MODERN POLICE (_continued_): INDIA.
The New System Compared with the Old--Early Difficulties Gradually
Overcome--The Village Police in India--Discreditable Methods under
the Old System--Torture, Judicial and Extra-judicial--Native
Dislike of Police Proceedings--Cases of Men Confessing to Crimes of
which they were Innocent--A Mysterious Case of Theft--Trumped-up
Charges of Murder--Simulating Suicide--An Infallible Test of
Death--The Paternal Duties of the Police--The Native Policeman
Badly Paid.
The regular police of India, as it is now constituted, dates from the
disappearance of the East India Company. Under the old system, taking
Bengal for our example, the district magistrate, a member of the Civil
Service, was the head of the district police. He had under his orders a
certain number of constables, fifty or more, who were called
_burkundazes_; they were distributed among the various stations or
_thannahs_, each of which was under a thannadar, who was more commonly
called a _darogah_, and was practically a police superintendent. This
officer was responsible to the magistrate only, just as the magistrate
was directly responsible to the supreme Government. But after 1859 the
police throughout the province of Bengal, and eventually throughout
India, was constituted into a special department; the regular force
became a species of Government constabulary, under the central authority
of an Inspector-General seated at Calcutta, with Deputy-Inspectors and
Superintendents in charge of divisions and districts respectively. The
senior police official in every district, generally a military officer,
was associated with and subject to the orders of the magistrate in all
executive duties, such as the repression of crime and the maintenance of
peace and good order; but as regards administration, in all questions of
pay, clothing, promotion, and so forth, the chief police officer looked
to his police superior, the Inspector-General.
Nevertheless, the character of the new police was as little military as
[Illustration: A COURT OF JUSTICE IN THE JUNGLE.]
it could be made consistently with the control and discipline of a large
body of men. Constables learnt the rudiments of drill, and wore uniform,
but were seldom armed except when employed in gaols or to guard
treasuries. As a general rule supervision was entirely entrusted to
Europeans, but there was a superior grade of native officer fairly well
paid. Yet the service was not generally popular, owing to persistent
local prejudices, and good material was not always available either for
sub-officers or for constables. Natives preferred to enter the fiscal
and administrative departments.
At first the new force did not work very smoothly. The military
superintendents were not always acceptable to the civilian magistrates,
and no doubt many thought more of drill than of their more important
functions in preventing and detecting crime. Numbers of the old order of
police hated the "new-fangled notions" and resigned, with the result
that the force was recruited hastily with inexperienced, often
unsuitable men, many of them old soldiers, and few, if any, fitted to
deal with intricate and complicated police investigations. Colonel
Lewin, one of the first-appointed district superintendents, has frankly
recorded his want of experience and his mis-directed zeal when first
called to police work; but he also hints at the difficulties and
obstacles thrown in his way by magistrates who hated the change.
Gradually, however, the steady, settled action of the well-organised,
well-governed body of earnest workers has made itself felt, and the
regular Indian police of to-day is not inferior to any in the whole
world.
Another form of police has existed from time immemorial in India, the
rural or village police, and it has still a certain limited power. These
functionaries hold office by a quasi-hereditary tenure; they are not
appointed by the State nor paid from the public treasury, but they have
a recognised position; their clearly defined duties, as well as their
emoluments, drawn from the villages, are fixed and controlled by
authority. These village watchmen, and they are little more, although
distinct and separate from the regular police by constitution, are yet
allied to them, being expected to report to them, without fail, all
criminal and extraordinary occurrences, and at the same time to take
their orders and execute them punctually. This local, unofficial police
is not in the highest state of efficiency, perhaps, but much has been
done of late to bring its members into good order, and to exact from
them a punctual performance of their duties. The worst that could be
alleged against them was that they might at times work with evil-doers
who were their friends and neighbours, or that they might yield to the
threats or temptations of the larger landowners around when these were
criminally disposed.
It has been said by all who know India well that the deceit inherent in
the character of its people must tend to interfere with the course of
justice. Witnesses will not speak freely, or will say too much; they
conceal facts or over-colour them just as their interests suggest; some
can be bought, others intimidated, while the most independent chafe at
police inquiries which are apt to be wearisome and irritating, and
though not always personally hostile, will say anything or nothing
merely to get rid of the police. "They would condone even grievous
wrongs," says Sir Richard Temple,[17] "disavow the losses of property
which they had suffered, and withhold all assistance from their
neighbours in similar plights, rather than undergo the trouble of
attending at police offices and the criminal courts."
Police methods under the old system were often most discreditable. The
native officers charged with detection had but one thought--to make the
case complete. For this they would invent facts, manufacturing evidence
from witnesses inspired by themselves. "The police," an eminent Indian
judge once said from the Bench, "will never leave a case alone, but must
always prepare it and patch it up by teaching the witnesses to learn
their evidence off by heart beforehand, and to say more than they know."
In another case a judge gave it as his opinion that certain prisoners
confessed to a burglary merely to screen others whom the police
befriended, and that in the prosecution there was not a single fact on
which he could with confidence rely. Again, a _darogah_, or village
official, was so impressed with the necessity for succeeding where his
colleagues had failed, in a murder case, that he used the most
unjustifiable means to create evidence: witnesses were forced under
threats and ill-treatment to depose to facts which had never occurred.
Another reprehensible practice was that of drugging prisoners before
their appearance in court so that they could make no defence. One was
given a hookah to smoke, and remembered nothing of what he said or had
to say. Still worse remains, for it is a well-authenticated fact,
attested by all who have personal experience, that where evidence of the
right sort was not forthcoming it was obtained by intimidation or actual
torture.
Of the survival of torture in India as a judicial process, secret and
unavowed, but undoubtedly practised, there can be no doubt. It was the
subject of constant regret to conscientious English officials, who were
yet unable entirely to check it. Cases of cruel maltreatment were
continually brought to light, and met with exemplary punishment. Thus in
1855 a _darogah_ and his men were convicted in the Court of the
"Twenty-four Pergunnahs" of having tortured a man into confession by
tying his hands behind him and then hoisting him by his wrists to a beam
in the roof. Another case consisted in tying a prisoner's hands and feet
together and introducing a stick below the knees, after which the
police, holding each end of the stick, dashed him violently against the
door.
As late as 1866, after the introduction of the new system, an inspector
and sub-inspector trussed up four recalcitrant prisoners upon the roof
of a house and left them there to starve. In the same year another
sub-inspector was transported for life for having caused the death of a
suspected thief by ill-usage. In this case the victim was stripped on a
cold February night, whipped, then water was poured upon his naked body,
and a fan was used to keep down the temperature. Again, in the same
year, a high official, Colonel Pughe, reports twelve cases in which the
police were accused of torturing prisoners, and out of the twelve cases
seven convictions were secured. He relates in the same document that
soon after the establishment of the new police, a sub-inspector of the
old school ordered a man to be tied up and flogged to extort confession
from him, and this in open day in the middle of a large bazaar in the
Hooghly district! "So little was the occurrence thought of," writes
Colonel Pughe, "that no complaint was made by the sufferer, and it was
by the merest accident that the circumstance came to notice." The custom
till then was apparently too common to attract attention. The people of
Bengal had become accustomed to be flogged, just as the fakir grew so
fond of his bed studded with pointed nails that he could not sleep
comfortably on any other. As late as 1870 the editor of a respectable
periodical in Bengal expressed his belief that the flogging of supposed
delinquents had been so long practised with impunity that the natives
took it as a matter of course.
[Illustration: INDIAN POLICE AND THEIR METHODS (p. 316).]
It may be interesting to make a short digression here and recount some
of the modes of extra-judicial torture that have prevailed throughout
India. There is abundant evidence that this atrocious custom was, and
probably still is, common among all sects and classes of natives in
India. Dr. Cheevers gives it as his opinion that "the poor practise
torture upon each other; robbers on their victims, and _vice versâ_;
masters upon their servants; _zemindars_ upon their ryots; schoolmasters
upon their pupils; husbands upon their wives; and even parents upon
their children." "The very plays of the populace," says another
authority, "excite the laughter of many a rural audience by the
exhibition of revenue squeezed out of a defaulter coin by coin through
the appliance of familiar provocatives." Colonel Lewin, already quoted,
details some of the devices which he discovered had been in use among
the old police. They would fill the nose and ears of a prisoner with
cayenne pepper; stop the circulation of the blood with tight ligaments;
suspend their victim head downwards in a well; and in cases of great
obstinacy immerse the body repeatedly in the water until insensibility,
but not death, was produced.
Dr. Cheevers has been at great pains to collect details of the various
processes. They are torture by heat--by a lighted torch or red hot
charcoal or burning tongs, or by boiling oil, which sometimes was poured
into the ears and nose; torture by cold; suspension by the wrists, by
the feet, by the hair, by the moustache; confinement in a cell
containing quicklime; blinding by the _bhela_ nut; placing on a bed of
thorns; rubbing the face on the ground; employing the stocks; tying the
limbs in constrained postures; placing stinging or annoying insects upon
the skin; flogging with stinging nettles; sticking pins or thorns or
slithers of bamboo under the nails; beating the ankles and other joints
with a soft mallet--a devilish invention from Madras. The list is long
and horrible, but before leaving the subject we may mention milder
methods, as they seem, because the ill-treatment leaves no mark, but in
which the agony is nevertheless extreme. Exposure to the sun is one of
these, starvation another, pinching a third, and "running up and down" a
fourth, as practised in Madras till quite recently, according to a
report under date 1870, where the police, unable to obtain evidence,
made it their business to "walk the prisoner about." This was not done,
as was pretended, out of mere wantonness, but with the ostensible
purpose of obliging him to show where certain stolen property was
hidden. The police relieved each other every two hours or so, but the
prisoners were kept perpetually in motion. After a night's unceasing
promenade the craving for rest and sleep becomes imperative, especially
in a native who is always ready to sleep, and is often awake for no more
than eight hours out of the twenty-four. Other refinements of torture
are the infliction of degradation and mental suffering by breaking
caste, and by exposing the victims to various indignities.
Police action in India is often complicated, impeded, and even
neutralised by the peculiar conditions of the country, where long
prevailing, more or less ineradicable custom is supreme. The average
native does not pause to balance right or wrong; he likes to do just as
his forefathers did through the centuries, and fails to see why an act
honoured by long prescription should be called wrong-doing. Offences
that the present rulers of India have put down with a strong hand, such
as suttee (widow burning), leper burying, and suicide, the natives are
still reluctant to call crimes. Thuggee, the cowardly murder and robbery
of inoffensive and unsuspicious travellers, was part of its
perpetrators' religion; theft is to thousands a sport or a profession, a
habit or family tradition inherited from ancestors who were all
gang-robbers. While thus tradition and custom continue to make even
serious crime appear venial to the ordinary intelligence, the
investigation is continually hampered, and the actual fact often
concealed. Many natives, as I have said, detest police proceedings,
afraid of their being unduly prolonged, of their wasting time, of their
imposing the inconvenient presence of officers charged with the inquiry.
Others forbear to speak, either fearing the enmity of the friends or
neighbours they may implicate or with a mistaken tenderness for their
honour. Yet again, timidity, venality, or stupidity has led to
concealment. Witnesses whose testimony was damaging have often been
bought off, having been found ready to perjure themselves for quite
small sums.
[Illustration: MADRAS POLICEMAN.]
The police themselves have been known to hush up crimes, having been
bribed to silence, and it has been discovered later that some mysterious
murder had been no secret to them from the first. They have been known
on sufficient payment to transport a victim's corpse to another
jurisdiction, so that they might evade all responsibility for its
presence. Suspicion of foul play was once aroused (it was in the old
days) by the fact that certain persons who had but just dug a well for
the irrigation of their fields had, for no plausible reason, filled it
up again. Police officers were ordered to reopen the well, and they
reported that they had done so, finding nothing wrong. But the
magistrate of the district heard presently that a woman had been seen in
the neighbourhood of the well just about the time it had been filled up,
and that she had disappeared. Rumour said she had been murdered for the
sake of some golden ornaments which she wore. The well was now dug out
under the official's own eye, and it was clear that a female corpse had
been buried within; a quantity of long hair was found, but the body had
been removed, probably by the police.
The dishonest vagaries of the Indian police are nearly endless. The
police when baffled in detection will try to create a criminal and
manufacture a crime. Higher officials must always be on their guard
against such frauds. It is essential, for example, to watch
identification closely. A case is on record where the headless body of a
woman was found in a well, and suspicion fell upon certain Rajpoots
whose sister was known to be missing. They were arrested, and confessed
most circumstantially that they had in truth murdered her. Conviction
followed, and they would have been executed but for the unexpected
reappearance of the missing woman herself. She had eloped with a man
who, having heard of the charge brought against her brothers, produced
her in court. The accused men, thus saved at the eleventh hour,
explained their false confession by their fears that they could not
prove their innocence, so strong was the presumption of their guilt. It
should be added that the headless corpse was never identified.
One more case of the same kind. A corpse bearing marks of violence was
found floating on the Teesta river, and a murder was surmised. The
head-constable proceeded to investigate, and found a woman ready to
declare that her adopted father, Oootum by name, was missing. She could
not identify the body at first, but was eventually persuaded to do so.
Corroboration was now needed, and after that the discovery of the
perpetrators of the crime. Aided by the woman, the constable fixed upon
four men, who were forced (probably in the usual manner) to confess that
they had murdered Oootum. Fortunately, at the first inquiry into the
case the missing Oootum turned up before the district magistrate. For
this the head-constable and three associates were very rightly sentenced
to five years' imprisonment.
[Illustration: _Photo: Bourne & Shepherd, Calcutta._
INDIAN PROVINCIAL POLICE.]
A curious case of theft which was never explained, although the supposed
thief was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment, is told by
a Bengal civilian. It appears that a Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were on a
visit to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and that one evening the
lady missed a diamond ring. Information was at once lodged with the
police, and a native detective was employed, who entered the Governor's
service disguised as a _kitmutgar_ (butler). Suspicion from the first
had rested upon an _ayah_, or female servant, and it was to be the
detective's duty to worm himself into her confidence. The police officer
was successful, as it seemed, for the woman presently admitted that she
had stolen the ring. She was anxious to dispose of it, but did not dare.
However, she picked out one diamond and handed it over to him to sell,
promising him others if he succeeded. The police officer produced the
diamond, which was identified by Mrs. Phillips as one belonging to her
ring. On this evidence the _ayah_ was tried and convicted. She appealed,
but the conviction was upheld.
Not long afterwards Mr. and Mrs. Phillips moved up country, and on
unpacking their goods the missing ring was found jammed into an
inkstand, with all the diamonds intact. The case was immediately
reopened, and it was recommended that the _ayah_ should be forthwith
released. One of the judges protested, however, that the conviction was
legal, on the ground that the prisoner's friends had inserted a diamond
in the place of the one removed, and had put the ring where it was
certain to be found. Nevertheless the _ayah_ was pardoned. The theory
held was that the detective, eager to get the credit of having
discovered the thief, had fabricated the whole story and gone to the
expense of purchasing a diamond in support of it. He still stuck to it
that the woman had given him the diamond, which, as has been seen, was
one more than the ring contained. Now another strange fact cropped up.
Mrs. Phillips discovered that a diamond was missing from a locket she
possessed, and when this locket was produced the surplus diamond
appeared to fit into the vacant space. From this a new theory was
started--that the _ayah_ had really stolen the ring, but, distrusting
the disguised _kitmutgar_, had also picked out the diamond from the
locket to test his willingness to serve her. When, later, the case had
gone against her, her friends had intervened in the manner described,
replacing the ring in the hope of obtaining her pardon. Jewellers who
were consulted gave it as their opinion that the surplus diamond was
very similar to those in the locket, but no one could swear that it was
one of the same. There the matter rested, and the mystery has never been
solved.
Attempts to defeat the ends of justice are very often made in India by
the natives themselves on their own motion, to satisfy some personal
animosity. Many cases might be cited of conspiracy to advance false and
malicious charges against an enemy. In one case wounds were fabricated
on a body already dead to support an accusation of murder. An old man
was found with his head nearly separated from his body and other deep
wounds in both shoulders, besides cuts on the back. Yet there had been
no considerable effusion of blood, no retraction of the muscles, and
medical opinion was emphatic that all these injuries had been inflicted
after death, which had undoubtedly occurred from long-standing
tubercular disease. It was presently shown that the whole case had been
trumped up to support a charge of murder against an unpopular neighbour.
[Illustration: A RELIGIOUS MENDICANT.]
A monstrous case is recorded by Mr. Arthur Crawford, whose
"Reminiscences" have been several times quoted in these pages, in which
a son was on such bad terms with his father that he elaborated a great
plot to involve him in disgrace and suffering, if not to convict him of
his own (the son's) murder. The father was an aged and most respectable
Brahmin in the South Konkan, Madhowrao by name, described as a kindly,
courtly native gentleman, with intellectual, well-cut features, and
spare and active in body. He had this one son, Vinayek, a constant
trouble to him, chiefly on account of his wandering habits. He often
absented himself for months together, and roamed the country as a
_gosai_, or religious mendicant. After an unusually protracted absence,
the father offered the police a reward if they would trace and find his
son. The matter was taken up by a local constable, and he had no sooner
commenced his investigations than he received an anonymous letter
through the post charging the father with having made away with his son.
The story was told most circumstantially: how Madhowrao, assisted by his
widowed sister, who acted as his housekeeper, had strangled Vinayek in
the dead of night, and had then employed two servants to throw the body
to the alligators, at the foot of a torrent hard by the village. These
servants came forward and described how they had seen the corpse with
protruding eyes and tongue, the cord still round its neck, then how they
had stripped it, and, tying it to a heavy stone, had thrown it into the
water. The constable searched the house, and found hidden away a bundle
of clothes with a pair of sandals. Moreover, he fished up a great heap
of bones from the alligators' pool. The whole party were arrested, and
the servants, the chief witnesses, were examined. They stuck to their
story, declared that they had acted solely to oblige their master, who,
they saw, was in great distress, and said that was all they knew.
But Madhowrao himself stoutly denied his guilt, repeating always that
his son was alive, but was only keeping out of the way until his father
was hanged. Closer inquiry was in the father's favour, for it was
clearly proved that the bones found in the water were those of a
bullock, and also that there was no sort of attempt to conceal Vinayek's
clothes. Nevertheless, the High Court, to which the matter had been
referred, pressed for the committal of the prisoners.
Meanwhile, the head constable, a very keen-witted and indefatigable
officer, had gone away on a journey. Pleading ill-health, he had sought,
and obtained, three months' sick leave, which he had spent to very good
purpose in searching for the missing Vinayek. He ran him down at length
at a great distance, somewhere in the territory of the Nizam, and
brought him back in person, to be confronted with his father, who was
still lying under the charge of compassing his death. A very dramatic
scene followed; Vinayek was brought into court almost noiselessly behind
Madhowrao, who was desired to turn round; at sight of his son he fell
down flat on his face insensible, while his sister went off into
hysterics. Now Vinayek made full confession of the plot, in which he had
been assisted by a young cousin. He was to disappear, as he did, and
after an interval the other was to denounce the murderers; the two
servants were suborned by the promise of a good reward when Vinayek came
into his estate, and they very properly shared the punishment which was
inflicted on the chief conspirators.
[Illustration: FATHER AND SON CONFRONTED.]
In these cases it was vindictiveness and animosity that led to the plot,
which was only unmasked by the astuteness and perseverance of the
police. But greed also is a potent incentive to false accusation of
crime, and thus it was with Khan Beg. Coveting the inheritance of a rich
relative, Ibrahim Beg, whose heir he was, he laid a deep scheme to
secure it without waiting for Ibrahim's death. Khan Beg was a dissolute
wastrel who had been reduced to poverty by his own extravagance, and who
knew that he might expect no further help from his kinsman. Ibrahim was
married to a young and handsome wife, Chumbelee, with whom he did not
live on the very best of terms, due mainly to the lying stories of a
confidential servant, an accomplice of Khan Beg's. One day in a fit of
fury he forgot himself so far as to raise his hand against Chumbelee.
The woman, goaded by pain and disgrace, screamed aloud in the full
hearing of neighbours and servants. Next morning she was gone, and
information was laid at the nearest police station by the manservant
above mentioned that Chumbelee had been murdered. Officers proceeded at
once to Ibrahim Beg's house, and searched the premises. It was soon seen
that some earth in the courtyard had been recently moved; on digging,
the headless body of a woman was found a little way down. The body was
identified by the manservant, who swore to a bangle found upon one arm,
remembering that he had once taken it for his mistress to be mended. A
slave-girl who did the household work also declared that the body was
Chumbelee's.
Ibrahim Beg was, of course, apprehended, and locked up, vainly
protesting his innocence. His own story was that he had been stupefied,
he knew not how, by some narcotic, and after his violent quarrel with
his wife, which he did not deny, he had fallen asleep until a late hour
the following morning. His jealousy and ill-treatment of his wife were
notorious, and told greatly against him; the seclusion in which he had
always kept her also militated against him now. So few people had seen
her that there was no more evidence of identity than that already
adduced. All that could be said in his favour was that without the head,
absolute recognition was impossible. Ibrahim Beg himself stoutly denied
that the corpse was Chumbelee's. The trial proceeded, and ended in his
conviction; the case was referred to a superior court, which deemed the
evidence conclusive; the sentence of death passed was about to be
executed, and Khan Beg was on the point of obtaining his ends and
acquiring considerable wealth.
But now came the slip. An anonymous letter was received by a young
English civilian who had charge of the district, informing him that
Chumbelee was still alive, actually residing within twenty miles of the
scene of her supposed murder. The magistrate, knowing it to be a case of
life and death, straightway rode to the place indicated, a certain tomb
occupied by a gang of fakirs, men of evil repute, whom it was necessary
to approach with caution. The magistrate, summoning the village police
to his aid, cautiously surrounded the tomb, then broke in, and searched
the whole place. He came upon Chumbelee at last in an underground
apartment.
She was, of course, forthwith taken out and brought back to her
husband's house. The whole plot was now laid bare by the manservant,
anxious to save his own skin. He had long been in the power of Khan Beg,
and agreed to assist him the moment a body could be found to be palmed
off as Chumbelee's. A widower at last consented to sell the corpse of
his recently deceased wife, which they took and decapitated. It was the
manservant who had administered the drug to Ibrahim; he made the
slave-girl prisoner, and then carried off Chumbelee in a blanket to the
fakirs' tomb. Ibrahim Beg, when he recovered next morning from the
effects of the drug, gave the police no information of his wife's
disappearance, for he believed that she had eloped and left him of her
own accord. The whole of this pernicious plot was admirably planned, but
it failed, as such plots often do, through the avarice of the principal
personage. Khan Beg had refused to pay a sum promised to one of his
subordinate helpers, and the latter had written the anonymous letter.
[Illustration: A FAKIR.]
In no country is it so essential that the body, in the case of a
supposed crime, should be not only produced, but identified, as in
India. An Englishman who was ascending the Hooghly nearly suffered the
extreme penalty of the law through ignorance of this axiom. He had left
his ship at Diamond harbour and hired a native boat to take him on to
Calcutta. The boatmen greatly exasperated him by their laziness, and he
applied his stick to them so vigorously that three jumped overboard.
Their comrades declared that they were drowned, and burst into loud
lamentations. On reaching shore they charged him with murder. He was
arrested forthwith, and committed to gaol. Ere long he was duly
arraigned, and on the oath of the boatmen who had been eye-witnesses of
his offence he was convicted without the slightest hesitation. While he
lay in gaol, however, under sentence of death, he was visited by a
native, who promised him that on the payment of a substantial sum the
drowned boatmen should be brought to life. The money was gladly paid,
and next day the charge of murder entirely broke down by the
reappearance of the missing men. It seemed that they were expert divers,
and having gone at once to the bottom they rose again at a considerable
distance from the boat, and swam ashore. Their comrades were fully aware
of the fact, and the conspiracy was formed so that the English stranger,
when in peril of his life, might be induced to pay a large ransom to
escape. It is clear from such cases as these that the police of India
have to be always on their guard against being led into traps.
Another trick which the police have to guard against is the simulation
of death by suicide. This is a very ancient imposture. Captain Bacon, in
his "First Impressions in Hindustan," describes how he saw a corpse
bearing three wounds on the chest and many marks of violence brought to
a magistrate's house, with the idea of fixing an accusation of murder on
a certain man. The magistrate, having his doubts, was about to examine
the body, when he was implored by those who carried it not to pollute it
by touch before the rites of sepulture had been performed. He did no
more, therefore, than thrust the sharp end of his billiard cue once or
twice into the side with such force that the point of the cue penetrated
between the ribs. Upon this the muscles of the supposed corpse quivered,
and there was a barely perceptible movement of the head. The natives
around were now told that life could not be yet extinct, but they
persisted in declaring that the man had been dead since cock-crow.
Whereupon, a kettle of hot water was produced and a small stream poured
upon the foot of the corpse, which there and then jumped up from the
litter and ran away at full speed! The same test was applied by a young
officer when the body of a native, who was supposed to have been
murdered by sepoys, was brought to his tent. There was no more evidence
than the existence of the corpse, but the officer was at breakfast, and
had the kettle handy. At the first touch of the scalding fluid "the
murdered remains" started up and scampered away. Boiling water, by the
way, is no doubt a generally satisfactory test of whether life is
actually extinct. But there is a better, as practised by a French doctor
in a Lyons hospital. He applied the flame of a candle for some seconds
to one digit of the hand or foot. A vesicle formed, as it will
invariably; if this vesicle contains serous fluid, there is life; if
vapour only, death has certainly supervened.
On the whole, the modern Indian police system may be said to operate
well. The police have numerous duties over and above those of the
prevention and detection of crime. A Government so paternal as that of
India finds the machinery of the police exceedingly useful in keeping in
touch with the great masses of the population. The constable is the
agent through whom the Government issues its orders or conveys its
wishes. If the people are wanted in any large numbers, such as for the
identification of bodies found, and if foul play is suspected, it is the
police who beat the drum and call them in. When supplies are needed,
such as carts, camels, bullocks, or forage, for any military expedition,
it is the police who work upon the men of the villages and gather in
what is required. When a high functionary had discovered a cure for
snake bites, it was the police who were entrusted with its distribution
through the districts most troubled with poisonous reptiles. The
particular panacea was liquid ammonia, which had to be applied at once
and in a particular way. It was not only necessary, therefore, to issue
supplies of the useful drug, but all the headmen of villages had to be
taught how to use it; this was the duty of the police. Again, when the
Government once seriously attempted to exterminate snakes, and offered a
reward for every dead reptile brought in, the machinery of the police
was at once set in motion to encourage natives to hunt up and kill the
snakes, and afterwards to distribute the rewards. When the plague of
locusts overran the length and breadth of the land, the police were sent
out to organise beaters and instruct the villagers how to destroy the
terrible pest. Another plague, that of rats, the jerboa rat, which
travels like a kangaroo by leaps and bounds and eats up everything it
meets, was to be grappled with by the police, and though they do not
seem to have been very effective in destroying the pest, it became their
business to pay out the rewards for all the vermin killed. An
interesting detail in Government methods may be mentioned in this
connection. The rats, when destroyed, were buried or burnt, but the
tails were first cut off and tied up into neat little bundles like
radishes, which were produced as vouchers for the numbers destroyed. A
police official records that the travelling police superintendents were
called upon to make entries in their diaries such as: "Visited
Bangalpore, counted 10,000 rats' tails, paid the reward, burnt the
tails."
The police have also rendered very valuable services during famines,
when their labours increase ten-and twenty-fold. Not only does crime
multiply in these dread seasons, but the force is actively employed in
helping to establish relief camps, in hunting up and bringing in the
starving population, in passing on supplies of grain from the railway
stations to the out-districts, and so forth.
Yet with all this the Indian native policeman is but indifferently paid,
much less than a soldier or other subordinate members of the public
departments. Ordinary labour even is better paid. The horsekeeper, the
gardener, the cowman is better off, even the coolie despises the
pittance of the policeman, who has no advantages but those of a remote
pension and the respect he inspires as a man clothed with a little
authority.
[Illustration: JERBOA RATS.]