Two other important buildings of a different character were provided during Mr. Gell’s régime—the Northcote Police Hospital and the office of the Protector of Pilgrims. Up to 1866 constables requiring medical treatment were admitted to the Sir J. J. Hospital on Parel road. In that year the stable of the old Hamilton Hotel was assigned as a separate hospital for the police, and was so used till 1870, when the Municipality placed an old workshop in Mazagon at the disposal of the Police Commissioner. This ramshackle building, which accommodated only 35 indoor patients, was totally unsuited for a hospital and was a source of constant and justifiable complaint. Nevertheless the police were forced to put up with it, until Lord Northcote, the Governor, (1900-03) sanctioned the construction of a proper building, accommodating 94 patients, on one of the new roads at Nagpada constructed by the City Improvement Trust. The building was formally opened by Lord Lamington in August, 1904.
The growth of the annual Haj traffic, mentioned in a previous paragraph, rendered accommodation for the office of the Protector of Pilgrims an urgent necessity. A ground-floor building, consisting of a large covered porch and two or three rooms, was therefore built in 1907 in the compound of the Head Police Office and served as the headquarters of the Pilgrim department, until the reorganization of the Criminal Investigation Department by Mr. Edwardes and his Deputy, Mr. F. A. M. H. Vincent, rendered necessary a re-arrangement of the accommodation at headquarters.
Before we describe the disturbances which occurred during Mr. Gell’s tenure of office, a word may be said of the courage and resource occasionally shown by Indian constables in the course of their daily duty. In 1903 a havildar was awarded the medal of the Royal Humane Society for rescuing two boys from drowning; a constable received the medal for similar action in the following year; while in 1906 the Society rewarded three constables for saving life in difficult and dangerous circumstances. On several occasions also the Commissioner rewarded constables for actions marked by conspicuous courage or intelligence. These instances serve to support the opinion that under proper leadership the Maratha of the Konkan and the Muhammadan of the Deccan will show plenty of sang-froid in emergencies. Considering that the men received little or no training before being placed on duty in the streets, that they had little or no education, and that they served year after year in a climate which is notoriously enervating and under conditions productive of ill-health, it is greatly to the credit of the police constable that he performed his duty with so few serious mistakes and that he frequently gave proof of personal courage and tenacity. If at times he appeared to cling too closely to the pan-supari shops in the vicinity of his post or beat, or to lack alertness in directing traffic, it must be remembered that he was rarely off duty for any length of time, that he had singularly little opportunity for recreation and amusement, and that long hours of point-duty under the Bombay sun would try the strongest constitution.
Twice during Mr. Gell’s term of office the peace of the City was broken by rioting at the annual celebration of the Muharram. The first occasion was March 23rd, 1904, the fifth day of the festival, when the ancient antagonism between the Sunni and Shia sects developed into open hostility. The ostensible cause of the disturbance was the determination of the Sunni processionists to play music and beat their tom-toms in front of the Bohra mosque in the notorious Doctor Street. Casual street-fighting between the Bohras and their antagonists occurred daily up to March 27th (the Katal-Ki-Rat or night of slaughter), and the aspect of affairs was so ominous that Mr. Gell decided to cancel the license for the tabut procession from Rangari moholla (i.e. Abdul Rehman street and adjoining lanes), the inhabitants of which had been directly responsible for several assaults upon the Bohras. This order was strongly resented by the general Sunni population, which resolved not to carry out the tabuts for immersion on the final day of the festival. As usual, the abandonment of the tabut procession released large bodies of hooligans and bad characters, who testified to their annoyance by attacking the police and the general public. At the same time the Bohras were seized by a general panic, the results of which might have been disastrous, and this fact, combined with the open disorder in the streets, led Mr. Gell to summon the military forces to his assistance. The Cheshire Regiment, a Battery of the R. A., the Railway Volunteers, the Bombay Light Horse and H. E. the Governor’s Bodyguard were despatched to various points of the disturbed area and picketed the streets until April 1st, when peace was finally restored. The casualties were fortunately few, and serious loss of life was prevented by the speedy arrival of the troops.
Another serious disturbance marred this festival during the last year of Mr. Gell’s Commissionership. On the morning of February 13th, 1908, a fracas occurred between a Shia tabut-procession, composed of Julhais, Mughals, Khojas and a few Bohras, and a body of Sunni Muhammadans congregated at a mosque in Falkland road. The police arrested some of the Sunnis who appeared to be the ringleaders in the affray. The news of the encounter spread rapidly to other quarters; and the arrest of their co-sectaries so annoyed the Sunni Muhammadans that they declined to take out their tabuts in procession. This resulted, as usual, in letting loose on the streets hundreds of low-class and combative Muhammadans, who usually accompanied the processions, and they straightway proceeded to sow the seeds of disorder in various parts of the bazar. In the hope of averting a catastrophe Mr. Gell gave orders early in the afternoon for the release of the men arrested after the fracas in the morning. But the temper of the mob had by that time been aroused, the cry of Huriya, Huriya, was raised, and the ominous stampedes and rushes which usually preceded an outbreak of disorder occurred in the streets and lanes bordering on the Grant and Parel roads. The mob confined itself to these tactics and to spasmodic attacks on the Bohras and other Shias until the late hours of the afternoon, when serious rioting broke out on Parel road. Here the Pathan element joined forces with the mob; shops were looted and set on fire; all traffic was stopped and the tram-cars were stoned. General panic supervened. As the mob was truculent and refused to disperse, Mr. Gell ordered the European police, who were facing the mob in Parel road (Bhendy Bazar), to use their revolvers. The firing put a stop to the actual rioting, but in view of the general demeanour of the crowds, troops were called out in the evening in aid of the civil power and remained on duty in the disturbed quarter until the next day.
These Muharram disturbances, though imposing a severe strain upon the Commissioner and the police force, caused less concern to the general public than the prolonged rioting in the industrial quarter in July, 1908, when more than 400,000 mill-hands broke into open disorder after the conviction of the late Bal Gangadhar Tilak for sedition by the High Court. Tilak had been arrested in Bombay on June 24th on charges arising out of the publication in his paper, the Kesari, of articles containing inflammatory comments on the Muzaffarpur outrage, in which Mrs. and Miss Kennedy had been killed by a bomb—the first of a long list of similar outrages in Bengal. The bomb was extolled in these articles as ‘a kind of witchcraft, a charm, an amulet’, and the Kesari delighted in showing that neither ‘the supervision of the police’ nor ‘swarms of detectives’ could stop ‘these simple playful sports of science.’ Whilst professing to deprecate such methods, it threw the responsibility upon Government, which allowed ‘keen disappointment to overtake thousands of intelligent persons who have been awakened to the necessity of securing the rights of Swaraj’. “Tilak spoke for four whole days in his own defence—21½ hours altogether—but the jury returned a verdict of “Guilty”, and he was sentenced to six years’ transportation, afterwards commuted on account of his age and health to simple imprisonment at Mandalay.”[113]
From the moment of his arrest, Tilak’s agents and followers descended upon the mill-area of Bombay and sedulously spread the story that Tilak had been arrested because he was the friend of the industrial workers and had tried to obtain better wages for them. Some of them were reported to have declared during the trial that there would be a day’s bloodshed for every year to which he might be sentenced by the Court. Most of the ‘jobbers’ who control the supply of labour were easily won over, and Tilak’s Brahman emissaries from Poona found many co-adjutors among their own caste-men in Bombay, and among the Bhandaris and Konkani Marathas living in Parel, Tardeo, Chinchpugli and Dadar sections. Curiously enough the Ghatis, or Marathas from the Deccan, showed far less interest in the trial of Tilak and far less disposition to violence than their caste-fellows from Ratnagiri and other districts of the western seaboard. The Deccan mill-hands at Sewri, for example, at the very height of the rioting, informed an Englishman with whom they were familiar that he need fear no harm from them, and they confirmed their words by taking no share in the disturbance which lasted for six days. The hostile attitude of the Konkani Marathas was due to the continuous efforts of agitators, and this was particularly the case in the neighbourhood of Currey and De Lisle roads, where special agents from their own districts had been introduced by Tilak’s revolutionaries.
The probability of a disturbance was foreseen by the authorities, and Mr. Gell took various precautions to circumscribe the area of the outbreak. British regiments, Indian infantry and cavalry were held in readiness; a barricade was erected on Mayo road leading to the High Court; several officials and non-officials were appointed Special Magistrates and were posted at important points to watch the progress of events, assist the police, and take all feasible measures for securing the peace of the City. The Special Magistrates were a curiously mixed body. Among them were Mr. James Macdonald, a sexagenarian Scotsman, who had served the City for years as a member of the Municipal Corporation; Colonel Cordue, R. E., the Master of the Mint; Mr. Philip Messent, Engineer of the Port Trust; Mr. Arthur Leslie of Messrs. Greaves, Cotton and Co., who filled his pockets with lemon-grass oil for the benefit of the men of the Royal Scots, who were posted at the old police chauki in Jacob’s Circle and had their bare knees badly bitten by the mosquitoes and other forms of low life which shared the chauki with the police-constables; the author of this work, who was at the time enjoying a spell of comparative ease in the literary backwaters of the Bombay City Gazetteer; and last but not least, the Hon. Arthur Hill-Trevor, a commercial free-lance and honorary magistrate, who regarded himself as a sort of Honorary and Supernumerary Deputy Commissioner of Police, and in that capacity executed various blood-curdling manœuvres which caused no little apprehension to his more pacific colleagues.
It so happened that some of the precautions proved superfluous. There was no attempt on the part of the rioters to rush the High Court or even to attend the trial of Tilak: there was no organized attempt to march on the European residential quarter or to attack the European population en masse. Although the rioting assumed at times a very threatening character, it was confined wholly to the mill-area, except on one afternoon, when the Bania merchants, employed in the cloth-market of the C division, turned out in force and had to be dispersed by firing. A consideration of all the circumstances of the Tilak riots leads one to infer that the Commissioner was not as well served by his detective agency as he might have been, and that the disturbances might have been more disastrous and have lasted longer, if Tilak’s emissaries and agents had had more time at their disposal in which to foster the spirit of violence. By the end of the first day’s rioting it was clear that outlying areas like the Fort and Malabar Hill were exposed to no danger, and consequently most of the Special Magistrates gravitated from their original posts to Jacob’s Circle, which divided the industrial quarters from the central portion of the City and served as a gathering-ground for the forces of law and order.
Within the mill-district the rioting was fairly continuous and occasionally serious, and isolated Europeans whose duties obliged them to reside in the area north of Jacob’s Circle found it wise to vacate their houses for the time being and seek shelter in Mazagon, the Fort and other parts. Much damage was done to mill-property, and in several encounters with the mob the European police were forced to use their revolvers and the troops had to fire in self-defence. The Indian cavalry were stoned from the chals on more than one occasion, and small parties of unarmed police fared badly at the hands of the rioters, who had accumulated considerable stores of brick-bats and road-metal at convenient vantage-points.