Before dealing with the record of crime, a brief reference is desirable to the extraordinary volume of miscellaneous work performed under the orders of the Commissioner. Derelict children were constantly being picked up in the streets by the divisional police and forwarded to the Head Office, when the Commissioner had to make the best arrangements he could for their maintenance and welfare; penniless women and children were repatriated to various parts of India, to Persia, Mauritius, Egypt, South Africa and Singapore, with funds collected by the Police Office for each individual case from charitable townspeople; penurious women were assisted to get their daughters married, and on one occasion a Muhammadan and his wife, who desired a divorce and applied for police assistance, were granted facilities for the ceremony at police headquarters. On another occasion the Commissioner was asked to assist in the rebuilding of a mosque belonging to the Sidis or African Musalmans of Tandel Street, and was able to obtain the necessary funds from several well-to-do Muhammadans in the city. The Police dealt also with a large number of lunatics; they traced deserters from the Army and Navy; they made inquiries into the condition of second-class hotels and drinking bars in the European quarter and took action, when necessary, in consultation with the Excise authorities; they dealt with a very large number of prostitutes under the Police Act. The number of summonses which they were called upon to serve annually on behalf of magisterial courts in Bombay and other Provinces was enormous, and their work in connexion with the grant of certificates of identity to persons proceeding to Europe, with the grant of passes for processions and for playing music in the streets, and of permits to enter the Ballard Pier on the arrival and departure of the English mail-steamer, was heavy and continuous. Appeals for unofficial assistance from private individuals and from societies like the League of Mercy, engaged in rescue-work among women, were also never refused. Miscellaneous activities of this varied type formed no small portion of the annual task of the force and were rendered effective by the close collaboration of the staff at headquarters, the C. I. D., and the divisional police.
The difficulty of providing suitable shelter and guardianship for the many derelict girls of tender age found wandering in the streets by the police led directly to the foundation by the Commissioner of the Abdulla Haji Daud Bavla Muhammadan Girls’ Orphanage. With the possible exception of one or two Christian missionary institutions, to which it would have been impolitic on political and religious grounds to send children, no organization or society existed in 1909, which was prepared to take charge of homeless girls. Consequently, many little waifs gravitated into the brothels of the city or were gradually absorbed in the floating criminal population. Moreover, when a child was found in the streets, homeless and friendless, the police had no shelter to offer her except the cells at the sectional police-station; and these, being regularly filled with the dregs of the criminal population, were a most undesirable environment for girls of tender years. As caste-prejudices offered peculiar obstacles to any scheme for the benefit of Hindu girls belonging to the Shudra class, the Commissioner determined to concentrate his attention upon a home for Muhammadan girls, and accordingly drew up a scheme and issued an appeal, which was widely circulated among the Muhammadan community. The appeal was favourably received, and about 2 lakhs of rupees were collected within a few weeks. To this sum were added more than 3 lakhs from the estate of the late Abdulla Haji Daud Bavla, whose executors offered the amount on condition that the orphanage should bear his name, that his trustees should be represented on the managing committee of the orphanage, and that the objects, constitution and maintenance etc. of the orphanage should be embodied in a legal deed of trust. At the request of the Commissioner, the Bombay Government agreed to become a party to the deed and bound themselves to appoint the Commissioner of Police, or any other of their officers resident for the time being in Bombay, as chairman of the board of trustees of the orphanage. The legal preliminaries having been completed and the funds duly invested in gilt-edged securities, a suitable building was taken on a lease, and furnished at the expense of a philanthropic Muhammadan merchant, and in December, 1910, the orphanage was formally opened by Sir George Clarke (now Lord Sydenham) and Lady Clarke. The institution soon justified its existence; the number of girl-inmates steadily increased, their physical health and welfare being under the general supervision of a trustworthy Englishwoman, and their religious exercises and elementary lessons being given by a Mullani and her assistants. The problem of the girls’ future was solved in the only feasible way by arranging for their marriage with Muhammadans of their own class, as soon as they reached the age of maturity. These hymeneal arrangements were made by a chosen officer of the C. I. D., Khan Saheb M. F. Taki, in consultation with the jamats and leaders of the various Musalman sections. Experience has proved that the establishment of institutions like this Muhammadan Girls’ Orphanage is an essential preliminary to any serious effort to combat the deplorable traffic in children, which still flourishes in India and constitutes the chief means of recruitment for the brothels of the larger towns and cities.
This period witnessed a steady increase in crime up to 1915, when the stringent measures taken during the pendency of the War to clear the City of undesirables imposed a notable check upon the normal increase in reported crime. Previous to that date the rapid increase in recorded crime was the natural result of the changes which took place in the force after 1909, and particularly of the improvement in registration which followed the introduction of the new divisional police-stations. Not only did these stations offer increased facilities for the reporting and detection of crime, but it was also impossible under the new system for cases to escape registration and final inclusion in the returns. The improvement in the registration of cases was manifested also in a marked diminution of the number of complaints classed as made under a misapprehension of law or fact. By 1916 the sanctioned strength of the police force had been augmented by one-third since 1906, and this fact by itself would have sufficed to account for a large increase in the amount of crime brought to light. When coupled with the reorganization of the various police-stations, each of which was furnished with a strong registering and investigating staff, the increase in recorded crime became inevitable. It was likewise due to more accurate estimates of the value of property stolen that the percentage of recovery declined from 56 in 1908 to about 40 in succeeding years.
Murder and attempts at murder were still deplorably frequent, including cases of infanticide which are extremely difficult to detect in an Oriental city. The number of murder cases varied from 16 in 1909 to 31 in 1910, 25 in 1911, 31 in 1912, and 24 in both 1913 and 1915. The largest number, 35, occurred in 1914. The most notable murder was that of a young and wealthy Bhattia widow, residing in her own house on Malabar Hill. Her husband, Lakhmidas Khimji, who had died some time previously in circumstances which gave rise to ill-founded rumour, had been a well-known figure in Indian commercial circles. His widow Jamnabai, was brutally strangled by a gang of six men from northern India, two of whom belonged to well-known criminal tribes in the United Provinces and a third was a night-watchman in the employ of a Jain resident on Malabar Hill. At first there appeared to be no clue whatever to the crime; but a few days after its occurrence the commissioner received an anonymous letter in Hindi, which was translated for him by the Subehdar of the Armed Police, who happened to be a north-Indian Brahman conversant with that language. The letter, which was written by one of the criminals in revenge for not receiving what he regarded as a fair share of the ornaments stolen from the widow’s house, gave sufficient details to enable the Police to arrest five of the gang the same evening. The sixth accused was subsequently arrested at Bassein. All of them were placed on trial for murder and convicted.
By the year 1909, the vice of cocaine-eating had attained an extraordinary hold upon the lower classes of the population. Women and even children had fallen victims to a habit which plainly exercised a deplorable effect upon their health and morals. The supplies of the drug came in the first instance from Germany in packets bearing the name of Merk, and were frequently smuggled into India in ways that defied detection. Moreover the traffic in the drug, which was international in character, was so cleverly organized that it was practically impossible to trace and prosecute the importers and distributors. Action was therefore confined to prosecuting the smaller fry for the offences of illicit sale and possession, and the majority of such cases occurred in the notorious Nal Bazar area of the C division, which for the last thirty or forty years has sheltered a large population of disreputables. The Police were not held primarily responsible for the control of the cocaine-traffic. This duty devolved upon the Collector of Bombay, who maintained a large and well-paid excise staff for the purpose.[115] But the obligation which rested on the police to assist the excise authorities as far as possible, and the direct stimulus to crime provided by the cocaine-habit, rendered the question of combating the traffic of more than ordinary importance. With this in view, the Commissioner in 1909 put a special police-cordon on the area devoted to the traffic for about six weeks. This produced satisfactory results for the time being, but had to be abandoned, to allow of the men reverting to their regular duties which suffered by their absence. In 1911 a second attempt was made to restrict the evil by placing a European Inspector and a staff of constables on special duty in the C division for a period of about two months, during which nearly 600 individuals were caught and convicted by the courts. These incursions into the area of the retail-traffic were not the only successes achieved by the police. In 1911 the Dock Police arrested an Austrian steward of the S. S. Africa with 300 grains of cocaine concealed in the soles of his boots; in 1912 the Superintendent of the Harbour Police secured the arrest of a fireman from a German merchant-ship with 40 lbs. of the drug, valued at Rs. 45,500, in his possession; another large consignment, valued at Rs. 17,000 was traced by Khan Saheb M. H. Taki and Khan Saheb F. M. Taki of the C. I. D. to a house in Doctor Street in 1913; and on two occasions Indian constables on duty in the Docks arrested on suspicion persons belonging to vessels in the harbour, with large quantities of the drug concealed on their person. It cannot be asserted, however, that these arrests and prosecutions secured any real diminution of the traffic from abroad. They did upset the local market for the drug, and interfered temporarily with the supply of the tiny paper packets sold in the darker corners of the C division. The traffickers were not thereby daunted, for when the real article was difficult to procure, they palmed off powdered magnesia and Epsom salts on their unfortunate victims, who were naturally unable to complain of the deception. The first real check to the traffic was provided by the drastic restrictions on imports and exports imposed after the declaration of War in 1914, and by the sudden cessation of the continental steamship companies’ traffic between Europe and the East. At a comparatively recent date the question of the traffic in cocaine has been discussed at Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations, and the view seems to be generally accepted that the evil can only be adequately countered by stringent supervision of the primary sources of supply and joint action on the part of all the States concerned.
Of the many important criminal cases successfully investigated by the Police during these seven years, a few deserve special mention. In 1910 and 1911 some very seditious books were brought to the notice of the Bombay Government by certain persons to whom they had been sent anonymously. In the course of their inquiries the Police discovered a large store of these books at Navsari in the Baroda State, and also secured proof that the books were printed at Mehsana in the same territory. A prominent Indian pleader of Kaira, who was concerned in their distribution, was prosecuted and duly convicted. H. H. the Gaekwar of Baroda was in England at the time of the inquiry; but on his return he deported the author of the books, who was one of his own subjects, for a period of five years. In 1912 the police successfully dealt with a swindler named Amratlal, who had victimised a firm of jewellers in Germany to the extent of nearly 2 lakhs of rupees, and they also detected the perpetrator of a series of thefts on board the P. and O. Company’s ships, including a case of tampering with the mails. In the following year the premises of the well-known firm of Messrs Ewart, Latham and Company were destroyed by fire. Immediately after the fire, a stolen cheque filled in for Rs. 10,826 and bearing a forged signature, was presented at a bank for payment and cashed. One of the firm’s employés was eventually arrested and charged with the offences of theft, cheating and forgery, the police investigation establishing also the moral certainty that the accused had set fire to the office in the hope of obliterating all trace of his crime. The accused was committed to the Sessions, where a peculiarly stupid jury, failing to appreciate the evidence, brought in a verdict of “not guilty.” The presiding Judge discharged the accused and passed severe comments on the perversity displayed by the jury. A case, which contained elements of both tragedy and comedy, concerned the marriage of a Koli girl, about 9 years old, to a sexagenarian Bania. Three Hindus, acting on the principle that love is blind, falsely represented that the girl was a Bania, and thereby induced the elderly Lothario to pay Rs. 1,500 for the privilege of wedding the girl. After the marriage the old gentleman discovered the deception practised upon him, and made a formal complaint to the police, who traced the three culprits and secured the conviction of two of them.
In 1914 the embezzlement of Rs. 1,000, representing the fees paid by students at the Government Law School, led to the arrest and conviction of a clerk on the school staff, who was proved in the course of the police-inquiry to have embezzled no less than Rs. 12,000 between the years 1902 and 1912. At the request of the police of the United Provinces, two charges of filing false civil suits, with the object of avoiding payment of sums due by them, were successfully proved against natives of upper India; and these were followed by an equally long and intricate inquiry into a case of cheating, in which three Hindus, one of whom had a local reputation as a palmist and astrologer, persuaded two Bhandaris of Bombay to pay them Rs. 4,000, on condition that they would use their supposed influence with the excise authorities to obtain two liquor-licenses for their dupes. In 1915 the Bohra thief and house-breaker, Tyebali, whose conviction during Mr. Gell’s régime has already been mentioned, completed his term of imprisonment and recommenced his thieving exploits. After committing several thefts from houses in Nepean Sea road he was caught, convicted and sentenced to a fresh term of six years’ imprisonment. All the stolen property was recovered from a Bohra receiver, who worked with Tyebali. In September of the same year information was received from the Director of Criminal Intelligence, Delhi, that three valuable Persian manuscripts had been stolen from the library of Nawab Sir Salar Jung Bahadur at Hyderabad. After a lengthy inquiry the Bombay police traced one of the manuscripts, a Shahnama, with illuminated headings and illustrations in colours and gold, which was declared by experts to be an artistic treasure of immense value. A chance remark furnished a clue to the whereabouts of the manuscript, which was in due course returned to its owner in Hyderabad.
Anonymous communications are exceedingly common in India, and as a rule it is practically impossible to trace their authorship. A case of this type, which presented unusual features, was successfully investigated by the police in 1915. For more than two years a series of objectionable and defamatory postcards and letters had been received by high officials, prominent Indians, and clubs. Any event of public interest during that period resulted in a shower of these typed communications, which were always very scurrilous and occasionally flagrantly indecent. They were addressed not only to residents of Bombay, but to officials in other parts of India also, to the Governor, the Viceroy and even to members of the Royal Family in England. The C.I.D. had been able to establish the fact that all the cards and letters were typed on a single machine of a particular and well-known make; and having done that, they proceeded, with the approval of the postal authorities, to subject all the postcards received in the General Post Office to close scrutiny throughout a period of several weeks. At length their patience was rewarded. A card was found, which on careful scrutiny was seen to have been typed on the missing machine, and as it was an ordinary and bona fide business communication it was not difficult to locate the machine. It proved to be the property of a well-known Indian merchant, and further inquiry rendered it certain that he was the author of the anonymous cards. He was therefore arrested and released on bail. While the Police were collecting further evidence to support the charge against him, the accused, who had many influential friends, confessed his guilt to one of them and asked his advice. The friend advised him to make a clean breast of the whole matter to the Commissioner of Police and throw himself on his mercy. This he agreed at the moment, but in the end failed, to do and a few days later, while ostensibly endeavouring to light a gas-stove with a bottle of methylated spirit, he was so severely burned about the body that he died in a few hours. The case caused some commotion in the community, to which the accused belonged, and the Commissioner was urged to refrain at the inquest on the deceased from any allusion to the criminal inquiry into the authorship of the postcards. But this the Commissioner refused to do, in view of the wild rumours about the case which were being spread about the City, some of which placed the police in a false and undesirable position. It was doubtless satisfactory to the friends of the deceased that the Coroner’s jury found themselves able to pronounce a verdict of accidental death. It only remains to add that after the arrest of the accused the plague of anonymous postcards entirely ceased.
The criminal record of these years would be incomplete without a reference to the collapse in 1913 of a number of Indian banks. The most notable of all, the Indian Specie Bank, was never made the subject of a criminal investigation, though the apathy of its Directors was unquestionable, and its manager, who had set out to “corner” silver against the Indian Government with the monies of the bank’s depositors, found it desirable, when the crash came, to die suddenly at Bandora. Orders were issued by the Bombay Government to the Police to investigate the transactions of several lesser banks and bring the guilty to trial; and accordingly a protracted and intricate inquiry was commenced by Inspector Morris of the C. I. D. into the accounts and balance-sheets of the Credit Bank, the Bombay Banking Company and the Cosmopolitan Bank. In the case of the first-named bank, charges of criminal breach of trust and falsification of accounts were proved against the manager, who was sentenced in 1914 to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment, while the manager of the Bombay Banking Company and his nephew were likewise convicted of criminal breach of trust and cheating and sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment with hard labour. In the third case the police proved clearly that the bank was not a bank at all, and had neither funds, business nor influence; but the manager and the “bank’s” broker, who were charged by the police with cheating, were eventually discharged by the trying magistrate. These bank-failures were not confined to Bombay, but took place in other Provinces also, notably in the Punjab. When the collapse commenced, an attempt was made to draw some of the European-managed banks into the vortex, with the object of showing that the failures were due rather to general economic conditions than to bad management. The attempt failed; for the Scotchmen, who form ninety per cent of the European banking community in India, were too cautious and too solidly entrenched to succumb to any artificial panic, and despite the assertion of some Indian politicians that the European-managed banks, by withholding assistance from these mushroom Indian concerns, had deliberately precipitated the crisis, the general conclusion was that the failures were primarily due to careless or fraudulent management. This view found confirmation in the verdicts delivered in the Courts.
The collapse of at least one bank was due to the uncontrolled habit of speculation which has always distinguished the City of Bombay. Few persons now remain who can remember the famous Share Mania of the early ’sixties: but the spirit of gambling which underlay that colossal financial fiasco is still alive and manifests itself from time to time in wild speculation in the cotton and share markets. The abnormal readiness of the average Indian to follow the lead of any man of outstanding personality, and the ease with which credit is obtained and renewed in Indian circles only serve to aggravate the evil. The suicide of Mr. Dwarkadas Dharamsey, a leading Bhattia mill-agent and merchant, in September, 1909, provided an example of the latitude allowed to one whose financial position had for several years been very unsound. Dwarkadas Dharamsey was a man of great mental capacity, but devoid of scruple. He occupied a leading position in the mercantile and social world, was well-known on the race-course as an owner of horses, was a member of the Municipal Corporation and of the Board of the Improvement Trust, and had been appointed Sheriff of Bombay two or three years before his death. Yet in the very heyday of his prosperity he was spending more than he possessed, staving off importunate demands by all manner of temporary expedients, and juggling with the funds of the mills of which he was director and agent. Faced at last with almost complete insolvency and unable to raise further funds, he shot himself with a revolver at his house in the Fort. He left a kind of confession behind him in which he explained the reason for his action and referred in ambiguous language to some greater crime that he had committed. Though various conjectures were made as to the nature of this act, no definite solution was ever forthcoming. His secret died with him. Immediately after his death, the police discovered that the operatives of his four mills had not been paid their wages for two months, and owing to the closing of the mills they were left stranded and unemployed. With the assistance of Mr. R. D. Sethna, the Official Receiver, the Commissioner was able to get the mill-hands’ wages treated as a first charge on the estate of the deceased, and within a short time the wages due to the men were liquidated under Mr. Sethna’s orders.