Policing Knowledge: Surveillance in Colonial Bengal, 1861 to 1913 Erin Margaret Giuliani Bachelor of Arts (Hons I)

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2012 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics

1 Abstract

The present study investigates the portion of colonial Bengal’s policing infrastructure that developed according to a surveillance epistemology between 1861 and 1913. It introduces the idea that a primary consideration of those who took charge of the new police was that public order could be secured via covert and distant police power. In Bengal, surveillance was used to monitor the movements, habits, and associations of people who the police assumed most likely to commit crime. It required the police to identify particular individuals, to record their habits and movements, and to exercise continual surveillance over them in an effort to reduce crime through preventative policing.

This police abstraction can be understood as a by-product of an administrative preference for indirect rule in India, which had produced a small regular police force. Surveillance was a policing strategy viewed as a necessary corollary of a colonial police force whose presence in Bengal was far from pervasive. A police force with a limited presence across the territory could at least target areas where crimes were assumed likely to occur and people assumed likely to commit them. Simultaneously, surveillance was aimed at preventing the crimes of individuals who fell into a constructed category of habitual criminality. The nature of crime in Bengal, as the police authorities understood it, gave rise to a belief that police surveillance was an essential policing strategy. A continual police watch that occurred according to carefully classified information was viewed as a means to prevent the apparently inevitable crimes of suspected and actual repeat offenders. By the first decade of the twentieth century, surveillance was a clearly defined policing strategy aimed at preventing recidivism, and at extending limited caches of police power.

The significance of a surveillance epistemology is demonstrated through an examination of its impact on three key areas of administrative development. The thesis reveals that surveillance defined the primary technological apparatus utilised by the police over the course of the nineteenth century, and this was made evident by a transformation of the role of written information in everyday policing. It moreover develops the idea that information-based surveillance consolidated the relationship between the enrolled colonial police and the non- enrolled village police, which had been co-opted as an adjunct to a minimally staffed police force in 1870. The third area of analysis is to demonstrate that a project of surveillance informed an ongoing project to reform the supervisory structures over the village police, which had major consequences for the shape of Bengal’s village administrative structure.

2 Such emphasis frames the study as a rejoinder to contemporary Indian police historiography, which has centred narrowly on the political purposes of colonial policing. Recent work on Indian police history that has drawn it into well-established historical discussions about the establishment, maintenance and demise of British power and authority in India, has inadvertently obscured an important bureaucratic and non-political function of surveillance. The study explicates the aspects of colonial policing that had little connection with establishing or maintaining foreign rule and which highlight a desire to establish a conciliatory framework for police administration. Its focus is the small powers of policing; the instrumentations that relied on knowledge and information, rather than coercion and brute force.

This is achieved through the use and reformulation of dominant theories of modern and pre- industrial information states, and a subsequent re-evaluation of discourses of knowledge and power that have identified an ‘all-India information order’. The study presents a theory of colonial surveillance that expands the idea of an information order in India to include its hitherto peripheral police context.

Overall, this thesis reconsiders dominant assumptions about the purpose and character of colonial policing in India. Through an analysis of the development and importance of preventative surveillance, the Bengal police are shown to have been simultaneously a force for imperial consolidation, and a conciliatory policing body reliant on paperwork; the collection, classification and utilisation of criminal information.

3 Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the General Award Rules of The University of Queensland, immediately made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis.

4 Publications during candidature

Giuliani, Erin. ‘Surveillance policières et technologies d'identification dans les colonies de Nouvelle Galles du Sud et du Queensland, 1880-1903’. In Vincent Denis and Catherine Denys (eds). Polices d'Empires: Experiences policières coloniales, 1750-1900. Presses Universitaires de Rennes: Rennes, forthcoming.

Publications included in this thesis No publications included in this thesis

Contributions by others to the thesis No contributions by others to the thesis

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree No parts of the thesis submitted for the award of another degree.

5 Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am grateful for the assistance and advice provided by my supervisor, Dr. Geoffrey Ginn. It has been his wisdom and expertise that I have found to be most valuable throughout the research, drafting and completion of the thesis. Without his ongoing cheeriness and support, and his wonderful capacity to reassure through storytelling, I would neither have embarked upon, nor completed this thesis.

Thanks are moreover due to the staff of the history department at the University of Queensland. Prof. Marion Diamond, Dr. Andrew Bonnell, Dr. Kriston Rennie, and Assoc. Prof. Martin Crotty offered their ideas and comments at numerous seminars and were persistently optimistic about the viability of the project. Serena Bagely was a friendly face in the office, to whom I am grateful for her sunny outlook and helpfulness.

Far away from the cloisters of UQ, I am indebted to several historians who read early drafts of the thesis and with whom I had the pleasure of discussing ideas. In the halls of King’s College, London, Dr. Frank Bongiorno and Dr. Jon Wilson provided invaluable feedback on early versions of the ideas and conclusions presented within the thesis. Dr. Simon Sleight in particular became a mentor and friend, who provided much needed encouragement to see the project through to completion. Prof. Carl Bridge is also deserved of many thanks, for providing me with workspace in the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies (KCL) between 2009 and 2012.

Financially, I am grateful to the University of Queensland and to the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies for their exceptionally generous awards and grants.

On a more personal note, thanks are due to particular friends and family members. Heidi and Arthur for allowing me to stay and study in their beautiful Northcote home; Mark and Rebecca for sharing the toil of postgraduate education with me; Elwyn, Avan, Luke and Dan, for their wonderful friendship, encouragement and laughter; Joe for saving rock and roll; Lori for total faith and support; Althea and Eddie, for their confidence, good humour and for supporting ongoing higher education despite more likely options; and finally to Jon, whose inventiveness and enthusiasm for ideas are continual sources of my motivation.

6 Keywords Indian police; Bengal police; surveillance; colonial knowledge; British empire; colonial policing.

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code 210305 British History (90%) ANZSRC code 160204 Criminological Theories (10%)

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification FoR code: 2103 Historical Studies (90%) FoR code: 1602 Criminology (10%)

7 Table of Contents

Preliminary Pages 1

Table of Contents 8

List of Figures 9

List of Abbreviations 10

Glossary 11

(1) Introduction 13

(2) Constructing a Theory of Surveillance: Reviewing the Literature 36

Section A

(3) A Genealogy of Surveillance: Policing History 52

(4) The Bengal Criminal and What to do with Him 69

Section B

(5) Policing and Technology: Surveillance and the Police Record 81

(6) The Collectors and Inspectors of Surveillance Knowledge 108

(7) Internal Surveillance: a Dilemma of Supervision 129

Conclusion 154

Bibliography 160

8 List of Figures

Figure 1: Statement Showing the Number and Cost of New Police 68

Figure 2: Police Form no. 257: Register – Persons Under Surveillance 102

Figure 3: Anthropometrical Measurement; left middle finger 103

Figure 4: Anthropometrical Measurement; length of head 104

Figure 5: Anthropometrical Measurement; measuring implements 105

Figure 6: Fingerprints classified as ‘loops’ and ‘whorls’ 106

Figure 7: Henry’s grid for classifying fingerprints 107

Figure 8: Plan of chaukidar parade ground 121

Figure 9: Register of attendance of Village Chaukidars and Notebook of Crime 127

Figure 10: Domiciliary Report Form no. 258 128

9 List of Abbreviations

BL British Library

CIB Criminal Intelligence Bureau

CID Criminal Investigation Department

FLUQ Fryer Library, University of Queensland

IOR India Office Records, National Archives, housed at the British Library

IOR/V Official publications of the India Office Records

IOR/P Bengal Police and Judicial Proceedings

Mss Eur European Manuscripts, India Office

Offg. Officiating

QSA Queensland State Archives

10 Glossary

The terms below are Bengali words used in this thesis. The original spelling used in British documents has been retained, however for uniformity one version has been selected from a range of variations (for example chaukidar often appeared in British documents as chowkeydar; amin as aumeen; babu as baboo and so on). Most of the definitions of these terms have been taken from Charles Wilkins, Glossary of Oriental Terms: Originally Annexed to the Fifth Report of the East-India Company in 1812-13, and Communicated to the House of Lords in 1830, in John Marriott and Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Britain in India, 1765-1905, vol. 3, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. Where indicated (*), the definitions represent the contemporary British use of the word, in judicial and police documents of the Government of Bengal.

Amin Trustee, commissioner. A temporary Collector, or supravisor, appointed to the charge of a country on the removal of a Zamindar, or for any other particular purpose of local investigation, or arrangement.

Babu Master, sir. A Hindu title of respect paid to men of rank, or high in office.

Bakhshi Paymaster.

Bazaar Daily market, or marketplace.

Bhadralok* Contemporary British designation of a literate and politically influential class of Hindus in Bengal.

Burkandaze* Police constable; part of the regulation police of the Company.

Budmashes* Traditionally, a ‘villain’ or ‘evil’ person. Used by the Bengal police interchangeably with bad character, repeat offender and habitual criminal.

Chaukidar A village police officer, who receives a stipendiary payment.

Coss* Two square miles.

Cutcherry Public office where business respecting village revenue is transacted.

Daffadar* Appointed to assist the panchayat to supervise chaukidars and collect revenue; also refers to a non-commissioned officer of rank of sergeant in the Indian army.

11 Darogah A police superintendent under the late Regulations of the East India Company, who has a limited local jurisdiction, is subordinate to the magistrate of a Zillah or district, and has under him an establishment of village policemen.

Dacoity/Daikaiti Gang robbery

Dewan By this title the East India Company are receiver-generals, in perpetuity, of the revenues of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa.

Jemadar A native officer of the Company’s army.

Mela* Fair; meeting.

Mofussil The subordinate divisions of a district; the country opposed to the town.

Mohurir Clerk who assisted the darogah; part of the regulation police of the Company.

Mussalman Muslim.

Naib A deputy.

Panchayat Village council of representatives.

Pugree Turban.

Ryot Peasant, subject; tenant of house or lands.

Sanad* Documents outlining the terms of a grant of land was made to a zamindar.

Sirdar Chieftain, captain, headman.

Tehsildar A village collector.

Thanā A police jurisdiction subordinate to district superintendent; area surrounding the police station; police station.

Thanadar A police station, sometimes referred to as above.

Zamindar Land-holder, land-keeper.

Zamindari Office or jurisdiction (prior to Permanent Settlement) of a zamindar.

12 (1) Introduction: Information, crime prevention and the bureaucratisation of policing.

In 1921, J.A. Scott presented a lecture in Calcutta about the duties associated with police surveillance in India. In 1932, his lecture was published as part of his book Practical Police Work, which was aimed at assisting members of the Indian police in their day-to-day duties. According to Scott, surveillance was “watching over probable evil-doers so as to prevent them from committing crime”.1 In particular, it was exercised over suspected habitual criminals – a criminal classification that included released convicts and non-convicted but suspicious characters. 2 Known and suspected repeat offenders were assumed to be the “formulation stone” of Indian criminality – “responsible for a large volume of the crime” committed in India, whose crimes were considered “the most dangerous of the total committed crime”.3 Scott highlighted the fact that it was the duty of high-ranking police officers to decide which individuals should be classified as habitual criminals, and to register them for police surveillance.4 The police station was the “primary receptacle for local information and it [was] on [the station police], therefore that responsibility largely rest[ed] for choosing the surveillè, and eliminating those that are unnecessary”.5 As a rule, among the “unnecessary” were usually the “casual criminal, the petty criminal, the non-habitual, and the man who had fallen in time of famine”.6 The task of classifying criminals for surveillance was accompanied by a need to keep track of “which persons of his jurisdiction he has under surveillance”.7 It was through the compilation of written indexes, returns and court orders that this was achieved. “History sheets” or “bad character rolls” were to be regularly updated, because these were the “progressive recordings of the steps the surveillance officer has taken”.8 The upkeep of written

1 Extract from J.A. Scott, Lectures on Practical Police Work, 24. Mss Eur F161/181-189. 2 This police classification of habitual criminality is corroborated and described in greater detail in letter no. 4146J from A.E. Stanley, District Superintendent of Sāran to the Offg. Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial, Political and Appointment Department, 28 December 1890, 92. IOR/MF/1/530 3 J.A. Scott, Lectures on Practical Police Work, 24 4 The role of the district superintendent and station officer in particular in classifying criminals is described in circular No. 3, 21 April 1892 ‘Register – Persons Under Surveillance, P.C. Form no. 257’, in The Bengal Police Code, 395. 5 J.A. Scott, Lectures on Practical Police Work, 24 6 Ibid, 28. 7 Ibid, 28. 8 Ibid, 24; The compilation of ‘history sheets’ is described in greater detail in L.F. Morshead, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report on the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency 1911, Ranchi: Bihār and Orissa Government Press, 1912, 40.

13 records would ensure that “only the right men” would be brought under surveillance and that the numbers were kept down to the “lowest margin”.9

The words of Scott are highlighted above to draw attention to the general ideas underpinning a commonly exercised preventative strategy of the Bengal police. In Bengal, surveillance was used to monitor the movements, habits, and associations of people who the police assumed to be likely to commit crime. It required the police to identify particular individuals, to record their habits and movements, and to exercise continual surveillance over them in an effort to reduce crime through prevention. Whilst his speech demonstrates that surveillance was considered to be a vital preventative police strategy, it also reflected dominant assumptions about securing public order in India, which helped to shape the character of colonial policing. Underpinning his speech was a surveillance epistemology; an abstraction within police thinking that surveillance was a primary means to secure order in a vast and predominately rural territory. This police abstraction can be understood as a by-product of a philosophy of indirect rule in India, which had produced a small, regular police force. Surveillance was a policing strategy viewed as a necessary corollary of a colonial police force whose presence in Bengal was far from pervasive. A police force with a limited presence across the territory could at least target areas where crimes were assumed likely to occur and people assumed to likely to commit them. Simultaneously, surveillance was aimed at preventing the crimes of individuals who fell into a constructed category of habitual criminality. To the police authorities the particularities of crime in Bengal reiterated the necessity of surveillance. The people who were seemingly the most likely to commit crime and who were argued to be responsible for the majority of crime committed, seemed controllable through the collection and analysis of criminal information, and the targeted deployment of police resources. By the first decade of the twentieth century, surveillance was a clearly defined policing strategy aimed at preventing recidivism, and at extending limited caches of police power.

A second concern of this thesis is to demonstrate that the development of a surveillance epistemology and the subsequent consolidation of a vast bureaucratic function of surveillance defined the character of the Bengal police as a preventative police force that was reliant on the collection and analysis of information. It discusses the impact of surveillance on three key areas of policing that were consolidated between 1861 and 1913. Firstly, efforts to secure colonial order through the realisation of a surveillance project produced the police record as a

9 J.A. Scott, Lectures on Practical Police Work, 24.

14 primary technological apparatus used by the police. Secondly, local and official strategies of surveillance that were developed by police administrators would define the everyday tasks of regular police and the non-enrolled or non-official village police. The regular constabulary performed a range of surveillance duties throughout the day; higher ranking officers, such as officers in charge of stations and district superintendents, spent a significant part of their day analysing and classifying criminal information to determine who should be surveilled and how often; and the village police were utilised primarily as a way to gain access to criminal information from the village, which was used to target criminal hotspots or suspected habitual criminals. Lastly, a concern to guarantee the delivery of criminal information from the village determined the relationship of supervision and regulation between the regular police and the village police. An ongoing and central reform campaign that focused on securing the co- operation of the village police throughout Bengal was underpinned, primarily, by a desire to gain access to important criminal information. It is within these key areas of police development that a surveillance epistemology can be seen as defining the Bengal police as a preventative and professional body, reliant on the collection and analysis of information.

The period between 1861 and 1913 is selected to trace the development and impact of surveillance because it is within this range that both the consolidation of the surveillance function and of the character of policing occurred. The year 1861 saw the introduction of a unified police into India under the Police Act (V of 1861). On August 17, 1860, the Government of India had passed a resolution appointing a committee to enquire into the state of the police throughout British India and to sketch the design for a police force that could be introduced into each province.10 In March the following year the draft act submitted by the committee became Act V. It vested ultimate control of separate provincial forces in inspectors general of police, who were assisted by one or two deputy and assistant inspectors general.11 In Bengal, nine revenue divisions, each controlled by a commissioner, were separated into 47 police districts, under the control of district magistrates.12 District superintendents of police, however, took charge of the police working within each district, which were on average 3, 000 square miles and populated by upwards of one million people.13 Though formally they were the assistants of the magistrate, superintendents “had a free hand” in the administration of the

10 ‘Government Resolution Appointing the Police Commission’, 17 August 1860, 14. IOR/P/146/27. 11 Section 4, Act (V of 1861), in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act (Act V of 1861) and the Indian Police Act (III of 1888) and the Police (Incitement to Disaffection) Act (XXII of 1922) with Commentaries and Notes of Case-Law Thereon, The Law Printing House, Madras, 1927, 117. 12 Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Bengal, vol. 1, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909, 106. 13 Ibid, 106.

15 district police.14 Under the “general control and direction” of each magistrate, they oversaw the working of the entire district police force, which was further divided into the smallest unit of police administration, the thanā. 15 Under the control of police inspectors each thanā — averaging 270 square miles and 130, 000 people — was provided with a civil constabulary consisting of head constables and constables who worked from police stations supervised by station officers.16 Constituted under Act V, the police that had been introduced in Bengal was a civil force for the prevention and detection of crime and disorder, and the protection of the life and property of the Indian population under British rule.17

The enrolment of a civil police force under Act V initiated a period of experimentation within which the surveillance function of the Bengal police was developed. The framers of Act V sought to lay down the fundamentals of a police code and to sketch a framework for a system of colonial policing that was able to be adapted to suit the particular requirements of each province.18 This allowed and required provincial governments and the police themselves to design complementary legislation and police practises according to local variables.19 More particularly, the distance between the colonial legislature and the district police meant that the onus to develop policing practises and technologies largely fell on Bengal’s executive police administrators, especially on district superintendents. This degree of autonomy served to foster informal and local strategies of policing that were not supported by legislative sanction, yet were not necessarily illegal. The character of policing in Bengal was therefore determined both by official and non-official discourses and philosophies, and by the formal and extra-legislative practises that comprised the minutiae of policing in Bengal. As police reformers sought to discover the best means to police Bengal, they were active in constructing a surveillance project, which had an impact on the technological apparatus, the daily tasks of official and non- official police agents, and the relationship between the regular and village police. 1861 is thus the beginning of the discussion, because Act V had given space for the development of a police-designed project of surveillance. In this thesis, the development of the police according to a surveillance epistemology is paramount, thus 1861 stands as a significant turning point in the history of Indian policing.

14 Ibid, 106. 15 Ibid, 106; Section 4, Act (V of 1861), in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, 117. 16 Imperial Gazetteer of India, 106. 17 Preamble, Act (V of 1861), ibid. 18 P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, xxxii. 19 ‘Report of the Police Committee, 1860’ in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, 126.

16 Made implicit then, is that the Indian Penal Code (I.P.C) and the utilitarian and liberal ideals upon which Thomas Macaulay wrote it were far less influential in the course of development of Indian policing than the identified surveillance epistemology.20 Indeed, the influence of the I.P.C on subsequent legislative enactments responded to local circumstances and pressing policy challenges, rather than reflecting systematic attempts to combine local needs with attention to Macaulay’s general codifying principles.21 This thesis is concerned to highlight and evaluate the local circumstances and the ideas and impulses that are useful in explaining the course of development of British policing in Bengal. A story that begins in 1861, when a police-led campaign for reform culminated, might ignore the longer history of legal codification in India and the wider Empire, however will focus much needed attention on the role of the police authorities in the course of its historical development.

It is for this reason that the thesis relies upon the primary sources that comprise the official and non-official discourses of the Bengal police department, held within the India Office Records of the British Library. Such sources include the extensive correspondence shared between the police authorities and the jails, Legislative Council, judicial department, and Governments of Bengal and India (Bengal Proceedings, IOR/P and IOR/Z), and the Annual Reports of the Inspectors General of Bengal Police (IOR/V/24). Private memoirs held in the European Manuscripts collection of the India Office Records (Eur/MSS) also provide insight into the motivations and philosophies of key police reformers, as do a variety of official and non- official material published by the Bengal police department, including evidence given at and reports of police commissions. This material is used to provide the historical context of

20 The momentous codification of criminal law that occurred in 1860 was the first of its kind across the British Empire and is the longest serving in the common law world. Drafted in 1837 by Thomas Macaulay, it was aimed at achieving universal jurisprudence in India. It was intended as a concise, lucid and comprehensive code that would minimise judicial discretion and concessions to local circumstances by transplanting ‘oriental’ (a confusing array of Muslim and Hindu legal practices) with a single code that reflected the so-called genius of English law. This had been the aim of Jeremy Bentham, who wished to establish a common law that was useful in any jurisdiction. James Mill, who from 1832 controlled the direction of imperial law and who was dedicated to realising Bentham’s ideals in India, appointed Macaulay, an old London Whig, as legal representative to the Government of India’s new Legislative Council in 1837, who in the same year drafted the I.P.C. Despite the fact that Macaulay critiqued at the same time as advocating Bentham’s reforms to English criminal law, his draft penal code is generally seen as a continuation of Bentham’s overall ambition to achieve universal jurisprudence. Its delayed enactment has been attributed to the fact that it was not until the Indian Mutiny of 1857 that legal codification became a legislative priority. In the aftermath of 1857, restoring a semblance of legality and enhancing the rule of law was viewed as vital to re-establishing British legitimacy in India, and codification was a step in such a direction. For the most comprehensive treatment of the historical circumstances that explain the delayed enactment of Macaulay’s draft, and of the political, cultural and philosophical contexts which led to its drafting and passing, see Wing Cheon-Chan, Barry Wright, Stanley Yeo (eds), Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Challenges of Modern Penal Reform, Surrey: Ashgate, 2001. 21 Barry Wright, ‘Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code: Historical Context and Originating Principles’, 19-55 in Wing Cheon-Chan, Barry Wright, Stanley Yeo (eds)Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Challenges of Modern Penal Reform, 24.

17 policing strategies developed at both the station and district level, and the police discourses and initiatives that led to the creation of an official policing infrastructure by the colonial legislature. Such sources are vital to understanding the police epistemologies by which the character of colonial policing was shaped. A deliberate favouring of the official epistemologies that shaped the character of colonial policing has meant that the thesis relies on the English language sources that comprise the official and non-official discourses of the Bengal police and British government of India. The content of the present thesis demonstrates the importance of a thorough analysis of such discourses, to the ends that public opinions on the issues presented is largely avoided. Outside the scope of the present discussion is therefore commentary on a public discourse on policing, which may have impacted in some way the character of colonial policing, yet had to be set aside in light of the extensive records from which the conclusions of this thesis is drawn.22

The study culminates in 1913, when a resolution was achieved regarding the question of how to regulate and supervise the surveillance project. Indeed, by 1913 the philosophical basis, criminal targets, technologies and personnel used for surveillance had been established. Whilst these elements would continue to define the character of colonial policing, a study that seeks to understand how the emergence and development of surveillance shaped the character of the police concludes when surveillance policing ceased to be a key topic of reform. 1913 does not signify the cessation of the surveillance project as a fundamental part of the preventative function of the police; rather, it flags the end of a lengthy project of reform and experimentation, which had begun in 1861. Indeed, an examination of Bengal’s annual police reports has revealed that surveillance and the prevention of habitual criminality continued to appear as chief categories of police reportage right up until 1947.23 However, the perseverance of surveillance policing in the later stages of colonial rule in India is not considered in this thesis. Instead, the study seeks to analyse the emergence of a surveillance epistemology in police thinking and its impact on the character of colonial policing between 1861 and 1913 – a key period for the development and consolidation both of the surveillance project, and of the character of colonial policing.

22 Such records comprise an area of future research that the author intends to return to. 23 This is evidenced by the equal attention paid in yearly reports of the Bengal police to two important tasks in crime control; namely, the repression of “political crime” and the surveillance of habitual criminality. Until the end of the British Raj, the inspector general devoted a separate section for the detailed reporting about these two categories of crime, publishing details of the number of habitual criminals who were under surveillance, and about political criminals who were viewed as directly subversive to British rule.

18 These aims have informed the structure of the present study. After a review of the relevant literature and the theoretical underpinnings of the thesis (Chapter Two), the thesis divides into two sections. The first (Section A) explains the emergence of the idea that surveillance was an ideal way to police Bengal by examining the structure of the Bengal police in the early years of development, and the problems of crime and disorder that surveillance was argued to resolve. Chapter Three, ‘The Genealogy of Surveillance’, argues that a key foundation of the surveillance project was the fact that Bengal’s new police24 was introduced as a minimally staffed force, whose presence was kept largely separate from the populace. It demonstrates how those who designed the legal underpinnings of Bengal’s new police constructed it on a principle of indirect police power. This was undertaken in order to redress the perceived and actual failures of the East India Company’s police regulations made at the time of the Permanent Settlement, and moreover reflected the cautious nature of colonial governance in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion. These processes are identified as central in the conception and design of the Police Act (V of 1861), insofar as it dealt specifically with Bengal. Act V created a minimally staffed police force requiring support structures of surveillance and information collection in order to control outlying rural areas. The foundations of what would in subsequent years narrow into an explicit surveillance function were visible in the enactment of this key piece of legislation. Exploration of its character and development is therefore key to understanding police surveillance in Bengal.

Chapter Four, ‘The Bengal Criminal and What to do with Him’25, argues that a colonial discourse about habitual crime gave further impetus to a preventative strategy of surveillance in Bengal. The idea of habitual or professional criminality, whilst influenced by European discourses of crime, was a rubric for suspected and actual repeat offenders or so-called bad characters who were considered to lead a life of crime. The development and importance of surveillance can be connected with British perceptions that certain individuals were particularly

24 The term ‘new police’ is used in this thesis to specify the introduction of a uniformed police in India 1861. The police that replaced disparate Company policing agencies after this date were contemporaneously referred to as the ‘new police’, hence this term is adopted in the thesis. It is likely that this term was borrowed from that which referred to the British police reforms occurring during the nineteenth century, however such was never used in India to comment on similarities between British and Indian policing. Key differences in policing in India and Britain, notably the closeness of the magistracy and the executive agencies in India, entailed that ‘new police’ in India and Britain designated markedly different things. This thesis is intended to explain the character of the ‘new police’ in Bengal, insofar as it operated as a surveillance body, and does not intend to delineate in detail the differences between British and Indian policing during the nineteenth century. Some commentary on the similarities in the way that habitual criminals were dealt with is provided in Chapter four, however. 25 The title of this chapter has been adapted from the title of a key criminological text of the early twentieth century that dealt with the perceived threat of criminal tribes. See Frederick Booth-Tucker, ‘Criminocurology, or, The Indian Criminal and What to do with Him’, Review of the Work of the Salvation Army among the Criminal Tribes of India, Simla, 1911.

19 threatening to public and rural order, and that surveillance was the best way to deal with them. Surveillance was an exercise in the prevention of crime, which was aimed in particular at individuals who were considered most likely to commit crime – known as repeat offenders, released convicts and suspected habitual criminals. However, it was given particular impetus by a judicial system that was viewed as unable to deter offenders from committing crime, which had produced the idea among the police that the suppression of crime was reliant on their abilities to prevent it. During the 1870s, the police would begin to argue that this system failed to deter the unreformable habitual criminal and that ongoing and targeted police surveillance of suspected habitual criminals and released convicts was necessary to prevent their crimes. Throughout the nineteenth century, in light of police attitudes that punishment was unable to deter habitual criminals from a ‘life of crime’, and of a seemingly worsening or at least persistent problem of habitual criminality, the police expanded upon a system of surveillance that was able to function separately from Bengal’s judicial and punishment apparatus.

The second section (B) focuses on three different aspects of the police structure that developed as the apparatus of surveillance policing, vital to the everyday task of colonial policing. Major innovations in police technology, the routinisation of the work conducted by the village and regular police, and the development of an apparatus of internal supervision, are viewed as part of an ongoing process of experimentation to construct a surveillance order. Chapter Five, ‘Policing and Technology: Surveillance and the Police Record’, discusses the emergence of the primary technological basis of policing and how it was shaped by the requirements of surveillance. Surveillance, involving the deployment of police officers into the countryside and the collection and collaboration of information, required the development of a range of instrumentalities. That it involved selective deployment of limited police resources according to criminal patterns, known localities of crime, and networks of criminal association, meant that police knowledge was required in a useable form. Between 1870 and the first years of the twentieth century, the Bengal police designed a range of technologies that would enable the collection and classification of criminal information for the purposes of surveillance. District and central registers for the classification of surveillance knowledge collected by the village police, crime maps that localised such information and systems of indexing and classification to provide access to and to enable the circulation of police knowledge were examples of a range of instrumentalities designed in support of the surveillance function. By the turn of the twentieth century this would elevate the status and utility of written information from relative insignificance to vital importance in Bengal policing. The notion that professional crime could

20 not be prevented without specialised knowledge generated a variety of technologies that were reliant above all on written information. Systems used for the collection and analysis of surveillance knowledge accelerated the consolidation of a bureaucratic police function in Bengal.

Chapter Six, ‘The Collectors and Inspectors of Surveillance Knowledge’, argues that surveillance informed official and non-official police agents’ everyday tasks. The separation of the physical and written components of police surveillance was replicated in the police hierarchy, which established the village police as watchers and collectors of surveillance knowledge and consolidated the police executive’s supervisory and professional roles. Police- designed surveillance strategies required personnel to watch and report on the villages and rural tracts that some argued amounted to an unpoliceable periphery. Village police officers and headmen were believed to be best suited to collect information and surveil the village, and so were relied upon for this by the police. On the other hand, a professionally trained police executive was deemed necessary to direct and supervise targeted surveillance. As surveillance became increasingly bureaucratic, it involved the classification and identification of criminals; the indexing of crime by cartography; and the analysis of criminal information for locating and tracking certain well-known criminals. Concomitantly, the work conducted by police inspectors, district superintendents, and the inspector general came to be considered scientific, precise and specialised. As such, the division of police work entailed that the police executive was largely engaged in the classification and analysis of criminal information, whereas the village police were used as a source of information. Consequently, a relationship of exchange was forged between official and non-official police agencies. Daily police tasks were in large part defined by a system of corroboration, whereby criminals were surveilled by the constabulary according to information recorded and classified by the police executive.

The importance the police placed on the collection of information and the conduct of surveillance would require a system for controlling the means to know rural and criminal Bengal. Chapter Seven, ‘Internal Surveillance: A Dilemma of Supervision’, argues that the primary techniques for supervising and regulating the village watch were designed to increase police control over the portion of the surveillance project that depended on village information. An important and ongoing project to reform the means of supervision over the village police – which was part of a general effort to secure their efficiency – was aimed at securing control over the village system and providing access to surveillance knowledge. Between 1870 and 1913, both the Government of Bengal and the police executive endeavoured to implement a

21 workable system of chaukidar supervision to secure their access to important channels of village information. During this period, policy vacillated between placing the village police under the direct supervision of the regular police and fostering village autonomy through the maintenance and introduction of locally paid ‘native’ supervisory institutions. This in turn revealed a tension between wanting to maintain an administrative policy of indirect police power and the need to exert executive strength for the supervision of the village system. By 1913 a clear policy of British supervision prevailed. Four decades of trial and error had shown that total control over the information required for surveillance was impossible without strong executive intrusion, and the policy of utilising non-official indigenous elites and councils for supervision was abandoned. Yet, pursuant to the notion that Bengalese were more inclined to co-operate with administrators if connections between regular police and the village watch were imperceptible, the police themselves were not named as chaukidar supervisors. Instead, intermediaries employed as subordinate Civil Servants were utilised as a link between the police executive and the village. This was arguably to maintain the division between official and non-official power—a division that was an integral feature of the surveillance project.

Presented in this way, the study amounts to a discussion of surveillance as a defining feature of policing in colonial Bengal. Surveillance elevated the police record to a position of central importance, influenced the development of a professional identity among its executive branch, consolidated the role of the village police as the watchers, collectors and messengers of surveillance knowledge, and defined a relationship of supervision and subordination between the regular and the village police. The character of the Bengal police is presented in this thesis as reliant on paperwork; the collection, classification and circulation of information.

A dominant view of colonial policing in Bengal, and more broadly India, is that the police were fundamentally agents of colonial control. Seeking to redress the fact that the police has been a neglected aspect of India’s colonial history, police historians have focused on their role in enabling colonial power in order to draw the police into well established historical discussions about the establishment, maintenance and demise of British power and authority in India.26 As David Arnold writes, the fact that they were “seldom the subject of high-level imperial debates and exchanges” has meant that “the police have frequently been passed over in silence by historians as well, or at best relegated to occasional footnotes and minor asides” in histories of

26 David Arnold, ‘Police power and the Demise of British rule in India, 1930-1947’ in David M. Anderson and David Killingray, Policing and decolonization: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917-65, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, 42.

22 colonial power.27 A central aim of police history in India has therefore been to demonstrate the important relationship between the police and the colonial government it served, the extent to which it served imperial purposes, and its identification by the Indian populace as an agency of foreign oppression.28 To do so, historians have examined the development of the new police idea in India as an undertaking to strengthen and refine the state apparatus prior to and in the aftermath of the rebellion. More commonly for those studying the Bengal police, the repressive function of the police after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and the subsequent rise of political terrorism, has been central.

Within the current discourse, the formation of the new police in India is understood as a by- product of changing notions of government responsibility that were evident by the mid- nineteenth century. As David Arnold has noted, the idea of imperial hegemony was at this time underpinned by a bureaucratic ideology that stressed that the power of the colonial state, largely established by the army, was to be maintained by administrative and civil power.29 It was through the army that the British had acquired India as a colony, yet it was through the rationalisation of a legal code, and the establishment of a civil police that the British sought to exercise control over it.30 Peter Robb has utilised a similar line of argument to explain why in the 1850s, British police forces were aimed at demonstrating the importance and supremacy of the state and defending its interests, especially in regards to the payment of revenue, rather than the investigation and prevention of crime.31 At this time, police inspectors were more likely to hold court to try a defaulting zamindar, or suppress instances of rural insurrection or political upheaval, than to attempt to catch a thief.32 Police agents were viewed as serving directly the interests of a ruling power and the desire to consolidate administrative and civil power throughout India.

The rebellion of 1857 is similarly used to signpost the idea that a civil force had become necessary to support a changed concept of colonial power. Anandswarup Gupta points to the fact that the rebellion highlighted to the British that the “effective ‘occupation’ and administration of the country with minimum expense, the prompt suppression of all challenges to British power and authority and the realisation of the maximum revenues from all

27 Ibid, 42. 28 Peter Robb, ‘The Ordering of rural India: the Policing of Nineteenth Century Bengal and Bihar’, in David M. Anderson and David Killingray, Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830 - 1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991, 126. 29 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859 to 1947, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986, 13. 30 Ibid, 4. 31 Peter Robb, ‘The Ordering of rural India’, 129. 32 Ibid, 129.

23 conceivable sources” required a civil, uncostly and ubiquitous police force. 33 Whilst momentarily diverting the attention of the Government of India from the question of police reform, the rebellion would enhance an existing urgency to remould and strengthen the civil administration of India, via the establishment of a uniform Indian police force. 34 The establishment of the ‘new police’ idea, it is argued, thus took place within a broader context of establishing British administrative, legal and civil hegemony within India, and the evolution of the police continued to support these purposes. As Robb has noted

placing the developing police force in a broader context of imperial purposes in India, it is seen that it long remained a largely symbolic representation of power and order, playing its part alongside other such instruments rather than being a force for the detection and reduction of crime.35 Certainly, this framework explains specific provisions of Act V that made the new police instrumental in the subordination of the Indian populace to colonial rule. For example, Act V allowed for a close connection to be established between the magistracy and the police, which in the words of Arnold enabled the police to combine “the role of the judge, jailor and executioner”. 36 Act V granted full magisterial powers to European provincial inspectors general of police and their assistants, who comprised the top tier of provincial police authority in India.37 Moreover, the district magistrate was made the principal controlling officer in the police administration of each district within each province, therefore establishing their dual position in the administration of criminal justice. The magistrate or ‘district officer’ was the “mainstay of British administration” in the district, to whom all magisterial, police and revenue officers were subordinate.38 Yet, as the head of the department of criminal justice, he was also charged with the trial of all but the most important cases (which were committed to the court of sessions). The impartiality of his role as magistrate was therefore undermined by his role as the head of the district police. At the point of the enactment of Act V, this was justified because it was apparently impracticable to relieve the controlling magistrates of their judicial duties, and at the same time, “inexpedient to deprive the Police and public of the valuable aid and supervision of the district officer in the general management of Police matters”.39 In Arnold’s opinion, the dual position of magistrates and inspectors general in the legal process points to

33 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India: 1861 to 1947, New Delhi: Concept Publishers, 1979, 3. 34 Anandswarup Gupta, Crime and Police in India: Up to 1861, Agra: Sahitya Bhawan, 1974, 376. 35 Peter Robb, ‘The Ordering of rural India’, 129. 36 ‘Report of the Police Committee, 1860’, 134g; David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 3. 37 Section 5 and 6, Police Act (V of 1861) in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act. 38 Imperial Gazetteer of India, 146. 39 ‘Report of the Police Committee, 1860’, 134f.

24 the police as a “mainstay of colonial state power”, and precludes considering the police outside a paradigm of colonial state power.40

This thesis does not directly challenge the wisdom that the police introduced into India in 1861 was a bulwark for newly defined colonial power, and that it continued to exhibit such characteristics throughout Britain’s rule over India. However, it seeks to re-focus the debate onto the aspects of colonial policing that had little or no connection with establishing or maintaining foreign rule. Current historiography has downplayed instances where police reform was driven by a desire to attain an appropriate framework of colonial police administration, rather than to achieve abstract imperial purposes in India. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that Indian police historiography is rather undeveloped compared to other well-established historical debates on policing. The ‘silence’ that Arnold uses to justify a narrow focus on the political contours of Indian policing can similarly be used to explain why its subject matter has tended to revolve around the same areas of debate. The relatively few studies that specifically deal with the Indian police (especially after 1861) has meant that the possibilities for engaging with the questions that police historians have posed have not yet been exhausted. This has fostered a tendency among historians to continually refine and develop existing arguments, rather than to branch out into new territories. For this reason, Indian police historiography, possessing a narrow definition of the character of the police, offers little in the way of an explanation for the development and consolidation of a vast bureaucratic and non- political function of surveillance.

In fact, this narrow definition has directly precluded a discussion of the surveillance project within Bengal’s historiography after 1905. This literature has ignored the surveillance project as a defining feature of colonial policing partly because it argues that at this time, police resources were directed solely against the nationalist threat. This assumption comprises a central aspect of debate that this thesis seeks to redress. Currently, there is little if any deviation from the notion that the rise of political terrorism in the context of the 1905 partition of Bengal was a watershed moment for the Bengal police that narrowed their control function solely against the nationalist threat in the post-partition era.41 It has been argued that the political motivations of the partition gave rise to communal disorder after 1905, which produced a narrow police role to contain the nationalist threat.

40 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 3. 41 Foremost in this argument is Arun Mukherjee, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal: 1861 – 1912, Calcutta: KP Bagchi and Company, 1995, 229.

25 Outwardly, the partition of Bengal that was announced July 1905 by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, was a measure of “administrative convenience” that altered the eastern boundaries of Bengal proper to make Bengal a smaller and more manageable province.42 The proclamation of partition transferred a significant portion of Bengal’s eastern districts to Assam, and constituted them as part of the newly created province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, subject to the laws and regulations of the Indian Councils Act.43 Several reasons underpinned Curzon’s decision to partition Bengal, which had been discussed since the late 1890s. First of all, reducing the size of the area under the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal would allow the often forgotten and thus poorly administered districts in its eastern portion to be more tightly supervised under a separate administration.44 Secondly, it was viewed as necessary to foster the development of a strong frontier province in northeast India, which was characterised by the economic and administrative backwardness of Assam, the “smallest and most backward of the local administrations”.45 The expansion of the administrative area of Assam was seen as a way to foster its independent development, by allowing it to flourish away from the shadow of Calcutta and the districts of west Bengal, whose administrative, industrial and maritime pre- eminence hampered its growth.46 The Government of India thus professed twin aims to be achieved by the partition – the development of the northeast frontier, and the relieving of the “over burdened and congested administration of Bengal”.47

However, the partition was highly politically motivated, aimed at weakening the political influence of the minority yet vociferous and literate Hindu communities in East Bengal.48 It was a continuation of British policy that was aimed at breaking up the influence of high-caste

42 A.K. Biswas, ‘Paradox of Anti-Partition and Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1905’, Social Scientist 23, no. 4/6 (April-June 1995): 38. 43 Assam, formerly administered as part of the Bengal province, was in 1874 severed from Bengal proper and created as a separate province under the command of a Chief Commissioner, directly subordinate to the Government of India. Under the 1905 partition, its north-western borders with Bengal were altered, and its administrative area enlarged to subsume the former eastern Bengal districts of Dacca, Mymensingh, Farīdpur, Backergunge, Tippera, Noākhāli, Chittagong, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Rājashāhi, Dinājpur, Jalpaigurī, Rangpur, Bogra, Mālda, and Pābna. Consequently, it was announced that the former districts of Assam, and its new additions would from 1905 be “subject to and included within the limits of the Lieutenant-Governorship of the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam”. See ‘Government of India’s Resolution, 19 July 1905’ in Nityapriya Ghosh and Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay (eds), Partition of Bengal: Significant Signposts 1905-1911, Sahitya Samsad: Kolkata, 2005, 57-65. 44 H.H. Risely, ‘Letter of 3 December 1903’, in Nityapriya Ghosh and Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay (eds), Partition of Bengal, 1; Anil Baran Ray, ‘Communal Attitudes to British Policy: The Case of the Partition of Bengal, 1905’, Social Scientist 6, no. 5 (December 1977): 35. 45 H.H. Risely, ‘Letter of 3 December 1903’, 10. 46 Ibid, 10. 47 Ibid, 10. 48 Anil Baran Ray, ‘Communal Attitudes to British Policy’, 35.

26 Bengali Hindus or the bhadralok49 who had traditionally enjoyed the patronage of the British administration in Bengal and had exercised far greater influence in East Bengal than the majority Muslim population. In conversations with Curzon about the proposed partition, A.H.L Fraser, then Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, described East Bengal, especially the Dacca and Mymensingh districts, as a “hotbed of the purely Bengali movement, unfriendly if not seditious in character, and dominating the whole tone of Bengali administration”.50 Curzon’s proposals for partition, it was agreed, would alleviate this by relieving Bengal of its “elements of weakness and dissension”.51 The alteration of Bengal’s boundaries and the creation of a new province would weaken the political alliances that had been formed within the bhadralok by distributing them between two provinces. 52 By ceding territories where Hindu influence dominated in the administration to a newly created eastern province with a majority Muslim population, where the government would actively foster the improvement of the social and civil position of Muslim people, the seditious threat of the bhadralok in Bengal would be diluted.53

The political motivation of the partition gave rise to significant agitation prior to and after the partition was announced, precipitating the overtly repressive response by the police that historians have argued transformed their policing function. Early on, when government proposals for partition were being discussed, Hindu leaders, especially in Dacca and Mymensingh, voiced their ardent discontent towards proposals for partition in several demonstrations during Lord Curzon’s tour of the districts prior to the partition in 1904.54 At this time Curzon would reveal that members of a social elite felt that they were being “handed over to a backward and inefficient administration” and that their “valuable rights and privileges, which they are present to enjoy” were being eroded.55 While opposition to the partition was initially framed in terms of protecting a privileged or influential position in Bengal society and politics, Hindu private elites from the legal and commercial sector would moreover view the move as an attack on the solidarity of the Bengali-speaking population and as an attempt to initiate a policy of ‘divide and rule’.56 These ideas would coalesce in an early campaign against the proposals, whereby petitions, public meetings and protests were

49 Though occluding a variety of communal affiliations, the term bhadralok was used in contemporary documents to designate a literate and politically influential class of Hindus in Bengal. 50 Ibid, 35. 51 Ibid, 36. 52 Anil Baran Ray, ‘Communal Attitudes to British Policy’, 36. 53 Ibid, 37. 54 ‘Speeches given during Lord Curzon’s visit in East Bengal’, 18 February, 1904, Dacca, in Nityapriya Ghosh and Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay (eds), Partition of Bengal, 23. 55 Ibid, 23. 56 Anil Baran Ray, ‘Communal Attitudes to British Policy’, 39.

27 employed to demonstrate the widespread discontent amongst Bengal’s population towards Curzon’s plans.57 This early agitation required the police to put down small demonstrations that were potentially volatile, and to keep watch over eminent leaders who were viewed as politically dangerous.

The clearest impact of the agitation on the character of policing stemmed from the swadeshi movement for the boycotting of English produce and manufactured goods in India.58 Hindu leaders who felt that the British government had embarked on a deliberate campaign against them instigated the swadeshi movement immediately after the partition was announced in 1905.59 Gaining momentum in Calcutta under the leadership of the Indian Association, it spread throughout Bengal between 1905 and 1907, where the bhadralok classes perpetuated it across the province. 60 Its significance lay in its failure to affect government policy, transforming the character of the anti-partition boycott to public disorder crimes after 1907.61 In light of the failure of the movement in the former territories of east Bengal, Hindu youths resorted to rioting, rick burning and political terrorism, to vocalise their discontent.62 As the movement gained momentum, disorganised protest activity was transformed into organised political terrorism after 1908. 63 Instances of so-called ‘political crime’ included bomb outrages, robberies, and assassinations of government officials, generally committed by individuals or by small groups of bhadralok revolutionaries. 64 Between 1908 and 1912, however, the most common form of political crime was dacoity committed by organised revolutionary societies. 65 Whilst initially communal violence or political crime had been confined to the eastern districts, after 1908 all districts of Bengal were affected in some way by political dacoity.66 Across Bengal crimes of dacoity, committed in particular by the bhadralok youth who participated in the anti-partition movement within organised secret youth societies,

57 Gordon Johnson, ‘Partition, Agitation and Congress: 1904 to 1908’, Modern Asian Studies 7, no. 3, (May 1973): 546. 58 Anil Baran Ray, ‘Communal Attitudes to British Policy’, 36. 59 Ibid, 36. 60 Ibid, 36. 61 Gordon Johnson, ‘Partition, Agitation and Congress’, 559. 62 Ibid, 559. 63 Ibid, 551. 64 Arun Mukherjee, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal, 229. 65 Ibid, 179. 66 Dacca, Mymensingh, Farīdpur, Tippera, Noākhāli and Backergunge were zones marked by ongoing communal violence and forms of criminal protest taking shape primarily as dacoity committed by organised secret societies. Such moreover occurred in western Bengal districts of Bankurā, Midnapore, Hooghly, Howrah, Nadiā, Khulnā, and Jessore. Elsewhere revolutionary violence had less of a firm hold, but there were isolated instances of protest and political crimes occurring. Particular instances of protest and communal rioting are highlighted for Bakargunge and Mymensingh in Gordon Johnson, ‘Partition, Agitation and Congress’, 577.

28 increased exponentially according to annual reports of the Bengal police. 67 This form of political terrorism was most severe between 1908 and 1912, contributing to a phase of criminality that was characterised by elite Hindu involvement in organised crime, under the banner of the anti-partition movement.68 Despite the annulment of the partition in April 1911, instances of political crime continued across Bengal until 1947.69 By this stage, anti-partition agitation had given a permanent base to anti-British sentiment. The partition had been viewed as a deliberate attack on the unity of Bengali-speaking populations in Bengal, thus after annulment political crime persevered under the banner of nationalism.70

This is the primary context that police historians have used to argue that 1905 marked a watershed moment for the character and purposes of colonial policing in Bengal.71 Police work became concerned primarily with the investigation of political crimes committed by the bhadralok, and plans to improve the role of the police in preventing and detecting crimes that were committed by and affected the common person were waylaid.72 Police historians have argued that even though a programme of reform was initiated that sought to improve the police as an agency for the prevention and detection of crime, but it lost momentum after 1905 in light of the nationalist threat.73 The Police Commission of 1902 that was held to improve the general efficiency of the police had revealed that the Bengal police existed in a state of inefficiency and required an expensive but necessary overhaul in order to improve them as an agency for the prevention and detection of crime.74 To do so, the recommendations included the need for improved supervision over the constabulary, an increase in their pay, the establishment of training schools in each province, a system of competitive examination and stringent recruitment, and the enlargement of the police force so their presence in towns and cities was more total.75 It moreover detailed the guidelines for the functioning of a central Criminal Investigation Department for India, which could co-ordinate provincial investigations into organised crime. Such comprised a set of administrative reforms that were aimed at improving the efficiency of the police in preventing and detecting crime.76

67 Ibid, 578. 68 A.K. Biswas, ‘Paradox of Anti-Partition and Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1905’, 36; Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India, 308. 69 Ibid, 308. 70 Ibid, 308. 71 Arun Mukherjee, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal, 229. 72 Ibid, 229. 73 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India, 3. 74 Details of the recommendations of the committee are included in subsequent chapters. 75 Arun Mukherjee, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal, 229. 76 Ibid, 229.

29 By the time of publication in 1905, however, the onset of the anti-partition movement entailed that the committee’s recommendations were implemented slowly and half-heartedly. Small additions to the Bengal and Calcutta police forces were sanctioned over the next two years, some police training schools were opened, and provincial Criminal Investigation Departments were established across India (though these proved useful in dealing with political crime, and thus have been treated as the result of a concern to repress political crime rather than to increase the ordinary preventative and detective police functions).77 However, by 1905 the attention of the colonial state had been diverted away from general administrative reform, and towards the development of a legislative apparatus that would enable the police to suppress political crime.78 The sum of this was that a programme to improve the efficiency of the police as an agency who cordially co-operated with the people for the prevention and detection of crime lost momentum in light of the need for an agency for the repression of political crime. The control of traditional crimes and the reform of the preventative apparatus of the police, as argued by Gupta, “became casualt[ies] with the increasing preoccupation of the police with the suppression of political movements and clandestinely-inspired communal conflict”. 79 Similarly, Robb has argued that the work conducted by the police became dominated by tasks such as intelligence gathering and the detection of revolutionary activities, as the executive directed police resources onto the political struggles of the twentieth century.80 Concerned instead with augmenting the strength of political powers of the police rather than reforming or strengthening the efficiency of the village-level or thanā police, Bengal’s police forces were increasingly alienated from the people, and positioned more than ever as agents of political control.81 The Bengal partition years, Arun Mukherjee argues, “stand out as the ‘great divide’ between one era and another in more ways than one”, marking the onset of the revolutionary or nationalist period on one hand, and the narrowing of the strength of the police entirely onto political crime and terrorism, on the other.82

The idea that the course of Bengal’s police history in the twentieth century was defined by events occurring after 1905 is challenged by a study that investigates the development and consolidation of a preventative surveillance function from 1861 that was aimed at the

77 Ibid, 307. 78 Ibid, 259-278. See for example ‘Explosives Substances Act, 1908’ and ‘Newspapers Act, 1908’. Security measures were also introduced into the Code of Criminal Procedure obliging police officers to monitor political meetings, and police officers who helped to capture political criminals were presented with awards and honours. 79 Ibid, 260. 80 Peter Robb, ‘The Ordering of Rural India’, 146. 81 Arun Mukherjee, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal, 230. 82 Ibid, 230.

30 suppression of non-political criminality and which persevered beyond 1905. This thesis locates an ongoing project to reform the means of information collection for the task of preventative surveillance to highlight that a preventative crime control function of the police persevered into the twentieth century. Historians that view the changed political climate as lessening the urgency for the reform of the preventative role of the police have ignored that preventative surveillance for the suppression of non-political crime continued as a central purpose of the Bengal police until 1947. As this thesis demonstrates, the development, use and refinement of surveillance technologies and strategies that were aimed at preventing habitual criminality occurred throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries in Bengal, and dominated both local and provincial agendas for reform. Chapters Five and Six in particular delineate the primarily local strategies of surveillance that were implemented throughout Bengal between 1861 and the 1913 that point to the centrality of the preventative function of the police, which persevered in the post-partition era. Moreover, Chapter Six highlights that the village police was the basis of the preventative surveillance function of the regular police, which was in a continual state of reform and development until 1913. The final chapter of this thesis similarly indicates the importance placed on preventative crime control in the twentieth century by explicating the significant changes made to police modes of supervision over key actors in surveillance, Bengal’s non-enrolled village police. The discussion is narrowed onto the official and unofficial experiments conducted by the government and police to strengthen supervision over the village police in an effort to secure their co-operation in the task of preventative surveillance, especially over Bengal’s so-called professional criminals. This study thus views the Bengal police as characterised by a dominant preventative surveillance function that was separate from, but equally important as, their role in the repression of political crime.

An examination of the preventative functions of the Bengal police has moreover highlighted an imbalance in the way in which criminality has been categorised within discourses about Indian crime. This literature has largely focused on the portion of the colonial legal and policing infrastructure that was designed to deal with so-called ‘criminal tribes’ or “collective criminality”, as it is termed by Sandra Freitag.83 The British construction of the criminal tribe, legally defined in 1871 under the Criminal Tribes Act, entailed that the identity of entire communities of people became synonymous with the notion of hereditary criminality. 84

83 Sandria B. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India”, Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 227. 84 Henry Schwarz, Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting like a Thief, Wiley Blackwell: Oxford, 2010, 2.

31 Criminal tribes were argued by the British to be hereditarily predisposed to lifetime criminality and incapable of reform, and thus were subjected to police surveillance to restrict their movements, and in some cases were relocated onto agricultural settlements.85 The historical conditions that gave rise to attitudes that designated whole groups of people as addicted by birth to the commission of systematic crime, and the legal infrastructure and incremental adjustments that were made by the British to control and restrict their movements, have been extensively and accurately documented in a discourse of Indian crime. 86 However, the dominance of criminal tribes as a subject of inquiry in historical literature has contributed to a rather one-sided historical picture about the primary targets and nature of India’s legal infrastructure. In particular, it has produced an image of colonial policing as designed primarily for the repression of collective criminality.

Certain historians have exacerbated this partiality by claiming that the British state committed maximal resources to the policing of collective criminality, and “minimal state resources… to the policing of individual crime”.87 Whilst Freitag has been the foremost exponent of this idea, Sanjay Nigam has similarly argued that the terms in which the threat of certain communities of people were discussed, and their resultant labelling as criminal, ensured the legal infrastructure of the colonial government was primarily geared towards repressing migratory populations.88 A government whose power and authority was enabled by the revenue derived from the existence of a settled agricultural society was inevitably suspicious of migratory people whose modes of livelihood lay outside the colonial economy.89 This notion was also strengthened by the fact that British elites had long equated mobile populations in Britain and throughout the Empire with crime and disorder.90 This tendency to view India’s migratory populations as

85 A discussion of whether or not criminal tribes were actually ‘criminal’ appears in Henry Schwarz, Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 25-33. 86 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’; Andrew J. Major, State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the ‘Dangerous Classes’, Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (July 1999): 657-688; Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth’, Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype – The Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India’, Indian Economic Social History Review 27, no. 131 (1990): 131-164; David Arnold, ‘Criminal Tribes and Martial Races: Crime and Social Control in Colonial India’, paper presented at Comparative Commonwealth Social History: Crime, Deviance, and Social Control, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, December 1994, 1-22; Mark Brown, ‘“The most desperate characters in all India”: Reconsidering law and penal policy in British India’, Punishment and Society: The International Journal of Penology 3, (2001): 433-440; Mark Brown, ‘Race, science and the construction of native criminality in colonial India’. Theoretical Criminology 5 (2001): 345-368; Mark Brown, ‘Ethnology and colonial administration in nineteenth century British India: The question of native crime and criminality’. British Journal of the History of Science. 36 (2003): 1-19. 87 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, 230. 88 Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth’, Part 1, 131. 89 Ibid, 131. 90 This is an important part of the debate surrounding the evolution of the idea of the criminal tribe in colonial India, yet is outside the scope of the present study. See for example Anand A. Yang, ‘Dangerous Castes and Tribes’: The

32 threatening to colonial power was inevitably brought to India as intellectual baggage or “colonial logic”, which subsequently resonated with a perceived criminal problem, and therefore was written in to the colonial legal infrastructure.91 Utilising such ideas, Indian criminologists have argued that criminal tribes were perceived as directly subversive of colonial power, whereas individual crime appeared petty and less threatening to the state. Henry Schwarz, who confronts the question as to whether criminal tribes were a “discursive construction” and “purely an Orientalist fantasy” or as an actual criminal problematic, emphasises that collective criminality was considered by far the most threatening category of crime in colonial India.92 Overall, the implication has been that the colonial legal infrastructure was focused primarily on collective criminality. The centralised policing efforts that were launched against criminal tribes have been considered as comprising “the last major policing operation before it became necessary to control the rising nationalist movement after 1905”, and the individual has been omitted from the discussion.93

Whether deliberately, or indirectly, this approach has obscured the fact that individuals, especially those classified as habitual criminals, were targeted within a separate police surveillance project in Bengal. As this thesis demonstrates, the development of the surveillance project was a major undertaking by the Bengal police and government, which included a range of formal and informal strategies that were aimed at preventing the recommission of crime by individual offenders. This challenges the idea that criminal tribes were considered to be more threatening than ordinary individual criminals, and the idea that they required their “own special form of extraordinary policing” that superseded in importance any other policing strategy designed in the nineteenth century. 94 The current historiographic depiction of collective and individual criminality that respectively categorises them as threatening and non- threatening is an assumption that is revealed as false in this thesis. Instead, this study demonstrates that individual repeat offenders were significantly threatening to colonial order, giving rise to an array of strategies of surveillance aimed at preventing of habitual criminality.

Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doms of North East India’ in Anand Yand (ed.) Crime and Criminality in British India. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1985. Yang argues that ideas about native crime and criminality were in part connected with contemporary and earlier metropolitan discourses about habitual criminality and fears of mobile criminal classes. 91 See Mark Brown’s commentary on Anand A. Yang’s work in Mark Brown, ‘Crime, Liberalism and Empire: Governing the Mina Tribe of Northern India’. Social and Legal Studies 13 (2004): 196. 92 For information regarding the historical debate over the criminality of criminal tribes in India see Henry Schwarz, Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 25 and Mike Dash, Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult, London: Granta, 2005. 93 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, 230; Henry Schwarz, Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 100. 94 Andrew Major, ‘State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab’, 662.

33 Certainly it is true that a portion of the surveillance carried out by the police in colonial Bengal was used to control and regulate communities of people who were viewed by the British as collectivities of hereditary criminals, and had been legally classified as ‘criminal tribes’. Under the Criminal Tribes Act (VI of 1871) the police were utilised to surveil and restrict the movements of whole communities of people who were proclaimed as a “legally addicted to the commission of non-bailable offences” and as belonging to a criminal tribe.95 Surveillance was used to ensure that members of criminal tribes did not breach the terms of their registration, and remained within their residential location, or their specified place of settlement. 96 Any registered member of a criminal tribe who was found “beyond the area prescribed for his residence, without a prescribed pass, or in a place or at a time not permitted by the conditions of his pass” was liable for arrest without warrant by any police officer, village-headman or village police officer.97 This meant that the regular and village police were required to watch for the arrival into their jurisdictions of persons who “may reasonably be suspected of belonging to any criminal tribes”.98 To ensure criminal tribes were at all times kept within the purview of the state, police constables and chaukidars were required to conduct roll-calls, to inspect their residences and to maintain registers of information of their movements and whereabouts.99 The Criminal Tribes Act, in requiring the police to assist in the registration and monitoring of the movements and whereabouts of criminal tribes, ensured the police performed a repressive surveillance function for the control of criminal tribes.

However, it should be considered that surveillance in Bengal was divided into repressive and preventative police functions. On one hand, surveillance was used to limit and control the movements of groups of people who had been proclaimed as hereditary criminals under the Criminal Tribes Act. On the other, it was designed to circumvent an apparently faulty judicial system that failed to eliminate the threat of habitual criminality, and to prevent recidivism and reduce crime. Indian crime and policing historiography should therefore account for both, yet so far it has only dealt with the role of police surveillance in restricting the movements of criminal tribes. Whilst this has produced an extensive historical treatment of how and why so- called criminal tribes were controlled, it has at the same time served to obscure a vast, bureaucratic function of preventative surveillance and the individuals who became targeted

95 The Criminal Tribes’ Act (XXVII of 1871), in A Collection of The Acts passed by the Governor General of India in Council in the year 1871, Office of Superintendent of Government Printing: Calcutta, 1872, 348. 96 Ibid, 351. 97 Ibid, 353. 98 Ibid, 354. 99 Andrew Major, ‘State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab’, 662.

34 within it. The present study is therefore concerned to account for the establishment and consolidation of a police function that targeted individual repeat offenders, principally because it has been overlooked in Indian discourses of policing and criminality.

By redressing some current problems in Indian policing and crime historiographies, in particular their ignorance of major preventative strategies that were deployed against non- political and non-collective criminality, this thesis reconsiders dominant assumptions about the purpose and character of colonial policing in India. Through an analysis of the development and consolidation of preventative surveillance and the strategies, technologies and tools that it produced, the Bengal police is shown to have operated as a preventative policing body, reliant on paperwork; the collection, classification and utilisation of criminal information.

35 (2) Constructing a Theory of Surveillance: Reviewing the Literature.

This chapter indicates the theoretical setting of the present study, and outlines the contribution it seeks to make to an established area of historical theory.1 A system of police surveillance that is identified as central to the control of rural Bengal is situated within established theories about colonial power and knowledge. It is argued that police surveillance was a subset of what has been identified as a wider knowledge-gathering project in India; an “all-India information order” within which the collection, classification and utilisation of information was used to expand the domain of colonial power.2 Discussions about an Indian information order, which have paid only cursory attention to policing, are thus expanded by this study. However, whilst the notion of an all-information order frames an analysis of surveillance policing, it does not explain its development. This chapter thus formulates a theory that utilises a western model of surveillance to name and analyse the processes underpinning Bengal’s surveillance project.3 Additionally, this theory draws upon discourses about indirect rule as a British strategy of governance in order to apply an alternate model of surveillance to the colonial setting.4 In order properly to account for a largely ignored subset of India’s information order – a police- designed surveillance project – discourses of colonial rule are applied to historical and sociological literature that has dealt extensively with the emergence of surveillance and information collection in nineteenth century Europe.

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the purpose of this thesis is to include a thoroughgoing treatment of the development and functioning of the surveillance project within Bengal’s police historiography. By extension however, the thesis draws attention to a misrepresentation of the police in discourses that explore the relationship between colonialism and colonial knowledge in British ruled India. This literature has mainly focused on the ways

1 It is not intended that the central arguments and evidence used in this thesis are revealed in this chapter, rather the ideas that helped to formulate them are. Therefore, the chapter alludes to the conclusions of the remaining thesis, rather than delineating them in detail. 2 The term ‘information order’ is taken from C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 2. 3 Information states are argued to have existed throughout the pre-industrial and modern period by Edward Higgs, ‘The Rise of the Information State: the Development of Central State Surveillance of the Citizen in England, 1500- 2000’, Journal of Historical Sociology 14, no. 2 (June 2001): 175-197. 4 The notion that indirect rule was both an administrative abstraction and a mode of governance in India is presented in David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Michael Edwards, British in India: 1772 – 1947, A Survey of the Nature and Effects of Alien Rule, Sidgwick and Jackson: London, 1967; Barbara N. Ramusach, The New Cambridge History of India: The Indian Princes and their States, vol. 3.6, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

36 that colonialism can be considered a “cultural project of control” in India.5 It is predicated on the idea that in India colonial power was made possible and then sustained and strengthened just as much by its use and production of knowledge as it was by foreign invasion, territorial conquest, military superiority and economic wealth.6 Ruling via what is termed by Cohn as “cultural power”, colonial knowledge was transformed into colonial power.7 An “inquisitive and paper-obsessed colonial power” sought to collect information about Indian languages, ‘traditions’, and social interactions, in order to inform the best administrative decisions, and to “make the unknown and the strange knowable”. 8 In a range of institutional contexts, information was administrative power.9 Historiography; the “enumerative technology” of the census; the official efforts of the Company to master Indian languages, and the survey projects that sought to map, bind, and describe the physical, natural, and sociological features of India, all transformed knowledge into power.10 They produced information that was used to assess and collect taxes, to administer the law, and to identify, classify and group people into useful taxonomies such as ‘tribe’, ‘village’, and ‘caste’, such that they could be located and controlled.11 Broadly, the colonial project in India presented a range of systems that were often “diffuse, disorganized, and even contradictory”, yet for the most part underpinned by an understanding that colonial rule was contingent on knowledge, even if the British were unsure “of all the ways in which knowledge was, in any direct or strategic sense, power”.12 It was the idea that administrative power would follow from representing India as a series of facts, categories, and statistics that produced a variety of colonial projects to investigate, compile, store and publish colonial data. In discourses of colonial governance, information formed the basis of the capacity of the British to govern.13

The police role that is discussed within this literature, though only forming a cursory point of focus, was to conduct surveillance on behalf of the colonial government, in order to collect information about individuals and groups of people who undermined directly the power of the British. Cohn argues that police surveillance was but one “investigative modality” that was

5 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’ in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge: the British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, i. 6 Ibid, i. 7 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 4. 8 Ibid, 4. 9 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’, xii. 10 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 9. 11 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’, ix. 12 Ibid, xiii. 13 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 3.

37 designed to collect, classify and deploy information as colonial power.14 An ‘investigative modality’ is a term that describes a process of identifying a body of knowledge, the designing of procedures to collect, order and classify such information, and which involves the transformation of knowledge into useable forms, such as published reports, legal codes, statistical returns and so on.15 These were the technologies that the British constructed to ‘know’ India – to classify, categorise and bind the “vast social world that was India such that it could be controlled” efficiently and purposefully.16 Cohn pays brief attention to the special police strategies that were used to surveil and collect information about particular groups of individuals, in order to locate, identify and punish whole communities of people who threatened the rural order that was required to govern colonial territory. Between the 1830s and 1850s, the Thagi and Daikati Department, for example, was involved in the formation of an archive of ethnographically classified information, which was used to designate transient people as criminal by nature in order to justify increasingly strict punishment, regulation and surveillance.17 The construction of this archive, he argues, required police use of informants, networks of intelligence gathering, and the co-opting of ‘traditional’ networks of communication to collect relevant information. Surveillance policing is thus placed alongside a range of investigative modalities that relied on strategies of information collection and were aimed at securing efficient control of India; police surveillance, the survey, the census, and the construction of a British version of Indian history are all argued to have comprised a singular knowledge-gathering project.

Similarly, Christopher Bayly considers police surveillance in colonial Bengal alongside other modes of intelligence gathering that were used to locate threats to British rule. Bayly’s principal focus is the colonial state’s construction of a “sophisticated intelligence system” to collect military and political intelligence, which he identifies as an “all-India information order” that reflected the “inquisitive and paper-obsessed” nature of colonial rule.18 He argues that an information order was developed as a well-organised and flexible system designed to make “limited caches of power and resources work harder”.19 As a small occupying power, the British built an information system on established modes of Indian communication, in order to

14 Ibid, 3. 15 Ibid, 4. 16 Ibid, 4. 17 Ibid, 4. 18 C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information, ix,1. 19 Ibid, 6.

38 secure their grip over the territory.20 Therefore, a chain of surveillance stretched from the district officers who were formally attached to the Company to a body of indigenous elites who provided access to information that was collected from traditional servants within the village. The police role in this was to develop networks of spies and informers, who were used to learn of and contain activities that threatened the rural order – urban robberies, grain riots, and the outbreak of sectarian violence.21 According to Bayly, surveillance, including that which was conducted by the police, had an explicitly political function in India. Prior to the rebellion, the Company used indigenous systems of communication to inform them of seditious activities in an effort to consolidate British rule. After the rebellion, which had revealed their ignorance of forces of insurgency within India, the British sought to recast and consolidate an information order in the later nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.22 In order to reinforce their physical control over towns in north India, the British invented new techniques of formal and informal surveillance, which included a police function.

Like Cohn’s discussion, Bayly’s inclusion of the police within a wider information order provides a useful start point for framing the current study. Both draw attention to a surveillance function of the police, which they include as part of an expanding information order. Police surveillance has been considered alongside other knowledge gathering projects, to argue that a well-established mode of colonial control relied upon information collection. However, each discussion is brief and focused mainly on the years immediately prior to and following the rebellion. This prompted questions about whether surveillance endured and continued to develop over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and what its specific relationship was to an ‘all-Indian information order’ in colonial Bengal. A principle discovery of this study is not only was the surveillance function far more intricate and enduring than Cohn or Bayly have indicated, but that it was not necessarily a by-product of an ‘information order’ and its narrow political aims. An information order was in fact expanded by the development of the surveillance function of the police, which had a separate police context. A restricted police budget, a set of abstract assumptions about the character of colonial crime, and the influence of western models of surveillance, are viewed as providing the rationale for and informing the character of surveillance policing. Selective use is thus made of the concept of the ‘all-India information order’ – its key features are utilised to name certain police strategies, yet the police are argued to have played a central role in its formation.

20 Ibid, 6. 21 Ibid, 339. 22 Ibid, 338.

39 This study recognises that many administrative tools that the British used were reliant on the collection and construction of colonial knowledge, but seeks to demonstrate that they cannot all be viewed as stemming from a single purpose of colonial control. The police role in constructing an information order was produced within a separate context, which reflected the themes and idiosyncrasies of British rule in India, but did not share the same purposes. The contribution that this study wishes to make to discourses of colonial knowledge is to highlight that an information order was a theme in colonial administration, but one not necessarily aimed solely at strengthening colonial power. It seeks to do so by examining the police context, rather than the political context, of an information order.

To understand the police context and purposes of Bengal’s information order, a western model of surveillance has been used to name the processes underpinning police surveillance in Bengal, however such is altered to suit colonial conditions in India. First of all, a theory of modern surveillance has been utilised.23 Broadly, surveillance has been considered to be an integral function of nineteenth century policing agencies that collected and analysed information about their individual subjects. This was part of an effort of modern states to control and regulate deviant behaviour in expanding cities and towns via surveillance. 24 Surveillance as a feature of modern states has been discussed extensively in historical and sociological literature ever since Michel Foucault introduced a theory of carceral and surveillance-based societies in his study of surveillance and punishment in modern Europe. Foucault’s observations about surveillance relate specifically to the “total institutions” of the nineteenth century, the prison, factory, workhouse or asylum, which are argued to have embodied the principle of ‘panopticism’ – the perpetuity and totality of surveillance.25 The principle of surveillance is, however, argued to have extended past the walls of the prison, manifesting in a range of social institutions of the nineteenth century, thus contributing to the rise of surveillance based societies.26

Sociologists and historians, taking impetus from this notion, have continued Foucault’s work to demonstrate that the mechanism of ‘panopticism’ operated in institutions as diverse as the

23 Namely, that which is presented by Edward Higgs, ‘The Rise of the Information State’; and by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Allen Land, 1977. 24 See for example Andy Croll, ‘Street Disorder, Surveillance and Shame: Regulating behaviour in the public spaces of the late Victorian British town’, Social History 24, no. 3 (October 1999): 250-268; Neil Websdale, ‘Disciplining Non-Disciplinary Spaces: The Rise of Policing as an Aspect of Governmentality in Nineteenth Century Eugene, Oregon’, Policing and Society 2, (1991): 89-115. 25 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 21. 26 Ibid, 21.

40 museum, the library and the police.27 The police in particular have become a central focus of studies that seek to demonstrate that social life was managed and regulated outside of disciplinary spaces via surveillance and information collection. From the early nineteenth century in Britain for example, John McMullen has argued that a “new grammar of policing” concerned to map, administer and comprehend society panoptically, reflected the idea that police surveillance lessened the need for internalised punishment. 28 He points to police intellectuals such as Edwin Chadwick and Patrick Colquhoun who held the view that the “civilizing effect” of police surveillance was that it extended carcerality into the public domain.29 McMullen argues that during the nineteenth century the policeman became the “personification of panopticism”; an invisible power designed as an “arresting eye” that would function as a preventative force for crime control.30 Similarly, Neil Websdale views the police that emerged in nineteenth century Eugene, Oregon, as the “bridging links” for a principle of surveillance that had been enclosed in carceral institutions.31 He argues that the new police was designed as “difficult to see” and “invisible and less regular” such that the lives of deviant individuals were as closely monitored as they would be within the walls of the prison.32 In Eugene, the new police that had emerged had extended the principle of panopticism into public space, in order to regulate and monitor urban deviancy.33

The last thirty years of the nineteenth century in Britain has received particular attention because of the official efforts to strengthen the powers of the uniformed police to conduct surveillance over and collect information about the so-called ‘criminal classes’.34 As Terence Stanford has recently pointed out, within Victorian Britain there was widespread acceptance of the idea that there were a number of “levels” at the bottom of society that constituted a criminal class.35 He writes that this diverse group grew out of the working class and were considered to be responsible for the vast majority of offences, from begging to murder.36 Stemming from this

27 Andy Croll, ‘Street Disorder, Surveillance and Shame’, 251. 28 John L. McMullen, ‘The Arresting Eye: Discourse, Surveillance and Disciplinary Administration in Early English Police Thinking’, Social and Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 97. 29 Ibid, 102. 30 Ibid, 97 31 Neil Websdale, ‘Disciplining Non-Disciplinary Spaces’, 89. 32 Ibid, 97 33 Ibid, 89. 34 Ibid, 89. 35 Terence George Stanford, ‘The Metropolitan Police, 1850 – 1914: Targeting, Harassment, and the Creation of a Criminal Class’, PhD Thesis, University of Huddersfield, September 2007, 2. 36 Ibid, 2. This idea had an earlier inception, the history of which has been nicely summarised in Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, ‘Incapacitating the Habitual Criminal: The English Experience’, Michigan Law Review 78, no. 8 (August 1980): 1305-1389 and Victor Bailey, “The Fabrication of Deviance: 'Dangerous Classes' and 'Criminal Classes' in Victorian England”, 221-256.

41 public and police perception that certain individuals were likely to commit crime, the Metropolitan Police were tasked with supervising the so-called criminal classes, in order to prevent and therefore reduce crime in London.37 Faced with the difficulties of supervising a densely populated London, which possessed a large transient population, the police themselves called for wider powers of surveillance and extra responsibility for the compilation of criminal records over released convicts.38 It was this segment of the criminal population in particular who became the primary target of surveillance in Victorian London, because not merely were they viewed as likely to reoffend, but they constituted knowable individuals within a largely unknowable class. Upon release their personal particulars, antecedents and location could be recorded, whereas unconvicted or suspected habitual criminals remained an imagined and unknowable part of the so-called criminal classes.39 Repeat offenders became the targets of the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act and the 1871 Prevention of Crimes Act, which made periods of police surveillance and registration compulsory for suspected and actual repeat offenders upon their release from prison.40 A national surveillance body, the Convict Supervision Office, which was developed as an agency for systematic records keeping, widened the role of the police in a burgeoning system of central state surveillance.41 With professional agencies and powers in place that enabled the systematic conduct of surveillance and information collection, Britain was beginning to exhibit the characteristics of Foucault’s carceral society, whereby the state, mediated by the police, collected detailed information about its subjects via surveillance outside of the prison.42

This understanding of surveillance, characterised by but not confined to the rise of centralised information systems in police and security systems, frames the analysis of a concurrent and contemporaneous system of police surveillance in Bengal. Seemingly, surveillance was a global feature of nineteenth century policing, which suggests that Bengal’s surveillance project was contemporary to what McMullen terms a ‘new grammar of policing’ that gave rise to surveillance in Europe. That the types of state surveillance others have indicated as characterising modern police forces can be recognised in Bengal allows the utilisation of this theoretical model to at least name aspects of Bengal’s police structure. Foucault’s idea that the

Its affect on policing and surveillance in particular is the topic of Stanford’s work as cited above, and also Stefan Petrow’s Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 37 This is also the topic of Stefan Petrow’s Policing Morals. 38 Terry Stanford, ‘Who Are You? We Have Ways of Finding Out! Tracing the Police Development of Offender Identification Techniques in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Crimes and Misdemeanours, 3, no. 1 (2009): 55. 39 Ibid, 56. 40 Neil Websdale, ‘Disciplining Non-Disciplinary Spaces’, 90. 41 Ibid, 90. 42 John L. McMullen, ‘The Arresting Eye’, 121.

42 ‘small powers’ of the police; the “technical procedures, instrumentations and knowledges” that included physical surveillance, information collection and the classification and dissemination of police knowledge, were the chief characteristics of nineteenth century police forces, has been used in this study to identify and locate a set of similar processes in colonial Bengal.43 This is moreover possible because certain parts of Bengal’s surveillance system were obviously formulated with the features of western policing models in mind. As chapter four demonstrates, the Bengal police made a concerted effort to introduce surveillance over habitual criminals according to the British model for dealing with them. This was a result of Bengal’s inclusion in an interconnected Empire, bound by networks of personnel and correspondence across which ideas were shared and mutually reformulated.44 Perhaps taking some impetus from strategies of crime control in Britain, the Bengal police helped to produce an Indian information order that was based on a selection of ideas, instincts and technologies that were exchanged across the Empire. However, a key fact must be kept in mind, where British legislation called for the supervision of released and therefore previously convicted individuals, in India, the police were empowered to surveil and in some cases relocate and supervise individuals and groups of people who were only suspected as belonging to the so-called criminal classes.

Inevitably, a western model of surveillance is not entirely suitable to explain the emergence of an information order in Bengal. Though studies regarding western forms of surveillance can be used to name aspects of Bengal’s surveillance project, and to discuss certain policing technologies and strategies that were shared across the world, they are not suitable to explain the role the police played in the emergence of an information order in Bengal, because it obviously developed with a different set of aims and objectives. This is strengthened by the consideration that the purposes argued to underpin the surveillance systems of western states are ill fitting to an Indian context. A dominant explanation for the expansion of surveillance as a feature of the police and other state agencies in the nineteenth century is urbanisation and the

43 Ibid, 99. 44 A recent trend in British imperial history has been concerned to uncover the processes of exchange, whether discursive or material, which contributed to an often-homogenised character of administrative protocol and development within different parts of the Empire. See for example David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control 1830-1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. David Lambert, 'Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,' in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: University Press, 2006. Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche, 'Introduction: Place, Network, and the Geographies of Empire,' in (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005.

43 emergence of an industrial economy.45 Anthony Giddens in particular has argued that the immense administrative power that was developed to direct and surveil populations was a corollary of the transfer of rural populations to urban localities and of a subsequent desire to protect capitalist development.46 The seemingly orderly societies that had been based on the strong ties of local governance and by familiar bonds of community were replaced by societies of strangers in rapidly expanding towns and cities, viewed as controllable only through a penetrating knowledge of the complexion of urban society.47 The state, at this point, designed surveillance strategies as a means to collect information and prevent deviancy in order to replace obsolete modes of social control.48 As the police role in the prevention of crime became increasingly centralised and refined in the late nineteenth century, so too did the notion that the orderliness of rapidly expanding towns and cities relied on the ability of the police accurately to know and measure the mass of supposedly unidentifiable repeat offenders within. This involved the careful vigilance of the police on the beat, but moreover, required the recording of information about the comings and goings of habitual criminals in towns and cities. As brief analysis as this is, it is intended to illustrate the associations that has been drawn between modernity and the impulse of modern civil institutions to collect and classify surveillance knowledge.49

These explanations of modern surveillance highlight that irrespective of any obvious conflation in rhetoric or any similarities between Indian and European systems of surveillance, contemporary discourses that associate the latter with modernity have little explanatory power for an Indian context. Urbanisation cannot be seen as a causal factor for the emergence of an information state in Bengal, simply because the movement of people into towns and cities from rural areas was not coincidental with the development of a range of systems for surveillance and information collection. Even in the first years of the twentieth century, Bengal was still a “distinctly agricultural country”.50 In most areas, the urban population was minimal at around four per cent, and many of the “so-called towns [were] merely over-grown villages”. 51 Certainly, in west Bengal flourishing industrial centres at Howrah, Bally, Serampore and

45 John L. McMullen, ‘The Arresting Eye’, 101; A.R. Gillis, ‘Crime and State Surveillance in Nineteenth-Century France’, The American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 2 (September 1989): 310; Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1, Macmillan: London, 1995, 15. 46 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 15; 190. 47 See Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and discipline from 1700 to the present day, Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, 1990, 110. 48 Ibid, 111. 49 John L. McMullen, ‘The Arresting Eye’, 98. 50 Imperial Gazetteer of India, 34. 51 Ibid, 34.

44 Raniganj meant the population in towns was higher than average (7%) and in the East, Calcutta and its surrounding suburbs had a significantly larger proportion (19%) of people living in urban areas.52 In any case, for most of the nineteenth century, surveillance had been a policing strategy that was developed to prevent crime within villages and rural tracts in particular, where most people lived. Whilst one could certainly argue that the surveillance project in Bengal appeared synchronically with urban systems of policing that developed in the west, and thus urbanisation was indirectly a causal factor, this thesis argues that a separate theory of surveillance policing in Bengal is required to understand why this occurred. As Arnold has written about the incentive to reform the Indian police,

Governments, especially pinchpenny colonial ones, do not innovate from fashion or from a casual fancy to follow metropolitan trends. They select and adapt available institutional ideas and administrative policies only in so far as these seem likely to ameliorate or resolve pressing problems and meet needs locally felt.53 To locate the separate Indian context that produced similar modes of police surveillance to that which can be identified in Europe, America and Britain during the nineteenth century, an understanding of pre-industrial surveillance and information collection has been utilised. In particular, Edward Higgs’ theory of surveillance for pre-modern England provides insight into the purposes of surveillance in non-industrial settings. Higgs’ argument centres on the idea that the modern form of state surveillance cannot be seen as being an entirely new social function, because surveillance took place at the local level via a decentralised network of information collection in the pre-industrial world.54 A few examples are used to highlight instances of pre- modern surveillance systems. From the twelfth century, local justices of the peace and parish constables kept watch over villages at night and reported important information to itinerant royal justices; the Old Poor Law, under Tudor state policy, governed the payment of a dole levied out of a parish rate, which required the keeping of records about the indigent of the parish; the registration of baptisms, marriages and burials by the Church of England had been introduced in the sixteenth century; and Royal courts had collected records about property ownership to guarantee property rights in land since the twelfth century.55 Viewed as part of pre-industrial centralised surveillance systems, Higgs argues that these facts undermine the connection between modernity and the information state.

52 Ibid, 34. 53 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 7. 54 Edward Higgs, ‘The Rise of the Information State’, 175. 55 Ibid, 176.

45 Finding it problematic that the industrialisation model of state surveillance is applicable only insofar as “the first industrial nation” is seen as the exception to the rule, Higgs has looked to the nature of state authority and administrative power as determining the development of information states outside the industrialised world. 56 Higgs argues that in the absence of centralised administrative power, or the means to govern via a state bureaucracy, medieval and early-modern monarchs used an informal and decentralised system of surveillance and information collection. As governance had to be decentralised and organically localised, it became based on a series of networks and face-to-face encounters that relied on the collection of information and conduct of surveillance at the local level. In the absence of state bureaucracy, the state entered into symbiotic relationships with local power elites to undertake the governance of the realm, entailing that England was a “much-governed” country as early as the twelfth century, even in the absence of strong central power.57 The involvement of the English state in the surveillance of the population thus pre-dated the industrial period, if in a necessarily informal and symbiotic relationship with local elites. Information collection and surveillance, he argues, cannot therefore be seen as tools designed to meet the functional needs of an industrial capitalist society, because in the pre-modern period they were utilised to meet “the needs of the state qua state”.58

The usefulness of Higgs’ work to a study of the police in Bengal is that it introduces a theory of surveillance that can be applied to sites of administrative power in India that were weakened by distance and limited personnel. One can point to similarities in the development of local networks of surveillance and information collection in pre-modern England and the co-opting of indigenous elites and ‘traditional’ agents of rural control to conduct surveillance on behalf of the regular police in Bengal. Both, it can be argued, were strategies designed to extend the limited caches of power into areas that were beyond the reach of a central authority. The police in Bengal, unable and unwilling to extend a regular or overt presence into the countryside, designed a system of information collection and surveillance that would enable them to keep a tight control of villages and rural tracts, without the necessity of a large regular police force. This required the co-opting and recasting of local or traditional control systems into a concomitant, yet administratively separate, hierarchy of colonial control. Just as English monarchs, who lacked the bureaucratic power to administer the entire realm from a centralised location, used surveillance and information collection to expand their own power throughout

56 Ibid, 176. 57 Ibid, 176. 58 Ibid, 193.

46 England, systems of surveillance policing in rural Bengal served a similar function. Taking heed from Higgs, surveillance in this thesis is thus shown to be an administrative strategy designed partially to avoid the maintenance of a comprehensive and visible chain of bureaucratic police control.

Whilst Higgs’ work has been useful in formulating a theory of colonial surveillance because it highlights surveillance as a strategy designed to strengthen administrative power, an examination of the nature of administrative power in a policing context in colonial Bengal has been necessary to apply its principles. To do so, this thesis turns to studies of indirect rule in India, to highlight how a governing strategy of ‘rule from afar’ contributed to the weakness of Bengal’s police administration, and thus the necessity for surveillance and information collection. 59 Though the nature of British governance in India is contested territory in historiography, for the purposes of this study, a governing philosophy of ruling from afar is considered as fundamental to the administration of India. Cohn’s idea that the “British appear[ed] in the nineteenth century to have felt most comfortable surveying India from above, and at a distance – from a horse, an elephant, a boar, a carriage, or a train”, or anywhere away from “the narrow confines of a city street, a bazaar, a mela”, is a useful metaphor for the nature of British governance in India, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century.60 It has been used to highlight the efforts of the British to distance themselves as foreign rulers from a population that far exceeded the capacity of a tiny colonial government to physically represent its power, and to examine the strategies of rule that dispersed the business of governance amongst Indian collaborators. 61 Applied to many administrative situations, rule from afar perpetuated the principles of a system of indirect rule, which was part of the ideological infrastructure of colonial rule in the Company era.62

Used to describe the type of government in the mid-eighteenth century when British political power was established in India, indirect rule has been used to describe “the exercise of determinative and exclusive political control by one corporate body over a nominally sovereign state”.63 It was a tool of an imperial government seeking to extend their political influence over disparate peoples and a vast geographic region, yet who were constrained by limited budgets

59 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 11. 60 Ibid, 10. 61 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 8, Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 11. 62 Barbara N. Ramusach, ‘The Indian Princes and their States’, 48. 63 Michael H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and Residency System, 1764-1858, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1998, 6.

47 and material and human resources.64 It relied on the establishment of treaties or contracts with indigenous elites, and the creation or fostering of a group of loyal intermediaries that would extend the political control of the British either through the collection of taxes or the expansion of their military presence. 65 On one hand it served the purpose of British military aggrandisement; the forming of alliances with Indian rulers entailed that by the early nineteenth century Britain controlled one of the largest standing armies in the world.66 On the other hand, indirect rule suited the revenue interests of the Company, and was utilised in the annexed territories to guarantee income from lands where the British collector was not present. Through the formation of alliances that offered limited opportunities for indigenous collaborators, the British extracted resources such as military personnel, tribute payments and revenue from the presidencies and so-called native states.67 Though never a total or comprehensive strategy of governance, indirect rule was utilised in both annexed and non-annexed territories in an attempt to mitigate the difficulties of ruling by a tiny minority in a rapidly expanding empire.68

Not merely was indirect rule a system of military and political domination. It moreover informed the character of the state that was invented by the Company to administer its annexed territories through.69 In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the Company was acquiring a political identity, an underlying principle behind the construction of the new regime was to cloak its foreignness in the “familiarity of old institutions, practices and personnel”.70 The administration of criminal and civil justice in Bengal, for instance, would be run through English collaborations with indigenous elites, to ensure the law was administered according to British understandings of Mughal and Hindu practice. Through a policy of modifying and adapting “the old to fit English ideas and standards”, western notions of law and order were seemingly “grafted on to the main stem of Eastern institutions”.71 An indigenous legal system prevailed in two courts until 1864, when the reform of the judicial system established provincial high courts, abolished the Muslim and Hindu law officers of the various courts, and transformed ‘Hindu law’ into English law.72 Post-rebellion, the administration of the law was left solely in the hands of the executive, which reflected an attitude that “the man who ruled

64 Barbara N. Ramusach, ‘The Indian Princes and their States’, 48. 65 Ibid, 49. 66 Ibid, 51. This includes the three armies of its presidencies as well as the supplementary contingents that were controlled by Indian rulers in non-annexed territories. 67 Ibid, 85. 68 Ibid, 58. 69 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 57. 70 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 8. 71 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 62. 72 Ibid, 75.

48 should be the man able to inflict punishment”.73 It has been argued that the pursuit of early Company administrators to establish a regime that was based on “an ancient Indian constitution” and which worked through existing institutions ended when English law became the law of India.74

Yet, as Arnold has pointed out, indirect rule was never entirely superseded in British India because it persevered as an administrative technique. Indeed, the continuing use and effectiveness of indirect rule “was one factor which made possible the governing of the subcontinent for one hundred and fifty years by a relatively small number of Europeans”.75 Even after the formal establishment of British power after 1857, for the administration of the police and the judiciary for example, zamindars, panchayets, daffadars, and a variety of village elites and headmen were co-opted as indigenous collaborators.76 They replaced the necessity of official British representatives throughout the colony by acting as intermediaries between the formal British administration, and forms of social control that operated at the locality. For example, in Madras, the village police were controlled by village headmen, such that a formal policing hierarchy need not replace an ‘ancient system’ of policing in the province.77 Arnold has argued that this reflected a desire to distance foreign rulers from “all but a fraction of the population”, because the majority of the population was expected to mistrust forms of western control.78 Beyond the transfer of India to direct British control in 1858, indirect rule continued to inform a range of administrative situations, either where colonial power was weak, and needed to be extended, or where it was considered expedient to reduce the presence of an unpopular occupying power.79

As this study and in particular Chapters Three, Six and Seven demonstrate, policing in Bengal reflected the perseverance of indirect rule as an administrative principle. In order to remove the negative associations that the populace made between police darogahs and an oppressive foreign power, the police model that was developed after 1861 advocated a reduced police presence in rural Bengal, and the fostering instead of an ‘ancient’ police constitution.80 The Police Act in particular had endeavoured to establish an inexpensive and unobtrusive means of coercion throughout India. It resolved that the “new constabulary would be linked to the

73 Michael Edwards, British in India: 1772-1947, 180. 74 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge, 75. 75 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 8. 76 Ibid, 8. 77 Ibid, 8. 78 Ibid, 8. 79 Ibid, 8. 80 See for example Chapter Three.

49 village police, so as to make the latter an useful supplement to the former”.81 Whilst the regular or formal police would be active within town centres and in areas surrounding the police station, the villages, where 95% of the population tended to live, were to fall under the watch and ward of ‘traditional’ village police officers, remunerated from a police tax collected and paid within the village. 82 This can be contextualised in a broader anxiety about the precariousness of colonial rule in a vast and foreign landscape. Those contemplating the design of a new police in India were acutely aware that police power “rested on the prestige” of a “handful of Europeans”, yet doubted the capacity of the colonial state to secure order on its own.83 Indirect rule in a police context was therefore a strategy aimed at overcoming the sense of anxiety that went along with policing a vast and densely populated foreign territory.84

An understanding of indirect rule as an administrative principle allows an extrapolation of Higgs’ theory about the use of surveillance in pre-industrial settings to colonial Bengal. Overall, Higgs has argued that surveillance and the concurrent tasks of recording and analysing information mitigated the weakness of bureaucracy in pre-modern England. It was a strategy that emerged in the absence of state agencies that were directly controlled and loyal to the centre. Just as the weakness of the English monarchs required intermediaries to surveil and collect information about their subjects, in Bengal a police built on a philosophy of indirect rule produced the necessity for a system of police surveillance. Surveillance, and the concurrent tasks of recording and analysing information, allowed the deployment of limited police resources in a targeted and responsive manner. The police collaborated with intermediaries to keep watch over remote parts of Bengal, and to furnish the regular police with relevant

81 P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, xxxii. 82 Imperial Gazetteer of India, 146. The district magistrate held power to designate an area as a ‘village’ for the purposes of revenue collection, census taking and policing. He was able to define any local area or group of dwellings a ‘village’. There was no uniform formula, yet the creation of a village ordinarily subsumed a logical geographic or demographic area. This is highlighted in a description of the village unit for census, revenue and police purposes in the Imperial Gazetteer, 1909, 36: “The villages of Bengal vary greatly in different parts. In Bihār, especially south of the Ganges, the buildings are closely packed together, and there is no room for trees or gardens. As one goes eastwards, the houses, though still collected in a single village site, are farther apart, and each stands in its own patch of homestead land, where vegetables are grown, and fruit trees and bamboos afford a grateful protection from the glare of the tropical sun. Farther east again, in the swamps of East Bengal, there is often no trace of a central village site, and the houses are found in straggling rows lining high banks of rivers, or in small clusters on mounds from 12 to 20 feet in height laboriously thrown up during the dry months when water temporarily disappears. The average population of the village is 335, but the definition of this unit for census purposes is not uniform”. For police purposes, this was used to define boundaries for collecting the chaukidari tax, which after 1870 was used to collect and pay the village police, and to determine their jurisdiction for policing. See G. Toynbee, A Chaukidari Manual, with rules, notes, government orders, and inspection notes, Thackers, Spint and Company, Calcutta, 1896, 4. 83 Arthur Kinnaird, ‘Bengal: its landed tenure and police system’, Speech in the House of Commons, June 11, 1857, Second Edition, James Ridgway: London, 1857, 6. 84 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, 3

50 information, in order to discover criminals and geographies that required the most attention. This would replace the necessity of direct police representation in the village, and allowed them to confine their area of operation to the police station. Ultimately, surveillance and information collection were designed to expand the limited reach of the police; to ensure the resources they could afford to expend were utilised in the most efficient manner possible. Information collection and surveillance by the police, two chief components of an information order, were considered the best way to expand the knowledge of the police, such that their deployment in rural Bengal was strategic, efficient and targeted. This is the essence of the theory of surveillance that underpins the conclusions presented in this thesis; surveillance was a police function made necessary by an administrative preference for indirect rule, rather than one that was aimed at discovering political insurgency as Cohn and Bayly have argued.

Presenting a theory of colonial surveillance has allowed for the inclusion of Bengal’s surveillance project as a central part of its police history and within discourses of knowledge and power that have identified an all-India information order. The thesis connects and expands two disparate areas of research; it demonstrates the relevance of an information order as an organising concept for police historiography, but delineates its police and non-political context that has largely been ignored. This has required the formulation of a theory of surveillance that deconstructs and selectively applies dominant theories of modern and pre-industrial information states, which frames the present study within established historical and sociological theories of surveillance.

51 (3) A Genealogy of Surveillance: Policing History.

This chapter focuses on the reforming era of the police in India during the 1850s to explain the design and implementation of a new police in Bengal that was built on notions of indirect rule and small power in 1861. In particular, the introduction of a police enrolled under the Police Act (V of 1861) comes under scrutiny, because its development was a by-product of and mirrored the consolidation of a preference for indirect policing. This preference, though dictating the subsequent shape of the Bengal police, only emerged in the late 1850s. In the years prior to 1857, those who sought to streamline the machinery of civil governance and policing wanted to dramatically expand the strength of the Bengal police. Post-rebellion, however, there was a clear transformation in police and government opinion about the best means to police Bengal. This chapter traces this shift, and connects it with changing attitudes towards governance in India in light of the events of 1857. In so doing, it provides the local detail upon which the theory presented in the previous chapter was based. Though Chapters Five through Seven will discuss the strategies of surveillance that were necessary to support a small police force, the present chapter focuses on an Indian discourse of police reform and administration that resulted in the creation of a minimally staffed and covert regular police in 1861. The surveillance project is dated from 1861 when the idea of indirect police power became embodied in Act V, though as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, it expanded rapidly after 1870 when the targets, strategies, materials and personnel utilised for surveillance were defined.

To contextualise the drafting and passing of legislation that would introduce a uniform and regular police into India in 1861, it is important to consider the calls for general police reform that were particularly frequent during the 1850s. At this time, Bengal’s Legislative Council bore criticism from vocal public denouncers of the police and internal pressure from civil servants, who wanted the colonial government in Bengal to initiate discussions with the Indian government about the issue of police reform. The aims that were shared by both public and private critics centred on the introduction of a regular police force that was efficient for the tasks of preventing crime, apprehending suspects, and protecting life and property, which would replace the oppressive, corrupt and largely inefficient and disparate police forces that then existed.

Briefly, the current arrangements for policing had been introduced by Lord Cornwallis at the time of the Permanent Settlement in 1793. Under Regulation XXII, district magistrates were

52 placed in charge of police jurisdictions or thanās of ten coss1 square, which were to be guarded by a darogah or police inspector.2 Subordinate to the darogah was an establishment consisting of a jemadar from the Army, a mohurir or clerk and a few burkandazes or constables.3 The darogahs were placed in charge of “all native watchmen of the village establishments”, who were required to forward apprehended suspects, or information regarding suspicious persons and vagrants, and threats to the peace direct to the thanadar.4 This system had been introduced as part of the colonial government’s effort to break up the power of the landed zamindari elite, who prior to the Permanent Settlement had controlled the village police in Bengal.5 Regulation XXII had effectively removed their power over the village police, by forcing them to disband their private police, and by introducing the darogah as police inspectors.6

Certain elements of this system came under the scrutiny of a petition forwarded to the Legislative Council in 1853, signed by 1, 800 Christian missionaries resident in Bengal. The petitioners emphasised that the current arrangements for policing “totally failed” in their intended role for preventing and detecting crime.7 They argued that the police offered the populace neither the protection that a police should offer, nor the guarantee that reported crime would be investigated, and instead were “an engine of oppression and a great cause of corruption”.8 The police were accused of collaborating with robbers and swindlers, and of conspiring to conceal criminals and stolen goods when it suited their interests.9 When suspects did fall under investigation, the petitioners wrote, “torture was believed to be extensively practised”, causing the “demoralisation and suffering” of those who found themselves in the hands of the judicial system.10 In 1857 Arthur Kinnaird (a Whig who at the time represented the Perth constituency), in a speech to the House of Commons about the state of the police in Bengal, highlighted that European residents in Bengal commonly directed such criticisms at the

1 One coss = 2 miles. 2 Regulation XXII, 1793, in R.W. Carlyle, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, ‘Note on the Rural Police in Bengal: A brief history of the village system with information as to the nature and success of any attempts which have been made to improve it’, Serial 28, October 1905, Bengal Papers Relating to the Indian Police Commission, Government of Bengal, 3. ORB 40/278. 3 Basudev Chatterji, ‘The Darogah and the Countryside’, 25. 4 Letter from the Court of Directors to Governor General in Council, 24 Sept 1856. Correspondence of the East India Company, General Correspondence, E/4/838. 5 See for more information Basudeb Chattopadhyay, Crime Control in Early Colonial Bengal, 22. 6 Letter from the Court of Directors to Governor General in Council, 24 Sept 1856. 7 ‘Extract from Petition of 1,800 Christian Missionaries to Bengal Legislative Council’, 15, Box 15/23, Correspondence of the East India Company. Mss Eur F161/8. 8 Ibid, 15. 9 Ibid, 15. The issue of darogah corruption has been explored more fully in Basudev Chatterji, ‘The Darogah and the Countryside’, 25. 10 ‘Extract from Petition of 1,800 Christian Missionaries’, 15.

53 colonial government during the 1850s. 11 Drawing on numerous examples of personal testimony, he discussed the perception amongst the British living in Bengal that “there was no police at all, rather a system of organised chicanery and oppression”.12 Torture and corruption ostensibly went hand in hand. The police were accused of taking bribes from offenders, and of using torture to force confessions from innocent people.13 To the villager, the police were argued to represent corruption and oppression. The appearance of the darogah in the village was cause for the villager to “bury their food and treasure, and to flee”.14 Claims of darogah oppression, corruption and inefficiency were thus the focal point of British criticisms of the police system in Bengal. The interest that non-indigenous residents in Bengal took in the matter of police reform can perhaps be seen as reflecting an understanding of their role in a ‘civilising mission’ that aimed at bestowing upon India an administration that provided “the privileges which [in Britain was] nationally enjoy[ed]”.15 Irrespective of their intentions, by highlighting the tendency of misrule by darogahs (which Basudev Chatterji has been shown to be widespread16), Christian missionaries and public commentators helped to intensify the issue of police reform as a point of attention of the colonial government in the 1850s.17

As Kinnaird highlighted in his speech, by 1857 the government authorities in Bengal were “sufficiently alive to the miserable condition of the police in Bengal” to argue for a thorough restructuring of the police.18 Yet, the public criticism that the government was by this stage receiving had only served to underline problems in police administration of which they were already aware. The obvious inadequacies of the rural police had been a cause for intermittent discussion and reform ever since Cornwallis’ police regulations were passed at the time of the Permanent Settlement. A series of police regulations that were introduced between 1793 and 1844 had sought to bring both the darogahs and village police up to a standard of efficiency by introducing local and indigenous agents of supervision, and by regulating how criminal information was collected and reported.19 However, the regulations had merely been aimed at resolving the question of zamindari liability for paying for them, rather than focussing on

11 Arthur Kinnaird, ‘Bengal: Its Landed Tenure and Police System’, 11. 12 Anonymous resident of Bengal quoted in Ibid, 12. 13 Extract from The Friend of India in Ibid, 12. 14 Ibid, 13. 15 Ibid, 3. 16 Basudev Chatterji, ‘The Darogah and the Countryside’, 25. 17 Arthur Kinnaird, ‘Bengal: Its Landed Tenure and Police System’, 25. 18 Ibid, 25. 19 See Regulation IX, 1808; Regulation IV, 1810; Regulation I, 1811; Regulation III, 1812; Regulation VIII of 1814; Regulation XX, 1817; Repealed by Act VI of 1844 in William Blunt, An Abstract of the Regulations enacted for the Administration of the Police and Criminal Justice, in the Provinces of Bengal, Behar, & Orissa, Vol. 4, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1818.

54 overhauling the current arrangements or creating a uniform and efficient rural police. 20 Governmental discourses of reform were similarly half-hearted and intermittent. Such matters had been considered in 1837, when a police committee was appointed to report on the state of the rural police in Bengal. In their report, the members of the committee argued that unless the government raised the status of darogahs through more stringent recruitment measures and by increasing their pay, the system would remain weak and corrupt.21 However, the colonial government, which was not particularly interested in securing a civil order through police reform, largely ignored their recommendations. As Chatterji has emphasised, until the 1850s, questions that pertained to police efficiency and overhaul had existed within a “sterile discourse of reform”.22 This can be connected with the idea that the colonial government only became interested in strengthening and re-modelling the civil administration of India during the 1850s, because prior to this they were concerned mostly with establishing political power via territorial conquest.23 Marking the onset of a changed sense of government responsibility, the 1850s were a time when the authorities were more receptive to public complaints about the police, and more interested in resolving problems in police administration of which they were well aware. It was a latent impulse and obvious need to reform the Bengal police that was intensified in the 1850s by changed notions of responsible government and by the emergence of public criticism.

In light of this enhanced urgency for police reform, the governments of Bengal and India had corresponded frequently with each other and with the Court of Directors in London about the need for funds to reform India’s variety of police agencies.24 Such correspondence occurred mainly in the years between 1853 and 1857, the rebellion providing a momentary distraction from the issue of police reform for the colonial government. In general, the discussion sought to persuade the Indian government that an overhaul of the disparate, corrupt and inefficient policing systems that prevailed throughout India could no longer be delayed. As F.J. Halliday, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, wrote in his influential ‘Minute on Police Administration’ that

20 Srinivasasara Aiyangar, ‘Confidential note on the question of the liability of the zamindars as landholders to report the occurrence of serious crimes in their estates and to assist the regular police in the apprehension of offenders’, serial 30, 1905, 2. ORB/40/278. 21 H. Pratt, ‘Extract from a Police Report of the Superintendent of Police, Lower Provinces, for the first Six Months of 1849, 24th December, 1840’, in Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, Cox and Wyman, 1857, 125. IOR/V/27/150/2. 22 Basudev Chatterji, ‘The Darogah and the Countryside’, 150. 23 Anandswarup Gupta, Crime and Police in India: Up to 1861, Agra: Sahitya Bhawan, 1974, 376. For more information, see introduction to the present thesis, 2. 24 Such comprise letters held within Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, IOR/V/27/150/2.

55 was submitted to the Indian government in April 1856, for “years complaints have been handed down” regarding all aspects of the “Mofussil police”, “yet very little has been done to improve it”.25 Whilst “efforts ha[d] been occasionally made” they had

been usually insufficient to meet the greatness of the evil, partial remedies [had] failed to produce any extensive benefit, and during long intervals the Government has appeared to fold its hands in despair, and to attempt nothing new, because the last tried inadequate measure had ended in inevitable disappointment.26 The Court of Directors had similarly urged the reorganisation of the police throughout India in their despatch of 1856:

That the police in India have lamentably failed in accomplishing the ends for which it was established is a notorious fact; that it is all but useless for the prevention, and sadly inefficient for the detection of crime, is generally admitted. Unable to check crime, it is with rare exceptions, unscrupulous as to its mode of wielding the authority with which it is armed for the functions which it fails to fulfil, and has a very general character for corruption and oppression.27 Kinnaird’s speech to the House of Commons in 1857 can certainly be included within this official discussion that sought to persuade the Indian government to overhaul the disparate, corrupt and inefficient policing systems that prevailed throughout. Overall, it was clear that by 1857, police reform in India was a topic of urgent consideration. Eventually, this dialogue would prompt the Indian government to in 1860 appoint a police committee to investigate the state of police throughout India, and to recommend a course of action. 28 In March the following year the draft act that the Commission submitted became the Police Act (V of 1861), which introduced a new police for India.

As influential as these conversations were in forcing the Government of India to recognise the obvious necessity of police reform, key features of this discussion stood in sharp opposition to the recommendations of the police commission, and to the eventual shape that the new police would take. The correspondence shared between the judicial department of the Bengal government, the Governor-General of India in Council and the Court of Directors in London, covered a range of administrative, disciplinary and theoretical concerns that were believed to have contributed to a general state of police disorganisation and inefficiency across India. Many of these topics, whilst certainly pertinent to general discussions about the administration

25 F.J. Halliday, ‘Minute by the Honourable the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal on Necessary Reforms at the Madrusseh, or Mahommedan College, Calcutta’, Calcutta, 1858, 66. 26 Ibid, 65. 27 Ibid, 10; Letter from the Court of Directors to Governor General in Council, 24 Sept 1856. E/4/838. 28 Government Resolution Appointing the Police Commission’, 17 August 1860, 14.

56 of the new police, are not immediately relevant here because they do not help to frame an explanation about the type of policing that emerged after 1861, which is the overall purpose of this chapter. Thus, significant areas of the reform agenda that dealt with the separation of the offices of collector and magistrate29; the introduction of a general superintendent (later the inspector general) to administer the entire police for the whole of Bengal30; and the union of the functions of a superintendent with those of a criminal judge31; will not be discussed in any detail. For a study that is concerned to understand the emergence of a new police built on principles of indirect rule, the most important aspects of this debate were those that argued for the exact opposite of this, because it was against these that the police commission seemed to frame their proposals.

The correspondence reflected an agreement among the Bengal government that the cost and strength of a new police should expand the current strength of the enrolled police. Sir John Grant, who between 1848 and 1854 effectively controlled Bengal in the absence of the then Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, believed that the “most pressingly required” reform for Bengal was to increase significantly the overall expenditure on the district police.32 This had been his chief agenda for some time, because he believed that the number of available civil officers to police “the interior of districts” was far too low to have any impact on a rural order.33 The notoriously bad darogahs could never be trusted to execute their duties and the orders of the station officers because of the sheer size of the tracts of land committed to a relatively small number of them.34 As he noted in 1854 when comparing the strength of the police in Bengal to that of the Punjab, “for about thirty very large districts in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, containing a population usually estimated at forty million, the number of policemen provided is little more than 27, 000”.35 The “one improvement” that needed to be “worked out to the utmost” was the expansion of the strength of the civil

29 See Letter no. II, from the Secretary to the Government of Bengal to C. Allen, Officiating. Secretary to the Government of India, 28 April 1854, in Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 44. 30 See Minute by J.P. Grant, no. XVIII, 9 April, 1857 in Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 100. 31 Ibid, 110. 32 Minute by the Honourable J.P. Grant, no. XVIII, 9 April 1857, in Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 99. 33 Minute by the Honourable Mr. Grant, no. IV, ‘Proposed Reorganisation of the System of Civil Administration in Bengal, including the reunion of the offices of Magistrate and Collector’, 23 November 1854, Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 20. 34 Ibid, 26. 35 Minute by the Honourable J.P. Grant ‘Punjab Report for 1851-52 and 1852-53’, 27 November 1854, Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 114.

57 officers.36 Continuing Grant’s efforts was the succeeding Governor-General of Bengal Charles Canning, who insisted that in order to “embrace the enormous extent of the territory”, the proposals that Grant had put forward “should be at once sanctioned”.37 Principally, the size of Bengal’s districts had to be made smaller, and the strength of the civil police significantly expanded.38 This would involve, of course, the expansion of the ranks of police officers required to superintend the constabulary. Sir Barnes Peacock, a civil servant within the revenue and judicial department who discussed the matter frequently with Grant and Canning, “concurred entirely” with the notion that within a new system, the number of darogahs required a dramatic increase, but pointed to the necessity of a concurrent expansion of the supervisory ranks.39 To overcome the problem of darogah corruption and general inefficiency, he argued, a superior class of naib darogahs should be introduced, who, “chosen from young men of education”, would oversee the duties conducted by the darogahs in each thanā.40 Grant, who remained involved in the discussion after he was given a Lieutenant Governorship in the Central Provinces in 1857, included Peacock’s recommendation in his minute of 1857 that summarised the course of action proposed by the Bengal government. Overall, he pointed to the absolute necessity of a vast augmentation in the strength of a district police. Instead of one darogah only, the thanā would now have three, plus a supervisory naib, and a handful of extra jemadars, detective policemen and native constables.41 This would expand the district police by around 10, 000 civil police officers, 5, 000 supervisory officers, and 5, 000 native constables.42 Grant highlighted that the consensus was that until these “indispensible though costly reforms” be introduced, the “evils of the present system” would prevail indefinitely.43 The “insecurity of life and property; the numerous gang robberies perpetrated annually; and the constant scenes of violence” that had been highlighted by the missionaries in their petition to the Bengal government, he argued, were resolvable by addressing an overarching “money

36 Minute by the Honourable Mr. Grant, no. IV, 20. 37 Minute by the right Honourable the Governor-General, Charles John Canning, no. XVI, 18 February 1857, in Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 89. 38 Ibid, 88. 39 Minute by the Honourable Barnes Peacock, XIX, 30 April 1857, in Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 115. 40 Ibid, 115. 41 Minute by the Honourable Mr. Grant, no. IV, 20. 42 Ibid, 20. 43 Minute by the Honourable Barnes Peacock, XIX, 113. These recommendations had been reiterated throughout this correspondence. See for a summary of this sentiment Letter no. 774, from the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary of India, Home Department, 30 April 1855, Papers relating to the System of Police in the Bengal Presidency, 15.

58 question”.44 The “days of these crying evils were numbered” and could be resolved with “money that could hardly be mis-spent”.45

Grant’s certain and ardent tone was matched by that of the Police Commission of 1860, which had been appointed by the Indian government to investigate the claims made by Bengal’s governing elite, and to determine a detailed plan for the introduction of a unified civil police.46 Yet, there was a notable departure from what police reformers wanted in 1857, and the reforms, improvements and principles that the police committee recommended. Before delineating the “unanimous conclusions” of the committee “regarding the principles, system and method, on which a good Police for all India should be organised”, it is important to note the structure of the committee and how it related to Bengal’s specific problems and administration.47 The committee was comprised of members with direct experience of the police systems within Bengal, Madras, Punjab, Oudh, and the North Western Provinces, who were required to complete extensive investigations within their province. This was so the information collected about the specific circumstances and requirements of the various provinces could be compared in order to inform proposals that would suit the whole of India.48 The following analysis mainly draws upon the sections of the report that deal specifically with Bengal, which based on the ideas of Samuel Wauchope, Commissioner of the Calcutta police (1856 to 1868), who represented Bengal within the police committee. 49 However, because the more general recommendations of the committee report resembled those that were relevant to the most politically important province of Bengal, these are used to explain the central tenets of an Indian policing philosophy in 1860. Overall, the ideas that were brought prominently forward that concerned both Bengal and India reflected a distinct about-face on the question of expanding the size of the district police, or ‘the money question’, so both the general Indian and specific Bengal context that this developed in will be considered.

Initially, the government resolution appointing the committee in August 1860 had outlined an explicit objective regarding the size of the new police in India. Though recognising that a specific number could not be forced upon each province given the different “area, population, revenue, or character of the country and people” in each, the resolution required the committee to adhere to the “general rule” that “the Police are too numerous for the duty they are required

44 Minute by the Honourable Barnes Peacock, XIX, 113. 45 Ibid, 113. 46 ‘Government Resolution Appointing the Police Commission’, 17 August 1860, 14. 47 Ibid, 14. 48 Ibid, 14. 49 Ibid, 14.

59 to perform, and that their numbers must be reduced”.50 A general aim of the committee was thus to devise a police system that was “likely to increase efficiency, but diminish expense”.51 They aimed at proposing a system that, as it became more efficient, would allow “the reduction of cost and numbers to advance month by month”.52 This was to be achieved by transforming the tasks currently performed by police agents in India. Firstly, the regular police would be required to perform an expanded set of duties, which would allow more work to be conducted by fewer personnel. In particular, a unified civil police that could be extended to all provinces of British India would subsume the duties of an existent military police.53 During the rebellion, 6, 000 privates comprised a police branch of the army, who were employed to guard prisons, escort prisoners, and to suppress minor disturbances that did not require the army.54 These were duties considered to be of a civil nature that could easily be conducted by a uniform and unified regular police.55 After the organisation of an efficiently organised and properly drilled and disciplined civil police, maintaining a military branch of policing would not be required.56 This was desirable for two reasons – the inevitable expense of organising a new police force would be offset by the abolition of the military police, and the political and coercive associations of the army would be eliminated from a newly organised civil police force.57 Abolishing the heavy and needless expense of the military police simplified the task of reducing the strength and cost of a new police in India.

A second way that this would be achieved was by removing certain duties from British controlled police officers, and reassigning them to non-enrolled village police officers. In Bengal, the committee recommended that the responsibility of darogahs (who would be replaced by inspectors of police in a new police hierarchy) to control the village police should be transferred to indigenous elites and headmen in the village. Briefly58, in Bengal darogahs were in charge of a variety of stipendiary village police officers, who were required to make arrests, forward apprehended suspects to the thanadar, and report information regarding

50 Ibid, 14. 51 ‘Report of the Police Commission, 1860’, from the Police Committee, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, 126-133. 52 Ibid, 132. 53 Ibid, 127. 54 ‘Select Extracts from the Speeches during the Proceedings of the Legislative Council of India, no. III, First Reading of the draft Police Act’, September 29, 1860. IOR/P/146/27. 55 ‘Report of the Police Commission, 1860’, 127. 56 Ibid, 127. 57 Ibid, 127. 58 A more detailed explanation of these arrangements occurs in Chapter Six, as it relates to a discussion of the village police and the role they played in the surveillance of Bengal.

60 suspicious persons, vagrants or threats to the police to the darogah.59 Lord Cornwallis had introduced these arrangements at the time of the Permanent Settlement in order to transfer zamindar control over the village police to the British. As he stated in 1793, Cornwallis wished to establish the “relations that ought to subsist between the regular police and the village police”, so they would “conjointly” prevent crimes and detect and bring to punishment criminals”.60 This reflected the administrative application of an eighteenth century version of indirect rule that was discussed in the previous chapter. These arrangements were viewed by the police committee as necessary, because logistically, even if a regular police were expanded according to the recommendations that Grant had viewed as necessary, an “organised Police cannot be informed of all that occurs” within the village.61 The committee thus recommended the perpetuation of the office of “Village Watchmen as contemplated by the regulations passed at the time of the Permanent Settlement”.62 However, wishing to minimise the contact that a regular police officer had with Bengalese villagers, they recommended that the village police were to be “regulated as far as possible by local custom”, and thus separated entirely from the official police hierarchy.63 Whilst the village police would be required to obey orders of the organised police and would still furnish them with important information, their appointment, supervision, regulation and payment were tasks to be carried out by local indigenous elites, rather than by darogahs or an equivalent inspector of police.64 Concomitantly, the Committee required that a more efficient use of the village police throughout India be achieved, so that it was not necessary to interfere in the policing of the village.65 British remunerated police officers would not visit the village for the investigation of crimes, nor for the control, payment or supervision of the village police.66 In their ‘Report on the Village Police’, the Committee had highlighted that the role of the regular police in the village would be diminished, thus undermining earlier calls for an expanded police force in Bengal. The village system would function independently of a regular police whose presence and indeed existence, unless absolutely necessary, would be obscured from the village.

Unlike the recommendations regarding the abolition of the military police, these proposals were not explicitly underpinned by fiscal considerations. Certainly, a similar logic applied –

59 Letter from the Court of Directors to Governor General in Council, 24 Sept 1856, 60. 60 Ibid, 60. 61 ‘Report of the Police Commission, 1860’, 127. 62 Ibid, 127. 63 ‘Report of the Village Police in India, 1860’, from the Police Commission, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, 135. 64 Ibid, 135. 65 Ibid, 135. 66 Ibid, 135.

61 fewer police officers on the colonial payroll equalled less government expenditure. This perhaps can be included as an unstated goal of the proposals to reduce the presence of the regular police from the village. Yet, it is not particularly logical that the government suddenly wished to reduce the police presence, or to provide for fewer police officers, solely to reduce government expenditure on the police. Consider the situation three years prior to the formation of the police committee; elite members of Bengal’s government and its judicial department were ardently calling for a dramatic increase in the size of an enrolled police force, regardless of the costs that this would entail. In 1860, both the Bengal government, and members of the Indian police committee, argued for the exact opposite.

A notable difference in the circumstances of 1860 compared with three years previously was the occurrence of the rebellion of 1857. Though specific reference to the rebellion was not made in the police committee report, the turning point of 1857 for British attitudes towards governance in India frames a possible explanation for the juncture in government policy regarding the police. As Burton Stein has written, “the Great Indian Mutiny, and the Civil Rebellion of 1857 came as a shock that was to reverberate through all the relations of the British Empire for the next ninety years”.67 He highlights that alongside a sepoy rebellion that threatened military power, a civil rebellion emerged that targeted newly established ‘modernising’ institutions of the empire – the law courts, government offices, and Christian missionaries. 68 This civil element had significant consequences for attitudes towards governance in India – “the mutiny was defeated, yet it taught a lesson that the British were not slow to learn thereafter”.69 An important lesson, he argues, was that efforts to impose British conventions or modes of governance ran the risk of alienating important collaborators, or promoting general public disaffection.70 This was something that the British in India were aware of whilst they were establishing political control in the late eighteenth century, yet had seemingly been forgotten by the 1830s when their claims on Indian territory were more secure. 71 As D.A. Washbrook has argued, it was from the 1830s that increased political confidence had encouraged the implementation of reforms that solely favoured metropolitan interests.72 Beginning with the Governor-General Lord Bentinck (1828 to 1835), the British had embarked on a more aggressive colonial mission that was underpinned by an “Anglicising

67 Burton Stein and David Arnold (ed), A History of India, John Wiley and Sons: Oxford, 2010, 222. 68 Ibid, 222. 69 Ibid, 222. 70 Ibid, 222. 71 D.A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818-1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’, in Andrew Porter (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 395. 72 Burton Stein and David Arnold (ed), A History of India, 219.

62 spirit”, or as Stein similarly puts it, the desire to transform “Indians to Englishmen”. 73 Bentinck in particular had increased the number of Christian missionaries in India, abolished what he saw as ‘barbaric’ Indian social practises, and, in the economic sphere, had encouraged cheap, industrial imports to displace Indian products.74 His Governorship is often cited as marking the abandonment of a mode of governance that sought to conciliate and collaborate with Indians, and the withdrawing of patronage from the support of Hindu and Islamic social and legal practises.75 A changed attitude towards British rule in India was that it should racially, politically and economically, favour non-indigenous colonial rulers.76 The events of 1857, however, demonstrated that irrespective of territorial or political hegemony, the imposition of British social, civil and administrative mores that were potentially intolerable to large sections of the populace needed to be undertaken with care.77 As Washbrook and others have emphasised, the British interpreted the rebellion as the rejection of Western modernity and the promotion and defence of “tenaciously held ‘traditions’”. 78 Moreover, its suppression, reliant in large part on the assistance of Indian allies and on Company servants who remained loyal to the British, reiterated that India could not be governed without the compliance of certain sections of the populace.79 Whilst the British would continue a ‘mission’ towards the modernisation of civil institutions that would favour metropolitan interests, there was recognition that successful governance had to be anchored more firmly within Indian society itself.80

The onset of a more cautious approach to governance partially explains why by 1860 plans to drastically expand the number of enrolled, or British controlled, police officers throughout India were abandoned. One can certainly recognise an anxious tone regarding the question of governance in rural Bengal in the police committee report of 1860. Whilst making no mention of the rebellion, it argued for the necessity of replacing occidental forms of policing in the village, with more ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ modes of policing, which were more amenable to the populace. In regards to the Bengal police, the discussion centred on the figure of the darogah. The failure of the darogahs to secure rural order was attributed not to corruption that had resulted from low pay, and relative freedom from supervision, but to their status as

73 D.A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818-1860’, 395; Burton Stein and David Arnold (ed), A History of India, 219. 74 Ibid, 395. 75 Ibid, 396. 76 Ibid, 396. 77 Burton Stein and David Arnold (ed), A History of India, 222. 78 D.A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818-1860’, 396. See moreover Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857-1870, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. 79 Burton Stein and David Arnold (ed), A History of India, 222. 80 Ibid, 222.

63 Company officials, who villagers therefore mistrusted. In Bengal, “prescription and custom” was argued to have “always carried special weight with the people”, and it was for this reason that the darogah had failed to secure their co-operation.81 They were considered by villagers to be “oppressive to the people” and unable to be “informed of all that occurs” in the village, because they were an “organised Police” that villagers implicitly mistrusted, feared and avoided.82 Testimony given to the committee from the magistrate of the Patna district was used to highlight the unsuitability of the regular police to the village. It was principally because darogahs were totally unacquainted with the habits, customs and feelings of the people around him” that they failed to “conduct important and delicate investigations”. 83 They were mistrusted by the people, and therefore largely useless as a police force. By contrast, the committee viewed the village police officer as “a man of the village, not enough of an official to be alien from or obnoxious to the villagers”.84 They were considered to be a “reliable agency in the village that was tolerable to the people” and therefore key to the successful policing of rural Bengal.85 Such ideas underpinned the recommendation of the committee to remove the darogah or any regular police officer entirely from the village, and to separate the village police from the official police hierarchy. 86 According to the committee, the most legitimate mode of policing for rural India, and in particular Bengal, was one that was small and instead reliant upon existing policing structures that were not controlled by British authority. Certainly, this was a cheaper way to exercise control over the village. The village police were remunerated from a tax collected by village elites, and by abolishing the darogah as their supervisors, the colonial purse would not be responsible for paying for an intermediate body of police officers.87 However, unlike the decision to disband the military police, which was aimed at streamlining India’s police agencies and removing an unnecessary financial burden of maintaining both a civil and military police, there was no immediate economic reason that explains the sudden abandonment of government and police plans for expanding the size of the police in India. So, in the absence of fiscal imperatives, the present analysis has turned to established historical arguments about colonial governance after the events of 1857. Attitudes towards rural policing that stressed a need to reduce the size of the enrolled police force can be related to the intensification of British anxieties about colonial rule in the late

81 ‘Report of the Village Police in India, 1860’, 156. 82 Ibid, 156. 83 Ibid, 156. 84 Ibid, 139. 85 Ibid, 139. 86 Ibid, 140. 87 ‘Government Resolution Appointing the Police Commission’, 17 August 1860, 14.

64 1850s, which had precipitated a return to collaborative and conciliatory modes of civil governance in India.

This cautionary and collaborative approach to policing would be achieved in Bengal in the early 1860s firstly by reducing the number of enrolled police officers, and subsequently by expanding the duties of existing village police establishments. If one considers the strength of the police for which Act V provided, Bengal was evidently “under-policed”; the overall population was around 40 million, and the strength of the regular police force remained low at around 25, 000 men.88 At the executive level, Act V had appointed one Inspector General to be placed in charge of the province, who was to be assisted by six to eight deputy inspectors general, depending on the workload that manifested in the years following enactment. The province was separated into police districts, which ranged between 1, 000 and 5, 000 square miles, and were allocated one district magistrate each, who could request the provision of one or two assistants. The strength of the subordinate constabulary was similarly paltry. Using the example of Patna, which was part of the most populous division in Bengal, the low concentration of the district police force is clear. Patna was one of the first districts where the Police Act was extended to in 1861.89 With an area of 1, 828 square miles and a population of 1.2 million, it was allocated around 1, 520 new police under the Act; 1 district superintendent; 3 Assistant District Superintendents; 22 Inspectors; 40 sub-inspectors; 51 head constables; and 1, 362 constables. 90 On average, this meant that one policeman was responsible for a population of 787 people and for patrolling 1.20 square miles (see Figure 1). Bhāgalpur, a much larger district within the division by the same name, with an area of 7 803 square miles and a population of 2 million, was allocated a mere 532 enrolled police officers in 1862, which provided one police officer per 14.66 square miles or one per 3 740 people (Fig. 1).91 The strength of the enrolled police in Bengal at this time comes as no surprise. The police commission had sought to minimise the size of the enrolled police, and the restrictions that Act V put on the number of appointments that could be made within each province ensured that a preference for a small regular police became precedent. Though George Trevelyan would write in 1864 that “a policeman in a bright blue tunic, yellow pantaloons, and a red pugree” could be encountered “at every turn of the road” over “the whole Bengal Presidency”, it is evident that

88 C.F. Carnac, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, ‘Report of the New Police in Bengal, from the date of its organisation (under Act V 1861), to the close of the year 1862’, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1863, 3. 89 ‘Report of the New Police in Bengal’, 1863, 5. 90 Ibid, 5. 91 Ibid, 5.

65 the aims of the police committee had been realised in the first years after the passing of the Police Act.92

Subsequently, to ensure Bengal could be adequately policed by a small regular force, it was “linked to the Village Police, so as to make the latter an useful supplement to the former”.93 Whilst the specific application of these principles in Bengal would be worked out within the Chaukidari Act (VI of 1870), the Police Act initially provided the guidelines for utilising the village police. It stipulated that the provincial police forces were reliant on existing village police establishments throughout India, members of which would not be “enrolled as police- officers under this Act”. 94 A clearer indication of how two policing establishments were intended to operate alongside one another is provided by the proceedings of the Legislative Council of India, during the first readings of the Bill. As Sir Barnes Peacock (who notably had argued for increasing the size of the enrolled police force in 1857) stressed when the draft Act was read in Council, the village or local police establishments would take care of general police duties within the village, so the general stipendiary constabulary need not bother with the watch and ward of the village. “Inspectors of Police, Head and Deputy Constables and Privates” would patrol and watch the highways, open country, and areas surrounding the station, whereas the village, and subsequently, the majority of the populace, would be policed by the village police who were arguably a more familiar and tolerable agency. 95 Daily communication between the village and regular police was however desirable, in case serious crime, riot or disorder required the strength of the village police to be reinforced.96 The essence of these arrangements was to allow the regular police to confine their work to policing towns and rural tracts, unless it became necessary to supress crimes that seriously threatened colonial order. With the support of non-enrolled and much larger establishments of village police officers, the regular police could remain small, but above all distant from the village. This was undertaken to legitimate the rural policing structures in Bengal, by obscuring British power and authority from the everyday tasks of colonial governance.

The perseverance and significance of these foundational structures for the character of colonial policing will be demonstrated in subsequent chapters. It was party because the Bengal police was so minimally staffed that strategies of information collection and surveillance were

92 G.O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, London: Macmillan’s Magazine, 1864, 113. 93 Section 21, ‘The Indian Police Act, (V of 1861). 94 Ibid, section 21. 95 ‘Select Extracts from first Reading of the draft Police Act’, September 29, 1860, 26. 96 Ibid, 26.

66 developed. In the absence of a large constabulary, the police focussed on monitoring patterns in criminality; where crime supposedly occurred, the habits of individuals who were assumed to be most likely to commit crime, and the seasons that seemed to coincide with sharp increases in criminality and public disorder. In so doing, the police could use their resources carefully and tactically, deploying constables to watch certain areas at certain times, and to keep under surveillance those people who were considered to be the most threatening to public order.

67 Figure 1: 'Appendix A' - Statement Showing the Number and Cost of New Police, ‘Report of the New Police in Bengal, from the date of its organisation, 1863.

68 (4) The Bengal Criminal and what to do with Him

Alongside the fact that the Bengal police was an administrative body that was limited in its reach, the development and importance of surveillance can be connected with contemporary police arguments that certain individuals were particularly threatening to public and rural order, and that surveillance was the best way to deal with them. Surveillance was an exercise in the prevention of crime, which was aimed in particular at individuals who were considered most likely to commit crime – repeat offenders, released convicts and suspected habitual criminals. It was given impetus by a judicial system that was viewed as unable to deter offenders from committing further crimes, which had produced the idea among the police that the suppression of crime was reliant on their abilities to prevent it. The individual repeat offender had appeared in punishment discourses in Bengal during the 1860s. At this time discussions about habitual criminality were focused on how to punish and reform the seemingly unreformable criminal type, and reflected a wider international debate about recidivism and crime causation. The provisions made for repeat offences within the Indian Penal Code embodied the central wisdom of these discussions – deterrence by means of enhanced punishment. During the 1870s, however, the police would begin to argue that this system failed to deter the unreformable habitual criminal and that ongoing and targeted police surveillance of suspected habitual criminals and released convicts was necessary to prevent their crimes. Throughout the nineteenth century, in light of police attitudes that punishment was unable to deter habitual criminals from a ‘life of crime’, and of a seemingly worsening or at least persistent problem of habitual criminality, the police expanded upon a system of surveillance that functioned separately from Bengal’s judicial and punishment apparatus. By the first decade of the twentieth century, it was an important function in the police repertoire of crime control and prevention.

The individual habitual criminal had emerged in India as a judicial classification of criminality in 1860. Provisions for extended sentences for repeat offences had been inserted into Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code of 1860, which could be used to extend the ordinary sentence for a person who twice committed the same offence.1 Section 75 empowered any court in British India or court or tribunal in any territory of any Native Prince or State of India to extend sentences to a maximum of ten years imprisonment or transportation for life if a person

1 Section 75, ‘Enhanced Punishment for Certain Offenders under Chapters XII or XIII after previous conviction’, Indian Penal Code, 1860, in H.N. Banerjee, An Analysis of The Indian Penal Code, Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, 1921.

69 committed a similar description of offence after his release from prison. This applied to offences made under Chapter XII (relating to coin and government stamp) or Chapter XVII (offences against property).2 It also empowered judges of the court of sessions to determine the discipline and conditions a repeat offender would be subjected to in prison; for example it could be ordered that an offender be kept in solitary confinement for terms of imprisonment that did not exceed three months.3 These provisions reflected an understanding that repeat offenders posed a tangible threat to public order, and moreover was testament to the influence of mid-century criminological, legal and sociological discourses across the globe within which the habitual crime was imagined as responsible for increasing crime and disorderliness in urban and rural localities.4

An investigation of the prevalence of repeat offences in India and wider European understandings of habitual criminality, and their impact on an Indian punishment infrastructure is outside the scope of the present discussion. What is pertinent is that during the 1860s the individual repeat offender existed primarily within discussions about prison discipline and administration, as a class of criminals who required special treatment within a newly consolidated system of punishment. In Bengal, for example, the problem of recidivism was examined within discussions about prison discipline in the late 1860s. Penal administrators, who had been concerned to reform the structures of punishment and to lower the rate of reconvictions in Bengal, had sought to introduce a ‘productive’ prison system in the mid- nineteenth century. In the Alipore and Hooghly jails, for example, prisoners were occupied with handicraft and agricultural production with the view that upon release some would “become skilled workmen, able to earn an honest livelihood from new callings”. 5 The existence of an unreformable segment of the criminal population who were seemingly immune to the positive effects of productive prison discipline, however, diluted the impact of such measures. This reiterated the need to make use of the enhanced punishment provisions of the Indian Penal Code. To deal with unreformable habitual criminals, for whom a “relapse into crime was inevitable” because “on liberation they were unable to forsake the callings which

2 Ibid, section 75. 3 Ibid, section 75. 4 Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, ‘Incapacitating the Habitual Criminal: The English Experience’, Michigan Law Review 78, no. 8 (August 1980): 1305-1389; Anand A. Yang, ‘Dangerous Castes and Tribes’: The Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doms of North East India’ in Anand Yand (ed.) Crime and Criminality in British India. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1985; E. R. Spearman, Preface in Alphonse Bertillon, ‘The Identification of the Criminal Classes: An Address by Alphonse Bertillon and Speech by M.L. Herbette’, Spottiswoode and Co: London, 1889, 3. 5 Letter no. 2513 from F.J. Mouat, Inspector General of Jails, Lower Provinces, to H.L. Dampier, Offg. Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 2 August 1867. IOR/P/244.

70 come to them by a hereditary calling”, judicial and penal experts argued that the best way to repress them was by utilising the provisions of the Penal Code for lifetime transportation, long periods of penal servitude, and solitary confinement.6 This is but one example of the judicial discussions that surrounded repeat offences and habitual criminality during the 1860s in Bengal, which were largely absent from police discussions of the same decade.

By the 1870s the individual habitual criminal had emerged as a topic of police concern. However, rather than arguing for the need to enforce stricter punishment upon repeat offences, the police argued that preventing habitual criminals from committing crime in the first place should be their primary concern. It was during the 1870s that preventative surveillance in particular would emerge as a police response to the problem of repeat offences.7 The clearest indication of an increasing use of preventative surveillance strategies appears in the annual reports of various inspectors general, who headed the Bengal police. For example, in 1872, it was reported by the inspector general J. Pughe, that the magistrate of the Presidency division had commented that “the number of cases” where “habitual thieves, receivers, and dangerous characters” were “being put under supervision of police officers” was “much on the increase everywhere”.8 Similarly Pughe’s successor H. Hankey, would comment in 1876, that “much greater stress” was being “laid upon the matter” of surveillance over suspected or actual recidivists.9 Whilst the police had been involved in the occasional surveillance over people who were reported as bad characters, the problem “had come more prominently brought forward than in former days”.10 This was attributable “to the increased energy on the part of officers” who sought to “put under sufficient restraint the classes who were habitually addicted to crimes”.11 Overall, as the inspector general of police James Monro would write in 1877, the police approached the problem of “reconviction” or the existence of “bad characters” with the attitude that “prevention was better than cure”.12 It was during the 1870s that this attitude became common to a police philosophy of crime control, evidenced most clearly in the

6 Section 75, Indian Penal Code. 7 Chapter Five demonstrates that many of the strategies of surveillance used to prevent habitual criminality were designed and implemented across Bengal from the 1870s. 8 Colonel J. Pughe, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1872, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1874, 121. 9 H. Hankey, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1875, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1876, 91. 10 Ibid, 121. 11 Ibid, 121. 12 J. Monro, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1876, Bengal Secretariat Press: Calcutta, 1877, 72.

71 emergence of police surveillance that was directed at individuals assumed likely to commit crime.

The idea that surveillance was useful for preventing individuals from reoffending was likely to have been framed, in part, by the passing of the Habitual Criminals Act in Britain in 1870, which provided for seven years continual police surveillance upon the release of convicts who had been classified as notorious repeat offenders. Indeed, in the same year that Monro detailed the rising utility of surveillance during the 1870s, he pointed to the model that the Habitual Criminals Act provided the police with in Bengal. Whilst it provided for legal surveillance by the police in Britain, as determined by the advice of the courts, in Bengal, only “the principles involved” had been replicated. 13 “The English Bill”, Monro wrote, “lays down certain regulations for the supervision of men who are considered habitually dangerous to society”.14 In Bengal, however, once a criminal had been declared to be habitually addicted to crime, either by the police themselves, or by the courts, the police had exercised informal surveillance over individuals, until it was evident that surveillance was no longer required. As Monro noted,

On complaint by the police or otherwise that a certain man is a bad character, the officer in charge of the police station in whose jurisdiction the suspect resides is first of all directed to make enquiries to see if there is a valid reason for surveillance. The principal inhabitants of the surrounding villages are called upon to give testimony and the accused is called upon for his defence of his status as a habitual thief, receiver, and dangerous character.15 Whilst in Bengal, “great caution [was] necessary to secure that private spite [was] not allowed to operate”, and that police officers (who to the British seemed to be ever prone to corruption) carried out their task honestly and diligently, there is some evidence that the model of British habitual crimes legislation played a role in the development of preventative surveillance during the 1870s.16

This context should not be overemphasised, however. Whilst British legislation provided a model to consider, the emergence and perseverance of police surveillance was more closely associated with the idea that Bengal’s newly consolidated judicial system had failed to deter repeat offenders from a lifetime of criminality. Some indication of this is provided in the

13 Letter no. 15986 from J. Monro to Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, 12 December 1877, 9-10. IOR/P/1166. 14 Ibid, 10. 15 Ibid, 10. 16 Ibid, 10.

72 police statements detailed above that reflected the notion that prevention was better than cure. Indeed, alongside reports of an increasing use of the police for preventative surveillance was occasional commentary that cases of repeated acts of criminality were on the increase, despite the provisions of the Indian Penal Code for extending sentences for repeat offences. Monro would highlight that between 1874 and 1876 there was a notable “increase of cases under the heading of habitual criminality” by at least 1, 500 cases of repeat offences.17 This was a modest estimation, he argued. Due to the ease that one could falsify their name to escape the enhanced punishment provisions of the Indian Penal Code, it was difficult to estimate with any certainty how many cases of repeat offences occurred yearly.18 Although the police supported the idea that the introduction of solitary confinement, or of stricter prison discipline should be exercised over repeat offenders, the increasing use of surveillance as a preventative measure during the 1870s suggests that they felt that the “chief defect and remedy [lay] in the police”.19 Rather than relying on the courts to hand down longer sentences or enhanced punishments for repeat offences, the police focused on watching “constantly and carefully” the movements “of any notorious bad characters”. 20

Now, it is a methodological predicament of the historian of Bengal policing that police attitudes and philosophies at times remained obscured from view. In the absence of a contemporary police debate or exchange, which usually characterised the formation of a police committee for reform for example, the police had little cause to extensively document their ideas about particular topics of concern. District superintendents and officers in charge of stations had a relatively free hand to introduce different policing strategies and ideas, which meant that they were not required to provide detailed justifications for their reforms. Therefore when the inspector general wrote his annual report, exhaustive rationales for new strategies or technologies introduced were typically absent. The cursory remarks appearing in annual reports that have been noted above are emblematic of the fact that the police remained relatively silent about why they were concerned to prevent, rather than punish, habitual criminals during the 1870s. This has meant that the above conclusions have been formed by treating brief insights into a police belief in ‘prevention over cure’ as the explanation for the emergence of preventative surveillance during the 1870s.

17 J. Monro, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1876, 72. 18 Ibid, 72. 19 Ibid, 72. 20 Letter no. 705 from R. Porch, Offg. Magistrate of Noākhāli, forwarded to all District Superintendents, 28 March 1876, 156. IOR/V/P/924.

73 The ongoing importance of this context is corroborated, however, by the fact that a police belief in the utility of preventative surveillance persevered for the same reasons throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century – that is, police surveillance continued to be aimed at preventing repeat offences in the absence of a system of punishment that they saw as able to deter it. This was revealed in police conversations that occurred during the late 1880s and 1890s in the aftermath of the drafting of the Punjab bill in 1885, which sought to provide legal backing for police surveillance of habitual criminals in that province. Framed in view of a defective criminal administration in the Punjab, the bill was a culmination of a question under consideration for some years of how legalised police surveillance over repeat offenders would help to reduce a growing rate of reconviction.

The matter had emerged with increased urgency in the Punjab during the 1880s for two reasons. Firstly, the security for good behaviour provisions in the Code of Criminal Procedure could no longer be relied upon as a means to supervise the criminal classes, due to the ease that criminals eluded police vigilance in a modern age. So the argument went, in an age where “the development of railways had rendered bad characters more able and willing to leave their villages”, the “deterrent effect of being placed on security” had been “seriously impaired”.21 As the only means to supervise released offenders, or bad characters, it was seen as a less than effective check against repeat offences, because “the offender [was] not bound thereby to remain in any particular locality, and neither by inclination nor by the difficulty of communications is he precluded from seeking new scenes wherein to indulge his criminal propensities”.22 Secondly, a ‘crime panic’ in the Punjab had focused on the rise of cases of “serious mischief” during the 1880s; property crimes such as cattle poisoning or rick-burning, perpetrated by individuals viewed as “bad characters” who were known in the villages, but who committed such crimes time and again without apprehension.23 Such crimes, reported to have doubled between 1883 and 1885, provided impetus for legal surveillance because the frequency of these crimes was attributed to the impossibility or at least difficulty in detecting and prosecuting the perpetrators.24 Evidence of a crime that was “committed by one person on a dark night” was difficult to produce in court, and although “the perpetrator was often known to the villagers, no one dared to come forward and give evidence lest a similar fate befall his own

21 Letter no. 732 from Colonel O. Menzies, Inspector General of Police, Punjab to the Inspectors General of Bombay, Madras, Lower Provinces, North West Provinces, Central Provinces, and Hyderabad Assigned Districts, 17 March 1886, 6. IOR/MF/1/530. 22 Ibid, 6. 23 Ibid, 6. 24 Ibid, 6.

74 property”.25 Crimes that were perpetrated by individuals viewed as difficult to detect and prosecute were argued to be preventable if surveillance over notorious ‘bad’ or ‘suspicious’ characters was legalised in the Punjab. Using British habitual criminal legislation as a model, the Punjab bill sought to expand the Criminal Tribes Act to include individual repeat offenders, such that it would become the “duty of every village headman and watchman in a village in which any registered habitual offender under surveillance resides to give the earliest information of their movements at the nearest Police station”.26

In 1886, the inspector general of the Punjab police, Colonel A. Menzies, wishing to take collective action to impel the Indian Government to pass habitual criminal legislation throughout India, requested that each of the heads of India’s provincial police furnish him “with [their] views regarding the necessity of placing some check on the movements of persons who by their previous convictions have proved themselves to be habitual offenders”.27 This generated an ongoing debate amongst Bengal’s police and judicial executive about whether legal surveillance over habitual criminals should be extended throughout India. 28 More relevant to the present argument however, the large volume of correspondence shared between heads of police from 1886 to 1893 detailed the structures of surveillance the Bengal police had developed, and revealed them as part of an ongoing effort to supplement a system of punishment that failed to deter habitual criminality.29

Within an existent system of surveillance, the police had defined for themselves an active role in preventing known or suspected repeat offenders from committing crime. According to John Beames, who was president of the Police Commission of 1890 that ran parallel to the discussions surrounding the drafting of the Punjab bill, the police viewed “the surveillance of habitual criminals as one of the most important duties that they have to perform”.30 How surveillance was conducted was left to the discretion of the police executive.31 A district superintendent assessed “from the nature of the case whether an offender is or is not a habitual

25 Ibid, 6. 26 Ibid, 6. 27 Ibid, 6. 28 See for example Letter no. 1/420 from John Beames, President of the Police Reform Committee to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 10 November 1890, 90. IOR/MF/1/530 29 Ibid, 90. 30 The debate over the Punjab act coincided with the appointment of the ‘Committee to consider the Reform of the Police of the Lower Provinces of Bengal’ in 1890, which meant that many of the concerns about habitual criminality were reproduced and referenced in that report. In particular, John Beames, the President of the Committee, summarised much of this debate in the report of the committee, as well as becoming involved in the immediate discussion. Ibid, 90. 31 Ibid, 90.

75 offender” and if they should be subject to surveillance.32 For example, “a notorious railway ‘cut-purse’ who used a knife in his profession would be ordered for surveillance; while a cultivator who had sometimes taken an armful of sprouting crops to feed his cattle would not”.33 The district superintendent of Sārun similarly emphasised the importance of police discretion in deciding who was kept under surveillance. It allowed the police to include “dangerous criminals who escape conviction though who are known to be habitual offenders” in a project of preventative surveillance.34 Both “suspected persons” and convicted “habitual criminals” were at present “the objects of surveillance”; both could be classified by the police as either a) men to be inquired after from time to time, b) men to be watched or c) men to be watched closely. 35 This comprised a system not directly authorised by law, though not necessarily contrary to it either, falling under the discretionary powers of superintendents to direct police resources according to the imperatives of crime that presented in their district.36 Overall, in reply to Menzies request for information about whether surveillance should be legalised, the police had demonstrated that in Bengal supporting legislation was not necessary.37 Legal definitions of who a habitual criminal was, or how often they should be surveilled were superfluous, because it was the duty of district superintendents and officers in charge of stations to classify repeat offenders or suspected habitual criminals for surveillance.38 Notably, the surveillance was reported to be conducted over 42 812 registered surveillès in 1889, of whom only 39 198 had actually been convicted previously, was conducted by a police who had defined their own role in the prevention of habitual criminality.39

The discussion about whether legislation should underpin preventative surveillance further revealed that surveillance had been developed in Bengal as a response to problems the police viewed as endemic in India’s system of punishment. First of all, it was argued that the current arrangements for the punishment of repeat offences failed to deter repeat offenders who were considered to be unreformable. The existence of a class of offenders who the police arrested

32 Ibid, 90. 33 Ibid, 90. 34 Letter no. 4146J from A.E. Stanley, District Superintendent of Sāran to the Offg. Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial, Political and Appointment Department, 28 December 1890, 92. IOR/MF/1/530 35 Ibid, 92. 36 Ibid, 92. 37 Letter no. 336 from J.C. Veasey, Inspector-General of the Bengal Police to Colonel O. Menzies, Inspector General of the Punjab Police, 30 March 1886, 113; Letter no. 94 from Colonel O. Menzies, to the Government of Punjab, 1 October 1886, 114. IOR/MF/1/530 38A.E. Stanley, Offg. Magistrate of Sāran to the Offg. Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial, Political and Appointment Department, 28 December 1890, 92. IOR/MF/1/530 38 Ibid, 92. 39 J.C. Veasey, Inspector-General of the Bengal Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1889, Bengal Secretariat Press: Calcutta, 1900, 39.

76 time and again, yet upon whom “confinement in our jails had no deterrent effect whatsoever” pointed to an inherent flaw in the way habitual criminality was punished. 40 “Successive sentences” demonstrated to the police that “prison life in India has no terrors” for these persons. 41 These ideas are corroborated by contemporaneous police commentary that the continually increasing number of cases of repeat offences proved that imprisonment failed to deter habitual criminality. A comparison made between serious crimes committed in 1886 as compared with 1875 highlighted that “there was in 1886 one crime to every 986 persons, while in 1875 there was one crime to every 918 people”.42 Relative to population increase, there “would appear to have been a decrease of crime in Bengal”.43 Whilst the “course of crime” could therefore be argued to “inspire encouragement rather than alarm”, there was “one class of criminals” to which these remarks did not apply. 44 Between 1874 and 1886, a “marked increase in repeat offences” pointed to a “steady increase in professional crime”.45 This was attributed to the “imperfect manner in which crime is repressed in Bengal”, and to the inability of punishment structures alone to act as a deterrent to a ‘life of crime’.46 It was this prevailing, and seemingly worsening problem of recidivism that had demonstrated to the police that habitual criminals were undeterred by the prospect of reconviction or by the enhanced punishment provisions of the Indian Penal Code.

Compounding the issue, Beames in particular argued, was the fact that judges were too lenient on “previously convicted offenders”, which resulted in “far too many instances of inadequate punishments” being handed down.47 Whilst specific cases were not provided, the discrepancy between police and judicial notions of what constituted a habitual criminal is substantiated by cases that appear in Bengal’s judicial proceedings. Indeed, in the district of Patna, the matter of who constituted a habitual criminal had “on frequent occasions formed the subject of discussion” between C. Quinn, the district magistrate, and T.M. Kirkwood, judge of the court

40 John Beames, President of the Police Reform Committee to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 10 November 1890, 90. IOR/MF/1/530 41 Ibid, 90. 42 Letter from A.P. MacDonnell to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 22 December 1888, ‘Return of Serious Crime’, 6. IOR/V/P/4335. 43 Ibid, 6. 44 Ibid, 6. 45 Letter no, 3383 from T.M. Kirkwood, Sessions Judge of Patna to the Magistrate of Patna, 18 August 1885, 500. IOR/V/P/2944. 46 Letter from E.N. Baker, Offg. Deputy Commissioner of Manbhum to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 14 August 1889, 35. IOR/P/4335. 47 Letter from John Beames, 10 November 1890, 90. IOR/MF/1/530

77 of sessions.48 For example, the case of Mithu Barhi, who had been sentenced to eighteen months’ rigorous imprisonment in December 1886 for theft of goods valuing one rupee, revealed the differing ideas of the police and judiciary about who should be classified and punished as a habitual criminal. At the advice of the district superintendent, the magistrate had tried the prisoner as a habitual offender, and awarded a sentence that Kirkwood regarded to be disproportionate to Barhi’s crime. That “he had committed a deliberate offence in 1874, and was found again committing a similar offence in 1886” was sufficient in the police magistrate’s opinion to conclude that “he has not only committed theft, but that he is by conduct and character a thief”, thus a sentence of eighteenth months rigorous imprisonment was imposed.49 An appeal was made in February 1887, at which the appellate judge argued that it was unreasonable to suggest that an original punishment of flogging had not deterred the convicted from a life of crime. The punishment of flogging which was administered in 1874 had “very nearly so” deterred the accused from offending again.50 In 12 years, there was “nothing at all to show he is so hardened a criminal that an ordinary sentence should be enhanced” and as such the sentence was reduced to three months rigorous imprisonment in February 1887.51 In the opinion of the judge, “a thing done twice in a lifetime of thirty years, with an interval of 12 years, during the whole of which period the person was free to act, can hardly be regarded as a habit”.52 Kirkwood similarly recalled a case from 1883 when the police had attempted to obtain a conviction as a repeat offender for Panchu Dusadh, based on his conviction for petty theft that was handed down in 1875. At the time, the judge had dismissed the recommendation of the police, arguing that the conviction was “of such an old date that I did not allow it to weigh with me in sentencing”.53 The magistrate was criticised for wasting the time of the high court, for committing him to trial was deemed totally unnecessary for a petty crime that could easily have been dealt with in the police court.54 In both cases the police had, in the opinion of the judge, misinterpreted the provisions of section 75, which provided for extended sentencing “when the ordinary term allowed by law, has, from the prisoner’s conduct, been shown to be inadequate to deter”.55 These cases tend to corroborate the notion advanced by Beames that the

48 Letter no, 3383 from T.M. Kirkwood, Sessions Judge of Patna to the Magistrate of Patna, 18 August 1885, 500. IOR/P/2944. 49 T.M. Kirkwood, Judge of the Court of Sessions, Criminal Appeal, no. 13, February 1887, ‘Appeal from the Order of C. Quinn, Magistrate of Patna, 27 December 1886, 499. IOR/P/2944. 50 Ibid, 499. 51 Ibid, 499. 52 Ibid, 499. 53 Letter no, 3383 from T.M. Kirkwood, Sessions Judge of Patna to the Magistrate of Patna, 18 August 1885, 500. IOR/P/2944. 54 Ibid, 500. 55 Ibid, 500; Section 75, Indian Penal Code.

78 police had developed a system of preventative surveillance because they viewed Bengal’s judicial and punishment system as unable to repress individuals who they considered to be habitual criminals. Whilst during the 1870s these ideas were reflected within police commentary about newly instituted surveillance strategies, the drafting of the Punjab bill arguably provided the police executive with greater cause to explicate their opinions on the matter in detail.

After the 1890s there is less police commentary on why surveillance continued to be utilised as a preventative strategy aimed at habitual criminals. The Punjab Bill had been submitted to Council in 1893, however was rejected based on the strength of the argument, largely held by the police executive, that legalising surveillance and thereby involving the courts in the procedure was useless because a large part of police surveillance was conducted over suspected and therefore unconvicted offenders.56 In the absence of an official discourse about the matter, the police tended to confine themselves to general remarks about the utility and ongoing necessity of surveillance, which accompanied reports about newly introduced technologies and strategies or the number of people who were kept under surveillance. The justification remained the same, however. Surveillance was a strategy of crime prevention aimed at supplanting a punitive system that had been seemingly proven to have “no deterrent effect on habitual criminals whatever”.57 An apparently enduring problem of repeat offences was made worse by the difficulty of “inflict[ing] adequate sentences on habitual criminals after numerous convictions”, and thus prevention surveillance was paramount.58 In the inspector general’s report for 1909, for example, it was the “comparative futility of the Indian jail system” to deal with “individual habitual criminals” that justified the 24 269 “registered surveillès” and the 18 237 suspicious characters who were under police surveillance.59 Based on these remarks, it seems that the attitude of the police towards the judicial and punishment systems was shaped by the same considerations that were delineated during the 1890s, which had prevailed since the 1870s. Most likely, the idea that there existed a class of unreformable criminals, who would continue to commit crime with impunity, was enough to justify expanding the means available to the police to exercise surveillance.

56 Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 104. 57 C.W.C. Plowden, Inspector General of the Bengal Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1909, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1910, 40. 58 Letter no. 2463, from Sir John Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 24 June 1891, 201. IOR/P/4105. 59 Ibid, 40.

79 Indeed, by the first decade of the twentieth century, the surveillance of repeat offenders or suspected habitual criminals was part of established police wisdom about how crime should be controlled in Bengal. During the twentieth century the police remained committed to reducing crime by targeting those who were arguably likely to commit it and who were supposedly responsible for the bulk of crimes committed, whether convicted or not. Whilst the following chapters indicate the centrality of surveillance to everyday policing in Bengal, the present has been concerned to delineate the reasons behind the emergence and continued use of surveillance. Preventative surveillance in Bengal was developed to prevent repeat offenders, or suspected habitual criminals from committing crime, because they were viewed by the police as undeterred and inadequately dealt with by an ineffective system of punishment. In order to circumvent apparently ineffective judicial and punishment systems, the police developed a separate bureaucratic system of preventative surveillance. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the police would perpetuate and expand this system, because surveillance over repeat offenders and suspected habitual criminals had become part of the fabric of everyday policing.

80 (5) Policing and Technology: Surveillance and the Police Record

A variety of everyday tasks conducted by the Bengal police were defined by the exercise of surveillance over habitual criminals. The present chapter examines how and why surveillance changed the technological aspect of policing in Bengal over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This period, within which the new police was consolidated as a civil force for the prevention and detection of crime, witnessed the bureaucratisation of policing in Bengal. Collecting, recording, classifying and accessing police information became principal operational tasks, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, the police were heavily reliant upon paperwork. Considered in the 1860s to be an encumbrance to the police function, paperwork became central to colonial policing during the nineteenth century because of its use in an emergent surveillance project. To conduct preventative surveillance, a range of instrumentalities were developed throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that relied upon police abilities to collect, record and analyse written information. Here, the interplay between a fact of limited police resources and an understanding of the police role in the prevention of repeat offences is most obvious. Surveillance was a targeted and responsive deployment of police personnel to pre-empt and prevent repeat offences, and this meant that written information was vital. The collection, analysis and exchange of information allowed the police to keep watch over areas where crime was seen as likely to occur, or localities where sudden increases in crime had occurred, and to surveil only those criminals who were assumed most likely to commit crime. Pursuant to the notion that the bureaucratisation of policing in colonial Bengal was connected with the aims of the surveillance project, this chapter focuses on the tools and systems that were designed to expand the outer limits of what was known about criminal Bengal.

Police attitudes to paperwork, the commitment of abstract police knowledge to a tangible, precise and thus useable thing, underwent a transformation during the nineteenth century. From a position of relative insignificance in the 1860s, the police record would become entrenched as a central policing modality by the turn of the twentieth century, emerging as a by-product of an increasingly central surveillance function. The remarks of the commissioner of the Cuttack division T.E. Ravenshaw in 1867 were typically disparaging of the written component of police work. The police capacity for criminal repression, he argued, was significantly impeded by the excessive attention (then comparably paltry) given to the preparation of statistics, daily returns, diaries, and special reports. In his opinion, time spent

81 writing and translating reports was better devoted to actual police work in the thanā. A regular patrol of the thanā, or face-to-face investigation into serious cases, were considered more efficient uses of limited police resources than having district superintendents, their assistants, police inspectors and sub-inspectors, constantly desk-bound in the preparation of written records, which he argued were “far more numerous, prolix and voluminous than necessary”.1 In his opinion, the Bengal police system, though “elaborate”, was “too much in form, and too little in substance” and thus crime was imperfectly controlled. 2 Yet, by the turn of the twentieth century, the multiplicity of registers, history sheets, descriptive rolls, indexed volumes of photographs, fingerprints and so on, comprised a vast archive of police information viewed now as vital to prevent crime, and entailing a heavy, yet indispensable, paperwork load of the regular police. The paperwork burden lamented by Ravenshaw in 1867 had increased substantially, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was conceived in entirely different terms. It became an imperative instrumentality in the task of crime prevention and more particularly, in the exercise of surveillance. Written information helped to “localise crime and connect it with bad characters” such that targeted policing could occur, and preventative surveillance could be exercised with precision and efficiency.3 Indeed, as members of Bengal’s police executive would reiterate time and again, “until we know what crime is committed, our efforts to cope with it all will necessarily be not wholly successful”.4 A markedly different attitude to paperwork was notable. By the end of the nineteenth century, writing down what was known about criminals or criminal hotspots was considered vital for crime prevention – in a “condensed and easily intelligible form”, the written police record was most useful to the task of preventative surveillance.5

One can relate the rising status of written information to the increasingly important place given to preventative surveillance over habitual criminals from the 1870s. As it became important to ‘know’ the names and residences of individuals considered likely to commit crime, the police began compiling lists of people who required surveillance. Released convicts in particular were a focus of surveillance in Bengal, producing an increased paperwork load for the police. In the last years of the 1870s, the recording of information about released offenders had become an important daily administrative task of the police in Bengal. In 1878, the inspector

1 T.E. Ravenshaw, Annual Report of the Police of the Cuttack Division, 1860-1867, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1868, 5. 2Ibid, 5. 3 E.R. Henry, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1891, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1892, 61. 4 Ibid, 100. 5 Ibid, 100.

82 general of Bengal police requested that the inspector general of jails would henceforth furnish the district police with lists of prisoners whose sentences were about to expire so that select offenders could be kept under surveillance upon their release from the district jails.6 The daily compilation of rolls of released convicts from information received from the Presidency Jail in Calcutta, a Central jail where European convicts were incarcerated, and the reformatory schools at Alipore and Hazāribāgh, vastly expanded the amount of paperwork dealt with by the police by the end of the 1870s.7 Compared with 1872 when “there was no such correspondence”, in 1879 1, 976 rolls of released convicts were issued and received daily across Bengal.8 Jail authorities were from 1878 also required to take the photographs of notorious habitual offenders and to forward these to the relevant District Superintendent, to ensure that the descriptions of suspected bad characters was accompanied by a somewhat reliable means of identification.9 However, photographing was at this stage infrequently used, on average 20-30 photographs taken of habitual criminals yearly, largely because of the expense such technology incurred, and due to the fact that criminals easily changed their appearance to escape identification.10 Overall, however, “correspondence regarding offenders released from jail [was] now freely interchanged with the mofussil authorities” for the purposes of police surveillance, the amount of paperwork conducted at the station had increased significantly.11 Such correspondence was part of a general trend towards greater co-operation between the prisons department and police department but, more narrowly, it also points to an increased police role in preventing repeat offences.

The establishment of daily correspondence about released offenders with the prisons department reflected the expanding police role in the prevention of repeat offences. District

6 Circular no. 7756, 30 May 1878, 1207 in Botelho, T.F. The Bengal Police Manual comprising the Circulars and Circular Memorandum of the Inspector General of Police, Lower Provinces, from 1862 to 1883 together with Extracts from Circulars of Other Departments and Enactments Referring Directly and Indirectly to the Bengal Police, P.S. D’Rozario and Co: Calcutta, 1882, 395. Unless otherwise stated, all circular memorandum of the inspector general are drawn from Botelho’s file compiling these memorandum. 7 Letter no. 4777 from J. Lambert, Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, to the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal, 21 July 1884, 19. IOR/P/2810. 8 Ibid, 19. 9 James Monro, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1877, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1878, 93. IOR/V/24/3199. 10 Ibid, 93. Photographing habitual criminals becomes more frequent in the early 1890s, when the technology had become more advanced, and was required to accompany entries made to the Surveillance Register (see page 92 of this chapter). Even still, identification by means of anthropometry and fingerprinting was considered to be a superior way to identify habitual criminals, and by 1894 had superseded photography in importance in police work. Photographs were frequently taken and were filed alongside anthropometrical cards (see page 92), yet were considered to be a secondary means to identify criminals, due to the ease that a criminal could change their appearance. See E.R. Henry, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1892, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 96. 11 Ibid, 19.

83 superintendents in particular were required to select “all prisoners of note to be released in the following month” from the information supplied by the prisons department and to record their details in bound registers to be kept at the police station.12 Principal attention was paid to the registration of detailed information about criminals who should be classified as habitual criminals by the police authority; “notorious thieves, highway robbers, cattle thieves, and swindlers” were to be the focus.13 The usefulness of paperwork for this task was that from lists of ex-convicts, the names of only the most notorious criminals could be registered as people who required police surveillance. The police argued that this allowed “watching the movements of known bad characters” to become “systematic” and to occur according to police knowledge about the types of people who should be surveilled.14 The necessity of accurately knowing the extent of the habitual criminal class in Bengal required the establishment of communicative networks between the police and prisons department and the careful registration of the most important aspects of such information. Both ensured an expanding paperwork component of the station police and moreover reflected a fact of police control over the conduct of preventative surveillance from the late 1870s.

Written information was important to a police-designed and controlled surveillance project because in a written form police knowledge about suspected habitual criminals could be shared and transferred. Typifying this was the procedure introduced in 1876 within the Rājshāhi division that saw the exchange of lists of names and criminal histories between the district police working in Rangpur, Dinājpur and Jalpaigurī. The borders of these three districts were argued to form a “tri-junction” that bad characters crossed to escape police vigilance, yet across which registered police knowledge could also be shared.15 At the end of each week a constable was despatched with a “written account of all that the officer in charge was able to discover during the week”, who would exchange this for a similar report written by the officer in charge of the bordering station of one of the three districts, rotating with the other at the end of the next week.16 This practise was undertaken to ensure that bad characters were under closer supervision throughout bordering police districts, and that their departure did not necessarily mean they would fall out of the surveillance of the local police.

12 Cir. no. 7756, 30 May 1878, 1207. 13 Ibid, 1207. 14 This practice of registering released convicts had been the recommendation of Cir. no. 61, R.L. Mangles, ‘Suppression of Dacoity in Bengal’, 30 November 1875, 3-4. IOR/P/924. 15 Letter no. 169 from Lord H. Ulick Browne, Commissioner of the Rājshāhi and Cooch Behār Division to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, ‘Dacoity in Rājshāhi and Cooch Behār: Suppression, Statistics, Measures Adopted’, 3 May 1876, 171. IOR/P/924. 16 Ibid, 171.

84 Throughout Bengal similar strategies became central in an expanding police function of surveillance. The daily reports made by the subordinate police for each thanadar and outpost in Noākhāli “put local knowledge of bad characters to use” by registering information regarding wandering suspects and compiling this information within a monthly report. 17 Visiting inspecting officers during their tours of inspection delivered the reports to relevant or nearby districts in order to circulate relevant information across a wider jurisdiction.18 Station officers in charge of surveillance who kept track of their “own bad characters only”, were considered to have “neglected their duty”, and were reminded that for surveillance to be an effective preventative measure, they needed to consider information from and provide information to surrounding districts.19 By transforming the locally acquired knowledge of the subordinate police into a written form, surveillance knowledge could be shared and utilised across a wider jurisdiction for the prevention of crime.

While a concern to make police knowledge transferable and accessible was visible in a variety of local police strategies, it was made official by the introduction of compulsory police forms that aimed at providing superior police officers with a uniform means to access and utilise information from their surrounding districts. For example, in order to discover the antecedents of a suspicious person and to determine whether or not they should be subjected to increased surveillance, ‘Form No. 99’ was introduced in 1881 throughout Bengal.20 It was designed to allow district superintendents to readily and uniformly obtain information about suspicious persons wandering in and out of police districts across Bengal, and to ensure their “judgment in securing surveillance over the really criminal classes” was appropriate.21 It provided the police with a way to request information about known criminal connections, antecedents, aliases, migratory habits, legitimate means of subsistence, and so on, which could be used to establish whether an individual should be considered to be a bad character and requiring surveillance.22 Its introduction pointed to the formalisation of the means to acquire such information; standardised forms entailed that communicative networks between district superior officers were formal and routine and that information could be requested, conveyed and archived in a

17 Memo no. 705, by R. Porsch, Magistrate of Noākhāli, forwarded to all District Superintendents of Police for Information and Guidance, 22 December 1875. IOR/P/924. 18 Ibid, 55. 19 Ibid, 171. 20 Cir. no. 7, 1881, ‘Form for Making Enquiries about Suspicious Persons (Bengal Police Form, no. 99)’, 321. 21 Ibid, 321. 22 Ibid, 321.

85 uniform manner. This reflected the prevalence of the idea that “local knowledge was useless” unless it could be uniformly and readily catalogued, circulated and accessed efficiently.23

The use of written information in this way was partly informed by a general consensus among the Bengal police that habitual criminals travelled between districts, divisions and indeed provinces, for the purposes of committing crime. The police argued time and again that habitual criminals were well aware of the fact that “crime may be committed outside the jurisdiction of the station in which he resides or in another district with comparative impunity”. 24 Their mobility was supposedly aided by the advent of modernity in India; “improvements in communication, effected chiefly by the railways and the telegraph, had greatly facilitated the operations of professional criminals”.25 It was therefore important to design and improve strategies that increased the sharing of information about known habitual criminals between jurisdictions.26 The activities of “habitual criminals and their accomplices” were assumed to be professional and predictable and “could be known”. 27 It followed “therefore [that] they should be watched”, and that information of their movements, antecedents, and habits, should be collected, registered and circulated across different police jurisdictions. 28 Networks of correspondence and exchange were developed as part of a “concert of surveillance” because they allowed the sharing of criminal information between district superintendents, or between station officers at bordering or nearby police circles.29 A project to prevent habitual criminality was predicated on obtaining and recording knowledge about the migrations of notorious or suspected repeat offenders. It was via informal and formal strategies of surveillance, and the collection and circulation of police knowledge, that this was seemingly achievable.

While ideas about the transience of habitual criminals would produce police forms that widened the distribution of information, the development of other strategies was informed by the professional mobility of members of the superior police of Bengal. Compounding the idea that police knowledge about suspected or notorious repeat offenders had to be archived for

23 Letter from H.J. Newberry, Joint Magistrate of Monghyr to E. Lockwood, Magistrate of the District of Monghyr, 16 May 1876, 225. IOR/P/924. 24 Ibid, 324. 25 Letter from C.J. Lyall, Offg. Secretary to the Government of India, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, no. 156/157, 31 May 1890, ‘Control of Habitual Criminals: Draft Bill and Correspondence’, 170. IOR/P/4105. 26 To be discussed in Chapter Five. 27 Letter no. 206ct, from C.C. Quinn, Offg. Commissioner, Bhāgalpur Division and Santāl Parganas, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 30 December 1890, 97, serial no. 12, IOR/MF/1/530. 28 Ibid, 97. 29 Ibid, 170.

86 future reference was a concern to add permanency to such knowledge in spite of typically impermanent police appointments. Systems of registration were designed to ensure that information regarding the movements of habitual criminals was available to new police officers in a familiar format, so access to criminal information was uniform within each district. In a circular memorandum of the inspector general, issued in 1879, for example, it was ordered that each district superintendent was henceforth to record vital information about the criminality of his district in a district notebook.30 The aim of the notebook was to ensure that surveillance records were up-to-date for current members of staff, so in the likely instance that the district superintendent would be transferred, his replacement would be provided with information about who should be watched, how to recognise them and where they ordinarily resided. Each notebook was compiled in a uniform way, so that the collected information was familiar to the “officer succeeding the writer, or to the writer himself”.31 Information about the manners, habits and the locale of notorious criminals in the district was geographically divided according to the subdivisional police stations, and was categorised under standard headings. “Information that was really worth noting” was entered into sections labelled as “prevailing criminal and bad character’s residence/names of receivers (known and suspected) of stolen property/past history of absconders to look after/criminal classes which require special attention/particulars of their working and previous convictions”. 32 The idea was that in the likely case that a district superintendent had worked within another district, it would be easy for him to access the information required to continue the surveillance of bad characters. The district notebook was abolished in 1914, and replaced by the crime gazetteer, a register kept at the headquarters of the district superintendent that recorded similar information but was also contributed to by circle inspectors (whom will be discussed in detail in Chapter Seven) and railway and river police officers. Similarly, it was aimed at providing available information to different branches of the police administration.33 However, the simple utility of the district notebook in conveying information between personnel about suspected or actual habitual criminals was reiterated in 1919 when the gazetteer was abolished and the district notebook re-instated. 34 Since the district superintendent corresponded with most branches of police administration for the exchange of information, and ultimately directed the surveillance project within the district, a

30 Letter no. 2677, from C.W.C. Plowden, Inspector-General of Police, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, ‘Amendment to rule 121 of Part 1, Police Regulations’, 12 March, 1919, 6. IOR/P/10522. 31 Ibid, 6. 32 Ibid, 6. 33 Ibid, 6. 34 Ibid, 6.

87 centralised source was more easily maintained.35 Its conceived value to the surveillance project throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that it made information about the habits and identities of habitual criminals accessible, transferable and permanent, despite typically impermanent police careers. Reflecting the wider aims of surveillance, it was designed and utilised to provide the police with information about where crime occurred and who committed it, in the hope that this would enable them to prevent crime through targeted and responsive surveillance.

Interplay between police understandings about their role in preventing repeat offences and the reality of limited police resources would moreover increase police reliance on pen and paper. Surveillance in Bengal, the province that was the “most under policed in all of India”, was designed to be targeted, selective and efficient.36 Certain surveillance instrumentalities were created precisely with this in mind, and were aimed at extending the efficiency of a police constrained by limited personnel. This can be understood through the development of two phenomena; firstly, the development of a system to index crime by geography, and secondly, the design of a system of surveillance classification.37 Turning first of all to the surveillance modalities that were developed to map criminal patterns, it is evident that they were aimed at ensuring preventative surveillance was an efficient use of police resources.

A system developed in the Midnapore district by the district superintendent in 1873 was representative. The Midnapore district police were reported to be committed to the idea that crime could be prevented if the police were “fully conversant with the movements” of budmashes.38 Budmashes fell into the surveillance of the police by sending a constable into “certain villages” to check up on their whereabouts, activities and general movements, in order to extend a preventative police presence into the village.39 Yet, the clandestine deployment of the police into the village occurred according to the information that had been collected and carefully examined by the officer in charge of the station. During their shift, station officers were required to note down important information that had been received from the village police (the role of the village police in the surveillance project will be discussed in Chapter Six) about the criminal goings on in the village, and from the constabulary, about crimes occurring

35 Ibid, 6. 36 W.R. Bright, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1900, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1901, 17. 37 “To index crime by geography” was a phrase was coined by Colonel H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, Bengal, 1874-1881: With Bearings for a Future Course, Army and Navy Co-operative Society: London, 1882, 6. 38 J.R. Pughe, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1873, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1874, 78. 39 Ibid, 78.

88 in rural tracts surrounding the police station. This information was transcribed and filed, and forwarded to the superintendent every fifteen days.40 From the information received from Midnapore’s thanās, the superintendent plotted the movements of the constables and chaukidars on a map, to “judge how far the supervision in each thanā was effective”.41 If the superintendent felt that the attention paid to each area was insufficient or excessive, advice was issued about which localities should receive the most attention by the constabulary and the village police in the future.42 The tedium associated with the task was argued to be outweighed by the fact that it allowed the superintendent “at a glance” to decide whether the resources allocated for surveillance corresponded to the level of crime in particular localities.43 This entailed that in Midnapore, surveillance was a targeted deployment of police resources according to carefully analysed and archived information.

H.M. Ramsay, superintendent of the Patna district, whose locally developed policing techniques were discussed extensively in his police memoir Detective Footprints, had introduced a similar strategy during the winter of 1874.44 This is the best available source for understanding the rationale behind surveillance strategies, because it provides local information about the aims and objectives of strategies that were extended for implementation across Bengal, or which closely resembled other techniques of policing. During his superintendentship of Patna (1874 – 1881), Ramsay had announced a system that would record how crime was distributed throughout his district and which villages and towns suffered more than others from “particular phases of crime”.45 This system was aimed at ensuring that “the watching of bad characters” occurred according to registered geographies of crime.46 Ramsay introduced a habitual criminal register that would detail the tendency of crime to increase in particular localities of the district and at certain times in the year, which would enable him, and future superintendents, to direct police personnel accordingly.47 Resembling a kind of criminal almanac, occurrences of crime were recorded against calendar entries and updated periodically, as new information was brought to light. The recording of criminal patterns was based on the information collected from the village police. Each station or outpost circle was divided into

40 Ibid, 78. 41 Ibid, 78. 42 Ibid, 78. 43 Ibid, 78. 44 Colonel H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 6. 45 Ibid, 12. 46 Ibid, 12. 47 J. Monro, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1877, 56.

89 beats to be patrolled by 15 to 20 chaukidar officers to form a group.48 Each group was represented on one page of the register, which detailed relevant police knowledge collected by the chaukidars responsible to that group; for instance, the names of any known bad characters residing in their villages would be noted on the top half of the page. The bottom half of the page was divided into 12 equal spaces to represent the months of the year, and as significant cases of crime were reported by the chaukidar, they were recorded in the appropriate month along with details of the village of occurrence and the chaukidar’s personal details. The utility of the chart was that it allowed him to “estimate in detail” how to “parcel out” each police group with its required strength of village police or, if it appeared to be the location of increasing crime, extra police from regular constabulary would be stationed there.49 According to these patterns “the full energy of the police” could be directed to ensure that “meaningless wanderings about parts of the country not in immediate want of police care” were prevented.50 This was undoubtedly connected with the fact that police resources were limited, and that surveillance could occur according to recorded patterns in criminality, which theoretically reduced the need for a totally policed countryside.

There was a specifically local context that had supposedly contributed to the formation of this idea, however it is likely that it was part of an established wisdom about crime prevention in Bengal, as it is replicated in different sources at this time. Nonetheless, according to Ramsay’s memoirs, the necessity of targeted surveillance had been revealed to him due to the local particularities of the district. During Ramsay’s charge as district superintendent between 1874 and 1881, he was astonished with the level of what he deemed as preventable crime in the district, which occurred at the hands of professional thieves. Particularly disturbing was the knowledge that he acquired during his first cold weather tour that in a “particular municipal town”51, two thirds of the number of burglary cases reported in 1876-77 had occurred within two square miles of the police station, “under the very noses of a regularly paid police force specially employed for the prevention of crime”, who were engaged in a regular police patrol of the area. 52 To Ramsay, a “native” adage resonated well; “chiraghke niche andhera”, i.e. “darkness immediately below the lamp”.53 The “lesson”, he argued, was that if this “extremely disgraceful condition of affairs” occurred within two square miles of the police station, then it

48 H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 14. 49 Ibid, 15. 50 Ibid, 43. 51 Colonel H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 6. Unfortunately details of specific locations are not provided. 52 Ibid, 6 53 Ibid, 6.

90 was probable that a similar condition was recurrent in the “2101 square miles of the district under [his] police care”.54 To Ramsay this revealed the current arrangements for the watch and ward of his district as entirely useless for the prevention of crime. In February 1877 Ramsay held a general parade of the entire district police force to inform them why the criminality of the district was uncontrolled. Principally, he argued, the reason that crime went unchecked was that the officers in charge of Patna’s police stations and outposts were failing to inform him of where and what type of crimes were being committed, which “depriv[ed him] the opportunity of aiding them with counsel and advice as to the best means that could be devised to detect the perpetrators and check their crimes” in the future.55 This meant that the regular beat patrols of the stations circles did not respond to criminal hotspots or to “a steady and unduly heavy bill of crime in special localities”, and were thus ineffectual and wasteful of scarce resources.56 They were a police force who were unable “to feel the pulse of crime”, and to respond accordingly, which to Ramsay meant that preventative policing was near impossible.57 To deal with the problem of professional crime, careful analysis of criminal information and a subsequently targeted policing response was vital.

A particular case was utilised to illustrate his point. Ramsay highlighted the details of an instance of successful police detective work that had convinced him of the usefulness of knowing and archiving criminal information in order to prevent crime. He recalled the instance in detail, emphasising the usefulness of policing by “experience”.58 On April 17, a constable on the beat had discovered “a party of eight thieves” committing a burglary, yet they had narrowly escaped apprehension by throwing a pot of hot ashes in the officer’s face.59 Though “rendered temporarily helpless”, he quickly informed the head constable of the event, who sent two constables to follow the route of the thieves, and alerted a group of constables to block known roads to their suspected destination.60 The route taken by the thieves was alongside a river, with a steep sloping bank, atop which were the laneways and houses comprising a small village. Most of them took to the river, and escaped the capture of the police, yet one attempted to escape into the village, and was subsequently apprehended by the police. Upon turning informant, the names of his seven accomplices were made known to the police and “two smart constables were speedily despatched to the village whence the thieves were said to

54 Ibid, 6. 55 Ibid, 7. 56 Ibid, 7. 57 Ibid, 8. 58 Ibid, 8. 59 Ibid, 9. 60 Ibid, 9.

91 have come to await their return”.61 The village was eight miles southwest of the town, but the police knew of a shortcut across a field that would take them directly there. Setting off at 1am the following morning, the police overtook five men in open fields, but the men gave chase and two, who were proven to be associated with the absconded group of thieves, were arrested. Over the course of the next few months the remaining suspects were discovered, and each sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment. The detective efforts of the constabulary were praised for “breaking up the formidable burglars”, demonstrating the results that diligent detective work yielded.62

However, the most significant result of this case, Ramsay argued, was that it yielded information about other associates of the thieves, who were not involved in the described case, but whose antecedents threw suspicion on their criminal propensities. Having nothing to connect other suspects with any instance of crime, a village policeman was ordered to covertly surveil their resident village. “Experience proved the value” of the “knowledge” obtained in the first case, when four suspects were caught thieving by the guard, and were subsequently convicted for burglary.63 To Ramsay, this confirmed his belief that the key to crime prevention lay in knowing the “names and habitats of dangerous professional housebreakers” because this information “enabled the police to be on their guard in the future”.64 This experience, he argued, was instrumental in shaping the idea that police knowledge should be “indexed geographically”.65

That Ramsay’s habitual crime register was introduced into all districts of Bengal in 1876 suggests that these ideas were common to a general police understanding about crime prevention.66 Monro, the inspector general of police, described its usefulness in 1878 as a “written skeleton chart of the progressive criminal history of a tract of country”, which revealed geographic and periodic patterns of criminality.67 The entries made in this “geographically- calculated criminal chart” were intended to sketch a “rough bird’s-eye view of the general position and nature of reported crime in the locality”. 68 It effectively ‘mapped’ criminal information on a calendar, to highlight the groups and villages that should be considered

61 Ibid, 9. 62 Ibid, 9. 63 Ibid, 9. 64 Ibid, 9. 65 Ibid, 12. 66 J.C. Veasey, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1887, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1888, 15. 67 Ibid, 14; J. Monro, Report of the Lower Provinces, 1878, 42. 68 J. Monro, Report of the Lower Provinces, 43.

92 “criminal hot spots” requiring special police attention. 69 Based on the knowledge of past instances of crime, and in particular, of criminal geographies, the prevention of crime could occur through targeted surveillance.

The pervasiveness of this idea is further revealed in the general introduction of ‘crime maps’ into all police stations in 1891. Each map detailed the residences and habits of known habitual criminals and suspicious characters and was compiled on a monthly basis according to an “official cartographic sample”.70 Every December, the district superintendent provided the station officer with a new map on tracing material backed with cloth, and over the course of the year the officer in charge of the station would add criminal information as it was brought to his attention. The map was hung in each police station, so that the information it conveyed was visible to the constabulary, who could easily identify areas of special notice and could “localise crime in connection with bad characters”.71 With official and informal systems of geographic indexing in place, it was argued that Bengal’s police and the “District Superintendent especially, were able with ease to find information concerning the crime that had occurred, the coming and going of suspicious persons, the residence of bad characters, and various other important matters”; information vital to the “prevention of crime” in Bengal.72 This reflected an important consideration in developing policing technology towards the end of the nineteenth century – surveillance should occur according to recorded information about where crime was likely to occur, and who was likely to commit it. It highlights interplay between a fact of limited police resources, and police understandings of their role in the prevention of repeat offences. By the end of the nineteenth century, both were evident considerations in the development of instrumentalities that transformed police knowledge into a tangible and written form.

Police adaptability to a problem of limited resources was moreover reflected in the development of systems of classification designed to keep the surveillance project within manageable limits. The introduction of a “Register of Persons Under Police Surveillance (Register XV)” in 1892 formalised a system of classification for the surveillance of bad characters for this purpose (see Fig. 2).73 The register was intended to be a running list of the

69 Ibid, 14. 70 E.R. Henry, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1891, 100. 71 Ibid, 100. 72Ibid, 100. 73 Circular No. 3, 21 April 1892 ‘Register – Persons Under Surveillance, P.C. Form no. 257’, in The Bengal Police Code, 395. The term ‘formalised’ is used, because in certain districts, this system existed prior to the introduction of

93 “most dangerous criminals whom the police have to watch”.74 Its purpose was to assemble an archive of police information, collected from official and non-official sources, about the current movements, locale, associations and habits of bad characters. Indeed, the aim of the register was the “intelligent tabulation” of the “mass of information about active criminals” which was collected and known within each station, and which was periodically received by the superintendent.75 “Experience”, it was argued, “show[ed] that many criminals confine[ed] their operation to well-defined areas”, over which, if known to the police, extra supervision could be exercised.76 Thus, an entry into the register recorded the “liquor shops, prostitute houses or houses of other criminals or active associates and receivers and harbourers, visited by the bad character”.77 Police surveillance, if it took heed of the information classified within the register, would theoretically be targeted and efficient.

The system of classification by which surveillès were registered was aimed at ensuring only the “really criminal classes” were under surveillance.78 The district superintendent played a central role in classifying criminal information to ensure that those who fell within police surveillance were really deserving of it. 79 From the information the superintendent received from chaukidars, police constables, the magistrate, and his own investigation of “files of detected and undetected cases”, he was required to select the most notorious criminals who required surveillance, and to divide “dangerous criminals into three classes; A, B and C”.80 Class ‘A’ applied to convicted offenders (who were also entered into Register XIII of Persons Convicted), who, whilst needing to be “inquired into from time to time” due to the commission of a past offence, were not the “pick of the criminal population” and thus did not require any routine surveillance.81 Regular surveillance was only conducted over individuals falling within classes ‘B and C’; those individuals who were to be “watched” or “watched closely” in order to prevent the likelihood of their recidivism. 82 Notably, past conviction was not crucial for classification. ‘Suspicious characters’, could be classified as belonging to class ‘B’ or ‘C’,

Register XV. The introduction of the register extended this system to all districts of Bengal, and moreover provided a uniform system to underpin established protocol. 74 Ibid, 395. 75 Ibid, 397. 76 Ibid, 397. 77 Ibid, 397. 78 Ibid, 397. 79 Ibid, 396. 80 Ibid, 395. 81 Ibid, 396. 82 Classification as ‘class A’ entailed that a suspect was occasionally checked up on; ‘class B’ were visited by the police at least once every few months; and ‘class C’ were frequently surveilled, as well as having their whereabouts registered once a month.

94 despite their suspected criminality being unaccompanied by any recorded criminal conviction. The object was to “bring under the adequate surveillance of the police those persons who are actually committing crime, whether they have been convicted or not”.83 This entailed a wide discretionary role for the district superintendent to decide the level of supervision that was required over a suspected or convicted repeat offender. Indeed, the district superintendent’s permission had to be obtained before an individual could be removed from the register. Based on information provided by the constabulary or village watch, station officers periodically reported to the district superintendent the names of people they felt should be removed from the register, as without written orders, they were unable to cancel any name from the register.84 The district superintendent would either grant permission to remove a name from the register, or would recommend the individual be differently classified. This was designed to ensure the surveillance function was in a constant state of review, such that it was as precise and responsive as possible. Evidently, the district superintendent was required to conduct a careful scrutiny of collected information to ensure preventative policing proceeded “upon sound and systematic lines” and was a manageable task for the size of the constabulary.85 The register was part of a vastly increased paperwork load for the police, and reflected a concern to possess the means to collect, classify and utilise police information. By the end of the nineteenth century, written information was viewed as vital to the conduct of surveillance, because it extended limited caches of police power. It was argued to eliminate “meaningless wanderings” of the countryside and to render surveillance targeted and responsive, in light of the fact that police surveillance could never be extensive and total.86

A final point to consider is that the bureaucratisation of policing in Bengal occurred due to the problem of accessing an expanding archive of surveillance knowledge. Indeed, a system for classifying fingerprints was developed during the 1890s to provide the police with the means to access centralised criminal information. 87 Fingerprinting for the purposes of criminal identification was initially a means to strengthen the reliability of a system of identifying habitual criminals via anthropometrical measurement, in order to inflict harsher punishments for repeat offenders. Anthropometrical measurement, or the Bertillon System of Identification

83 Letter from John Beames, 90. MF 1/530. Though this system of classification had been utilised from the late 1880s, it was formalised in the Police Code as the primary means to deal with habitual criminality. 84 Ibid, 395. 85 L.F. Morshead, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1910, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1911, 3. 86 J. Masters, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1899, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1900, 58. 87 For information regarding the non-coercive or administrative uses of fingerprinting see Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was born in Colonial India, Macmillan: London, 2003, 55.

95 by measurement was the first internationally adopted technology for “unveiling the tricks of a person suspected of giving a false name”.88 It was a system developed by Mons. Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Identification Bureau of the Parisian Police in 1882 that measured and recorded parts of the human body (length and width of the head and of the middle finger, for instance) that remained constant during adult life (see Fig. 3, 4, and 5).89 The rationale behind its development was that few recidivistic criminals in Paris (“except in the domain of Romance”) were ever identified via their photographs and descriptions alone, thus an alternate means accurately to identify habitual criminals was necessary in order to inflict harsher sentencing.90 E.R. Henry, then inspector general of the Bengal police, introduced Bertillon’s system of measurement in 1892 for a similar purpose.91 It was originally conceived as a way to ensure that the courts could legally impose an enhanced punishment if a suspect was discovered to be a notorious repeat offender. From 1892 measurement cards of all convicted offenders were compiled at police stations and forwarded to a central office, where they would be filed alphabetically, ready to be accessed in the instance of a subsequent arrest.92 Upon arresting an unidentified person who was suspected of habitual criminality, the police would request for a search of the measurement cards to be made to compare the arrested person’s measurements with any existent entries so that an offender could be identified as ‘habitual’ or ‘casual’, and sentenced accordingly.93 Yet anthropometry did not solve the problem of identification of repeat offenders who had falsified their name, because there was no comprehensive means to index and access the multitude of identity cards that the measuring process produced.94 By 1894, it was argued that the 18, 000 identity cards had been received at the Central Office, a branch of the inspector general’s office that dealt with criminal identification, provided little assistance to the police or judiciary as a means accurately to identify a repeat offender because of the inherent difficulties involved in locating a suspect’s card in the record.95

88 Romain Costes, Chief of the Anthropometric Service at New Caledonia, ‘Memo to Queensland Police Commissioner on the working of the Bertillon System of Identification’, 6 March 1900. QSA, 316152. 89 Alphonse Bertillon, ‘The Identification of the Criminal Classes by the Anthropometrical Method’; an Address Delivered at the International Penitentiary Congress at Rome, 22 November 1885, 2. 90 Ibid, 2. 91 The Bengal Police Code, 309; E.R. Henry, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1892, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 96. Such cards included a photograph of each suspect/prisoner, however such technology was viewed as inferior to anthropometry as a means of identification, due to the ease that a criminal could change their appearance. 92 Ibid, 96. 93 Ibid, 310. 94 E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, George Routledge and Sons: London, 1900, 62. 95 E.R. Henry, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1894, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1895, 89.

96 A system of fingerprint classification would solve these difficulties however. Henry had introduced the inclusion of a left-thumb print on all measurement cards from 1893, yet indexing according to fingerprint classification was not introduced until 1897.96 The question of the best means to identify habitual criminals was a topic of global debate amongst penal administrators during the 1890s, and whilst Henry corresponded frequently with key administrators during this time, was dissatisfied with their recommendations and reforms because they did not solve the problem of gaining access to criminal information.97 When H.H. Asquith in 1894, then Home Secretary, declared that fingerprints would be utilised only as a secondary or sub-classification to anthropometrical measurement in Britain, Henry had begun experimenting with the use of fingerprints as a primary means of identification and classification in Bengal.98 In 1897 Henry announced that he had discovered a workable system of classification that would solve the problems presented by anthropometry, which subsequently was introduced throughout British India in 1897, and in Britain and the colonies after 1901.99 It was based on an ingenious and outwardly simplistic (which now appears complicated and intricate) system, whereby fingerprint combinations were assigned numerical values according to an arithmetical formula, which would allow them to be filed and accessed quickly and easily from a gridded pigeonhole cabinet. 100 Fingerprints were classified as combinations of loops, arches and whorls, or as composites – a print that combined all three (see Fig. 6).101 In broad terms, the police officer was required to determine, based on an

96 E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 62. 97 Ibid, 63; Henry visited and corresponded with Francis Galton, a key figure in the development of fingerprint technologies at the end of the nineteenth century. His work frequently referenced Galton’s and was presented as a system of classifying the ‘Galtonion’ method of fingerprinting. See Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj. 98 Ibid, 63. It should be noted that it is only for the sake of convenience that the development of this system is here attributed solely to Henry. In fact, Henry had two Indian assistants whose involvement has since been acknowledged as seminal in the development of the system. There is evidence that suggests that Azizul Haqq and Hem Chandra Basu Bahadaur, despite leaving no account of their time with Henry, helped to design the system of fingerprint classification that filed identity cards according to combinations. Within a letter written by Henry to he then Secretary Services and General Department, India Office, London in May 1926, Henry declares that the contribution made by Bahudar to the science of fingerprint classification was seminal in “bringing about the perfecting of a system of classification that has stood the test of time and has been accepted in most countries”. The Bengal government moreover had recognised their contributions in 1913 and 1924 by awarding the title Khan Sahib to both Khan Bahadur and Khan Azizul Haqq. This was the topic of letter no. 7402A from Assistant General to the Inspector-General of Police, West Bengal to Shri Stracey, Deputy Commandant, Central Police Training College, who had requested details of the Honoraria granted to K.B. Azizul Haqq and Hai Hem Chandra Basu Bahadaur for their outstanding work on fingerprinting. The letter is dated 27 May 1963, and can be found within the India Office Record’s police collection, Mss Eur 161/185. 99 ‘Report of the Commissioner for Police London’, 1902, 1, QSA, 316152/02/10546. The system was implemented in Australia from 1903, see Joseph Chamberlain, Circular Memo, 8 July 1904, QSA, 316152, 03/08533. 100 Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 66. 101 Henry’s division of fingerprint ridge patterns was a variation of Francis Galton’s system of dividing fingerprints into arches, loops and whirls. It was based on Galton’s discovery that that there were only 1, 024 combinations of fingerprints possible, if fingerprints were divided into categories of combinations of whorls, arches, loops and composites. See Francis Galton, Finger Prints, Macmillan: London, 1892.

97 algorithmic formula, what combination the impression of each digit represented, which were arranged into five pairs.102 Based on this information, he assigned each pair the prescribed numerical value, and the sum of the values of each pair indicated which pigeonhole in a cabinet divided into 1, 024 shelves the card should be placed (see Fig. 7).103 Theoretically, the person seeking to determine the criminal history of a suspect need only take their finger impression, work out the prescribed numerical value, and then fetch the card from the appropriate pigeonhole. In 1899, the Central Office reported that this system had successfully aided in the identification of 569 ex-convicts, whom the local police “after exhausting all the means of inquiry at their disposal, had failed to recognise” as habitual.104 Year upon year, this number had increased, vastly improving the process of identifying habitual criminals in Bengal such that by 1900 its successes had made anthropometry an obsolete system of classification.105 So, prior to the discovery of the forensic use of the fingerprint106, in Bengal it represented an index, a means to ensure that even in the absence of a name, a suspicious character was unlikely to escape their criminal record.

For the purposes of handing down the enhanced punishment provisions in the Indian Penal Code for repeat offences, this had obvious utility. However, a criminal record that was indexed by Henry’s system was used to draw acquitted, yet “unidentified and accused” suspects under the surveillance of the police.107 If an unknown offender was arrested for a crime they had not committed, or whose involvement could not be proven due to insufficient evidence, their involvement in past crimes could be brought to the attention of the police by matching their fingerprints with their criminal history. Should an individual be proven to be a repeat offender, the police could use that information to register a person for surveillance. For bad characters who were seeking to evade their criminal past in a district or province where they were unknown, fingerprints were used to justify preventative surveillance. To illustrate, in 1900, a stranger arrived in Rangoon who was suspected by the district police to be a bad character, involved in the theft of a bag containing 500 rupees.108 Whilst sufficient evidence could not be obtained for the conviction, the police decided that upon release from police custody, the suspect should be kept under strict police surveillance. This was based on the fact that the

102 E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 66. 103 Ibid, 67. 104 E.R. Henry, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1897, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1898, 101. 105 Ibid, 68. 106 Early forensic fingerprint use has been dated from 1902, when fingerprints were for the first time used as evidence to solve a case of burglary in South London. See Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 1-3. 107 Letter from E.R. Henry to Chief Secretary of Government of Bengal, 26 June 1895, 3. 108 W.R. Bright, Report of Bengal Police for 1900, 33.

98 suspect’s fingerprints were matched by telegraphic description with records proving he was an old offender who had been convicted at each of the district jails in Dinājpur, Calcutta, and Howrah, under different names and residences.109 Classified as a ‘suspicious character’ whose involvement in the present crime could not be proven, though who was believed to be a habitual criminal who would continue to offend, surveillance was deemed the best way to prevent him from committing crime. This case underscores the conceived usefulness of fingerprinting as a means to ‘know’ the criminal classes and to justify preventative surveillance. Fingerprints were utilised to enhance both the power of written information and to provide access to criminal histories when physically recognising habitual criminals was impossible. It was a vital part of the “record of the criminality of all recidivists” because it meant that the information contained within was accessible and reliable.110 When the police required vital information about an unknown suspect’s residence, associations and habits, a way into the multitude of records that stored this information was found at the provision of a fingerprint.

Of course, the use of fingerprints for identification and indexing would increase the bureaucratic workload of the police. In 1904 the fingerprint record totalled around 91, 000 identity cards, and had exhibited an increase of more than 11, 000 slips in the year. 111 However, fingerprints were useful for ensuring the size of the police archive was kept within manageable parameters. One of the primary strengths of Henry’s indexing system was that it allowed the police to gauge with relative precision the extent of the criminal class who they believed required surveillance, and those who no longer fell into this category.112 Whilst the number of successful cases of identification by fingerprinting was impressive at around 1, 700 habitual criminals being discovered each year, throughout the year superintendents compiled much longer lists of people who should be eliminated from the record; “chiefly those of convicts with only a single conviction” and who were not sufficiently threatening to require police surveillance.113 Fingerprinting was useful because it brought to light cases where past offences had faded into insignificance over time, and enabled the police to eliminate certain individuals from the “very crowded” record. 114 This was useful to a police who were concerned to reduce the record of convicts, ex-convicts and suspicious characters, in order to

109 Ibid, 33. 110 Ibid, 33. 111 C.J. Stevenson-Moore, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1904, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1905, 36. 112 Ibid, 36. 113 Ibid, 36. 114 Ibid, 36.

99 make the task of surveillance more manageable, targeted and efficient. Surveillance was not an arbitrary deployment of police resources; it was aimed at reducing the necessity of a totally policed countryside, by ensuring that the most threatening criminal classes were prevented from continuing supposed lifetime criminality. Whilst the discretionary powers of the police permitted them to classify anybody as a surveillè, the police sought to keep within a manageable boundary those who fell within their watch. Rather than capriciously watching all suspects, strangers or released convicts, the police looked for sound justifications for classifying a person as requiring surveillance. Systems of classification and identification were designed and utilised with the view to ensuring that the task of physical surveillance was manageable, strategic and targeted.

It was during the course of the nineteenth century that the threat of habitual criminality became viewed as controllable through preventive police surveillance and which saw the creation of a supporting information archive. With the belief that they could prevent repeat offences, the police sought to expand their capacity to know and locate Bengal’s criminal classes. This can be seen through the development of instrumentalities that enabled the collection, collation and classification of information that was viewed as relevant to the surveillance project. The centrality of written information to everyday policing reflected the contingencies of policing Bengal by a small minority. Surveillance policing relied on stores of information, police forms, systems of classification and access, because these modalities were believed to render the police surveillance targeted, responsive and efficient. One of the most tangible effects of the introduction of such technology would have on police work was to transform attitudes to written information from something that should be minimised as far as possible, to an essential tool in the prevention of habitual criminality and the conduct of professional police work. This process was well underway in 1884 when J. Lambert, commissioner of police, commented,

no one who has not been for a long time in this appointment can possibly know what a complete change has taken place during the last ten years in the character of work done. In 1872 police diaries were never required from investigating officers; no serious attempt was made to register previous convictions; no complete registers were prepared of convicted offenders. Correspondence of all kinds, even that connected with crime, was kept down as much as possible, and interchange of communication with police authorities was extremely rare.115 Lambert’s reflection revealed the rising utility of written information as underpinning the capacity of the police to surveil and prevent habitual criminality. Indeed, by the first years of

115 Letter no. 3600 from J. Lambert, Commissioner of Police, to the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal, 21 July 1884, 19. IOR/P/2810.

100 the twentieth century it was widely believed that the “basis of the whole fabric of police work [was] information - of the occurrence of crime, of facts throwing suspicion on criminals, and on the movements of surveillès”.116 With systems in place to collect, analyse, transform and deploy police knowledge, surveillance contributed greatly to the bureaucratisation of the character of police work in colonial Bengal.

116 C.J. Stevenson-Moore, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, ‘Resolution of the Inspector-General for 1910’, in L.F. Morshead, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces 1910, 40.

101

Figure 2 no. 257. Cir. No. 3, 21 April 1892 ‘Register – Persons Under Surveillance, P.C. Form no. 257’ in The Bengal Police Code, 395.

102

Figure 3: Anthropometrical measurement; Measuring left middle finger. E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 325.

103

Figure 4: Anthropometrical measurement; measuring length of head. E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 323.

104

Figure 5: Anthropometrical measurement; measuring instruments. E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 311.

105

Figure 6: Fingerprints classified as ‘L’ (Loops) and ‘W’ (Whorls). E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, Appendix plate 2.

106

Figure 7: Grid for assigning fingerprints a place in the pigeonhole system of storing classified records. E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, appendix plate 3.

107 (6) The Collectors and Inspectors of Surveillance Knowledge

The bureaucratisation of surveillance, the fact that preventative surveillance was predicated on the ability to collect and analyse criminal information, helped to define specific roles played by official and non-official police agents, and to demarcate a unique relationship between the regular police and the village police. Targeted surveillance, involving the analysis of collected information, and the deployment of police agents to not merely conduct surveillance according to the patterns discerned after analysis, but to collect information for analysis, required the separation of police personnel into mutually reinforcing categories. Some were required to collect information and conduct surveillance, and others to analyse and circulate police intelligence, and to direct and supervise the surveillance project. Unsurprisingly, the everyday tasks of the executive or superior ranks of the regular police (those at or above the level of station officer) involved a large written and analytical component, because their status in the police hierarchy posited them as the supervisory and professional elite. A concurrent function of information collection was by extension assigned to the village police who were required to furnish information to the regular police about the comings and goings, locale, habits and antecedents of surveillès. Local village watchmen and headmen were co-opted because they were seemingly less objectionable to an Indian populace apparently disinclined to cooperate with a regular police, and they knew the country better than the British believed they could themselves. Divided in this way, the regular police and the village police operated according to a relationship of information exchange and supervision. The village police agents were co- opted to watch bad characters and to supply information that was in turn used by the superior ranks of the police to make decisions about who required surveillance. The present chapter delineates the legislative and official police enactments and ongoing local projects that produced a vertically divided hierarchy of personnel, which operated within a single system of information exchange for surveillance. By the twentieth century a professional elite of information specialists had emerged as a result of the importance of information-based surveillance. However, the fact that information was considered as the “fabric of everyday police work” meant the regular police relied upon local agents to collect and report criminal information.1

Information-based surveillance defined the role of the village police in crime prevention, and consolidated its relationship with the regular police in Bengal. They became the collectors of

1 C.J. Stevenson-Moore, Report of Lower Provinces 1910, 40.

108 surveillance knowledge, and were used as a means to access vital criminal information from the village. This was possible because after 1870, Bengal’s stipendiary village police agencies had been drawn under the indirect control of the regular police as per ‘The Village Chaukidar Act (VI of 1870)’. In its various modifications, the Chaukidar Act remained the principal enactment to control, pay and supervise the village police in British ruled Bengal.2 Briefly, the drafting and passing of the Chaukidar Act occurred in the aftermath of the introduction of the Police Act (V of 1861) in Bengal. One of the first areas of police administration that had to be worked out was the specific relationship between the new police and a variety of stipendiary village police forces that existed throughout Bengal. Act V had stipulated that a minimally staffed new police was reliant upon the assistance of the village police to conduct the duties associated with the watch and ward of the village. While it stated that the village police would be required to obey the orders of the regular police, as noted in Chapter Three, the two agencies would remain administratively separate, so as to protect the idea of municipal self- determination in the village. This was the basic premise underpinning the relationship between the two agencies. However, Act V did not define exactly what this meant for the daily policing tasks of each agency, nor did it provide details of how the regular police could utilise the village police. Act V was aimed merely at providing a framework for the introduction of a new police across India, as there were problems and considerations specific to the policing of each province that could not be resolved within one piece of legislation. 3 One of the most immediate questions the Bengal government was faced with was the problem of defining how the regular police would utilise existing village police agencies, and how they could be reformed and made more efficient.

The first steps to reform and make use of the village police were made in October 1864, when Charles Hobhouse, Member of the Bengal Legislative Council, submitted a report on the reorganisation of the village police in Bengal, together with a draft bill for their reform.4 First and foremost, he argued, the village police existed throughout Bengal in a state of utter inefficiency. The operation of the village police was “radically bad” due to the inconsistent manner they were appointed, the insufficiency and irregularity of their remuneration and the corruptive influence of zamindars, who were argued to connive with chaukidars in the

2 For full copy of Act VI see Henry Wheeler, A Chaukidari Manual, with the Village Chaukidari Act, Bengal Act VI of 1870 and the Bengal Village Chaukidari Act I of 1871; as modified up to 1 May 1907, Calcutta: Government of Bengal, 1908, 81. 3 P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, xliii. 4 R.W. Carlyle, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, ‘Note on the Rural Police in Bengal: A brief history of the village system with information as to the nature and success of any attempts which have been made to improve it’, serial 28, 1905, 3, IOR/ORB 40/278.

109 concealment and commitment of criminal offences. 5 Appointments were unsystematic, sometimes made by the villagers themselves, at times by their landlords, or by a resident magistrate. There was no uniformity or regularity in the payment of chaukidars, and those that were maintained by land tenure contributed little in the way of crime control, for the simple fact that they considered their policing duties to be of minor importance. A confused chain of command, and the fact that there was little monetary incentive to perform their policing duties entailed that many chaukidars “must live… by being the participator in or the conniver at the offences it is his duty to prevent or discover and disclose”.6 The sum of this was that no matter where one looked, the state of the village police was entirely unsatisfactory.

This was problematic because the “village policeman” was widely regarded by the police and government as “essential and invaluable” to the task of securing public orderliness.7 It had long been argued that as an “inhabitant of the village that he has to watch over”, the village police officer possessed a “knowledge of the people and affairs that a regular policeman can never acquire”. 8 In order to bring the village police up to a standard of efficiency and usefulness Hobhouse introduced a proposal for their reform. He proposed a reinvestment of police control over the village watch – the maintenance of the village watch would be raised from landholders, merchants and villagers, yet their “allegiance to the regular police” would be secured by drawing them into an official police hierarchy.9 This proposal generated “a good deal of hostile criticism” within the Legislative Council when it was circulated for opinion, principally because it undermined the central tenets of Act V, which had established a separation of the village and regular police.10 The Council evidently shared the generally held the idea that the cause of the inefficiency of the village police was that darogah control had destroyed their status as municipal and village servants, associating them too closely with British power and repression. In response to such criticism, yet recognising that the question of chaukidar reform remained unresolved, the Government of Bengal appointed D.J. McNeile as ‘Magistrate on special duty’ to submit a full report on the history and current organisation of the rural police in Bengal.11

5 Ibid, 3. 6 Charles Hobhouse, quoted in R.W. Carlyle, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, ‘Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 3. 7 Ibid, 4. 8 ‘Report of the Village Police in India, 1860’, from the Police Commission, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, in P. Hari Rao, The Indian Police Act, 135. 9 Ibid, 4. 10 R.W. Carlyle, ‘Note on the Rural Police in Bengal’, 4. 11 Ibid, 4.

110 McNeile’s ‘Report of the Village Watch’ was subsequently presented in 1866, becoming a key text about the village police, which continued to inform administrative decision-making on the village police over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 Seeking to delineate the origins and working of Bengal’s variety of village policing establishments, McNeile introduced a story of the demise and almost total disappearance of a once useful municipal institution of social control; the village police. The current state of disorganisation that characterised the rural police was the sum total of this story. It vaguely began in “ancient times” of the “Hindustan Empire”, prior to an age of “Mahomedan religion, Mahomedan laws and Mahomedan oppression”, which preceded the establishment of British political power in the mid-eighteenth century.13 Part of a “Hindustan village system” of governance was a village police, comprised by an officer maintained by the village community “in which he lived”.14 Their duty was to “guard the persons and property of his fellow villagers from the depredations of dacoits, burglars and thieves” in lieu of an assignment of land, “made over to him free of rent in money or in kind” by the village headman. 15 The village constituted a corporate municipal authority in charge of a watchman, who performed services that were of “a public, not a private character”.16 The nature of the arrangement was described as a public agreement between the police and a group of people comprising a village; he was a municipal servant, loyal to village that maintained him.

This municipal authority was arguably corrupted however, by the accession of Mughal power in the sixteenth century. A “vital change” occurred because zamindars had been appointed by the state as revenue collectors or “tributary chiefs”, whose secondary duty it was to conduct civil and criminal administration within their estates. Akbar the Great’s infamous conquests were highlighted as the moment when “the village communities lost their municipal character” and consequently, when the village police were merged with a new system of revenue collection and social control.17 Yet, until the last years of the Mughal empire, the village police continued to function in a similar capacity as they had done under previous rulers, the only difference being that they were maintained by tenures directly provided by the central government. It was not until the final years of Mughal rule, as the control of the government was weakening and the local power of zamindars was strengthening, that chaukidars

12 D.J. McNeile, Report on the Village Watch of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1866, 4. 13 Ibid, 4. 14 Ibid, 4. 15 Ibid, 4. 16 Ibid, 5. 17 Ibid, 6.

111 supposedly lost their allegiance to the village.18 Whilst in times of peace a Mughal system of central control had maintained a social equilibrium, McNeile argued that as zamindari power grew in the last years of the empire, landholders exerted their authority over the village police for dishonest purposes. Indeed, “the zamindars and their subordinates were soon found to be themselves the perpetrators or abettors of half the crime in the country”.19 This was redolent of the eighteenth century argument that the transferral of police power from landholders into the hands of the Company in 1793 was necessary in the context of a breakdown of Mughal systems of control that occurred due to zamindari corruption.20 McNeile, however, extrapolated this notion to demonstrate that the breakdown of a Mughal system of control destroyed any semblance of village allegiance that might have been retained by the village police in spite of the centralising policies of the Mughals. The ‘corrupted’ system of rural policing that the British inherited under the terms of Regulation XXII, 1793, when a variety of zamindari servants were transferred to the control of the Company thus bore none of the municipal qualities of the village system of “ancient Hindustan”.21

A once useful municipal institution had been undermined first of all by the rise of zamindari power in the context of a crumbling empire, yet, secondly and more decisively, by the failures of Cornwallis’ police regulations to re-constitute the village watch as loyal municipal servants. Part of the rationale behind Cornwallis’ police reform was to demilitarise a landholding elite and to remove their influence over the legitimate means of coercion in rural Bengal. 22 Cornwallis sought to vest this control “in the hands of stipendiary officers of Government” who were arguably “free from all those passions and feelings” that had corrupted the loyalties of the village police.23 Whilst outwardly Cornwallis’ police regulations could not pretend to restore the principle of local control because it established central control over the village police through the introduction of police darogahs, it was intended that their ‘ancient constitution’ could be re-created if zamindari control was eliminated. Moreover, the duties of a stipendiary

18 Ibid, 6. 19 Ibid, 12. 20 As discussed by Basudev Chatterji in ‘The Darogah and the Countryside’, the British would view a rapidly deteriorating law and order situation as the result of the corruptive influences of the zamindars, which justified removing further powers from Bengal’s landholding elite. In actual fact, the Permanent Settlement, in forcing the disbanding of local police forces and increasing the revenue demands that were placed on the zamindars encouraged banditry and crime among both disaffected and disenfranchised zamindars, and the disbanded village police forces. 21 D.J. McNeile, Report on the Village Watch, 12. 22 Basudeb Chattopadhyay, Crime Control in Early Colonial Bengal, 33. 23 ‘Minutes of Evidence of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1832’, 22 Feb 1827, serial 29, 257. 40/278.

112 village police were based on an understanding of their role in an ‘ancient’ village system.24 The first regulation passed, XXII of 1793, was aimed at affirming the ‘traditional’ role of the village watch as local agents for the watch and ward of the village, by removing zamindari control over the village watch. 25 However, as McNeile would argue, subsequent reforms undermined Company policy to restore an efficient system of village policing, which ultimately destroyed the municipal character of the village police.

Crucially, McNeile argued, the government had hesitated on a policy of total exoneration of the landholders from their police responsibilities. Aware that “its hold upon the country was far too uncertain and ill-defined” to manage the policing of the countryside without the cooperation of the zamindars, yet “dar[ing] not to openly entrust the landholders with Police authority”, Cornwallis had endeavoured to balance the power of the zamindars against the usefulness of their assistance.26 Despite the fact that many disenfranchised and impoverished zamindars were increasingly resentful towards and alienated from the Company, Cornwallis had argued for the continued usefulness of the role of zamindars. As stated in 1792, to “exonerate the zamindars from all responsibility would be improper”.27 The traditions of their tenure were seen as being apt to convert

to the most beneficial purposes in aid of an established police, by limiting the operation of it to cases in which they may be proved to have connived at robberies, harboured robbers, aided their escape, received any part of the property stolen, or omitted to give effectual aid to the officers of Government (the darogahs) in the apprehension of offenders.28 It was expected that despite being forced to disband their own bands of militia, or cede control of village police establishments, the zamindars would be convivial to the demands of the colonial authority. The expectation was that as landholders and citizens they would continue to cooperate with the village police in the prevention and detection of rural disorder, despite the fact that they no longer held control over them. Sanads, documents that outlined the terms of a

24 It has since been noted by historians of Bengal’s police, that the idea of ‘ancient’ policing methods discussed by the likes of McNeile and Halliday was not reflective of any insight into the ancient modes of policing in rural areas. Most discussions of the ‘traditions’ of rural policing were based on an understanding of medieval policing structures, whereby headmen had responsibility for the crime committed in the village. Even so, such agencies were not uniformly evident across Bengal, and local variations existed. In any case, the use of the word ‘ancient’ indicates a reverence for pre-Mughal policing methods, whereby the police were controlled, and argued to have been corrupted by zamindari influences. See for more information Anandswarup Gupta, Crime and Police in India, xvi. 25 Regulation XXII, 1793, in Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 1 26 ‘Minute by Lord Cornwallis, The Governor-General’, 7 December 1792’, in S. Srinivasasara Aiyangar, ‘Confidential note on the question of the liability of the zamindars ’, 2. IOR/ORB 40/278. 27 Ibid, 2. 28 Ibid, 2.

113 grant of land was made to a zamindar, often stipulated that landholders must ensure that no thieves, robbers of disorderly person remain in his boundaries and that any stolen property must be returned to the owner. As such, sanads outlined the police duties that were still to be performed by the zamindars by inserting the clause:

I will take proper care of the high roads within my boundaries, see that the travellers journey in perfect safety. I will not shelter thieves or robbers within the boundary of my holding, and if the property of any person be stolen or plundered I will seek out the thieves and robbers and the stolen property and hand over the property to the owners of the offenders to the Court officer.29 This was a paradoxical reiteration of the Mughal principle that the responsibility for the occurrence of crime laid within the estates of each landholder. Under the new regulations, whilst the zamindar was no longer required to apprehend the offender, he was now required to furnish the Magistrate with information regarding criminal occurrences within his estate, either through the village watch or the darogahs.

The role of the zamindars within a new arrangement of rural control would become increasingly blurred in the early years of the nineteenth century. The sudden implementation of a system within which police duties were entrusted to a new class of government officers under the supervision of European magistrates did not work well in remote tracts of country, and it was found necessary to utilise the agency of the zamindars for police purposes.30 Subsequent regulations were passed in order to establish or revert to a kind of zamindari police who would, it was intended, work alongside the official police superstructure. Regulation XVII of 1805, for example, which was extended in the littoral Jungle Mahāls31 highlighted a paradoxical reversion to Mughal systems of police administration.32 The stipulation of this regulation was that zamindars were to exercise a local charge of the police either jointly with police darogahs appointed in 1793 or instead of such police officers. In 1807 a similar regulation was extended throughout Lower Bengal33 that enabled the government to utilise the services of “respectable Mussalman and Hindu inhabitants” in the task of preventing crime and apprehending

29 Lord Cornwallis, ‘Zamindari Settlement of Bengal’, 7 Dec 1792, Serial 31, 1905, 261. ORB 40/278. 30 S. Srinivasasara Aiyangar, ‘Confidential note on the question of the liability of the zamindars’, 3. 31 The Jungle Mahāls was an area consisting of British possessions and semi-independent chiefdoms lying in between the regular districts of Bīrbhūm, Burdwān, and Bānkurā that in 1805 became a distinctly defined district, only to be abolished in 1833 and the territory distributed among the adjoining districts. See for more information Imperial Gazetteer of India, 253. 32 Ibid, 3. 33 Lower Bengal was a precise geographic designation for the largest and most populous province in India. It included four large sub-provinces – Bengal proper, Bihār, Chotā Nāgpur, and Orissa. Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1.

114 offenders.34 These ‘respectable natives’, drawn particularly from the zamindari classes, were to be appointed as amins of the police with concurrent authority to the darogahs, charged with the control and supervision of village police officers. However, such regulations were not envisioned as devolution of British power of the police back into the hands of landholders. They were aimed at the establishment a kind of dual authority in rural policing structures, to establish a co-operative relationship with landholders, by giving them nominal authority in police matters. It was still stipulated that all information from the countryside, whether reported directly by the village watch, or by ‘respectable’ village amins, was to reported to the darogahs to be collected in the thanās of each district. This was intended to establish and protect the relations that ought to exist between the regular police and a village police, under nominal control of zamindars, in conjointly preventing crimes and detecting and bringing to punishment criminals.35 It envisioned zamindars as part of the village system, in which they would cooperate in the task of securing colonial order.

McNeile’s interpretation of this arrangement, however, was that the vacillating position that the Company had taken on the issue of chaukidari control had served to weaken rather than restore village loyalty or cooperation. Principally, it had contributed to a “dual character” exhibited by many (though not all) village policemen. 36 A body of public officers, established by Regulation XXII might have been modelled on notions of ‘ancient’ municipal authority, yet a “large number of them [were] also dependent by law upon the landholders as their private servants”. Thus, any pretence of a municipal system was “mythical”.37 Despite the fact that some village police officers, for example those not in occupation of service tenures, were supported by a tax paid by their fellow villagers, many were liable “for a double service” to both the village and the controlling zamindars, which countered any notion of village loyalty.38 The broad conclusion drawn by McNeile about the wavering stance of Company policy on the question of chaukidari control was that a protracted and complicated series of Company regulations entailed that the village police currently existed as an establishment that was subjected to local influences of the zamindars, possessed “inveterate bad habits” and which existed in a remarkably “complicated position” across Bengal.39 His summary was that the

34 Ibid, 3. 35 ‘Minute of Lord Hastings, dated 2 October, 1815’, quoted in F.J. Halliday, ‘Minute by the Honourable the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal’, 146. 36 D.J. McNeile, Report on the Village Watch, 23. 37 Ibid, 23. 38 Ibid, 23. 39 Ibid, 23.

115 Company had undermined the village loyalties of what was now only axiomatically an ancient municipal institution.

McNeile’s recommendation for reform was thus to abandon any project to reconfirm or restore their municipal character.40 He argued for their abolition because presently the village police occupied an anomalous and complicated position, whereby it was subjected to the local influences of the zamindars and yet supposedly bound to the village. The scheme that was recommended was their replacement with an organised subordinate constabulary, who similarly would reside within the village that they were employed, in an effort to balance “executive strength against local knowledge”.41 McNeile acknowledged that the “local knowledge” of the village police was invaluable, and that a regular constabulary were “not qualified either by their numbers or constitution to acquire such knowledge”.42 Yet, by “garrisoning the countryside” with a subordinate constabulary who were effectively a village police, yet singly loyal to the regular police, a more effective policing of Bengal could proceed. 43 Essentially, McNeile argued for the total abolition of an irreparable village police, and their replacement with “an organised constabulary, all its members being residents of the circles of villages within which they are employed”.44 The reform of the village police, he argued, would “be found in a system of full and effectual supervision”, of unwavering authority invested into the hands of the regular police.45

McNeile’s report was influential in an ongoing dialogue about securing colonial order through the exercise of indirect police power, despite the fact that his plan argued for the opposite of this. Indeed, the plan proposed by McNeile was met by strong opposition among police and judicial elites, and was ultimately rejected by the Legislative Council.46 This was due to the almost universality of the argument that a British controlled regular police would fail to solicit the co-operation of the people, which would render useless any attempts to utilise the village police as a link between the regular police and the people. However, the significance of McNeile’s report was that it seemed to strengthen an inherited administrative preference for indirect rule, by sketching a practical application of this abstraction in the village. In particular, he popularised the notion of the lost ‘municipal’ character of ‘ancient’ establishments of the

40 Ibid, 64. 41 Ibid, 64. 42 Ibid, 64. 43 Ibid, 64. 44 Ibid, 64. 45 Ibid, 64. 46 Rivers Thompson, quoted in R.W. Carlyle, Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 5.

116 village police, by detailing exactly what had characterised a successful village watch and why the Company had (arguably) destroyed it. By emphasising that the utility of the village police had been destroyed by the police regulations made at the time of the Permanent Settlement, the report inadvertently bolstered support for the notion of indirect police power, and for their reconstitution as a separate municipal institution, rather than their removal.

In particular his notion of a lost ‘municipal character’ of ‘ancient’ establishments of the village police would inform the shape of the Chaukidari Act (Act VI of 1871), which legalised the division between a regular and village police that Act V had recommended. 47 In 1869 a committee was appointed to draft a bill for the control of the village watch on the principle of affirming the “municipal character” of the rural police.48 The bill submitted to the Legislative Council on 22 January 1870 by Committee member Sir Rivers Thompson was much more favourable to Council, police and government, because it recognised that the village chaukidar was once “purely a village servant, employed for the protection of the lives and property of the villagers” and provided the means to re-engage them as such.49 This would ensure, or as it was argued, that a village police was congruent with the nature of a populace who were argued to favour prescription and custom over ‘occidental’ forms of police power. The bill, becoming Act VI of 1870, thus codified the idea of indirect policing that had become refracted through McNeile’s notion of municipal authority. McNeile’s plans for a government paid village constabulary were shelved, yet the bulk of his research was used to frame the legal basis for the interaction of a regular police with the village police. As such, the general control of stipendiary chaukidars was invested in an authority that was neither tied directly to the central government, nor to a landholding elite. Instead, the village police was placed under direct control of a village panchayat or council, comprised of so-called respectable householders drawn from the village in which the chaukidars resided. So the argument went, if the chaukidari appeared a remote and non-invasive version of police power, the villagers would be more inclined to report information to and assist them, and a respectable panchayat would ensure the overall functionality of the system.50 A redefined version of indirect control was codified in Act VI, which provided an independent and non-official village police agency to

47 See the Chaukidar Act VI, B.C., of 1870, as amended by Acts I, B.C., of 1871, 1886, and 1892, in G. Toynbee, A Chaukidari Manual, with rules, notes, government orders, and inspection notes, Calcutta: Thackers, Spint and Company, 1896. 48 R.W. Carlyle, Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 5. 49 Rivers Thompson, quoted in R.W. Carlyle, Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 5. 50 Ibid, 6.

117 operate free from the interference of “meddling Peelers”. 51 The passing of Act VI thus provided the new police with access to an agency comprised of people who, thanks largely to McNeile’s report, they viewed as fundamental to village policing.

Indeed, after 1870, those who designed the primary policing infrastructure confirmed this role by utilising the village police as the information collectors for an expanding surveillance function required. The Chaukidari Act had stressed that a duty of the village police was to supply criminal information about the movements and whereabouts of bad characters, absconded ex-convicts or suspicious characters, and the occurrence of village crimes to the regular police. 52 Their separateness from the regular police would protect a veneer of autonomy in the village to encourage the co-operation of villagers, however they would function as a conduit of village information for the regular police. As preventative surveillance became reliant upon information, the duty of Bengal’s stipendiary chaukidars to collect and deliver criminal information was solidified. As noted in the previous chapter, crime maps, station and district habitual criminal registers, and systems for criminal classification, were compilations of information that had been collected and reported by the village police. It was the role of the village police to provide information about “ex-convict[s] and notorious burglar[s]”, and of the station officers to classify them as “m[e]n upon whose movements it was desirable to exercise further surveillance”.53

Ramsay’s memoirs detail a selection of cases that reveal the use of the village police for information collection, which in other police sources are obscured by more general remarks about the chaukidar role in collecting “village information about the movements of surveillès”.54 The interplay between the village and regular policing bodies in Patna is brought to light in a case involving the surveillance conducted over a released prisoner, Sequmber Gwallah, who upon release had been classified by Ramsay as a suspected habitual criminal. This classification meant that upon release in 1879, it became a matter of “ordinary routine” for the village police to supply regular information about the suspect.55 Shortly after his release the officer in charge of the station nearest to his home village (station A56) was informed of the criminal classification, and was ordered to have the village police collect information about his

51 Letter No. 1693G from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, Esq., Magistrate of Jessore to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division, 17 September 1891, 518. IOR/P/4105; R.W. Carlyle, Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 5. 52 Chaukidari Act (VI of 1870), section 21. 53 Letter No. 1693G from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, 17 September 1891, 518. 54 Ibid, 5. 55 H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 44. 56 Ramsay’s recollections do not name specific villages or stations, nor do they utilise police names, therefore substitutions have been made.

118 familial associations, past criminal endeavours, and his antecedents, which entered into the surveillance register kept at the station. Facts about his birthplace and village of residence prior to and after imprisonment were similarly recorded from information supplied by the village police for “future reference”.57 Based on this information, regular surveillance was exercised over the suspect. However, within a month of release, the suspect was reported as missing from the village. Supposing that he had disappeared to his ‘paternal home’, the station police contacted the thannadar that the suspect’s home village was part of. The chaukidars of that station (station B) were therefore provided with the information that the station police at station A had recorded in the surveillance register, so they were able to watch for the suspect.58 Seemingly, Ghallah had escaped police invigilation. Nothing more was seen or heard of him for some months, despite the efforts of the police to trace his movements across the countryside. A later investigation, however, would provide the police with clues that led them to his whereabouts. Some months after the village police had been ordered to keep track of Ghallah, the station police of his “home” village (station B) requested the assistance of station A to aid in the capture of an absconding criminal, named Gujadhur Gwallah, who had been charged with burglary. The 433 village police officers who worked within the thanā were informed that their efforts were to turn to discovering the absconding suspect. The descriptions that the officer in charge of station B had provided had apparently alerted the police to the possibility that Gujadhur was an alias of Sequmber. Indeed, upon capture and delivery to the police at the station (B) for identification, the stranger admitted to have falsified his first name. Gujadhur alias Sequmber, son of Beharee Gwallah, was promptly arrested and eventually convicted as a repeat offender under section 75 of the Indian Penal Code. 59 The careful vigilance of the village police and the value of their collected information that had been diligently kept up in registers by the station police were applauded for preventing Gwallah from “pursuing his nefarious career”.60 The particular relevance of the case demonstrates how the police utilised the information supplied by the chaukidari to keep track of people who they suspected of habitual or in this case professional criminality. Indeed, lauding his own use of the village police for such purposes, Ramsay would conclude his memoirs with the summary that

57 Ibid, 44. 58 Ibid, 44. 59 Ibid, 44. 60 Ibid, 44.

119 my village Police have gotten so smart, that an impostor posing as a respectable traveller has not a chance of passing through a village without incurring the risk of having his movements recorded at the police station.61 The role of chaukidari information in collecting surveillance knowledge was formalised by the development of a uniform way to collect it during the 1880s. In 1886 “arrangements for questioning and eliciting information from chaukidars [had] been systematised” with the introduction of the chaukidar muster parade at all district police stations in Bengal.62 Daily chaukidar parades proceeded as follows. Each village police agent within a district was required to attend a muster three times a month, which would be supervised by the officer in charge of the station.63 Most station circles, divided by groups of villages, had approximately 400 village police under its control. Each chaukidar was given a number according to the group of villages they patrolled. For example, group 1, might have 40 watchmen, and each were assigned a number from 1 to 40 (see Fig. 8).64 Those with odd numbers were required to attend parade on the 1st, 11th, and 21st day of each month, and those evenly numbered on the 2nd, 12th and 22nd.65 Each parade was attended by a maximum of 50 village police, who were individually allocated a mustering position so that when lined up into rows of ten men in “native fashion” according to their number, absentees were readily discernible and could be recorded (see Fig. 9).66 The muster eliminated the need for a roll call because each chaukidar was to stand in the same position at every parade; identities were irrelevant as “the eye at once detected any hiatus in what should have been an unbroken line of ten men”.67 Failure to attend was recorded by the station officer so that the police magistrate could issue fines for tardiness or non-attendance. The importance of the parade was that it formalised the means to collect important information about criminal matters by introducing a kind of non-official supervisory power in the hands of the station officers, in place of inefficient panchayets.68 By the 1890s the parade was utilised generally throughout Bengal, solidifying the village police as a primary means to collect information for the compilation of surveillance records.69 At this time, the

61 Ibid, 144. 62 E.R. Henry, Report of the Lower Provinces of Bengal 1891, 3. 63 Police Circular No. 2, 1887, ‘Chapter III: Review of the Village Police’, Report of the Committee appointed by Government to consider the Reform of the Police of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1891, 31. 64 Henry Wheeler, A Chaukidari Manual, 81. 65 Ibid, 81. 66 H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 26. 67 Ibid, 26. 68 Further information about the inadequacy of the village panchayat as supervisory agents is provided in the following chapter. 69 Police Circular No. 2, 1886, ‘Chapter III: Review of the Village Police’, 31.

120 parades were reported to have become an “important branch of police work” because they enabled the police “weed out information about disreputable men” from the chaukidars.70

Figure 8: Plan of parade ground for 86 chaukidars (fourth and fifth rows not pictured). H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 26.

The conduct of surveillance according to carefully classified village information would moreover shape an important role for Bengal’s superior police, one that defined them as crime analysts. Just as the introduction of the chaukidari parade had influenced the type of work conducted by the village police, it had fostered an important role for station officers as crime analysts and information collators. Station officers were to oversee the conduct of interviews between the police and the chaukidars, which were supposed to ensure the information that was relevant to the current concerns of the station police was carefully recorded. Each chaukidar was separately cross-questioned by three different writer constables or police clerks present in the station, who would report their findings to the officer in charge of the station at the end of each parade.71 It was the duty of the officer in charge of the station to sign off on every entry, and from the information recorded, to transfer only the most salient points into the stations registers which were forwarded to the district superintendent for classification in the district’s surveillance register.72 After 1911 it became the duty of the officer in charge of the station to provide a copy of the surveillance register to literate village headmen, so that they knew which

70 E.R. Henry, Report of the Lower Provinces of Bengal 1891, 3. Further relevance of the parade as a means to access chaukidari information is demonstrated in Chapter Seven, within a discussion about police outrage at their abolition during the first years of the twentieth century. 71 Cir. No. 3, in The Bengal Police Code, 395. 72 Ibid, 395.

121 individuals were under surveillance, and about whom information was required. 73 Subsequently, the village headman was required to inform the officer in charge of the station of the “departure of any bad character whose name [was] entered into the surveillance register, and his alleged destination”.74 Evidently, the basis of police surveillance had become the collection of information at the station from the village police, which meant the analysis of criminal information received from the village comprised a central duty of the station officer, requiring them to record and circulate relevant police knowledge to the village police or headmen and to his superior, the district superintendent. 75 This was aimed at achieving concurrent awareness between official and non-official agencies about the bad characters under surveillance, and about whom further information was to be collected.76

This interplay between the regular and village police was evident in the conduct of formal surveillance enquiries. According to classifications made by the district superintendent, the officer in charge of the station deputed the village police to “look up on the worst characters in the middle of the night”, and to follow them to the places they most frequently visited, “on the good grounds that he would at least meet their associates in crime”.77 The aim was not “the unnecessary harassment or annoyance of the criminal classes”, but the “establishment of an effective supervision of their movements” according to properly classified police knowledge.78 After an enquiry was made, the station officer compiled a ‘Domiciliary Visit’ report (see Fig. 10). 79 It recorded the whereabouts of each surveillè, and from 1894 required a thumb impression to prove their presence and confirm their identity.80 The domiciliary visit form would also detail any relevant information discovered which might be useful to future policing enquiries. If the surveillè was not at home, for example, his relatives or neighbours were questioned as to his whereabouts, and if the police were successful in locating him at the attested destination, respectable villagers there were required to vouch that he had honourable

73 Notification no. 9484 by J.H. Kerr, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal to all District Superintendents of Police, 22 July 1911, 9. IOR/P/9891. 74 Ibid, 9. 75 As was shown in the preceding chapter, the role of the district superintendent was informally one of ‘scientific’ classification of criminal information that was received by them from station officers, constables or directly from village agents. In the 1890s, this role was formalised by the creation of the ‘Surveillance Register’, which required them to classify information received by station officers and to decide upon the frequency of surveillance to be conducted by the village watch and constabulary, and by their role in the maintenance of crime maps. Such procedures meant that superintendents had an analytical and increasingly professional or expert role to play in the surveillance project by the end of the nineteenth century. 76 Ibid, 9. 77 Cir. No. 3, in The Bengal Police Code, 395. 78 Ibid, 395. 79 The Bengal Police Code, containing the Rules and Regulations of the Bengal Police, Lower Provinces, vol. 2, Bengal Secretariat Press: Calcutta, 1897, 389. 80 Ibid, 389.

122 reasons for his presence.81 This information was filed as witness testimony in the domiciliary visit form, and was supposed to inform decisions about how surveillance would be carried out on the next enquiry, if at all. The physical and written components of the enquiry process were designed to ensure the surveillance function was in a constant state of reformulation and review, which involved both collectors, and analysts of criminal information.

The relationship between those who conducted the physical component of surveillance, and those who recorded, classified and analysed the information provided by the former, was most visible as records keeping for the province became increasingly centralised. As paperwork increased, comprehensive indexing systems were required to provide access to police information, requiring trained experts to conduct this task out of speciality bureaux that operated from centrally located archives in Calcutta. The introduction of identification via fingerprint classification first of all would require the employment of specially trained officers working within the Central Office, whose daily tasks revolved around providing access to a central record of repeat offenders who had been classified by their fingerprints. Upon conviction of an individual, court sub-inspectors recorded the measurements (until 1900) and finger impressions of the convicted person, and forwarded it to the Central Office.82 Once received, they were classified by one officer, checked by another, and filed in their respective collections and groups.83 The system of classifying data was designed to eliminate inattention and haste, by requiring a secondary examiner to double-check each officer’s work. Moreover, the whole record was subjected to examination from time to time, to ensure incorrect classifications were detected. The systems in place to reduce the likelihood of error and to ensure classifications were accurate contributed to the idea that the “staff at the Central Office… by practise became experts” and were comprised only by “men possessing an aptitude for the work”.84 Overall, the reputation of the Central Office was an expert elite of police officers that increased exponentially as the fingerprint record grew.

Exponential growth of the record would, however, require the creation of the Fingerprint Bureau in 1904, a branch of the Criminal Investigation Department (C.I.D), to manage the burgeoning archive of criminal records.85 Whilst the Central Office had functioned with a high

81 Cir. no. 3, in The Bengal Police Code, 395. 82 E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 90. 83 Ibid, 90. 84 Ibid, 90. 85 India’s Criminal Investigation Department was established in 1904. Its establishment had been a key recommendation of the 1902-03 Indian Police Commission. In the wake of the nationalist disturbances that occurred from 1905, the C.I.D was focused primarily on gathering intelligence on nationalist organisations and

123 degree of success since its creation, the growth of the archive of fingerprint information saw the creation of a separate agency that dealt solely with fingerprint classification.86 After 1901, the thousands of records that were on file at the Fingerprint Bureau were handled by “expert officers” who dealt solely with the compilation of the record and who were trained in Henry’s method of classification so that they could provide access to the record at the request of the courts and police.87 They received ongoing training within the bureau, which contributed to the perception and reality that they were highly trained specialty officers. This professional image of the staff of the bureau was enhanced by their regular visits to the central and district jails to check and cross-reference the police registers and finger impressions of convicted criminals, which demonstrated the requirements of meticulousness and diligence that went along with the position.88

The Criminal Intelligence Bureau, established in 1911 as a further division of the C.I.D, would create another branch of ‘expert’ officers within the executive administration who were employed to manage an expanding archive of information. Like the Fingerprint Bureau, the C.I.B was designed to provide facilities for obtaining information regarding professional criminals. However, rather than providing access to fingerprint records, they dealt with the collection and collation of written materials – police gazette cuttings, history sheets, and miscellaneous reports and extracts from police files.89 Staff members were required to collect and collate such information into a central register, and to compile a list of notorious criminals who operated throughout the province, and not merely within a particular district or division. In its first year of operation, the staff of the newly created C.I.B were engaged with the filing and indexing “over 1, 500 gazette cuttings and 1, 700 history sheets” and had added over 10, 000 entries to a central register.90 The collation of the “large amount of information regarding habitual criminals” was supposed to aid in their surveillance by providing police with ready-to-

seditious threats to British governance. Prior to this, provincial police forces had maintained their own branches of intelligence gathering operating out of each Central Office of the Inspectors General. A separate Thagi and Dakaiti department that had been established as part of Colonel Sleeman’s infamous campaign against criminals tribes during the 1830s operated as a central intelligence gathering agency, which from the 1860s had worked with the provincial police agencies to gather intelligence on groups suspected of criminal tribes status. In 1904, the Thagi and Dakaiti department was subsumed into the C.I.D, because it made more administrative sense to operate one agency for intelligence gathering, especially considering the amount of paperwork that each agency were separately dealing with. See for more information Mark Brown, ‘Ethnology and Colonial Administration in Nineteenth Century British India’, 210 and Bengal Papers Relating to the Indian Police Commission, 15. ORB 40/278. 86 R.W. Carlyle, Report of Lower Provinces of Bengal 1901, 38. 87 L.F. Morshead, Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, Report on the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency 1911, Ranchi: Bihār and Orissa Government Press, 1912, 40. 88 Ibid, 40. 89 Ibid, 40. 90 Ibid, 7.

124 hand information about their habits, antecedents, and past crimes. It is likely that the C.I.B. created more administrative problems than they solved, as the only really effective indexing and classification method was one based on Henry’s fingerprint system. Moreover, the fact that communications in Bengal were still relatively slow, and that registered habituals escaped surveillance by disappearing across district and provincial borders with ease, efforts to utilise a centralised archive of police knowledge for surveillance can be assumed to be at times futile. Nonetheless, the working of the bureau demonstrates an increasing centralisation of information and an evolution of a highly professionalised executive police function as it narrowed into specialty areas of operation. A police almost obsessed by the notion that habitual criminality could be surveilled and controlled through the creation archives of information multiplied the written records of the police, expanded the necessity for speciality bureaux to manage them and required an increasingly professional and specialised group of police administrators to analyse, distribute and provide access to police information.

As systems for collection, classification and surveillance became more complex, authoritative and official, a clear professional divide emerged between those who physically surveilled and collected information about the criminal classes and those who analysed, classified, and produced from it official and useable instrumentalities. The requirement that information was to be assembled into registers and forms according to uniform procedure meant that, especially after the 1880s, surveillance was bound to officially sanctioned systems of classification, which assigned increasing authority to an inevitably professionalising police executive. The superior ranks of the police were specially trained to analyse, classify and index criminal information, to recognise criminal geographies, and to deploy available personnel accordingly. Their role as collators, archivists and crime analysts meant the work conducted by district superintendents, officers in charge of stations, and later the staff of speciality criminal intelligence bureaux was considered to be of an “exacting nature”.91 Surveillance was, however, still based on the collection of information from the village, conducted in particular by village agents whose everyday work was increasingly defined by their role as collectors, watchers and informants of surveillance knowledge. “Information” continued to be the “basis of the whole fabric of police work”, thus the police “depended on the village police” for information into the twentieth century.92 The constabulary, the police executive, and village police were thus connected in a system of corroboration and communication to surveil criminals, and to record, classify and

91 L.F. Morshead, Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency for 1909, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1910, 11. 92Ibid, 19.

125 review criminal information, in order to prevent crime and discover notorious criminals. It was the fact that village information was viewed as more easily obtained by village agents that stipendiary chaukidars were utilised to collect information for use in an expanding surveillance function. Surveillance thus forced the adjunct village police and the regular police into a relationship of information exchange and collaboration.

126

Figure 9: Register of attendance of Village Chaukidars and Notebook of Crime. The Bengal Police Code, containing the Rules and Regulations of the Bengal Police, Lower Provinces, vol. 1, Bengal Secretariat Press: Calcutta, 1897, 64.

127

Figure 10: Domiciliary Report Form, no. 258, The Bengal Police Code, 189.

128 (7) Internal Surveillance: A Dilemma of Supervision

The construction of split sites of police personnel that exchanged information for the conduct of surveillance initiated a struggle to control the means to know criminal Bengal. To acquire the information that the police were to increasingly design their policing techniques and technologies around, compliance of the village police and the panchayat in particular needed to be secured. Provisions for supervision had been inserted into Act VI and could be utilised, yet their failure presented the police executive and government with an administrative dilemma that was not fully resolved until 1913. British interactions with local village agents were supposedly defined by the notion of decentralised police power and predicated on a belief in a reduced presence of regular police officers in the village. Overt connections with British authority had long been considered to be antithetical to the central tenets of a village system. Yet an implicit mistrust of the Indian populace, and those that the British sought collaboration with; an enduring anxiety about the task of colonial rule; and the problems of non-compliance of the village police and panchayat which presented post-1870 necessitated a form of supervision more closely aligned to the centre. Two seemingly conflicting considerations were thus evident in the use of the village police for the purposes of information collection. Until 1913, conversations among police and government and a series of official and district reforms to the administration of the village police hesitated between drawing them under the direct supervision of the regular police and continuing to foster and protect village autonomy through use of locally paid indigenous supervisory institutions. This reflected a tension between protecting the principles of a so-called ancient village system and its traditional social networks on one hand, and exerting executive strength in order to access information, on the other. By 1913 a clear policy of official supervision prevailed, and a separate plan for the devolution of local government was expanded to provide the necessary structures of supervision over the village police. This chapter expands on the previous’ discussion of the interaction between the district police and the village police to demonstrate how the question of supervision dominated in an ongoing project to reform and utilise the village police for surveillance. By extension, it outlines some major consequences of surveillance for the shape of Bengal’s local administrative structure.

A measure of indirect British supervision was provided for within Act VI despite devolving the responsibilities for the watch and ward of the village onto chaukidars, and the responsibility for their remuneration onto villagers. The theory upon which Act VI was based was discussed as

129 municipal; it was envisioned that the people would manage their own village police, independent of “meddling Peelers”.1 Regular police officers were given limited power in the village over the rural police, only mentioned as the receivers of criminal information, and district superintendents were deliberately excluded from performing any supervisory function.2 Legally however, Act VI provided the police with recourse to a measure of coercion for instances where the village police neglected their duties.3 Suspicious of the “amount of public spirit likely to be found in the villagers to whom they were entrusting such extensive powers”, the framers of the Act inserted provisions for local intermediary councils to instead act as supervising bodies.4 Supervisory village councils or panchayats consisting of influential or propertied members of the village community were to ensure the chaukidar conveyed relevant information to the police, kept an eye on suspected and actual habitual criminals, and disseminated relevant criminal information throughout the village.5 Their job was to pay, nominate, dismiss and punish what was essentially a devolved, local network of “government sp[ies]”.6 Panchayats had in the past functioned as decision-making bodies for village courts prior to the introduction of a criminal administration based on English principles in 1793.7 In 1816, however, their consultative role had been transformed into a tax-assessing body for the village police fund within the Company’s new police administration. Regulation XXII required panchayats to regulate and fix the rate of assessment to be levied from the people for the maintenance of the village police, and stipulated that they were to nominate and appoint chaukidars, under the general supervision of magistrates.8 Act VI, however, would draw the chaukidars more comprehensively under the control of the councils, by stipulating that the village police were bound to obey the orders of the panchayat. Each panchayat, consisting of three to five members for each village containing 60 or more houses, were required to appoint, fine and dismiss the village police, and to supervise and report on their working to the magistrate.9 An extension of their role from merely a tax-assessing body, to one that paid the chaukidar directly, consolidated this supervisory role. Under Regulation XXII, the panchayat had been merely required to determine the monthly salaries of the chaukidars within the limits

1 Letter no. 1693, from C.J. Stevenson-Moore to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division, 17 September 1891, 518. IOR/P/4105; ‘Chapter III: Review of the Village Police’, 6. 2 Ibid, 6. 3 Ibid, 22. 4 Ibid, 22. 5 Section 62, Chaukidari Act (VI of 1870), ‘Miscellaneous Provisions’, 32. 6 ‘Chapter III: Review of the Village Police’, 28. 7 S.K. Bhowmik, Rural Police and Local Justice, 107. 8 Ibid, 107. 9 Section 62, Chaukidari Act (VI of 1870), ‘Miscellaneous Provisions’, 32.

130 of 3 to 6 rupees per month, which they would assess and collect from the village under their charge.10 After the passing of Act VI, panchayat were invested with the responsibility to pay the village police. An expanded supervisory role for the panchayat would thus replace Cornwallis’ darogahs as the controlling body of the village police, providing a supervisory body that was not connected to the provincial police. This was viewed as a way to reconfirm the municipal character of the village police because, unlike former supervising bodies, no overt connections to imperial power were visible. 11 The rationale underpinning this collaboration was to entrust the supervision of the village police to a representative body without betraying the notion of municipal autonomy. Though the district magistrate held nominal power to fine, dismiss and reappoint members if they were perceived to be neglecting their supervisory duties, Act VI vested ultimate control over the chaukidari in the councils. This reflected the fact that initially, collaboration with village elites was favoured over direct British supervision. The panchayat, self-remunerated through the local collection of the chaukidari fund, and thus separate from the provincial government, was intended as a collaborating agency not directly representative of the central authority, but one that supervised an important system of rural control on their behalf.

In the first decade following the passing of Act VI, however, the inadequacies of the arrangements for panchayet supervision were brought to light. The Act was extended experimentally across Bengal from 1870; initially introduced into six divisions, namely Bhāgālpur, Patna, Dacca, Rājshāhi, Chittagong and Birbhūm.12 Different experiences of the working of the Act were reported each year in Bengal’s annual police reports. In particular, the police focused on the role played by the panchayat in supervising the village police. In the first years of its introduction into Patna, where by 1872 the Act had been introduced into a selection of villages within the Patna, Birbhūm and Bhāgālpur districts, “results were not encouraging”.13 In Birbhūm, some panchayats had been convicted of embezzlement of the chaukidar fund; in Patna members of the council were reported to be inattentive to their duties and many had resigned from the council; and in Bhāgālpur it was difficult to find “good men” to serve on the

10 Regulation XXII, 1816 in R.W. Carlyle, Note on the Rural Police in Bengal, 5. 11 Letter no. 1817 from C.C. Quinn, Offg. Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 21 October 1891, 63. IOR/P/4105; Letter no. 2744J R. Castairs, Esq., Deputy Commissioner of the Santāl Parganas, to the Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division, 14 August 1891, 65. IOR/P/4105 12 G.E. Porter, Magistrate of Sāran to the Commissioner of the Patna Division, ‘Act VI (B.C.) of 1870 Review’, no. 505, 15 April 1875. IOR/P/259. 13 Colonel J.R. Pughe, Inspector General of Bengal Police, Report of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the Year 1871, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1872, 18.

131 councils in the first place.14 While it was intended that the councils were made up of influential or respectable villagers, the police believed that the requirement to collect the chaukidar tax door to door was abhorrent to some members because it entailed collecting tax from persons of inferior caste or social status, which meant that it was difficult to attract ‘the right men’ to the post.15 These problems were not necessarily unique to each division, and similar problems were reported throughout Bengal as the Act was extended during 1870s. Indeed, such reports are corroborated by the general remarks made in 1875 by the magistrate of Nadiā about the “difficulty in getting panchayats to accept their responsibility” and to carry out the “full nature of their duties”. 16 A more detailed report about panchayat non-compliance by J.Monro appeared in 1877. He wrote:

What I saw on my last cold weather tour led me to believe that unquestionably, on the whole, the chaukidar does not get the supervision he is supposed to get; that the accounts of the panchayat are fictitious…; and that the panchayat are in many instances unfit to have anything to do with a post which gives them a control over village crime in which they may be interested.17 Overall, these cases were used by the police to argue that it was “a great danger and a practical mistake” to separate the supervision of the village police from the regular police.18

The reluctance of the panchayat to perform their duties of supervision gave impetus to the police to introduce extra-legal measures to supervise the chaukidar. A police body who “object[ed] to the fact that the law [gave] the district superintendent no power over the chaukidar”, often interfered directly in their supervision and control.19 In Patna, for example, it was reported that the police made the majority of chaukidari appointment recommendations because the panchayats had generally failed in this task. 20 More particularly, Ramsay’s bakhshi system of payment required police constables to distribute chaukidari wages instead of the panchayat, who was officially required to carry out this task.21 Bakhshis, chosen from the district constabulary and thus appointed, paid by and responsible to the district superintendent, were required to look after a small number of villages each and to collect the chaukidar tax,

14 Ibid, 18. 15 Ibid, 18. 16 H.Hankey, Inspector General of Bengal Police, Report of the Lower Provinces of Bengal Presidency for the Year 1875, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1876, 7. 17 J. Monro, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces 1877, 7. 18 Ibid, 7. 19 Ibid, 7. 20 Ibid, 8. 21 H.M. Ramsay, Detective Footprints, 223.

132 which removed the loathed task from the panchayat.22 After collection, they delivered it to the panchayats, who had to pay the chaukidar in the presence of the constable.23 The constable was therefore able to ensure that the village police were paid on time, and that the panchayat could not pocket the money. This system, prompted by the failure of the panchayat to regularly pay the chaukidars, allowed the police tighter control over the remuneration of the village police, which was argued to increase the likelihood that they would perform their duties.24 Without the bakhshi the panchayats were largely free from restraint, because it was impossible for a magistrate to supervise the panchayat and to exercise their nominal powers under Act VI without an available informant.25 By inserting a layer of official representation into a system designed to encourage local and village autonomy in criminal matters, Ramsay drew the chaukidari system in Patna under the closer supervision of the police. Though this betrayed the principles of local autonomy and minimal police interference, it resulted in more prompt payment of the village police and was reported to have helped to increase the efficiency of the chaukidars in Patna.26

Similarly, the introduction of chaukidari parades meant that the police had closer control over the information collected by the village police. Act VI had stipulated that the panchayat was to collect criminal information from the village police, and furnish relevant information to the station police. Yet a direct interaction with mustered chaukidars at the station was a far more reliable way to obtain information from the countryside, to exert influence over the conduct of their work and to eliminate the third party involvement that at times resulted in the concealment of information. To be able “with ease to find information concerning the crime that had occurred, the coming and going of suspicious persons, the residence of bad characters” the guarantee that information would reach the station was paramount.27 By establishing “frequent personal communication between the village police and the district superintendent and his subordinates”, the police were provided with “the means of gaining an intimate knowledge of local information bearing upon crime, and specially every fact connected with the bad characters of the locality”.28 Evidently, local policing projects and initiatives that forced the village police and the regular police into close alliance reflected the idea that the police were better suited to and in some cases had subsumed the task of supervising the village police.

22 Ibid, 223. 23 Ibid, 223. 24 Ibid, 223. 25 J. Monro, Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces 1877, 7. 26 Ibid, 7. 27 Ibid, 7. 28 Ibid, 7.

133 By the 1880s, the police sought official recognition of this role and the legalisation of unofficial modes of supervision over the village police. In fact, the idea that the police should supervise the chaukidari because they relied on them for information collection informed the framework for the recommendations of two key police reform committees held in 1882 and 1890.29 Each dealt broadly with the reform of the village police, but focussed particularly on the necessity of legalising police supervision to secure chaukidari compliance in the delivery of information to the station. Late in 1881, the Government of Bengal had appointed Monro, former inspector general of police, to lead a committee of enquiry on the subject of the improvement of the village police.30 The formation of the committee had been prompted by the complaints made by the inspector general in his 1881 annual report about the unsatisfactory working of the village police in Bengal and the necessity of bringing it under the closer supervision of the police.31 Additionally, a request for opinion on the working of Act VI from the Government of the North West Provinces provided further impetus for the formation of the committee.32 So, in consultation with district magistrates and superintendents across Bengal, Monro and his committee made local enquiries into the material benefits, if any, that Act VI had introduced, and what reforms the police believed to be necessary to raise the status and efficiency of chaukidars paid under the Act.33 The police opinion that was revealed during their enquires was that provisions for legal police supervision of the village police were urgently needed.34 The information provided by the police highlighted that any punctuality or efficiency in the working of the village police had been secured through illegal magisterial and police supervision.35 Improvements in the efficiency of the village police were due not to “local initiative or voluntary action on the part of village communities” but to “official pressure”.36 The panchayat had generally been found to be apathetic and inattentive to their duties, so it seemed obvious that the police and magistracy should overtake their supervisory role, thus

29 ‘Chapter III: Review of the Village Police’, 14. 30 ‘Resolution of the Police Committee appointed to enquire and consider what measures should be adopted for placing the entire system of the village watch on a more satisfactory footing’, 21 May 1884, file 106 A-29, 269. IOR/P/2247. 31 Circular no. 30J from the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, judicial department, to J. Monro, Offg. Commissioner of the Presidency division, file 522-17, 22 June 1881, IOR/P/2247. 32 Ibid, 269. 33 Ibid, 269. 34 Letter no. 1068J from C.T. Metcalfe, Offg. Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division and the Santāl Parganas, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, ‘Amendment of Law Relating to Powers and Duties of Village and Road Chaukidars’, 3 July 1882, file 522-15, 192. IOR/P/2247. 35 Letter no. 586GM from E.E. Lowis, Commissioner of the Chittagong District to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, 28 August 1882, file 522021, 205. IOR/P/2247. 36 Ibid, 205.

134 legalising the practises that were carried out in certain parts of Bengal in any case.37 This was important because of the fact that “cases ha[d] occurred” whereby “chowkidars [sic] refuse[d] to obey the general custom and had escape[d] punishment, because the law ha[d] no provision” to deal with chaukidar disobedience.38 While the police had been able to secure criminal information from chaukidars and had coerced their attendance at muster parades, the police feared the moment when it became obvious to chaukidars that there was very little compelling them to co-operate with the regular police.39 The opinion of the police, and subsequently the police committee, was that provisions for supervision by the police had to be inserted into the Chaukidari Act, because the police relied upon them for criminal information. Indeed, it was argued that

the time has come when the Government of India should recognise the very important part which the village chowkidar [sic] plays in the criminal administration of the district. It is on the information of the village chowkidar that the regular police act; the real work is done by the village watchman and the more they are improved the better will be the criminal administration of the country.40 Convinced of the strengths of the police argument, the recommendations of the committee centred on strengthening police control over the village police, by legalising existent practises of supervision. The general implementation of the thanā parade, alongside a scheme for introducing fixed sets of questions to be answered by chaukidars at parade, were recommended in particular.41 It was these two measures had enabled close police control of the chaukidari and had heightened the reliability and useability of their information, in the absence of official police control. 42 Additionally, supervisory power was to be secured by transferring the responsibility of the panchayat to pay the chaukidari to the regular police.43 The committee argued that the village police should be paid at the station in the presence of an officer of no lower rank than a sub-inspector, because this would not only ensure a close police scrutiny over chaukidari wages, but would provide an additional guarantee of chaukidari attendance.44 To ensure the chaukidari remained separate from the official police, however, their wages would

37 Ibid, 205. 38 Letter no. 61JJ From J. Monro to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 16 August 1882, file 552-17, 195. IOR/P/2247. 39 Ibid, 195. 40 Letter no. 1068J from C.T. Metcalfe, ‘Amendment of Law Relating to Powers and Duties of Village and Road Chaukidars’, 192. IOR/P/2247. 41 ‘Resolution of the Police Committee appointed to enquire and consider what measures should be adopted for placing the entire system of the village watch on a more satisfactory footing’, 269. IOR/P/2247. 42 Ibid, 269. 43 Ibid, 269. 44 Ibid, 269.

135 continue to be paid out of the chaukidari fund, assessed and collected by the panchayat.45 Close official control of the village police would to be achieved by legalising and expanding upon practises that had been locally developed across Bengal since 1870, yet the idea of local and municipal control would be theoretically protected.

The formation of the 1882 police committee had revealed a markedly coherent attitude of the Bengal police towards the question of supervision. Such was embodied within and expanded upon by the amending chaukidari bill, submitted by Monro in April 1883, which sought to define a supervisory role for the district superintendent of police over panchayats and thus chaukidars.46 In this version of the Act, the superintendent was to oversee the payment of the chaukidar at the station, and was vested with powers to fine, suspend, punish and dismiss the chaukidar. The duties of the village police remained unchanged, except that they were to report crime directly to the station, without any reference to the panchayat. Monro in particular had argued that it was desirable to invest these powers in the district superintendent, in order to establish the chaukidar as the “executive right hand” of the police, rather than allowing a devolved, and ineffective supervisory body too much control.47 The notion that the village system would remain intact was still outwardly important, thus the bill sought to protect the veneer of village control held by the councils. The police replaced panchayats as supervisors, yet tehsildars, were selected from the panchayat to collect the chaukidari fund to ensure the village police were still paid by and loyal to the villagers they supposedly served.48 The bill amounted to a reconfiguration rather than overhaul of a dysfunctional chain of rural control, whereby links that were deemed ineffective were replaced with those more closely aligned with British authority.

However, a policy of tight police control masquerading as village autonomy failed to convince the government, and oppositional positions that the police and legislature had taken were revealed in a significantly watered down legal version of the amending bill. Monro’s bill would not obtain the legal sanction for the reforms sought by the police because according to the Legislative Council, the bill had not gone far enough to uphold the central principles of a village system, which were enshrined in Act VI.49 Legislation that removed the power of

45 Ibid, 269. 46 J. Monro, C.F. Worsley, E.V. Westmacott, Members of Committee appointed to enquire into the working of Act VI of 1870, 27 April 1883, file 106 A-28, 211-253. IOR/P/2247. 47 Ibid, 212. 48 Ibid, 212. 49 ‘Chapter III: Review of the Village Police’, 29.

136 control from the village was still unpalatable to a government committed to notions of collaboration and indirect power.

When the bill was brought to the Legislative Council, it was passed into law in a highly modified form.50 Many of the important suggestions; the increase in power of the district superintendent, the transferral of the power to appoint chaukidars to the magistrate, and their payment at the thanā, were strongly opposed in Council.51 Especially vexing to the indigenous members of the Council had been any stipulations that transferred control of the chaukidars from the village council to the police.52 When the bill became law as Act I (B.C.) of 1886, a tension between government and police policy was made explicit. The Act rejected the police design for greater control of the village police and council, and highlighted a course of action that favoured maintaining the existing system of supervision. The panchayat retained their supervisory function, and the only curtailment to their power was that the magistrate, who was required to visit each village to explain the terms of the Act, was empowered to appoint the fittest and most respectable villagers to the watch.53 The new Act reiterated a government belief in the utility of collaborating with village elites as a means to achieve conciliatory and indirect village administration. At the close of the first stage of reform of the village police, a desire to protect village control, at the expense of the overall functionality of the system, was reiterated in amending Act I against the recommendations of the police. Though the police had unequivocally denounced the panchayats as an unsuitable supervisory body, the government of Bengal was still convinced that effective supervision could be obtained without recourse to central power.

The amendment of the Chaukidari Act in 1886 did not end the debate, however. In the aftermath of the passing of Act I, the Bengal police continued to pressure the government to legalise local initiatives for supervising the village police. The appointment of a police committee in Bengal in 1889 would provide the police with renewed opportunity to bring the chaukidari under their supervision.54 Its appointment was the result of police and judicial complaints sent to the government of Bengal that “crime was still imperfectly repressed” and

50 Ibid, 29. 51 In summary of the achievements of the 1883 police committee, letter No. 1693G from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, Magistrate of Jessore to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division, 17 September 1891, 518. IOR/P/4105 52 Ibid, 518. 53 Henry Wheeler, A Chaukidari Manual, 81. 54 Letter no. 39 from Babu Raj Kumar Sarvadhikari, Secretary, British Indian Association, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 26 September 1891, 19. IOR/P/4105.

137 that “a considerable increase of crime” was notable throughout Bengal.55 Though a closer inspection of the crime returns for Bengal would demonstrate that between 1875 and 1886 crime had not increased, the resolution appointing the committee acknowledged the increase in certain types of crime, especially “dangerous offences against property” that were assumed to be committed by repeat offenders.56 The committee was therefore asked to conduct a “careful enquiry into the causes of this state of things”.57 Led by J. Beames, J.F. Stevens and J.C. Veasey, who at various times had been members of either the Bengal police or the civil service, the committee consulted extensively with Bengal magistrates, police superintendents, and with indigenous members of prominent associations, such as the British Indian Association. This provided the police in particular with the opportunity to appeal to the government to reconsider the question of supervising the village police.

The committee concluded that the poor state of criminality in Bengal was connected with the difficulties involved in getting chaukidars to report crimes to the station, and therefore reiterated a police desire to reform the means of supervision.58 Their report was based largely on testimony of magistrates and superintendents, who argued that the village system, whereby panchayats supervised and controlled chaukidars, was “almost an entire failure”. 59 The “general opinion” was that “panchayats have rendered practically no assistance to the administration”, and the “chaukidar”, “dependent entirely on the supervision he gets”, was therefore poorly utilised. 60 Despite local initiatives that had established close and daily interaction between official and non-official police agents, police utilisation of the village police was felt to be “imperfect” because, as was argued previously, without legal support, their initiatives could only go so far.61 The chaukidar was “the unit of one enormous administration on whom [the police were] so dependent for [their] information and prevention of crime in the village” but who were difficult to control by a “force whose interference law does not recognise”.62 In cases where the village police or panchayat refused to carry out their duties, the police had no power to compel compliance through punishment or dismissal. The

55 See for more information Report of the Committee appointed by Government to consider the Reform of the Police of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1891, 1-3. 56 Ibid, 1-3. 57 Ibid, 1-3. 58 Ibid, 1-3. 59 In summary of the police committee’s chief recommendations, letter no. 1693, from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, 17 September 1891, 518. 60 Letter no. 1817 from C.C. Quinn, Offg. Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 63. IOR/P/4105; Letter no. 2744J R. Castairs, Esq., Deputy Commissioner of the Santāl Parganas, to the Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division, 14 August 1891, 65, IOR/P/4105. 61 Ibid, 518. 62 Ibid, 518.

138 magistrate currently held nominal power to fine and dismiss chaukidars, but it was difficult to enforce because it could only be exercised “indirectly” through the panchayet. 63 The magistrate had no established means to communicate with chaukidars, and it was doubted that fines issued to chaukidars for non-compliance were ever enforced or paid into the chaukidari fund. The district police, on the other hand, “came into daily contact with [chaukidars], and were an obvious choice for supervision.64 Therefore, the committee report once more argued for the legalisation of modes of chaukidar supervision by the police.

In fact, the recommendations of the committee reiterated those of 1883.65 Effective supervision was to be exercised by the station police, whose close daily interaction with the village police would be recognised under the new scheme.66 Direct police contact, which hitherto had been established extra-legally through daily chaukidari parades, would be guaranteed by the stipulation that the chaukidar received payment at the police station at the first muster parade of the month, in the presence of the officer in charge of the police station.67 The legalisation of the thanā parade would also sanction and extend the modes of interviewing, mustering, and other techniques devised by the police to record and utilise chaukidar-collected information. An important recommendation was made regarding magisterial control over the chaukidari, who under a reformed scheme would be empowered to delegate ultimate supervisory power onto the district superintendent.68 In instances where the relationship between the police and village was recognisably closer than that of the magistrates, power to dismiss and appoint chaukidars could be devolved onto the superintendent.

The bill submitted by H.J.S Cotton embodied and expanded the recommendations of the police committee and presented the police argument for supervisory power, which had been developing since 1870, in the clear and concise manner needed to convince a reluctant government. His position was that to be useful, the village police needed to be “much more than it is now under the immediate supervision of the district superintendent”.69 Cotton argued that the government’s resistance to police supervision had proceeded on the ill-gotten principle that strong executive control was antithetical to the integrity of a ‘village system’. Yet

63 Letter no. 1817 from C.C. Quinn, 21 October 1891, 63. 64 Ibid, 63. 65 Letter no. 501, From E.E., Lowis, Commissioner of the Rājshāhi division to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 13 October 1891, 29. IOR/P/4105. 66 Letter no. 39, From Babu Raj Kumar Sarvadhikari, 26 September 1891, 457. 67 Ibid, 457. 68 Letter no. 501, From E.E., Lowis, 29. 69 Letter no. 2991J from Sir John Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Govt. of Bengal, to all Commissioners of Divisions, ‘Submitting Draft Chaukidari Bill’, 28 July 1891, file4-c/5.1. IOR/P/4105. 439-440.

139 supervision, he argued, allowed for the maintenance of the divide between official and non- official police power and supported the notion that the “existing constabulary has virtually no other functions to discharge in the village than those of escort and guard”.70 It “adhered to the only sound element of the chaukidari system, viz, that of retaining local knowledge of man resident in the village in which they are to be employed”.71 He argued that it did nothing to undermine a “precious” village system because without supervision, this system did not exist in any practical form.72 It was a fallacy to view efforts to place the village police under executive authority as disruptive, because it was immeasurably disruptive to public order to have a village police controlled by councils who had no interest in doing so, especially since it was obvious that the village police would not perform their work unsupervised. To Cotton, without executive intrusion, self-determination in the village would never occur. The replacement of an inefficient panchayat with direct powers of intervention for the magistracy and the police was the lesser evil required to reform an inefficient yet essential policing agency.

On the strength of his argument, the bill was passed in 1892 as amending Act II (1892), which contained all the recommended provisions. 73 Most significantly, it defined the district magistrate as the powerbroker, but allowed for him to delegate power to the district superintendent of police, who usually had a much closer relationship with the village police.74 Magistrates who felt burdened with their already expansive workload and who recognised the familiarity between the district superintendent and the village police that had been developing for some time readily resorted to this provision.75 In most districts it was deemed appropriate and desirable to hand the power to control the village police to the most likely supervisory body; the station police, under the control of the district superintendent. Where total delegation of this responsibility had not occurred, the district superintendent supervised matters conjointly with the magistrate at district headquarters.76 By 1899, many district superintendents were operating in a supervisory capacity either independently or in mutual co-operation with their magistrate. 77 In Jessore and Darbhangā, for example, the district Superintendent worked closely with the magistrates. 78 However, in Tippera, Noākhali, Muzaffarpur, Bhāgalpur,

70 Ibid, 440. 71 Letter no. 1231J from H.J.S Cotton, Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Commissioner of the Burdwan division, 18 March 1892, file p-54p/2.8, 431. IOR/P/4105. 72 Ibid, 431. 73 Ibid, 431. 74 Amending Act (II of 1892), of the Chaukidar Act (VI of 1871), 4. 75 Ibid, 4. 76 Ibid, 4. 77 H.J.S. Cotton quoted in R.W. Carlyle, ‘Note on the Rural Police in Bengal’, 9. 78 Ibid, 9.

140 Balasore, Bankurā, Hooghly, 24-Parganas and Sāran, the power to appoint, fine, reward, suspend and dismiss chaukidars had been placed solely in the hands of the superintendent.79 The widely utilised power of delegation fulfilled a central objective of the police that had been gathering pace since 1870; to be able to “free [the village police] from the supremacy of village elites, and to make them responsible agents in the police administration of rural tracts”.80

Seemingly then, the passing of the amending Act I in 1892 enabled legal police control over a closely aligned village police, without subsuming them as part of the subordinate constabulary, or having to rely on the support and acquiescence of a council of village elites. Indeed, it marked the point at which police opinion on chaukidari supervision paralleled the government’s official posturing on the matter. However, an impulse to collaborate with non- official indigenous agents for chaukidari supervision would prevail despite a policy of close police supervision. Though at the end of the nineteenth century official policy stressed that it was “impracticable to retrace our steps and seek to bring [the rural police] more directly under local self government”, there was a prevailing willingness to insert subordinate layers of indigenous supervision into a hierarchy that was ultimately bound to the centre.81

This, however, was born of necessity. Despite the fact that magistrates, district superintendents and station police legally controlled the village police and that the role of the village council in police matters had been reduced to an essentially consultative, tax assessing body, close attention to chaukidari administration outside of the station was often impossible. Not only were some stations miles away from the village, the district police also preferred to deal with the chaukidars from the station, rather than travelling to outlying villages. Systems designed to keep in touch with village affairs, such as the muster parade, obliged chaukidar attendance at the station but at times it was felt that a “link [was] needed between the police and chaukidars” to scrutinise their activities outside the station.82 Therefore, from 1898 a variety of measures were introduced to collect chaukidari information outside of the station that relied upon non- official village elites. The daffadar, for example, was introduced across Bengal in 1898 to enforce chaukidari attendance and to assist the panchayat in the collection of the taxes for their maintenance.83 They had no watch or ward duties to perform, but were to act as supervisors of 10 to 20 chaukidars and would supposedly inform the police if chaukidars were not fulfilling

79 Ibid, 9. 80 J. Masters, Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency for 1899, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1900, 74. 81 Ibid, 74. 82 L.F. Morshead, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces 1910, 39. 83 R.W. Carlyle, ‘Note on the Rural Police in Bengal’, 10.

141 their duties.84 Paradoxically, however, it was the panchayat who controlled and paid the daffadars because part of their function was to assist the council in their role as revenue collectors.85 The police expected that introducing a ‘native’ supervisory body, comprised of respectable men chosen by the magistrate from the ranks of chaukidars, would increase their control over the village police, yet by allowing the influence of the councils to prevail over daffadars a problem of dual authority was introduced.

Reflecting upon the working of the daffadar in 1909, the superintendent of police of the Nādia district highlighted the conflict that split sites of power inevitably introduced. In particular, allowing panchayat control of the daffadar precluded accurate information from reaching the station:

they (the daffadars) are so much under the influence and control of the village panchayat that it is doubtful if they can ever open their mouths unless they have the permission of their panchayats, whose clerks they practically are.86 Though this reveals much about British mistrust of indigenous collaborators, and highlights enduring assumptions that ‘native’ corruption was inevitable, there is an element of logic inherent. Even if the panchayat was not trying to protect an absconding criminal or seeking to conceal knowledge about stolen goods, they could still influence how the daffadar spent their time. The work of chaukidar supervision was often neglected for the simple fact that their duties associated with the collection of taxes left little time for anything else.87 Some positive results of the system were reported in Patna and Bankurā, but generally the magistracy and the police executive agreed that any reports of efficiency were countered by widespread abuses and problems.88 The weakness of devolving supervisory functions onto an agency that was not paid by and thus loyal to the police was once more brought to light. However, daffadars continued to be appointed into the twentieth century, in the absence of a better idea.

The hesitation on the matter of supervision was demonstrated most clearly by the introduction of the panchayat presidential system in certain districts in western Bengal, because it reinvested powers of supervision in the village council. In 1903 the experimental introduction of the panchayat presidential system in Nadiā, Bankurā, Midnapore, Hooghly, Khulnā, Jessore, 24- Paraganas and Murshidabad, undermined and frustrated thirty years of police discourse and

84 Ibid, 10. 85 Ibid, 10. 86 L.F. Morshead, Report of Lower Provinces, 1910, 45. 87 Ibid, 45. 88 Ibid, 45.

142 reform regarding the question of supervision. 89 Within the system, one member of each panchayat was elevated to the position of president, who was to supervise the collection of the chaukidari fund by the council. Most significantly, the president was defined as the primary recipient of information from the village police.90 In fact, the president would hold weekly panchayet parades of the village police at his office (the cutcherry), which would replace the weekly chaukidar parade at the thanadar.91 Under the new system, the village police officer was required to report information only as far as the president, who was expected to forward this information directly to the police station. One thanā parade of the village police per month was retained, however its objective was principally to corroborate the information that had been supplied by the president over the course of the month.92 In theory, if the president conducted his duties with honesty and diligence, control over the village police would not be compromised; rather, the authority of the president would merely replace that of the police. No breach in the connection between the station and the village would occur, because the president was supposed to represent the authority of the police, especially in “out of the way places” where close control was impracticable.93 However, the frequent complaints of the police that the presidents had used the village police for their own gains revealed the inadequacies of devolving control of the village police onto the presidents.

Although part of the impetus for elevating one member of the council to a position of authority was sound according to notions of governance that favoured cheap collaborations with influential village elites, it severed any semblance of police access to village information or control over the chaukidari, principally because it abolished the muster parade. This in particular was deemed responsible for the village police “growing more and more out of touch with the police”. 94 For members of the Bengal police who had been preoccupied with establishing the means to control access to village information, the president system in western Bengal appeared a bizarre about-face on the question of supervision. It particular, the system was shown to have broken a network of direct communication between the regular and village police, which had functioned with varying degrees of success and failure since the 1870s.95

89 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, ‘Proposal for an increase to the cadre of sub-deputy collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’, 19 March 1913, file 9/c/2.1, 151. IOR/P/9147. 90 ‘Memorandum on the working of the President Panchayat System and the Introduction of Circle Officers for the Control and Guidance of Presidents’, no. 14, 7 April 1911, 157. IOR/P/8929. 91 Ibid, 157. 92 Ibid, 157. 93 L.F. Morshead, Inspector General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces 1910, 39. 94 Ibid, 39. 95 Ibid, 39.

143 “Superintendents of Police [therefore] condemn[ed] the system with a remarkable unanimity”; for the proper functioning of a surveillance project, a loss of control of the means to access information was highly disruptive to a range of policing systems.96

This sentiment was summarised in 1912 by the district superintendent in the 24-Parganas who described the introduction of the panchayat presidents as part of a “system that has not worked on the whole”.97 It alienated the village police from the regular police, and limited police access to chaukidar information, “especially regarding the movements of bad characters”.98 “Under the old system”, he argued, “thanā officers used to be able to worm out a certain amount of information by questioning and cross-questioning”. 99 Now, the substitution of weekly for monthly chaukidari parades facilitated an impulse to conceal information from the police because although the presidents “jealously insist[ed] upon receiving crime reports” they often deliberately “delay[ed] or withheld information”.100 Since the implementation of the system it was argued that the “police do not get the assistance they used to from the chaukidars”.101 Even when the fullest intentions of reporting existed, “matters of interest [were] often long forgotten by both the police and the chaukidar before the parade comes round, so that the former forgets to put the question, while even if he does so, the latter is unable to respond to it”.102 Without the guarantee of the regular and up to date information from the village that was necessary for classification and cross-examination, “control over the professional criminals [was inevitably] and perceptively more lax”.103

It had been similarly reported in the Bengal annual police reports that powers devolved onto the president had encouraged them to exercise “a sort of local power” over the chaukidar that tended to disrupt police access to criminal information and to the village police in general.104 The abolition of the thanā parade with parades at the cutcherry of the president had allowed presidents illegitimately to administer local justice, thus subverting British attempts to use the chaukidar to secure rural order on their behalf. Since panchayat presidents were the first to receive reports of criminal information from the village police, they had sometimes interpreted their role as mediators of local disputes, seeing little necessity to inform the police of the

96 L.F. Morshead, Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, 1909, 11. 97 ‘Memorandum on the working of the President Panchayat System’, 157. 98 Ibid, 157. 99 Ibid, 157. 100 Ibid, 157. 101 Ibid, 157. 102 Ibid, 157. 103 Ibid, 157. 104 L.F. Morshead, Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces 1909, 39.

144 incident. Presidents intervened on land disputes to settle them locally, which contravened the stipulation that if they received intimation of a possible riot or local dispute from the chaukidari, they should immediately inform the police. In the district of Khulnā, the superintendent reported that the president of Betkasi village council, whose cutcherry was at Paikgacha, 50 miles from the nearest police station, had utilised the information provided by the village police to carry on a local court of justice, disposing of “all sorts of petty cases” and imposing fines on the chaukidars “as he pleased”.105 This had been possible because the affinity that the police had secured with the village police through the thanā parade had been replaced by a close alliance between the panchayat and the chaukidar.

A similar case that received brief mention in the 1909 district report for the 24-Parganas involved a reprobate president, who had adopted the chaukidari as a local militia to enforce the dispossession of crops.106 It was reported that there had been “one or two instances” in that year where the president, after being informed of a land dispute between parties of ryots, “had collected together the chaukidars of the union to allow one party to take possession of the land” by “overawing the second party”. 107 Highlighted as an example of the subversive and disruptive threat that the president posed, it showed that the devolution of supervisory power onto presidents had neither resulted in its desired effect of controlling chaukidars outside of the station nor had secured any greater access to local information. Though some presidents had realised “their position and responsibility, and really help the police”, for the most part a system of dual control over the chaukidari was unsatisfactory.108 There was a notable “want of co-operation” between the police and the presidents, who had demonstrated their capacity to “belittle the authority of the police”.109 For a strategy designed to increase central control over and knowledge of the working of the village police in particular, it was deemed a signal failure. Whilst reports of the loss of control over the village police significantly hampered arguments that supported the sole utilisation of unofficial village elites as their supervisors, in the absence of a plan for the reform of the president system, it was allowed to continue in a state of inefficiency.

105 Ibid, 39 106 Ibid, 39. 107 Ibid, 40. 108 Ibid, 40. 109 Ibid, 40.

145 A resolution to the inefficient president system, and more broadly to the entire question of chaukidari supervision, was reached in 1913.110 To understand this it is necessary first of all to return to the broader question of chaukidari supervision, and to emphasise that police attitudes towards it had undergone transformation in the early years of the twentieth century. During the Indian Police Commission of 1902-03, the question of general chaukidari reform had been recommended for reconsideration in each province.111 In 1904, the opinion of each provincial police administration was thus requested by the Indian government to inform the direction of reform for India’s variety of village police establishments.112 In 1907, R.W. Carlyle, then inspector general of the Bengal police, utilised this opportunity to narrow the government’s interest in reforming the village policing onto the supervision question, and to lobby the government to sanction and pay for a new scheme of chaukidari supervision and administration in Bengal.113

He proposed to appoint full-time officers, responsible and paid by the government of Bengal, to carry out the task of supervision and to replace inefficient panchayat presidents (where they had been introduced) in Bengal. Funds were requested to make extra appointments to the provincial civil service to form a government staff of non-police officers, whose authority would supersede that of the panchayat and who would work closely with district superintendents to supervise chaukidari work in Bengal.114 In response, the government of India agreed that it was evidently impossible for district officers (the superintendent and magistrate) to “give chaukidar administration that close and personal attention which is the first essential towards the construction and maintenance of an efficient system”.115 However, the government felt that because Carlyle had not indicated how a substantial administrative overhaul would be carried out or paid for, the most they could do was to express their “wholehearted approval of the principle underlying the scheme”.116 The significance of the proposed scheme extended past immediate implementation, however, becoming an important indicator of new direction in chaukidari supervision. The proposal to utilise a class of officers

110 Letter no. 1403 From C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’, 147. 111 Ibid, 147. 112 Letter no. 266 from Government of India, Home Department to Inspector-General of Police, Lower Provinces, 14 April, 1907, 147. IOR/P/9147. 113 Letters no. 1724 and no. 2545 from R.W. Carlyle, Inspector-General of Police to the Government of India, Home Department, 8 and 4 April 1907, 147. IOR/P/9147. 114 Ibid, 147. 115 Letter no. 1403 From C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’, 147. 116 Letter no. 1527 from The Bengal Government to R.W. Carlyle, 27 June 1911, 148. IOR/P/9147.

146 formally attached to the civil service was a novel version of past efforts to utilise the police or to collaborate with local elites for the purposes of supervision. It essentially combined the two strategies; the police would collaborate with influential and respectable ‘native’ agents, and whilst such agents would not be formally attached to the police, they were to be paid for and responsible to the same authority - the Government of Bengal. Though shelved for the moment, his proposal would form the basis for future policy in the direction of tighter official control over the village police.

Plans to appoint paid civil servants to supervise the village police entered upon a “second and more comprehensive stage” in 1911. 117 To understand this, a separate and past plan of administrative reform in Eastern Bengal and Assam has to be explicated.118 Indeed, a proposal developed in 1909 to introduce the “circle system” in Eastern Bengal and Assam provided the impetus and basis for the eventual implementation of Carlyle’s scheme in newly reunified Bengal, once the partition had been annulled. Briefly, the Decentralisation Commission had been held in Dacca in 1909 to discuss proposals for the devolution of local governance onto the villages within Eastern Bengal and Assam. The recommendations of the Commission, submitted in 1910, was to introduce the circle system, which would divide each subdivision into small groups or circles of villages under the charge of government-appointed and remunerated officers of the subordinate civil service, who would supervise matters of local governance within the circle. 119 Circle inspectors would manage the devolution of miscellaneous tasks of local governance (the collection of revenue, reporting on births and deaths, weather and crops, public works, statistics, cattle disease and so on) onto select representatives of the village, and would become responsible for supervising these local government representatives.120 However, the prohibitive costs associated with the plans and the fact that it was not clear who the responsible village agents would be forestalled immediate implementation.121 It had merely been suggested that specially appointed government officials would act as their superiors and it was left open for debate as to which villagers would be

117 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’, 19 March 1913, 147. 118 In 1905, parts of Bengal had been partitioned to form the new province of East Bengal and Assam. See introduction to the present thesis. 119 Letter no 1131 from F.P. Dixon, Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Eastern Bengal and Assam, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam, 7 August 1911, 109. IOR/P/9147. 120 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors’, 19 March 1913, 147-148. 121 Ibid, 147; Letter no. 1276 from N. Bonham-Carter, Commissioner of Dacca Division, to the Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Eastern Bengal and Assam, 30 May, 1911, 155. IOR/P/9147.

147 assigned duties of local governance.122 Although approving the recommendations for a circle system in principle, the Government of India refrained from passing orders because it was inevitably futile to provide funds for the reconstitution of village administration without a scheme in place for its control and management.

The problems identified by the government in the infancy of the plan would be resolved by conflating the existent panchayat president system in western Bengal, with the proposed plan for the circle system.123 Early experiments in this direction were conducted in 1911 in three small areas in the Hooghly district, where the president panchayat system was “ready to hand” as a working basis.124 Here, the circle system was commenced by expanding the duties of the existent panchayat presidents to include tasks of local governance and by employing existent sub-deputy collectors as circle inspectors who would supervise the panchayat. 125 The recognised benefit of the experiment was first of all that a necessary plan for devolution was provided with an existent class of village elites (the panchayat presidents) whose role in village administration only required expansion to include new tasks of local governance.126 Secondly, by combining the two systems, the panchayati, and thus chaukidari would be supervised by government paid civil servants. 127 The conflation of the two systems had provided the justification to carry out Carlyle’s original plan to supervise the village police via government officials. By naming the presidents as the collaborators chosen to conduct devolved local governance under the guidance and supervision of the circle officers, their role in chaukidari supervision, one that had been imperfectly and rarely carried out, was subject to official control. The obvious benefits of combining the two systems would “confirm the Bengal Government in the view that further development of the village system should no longer be delayed”.128 Now that a workable plan had materialised, the “frequent criticisms that the president panchayat system was by this stage receiving” could be addressed.129 The circle

122 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors’, 19 March 1913, 147. 123 By this stage, the partition had been annulled, and the districts of former Eastern Bengal and Assam had mostly been returned to the administration of Bengal (see introduction to this thesis for further detail). 124 Letter no. 1276 from N. Bonham-Carter, 30 May, 1911, 155. The president panchayat system that had been implemented in districts of Bengal was, after partition, something specific to Bengal proper, as it had not yet been extended into the area that would comprise Eastern Bengal and Assam. 125 Ibid, 155. 126 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors’, 19 March 1913, 147-148. 127 Ibid, 148. 128 Ibid, 148. 129 Letter no. 1276 from N. Bonham-Carter, 30 May, 1911, 155.

148 system, branched onto an inefficient president panchayat system, was therefore recommended for implementation across Bengal.130

At the Conference of Divisional Commissioners held in October 1911, a scheme to introduce circle officers as the supervisory agent over presidents and by extension over the panchayat and chaukidars was drawn up for the entirety of Bengal.131 The circle officer’s “primary function” was defined as being “to watch over and guide the presidents in their official business”, which would be expanded to include tasks of local governance; registering births, deaths and marriages, checking and reporting water supplies, reporting cattle deaths, and so on.132 Circle officers would moreover supervise the presidents’ role in village policing. They were conceived of as an authority loyal to and paid by the state to ensure the presidents of the panchayat carried out their duties with efficiency. An amalgamated circle system introduced a supervisory body that would ensure the panchayat properly assessed and collected the chaukidari tax; made regular payments to the village police; and enforced the delivery of chaukidari information about bad characters to the station. 133 Under the proposal, circle officers had no magisterial or police powers, yet were expected to consult with the regular police, in order to corroborate chaukidari information reported to the police by panchayats.134 This was intended to connect the “higher authorities” with access to and control over important “channels of communication” in the village, which were seen as vital to secure police scrutiny over outlying areas in the district.135 The establishment of a close relationship between the regular police (especially the district superintendents) and the circle officers was aimed at connecting the police with important criminal information from the village, in order to negate the relative autonomy exercised by the presidents. Ultimately, the office would insert a vital layer of control in a system that was seen to have grown beyond the purview of the police.

The recommendations of the conference led to the experimental introduction of the circle system into districts of Bengal where the presidential panchayat system was in existence and could form its basis. W.R. Weston of the Indian civil service was placed on special duty to oversee and direct the experiment in a selection of subdivisions, and was assisted by sub- deputy collectors from the subordinate staff of the civil service who were deputed to work as

130 Ibid, 155. 131 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors’, 19 March 1913, 147-148. 132 Letter no. 1276 from N. Bonham-Carter, 30 May 1911, 155 133 Ibid, 155. 134 Ibid, 156. 135 Letter no. 1403 from C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors’, 19 March 1913, 147-148.

149 circle officers.136 Each subdivision was divided into circles, comprised by around 40 to 45 unions or villages. A circle officer was assigned to each, responsible to the largest or most central police station of each circle. A typical police district would generally be provided with around eight circle officers, who would be required to move about his circle, collecting information from panchayats and chaukidars, and ensuring their work was conducted promptly and efficiently.137 Although problems presented, especially the difficulty of finding additional men for the post of circle officer, Weston’s report, submitted in August 1912, highlighted the proven necessity of official supervision that the working of the circle system had demonstrated. The introduction of circle officers as supervisors of the amalgamated system had materially benefited in several ways. For the functioning of village policing, Weston reported that presidents carried out their duties more promptly and completely, “daffadars and chaukidars had been stirred up, their beats better arranged, watch and ward was better performed and information was more readily conveyed to the thanā”. 138 Inevitably, it was argued, the effectiveness of an established system of village control was guaranteed if a reliable means to connect with and oversee the working of the village police was introduced.

To Weston, the experiment had underscored his conviction that any system of administration that relied on the aid of locally paid village elites would never work without provisions for supervision by officers loyal to the government.139 This had been made clear by the fact that there was still no semblance of uniformity in chaukidari performance anywhere in Bengal.140 Problems and failures prevailed in chaukidari administration where it had been left to the sole supervision of village elites, and piecemeal and protracted improvements were shown to have resulted from a partial experiment of the circle system.141 The obvious remedy, he argued, was to extend the president system throughout Bengal, and to introduce circle officers as their superiors.

Weston’s recommendation led to the extension of the system to districts in the east of Bengal, thus consolidating a single system of chaukidar supervision throughout Bengal. For this task, J.N. Gupta, magistrate of Noākhāli, was deputed on special duty to oversee its extension into a selection of districts in east Bengal. Alongside twenty circle officers from the western districts,

136 Letter no. 93 from J.G. Cumming, Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to all Commissioners of Divisions, 10 May 1913, file p/9-c/25.2, 115. IOR/P/9147. 137 Ibid, 115. 138 ‘Proceedings of the Conference held on the 7 April 1913’, 119. 139 Letter no. 93 from J.G. Cumming, 10 May 1913, 115. 140 Ibid, 115. 141 Ibid, 116.

150 Gupta was sent to carry on the experiment in certain districts of former Eastern Bengal and Assam; namely Tippera, Noākhāli, Dacca, Farīdpur, Backergunge and Pābna.142 The reports submitted by Gupta after a two-month trial of the circle system reflected the general sentiment of Weston’s reports. It was reported that the presidents now exhibited a “great keenness” in the conduct of their duties, because circle officers supervised them closely.143 Their reform was attributed to the fact that circle officers were able to “protect the ties between the rural police and the community who they serve” because they did not visibly represent the authority of the police.144 The circle officer was able to establish “personal relationships” with the panchayat, because they did not disrupt the “ties between the village police and the community who they serve”.145 To protect the façade of indirect rule in matters of village policing, the circle officer was deemed an exemplary figure. On the other hand, circle officers were useful because the police had been able to establish a close relationship with them. The fact that the circle officer was part of the subordinate civil service and was required periodically to visit the station enabled the police to establish their primary allegiance. It was reported in the 1913 annual report of the Bengal police that circle officers felt sufficiently connected to the regular police to “seek advice of Superintendents of Police, and receive the assistance of Inspectors of Police and Inspectors” when it was offered.146 That the loyalty of the circle officer tended to lie with the police rather than the presidents of the panchayat meant that the police could almost guarantee that where the conduct of panchayats had been unsatisfactory or suspicious, the circle officer would (and had) immediately informed the district superintendent.147

The ability of the police to extend their control into over chaukidars was a significant improvement on the past systems that had severed the connection between the police and the village. The benefits of the circle system were that the police could access the knowledge of the village police, could rely on the supply of their information at the thanā and could call upon them to check up on bad characters when necessary, without having to draw them directly into the regular police hierarchy. By inserting official authority to control the non-official panchayat, the chaukidari system functioned far more efficiently than it had done in the past. The “material assistance of the Circle officers” ensured that the police had access to accurate

142 Letter no. 68C.S from J.N. Gupta, on special duty to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 26 January, 1913, 123-125. IOR/P/9147. 143 Ibid, 123. 144 Ibid, 125. 145 Ibid, 125. 146 R.B. Hughes-Buller, Inspector-General of Police, Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency for 1913, Bengal Secretariat Press: Calcutta, 1914, 73. 147 Ibid, 77

151 information believed to be vital for “running down bad characters and for the investigation of police cases”.148 Its successes had shown that the village police could be subjected to official supervision, whilst upholding the idea that the “village police should not be subordinate to the regular police”. 149 The circle inspector was therefore viewed as the “keystone” of the chaukidari system, providing a means to connect the regular police with important village information, without betraying the notion of indirect police power.150 Overall, the scheme had “fostered the growth of a more efficient system of rural police administration under president panchayats”, pointing to the “great value and possibilities” of its total extension across Bengal.151 On the basis of its accomplishments in the experimental phase of the circle system, in 1913 the Governor of Bengal ordered its extension to every district in Bengal, thus setting the new direction that the question of supervision had taken over the last few years.152

The widening of the circle system to encompass police matters and its extension throughout Bengal after 1913 signified the consolidation of an official discourse on the matter of chaukidari supervision. By this point, both the government and the police tended to agree that the usefulness of indigenous agents for the purposes of rural control was subject to official backing. The role of the village police had been proven too important to the task of information collection to allow them to function in complete isolation from the police. It was agreed by 1913 that to ensure loyalty to the centre supervisory power must be entrusted to those most likely to comply – officials loyal to and paid by the government. This became embodied in the introduction of the circle system, which enabled supervisory power over the chaukidari to rest thoroughly with the centre. However, the maintenance of a suitable distance of the colonial police remained important, which was reflected in the use of civil officers, rather than police officers, to supervise the village system. As an assistant superintendent was reported to have said in 1913, “as soon as [villagers] find out that I am a Police Officer, they try and avoid me as much as they can”.153 The perseverance of this idea through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had meant that a regular police would be kept at arms length from villagers,

148 Letter no. 1403 From C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’, 147. 149 ‘Proceedings of the Conference held on the 7 April 1913 to consider certain questions of administrative policy in connection with the introduction of the Circle System and the reorganization of the Chaukidari Panchayati system’, 119. IOR/P/9147. 150 Ibid, 119. 151 Letter no. 1403 From C.J. Stevenson-Moore, ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’, 147. 152 ‘Proceedings of the Conference held on the 7 April 1913, 119. 153 R.B. Hughes-Buller, Inspector-General of Police, Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces 1913, 73.

152 who would continue to maintain and fund their own chaukidari establishment, though under the supervision of supposedly innocuous government agents.

Evidently, information and the expansion of police knowledge had remained chief concerns of the Bengal police into the twentieth century. The importance of the chaukidari as information collectors in particular was highlighted most clearly in a struggle to control access to village information, which culminated in 1913, altering significantly aspects of Bengal’s local administrative structures.

153 Conclusion

This thesis has described and analysed the origins, particularities and consequences of surveillance policing in colonial Bengal, in a key period of administrative development, 1861 to 1913. Broadly speaking, surveillance was a preventative police strategy that sought to draw a line around an imagined or actual criminal population and to keep watch over those individuals who fell within its bounds. It was a selective deployment of police resources that responded to assumptions about where crime was committed and who was likely to commit it. Surveillance thus involved the police in the formation of assumptions about Bengal’s most threatening criminals, their habits, associations and locale. The present study has therefore focused on a police epistemology of surveillance; comprised by what the colonial police administration believed they could know, the apparatus they built to obtain police knowledge, and the procedures of surveillance that transformed police knowledge into an object of use.

The overall contribution of this thesis to scholarly understandings about governance in India is to highlight the varied purposes of colonial knowledge and the separate police context that expanded an all-India information order.1 Certainly, policing in Bengal reflected the inquisitive and paper-obsessed nature of colonial rule in India, where the colonial state used historical knowledge, documentation, certification, and ethnography to transform knowledge into power.2 A documentation project that saw these epiphenomenal areas of colonial impact (which accompanied territorial conquest and brute force) being used as a means to package, subsume, and rule India, included the production of police knowledge as a means to circumscribe and ‘know’ criminal Bengal.3 However, rather than arguing that policing shared the aims of this grandiose project, the present thesis concludes that separate exigencies encountered by police administrators expanded India’s information order. A paper-obsessed colonial state was not solely the by-product of an imperial abstraction to achieve foreign domination, but one that was grounded in separate administrative realities.

This thesis used a theory of surveillance to demonstrate the need to widen the scope of the scholarly debate that surrounds the use of colonial knowledge as a tool of imperial domination. It shows how the production and use of colonial knowledge in a project of surveillance was aimed at extending limited caches of police power in order to prevent crime and secure public

1 C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information, 6. 2 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’, xii. 3 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’, xi.

154 order, and not to shore up foreign rule in India. 4 In this thesis colonial knowledge was therefore considered as an object of use, and not necessarily a political tool. Its use in the police administration was considered outside the paradigm of imperialism, therefore expanding the domain of current scholarship that views colonial knowledge as narrowly associated with the relationship between colonised and coloniser.

A theory of surveillance articulated in the thesis was connected firstly with the ‘smallness’ of the enrolled police force in colonial Bengal. Economic and philosophical forces combined to produce a relatively small colonial police in 1861, despite a trend towards enlarging the ranks of the police that had been gathering pace since the early 1850s. Colonial ideas about governance and securing public order in India, which were transformed in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, stressed the need for covert and indirect policing. This reiterated an eighteenth century administrative preference for indirect rule, and conciliatory modes of imperial governance, and would become reflected in the legislative and philosophical underpinnings of the new police in Bengal. In particular, the perseverance of a preference for indirect policing produced strategies of crime prevention that made selective use of limited police resources to secure public order. The Bengal police relied upon preventative surveillance, information collection and an archive of police knowledge because the police presence throughout the countryside was neither total nor constant. A preference to maintain a distance between themselves and the population meant the police were reliant upon information about the people and places that required a vigilant police presence.

The development of the idea that the police were foremost in the prevention of repeat offences formed the second analysis of a surveillance epistemology. Surveillance was a strategy of policing developed to prevent the crimes of individuals who were believed to be most likely to commit crime; those who were suspected and actual repeat offenders. It was given impetus by a judicial system that was viewed as unable to deter offenders from committing further crimes, which had produced the idea among the police that the suppression of crime was reliant on their abilities to prevent it. Throughout the nineteenth century, in light of police attitudes that punishment was unable to deter habitual criminals from a ‘life of crime’, and of a seemingly worsening or at least persistent problem of habitual criminality, the police expanded a system of surveillance that would function separately from Bengal’s judicial and punishment

4 C.A. Bayly, Knowing the Country, 6.

155 apparatus. By the first decade of the twentieth century, it was an important function in the police repertoire of crime control and prevention.

Within this analysis, it is made clear that the Bengal police utilised surveillance to resolve problems associated with the fact that the police was limited in scope and number, and to address their understanding of crime and disorder in the province, and not to underpin a colonial relationship of dominance. Indeed, the managerial ranks of the Bengal police used their relative freedom from the colonial legislature to shape policing strategies and the administrative hierarchy according to the idea that surveillance policing was the best way to secure rural order in Bengal.

This analysis was made evident through the second section of the thesis, which detailed the aspects of Bengal’s police administration that were defined by its surveillance project and its use of colonial knowledge. It focused on three key areas of police development, which defined the police as a preventative police force that relied on information collection and the utility of police knowledge.

Firstly it considered that interplay between the reality of limited police resources, a belief in covert and distant police power, and a commitment of the police themselves to prevent habitual criminality came to define the primary technological apparatus of surveillance policing and contributed to an overall bureaucratisation of policing in Bengal. During the period that witnessed the development of surveillance, one can note the rising importance of paperwork – the collection, collation and classification of written information. Surveillance was a targeted and responsive deployment of police personnel to pre-empt and prevent repeat offences, which entailed that written information was vital. Paperwork allowed the police to record areas where crime was likely to occur, localities where sudden increases in crime had occurred, and information about criminals who were assumed most likely to commit crime. The transformation of this knowledge into a tangible surveillance function was argued to be vital for preventing crime, and for utilising limited resources in a selective and targeted way. Collecting, recording, classifying and accessing police information were therefore primary operational tasks of the police, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, paperwork was believed to be an essential modality in crime prevention. Pursuant to the notion that the bureaucratisation of police work in colonial Bengal was connected with the aims of the surveillance project, the thesis examined the tools and systems that were designed to expand the outer limits of what was and could be known about criminal Bengal.

156 Secondly it argued that a police-built surveillance project reiterated and demarcated the reliance of the colonial police on informal or non-enrolled village agents, and characterised their daily interaction. While a small regular police was self-confessedly reliant on chaukidars to conduct general policing duties in the village, the importance of information-based surveillance redefined this relationship. Targeted surveillance, involving the analysis of collected information, and the deployment of police agents to not merely conduct surveillance according to the patterns discerned after analysis, but also to collect information for analysis, required the separation of police personnel into mutually reinforcing categories for the exchange of information. Information-based surveillance was shown in the thesis to have produced a vertically divided hierarchy of personnel, which operated within a single system of information exchange between the regular and non-enrolled police agencies in Bengal. An early definition of this relationship, that which was legalised within the village Chaukidari Act (VI of 1870), was consolidated and expanded upon by an emergent function of surveillance.

A final area of discussion, which highlighted the use of colonial knowledge as administrative, rather than imperial power, focused on the ongoing police efforts to establish legitimate and effective supervisory power over the chaukidary and their channels of village information. The control of police knowledge was a chief concern of the Bengal police administration throughout the period under examination, culminating in the overhaul of Bengal’s local village administration in 1913, which the police helped to shape. The period under consideration is shown to have revealed a tension between protecting the principles of a so-called ancient village system, and exerting executive strength to access information for use in strategies of preventative policing. By 1913, a policy of official supervision prevailed and the police were able to influence the reform of village administration to provide the necessary structures of supervision over village information. The thesis ended here; the year 1913 demarcating the end of a police-led reform project to establish control over village information, and to define their relationship with village agents.5

Surveillance was treated in the present study as evidence of the use of colonial knowledge by the ruling power in India, but as lying outside a paradigm of imperial domination and the colonised/coloniser relationship. The operation of the Bengal police as a preventative policing agency that was reliant on information collection and its transformation into useable

5 While surveillance continued to be utilised as a strategy of preventative surveillance beyond this date, the fact that the thesis was concerned to explicate the origins and course of development of surveillance policing justified concluding the thesis in 1913, a moment that saw its consolidation.

157 surveillance modalities certainly expanded an information order, without sharing its narrow political aims. Indeed, there was a separate police context that is vital to an understanding of the development of the surveillance function of the police. A restricted police budget, a set of abstract assumptions about the character of colonial crime, and the influence of western models of surveillance, are viewed as providing the rationale for and informing the character of surveillance policing. This study recognises that many administrative tools that the British used were reliant on the collection and construction of colonial knowledge, but seeks to demonstrate that they cannot all be viewed as stemming from a single purpose of colonial control. The police role in constructing an information order was produced within a separate context, which reflected the themes and idiosyncrasies of British rule in India, but did not share the same purposes and therefore cannot be viewed within a paradigm of colonial domination and control.

Beyond discussions of colonial governance and the use of knowledge and power in South Asia, the thesis redresses two aspects of a small, but important, literature about policing in India. The thesis concludes that the consolidation of a vast bureaucratic function of surveillance defined the character of the Bengal police as a preventative police force that was reliant on the collection and analysis of information. This serves to temper the claim, dominant amongst police historians of India, that in colonial India the police operated fundamentally to secure colonial control by a foreign power. Those examining the emergence of the new police idea in India during the mid-nineteenth century have viewed it as an undertaking to strengthen and refine the state apparatus prior to and in the aftermath of the rebellion. More commonly for those studying the Bengal police, the repressive function of the police after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and the subsequent rise of political terrorism, has been central. The police have therefore been viewed in current historiography as a facsimile of foreign power. Whilst the thesis has not directly challenged the wisdom that the police introduced into India in 1861 was a bulwark for newly defined colonial power, and that it continued to exhibit such characteristics throughout Britain’s rule over India, it seeks to re-focus the debate onto the aspects of colonial policing that had little or no connection with establishing or maintaining foreign rule. In fact, as the study has shown, a vastly, yet under-examined, aspect of colonial policing was the surveillance project, driven by a concern to prevent crime, rather than to achieve abstract imperial aims.

A defining feature of colonial policing, the study has argued, was that it functioned as a preventative and professional body that was reliant on the collection and analysis of

158 information. During the period between 1861 and 1913 this function was consolidated by the development and use of a vast bureaucratic system of surveillance. To demonstrate the influence of surveillance three key areas of police development were examined. Firstly, as Chapter Five demonstrated, efforts to secure colonial order through the realisation of a surveillance project produced the police record as a primary technological apparatus used by the police. Secondly, Chapter Six demonstrated how the local and official strategies of surveillance that were developed by police administrators would define the everyday tasks of regular police and the non-enrolled or non-official village police. Lastly, it was shown in Chapter Seven that a concern to guarantee the delivery of criminal information from the village determined the relationship of supervision and regulation between the regular police and the village police. It is within these key areas of police development that a surveillance epistemology can be seen as defining the Bengal police as a preventative and professional body, reliant on the collection and analysis of information. Of minimal relevance, however, were the imperial purposes of the British government, which have otherwise dominated in studies of Indian policing. It is for this reason that the study sought to redefine a discussion of the characteristics of policing in Bengal, arguing that surveillance should be placed in the centre, alongside the political underpinnings of policing in colonial South Asia.

In summary, the thesis is the product of the author’s desire to understand what British administrators of the Bengal police believed they could know about crime, and how knowledge was utilised in an attempt to prevent it. By extension, it is the product of a desire to understand how a police-belief in the utility of ‘knowing’ criminal Bengal determined administrative decision-making about police technology, indigenous collaborations, and relationships of internal supervision within a complex police hierarchy. The thesis has revealed that members of Bengal’s police administration believed the nature of crime and criminals in India could be comprehended as a series of facts and data, and that this was useful in preventing crime when deployed as a surveillance function. The thesis can therefore be considered an exploration of British assumptions about the usefulness of information and the necessity of surveillance, and the subsequent experiments and procedures that determined the character of policing as a preventative policing body reliant on the collection, classification and utilisation of information.

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_____. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1894. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893. IOR/V/24/3202.

_____. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1897. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893. IOR/V/24/3202.

Hughes-Buller, R.B. Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency for 1913. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1914. IOR/V/24/3204.

Plowden, C.W.C. Annual Report of the Police of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1909. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1910. IOR/V/24/3204.

Pughe, J.R. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1873, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1874. IOR/V/24/3198.

Masters, J. Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency for 1899. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1900. IOR/V/24/3202.

162 Masters J. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1899, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1900. IOR/V/24/3203.

Monro J. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1877. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1878. IOR/V/24/3199.

Morshead, L.F. Report of the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency for 1909. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1910. IOR/V/24/3204.

Morshead, L.F. Report on the Administration of the Police of the Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency. Ranchi: Bihār and Orissa Government Press, 1912. BL Shelfmark IOR/V/24/3204.

Ravenshaw, T.E. Annual Report of the Police of the Cuttack Division, 1860-1867. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1868. IOR/V/24/519.

Stevenson-Moore, C.J. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1904. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1905. IOR/V/24/3203.

Stevenson-Moore, C.J. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. ‘Resolution of the Inspector-General for 1910’. in L.F. Morshead, Inspector-General of Police, Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1910. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. IOR/V/24/3204.

Veasey, J.C. Report of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for the year 1887. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1888. IOR/V/24/3201.

Indian Office Records, Police Collection (Mss Eur F161)

Assistant General to the Inspector-General of Police, West Bengal to Shri Stracey, Deputy Commandant, Central Police Training College. Forwarding details of the Honoraria granted to K.B. Azizul Haqq and Hai Hem Chandra Basu Bahadaur for their outstanding work on fingerprinting. Letter no. 7402A, 27 May 1963. Mss Eur 161/185. la Bourchardier, B.R.E. ‘A Note on the Thugee and Dacoity Department, 1829 – 1904’. Despatch no. 155, June 1904. Mss Eur F161/172.

‘Extract from Petition of 1,800 Christian Missionaries to Bengal Legislative Council’, 15. Box 15/23. Mss Eur F161/8.

163 Giles, A.H. Report on the Police in Presidency Towns. India Home Proceedings (Police), no. 2964, 1887. Mss Eur F161/15/2.

Kennedy, J.P. Lecture on Police and Criminal Jurisprudence. United Service Institution: London, March 1889. Mss Eur F161/14.

Morley, John, Secretary of State, India. ‘Extract from Speech of Lord Morley, speaking at an Indian Civil Service dinner in London on the duties of the government to keep order’. July 1908. Mss Eur F161/20.

Papers Relating to a Bill to Provide for the More Effectual Surveillance and Control of Habitual Offenders in India and for Certain Connected Purposes, Home Department, Serial no. 12, Superintendent Government Printing, 1893. MF/1/530, no. 319 (formerly Mss Eur F161/185).

- Beames, John. President of the Police Reform Committee to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. 10 November 1890.

- Edgar, Sir John. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department. Letter no. 2463, 24 June 1891.

- Extracts from a Private Letter from Munro J, former Inspector-General of Police, Bengal and Superintendent of Criminal Investigations London, 1891.

- Menzies, Colonel O. Inspector-General of Police, Punjab to the Inspectors-General of Bombay, Madras, Lower Provinces, North West Provinces, Central Provinces, and Hyderabad Assigned Districts. Letter no. 732, 17 March 1886.

- Quinn, C.C. Offg. Commissioner, Bhāgalpur Division and Santāl Parganas, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Letter no. 206ct, 30 December 1890.

- Stanley, A.E. Offg. Magistrate of Sārun to the Offg. Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial, Political and Appointment Department. 28 December 1890.

- Veasey, J.C. Inspector-General of the Bengal Police to Colonel O. Menzies, Inspector General of the Punjab Police. Letter no. 336, 30 March 1886.

164 Private Papers Relating to the History of Fingerprints, compiled during the 1960s. Mss Eur F161/181-189.

- Assistant General to the Inspector-General of Police, West Bengal to Shri Stracey, Deputy Commandant, Central Police Training College, forwarding details of the Honoraria granted to K.B. Azizul Haqq and Hai Hem Chandra Basu Bahadaur for their outstanding work on fingerprinting, no. 7402A, 27 May 1963.

- ‘Police Surveillance’, extract from Practical Police Work, a series of police lectures by J.A. Scott, 1932.

Bengal Police and Judicial Proceedings (IOR/P)

Bengal Proceedings, 1 May 1860 to 31 May 1860, IOR/P/146/27

‘Government Resolution Appointing the Police Commission’, 17 August 1860.

‘Report of Committee appointed by Government to consider the reform of the police of the Lower Provinces of Bengal’. 1860.

Bengal Police Proceedings, 1867 to 1877, IOR/P/924:

Browne, Lord H. Ulick. Commissioner of the Rājshāhi and Cooch Behār Division to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, ‘Dacoity in Rājshāhi and Cooch Behār: Suppression, Statistics, Measures Adopted’. Letter no. 169, 3 May 1876.

Mangles, R.L. ‘Suppression of Dacoity in Bengal’. Circular no. 61, 30 November 1875.

Newberry, H.J. Joint Magistrate of Monghyr to E. Lockwood, Magistrate of the District of Monghyr. 16 May 1876.

Porsch, R. Offg. Magistrate of Noākhāli, to all District Superintendents. Letter no. 705, 28 March 1876.

Bengal Police Proceedings, 1875, IOR/P/259:

Clay, A.L. Magistrate of Chittagong to the Commissioner of the Chittagong Division. ‘Working of the New Chowkeedari (sic) Law’. Letter no. 197, 27 January 1874.

165 Monro, J. Magistrate of Nadiā district, to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division. ‘Report on the Bedyas, their Character and Mode of Living’. Letter no. 6429, 27 August 1873.

Porter, G.E. Magistrate of Sāran to the Commissioner of the Patna Division. ‘Act VI (B.C.) of 1870 Review’. Letter no. 505, 15 April 1875.

Pughe, Colonel J.R. Inspector-General of Police of Bengal to the Government of Bengal. ‘Major Gordon’s Scheme for Reforming Village Police’. Letter no. 1478.

Bengal Police Proceedings, 1879, IOR/P/1325:

Inspector-General of Police, Bengal to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, ‘The Gondah Burwars’. Letter no. 12784, 26 September 1879.

Bengal Judicial Proceedings, 1884, IOR/P/2247:

Lowis, E. E. Commissioner of the Chittagong District to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department. Letter no. 586GM. 28 August 1882.

Metcalfe, C.T. Offg. Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division and the Santāl Parganas, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department. ‘Amendment of Law Relating to Powers and Duties of Village and Road Chaukidars’. Letter no. 1068J, file 522-153, July 1882.

Monro, J. Offg. Commissioner of the Presidency division to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal. File 552-17, 16 August 1882.

Monro, J. Offg. Commissioner of the Presidency division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department. Circular no. 30J, file 522-17, 22 June 1881.

Monro, J., C.F. Worsley, E.V. Westmacott. Members of Committee appointed to enquire into the working of Act VI of 1870. File 106 A-28, 27 April 1883.

‘Resolution of the Police Committee appointed to enquire and consider what measures should be adopted for placing the entire system of the village watch on a more satisfactory footing’. File 106 A-29, 21 May 1884.

166 Bengal Judicial Proceedings, April to July 1887, IOR/P/2944:

Kirkwood, T.M. Sessions Judge of Patna to the Magistrate of Patna. Letter no. 3383, 18 August 1885.

Kirkwood, T.M. Judge of the Court of Sessions. ‘Appeal from the Order of C. Quinn, Magistrate of Patna’. Criminal Appeal. no. 13, 27 December 1886.

Paget, H.E.C. Memorandum of the Inspector-General of Police, no. 5011, 21 May 1886.

Bengal Judicial Proceedings, October to December 1892, IOR/P/4105:

C.C. Quinn. Offg. Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Letter no. 1817, 21 October 1891.

Castairs, R. Deputy Commissioner of the Santāl Parganas, to the Commissioner of the Bhāgalpur Division. Letter no. 2744J, 14 August 1891.

Cotton, H.J.S. Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to all Commissioners of Divisions. Letter no. 2991J, file 4-c/5.1. 28 July 1891.

Cotton, H.J.S. Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to all Commissioners of Divisions. Letter no. 1231J, file p-54/2.8. 18 March 1892.

Edgar, John. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to all Commissioners of Divisions, ‘Submitting Draft Chaukidari Bill’. Letter no, 2991J, file 4-c/5.1. 28 July 1891.

Lowis, E.E. Commissioner of the Rājshāhi Division to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Letter no. 501, 13 October 1891.

Lyall, C.J. Offg. Secretary to the Government of India, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. ‘Control of Habitual Criminals: Draft Bill and Correspondence’. Letter no. 156/157, 31 May 1890.

Sarvadhikari, Babu Raj Kumar. Secretary, British Indian Association, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Letter no. 39, 26 September 1891.

Stevenson-Moore, C.J. Magistrate of Jessore to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division. Letter no. 1693G, 17 September 1891.

167 Bengal Judicial Proceedings, January to April 1893, IOR/P/4335:

MacDonnell, A.P. Letter to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, , ‘Return of Serious Crime’, 22 December 1888.

Baker, E.N. Offg. Deputy Commissioner of Manbhum to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. 14 August 1889.

Bengal Judicial Proceedings, May to July 1895, IOR/P/4742:

E.R. to Chief Secretary of Government of Bengal, 26 June 1895.

Bengal Judicial Proceedings 1912, IOR/P/8929:

‘Memorandum on the working of the President Panchayat System and the Introduction of Circle Officers for the Control and Guidance of Presidents’. 7 April 1911, no. 14.

Bengal Judicial Proceedings, January to June 1913, IOR/P/9147:

Bengal Government in Council to R.W. Carlyle. Letter no. 1527, 27 June 1911.

Bonham-Carter, N. Commissioner of Dacca Division, to the Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Eastern Bengal and Assam. Letter no. 1276, 30 May, 1911.

Carlyle, R.W. Inspector-General of Police to the Government of India, Home Department. Letter no. 1724/2545, 8/4 April 1907.

Cumming, J.G. Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to all Commissioners of the Division. Letter no. 93, file p/9-c/25.2. 10 May 1913.

Dixon, F.P. Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Eastern Bengal and Assam, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Letter no. 1131. 7 August 1911.

Gupta, J.N. On Special Duty, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Letter no. 68C.S. 26 January 1913.

‘Proceedings of the Conference held to consider certain questions of administrative policy in connection with the introduction of the Circle System and the reorganisation of the Chaukidari Panchayati system’. 7 April 1913.

168 Stevenson-Moore, C.J.. Chief Secretary to the Secretary of the Government of India, Home Department. ‘Proposal for an increase to the Cadre of Sub-Deputy Collectors for the work in connection with the experimental chaukidari circle system’. Letter no. 1403, 19 March 1913.

Bengal Police Proceedings, January to July 1919, IOR/P/10522:

Plowden, C.W.C., Inspector-General of Police to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, ‘Amendment to rule 121 of Part 1, Police Regulations’. 12 March, 1919.

Miscellaneous India Office Records

A Collection of The Acts passed by the Governor General of India in Council in the year 1871, Office of Superintendent of Government Printing: Calcutta, 1872. IOR/V/8/42.

Blunt, William. An Abstract of the Regulations enacted for the Administration of the Police and Criminal Justice, in the Provinces of Bengal, Behar, & Orissa. Vol. 4. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1818. 8022.f.23.

Letter from the Court of Directors to Governor General in Council, 24 Sept 1856. India and Bengal Despatches, 6 Aug – 24 September 1857. E/4/838.

F.J. Halliday, ‘Minute by the Honourable the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal on Necessary Reforms at the Madrusseh, or Mahommedan College, Calcutta’. Calcutta: 1858. I.S.be.108.(20).

Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Bengal, vol. 1, Superintendent of Government Printing: Calcutta, 1909, 106. OIH 915.4

Acts of Government

The Criminal Tribes’ Act (XXVII of 1871) amended by Act (III of 1911)

The Chaukidari Act (VI of B.C. 1870), amended by Acts I, B.C., of 1871, 1886, and 1892.

The Explosive Substances Act (VI of 1908)

The Indian Code of Criminal Procedure, Act (XXV of 1861) amended by Act (VIII of 1869)

169 The Indian Police Act (V of 1860)

The Indian Newspapers Act (VI of 1908)

Queensland State Archives (QSA)

General Correspondence, Colonial Secretary (Series 16865)

Chamberlain, Joseph. Circular Memo, 8 July 1904, Item 316152, 03/08533.

Costes, Romain, Chief of the Anthropometric Service at New Caledonia, ‘Memo to Queensland Police Commissioner on the working of the Bertillon System of Identification’, 6 March 1900. Item 316152.

‘Report of the Commissioner for Police London’, 1902. Item 316152, 02/10546.

Fryer Library, University of Queensland (FLUQ)

Indian Police Collection. Topographical files.

Notes on the System of Police in Bengal Presidency, (1855-57). 12 May 1969. (9160/34).

Kidd, F.W. The Informer: Account of Dacoity. Mymensingh: 1920. (9160/35).

S.G. Taylor, ‘The Terrorist Movement in Bengal, 1930-34. 1923-36. (9160/34).

Contemporary published material

Bampfylde-Fuller, Sir Joseph. Studies of Indian Life and Sentiment. London: John Murray, 1910.

Banerjee, H.N. An Analysis of The Indian Penal Code. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, 1921.

Bertillon, Alphonse. ‘The Identification of the Criminal Classes: An Address by Alphonse Bertillon and Speech by M.L. Herbette’. London: Spottiswoode and Co, 1889.

Booth-Tucker, Frederick. ‘Criminocurology, or, The Indian Criminal and What to do with Him’, Review of the Work of the Salvation Army among the Criminal Tribes of India. Simla: The Salvation Army, 1911.

170 Desai, Trikamlal. An Analytical Commentary on the Code of Criminal Procedure: With a Brief Abstract of the Code and Examination of Questions and Answers. Calcutta: Ahmedabad Print, 1905.

Edwards, C.M. The Criminal Tribes in India. London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1922.

Galton, Francis. Finger Prints. London: Macmillan, 1892.

Henry, E.R. Classification and Uses of Fingerprints. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1900.

Kinnaird, Arthur. ‘Bengal: its landed tenure and police system’. Speech in the House of Commons, June 11, 1857. London: James Ridgway, 1857.

Kitts, E.J. A Compendium of the Castes and Tribes of India. Calcutta: Education Society’s Press, 1885. W 780.

Rao, P. Hari, The Indian Police Act (Act V of 1861) and the Indian Police Act (III of 1888) and the Police (Incitement to Disaffection) Act (XXII of 1922) with Commentaries and Notes of Case-Law Thereon. Madras: The Law Printing House, 1927.

Ramsay, H.M. Detective Footprints, Bengal, 1874-1881: With Bearings for a Future Course. London: Army and Navy Co-operative Society, 1882.

Read, D.H. Moutray. ‘Policing the Empire’. United Empire 2 (1911): 854-60.

Trevelyan, George Otto. The Competition-Wallah. London: Macmillan’s Magazine, 1864.

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Books/chapters

Arnold, David. Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859 to 1947. Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Bailey, Victor. ‘The Fabrication of Deviance: 'Dangerous Classes' and 'Criminal Classes' in Victorian England’. In Protest and Survival: Essays for E.P. Thompson, edited by John Rule and Robert Malcolmson. London: The Merlin Press, 1993.

171 ———. ‘The Metropolitan Police, the Home Office and the Threat of Outcast London’. In Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, edited by Victor Bailey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981.

Banerjee, Sumanta. The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan.

Bayly, C.A. ‘The Second British Empire’. In The Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, edited by Robin W. Winks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 54-72

______. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: University Press, 1996.

Bhowmik, S.K. Rural Police, Local Justice in Bengal: 1772-1870. Calcutta: Nalanda Publications, 1991.

Brogden, Michael. ‘The Emergence of the Police: The Colonial Dimension’. In Policing: Key Readings, edited by Tim Newburn. Portland: Willan Publishing, 2005. 69-79

———. The Police: Autonomy and Consent. London: Academic Press, 1982.

Burroughs, Peter. ‘Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire’. In The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, 170-97. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002.

Chattopadhyay, Basudeb. Crime and Control in Early Colonial Bengal: 1770-1860. Calcutta: KP Bagchi and Company, 2000.

Cohen, Stanley. Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985.

Cohn Bernard. Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge: the British in India. Princeton: University Press, 1996.

Colley, Linda. Captives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.

Critchley, T.A. A History of Police in England and Wales. London: Constable, 1967.

172 Cullen, Francis T. and John B. Toward a Paradigm of Labelling Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 1978.

Dandeker, Christopher. Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and discipline from 1700 to the present day. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, 1990.

Dash, Mike. Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult. London: Granta. 2005.

Davis, Jennifer. ‘Urban Policing and Its Objects: Comparative Themes in England and France in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’. In Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism, and Public Order, 1850-1940, edited by Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. 1-17

Edwards, Michael. British in India: 1772 – 1947, A Survey of the Nature and Effects of Alien Rule. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967.

Emsley, Clive. ‘The Changes in Policing and Penal Policy in Nineteenth Century Europe’. In Crime and Empire 1840-1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, edited by Graeme Dunstall and Barry S. Godfrey. Devon: Willan Publishing, 2005. 8-24.

———. Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900. New York: Longman 1996.

Finnane, Mark. ‘Crimes of Violence, Crimes of Empire?’ In Crime and Empire, 1840-1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, edited by Graeme Dunstall and Barry S. Godfrey. Devon: Willan, 2005. 43-56.

Fisher, Michael H. Indirect Rule in India: Residents and Residency System, 1764-1858. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M Sheridan-Smith. New York: Tavistock Press, 1972.

———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane. 1977

———. ‘Governmentality’. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality edited by Colin Gordon, Graham Burchell, and Peter Miller. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 87-104

173 Giddens, Anthony. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Ghosh, Nityapriya and Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay (eds), Partition of Bengal: Significant Signposts 1905-1911, Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 2005.

Gordon, Colin, ed. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 of Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Gupta, Anandswarup. Crime and Police in India: Up to 1861. Agra: Sahitya Bhawan, 1974.

Gupta, Anandswarup. The Police in British India: 1861 to 1947. New Delhi: Concept Publishers, 1979.

Howell, Philip. ‘Prostitution and the Place of Empire: Regulation and Repeal in Hong Kong and the British Imperial Network’. In (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, edited by Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005. 175-200

Jones, David. Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth Century Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Killingray, David and David M. Anderson. ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire, 1830-1940’. In Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830-1940, edited by David M. Anderson and David Killingray. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

______. Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917-65. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.

Laidlaw, Zoe. Colonial Connections 1815-1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government. Edited by John M. MacKenzie, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.

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174 Lambert, David. ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’. In Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by David Lambert and Alan Lester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 1-31

Lane, Roger. ‘Urban Police and Crime in Nineteenth Century America’. In Modern Policing: Crime and Justice, a Review of Research, edited by Michael Tonry and Norval Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 1-50

Levine, Philippa, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, New York: Routledge, 2003.

Mayer, John A. ‘Notes Towards a Working Definition of Social Control in Historical Analysis’. In Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, edited by Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983. 17-38

McLane, John R. Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth Century Bengal. Cambridge: University Press, 1993.

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Neal, David. The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Petrow, Stefan. Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office 1870-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Philips, David and Robert D. Storch, Policing Provincial England 1829-1856: The Politics of Reform. London: Leicester University Press, 1999.

175 Porter, Andrew. ‘Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century’. In The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 1-27

———, ed. The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Roger Louis. Vol. III, The Oxford History of the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Porter, Bernard. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Pratt, John. ‘Explaining the History of Punishment’. In Crime and Empire 1840-1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context. Devon: Willan, 2005. 25-42

Proudfoot, Lindsay J. and Michael M. Roche. ‘Introduction: Place, Network, and the Geographies of Empire’. In (Dis)Placing Empire : Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, edited by Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005.

Ramusach, Barbara N. The New Cambridge History of India: The Indian Princes and their States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Reith, Charles. British Police and the Democratic Ideal. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.

Robb, Peter. ‘The Ordering of Rural India’ in David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control 1830-1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1991. 126-150.

Schwarz, Henry. Constructing the Criminal Tribe in India: Acting like a Thief. Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010.

Scull, Stanley Cohen and Andrew. ‘Introduction: Social Control in History and Sociology’. In Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, edited by Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983. 1-16

Sengoopta, Chandak. Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was born in Colonial India. London: Macmillan, 2003.

176 Silver, Allan. ‘The Demand for Order in Civil Society: A Review of Some Themes in the History of Urban Crime, Police, and Riot’. In The Police: Six Sociological Essays, edited by David J. Bordua, 1-24. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967.

Spitzer, Steven. ‘The Rationalisation of Crime Control in Capitalist Society’. In Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, edited by Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, 312-33. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983.

Washbrook, D.A. ‘India, 1818-1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’. In Andrew Porter (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 396-421.

Weinberger, Clive Emsley and Barbara. ‘Introduction’. In Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism, and Public Order, 1850-1940, edited by Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. vii-xiii

Weiner, Martin J. Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Police in England, 1830- 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Wilson, Dean. The Beat: Policing a Victorian City. Melbourne: Circa, 2006.

Wilson, Jon. The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Woodworth, Richard J. and Jerome H. Skolnick. ‘Bureaucracy, Information, and Social Control: A Study of a Morals Detail’. In The Police: Six Sociological Essays, edited by David J. Bordua, 99-137. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967.

Wright, Barry. ‘Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code: Historical Context and Originating Principles’. In Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Challenges of Modern Penal Reform, edited by Wing Cheon-Chan, Barry Wright, Stanley Yeo, 19-55. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011.

Wylie, Diana. ‘Disease, Diet, and Gender: Late Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Empire’. In The Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, edited by Robin W. Winks, 277-89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

177 Yang, Anand. ‘Dangerous Castes and Tribes: The Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doms of North East India’ in Anand Yand (ed.) Crime and Criminality in British India. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Journal Articles

Arnold, David. ‘The Police and Colonial Control in South India’. Social Scientist 4, no. 12 (Jul. 1976): 3-16.

Baran Ray, Anil. ‘Communal Attitudes to British Policy: The Case of the Partition of Bengal, 1905’. Social Scientist 6, no. 5 (December 1977): 34-46.

Biswas, A.K. ‘Paradox of Anti-Partition and Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1905’, Social Scientist 23, no. 4/6 (April-June 1995): 38-57.

Brogden, Mike. ‘The Emergence of the Colonial Police: The Colonial Dimension’. The British Journal of Criminology 27, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 4-14.

Brown, M. ‘“The most desperate characters in all India”: Reconsidering law and penal policy in British India’. Punishment and Society: The International Journal of Penology 3, (2001): 433-440.

———. ‘Ethnology and colonial administration in nineteenth century British India: The question of native crime and criminality’. British Journal of the History of Science. 36 (2003): 1-19.

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