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.
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.