The tumult was enormous. The Muhammadans attacked every Hindu they met; the Hindus retaliated; and then both sides rounded on the police. Stones and lathis (iron-shod bamboo cudgels) were the rioters’ chief weapons, and they were used with murderous effect. Little care was taken by the Muhammadans to confine their attacks to the enemies of the Faith. Peaceful wayfarers were brutally assaulted; tram-cars and carriages were murderously stoned; post-office vans were attacked; messengers carrying money were savagely beaten and openly robbed. The crowds, raging from street to street, demolished Hindu temples, and dragged out and desecrated the idols in the most obscene and shameful manner. The Chilli-chors or Musalman drivers of public conveyances, most of whom hail from the Palanpur State in Kathiawar, stormed the Hindu quarter of Kumbharwada, while the Julhais or Muhammadan weavers from upper India attacked the Pardeshi Hindu milk-merchants and set fire to the milch-cattle stables in Agripada. All business was perforce suspended and the whole city was thrown into the greatest consternation.
Noting the rapid spread of the disorder, Mr. Vincent applied early for military assistance with a view to restricting the area of rioting. At 4 p.m. two companies of the Marine Battalion under Colonel Shortland marched into the City and were followed in quick succession by the 10th Regiment N. I. under Colonel Forjett, son of Mr. Charles Forjett, by the Royal Lancashires under Colonel Ryley, and by a battery of Artillery. The Bombay Volunteer Artillery under Major Roughton and the Bombay Light Horse under Lieutenant Cuffe were also called out. The Government sent reinforcements of British and Indian troops from Poona, and detachments of armed police were also drafted into Bombay from Thana and other districts. The troops, which numbered three thousand with two guns, were under the orders of General Budgen. Eighteen European citizens were appointed Special Magistrates to assist the Presidency Magistrates, Mr. Cooper and Mr. Webb, who were on duty in the streets night and day. The Municipal Commissioner, Mr. H. A. Acworth, and the Health Officer, Dr. Weir, made strenuous efforts to prevent the interruption of the sanitary service of the city, which in some wards temporarily broke down, and of the daily supply of food to the markets. One serious feature of the early part of the disturbance was the refusal of the butchers at Bandora to slaughter any cattle, and it needed prompt and tactful action on the part of Mr. Douglas Bennett, superintendent of municipal markets, to overcome their contumacy.
The troops were posted in various parts of the city and were forced to open fire on several occasions owing to the defiant attitude of the mob, which was being constantly reinforced. A notable instance occurred at the well-known Sulliman Chauki in Grant road, where a detachment of native infantry was so furiously attacked that it had to fire several times to avoid being overwhelmed by the rioters. Despite these measures, the rioting and looting continued on August 12th in all parts of the city, and many murders and assaults occurred also on the 13th. From the evening of the latter date, however, tranquillity gradually supervened, and eventually the efforts of the authorities, aided by the prominent men of both communities, effected a reconciliation between the excited belligerents.
The effects of the outbreak were for the time being serious. All business in the City was suspended for nearly ten days, and fifty thousand people, chiefly women and children, fled from Bombay to their homes up-country. About one hundred persons were killed, and nearly 800 were wounded, during the progress of the rioting, while the loss of property was enormous. The damage done to Hindu temples and Moslem mosques amounted respectively to Rs. 51,300 and Rs. 23,200, exclusive of the property stolen from them, which was estimated to be worth nearly 2 lakhs of rupees. During and for a few days after the disturbances, when the police were fully occupied in efforts to restore order and in prosecuting fifteen hundred persons arrested during the rioting, a great many cases of robbery, house-trespass and theft occurred, which, though registered by the police, could not be investigated and were never brought to court.
The second serious outbreak occurred in the last year of Mr. Vincent’s term of office, and was due directly to the hostility of the public to the measures adopted by Government for combating the plague. The Julhais, or Jolahas, professional hand-weavers from the United Provinces, who have for many years formed a colony in the streets and lanes adjoining Ripon road, compose one of the most ignorant and fanatical sections of Muhammadans. The trouble commenced on March 9, 1898, with an attempt by a party of plague-searchers to remove a sufferer from a Julhai house in Ripon cross road. The Julhais in a body took alarm, seized their lathis and any weapon that came to hand, and attacked a body of police who had been sent to keep order and protect the plague-authorities. The position rapidly became serious; and as the mob refused to disperse and showed signs of increasing violence, the third Presidency Magistrate, Mr. P. H. Dastur, who had been summoned to the spot and had himself been slightly wounded by a stone, ordered the police to fire. This served for the moment to disperse the Julhai mob. But in a very short time the disorder spread to Bellasis, Duncan, Babula Tank, Grant, Parel, Falkland and Foras roads, where many Hindus were celebrating the last day of the annual Holi festival by idling and drinking. The rioters tried to set fire to the plague hospitals; murdered two English soldiers of the Shropshire Regiment in Grant road; burned down the gallows-screen near the jail; and tried to destroy the fire-brigade station in Babula Tank road. On this occasion also the Muhammadan butchers at the Bandora slaughter-house refused to do their work, but were eventually forced to remain on duty by Mr. Douglas Bennett, who hurried to Bandora with a small body of native infantry and taught the refractory a sound lesson. An unpleasant feature of the rioting was the attacks by the mob on isolated Europeans, several of whom were protected in the pluckiest manner by Indians of the lower classes. The outbreak was quickly quelled by military, naval and volunteer forces, who were wisely called out on the first sign of trouble. By the following day peace was restored. The casualties were officially stated to be 19 killed and 42 wounded, and the police arrested 247 persons for rioting, of whom 205 were convicted and sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment.
The Hindu-Muhammadan riots of 1893 were directly responsible for the establishment in Western India of the annual public celebrations in honour of the Hindu god Ganpati, which subsequently developed into one of the chief features of the anti-British revolutionary movement in India.[109] The riots left behind them a bitter legacy of sectarian rancour, which Bal Gangadhar Tilak utilized for broadening his new anti-British movement, by enlisting in its support the ancient Hindu antagonism to Islam. “He not only convoked popular meetings in which his fiery eloquence denounced the Muhammadans as the sworn foes of Hinduism, but he started an organization known as the “Anti-Cow-Killing Society,” which was intended and regarded as a direct provocation to the Muhammadans, who, like ourselves, think it no sacrilege to eat beef.” As his propaganda grew, assuming steadily a more anti-British character, Tilak decided to invest it with a definitely religious sanction, by placing it under the special patronage of the elephant-headed god Ganesh or Ganpati. In order to widen the breach between Hindus and Muhammadans, he and his co-agitators determined to organize annual festivals in honour of the god on the lines which had become familiar in the annual Muhammadan celebration of the Muharram. Their object was to make the procession, in which the god is borne to his final resting-place in the water, as offensive as possible to Moslem feelings by imitating closely the Muharram procession, when the tazias and tabuts, representing the tombs of the martyrs at Kerbela, are immersed in the river or sea.
Accordingly, on the approach of the Ganpati festival in September, 1894, Tilak and his party inaugurated a Sarvajanik Ganpati or public Ganpati celebration, providing for the worship of the god in places accessible to the public (it had till then been a domestic ceremony), and arranging that the images of Ganpati should have their melas or groups of attendants, like the Musalman tolis attending upon the tabuts. The members of these melas were trained in the art of fencing with sticks and other physical exercises. During the ten days of the festival, bands of young Hindus gave theatrical performances and sang religious songs, in which the legends of Hindu mythology were skilfully exploited to arouse hatred of the “foreigner,” the word mlenccha or “foreigner” being applied equally to Europeans and Muhammadans. As the movement grew, leaflets were circulated, urging the Marathas to rebel as Shivaji did, and declaring that a religious outbreak should be the first step towards the overthrow of an alien power. As may be imagined, these Ganpati processions, which took place on the tenth day of the festival, were productive of much tumult and were well calculated to promote affrays with the Muhammadans and the police. A striking instance occurred in Poona, where a mela of 70 Hindus deliberately outraged Moslem sentiment by playing music and brawling outside a mosque during the hour of prayer.
These celebrations helped to intensify Tilak’s seditious propaganda; and although they are barely mentioned in the annual reports of the Police Commissioner, they had become firmly established in Bombay and other places by the date of Mr. Vincent’s retirement, and were destined to impose a heavy burden of extra work on the police-force for several years to come. At the present date the public celebration of the Ganesh Chaturthi still takes place and necessitates special traffic arrangements, when the crowds pour out of the city to immerse the clay-images of the god in Back Bay. But the more disturbing political features of the festival have gradually disappeared. This change may be held to date roughly from Tilak’s second trial for sedition and conviction in 1908, which dealt a severe blow to the seditious side of the movement. A few melas appeared in the following years; but the strength of the movement was broken by the incarceration of the leader of the Extremists and by judicious action on the part of the divisional and detective police.
This brief record of the period 1893 to 1898 will suffice to show that any improvement in the prevention and detection of crime, which might have been expected to follow on the increase in the numbers of the police force, was largely discounted by outbreaks of disorder and by the prevalence of a disastrous epidemic. With his police constantly being summoned to assist in plague-operations of a difficult character, and being forced in consequence of overwork and illness to seek constant treatment in hospital, the Commissioner was scarcely able to insist upon a standard of police-work suitable to normal times. In spite, however, of these difficulties and of additional work of a novel character arising out of the gradual spread of the anti-British revolutionary movement, the Bombay police under Mr. Vincent’s control contrived to achieve reasonable success in their dealings with the criminal elements of the population, and set an example of adherence to duty under very trying conditions which earned more than once the express approbation of the Bombay Government.