The hospital is exceedingly clean and well kept. The routine of the gaol generally runs smoothly, and the character of the treatment and discipline in this typical prison of India will bear comparison with that in many institutions of a like kind at home and abroad.
Some of the local gaols in India are worth a passing mention. A good specimen was that of Sirsah on the confines of the Bikaneer desert. Colonel Hervey visited it and speaks of it as a model gaol. He says, “Its lofty walls are shielded by a covered way running round its top. It has an outer and an inner ditch at the foot of the walls, and upward-sloping towers at its four corners, resembling the castles of a chess-board. The prisoners in it were warmly clothed and looked sleek, and being told off to healthful although hard labour, they ate with eagerness their diet of curried meat, curried shorwah, or soup, and wheaten cakes. This was served out to them plentifully while I was there. They sat down on the ground in lines without reference to castes, and all promiscuously partook of the food set before them. I was astonished at this, for there is generally so much difficulty in the matter of food, owing to caste prejudices.”
Another interesting native gaol is that of Orissa, visited by Sir William Hunter in 1872. He says: “It consisted of a courtyard with low thatched sheds running round three sides and the guard-house on the fourth. The shed roofs came so low that a child might have jumped on to them and thus got over the wall. When the guard turned out, moreover, we found it to consist of two very old men; and the Maharaja was rather displeased to find that one of them had his matchlock under repair at the blacksmith’s, while the other had left his weapon in his own village, ten miles off, to protect his family during his period of service at court. Inside were sixty-nine prisoners, and I asked how it came that they did not, under the circumstances, all jump over the wall? The question seemed to strike the Maharaja as a particularly foolish one. ‘Where could they go?’ he said. ‘On the rare occasion that a prisoner breaks gaol, it is only to pay a visit to his family; and the villagers, as in duty bound, return him within a few days.’ The truth is that the family instinct is still so strong in the tributary states that imprisonment, or even death itself, seems infinitely preferable to running away from kindred and home. There were no female prisoners, and the Maharaja stated that crime among women had not yet penetrated his country.
“I found the gang divided into two sections, each of which had a shed to itself on the opposite sides of the court, the shed of the third side being set apart for cooking. The one shed was monopolised by ten men whose light complexion declared them to belong to the trading class and who lolled at great ease and in good clothes in their prison house. In the other shed the remaining fifty-nine were crowded, packed as closely as sardines and with no other clothing except a narrow strip round their waist. On expressing my surprise at this unequal treatment and asking whether the ten gentlemen who took their ease were confined for lighter crimes, the Maharaja explained: ‘On the contrary, these ten men are the plagues of the state. They consist of fraudulent shop-keepers who receive stolen goods, and notorious bad characters who organise robberies. The other fifty-nine are poor Pans and other jungle people imprisoned for petty theft, or as the tools of the ten prisoners on the opposite side. But then the ten are respectable men and of good caste, while the fifty-nine are mere woodmen; and it is only proper to maintain God’s distinction of caste.’ All the prisoners were in irons except one, a lame man, whose fetters had been struck off on the report of the native doctor. They looked very fat and comfortable, as indeed they well might considering that the sixty-nine prisoners have an allowance of a hundred pounds of rice per diem, with goat’s flesh once a fortnight, fish twice a month, besides the little daily allowance of split peas and spices to season their food. It did not seem to have occurred to any of them to feel in the least ashamed on account of being in gaol. One of them had been imprisoned twice before, and on my asking him what his trade was he explained that the younger brothers of his family were husbandmen, but that for his part he nourished his stomach by thieving.”
No European country can show anything like the immunity from crime which the worst district in Orissa enjoys. In Balasor, the proportion of persons in gaol is one to every 3,375 of the population, or one female to every 121,278 of the population. Puri district, however, the seat of the so-called “abominations of Jagannath,” would blush to own such an overwhelming criminal population. Including both the central and the subdivisional gaols, the proportion is one criminal always in prison to every six thousand of the population and one woman to every hundred thousand.
The gaol is a great institution in Indian and Burmese stations. Your syce breaks the shaft of your dogcart; send it round to the gaol to be repaired. New matting is wanted for the veranda; you can get it in the gaol. You want a piece of furniture; whether it be a wardrobe or a whist table, you will find what you require in the gaol workshop, and if there does not happen to be one ready, you can order it to be made. They take a longer time to do it than free artisans, but you can depend upon sound material, good workmanship and reasonable prices; so the gaol industries flourish and the cost of supporting the criminal classes falls with comparative lightness upon taxpayers.
CHAPTER II
THE CRIME OF THUGGEE
Difficulties experienced in administering justice—Perjury common—Native officers delight in torture—Various devices used to extort evidence—Characteristics of the Indian criminal—Crime hereditary—Thugs’ method of strangling victims—Facilities afforded by the nature of the country—The river Thugs—Suppression of Thuggee gangs and their operations.
Crime in India does not differ essentially from that prevalent elsewhere, although some forms are indigenous to the country, engendered by special physical and social conditions. As a rule, the people of India are law abiding, orderly and sober in character, but there is an inherent deceitfulness in them that tends to interfere with the course of justice. This is constantly seen in the untrustworthy evidence so often given in court. Witnesses are either reticent or too fluent; they will conceal facts or over-colour them according as it serves their interests; they can be bought, or intimidated, or easily persuaded. It has been said of India that perjury is the rule and not the exception; it is a country in which no man desires to tell the simple truth or the whole truth, where exaggeration is perfectly natural and mendacity revels in the incredible minuteness with which false statements are made, so perfect indeed as to cast discredit on them at once when heard. Perjury has long been a flagrant evil thwarting the administration of justice, and is still frequent, although likely to decrease as social standards improve. The people chafe at police investigation which worries and irritates them and will say almost anything if it will rid them of the attentions of the officers of the law. “They would condone even grievous wrongs,” says Sir Richard Temple, “disavow the loss 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 criminal courts.” In the old days police methods for the detection and proof of crime were often reprehensible. Native officers were ever eager to make a case complete and would go to any length in colouring and creating evidence. An eminent judge in India found great fault with the police who “would never leave a case alone, but must always prepare it and patch it up by teaching the witnesses to learn their evidence beforehand and to say more than they knew.” A village official would be so eager to succeed when others had failed that he would threaten and maltreat the witnesses till they invented merely imaginery evidence. It was the frequent custom to drug prisoners about to be charged so that they could make no defence, and when evidence was wanting, the witness was subjected to actual torture until he promised to depose as required.
This use of torture, secret and unavowed, for the purposes of the prosecution, prevailed until a recent date. Disgusted English officers vainly sought to check the pernicious practice, which was common throughout India among all sects and classes, though strictly forbidden by law. According to one authority, “The poor practise torture on each other, robbers on their victims; masters upon their servants; zemindars on their ryots; schoolmasters on their pupils; husbands on their wives and even parents on their children.” “The very plays of the populace,” says another, “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.” Some of these as employed by the old police consisted of such devices as filling the nose and ears of a prisoner with cayenne pepper, checking the circulation of the blood with tight ligaments, suspending a person head downward in a well and sometimes immersing the whole body in deep water until insensibility but not actual drowning was caused.