From ‘Jack of all Trade’to ‘Master of Everything’: Changing Role of Colonial Police in Bengal, 1750s to 1920s

byaryama gHosH1

aBstract: Bengal served as the ‘bridgehead’ for the British colonial expansion and for that since the beginning, the province experienced all the approaches of the nascent colonial state to control the native society through coercion and conciliation. By this benefit of being the earliest stretch of land to be colonized, Bengal experienced the colonial policing apparatus from the start to the end of colonial rule. The capital of the British Colonial state was transformed from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911; up to that period, Bengal was the centre of Colonial control. In this long period, the policing activities started with the provision security to the tiny enclave of Fort William, and within a few decades, when the East India Company became the landlord after the grant of the Dewani right in 1765, the volume of work increased. Collection of revenue and subduing refractory subjects became the new job. Apart from maintaining day-to-day law and order or occasional job of pacifying insurgents, police started to other interestingly subsidiary jobs like keeping the city clean or saving local subjects from pariah dogs. Keeping in mind this multi-tasking apparatus of the Bengal colonial police, this article intends to argue that the colonial intention, if not ability, for a panopticonic system made the early policing system grab more than it can ingest, leading to occasional failures. Nevertheless, the system worked as a sphere of limited state-society interaction despite of failures. This article further argues that with the growth of colonial technologies of social order and their prompt and well-thought adaptations, the colonial police in Bengal outgrown into a ruthlessly efficient system of control by the end of the First World War. In this journey of growing efficiency, the police system gradually militarized its particular sections, sharpened its apparatus of intelligence gathering, and even reformed its day-to-day control over minute things. The changing nature of the colonial state was met with new kinds of challenges like communal riots, revolutionary activities, and the police system adapted to these challenges. This article argues that this continuous adaptation became successful due to the indigenous subalterns serving in the police forces. keyWorDs: PolIce

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“Jamādār! shyamchand mangao”2 (Lieutenant! Bring the shoe.)

This proverbial Bengali harangue, associated to the policemen at work in the 19th century, elucidates a historical conjuncture in a microcosm where the pre-colonial modes of malice paradoxically persisted within the colonial modes of management of the society or its social order. But at the same time, these dreaded minions of imperialism were often became subject of slur, satire, and stigma in the narratives of colonial Bengali gentlemen. This paradoxically contradictory existence has indeed borne out of manifold elements. These multiple identities were caused due to the multiplicity of policing jobs in colonial Bengal. This article tries to delve into this particular side of colonial policing in Bengal to figure out its structural and multifarious development.

It is true that the colonial policing or ‘police’as a concept in this discussion was to some extent bred out of the 19th century Britain3, but in the colonies policing far from being an importation, became a hybrid; result of acculturation. It was neither unarmed policing based on the policy of policing by consent, nor a totally coercive policing based on full armament of police force, but a hybrid of both.As Bengal was the first of the Indian regions to come under colonial political control of the English East India Company, it had gone through some initial formative phase when even England’s police was not totally modernized itself. This makes it an interesting area of research. This article argues that the organisational progress in colonial policing was based on specialising in the areas of necessities; state-society interaction in which the police acted as the state’s subaltern embodiment, countering insurgencies in which they acted as specialised troops of brutal coercion, and controlling space in which they acted as the state’s monitor of spatial control. These wings of necessities would transform into specialised branches of policing in later day, creating a modular precedent for other colonies. These various necessities had geographical specificities, differential expression of consent and dissent from the subject population, and periodical ideological as well as responsive shift among the authorities to the necessities. This article argues that three particular objectives: claiming the monopoly of legitimate violence, creating a bridge between society and state, shaping the contours of control, constituted the colonial policing authority. Claiming Sovereignty: Security-centric Justification and Limited Political Space

2 ‘Shyamchand’ was a type of long shoe (according to some references a type of whip) used to beat common criminals during investigations. Ramakhoy CHATTERJEE, Police o Lokrokhyā, Subarnarekha, Kolkata, 1892, p. 34.

3 Egon BIttner, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society: A Review of Background Factors, Current Practices, and Possible Role Models, JasonAronson, New York, 1975, p. 15.

Policing duties in the countryside was basically a zamindari duty since the Mughal times but colonial establishment planned to restructure the system. If we compare it with the pre-modern times, India under Islamic rule state’s authority of disseminate justice was limited. Since the period of Sher Shah Suri (1540-1545), the basic responsibility of maintaining law and order was local responsibility, which more or less remained the same throughout the Mughal phase.4 Though scholars like Parmatma Saran has criticised this conventional analysis pioneered by Sir Jadunath Sarkar, it seems principally localities were independent in case of day-to-day policing, until or unless the flow of revenue extraction met a halt caused by collective rebellion.5 Zamindari control over local modes of coercion proves this. But the East India Company after turning into a ruler of these new lands gradually marched towards the total monopolization of legitimate violence and policing was typically part of this notion.

Sinkichi Taniguchi in his study of the fall of Dinajpur estate, a Zamindari estate which continued since the pre-colonial period, shows that since the acquirement of the Dewani grant apart from their main objective of revenue maximisation, they had been trying to reduce zamindar’s military establishment. Vansittart started this by drastic reduction of expenses of zamindar’s central and local officers and this trend continued. There were nearly 50% reduction of Dwaks and Paiks; nearly 27% reduction of Barkandazes and Peons; and nearly 92% reduction of Sawars in Dinajpur estate.6 There was also a steady reduction of nearly 40% lands which were kept for the maintenance of such zamindari units.7 This trend continued in other districts also where such kind of rent free ‘Chakran’, ‘Ghwatwal’ lands were brought under the system of revenue collection. Once these armed men were disbanded, they either turned into bandits or migrated westward for military employment. This systematic reduction of the zamindari ability to muster armed men was termed by John McLane as ‘demilitarisation of the Zamindars’.8 While the state was trying to replace indigenous policing with their pre-conceived notions of policing, it met challenges in some areas.

4 Sir Jadunath sarkar, Mughal Administration, M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Calcutta, 1920, pp. 7980.

5 Parmatma saran, The Provincial Government of the Mughals, 1526-1658, reprint 2021, LG Publishers, Delhi, 1941, p. 371.

6 ‘Dwaks’ were native postal runners; ‘Paiks’or ‘Paikos’were native foot soldiers; ‘Barkandazes’were native armed guards mostly armed with native small firearms called ‘banduk’; Peons or ‘Pyoons’were low-ranking guards; ‘Sawars’were native cavalry.

7 Shinkichi TANIGUCHI, «The Permanent Settlement in Bengal and the Break-Up of the Zamindari of Dinajpur», The Calcutta Historical Journal, 3, 1 (1978), pp. 27-28.

After the famine of 1776, banditry increased and zamindar’s lack of military troops due to disbandment made it impossible to check the situation. In 1782, the colonial authority ordered all the landed elites to keep vigilant eye to prevent law and order problems like banditry within their respective areas and if they failed or themselves commit such crimes would be severely punished with death.9 This was the foremost attempt to be in command of social ordering. The approach was both draconian and arbitrary. In 1793, authority planned the appointment of the head of the police system to be controlled by the state rather than the zamindars. By severing the patron-client tie between the landed elite and police, state tried to monopolize the means and actors of day-to-day coercion. This effort led to more expenditure and taxation; ultimately caused the levying of the Police Tax, which was proposed to be taxed from the shops, bazars and gunges. 10 The plan was to tax the merchants in place of the peasantry who were already under huge taxation, because the merchants needed security from the robbers the most and were not under any direct taxation. Different District Magistrates surveyed local trade, classified merchant classes, and assessed the rate of payment. The Police Tax of 1793 was met with protest and hartals, an indigenous form of nonviolent protest.11 On 31 August 1797, following a series of hartals, the Company acknowledged the tax as a failure and rescinded it. People in Banaras protested against the Banaras House Tax (1810-11) in a way comparable to this instance.12 In 1816, residents of Bareilly attempted hartals by closing businesses and gathering outside the Magistrate’s office to lodge collective petition. Despite various amendments, the plan was a failure and the problem was solved with the introduction of the Stamp Tax of 1797.13 These successive events shows that the colonial state’s striving for control over coercion and try of justifying the revenue based of state’s position as sole security provider opened up a possibility for new state-society interaction. Petitions and legal litigations were brought under the new stamp taxation which successfully funded the new police system, and made way for new state-society conversation, ‘a limited political space’.14 Within this ‘limited political space’, the new police came up as a character whose job was not only to stop criminals but as the colonial concept of ‘law and order’ gradually expanded its boundaries and incorporated more and more within its ambit, they became state’s representation in the lowest tier of the society.

8 John R. MCLANE, «Revenue Farming and the Zamindari System in Eighteenth century Bengal», in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1977, p. 20.

9 Subhas Sinchan ROY, Police Administration of Bengal (1793-1833), Firma KLM Private Limited, Kolkata, 2008, p. 2.

10 WEST BENGAL STATE ARCHIVES (here after WBSA), Kolkata, Revenue Department Judicial Proceedings, dated 7th December 1792, n. 37.

11 Basudeb CHOTTOPADHYAY, «PoliceTax andTrader’s Protest in Bengal, 1793-1798», in Basudeb CHOTTOPADHYAY, Hari S. VASUDEVAN, Rajat Kanta ROY (ed.), Dissent and Consensus: Protest in Pre-Industrial Societies, K.P. Bagchi & Company, Calcutta, 1989, p. 30.

12 Richard HEITLER, «The Varanasi House Tax Hartal of 1810-11», Indian Economic and Social History Review, 9, 3 (1972), pp. 239-257.

13 WBSA, Kolkata, Letter from the Court of Directors to the Governor General in Council, dated 29th May 1799.

14 Aryama GHOSH, «A “Peace” of Paper and a Necessary Clown: Colonial Policing, Bengali Intelligentsia, and the Birth of Limited Political Space in Bengal», Journal of People’s History and Culture, 6, 2 (2021), pp. 63-71.

The Regulation of 1793 was planned to endow with an enduring solution to the predicament of social order. Coming of Marquis Charles Cornwallis, veteran of the American Wars had changed the situation a lot because a man endowed with comparatively much power was posted for first time replacing the pervious officials like Sir John Macpherson, who were purely nabobs with the intention of prolonging their carrier as well as fortune. Warren Hastings had tried fragmentary reorganisation of the concerns regarding law and order which was consolidated into a proper system by Cornwallis for first time. Cornwallis expressed his utter dislike for the fact that control of the native remains in case of law and order.

In his minute he said,

“The multitude of criminals with which the jails in every district are now crowded, numerous murders, robberies and burglaries daily committed and the general insecurity of person and property, which prevails in the interiorparts of the country”,... prove “the inefficacyresulting from all the criminal courts and their proceedings being left dependent on the Nabob Mahommad Reza Khan, and from the objections which he may be naturally disposed to feel, on the ground of his religion, to any innovations in the prescribed and customary rules and application of Mahommedan law, we ought not, I think, to leave the future control of so important a branch of Government to the sole discretion of any native, or indeed, of any single person whatsoever.”15

So, the plan was to replace the natives from the controlling position. Secondly, Cornwallis’ other ideological intent was to create an improving society whose societal elites, in this case the zamindars, would be the proprietary owner of the land with an obligation to pay revenue assessed on permanent basis while relieved from the obligations to maintain law and order of the lands. This intention was not novel, but a fruition of collective objective pursued since the beginning. But with the striving towards westernisation, policing itself spread as many headed hydra, which was not totally under control of the colonial state.

Calcutta grew up as the keystone of the British Imperial dream because it had been the ‘bridgehead’to their colonial endeavour. Scholars like Peter James Marshall, Rhodes Murphy found that colonial towns like Calcutta as ‘beach- heads of an exogenous system, peripheral but nevertheless revolutionary’16; based on foreign foundations, ‘alien to environment’, and resulting into ‘entirely new kind of social system’17. But it seems that the materialisation was hybrid rather than alien. In the earliest phase, policing the city was mostly a native job and by wielding the colonial baton of coercion lots of collaborators became rich enough to style themselves as ‘black zamindars’. People like Nandaram Sen, Gobindaram Mittra who were at the head of the city’s watch and ward unit and also acted as the deputy of the Calcutta zamindar of the Company, used to act as cord of relation between the nascent colonial state’s native collaborators and agents and the subjects. Known for his infamous club wielding paiks, Gobindaram was the first representative native imagery of colonial coercion.18

There was an interesting relationship of the Company’s zamindar and their ‘black deputies’, based on the trend of corruption. The first force was made in the time of Benzamin Bowcher, the second collector zamindar of Calcutta. It was made of one chief peon, forty five peons, two club holders, and twenty goalas or guards of cow-harder caste.19 Interestingly these goalas belonged to the so called unclean castes of Bengal. The colloquial verses continued to recite the awe-inspiring rise of such ‘black zamindars’ as new societal elite which was a sign that the state had found its necessary collaborators through whom they could have made their presence felt. But this early development started to crumble since the ending decades of the 18th century as the authorities trying to get more control over the system of coercion.

Notaries like Jaganmohan Mukharjee, Netaichand Sarma, Ramgopal Bose, and others in the 1790s petitioned the Governor-General to do something about the rising rate of robberies in Calcutta. They said in their petition that the town’s day-to-day safety had not improved despite the implementation of various kinds of policies. In addition to lamenting the deterioration of law and order, they brought up the issue of the Choukydary Tax, which was levied based on safety. This type of petition not only shows that the society had been in constant interaction with the state through a new type of political language but also shows

16 Rhodes MURPHEY, «Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing urban roles inAsia», Journal of Asian Studies, 29, 1969, p. 83.

17 Peter James MARSHALL, «Eighteenth-Century Calcutta», in Robert Ross and Gerard J. Telkamp (ed.), Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht, 1985, p. 87.

18 Reverend Father James LONG, Calcutta and Its Neighbourhood: History of People and Localities from 1690 to 1857, Indian Publications, Calcutta, 1974, p. 201.

19 C.R.WILSON, The Early Annals of English in Bengal, vol. I,W.Thacker & co., London/Calcutta, 1900, p. 240.

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that the early native collaborators were being purged due to the continuous importance on replacing natives from the position of influence and pushed them in the lower tier of colonial state structure. The petitioners went on saying that the earlier position of Hoodadars, a group of local notaries tasked with selecting and appointing peacekeeping officers for the police force, should be reinstated because ‘when power was committed in the hands of Hoodadars, no mischief was attended’.20 The initial collaborators were aware of their declining position as stakeholders in the day-to-day safety and security. But by putting forward the argument that they are taxpaying citizen they tried to justify their position as stakeholder in the state’s daily affairs. This demand of subject-hood and the expression of dissent through petition structured the early limited political space where the colonial subject and colonial masters accompanied each other into a modern era political language.

This interesting shift was due to the English plan for setting a rule of proprietary right over land, an unprecedented development in the state-society relation. Ranajit Guha argued that in the early phase of the Company rule in Bengal, all the administrators were locomoted by the idea that a sound administration is only possible when proprietary right over land could be secured and due to the distance from the metropolis London, there was a need for ‘a class of native entrepreneurs who had solid interests in the land and were politically reliable’, on whose help ‘the permanence of dominion’ would be kept.21 This idea of property was a post-Glorious Revolution invention, imported to Bengal and another interrelated idea accompanied this importation; the rule of law.22 Early modern Europe has seen a pacification of European elite lifestyle as a byproduct of modern state formation.23 England’s gentry class in the 16th century refashioned themselves as ‘polite and restrained gentleman’, which Norbert Elias described as ‘self-pacification’.24 Violence became irrelevant for political mobility

20 NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF INDIA (here after NAI), New Delhi, Petition of Jaganmohan Mukharjee, Netaichand Sarma, Ramgopal Bose and others representing that have been on increase, Home Department, Public Branch, 1791, pp. 3470-3477, Original Collection (here after O.C.), 19th October, N. 23.

21 RanajitGUHA, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Orient Longman Ltd., New Delhi, 1959, pp. 17-18.

22 Julian HOPPIT, «Compulsion, Compensation and Property Rights in Britain, 1688-1833», Past and Present, 210, 1 (2011), p. 93.

23 Norbert ELIAS, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Pantheon Books, New York, 1969; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, 1990.

24 Norbert ELIAS, «Introduction» in Norbert ELIAS and Eric DUNNING (eds.), Quest for Ex-

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for which these men adopted strategies like law, which ‘required verbal competence and technical learning rather than martial skill’25. The idea of non-martial gentlemanly elites was a preconceived notion, following which Company’s administrators planned for a demilitarisation of the zamindars in Bengal, who gradually became the proprietary landed elites, Cornwallis’so called mirror representation of Whig improving landowner gentlemen collaborator.

Bengali landed elites were themselves been going through a collective behavioural change. Since the Mughal conquest of Bengal till the time of Murshid Quli Khan’s reign, martial elites were ruthlessly exterminated and replaced with non-martial upper castes coming from Brahmin and Kayastha lineage. These men already been through the process of ‘self-pacification’ and adopted different strategies of societal control while the affairs of statecraft was in the hands of Muslim Nawabs and his Afghan entourage.26 Even before the East India Company entered in the politics of Bengal, native pacified elites considered the English as militarily superior and characteristically secure ally than the Muslim powers. During the Sobha Singh’s Rebellion, Raja Ramkrishna of Navadwip, predecessor of famous Krishnachandra of Navadwip, sent forty thousand rupees ‘thinking it more secure’in the hands of the Company behind their forts.27 By the start of the 18th century, the Company was aware of its position as a security provider to the inhabitants under its small fortified jurisdiction of Calcutta and the Court of Directors had instructed Sir Charles Eyre for raising revenue in form of custom subsidies and other taxes as ‘the protected should have an acknowledgement to their defenders’.28 In the middle of the 18th century, when Maratha raids caused havoc in Bengal which then Nawab Alivardi himself failed to contain totally, Company planned to fortify its territories with a ditch. The native inhabitants supported this effort with voluntary contribution29 citement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 58. which was a sign that ‘protection being the true foundation’ of Company state, created a background of state-society relationship based on security-centric legitimacy of rule which later developed into a limited political space. So when Jaganmohan Mukharjee, Netaichand Sarma, Ramgopal Bose and other notaries expressed their complaints through petition regarding the decline of law and order, as successors of Krishnachandra and other pacified landed elites and further strengthen with the colonial state’s propitiatory rights entered into a new type of collaborative relation. These men in turn were the predecessors of the Bhadrabittas or gentlemanly middle class-upper caste societal elites who would dominate the scene in later days’limited political space.

25 Jonah Stuart BRUNDAGE, «The Pacification of Elite Lifestyles: State Formation, Elite Reproduction, and the Practice of Hunting in Early Modern England», Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 4 (2017), p. 788.

26 See more, Aryama GHOSH, ‘Pacification’ of Bengal Presidency: Small Wars, Legitimacy, and Colonial State, 1760-1800, unpublished Master of Philosophy thesis, Department of History, Jadavpur University, 2019, pp. 57-92.

27 Extract from General Letter from Fort St. George to the Court, September 30, 1696, Original Consultation No. 6279, in C.R. WILSON (ed.), Indian Record Series: Old Fort William in Bengal, John Murray, London, 1906, pp. 21-22.

28 Extract from Instruction from the Court to Sir Charles Eyre, London, dated 20th December 1699, Letter book n. 10, in WILSON cit., p. 47.

29 ExtractfromtheMaterials‘BengalHistory’,OrmeCollection,O.V.,vol.66,inWILSONcit.,p.82.

While the urban space had been going through reordering based on western sense of modernity, rural society has seen different type of development which might be useful to show the growing bifurcation of colonial modernity as a whole. The countryside experienced banditry since the initial phase of the Colonial rule. Since the famine of 1770, the ranks of such bandits swelled. The bandit gangs became so numerous and fearless that they started to attack revenue on transit.30 Stopping the rural disturbances became the prime concern of the state. As mentioned before the Cornwallis Code first tried to transform the system totally and after demilitarising the landed elites, planned to post centrally appointed police officials like Darogas. But while the District Magistrates, who were not aware of the particularities of appointing a Daroga, used to depend on their native lower officials. These native officials used to take bribe for recommending the names of potential candidates to the collector.A19th century autobiography of a Daroga titled Mianjan Darogar Ekrarnamah (Confessions of Mianjan Daroga) mentions about the protagonists’rise to the post of Daroga due to nepotism and bribery.31 So just like Gobindaram Mitra, the ‘black deputy’, these little rural coercive masters started act as little corrupt minions of already corrupt colonial district collectors. But corruption soon became projected as a lower caste or Muslim stereotypical trait as most of the policemen were coming from such backgrounds. Hindu gentlemanly classes’discourse told and

30 Basudev CHATTERJI, «The Darogah and the Countryside: The Imposition of Police Control in Bengal and its Impact (1793-1837) », The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18, 1 (1981), p. 21.

31 Anon., Miyajan Darogar Ekrarnama,Ayan Publishers, Kolkata, 1957, pp. 11-12.

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retold this story till it became a normative narrative.

Urban and mofussil middle class mostly coming from an upper and middle caste lineage would start to criticise these Darogas mostly belonging to Muslim or lower caste communities as corrupt. These men were Bhadrabittas or gentlemanly middle classes with a hegemonic prominence in the system of socio-economic and cultural representation, who would continue to dominate the colonial and to some extent post-colonial socio-political sphere. Interestingly even the white colonial masters also keep on criticising them as corrupt. While for the westernised upper caste-middleclass natives this corruption was bred out of colonial bad governance, the colonial masters would keep on saying that this kindofcorruptionwastheingrainedcharacterof the orientalnatives. How come the Company bahadur isn’t the target of these complaints about native officials’ incompetence and malpractice? Dukhina Ranjan Mukharjee presented a paper on the state of the Company’s police establishment in the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge in the early nineteenth century in which he pointed out the corruptive malpractices of the police. Mukharjee’s narrative of dissent has interesting similarity with his 18th century predecessors, who criticised government for not fulfilling the governmental duties efficiently rather than criticising the colonial system as a whole. His predecessors had petitioned Hastings government for the decline of law and order but at the same time petitioned higher authorities during the impeachment ofWarren Hastings, that the later had governed with excellence.32 So, expression of dissent as modelled according to colonial logic of governance, far from being anti-colonial, served in legitimising governance. Following his predecessors Mukharjee argued, it would be unfair to suggest that the present system of policing was one in which the locals had rest the least confidence because the indigenous under the East India Company’s administration were safer than those under previous governments.33 In response to that Captain Richardson declared that indigenous had unparalleled security and abuses were caused by the corrupt tendency of the native darogas.Although Richardson was slammed in the Bengal Harkaru, his views were reprinted in every daily with a general acceptance of his comment. In spite of the Grambarta Prakashika’s reputation for outlandish sarcasm against native police, it always acknowledged that the British Government was not the problem and that they were the ones who could correct these behaviours.34 This tendency would get further development later. From newspaper editorial letters from rural and urban Bhadrabitta castes to later day satirical plays, darogas continued to be represented as corrupt and ludicrous effigy against which they penned their criticism.35 The colonial state, who themselves criticised the corrupt darogas, became saved from the direct criticism of the Bhadrabittas

32 NAI, New Delhi,Translation of an address from the zemindara and talukdars of the district of Dinajpore, in appreciation of the administration of Mr. Hastings, Home Department, Public Branch, 1788, pp. 5600-5605, O.C., 31st December, No. 16. (B).

33 Basudeb CHOTTOPADHYAY, Crime and Control in Early Colonial Bengal 1770-1860, K.P. Bagchi & Company, Calcutta, 2000, p. 166.

These darogas, ridiculed as corrupt and jocular, remained to be fearsome and atrocious for the rural population, often ridiculed by the urban Bhadrabitta as chāsā-bhusa (Bengali colloquial term for village bumpkin or rustic men without any kind of urban sophistication). Though various periodicals like the Gram-

34 CHOTTOPADHYAY, cit.

35 GHOSH, cit., p. 69.

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barta Prakashika used to put forward the disgrace of the rural population in the hands of corrupt policemen, the mainstream rarely talked without a patronising tune. They were busy with satirical compositions where the darogas were the effigial joker for both Bhadrabitta and the government. The Grambarta Prakashika wrote,

“Kiskinder Poshak Pora

Mukhe Shala Bol

Ghush Paile Naik Chalan, Mete Sakal Gol

Babu Sadai Chata”36

Gentlemanly classes’limited political space was further limited or I should say totally shut down for the rural populations; except for landed classes who lived in urban areas on the rent of their rural population. So, limited political space of colonial Bengal was essentially an urban, upper-caste dominated ‘Bhadrabitta’ space, where the colonial state and society constituted their parlances of interaction in a different, alien and impersonal political language. This non-inclusive character of the Bhadrabitta left for the rural and too some extent lower caste population to express their dissent in the pre-political norm. Scholars like Ranajit Guha perceived that the colonial criminological archives always showed sign of ‘a clear recognition’of ‘the passage from crime to rebellion’as a ‘process by which violence switched codes’.37 But while the resistance transitions from Guha’s ambiguity level to tangible insurgency level growth, so-called criminal activities never came up in the Bhadrabitta public discourse as a sign of resistance. One can perceive it from the Marxist model of ‘social banditry’but I would like to engage into this as a paradoxical wave of resistance from unrepresented lower rural strata in a time of Bhadrabitta inertia.

Since the time of Warren Hastings, there was a conviction regarding the fact that the bandits in Bengal were habitual criminals who had been practicing such acts as hereditary occupation. The robbers were described as ‘robbers by profession and even by birth’, ‘formed into communities’and ‘in a state of declared

36 Grambarta Prakashika,August 1881. [Translation: Police officer wears uniform like monkey and they are fond of foul words and bribes. They do not act if bribes are paid and otherwise always in atrocious mood.] war with government’ and ‘wholly excluded from every benefit of its laws’.38 This shows that the Company state differentiating between law abiding subjects from the lawless in which the gentlemanly classes obviously forming the former ranks. The administrators aimed at dispensing collective punishment to use it as ‘an incentive to guilt’ which they believed that would be able to turn such subjects into more ‘civilised inhabitants’.39 It is true that later administrators like Warren Hastings became aware of the fact that rapid demilitarisation of zamindars and famine might have created a pool of demobilised martial men joined by poor peasantry in banditry works.40 But the idea of habitual criminality loomed in the imperial mentality which was supported with numerous scattered evidences. It was also true that early zamindars had direct relations with the robbers and often acted as masterminds behind such acts but once ‘self-pacification’of the societal elites started under the colonial limited political space, these men were cut off from the old patron-client relationship. In the Cornwallis system, due to the new daroga-zamindar nexus, the need for old robber-zamindar nexus became obsolete.

37 Ranajit GUHA, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1983, p. 82.

One particular thing which previous historians never delved into that is the caste of these bandits. Most of these men came from Hindu lower caste rural background or from lower class Muslim communities who were ambiguously kept out of the imagery of colonial Bengaliness. John Rossellie argued that the western education reformed the Bengali societal elites as docile subject pursuing legal and clerical jobs who ‘excluded or hierarchically subordinate lower castes and Muslims’, and fell into the pitfall of creating a stereotype of its own image that Bengalis as non-martial or feminine.41 In the end of the 19th century, the Bengali bid for self-respect as masculine ambiguously would make the return of these martial lower tiers in the gentlemanly public discourse when the Bhadrabitta would start to incorporate lathials into its invented martial past. Bengali physical culture would adopt stick-play, sword-play as a past which

38 Extracts from the Proceedings of the Committee at Kissen Nagar, dated 28th June 1772, Alexander Higginson, Secretary of the Revenue Department, Fort William, in G.W. FORREST, ed., Selections from the State Papers of the Governor General of India, vol. II, Warren Hastings Documents, B.H. Blackwell, Oxford, 1910, p. 289.

39 FORREST, cit., p. 289.

40 Walter Kelly FIRMINGER, The Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company, vol. I, R. Cambray & Co., Calcutta, 1917, p. 245.

41 John ROSSELLIE, «The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Bengal», Past and Present, 86, 1 (1980), p. 121.

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beforehand they despised as un-gentlemanly. But this incorporation was incomplete due to the diverged educational background. Unlike the Bhadrabitta, the police workers and rural bandits were typically under-educated in western education scale. According to reports, from 1878 to 1887 the percentage of uneducated policemen in the lower tier was between sixty-two to seventy-five percent.42 Though the Inspector and Sub-Inspector levels were soon started to recruit from the Bhadrabitta service gentry, the scene would remain the same till the middle of the 19th century. Initially there was a racial tendency of depicting Bengalese, lawless and law-abiding, as cowardly and weak. Lieutenant Colonel H. Bruce once opined that the ‘character and nature of the crime in Bengal’was so non-lethal compared to other provinces that ‘maintenance of any separate establishment to surmount’ such problems were not necessary.43 The plan was to recruit non-Bengali police to stop banditry, but since 1815, many young Bengali men from gentlemanly class would start to get entry into police which by the end of the World War I would create a different type of cleavage within the forces. Lower tier policemen like constables and head-constables, ‘dominated by miserably paid upcountry migrant men’, formed associations from which they deliberately excluded the Bhadrabitta police inspectors.44 But that would be a different era.

Since the time of the East India Company’s rise as a zamindar of the areas, it had to indulge in policing activities to stop frontier raids as well as peasant/tribal rebellions within their jurisdictions. In case of frontier the initial tactics was typically military in character which would transform gradually into quasi-military approach. I would like to argue as gradual policisation of military pacification where the colonial state would gradually try to move towards a ‘minimum force policy’where use of sheer force was the last resort. If we take into account the earliest pacificatory duties in Rajmahal hills or Midnapur’s jungle territories or

42 Report on theAdministration of Bengal, 1878-79, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1879, p. 8; Report on theAdministration of Bengal, 1884-85, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1886, p. 25; Report on the Administration of Bengal, 1885-86, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1887, p. 26, Report on theAdministration of Bengal, 1886-87, Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1888, p. 20.

43 Lt. Col. H. BRUCE, Final Report on the Establishment of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, Bengal Secretariat Office, Calcutta, 1864, p. 21-22.

44 Partha Pratim SHIL, «The ‘Threatened’ Constabulary Strikes of Early Twentieth Century Bengal», South Asian Studies, 33, 2 (2017), p. 167.

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the peasant disturbances in Dhalbhum, Barasat etc, we can see a general gradual transformation towards minimum force policies as well as occasional demand for specialised quasi-military regiments to fulfil such special jobs.

The Company initially experienced the periodic raids from the Paharia tribes in the Rajmahal area and to contain that adopted militaristic coercion.According to European observers like Bishop Heber, Muslim zamindars had been murdering the Paharia people like rabid dogs or tigers before British officials came.45 The British encounter of the Paharia problem came as the attacks on the Company’s dak runners across the main linking pathway of Rajmahal hills. The Paharias, who had risen to spread havoc across the lowlands, had no problem taking advantage of the dak runners of a distant empire that was still only known by its name. They showed no mercy to anyone. After all was said and done, the theft of federal cargo continued. The British were able to regain control of the territory in 1772 after forming an infantry corps under Captain Brooke to deal with the onslaught of hill men.46 Brook had stormed the hill fort of the Paharia chiefs at Tiur and cannons were used to break the resistance.47 While travelling through Rajmahal, Dean Mahomet, a native sepoy and his company, was attacked by Paharia. He wrote in his memoirs about how the piquet guards followed, murdered, and captured some of them during one such raid. It was a harsh punishment for their crimes, which included having their ears and noses cut off, as well as hanging them on gibbets, for those apprehended. Mahomet further spotted Captain Brook’s five companies of Sepoys stationed around the Bhagalpur-Ramjahal passes in order to protect them from the Paharia insurgents, but the attack on Mahomet’s company while crossing reveals that these insurgentshadverylittleconcernfortheCompanyforces.48 LaterCaptainJames Brown conducted the Paharia campaign from 1777 to 1778. According to him, disarming the chiefs and their levies would result in the instability of the western boundary, which would be left undefended against the Marathas, the state’s natural foes.49 Browne also followed the policy of militaristically coercive tac- tics like punitive counter raids, village burning, and harvest destruction just like French brutal colonial pacificatory measures named Razzia. 50 After them in 1779, Augustus Cleveland fulfilled his objective to subdue the unruly people of the Jungle Terry via conciliation, confidence, and kindness.51 But along with paternalistic conciliation, Conscripting young Paharias, who served as paid archers in olive uniforms till the Great Mutiny of 1857, Cleveland formed the ‘Bhagalpur Hill Rangers’.52 This system was later followed in the pacification of Bhil, Gonds, Garos and many other tribes in India but more interestingly it provided a model for social ordering in which militaristic pacification showed a repetitive tendency of metamorphosing into minimum force day-to-day policing. But the swift shift into brute force remained to be the iron hand under the apparently visible image of silken glove.

45 I.K. CHOUDHARY, «The Socio-Political Organisation of the Paharia Tribe of Damin-I-Koh of Bihar-Jharkhand:AStory of Continuity and Change (1595-1784) », Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies, 5, 2 (2016), p. 6.

46 L.S.S. O’MALLEY, District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas, The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1910, p. 35.

47 O’MALLEY, cit., p. 36.

48 Michael H. FISHER, The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1765-1851) in India, Ireland, and England, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1965, pp. 33-35.

49 Major James BROWNE, India Tracts, Logographic Press, London, 1788, p. 25.

Apart from occasional tribal disturbances, colonial police faced peasant insurgencies where they equally used the militaristic approach whenever necessary. While the colonial state tried to reorder the society due to its own preconceived notions like improvement by starting the Permanent Settlement, it in turn developed into social disturbances. Social banditry about which we have already discussed often developed into large scale insurgencies. As most of the time it was against the zamindars, the collaborator societal elites, the state chose brute force to stop it. In case of Chuar Rebellion of 1799-1800, when the local martial castes tried to stop the infiltration of native collaborator farmers like Narayan Mustafee leading to disturbances, police forces often supported by military battalions used maximum force and punishment to stop it.53 In 1832, Ganganarayan of Dhalbhum joined hands with the Chuar rebels and local village police forces failed to contain it, three regiments of infantry and eight pieces of canons were sent to cull the rebellion: two guns with 24th Regiment of Native Infantry and Ramgarh Battalion, two guns with the 34th Native Infantry, two guns and two howitzers with the 50th Native Infantry and a detachment of 5th Malwa Local Horse.54 The sheer size of the force and ordinances show that once the disturbances took exceptional scale, colonial policing took the garb of military often supported by military itself. Armed offensives always ended with legal procedures. For example, in case of the Barasat Uprising of 1831, Company forces used two six-pounders and several muskets55 to overwhelm the rebels and the apprehended insurgents were put on trial which led to hanging or prison sentence. The Barasat Rebellion was primarily aimed at stopping the extortive acts of Hindu zamindars, the Bhadrabitta collaborators of the colonial state and when the insurgents took resort to violence, the colonial police forces extensively used brute force to stop the spread of the rebellion. In this phase, military and police would act as two different wings but often as one in the time of exceptional resistance but specialised force of military police would not develop till the first decade of the 20th century.

50 See more, Aryama GHOSH, «Old Wine in New Bottles: Elements of Modern CounterinsurgencyModalitiesinEarlyColonial‘Pacification’ofRajmahal», Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies, 11, 2 (2021), pp. 20-37.

51 K.K. BASU, «Augustus Cleveland», The Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research, 28, 1 (1942), pp. 75-76.

52 H. RISLEY, The Caste and Tribes of Bengal, Indiana Publishing House, Calcutta, 1891, p. 161.

53 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Proceedings, Criminal Branch, dated 14th March 1800.

54 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Proceedings, Criminal Branch, dated 13th November 1832, n. 1.

By the end of the 19th century, apart from tribal insurgencies, armed uprising reduced to none and expression of dissent in rural areas started to enter into the limited political space, already dominated by the collaborator Bhadrabittas. For example, 1873’s Pabna Rebellion was characteristically a rebellion of the ‘rich peasants’ or kulaks who were aware of the legal and non-violent processes of expression of dissent.56 Apart from the typical Marxist flavour to that connotation, these rural middle peasants challenged the feudal zamindars economically and too some extent legally, but their way of challenge was following the Bhadrabittas’ new colonial parlance. Police rarely resort to exceptional brute force in these cases but anti-colonial resistance from this time started to return back to the urban and mofussil space again as revolutionary terrorism. By the end of the 19th century, partly due to importation of European ideas like anarchism and nihilism in one side and Hindu revivalism on the other, gentlemanly youth would resort to violence, assassination based resistance to the colonial state. On the other hand, gradual communalisation of politics since the end of 19th century would another challenge to the colonial social order. This would lead to the second militarisation of the police force in Bengal.

This previous knowledge of dealing with insurgencies in Bengal served as a background for later day development of military police to deal with occasional violent peasant insurgencies as well as comparatively new nuisances like revolutionary terrorists and communal riots. Armed police as a division for such specialised jobs had been at work but the 20th century necessities made further progress in specialisation. The Commissioner of Police of Calcutta in 1910 pro- posed for the formation of a new company of Military Police as the armed police force seemed to be ‘inadequate for a Reserve for disturbances in Calcutta’.57 But interestingly it was not only for Calcutta but as H.T. Cullis, Under-Secretary of the Bengal Government proposed that the foremost activity of this police force would be ‘to be kept ready and intact, prepared to move directly their services are requisitioned wherever danger is threatened’.58

55 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Proceedings, Criminal Branch, dated 22nd November 1831, n. 78.

56 See more, Eric STOKES, «The return of the peasant to South Asian History», South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Series 1, 6, 1 (1976), pp. 96-111.

Cullis specifically pointed out the difference between the armed polices, whose job was to provide escort duty related miscellaneous jobs, while military police was for swift culling of insurgencies and riots, which were clubbed into the colonial taxonomy of disturbances. This colonial development was a departure from the traditional policing in the London metropolis, where the British policing was personified with ‘unarmed Bobby’ compared to the continental policing where the French Gendarmerie, the Italian Carabinieri, or the Dutch Marechausséepracticedarmedpolicing.59 WhileRoyalIrishConstabularywasa deviation from the earlier unarmed policing of London, this example was widely used, and to some extent perfected to be used in India and rest of the empire.60 Bengal interestingly shows the microcosmic picture of duel development: from early overlapping between military and policing duties to gradual specialisation of forces. In this gradual process some forces continuously changed its character like the Calcutta Mounted Police.

These tendencies of crowd control would later turn into much developed kind of policing systems. For suppose the mounted police system would come into existence due to the necessities of crowd and riot control in 1840s.61 Various other states like Madhya Pradesh also adopted mounted police just like Calcutta. Initially it was for courier and ceremonial services, but soon they started to serve ‘for bringing out orderliness in the carriages and people’.62 Soon these men were

57 Government of Bengal (here after GOB), Letter from F.L. Halliday, the Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, no. 16195, dated 24th December 1910, Political Department, Police Branch, File No. 34 of 1911, SL No. 1, paragraph 3.

58 GOB, Letter from H.T. Cullis to the Commissioner of Police, no. 1827P-D, Political Department, Police Branch, File No. 34 of 1911, SL No. 2, paragraph 2.

59 Dilip. K. DAS & Arvind VERMA, «The armed police in the British colonial tradition: The Indian perspective», Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 21, 2 (1998), p. 354.

60 P.J. STEAD, The Police of Britain, Macmillan Publishing Company, Basingstoke, 1985.

61 Lord Dalhousie adopted the London Metropolitan Police model in Calcutta in 1945. Mitchel ROTH, «Mounted Police Forces: a comparative history», Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 21, 4 (1998), p. 713.

62 Tapan CHATTOPADHYAY, The Story of Lalbazar: Its Origin and Growth, Firma KLM Pri-

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deputed with special patrolling duty around the maidan area of Calcutta armed with ‘a brace of pistol in holster and a belt of pouch containing ten rounds of ball ammunitions’.63 Most of the time, the traditional patrolling in the potential riotous areas stopped the possibility of riot. Controlling traffic and to some extent supervising surveillance over petty matters like ‘drainage, club plots, tents, and the general condition of the maidan area’ became the matter of their daily job.64 Apart from stopping petty criminals, Black Watch, the name given to the mounted police division, gradually became useful for stopping riots in Calcutta. Riots, particularly communal in character, became a new nuisance for the colonial urban management for which more specialisation in crowd control became necessary. However during the 1946’s riot in Calcutta, due to the new strategic policy named the ‘Emergency Action Scheme’, mounted police were kept in the Lalbazar control room and failed to check the riotous Muslim at outrage.65 Despite its iconic continuity as the symbol of colonial coercion, it remained as one of the most efficient coercive arms for crowd control even in the post-independence. Bengal’s first chief minister, Bidhan Chandra Roy’s government used thesepolicetostoptheprotestingcrowdin1954resultingintofivedeaths.66 This type of mounted police could be related to the militaristic development within the urban crowd control which was adopted by post-colonial state also; a type of continuous specialisation and evolution according to the colonial necessities.

The striving to stop criminal activities is not new to an establishment, but the Calcutta police gradually started to muster some new codes of control which was the interesting point of departure from the pre-colonial past. By the Charter Act of 1793, a new type of official rose up; the Justice of the Peace, who were authorised to impose taxes on houses and lands to meet the expenses for vate Limited, Calcutta, 1982, pp. 113-114. sanitation, maintenance of roads, police.67 Now, this was an importation from the British structure of municipal government just like posts like mayors, aldermen, burgesses.68 Like these structural importations, ideas of an ideal city were imported too. These men basically came from the gentlemanly upper middle classes who had already been gone through a hybrid metamorphosis in which tradition and modernity coexisted. Originally, the western idea of improving society transformed the objective of control, where policing was not only about apprehending criminals but to maintain law and order, where ‘order’ meant a lot related to the control of urban space. Paltry things related to sanitation and public health became part of this new era policing. Foucault points out such minute things of regulatory actions performed by the police related to sanitation as control which ultimately aims for ideal order.69

63 Memorandum of the officer commanding the Black Watch, 2nd Bengal Native Cavalry, dated 7th June 1913, Fort William, quoted in CHATTOPADHYAY, cit., p. 115.

64 CHATTOPADHYAY, cit., p. 118.

65 NakazatoNARIAKI,«ThePoliticsofaPartitionRiot:CalcuttainAugust1946»,inSatoTSUGITAKA (ed.), Muslim Societies: Historical and comparative aspects, London/New York, Routledge Curzon, 2004, pp. 120-121.

66 Anwesha SENGUPTA, «Anti-Tram Fare Rise and Teachers’ Movement in Calcutta, 195354», in Ranabir SAMADDAR (ed.), From Popular Movements to Rebellion: The Naxalite Decade, London/New York, Rutledge, 2019, p. 78.

For suppose in the year 1791, the Superintendent of Police ordered the payment of one anna for every pariah dogs killed at the streets.70 These particular dogs used to get ferocious during the hot seasons, for which the colonial head of police used to conduct an annual cull of these dog breeds.This was not a particular case of Calcutta, but in Bombay, another important port city, the police used to conduct such annual purge of pests for public safety. In Bombay during 1832, special dog-killers were appointed just like Calcutta in exchange of payment of eight annas for each dog killed.71 So, the very job of pest exterminator was emerged as a duty of urban police which was a sign of modern control. Men and beasts of the colonised country were situated in the ideal urban map, and it was the job of the police to keep up to that mark. On the other hand killing of animals with cruelty became a concern of policing as a part of modernity. Calcutta was not an exception in this case. Due to the British pre-conception that dogs should be killed during rabies outbreak, colonial police often practiced an annual cull but with the growth of voices against animal cruelty things became more balanced and under jurisdictional control. In Hong Kong, police was empowered to kill any dogs in the streets between 10 pm to 6 am.72 On the other hand killing of

67 NAI, New Delhi, Minute of the Board, Home Department, Public Branch, 1794, O.C., 27th January, No. 1, pp. 397-428, paragraph 6 & 7.

68 Keshab CHOUDHURI, Calcutta: Story of its Government, Orient Longman, Calcutta, 1973.

69 Michel FOUCAULT, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Routledge, London, 1973, p. 24.

70 NAI, New Delhi, Letter from Mr.T. Harding, Clarke to Mr. Edward Hay, the Commissioner of Police, Home Department, Police Branch, 1791, O.C., 14th December, No. 12, pp. 4032-4033.

71 Jesse S. PALSETIA, «Mad Dogs and Parsis:The Bombay Dog Riot of 1832», Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 11, 1 (2001), p. 14.

72 Shuk-Wah POON, «Dogs and British Colonialism: The Contested Ban on Eating Dogs in Co-

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animals, even rats with cruelty became a punishable offence.73 Civilised empathy towards animals along with systematic culling of animals which became an interesting but dichotomous side of modernity became a space of policing.

Keeping the urban crowd in control was another important function of the police. Effective crowd control within escalating urbanisation became a concern of colonial police which would later grow into specialised branches for such objectives. The colonial urban governance always tried to keep a ledger of population residing and day-population. Along with sanitation and security-related necessities, keeping numerical control of the population became another important aspect of social order. Captain Birch, the Superintendent of Police in 1837, tried to keep a ledger of people entering the city throughout the day and classified them according to caste, nationality, gender. This taxonomic intention was locomoted by the objective of efficient social control.

Nationality/CasteMalesFemales

English19531185

Eurasians29501796

Portuguese 17151475

French10159

Armenians465171

Jews185122

Muguls314195

Parsees328

Arabs27279

Mugs450233

Chinese243 119

Madrasees3025

Native Christians3019

Hindoos8514552506

Mohamadans3893419810

Low Castes120747010

Total: 2,29705

74 lonialHongKong»,The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,42,2(2014),p.316. 73 POON, cit., p. 313.

74 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Criminal Branch, dated 27th April 1841, N. 10.

The whole idea of having a population register got impetuous after 1850’s. Due to epidemics and growth of Eurasian population, officials often expressed the need of a proper estimate of the city’s population which ultimately partially materialised in 1866.75 This first scientific and systematic census despite various flaws was completed and according to the memorandum of the Chairman of the Justices of Peace, 26,480 rupees was the total expenditure of the endeavour.76

Not only keeping a ledger, but also with the growth of imperial confidence since the gaining of paramountcy by the East India Company after the Third Anglo Maratha War, Calcutta city administration took a new leap towards population control. For suppose in 1849, the Superintendent of Police imposed some restrictions related to native festival of Durga Puja, in which the devotees brings out a procession just like a carnival.77 As such processions used to crowd the important streets, the police planned to restrict a few streets from such religious processions. Native dignitaries of Hindu society protested against such regulations. The government didn’t approve such proposals but the intention of crowd control soon would be a necessary predicament of the city police. Just like the procession of Durga Puja, the city administration tried to ban the performative acts of Churuck festival. During these acts, the devotees used to pierce their bodies

Portrait of Ganga Narayan Singh (1790-1833), the great leader of Bhumij Tribes Revolt (183233), also known as Chuar Revolt. Britishers also named the rebellion as ‘Ganga Narain’s Hangama’, Kingsman3’s own work 2021, CC BY-SA4.0.

75 WBSA, Calcutta, General Department, General Branch, datedAugust 1862, Proceedings 40, 43.

76 WBSA, Calcutta, General Department, General Branch, dated February 1869, Proceedings B 66/69.

77 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, dated 5th September 1849, No. 9-10.

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with hooks, arrows and other sharp objects, which were seen as potential threat to law and order as well as disturbing to the reformed visual of the imperialists. Now, as the later festival was lower caste in nature, Bengali urban elites supported the ban unlike the case of the Durga Puja procession. While the Lieutenant Governor Cecil Beadon denounced the Churuck as ‘a practice dangerous to human life and safety and as an annoyance to all educated and right-thinking persons’78, the British Indian Association, an organisation of native townsmen, denounced the practices as ‘barbaric’, ‘cruel and degrading’and proclaimed that such practices are ‘confined to the lower orders of Hindoos’only.79 The critique of native ways due to colonial civilizing process became the agenda of urban policing and it seems that the new educated upper caste selectively collaborated to those reforming initiatives of the city administrations. The gentile middle class-uneducated lower caste divides which was the driving force of colonial times’state-society collaboration, remained the main scale of policing for which ‘Churuck’ crowd became criminalised while the upper caste crowd of ‘Durga Puja’ continued to dominate the space. Native Bhadrabitta collaborators had restricted but remains as sole agency in representing the indigenous realities and administrators rarely became able to go past them.

Public sanitation was the important factor which became part of the policing duties. Despite some early tries, the original drive towards the maintenance of city’s public hygiene started in the 19th century. The administration took initiatives like enacting laws and bye-laws for the acquiring of lands or improvement of sanitary condition. For example, in 1863 the Justice of Peace prepared a list of bye-laws for the sanitary purpose. According to these bye-laws, injunctions were proclaimed on bathing, washing of cloths, utensils etc in public; bathing any person suffering with contagious disease in public bathing places; unclean state of slaughter-houses, marketplaces within city periphery; shop owners congesting lanes, walks and pathways; irregular burial and crematory practices.80 Police was instructed to fine defaulters 20 rupees for each offence and further penalty of 10 rupees everyday for continuing such offences.81 But various forms of protest from the indigenous society continued also. For example in 1781, native protesters hung posters in Calcutta Court house addressing the Governor General in Council and other white settlers of the town that if the ‘bye-law is attempted to be enforced or caused into execution against the Natives of the country, they will rise to defend their property’.82 These areas of minuscule control were never unchallenged. This was where policing became necessary. In April 1865, the government passed the first SlaughterhouseAct in which all the slaughterhouses were tried to be kept under centralised control locating in Tangra.83 Police soon would take the job of surveillance over such minute cases of sanitation and cleanliness. Tangra stockyard would be structured again in 1916 and despite the protest from the butchers, slaughter houses would be structured in a most centralised manner. Food Inspectors in that year would destroy 12000 tin-cans of adulterated clarified butter, editable oils, milks and 16000 lbs of diseased meat.84 Form early bye-laws which were supervised by common policemen, specialised sanitary and food inspectors were recruited by the end of the 19th century which shows the gradual progress of specialisation in managerial technology which grew along the line of earlier objective of minuscule control.

78 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, dated March 1865, Proceedings No. 141.

79 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, dated March 1865, Proceedings No. 141.

80 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, datedAugust 1863, Proceedings No. 93.

81 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, datedAugust 1863, Proceedings No. 93.

Keeping the city clean or streets uncongested became such an important concern for the city police that soon controlling the traffic became part of urban policing. The Hackney Carriage Act of 1864 passed a set of regulations and bye-laws by which the police administration tried to regularise crowd free traffic. The palanquin bearers were licensed to keep them under proper register.85 Authorities extended the system of registration further to all Coolies, Porters, and Hackney Coaches.86 These public vehicles were provided with stands and number of such stands increased later on. Such regulatory measures would soon demand for the organisation of a proper traffic police. DavidArnold argued that the coming of traffic police and growth of traffic expanded the opportunity of policing as well as the consolidation of ‘everyday state’.87 Interestingly day to

82 NAI, New Delhi, Letter from the Commissioner of Police, Home Department, Public Branch, 1781, O.C., 22nd January, C File, No. 19.

83 Samiparna SAMANTA, Cruelty Contested: The British, Bengalis, and Animals in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920, unpublished PhD Thesis, The Florida State University, School of Arts and Sciences, 2012, p. 130.

84 Report on the Administration of Bengal 1916-17, Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta, 1918, pp. 45-46.

85 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Criminal Branch, dated 16th August 1836, No. 5.

86 WBSA, Calcutta, Judicial Department, Criminal Branch, dated 27th August 1838, No. 14.

87 David ARNOLD, «The Problem of Traffic: The street-life of modernity in late-colonial In-

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day chances of defiance and occasional protest by disturbing the traffic became a matter of resistance. So, basically traffic police became the specialised agents of the old objective of spatial control which had started with the early 19th century interest of jostle free traffic in ordered urban space.

It seems that early Bengal policing was the phase when imported notions of modernised control was checked with colonial realities like the lack of manpower and capital, for which the Company state used the police to fulfil various objectives ranged from city sanitation and control to culling of armed insurgents. They became the ‘Jack of all trades, but master of nothing’ leading to occasional misadministration and structural failures. But gradual specialisation of the forces based on the necessities and objectives, policing ability gradually increased and efficiency reached to optimum for which till the end of the rule apart from some stray cases, Police successfully controlled Bengal. This specialisation happened in the sector of gradual militarisation, steady state-society relation, and regular growth of the microphysics of spatial control. Compared to London metropolis and its European counterparts, Bengal police not only continue ‘policing by consent’but also periodically used militaristic brutality to cull exceptional disturbances. This hybridisation and steady evolutionary specialisation made it one of the most efficient police forces. But this development had some uncontrolled by-products. Native Bhadrabitta collaborators due to their monopoly over the limited political space strengthen their casteism and infused that into the colonial policing structure which detached the lower tier majority from the demonstrative welfare of the colonial statecraft. These men rarely found entry into the limited political space till the end of the World War I.

dia», Modern Asian Studies, 46, 1 (2012), pp. 119-141.