TO PROTECT AND SERVE? THE INDIAN COLONIAL POLICE: 1861–1932 A Thesis by MICHAEL R. HINZ, JR. Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2016 TO PROTECT AND SERVE? THE INDIAN COLONIAL POLICE: 1861–1932 A Thesis by MICHAEL R. HINZ, JR. Approved by: Advisor: William Kuracina Committee: Jessica Brannon-Wranosky Mark Moreno Head of Department: William Kuracina Dean of the College: Salvatore Attardo Dean of Graduate Studies: Arlene Horne iii Copyright © 2016 Michael Ray Hinz, Jr. iv ABSTRACT TO PROTECT AND SERVE? THE INDIAN COLONIAL POLICE: 1861–1932 Michael R. Hinz, Jr., MA Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2016 Advisor: William F. Kuracina, PhD Following the Munity of 1857 to independence in 1947, no single colonial institution was more essential for British rule than the Indian Colonial Police. Through this organization, challenges to the colonial regime were met; this institution also interacted most frequently with the indigenous population in India. Consequently, the colonial police of India represents a prism through which the rest of British colonial rule can be holistically understood. Reforms introduced to this police structure suggest that this imperial institution required accommodation to handle precise colonial law enforcement needs as the tide of indigenous nationalism, starting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, threatened to disrupt Britain’s foreign domination. Reforms, therefore, did not occur in a vacuum, but rather were introduced by the British in response to very precise conditions and imperial imperatives. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their support during the preparation of the thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. William F. Kuracina whose encouragement, great patience, and scholarly advice helped to make this thesis possible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1 2. FRAMING THE APPARTUS OF CONTROL .................................................................... 24 3. REFORMING THE APPARTUS OF CONTROL ............................................................... 45 4. THE FRUSTRATIONS OF CONTROL .............................................................................. 67 5. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................... 92 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................... 100 APPENDICES Appendix I. List of Terms .................................................................................................................. 104 VITA ................................................................................................................................................... 106 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Sir, that is the way the police work. There is no wonder if people distrust them. -Dewan Bahadur Rangachariar, resident of Madras, circa 19321 Just before dawn, during the early morning hours of October 21, 1932, a small group of four British nationals slowly maneuvered their automobile along antiquated dirt roads, barely wide enough to accommodate their car, constructed by the repeated tracks made by the traffic of animal carts. As they made their way through India’s western province of Gujarat, they were not there in the capacity of pleasure seeking tourists, content on witnessing the wonders of the sub- continent. The assembly had arrived to witness and study the growing development of Civil Disobedience in Britain’s key colonial territory with the colonial authorities’ attempts to suppress the nationalist movement. As the representatives of the Indian League of London reached their destination of the village of Bochesan, they did not have to wait long to collect information.2 As they entered the village unnoticed, the denizens of Bochesan began preparing for Congress celebration day; however, they were not the only ones there for the day’s events, so too was the Indian Police. Concealing themselves behind a parapet wall, as not to be observed by the Raj’s civil authorities, the league members made their way to a house terrace to witness the scheduled celebratory parade. Soon a procession of thirty to forty people, the vast majority of whom were women, slowly proceeded down the village road. As the assemblage neared the league’s surveillance point, the police gathered with their dreaded lathis to halt the illegal nationalist spectacle. To protest the action of the police, the marchers squatted down on the road 1 Leonard Matters, V.K. Menon, Monica Whately, and Ellen Wilkinson, Condition of India: Being the Report of the Delegation sent to India by The Indian League in 1932 (New Delhi: Konark Publishers,1999), 227. 2 Leonard Matters et. al., Condition of India, 170. 2 and refuse to move. With this provocation, the police charged into the crowd and began savagely swing their clubs with both hands at those who refused to disperse. Blows fell hard and heavy upon the heads and shoulder of those who sought to defy the Raj.3 What the league members witnessed, the interplay of force coupled with license and opposition equated with criminality, had developed in India long before the British set foot on the sub-continent. However, with the arrival of the East India Company in 1612 and the assumption of authority later by the British Crown in 1857, following the first serious challenge to British authority in the form of the Indian Munity, India’s colonial rulers sought to impose a tighter control over their dominion in India. Control was to be achieved through legal and administrative means; paramount to this sort of order was the Indian Police, as the Munity proved the folly of relying too heavily upon military forces. Taking Indian’s previous establishment-subordinate police systems, whose loyalty rested with the rulers not the ruled, the British appropriated the system the goal of which was not the prevention of crime but the maintaining of the state’s order. Lacking the incentive to a create a new police system, the colonial regime grew more adaptive with reforms which enabled the Indian Police to operate, with little hindrance as possible, against those who wished to hamper Britain’s colonial ambition. Thus, as this imperial structure was designed to impose and maintain order, reforming that structure suggests that the framework of order required accommodation that responded to precise colonial circumstances. Very few holistic examinations of policing as an imperial function exist, and many of these consider police in the context of governance and immediate law-and-order concerns rather than as an overt expression of imperial ideology and priorities. This thesis begins to address 3Leonard Matters et. al., Condition of India, 170. 3 intends to address this historiographical shortcoming. Although research about the Indian Colonial police appeared as soon the British began thinking about policing their empire, this essay considers India’s colonial police systems in the context of works produced by writers between 1875 and 2012. Of the writings that first began to appear in the later part of the nineteenth century, the first critical work that appeared was in 1875 with Mujan Mithu Khan’s Confessions of a Constable. A former constable who had served in various provinces, Khan wrote at the time to disclose to neophyte Indian officers the positive and negative qualities associated with the police as a profession. To the new officers Khan noted, “I repeat this caution to you that you may not act in ignorance, that is, that you may be on your guard.”4 The author then related his personal experiences as a part of the apparatus of the colonial state responsible for the maintenance of law and order. However, Khan in his work was quick to point out to his audience that he was not criticizing the British system in India. As the former constable noted, “I do not write against the system, for in my humble opinion, no better system of Police could be devised.”5 When abuses did occur in the line of duty, Khan observed that the fault did not fall on the British. Khan expanded this notion and explained, “I admit that the course of justice whenever it has been impeded is due to the peculiarities of my countrymen.”6 The author also wrote approvingly of his former boss, C. P. Carmichael, former Inspector General of Police of the Northwest Provinces. For the former constable, Carmichael appeared as an epic figure in the mold of the great men of history. Khan’s work provides one of the early accounts of an ordinary native police constable under the British system of rule. Though the work reflects the attitudes of the 4 Miyan Mithu Khan, Confessions of a Constable (Benares: E. J. Lazarus & Company, 1875), 2. 5 Khan, Confessions of a Constable, 3. 6 Khan, Confessions of a Constable, 3. 4 time in which it was written, it still provides an early glimpse through an Indian perspective of the system of operation of the colonial police. Following Khan’s work forty-eight years later, in 1923 S. M. Edwardes’s work, The Bombay City Police: A Historical Sketch 1672–1916, was published. Edwardes, formerly the Commissioner of the Police for Bombay, attempted to provide a historical record of police administration for the city of Bombay. The author’s