It may be noticed that these robbers took the utmost pleasure in their
calling, and were most averse to the idea of giving it up and taking
to honest pursuits. "Some of the men with me," one magistrate wrote,
[53] "have been in jail for twenty, and one man for thirty years,
and still do not appear to have any idea of abandoning their illegal
vocation; even now, indeed, they look on what we consider an honest
means of livelihood with the most marked contempt; and in relating
their excursions talk of them with the greatest pleasure, much in
the way an eager sportsman describes a boar-chase or fox-hunt. While
talking of their excursions, which were to me really very interesting,
their eyes gleamed with pleasure; and beating their hands on their
foreheads and breasts and muttering some ejaculation they bewailed
the hardness of their lot, which now ensured their never again being
able to participate in such a joyous occupation." Another Badhak,
on being examined, said he could not recall a case of one of the
community having ever given up the trade of dacoity. "None ever did,
I am certain of it," he continued. [54] "After having been arrested,
on our release we frequently take lands, to make it appear we have
left off dacoity, but we never do so in reality; it is only done as
a feint and to enable our zamindars (landowners) to screen us." They
sometimes paid rent for their land at the rate of thirty rupees
an acre, in return for the countenance and protection afforded by
the zamindars. "Our profession," another Badhak remarked, [55] "has
been a _Padshahi Kam_ (a king's trade); we have attacked and seized
boldly the thousands and hundreds of thousands that we have freely
and nobly spent; we have been all our lives wallowing in wealth and
basking in freedom, and find it hard to manage with the few copper
pice a day we get from you." At the time when captures were numerous,
and the idea was entertained of inducing the dacoits to settle in
villages and supporting them until they had been trained to labour,
several of them, on being asked how much they would require to support
themselves, replied that they could not manage on less than two rupees
a day, having earned quite that sum by dacoity. This amount would be
more than twenty times the wages of an ordinary labourer at the same
period. Another witness put the amount at one to two rupees a day,
remarking, 'We are great persons for eating and drinking, and we keep
several wives according to our means.' Of some of them Colonel Sleeman
had a high opinion, and he mentions the case of one man, Ajit Singh,
who was drafted into the native army and rose to be commander of a
company. "I have seldom seen a man," he wrote, [56] "whom I would
rather have with me in scenes of peril and difficulty." An attempt of
the King of Oudh's, however, to form a regiment of Badhaks had ended
in failure, as after a short time they mutinied, beat their commandant
and other officers and turned them out of the regiment, giving as
their reason that the officers had refused to perform the same duties
as the men. And they visited with the same treatment all the other
officers sent to them, until they were disbanded by the British on
the province of Allahabad being made over to the Company. Colonel
Sleeman notes that they were never known to offer any other violence
or insult to females than to make them give up any gold ornaments that
they might have about their persons. "In all my inquiries into the
character, habits and conduct of these gangs, I have never found an
instance of a female having been otherwise disgraced or insulted by
them. They are all Hindus, and this reverence for the sex pervades
all Hindu society." [57] According to their own account also they
never committed murder; if people opposed them they struck and killed
like soldiers, but this was considered to be in fair fight. It may
be noted, nevertheless, that they had little idea of clan loyalty,
and informed very freely against their fellows when this course was
to their advantage. They also stated that they could not settle in
towns; they had always been accustomed to live in the jungles and
commit dacoities upon the people of the towns as a kind of _shikar_
(sport); they delighted in it, and they felt living in towns or among
other men as a kind of prison, and got quite confused (_ghabraye_),
and their women even more than the men.