Catching and chastising organised criminals required the co-operation of the princes. Many were lethargic and others refused to collaborate. Man Singh, Raja of Jodhpur, was reluctant to throw his weight behind Bentinck’s campaign against the thugs, or permit the extradition of suspected thugs from the ancient Hindu sanctuary at Marwar.45 The Gaikwar of Baroda’s officials turned a blind eye to Bhil outrages in the early 1830s, and servants of the Maharaja of Bikaner were suspected of helping a notorious bandit chief, Doongur Singh, after his escape from Agra gaol in 1845.46 To prevent such backsliding, British officers often took charge of operations against dacoit bands in the princely states.
This was one of the tasks of James Paton at Lucknow. In 1834 he masterminded an attack by Awadh cavalry on a gang of 500 or so dacoits who had a base in the Bheera forest. The bandits were taken by surprise and sixty were cut down for the loss of one dead and sixteen wounded. Over 200 men, women and children were sent for punishment in Lucknow, including Rorki, the widow of the dacoit chief. Smiling, she told Paton that, ‘The troops got great spoils amongst us – all our Ornaments &c. I wore [jewels and clothes worth] about 1,000 rupees – My petticoat alone cost 60 rupees.’47 Like others, before and after, Paton discovered that Indian gamekeepers often had poachers’ instincts.
Company officers frequently found themselves in regions where the machinery for enforcing the law was either ramshackle or non-existent. Mughal authority had never run in these areas, which had been largely left to their own devices. One such district was the remote uplands of southern Orissa, where the Konds had lived a semi-nomadic life for centuries, undisturbed by the local rajas, who were notable for their ‘imbecility and feebleness of character’. This was the verdict of John Campbell, the Company official responsible for extending civil order to the region. His greatest problems were female infanticide and meriah (child sacrifice), a ritual used by the Konds to placate their gods, bring good fortune, and make the soil fertile. Kidnapped children were sold for a religious ceremony in which they were drugged and cut to pieces. Campbell was horrified by this custom, but he realised that the practice could only be eliminated slowly through patient persuasion. ‘The superstition of ages cannot be eradicated in a day, the people with whom we have to deal have become known to us only within the last few months,’ he wrote in 1837. ‘Any increase of coercion would arouse the jealousy of the whole race.’48 This was also the opinion of Viscount Hardinge, who believed that a minatory approach would drive the custom underground among a race with ‘a jealous love of liberty’.49
Campbell, a man of outstanding perseverance and humanity, proceeded with forebearance, always explaining rather than condemning. Seated alongside Kond chieftains on a tiger skin, he would tell them that the British had once sacrificed humans (‘we were then fools and ignorant’) and then ask them to renounce it for ever by making a traditional oath. Each held a handful of rice, water and soil and intoned: ‘May the earth refuse its produce, rice choke me, water drown me, and tiger devour me and my children if I break the oath which I now take for myself and my people to abstain from sacrifice of human beings.’50 By the late 1840s, his methods were bearing fruit; female infanticide had vanished and incidents of meriah were declining rapidly.
Legends of the coming of Campbell lingered in Kond folk memory. In one version, current at the turn of the century, he appears as a saviour:
At the time of the great Kiabon [Campbell] Sahib’s coming the country was in darkness; it was enveloped in mist.
And how was the country enveloped in mist? – there was murder and bloodshed; conflagration of villages; destruction of rice and crops.
Brothers and uncles sat together and deliberated how they were to act.
While they were discussing whether they would live or die the great Kiabon Sahib came.
All the people fled in terror; the Sahib said, ‘Brothers, uncles, fear not; Maliko [headman] Kuaro, come to me.’
Having caught the Meriah sacrificers, they brought them; and again they went and caught the evil councillors [who supplied victims].
Having seen the chains and shackles, the people were afraid; bloodshed and murder were quelled.51
Not the least of Campbell’s achievements was his ability to overcome natural moral outrage.
Loathing and fear were commoner reactions to Indian crime. Both were understandable, given the attitudes which prevailed in contemporary Britain. This was the age in which proto-psychologists, jurists and philosophers were endeavouring to define the criminal class and peer into its mind. Their efforts concentrated on discovering the nature of crime and the characteristics of what was called ‘criminal man’. Like the thug or dacoit, once his secrets were revealed, he could be deterred and restrained. It was thought likely that his moral deficiences were mirrored by his physical appearance, a theory which appealed at a time when phrenology had captured the popular and scientific imagination. While agents of the Thagi and Dakaiti Department were cataloguing the ‘criminal tribes’, phrenologist Hubert Lavergue was systematically examining his patients in Toulon gaol for facial signs of inner depravity.52 The theory that moral character, or the lack of it, was reflected in human features was given an academic imprimatur by Cesare Lombroso, the Italian doctor whose L’Uomo Deliquente appeared in 1876, a few years after the Indian government had issued laws that classified the so-called ‘criminal tribes’. Both the scientist and the legislators agreed that there were ‘born criminals’.53
How such creatures behaved and the world they lived in were vividly and disturbingly revealed by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1838) and Victor Hugo in Les Misérables (1861). Both described what today is called the ‘underclass’, a body of people who, from time to time, had made menacing appearances as the ‘mob’ in the principal cities of Britain and the Continent from 1789 onwards. Such a class clearly existed in India, or so the Company’s officers came to believe during the 1830s and 1840s. It endangered state and individual equally, for it was parasitical and capable of flourishing, hidden from the rest of society. Its members inhabited a deviant moral universe in which their delinquency was determined by birth. It was no accident that Indian delinquency was associated with vagrancy; for hundreds of years British law-makers had issued codes designed to coerce those whose lack of a fixed dwelling made them hard to control and, therefore, ‘natural’ miscreants.
These may have been exaggerated reactions to the phenomena of organised crime, but they were understandable. Given residual apprehensions that the Raj was precarious and depended upon the passive goodwill of its subjects, knowledge of the secretive and well-organised criminal clans was disconcerting. Most worrying of all was the Indian’s apparently unlimited capacity for dissembling. Were the external goodwill and obsequiousness of the thousands of Indians who worked for the British merely masks for malevolence and viciousness? What did British officers at Meerut make of the fact that, in 1845, two mess servants who handled their water and food were found to be datura (a species of poisonous plant) poisoners? The proximity to hidden crime must have been particularly unnerving. Another datura poisoner, a woman, was employed as a cook in an Indian household where she managed to drug and rob her master.54
Datura poisoners usually hung around public highways on the look-out for victims. They approached travellers, gained their confidence and then laced their food with narcotic datura seeds. Since they copied the thugs’ methods of ingratiation, the authorities leapt to the conclusion that they were part of another, vast clandestine confederacy. They were not, but most supported themselves solely by murder and robbery. In 1853, three men journeying from Calcutta to Cuttack were joined by a poisoner who, noting that they were of the same castes, offered to share travelling expenses. He added datura seeds to their rice and all fell ill, eventually recovering to testify against him. The court heard he was a professional poisoner with several previous convictions and sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in a penal settlement.55
IV
Catching In
dian criminals was very much a hit-or-miss affair. As Sleeman once wryly remarked, the government devoted more cash and energy to taxing Indians than to policing them. A collector was marginally better paid than a district magistrate and, if salaries were anything to go by, Indian police darogas (inspectors) and constables counted for nothing in the Company’s scheme of things. Professional – and the word signified little in this context – policemen were rare. Throughout princely India and in large swathes of the annexed territories, arrangements for law enforcement were makeshift and based upon the imagined goodwill and energy of local grandees and village headmen.
Rights of justice and punishment were exercised ‘by each man according to his power and influence’ in the Maratha districts occupied after the 1817–18 war. After a close examination of legal practices in this region, Montstuart Elphinstone failed to detect any system or consistency. There was ‘no prescribed form of trial’ – suspects were whipped to obtain confessions and ‘notoriety’ was enough to condemn a bandit to death. Patels had the power to flog wrongdoers, high-ranking Maratha noblemen could impose capital punishment, which included being blown from a cannon and trampling to death by a tethered elephant, the last a penalty for rebellion.56 It was confusing, but at least legal authority was vested in men of substance and standing, which Elphinstone thought best.
They had ordered things differently in Bengal and simultaneously managed to undermine the zamindar class’s influence and create a police force that was corrupt and incompetent. The 1793 police regulations had abolished the zamindars’ judicial and policing powers and replaced them with Company magistrates and constabulary. They were thinly spread. In the early 1850s, when the population of Bengal was between 25 and 35 million, there was one police superintendent, 400 darogas and 10,000 policemen. They were assisted by 180,000 chowkidars and the zamindari police which had been reinstituted in 1805. It was usual for the local zamindar and daroga to work together, not always in the public interest. A novice magistrate was warned by an experienced colleague in 1816: ‘You may depend on it, that against a combination of Zamindars and corrupt Darogas you can do nothing.’57 Dishonest darogas abounded: in Midnapur one was a salt smuggler and, in one year alone, thirteen out of the eighteen serving in the Hughli district were sacked for misdemeanours, including neglect of duty, suppressing evidence of a crime, bribery and torture.
Torture, a hand-me-down of Mughal policing, was discreetly permitted by some British officials as, in the frequent absence of efficient detective work, it offered a sure way of procuring evidence and confessions. According to Major Chevers’s investigations, torture was normal practice in the Madras presidency, where a native police officer would command his men to treat a suspect ‘cayidah procaurum’ (according to custom). Presidency custom included crushing the testicles. During the early 1850s a variety of euphemisms for torture were in everyday use in Bengal police stations. The expressions ‘Bhalaharo bhajoy’ (make him understand well), ‘Kala ghora miaghoy’ (take him to the back room) and ‘Patkara ana’ (Bring him back after he has been well prepared) all had one painful meaning for a man under interrogation. Immersion to the point of drowning, suspension by the arms, insertion of a chewing insect into the prisoner’s navel and the rape of his wife or a kinswoman were among the common torments.58
Elsewhere, police discipline was slack. There were 551 allegations of misconduct against the village and district police in the Madras presidency in 1848, of which 191 cases were proved; and a further 726 the following year, when 128 were upheld. The magistrate in North Arcot was disappointed by the performance of the local zamindari police and feared that most village watchmen were thieves. In other districts a lack of arrests was interpreted as evidence of police laziness or collusion with criminals.59 Remedial action was not taken, simply because of the effort involved and a reluctance to tamper with rural institutions. Slipshod policing by village headmen and indifferent zamindars was better than none at all. In these conditions, the only direction was downwards and, by the mid-1850s, the Madras police system was on the point of collapse. It was the same story in Bengal, where the 1857 Mutiny interrupted long overdue reform measures.
It was hardly surprising that few Indian criminals were caught and punished. There were 178,000 crimes reported in the Madras presidency during 1848, of which 164,000 were some kind of assault. Just under 30 per cent of offenders arrested were found guilty and punished.60 These figures may be deceptive, for cases occasionally came to light of wrongdoers being summarily killed. Chevers recorded instances of burglars caught in the act of being hacked to death by the tulwars of indignant villagers, a chowkidar charged in 1857 with beating a robber to death, and suspected thieves being hanged by their victims.61 Much wrongdoing went unreported. It was suspected that among the thousand or so suicides in Madras were wives driven to take their lives by the continual violence of their husbands. Others were feared to be undetected murders.
The level of crime was directly linked to economic conditions. It fell in Kanara during 1851, a year of good harvests, cheap food and a high demand for labour. Shortages and rising prices were blamed for a sharp increase in thefts in the Rajahmundry district in 1853 and in Masulipatnam the following year, when granaries were broken into and plundered.
Avarice and jealousy, rather than the desperation of hunger, were the usual mainsprings for Indian crime, as they were and are everywhere. Marital tensions, real or imaginary infidelity, and an older husband’s insistence on sexual relations with an unwilling child bride – sometimes as young as ten or eleven – led to many murders. So too did the golden and silver armlets and jewellery, part ornament and part advertisement of status, worn by young children. In one instance of this common crime at Bareilly in 1853, the murderer was a boy of between ten and twelve, his victim a three-year-old.62
Confronted with horrifying reports of such outrages, and conveniently ignoring the extent and nature of crime in Britain, it was easy for officials to agree with the conclusion of one district magistrate: human life was of little or no value in India.63 Moreover, its people seemed to be in the grip of a powerful recidivism. Dismissing optimistic forecasts made during the late 1840s that thagi and female infanticide were decreasing, Major Chevers believed that both were still flourishing. How was it that one official, travelling through Rajput villages in 1846, noticed that in twenty-six villages notorious for female infanticide there was not a girl under the age of six? They were in very short supply elsewhere, leading him to wonder how much passed in India unnoticed by and against the wishes of its rulers.64
He was certainly right. Whilst the Company boasted that its government was promoting peace and individual security throughout India, it failed to create the policing apparatus necessary. Nor was there a coherent policy towards law enforcement: Macaulay’s proposals for a uniform code of laws for the whole sub-continent were quietly shelved in 1835. The Raj was, however, good at accumulating crime statistics and, when confronted by something as widespread, organised and threatening as thagi, it moved decisively. But then, more was involved than the safety of travellers on India’s roads, for the thugs, dacoits and the so-called criminal tribes were seen as dangers to the state.
4
A Hearty Desire: Sex,
Religion and the Raj
I
‘I now commenced a regular course of fucking with native women,’ wrote Edward Sellon, recalling his arrival in India as a sixteen-year-old Company cadet in 1834.1 A brother officer, Lieutenant John Daniels, also new to India, was infected with a different passion. ‘I have this day,’ he wrote in his diary on 30 May 1836, ‘been deeply impressed with the culpability of not proclaiming the glad tidings of the Gospel to the Heathen around and I have had a hearty desire created within me to impart instruction to the Natives.’2 Both young men were, in their ways, typical of their background and times. India offered each the opportunity to indulge their passions freely; its native population providing the raw material for unlimited debauchery or conversion
to Christianity.
India offered the libertine abundant and varied sexual experiences, as Sellon soon found out. His exploration of Indian sexuality was not, however, a case of a young Englishman losing his home-grown inhibitions and being seduced by the legendary sensuality of the tropics. Sellon had left behind a country where the sexual culture was rich and diverse, although less exuberant and open than it had been twenty years before. The forces of what today we call Victorian ‘sexual repression’ were just beginning to muster for their systematic campaigns against the vice and depravity they feared would undermine the nation. The purity campaigners, Evangelical churchmen, public school headmasters and self-appointed champions of public morality faced an uphill struggle and would only start counting their gains in the early 1880s. There was no sudden revolution in morals either in Britain or in India.
Sellon and other young men of his generation were still free to follow a well-established pattern of sexual indulgence which stretched back beyond the days of Clive. Creating a seraglio in the Indian style had been one of Sir Matthew Mite’s daydreams in The Nabob, and at least one of his kind actually did so. He rented a house in Soho Square, where he lived with his wife and six imported Indian concubines. All shared a common bedroom with the beds in a circle, allowing the nabob to make nocturnal tours. Fearful that his exotic concubines might fire the lusts of London’s rakes, he forbade them to walk the streets unchaperoned.3 His wife was extraordinarily accommodating, as was the Marquess Wellesley’s wife, Hyacinthe, who had rejected her husband’s request to accompany him to India. Soon after his arrival in Calcutta, he wrote to her pleading for permission to acquire a lover, on the grounds that the climate had so aroused his appetites that he could not live without sex. She replied: ‘Prélaque [their code-word for intercourse] if you are absolutely forced to, with all the honour, prudence and tenderness you have shown me.’4 The Marquess’s example was followed by his protégé, Charles Metcalfe, after a sequence of rebuffs from eligible European ladies in Calcutta, which he blamed on his unattractive features. His well-born Sikh mistress provided him the affection he needed and three sons.5
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