decoyed them off their road by claiming that if they continued on their route they would be forced to pay a heavy tax. The bearers were led to a spot already chosen for their murder, persuaded to sit down and share a hookah. At the signal ‘Sussul Khan Chulo’ the stranglers pounced. According to Paton, Rumrati snapped his fingers to indicate the swiftness with which death came. Some of the spoils were sent home to the thugs’ families, and then they shifted westwards. They continued for at least four weeks and finally ended up at Benares, having strangled and plundered thirteen travellers, including four soldiers.
The pattern of murder was always the same. The site of the killing was selected in advance and the ‘inveiglers’ lured the victims to it by shows of friendship. Twice an inveigler offered to massage the limbs of men suffering from rheumatism. The corpses were stabbed, a ritual which linked the slaughter to sacrifices once made by thugs to their protectoress, Kali. The bodies were then squeezed into narrow graves which had been previously dug, or, in one instance, thrown down a well.33
Paton heard from other approvers that they regarded their crimes as a trade. One told him: ‘I have followed the trade of murder. I have seen at a guess some four or five hundred men strangled and I have strangled about one hundred with my own hands.’ A man of Evangelical inclinations, Paton was shocked by the ‘relish and pleasure’ with which the murderers confessed, and their obvious pride in following their kinsmen into a profession which was often hereditary. They punctuated their narratives with laughter, and one approver was highly amused when the corpse of one of his victims was snatched by a Ganges mugur nutah (crocodile), which had become, as it were, the thugs’ accomplice. ‘The crocodile knew that we were murdering and came for his prey.’ This assassin claimed ‘the love of money’ was the thugs’ motive, but others described rituals and taboos (women were never killed), which linked thagi to Kali.34 This connection did not prevent Muslims from occasionally joining thug gangs. And yet bonds of religious brotherhood were brittle, for there were plenty of captured thugs who broke faith with their comrades, displaying the same devil-may-care spirit they did when they befriended and then killed their victims.
Paton was one of the eighteen officers attached to the Thagi and Dakaiti Department, which had been set up by Lord Bentinck in 1829 under Sleeman’s direction. It worked through informers whose intelligence enabled troops and police to intercept parties of thugs and excavate their burial grounds. By 1837, the department had acquired 483 informers who, their work over, were employed at Jabalpur gaol weaving carpets and tents. This manufactory was called The House of Industry, a title which reflected the current faith in honest labour as both corrective and cure for criminality. In 1857, four thugs-turned-weavers posed for the photographer Felice Beato, demonstrating how they had strangled their victims; they had not forgotten their old skills. Convicted thugs were either hanged or transported to the penal labour colonies on the Andaman islands. Sleeman believed that the executions deterred the thugs’ close relatives from taking up the family calling. The thugs were unmoved by their fate; in one instance several under sentence of death sung cheerily on their way to the scaffold and hung themselves rather than die at the polluted hands of an executioner who was a leather dresser.35
It is highly likely that Sleeman and his staff often mistook dacoits, who were straightforward armed robbers, for thugs, who had loose religious connections. Dakaiti (armed robbery by gangs) was a far commoner crime than thagi. There was an average of 1,500 dakaitis committed in Bengal in the early 1800s, but the number reported to the police had fallen to 169 by 1828. This downward trend was soon reversed. In the early 1850s there was an upsurge in dakaiti, and one magistrate admitted that no man of property could sleep easily at night in the Calcutta district.36 Dacoit bands were mobile, well-organised and often worked hand-in-glove with village chowkidars (watchmen) and even the Company’s police.37 In Awadh in 1840 there were an estimated 1,500–2,000 dacoits, all Bhudduks (peasant mercenaries hired by landowners), who enjoyed zamindar patronage and, like the thugs, had their own argot. They wandered far and wide, sometimes straying on to Company territory disguised as faqirs and pilgrims, and robbed taluqdars, bankers and tax officers.38
The typical dacoit was never a Robin Hood figure, although he and his exploits have been romanticised by Indian balladeers, story tellers, and, more recently, left-wing fantasists, for whom he was a class warrior, fighting inequality and oppression. This is sentimental nonsense. In reality, the dacoit was a vicious brute who robbed the poor more often than the better-protected rich. One case of dakaiti from 1809 may stand for many more as testimony of the nature of the crime and its perpetrators. Juggernath Ghose, aged seventeen and a cow driver, described to the magistrate how a party of dacoits came to his parents’ house at midnight, armed with swords, spears and a gun. They tore straw from the roof and made torches with which they tortured the couple in an attempt to force them to reveal where they had hidden their money. Burning hemp impregnated with ghi (clarified butter) was also used, and the pair later died from their injuries. The dacoits fled with some trinkets.39 Torture, usually involving fire, was used whenever dacoits wanted to discover the whereabouts of hidden cash or treasure. All of the 148 charged with dakaiti in the Nuddea district in 1848 had burned their victims, at least one of whom, an old man, died from his wounds.40
Whilst greed was invariably the mainspring behind Indian brigandage, there were bandits who were glamourised as local heroes because they led the authorities a merry dance and terrorised its more unpopular representatives. Maharashtra folk songs still recall the exploits of Raghu Bhanagre, a resourceful and elusive bandit chief active in the early 1840s:
Raghu raised his revolt,
He stayed in the deep hollows of the Konkan,
Hid in the mangrove groves,
There was a big gun battle.
The rebels fought until they were victorious,
And the gora’s [white man’s] face was besmeared with blood.41
Raghu was the son of a Bhil chieftain who, like so many figures with local power, was persuaded to serve the Raj. Appointed a police jemadar, he soon quarrelled with his masters over his salary and his son fell foul of the new jemadar, a Brahmin, who suspected him of leading a raid on a neighbouring village. Police investigating this incident tortured members of Raghu’s family by attaching ‘clipping horns’ to their breasts and testicles. This outrage started a war of personal vengeance which soon became a random campai
gn against everyone associated with the government: policemen were murdered, their wives raped, moneylenders had their noses sliced off and Indian revenue officials were robbed. Early in 1845 a detachment of the Bhil irregular corps under British officers was ordered to restore order. Raghu’s followers were dispersed and he was taken, tried and hanged.
The Bhils were one of those ethnic groups whom an official report of 1804 described as ‘thieves by profession’, stealing whenever the opportunity arose.42 They were, quite literally, a ‘caste’ of well-organised, peripatetic delinquents who posed a permanent threat to the peace of their districts. As a result of analyses of criminal intelligence made by the Thagi and Dakaiti Department, the Bhils, together with the Gujars, the Kolis, and the Bhudduks, were officially lumped together as members of an incorrigible and hereditary criminal class. Together, they presented a problem as vast as the country they ranged over. The remedy lay in vigilance and a prescription, which was first applied in 1856 by the Punjabi and Awadh administrations. Henceforward, there were officially defined ‘criminal tribes’, whose members were made subject to a strict régime of registration and surveillance.43 Another disciplinary formula, already well tested and tried, was applied to the Bhils. From 1841 onwards, they were recruited into the Company’s army as members of various Bhil corps. They proved excellent soldiers, loyal to the Raj during the 1857 Mutiny, and always willing to suppress disorders among their own people.
Nevertheless, the Bhils tenaciously clung to their old ways. In 1883, Sir Lepel Griffin, the resident at the Central Indian princely courts, reported a spate of Bhil outrages including peppering a bania with arrows when he unwisely appeared to recover a loan. ‘The true Bhil,’ he wrote, ‘is the child of the forest and will avoid hot work or plough if he can steal enough to get drunk upon,’ he told the Viceroy, Lord Ripon. As for the luckless bania, Sir Lepel added: ‘His Excellency remembers the old ballads of Sherwood.’44