CHAPTER 15

Bureaucracy, power and violence in colonial India: the role of Indian

subalterns

DEANA HEATH

The study of bureaucracy in a colonial context such as India is a rather unfashionable subject,

evocative of images of privileged white men struggling to uphold their moral authority and

maintain a gendered, racialized and coercive form of power. Until fairly recently, however, it

provoked a notably different image thanks to the romantic mythology surrounding the Indian

Civil Service (ICS), which from the late 1850s was the so-called ‘steel frame’ of the British

Indian empire. According to this myth, there was ‘no Service like it in the world’ since, as

viceroy Lord Dufferin (1826–1902) enthused, ‘for ingenuity, courage, right judgment,

disinterested devotion to duty, endurance, open-heartedness, and at the same time, loyalty to

one another and their chiefs [the ICS officer was] superior to any other class of Englishman’.1

Dufferin’s statement is oddly lacking in any reference to India, Indians, or the actual

effectiveness of the ICS. Nonetheless, this myth served to justify British rule in India, and it

grew in stature from the early twentieth century as that rule became increasingly threatened.

It also served to shore up the claims of other empire builders. For Theodore Roosevelt India

offered ‘the most colossal example history affords of the successful administration by men of

European blood of a thickly populated region in another continent’, which for him was not

only ‘a greater feat than was performed under the Roman Empire’ but ‘one of the most

notable and most admirable achievements of the white race during the past two centuries’.2

Such a myth—which served to foster an image of ‘a benign, paternalistic Raj

governing a quiescent society through the “rule of law” ’,3 and through collaboration with

3
indigenous elites rather than coercion—was perpetuated by much of the literature published

on bureaucracy in colonial India up to the 1970s, particularly works by former ICS officials

such as L. S. S. O’Malley and Philip Mason.4 The myth has, therefore, served the function (as

a later historian of the ICS has termed it) of ‘white washing the British bureaucracy’.5 Such

‘white washing’ was in many ways literal as well as metaphorical, for although the ICS

comprised roughly one tenth of a per cent of the individuals employed by the state by the late

colonial period (namely slightly over one thousand men out of a work force of one million),6

the considerable literature on it is unmatched by anything remotely comparable on the

subordinate—but in terms of understanding the nature of the colonial Indian state, arguably

far more significant—Indian-dominated elements of the colonial bureaucracy.7

The aim of this article is two-fold: to re-asses the nature of the colonial bureaucracy in

India, and with it that of the colonial state; and to consider the role of such a bureaucracy in

the exercise of sovereign, rather than governmental, power—in particular, how it employed

or condoned the operation of violence as a technology of colonial rule.8 Rather than focusing

on the colonial state as an abstract entity, I examine the agents who made up the various

rungs of the colonial state and explore how power operated through and between them,

concentrating on the lower, Indian-dominated rungs of the state machinery. In light of the

dominance of low-ranking officials in the colonial state and the dependence of British

officials upon them, it was such subaltern officials who were responsible for the day-to-day

business of governance—as well as for perpetuating the system of everyday violence upon

which colonial rule depended. Not only were so-called ‘traditional’ forms of violence, such as

police torture, a by-product of the colonial system, but in regarding them as an aspect of

‘indigenous’ practices and as a personnel problem rather than acknowledging their true

origins or nature, the colonial bureaucracy ultimately served to legitimate and perpetuate

them.9

4
 I

STATE OF THE QUESTION

Although there have been some notable works published on the subject since the 1970s,10 the

study of bureaucracy in colonial India was largely displaced by new questions that arose in

the wake of the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). These questions focused on

the role the role of ‘discourse’—in particular the colonial quest to ‘know’ India—in shaping

colonial rule and its impact on Indian society and culture;11 on the role of both Indian

subalterns and elites in shaping such processes;12 and on how to write ‘post-Orientalist’

histories of India.13 New areas of research emerged, on subjects such as gender, sexuality and

the body,14 and—drawing on the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault—new

conceptions about how power operated in colonial India. As conceived by Foucault, power is

both diffuse and productive (in shaping social discipline and conformity), and it is embodied

in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’, rather than wielded by people or groups

through ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion (or of the structures in which

they operate).15 This conception led, in turn, to a shift in emphasis from bureaucracy to the

colonial state.16 There is now a considerable body of literature on colonialism inspired by

Foucault which emphasizes the lack of homogeneity in colonial enterprises, the struggles not

only between colonizers and colonized but within and between different groups, and the

different political rationalities and configurations of power that emerged from the late

eighteenth century and that changed over time.17 Yet the state that has emerged from this

literature is both largely monolithic and, as Frederick Cooper argues below, disturbingly

powerful. Although recent work on the post-colonial Indian state has revealed it to be nothing

but a fractured assemblage of institutions, the incoherence of which makes it impossible to

dominate or control, much of the work on colonial India has yet to consider what William

Gould refers to as ‘the disaggregated qualities of the state’.18

5
 Yet although a ‘governmental state’ which strove to discipline its populace had begun

to emerge in India by the early nineteenth century and had come to full fruition by the

century’s end,19 its chief concern was to maintain British rule in India, rather than to fulfil the

primary goal of governmental power, namely regulating the bodies of its subjects in order to

maintain a healthy and productive population. The effects of colonial policies were,

furthermore, often unclear. The colonial government may, for example, have initiated the all-

India census in 1879 in an effort to ‘know’ and impose ‘order’ on Indian society, but whether

its ultimate effect was to make Indians objectify their own culture and to enshrine colonial

conceptions of caste in Indian society, as a number of scholars have claimed, is far from

clear.20 A governmental form of power such as law21 did become the key signifier of both

state legitimacy and civilization and the moral bulwark of colonial rule. Yet as a regime of

conquest, dependent on the authority of its executive and the strength of its police and army,

it was undoubtedly sovereign power (a repressive form of power exercised by an authority

figure or his or her agents and based on elected, inherited, or violently won ‘legitimacy’) that

ultimately made British rule over India possible.22 Indeed, not only did what Partha Chatterjee

terms the ‘rule of colonial difference’ make the completion of the project of the modern state

impossible in India, but the so-called ‘rule of law’ was not only despotically imposed and

discriminatory in its operation but was, in fact, frequently suspended.23 This was true not only

during moments of purported danger, when the British regularly resorted to undertaking what

they termed ‘acts of state’ that were beyond the realm of judicial inquiry, but on a daily basis

through such agencies as the police.24 As Elizabeth Kolsky reveals in her study of ‘white

violence’ in colonial India, British power in India was sustained through ‘quotidian acts of

violence’.25

The focus on ‘the colonial state’ in much of the recent literature on colonial

governance in India has, moreover, left little scope for analyses of either agency or structure

6
—in other words, of the ‘sovereign’ and ‘episodic’ exercise of power. Although the state has

been envisioned as being largely autonomous from Indian society, such autonomy was

impossible in a context in which local power operated through a largely clientist system. This

perspective also fails to account for the dynamics that played out among various groups

within the colonial bureaucracy.26 Lower rungs of the state machinery, such as the subordinate

police, posed particular problems for the colonial regime. While they served as a vital

intersection between the state and the people, the strong social and cultural ties that they

retained with the rest of Indian society made it impossible to reduce them ‘to dehumanized

agents of colonial control’.27

II

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLONIAL BUREAUCRACY

Up to 1858, the colonial bureaucracy in India served a trading company—the East India

Company, founded by royal charter in 1600—whose primary interest was to maximize

profits. The shortcomings of such a bureaucracy became apparent as early as 1765, when the

company assumed authority for the civil administration of Bengal and became a significant

political entity. What ensued was an age of plunder in which company servants sought to get

rich without hindrance, a state of affairs that led, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century,

to the company’s subjection to parliamentary control. Such a process facilitated the laying of

the foundation stone of a ‘modern’ bureaucracy in colonial India.28 The importance of an

efficient, well-trained bureaucracy to ‘execute the task of empire-building within the

framework of the developing capitalist system’ became particularly evident as the company

embarked on an aggressive new campaign of conquest and colonization beginning at the end

of the eighteenth century and, with the loss of its monopoly over Indian trade in 1813, came

to assume ever greater administrative responsibilities in governing its Indian empire.29

7
 Since, as Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao argue, ‘legal regimes are founded through

violent practices, and legal practices ultimately depend on the threat of violence and its

application under state sanction’, this process of empire-building was accompanied by a new

respect for law and procedural precision as a means, in part, of legitimating company rule.30

Rather than the ‘personal discretion’ embodied in what the British regarded as ‘Oriental

despotism’, British rule was to be distinguished by a ‘rule of law’ applicable to all its

subjects.31 But apart from the need for legitimacy, the codification of law (in addition to

developments such as the introduction of Western property rights) was also necessary for the

nascent state to provide a secure economic and administrative environment conducive to

British trade and investment.32 Moreover, the emphasis on the rule of law was accompanied

by ‘a strong insistence on the needs of a regime of conquest, particularly the discretionary

authority of the central executive’, as governor-general Warren Hastings (1732–1818)

surmised: ‘A rigid observance of the letter of the law … is a blessing in a well-regulated

state; but in a government loose as that of Bengal is, an extraordinary and exemplary coercion

must be employed to eradicate those evils which the law cannot reach.’33 The revolt of 1857,

following whose brutal suppression the governance of British India was transferred from the

company to the crown, led not only to important changes in the administrative structure of the

colonial state but to the further enlargement of such ‘extraordinary and exemplary’ coercive

powers.34

Colonial rule, with its violent underpinnings, was further legitimated through its

reinscription as a moral duty and sacred trust. The colonial bureaucracy was, in turn,

reconstituted beginning in the early nineteenth century in order to fulfil that trust, as the

power and prestige of the Indian civil service came to be invested in the integrity and

uprightness of conduct of its officers (while the moral virtuousness of public service served,

in turn, to foster an esprit de corps).35 In conjunction with the professionalization of the civil

8
service that was taking place in Britain, ICS officers were now expected, in short, to be

gentlemen, whose public school training imbued them with qualities such as virtue, courage,

honesty, loyalty, generosity, modesty and, crucially, ‘Self-restraint founded on a combination

of self-respect and self-denial’.36 In spite of the challenges, as E. M. Collingham has

demonstrated, in maintaining such a self-disciplined, bureaucratic body in a colonial context

such as India, where it was perceived to be constantly under threat of degeneration, it was

such virtues that purportedly made ICS officers fit to govern as agents of ‘justice and

effective action’—particularly when contrasted with the purported depravity and moral

decline of Indians—and to be given a wide degree of autonomy in carrying out their duties.37

The ICS did not, however, quite live up to the gentlemanly ideal that was envisioned

for it, particularly following the introduction of a merit-based recruitment system in the

1850s. As Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), former law member of the viceroy’s

council, lamented in 1876, ‘19 civilians in 20 [were] the most common place and the least

dignified of second and third class Englishmen’.38 Not only were their social backgrounds

generally more modest than was desired (including a small portion from the lower middle

classes),39 but few held degrees from those breeding grounds of gentlemanliness, Oxford or

Cambridge (or, for that matter, from any university).40 The problem in attracting desirable

recruits was that, contrary to the myth of the ICS, ‘Indian service of any sort … was widely

regarded as an enterprise solely for second-rate minds and middle class citizens’.41 But by the

late nineteenth century even such supposedly ‘second-rate minds’ were becoming loathe to

pursuing a career in the ICS, as growing numbers of left its employ before fulfilling their

terms of service.42 After the First World War, lack of interest in Britain in the ICS was so great

that recruitment by examination was virtually abandoned (since so few suitable candidates

showed up to sit for them) in favour of direct appointments.43 Yet while the ICS may not have

lived up to ideals the British envisioned for it, it was still regarded, as David Lloyd George

9
declared in a rousing speech in 1922, as ‘the steel frame of the whole structure’ of British rule

in India, without which ‘the fabric will collapse’.44

Unfortunately for the British, the ‘steel frame’ was beset by more than simply staffing

problems. It was undermined, to begin with, by a highly fractured system of governance in

the face of regional governments (namely those of the three presidencies of Bengal, Bombay

and Madras), which functioned virtually autonomously and were riven by both inter-

governmental and internal rivalries.45 Inter-governmental relations were particularly tense in

moments of crises such as famines, and attempts by the government of India to promote

administrative reform simply heightened tensions and revealed its lack of centralized control.

As viceroy Lord Lytton (1831–91), who was notoriously at odds with what he regarded as a

conservative establishment, noted in 1877: ‘The more I see of India . . . the more it strikes me

that the only serious danger we have to fear lies in the wretched personal susceptibilities, the

petty spirit, local jealousy, and deficient loyalty of our own authorities.’46 There were,

moreover, considerable conflicts between different branches of the service, particularly the

executive and judicial.47 Tensions between the executive and the high courts were often so

great that it was virtually impossible to maintain any cooperation between them. As a senior

ICS officer, Sir Archibald Earle, lamented in 1911 in regard to the problem of police torture:

‘The Courts here are extremely jealous of the Executive, and if they are in the least

suspicious of undue zeal on the part of the latter, they will make their meaning plain, as we

know to our cost.’48 Owing to such dysfunctionality, the government of India, according to

viceroy Lord Curzon (1859–1925), was ‘a mighty and miraculous machine for doing

nothing’.49

10
 III

INDIANIZATION

That anything at all was accomplished is a miracle in light of the ludicrous rapidity of

transfers in administrative appointments, particularly after 1868 when paid furlough (leave of

absence) for ICS officers was extended from a total of three to six and a half years.50 This

meant that one-fifth of the ICS was essentially on home leave at any given time. An officer

on furlough was entitled to the same job or one of equivalent rank when he returned from

leave, which led to an ‘immense tangle of transfers’, since comparable positions for the

acting men later had to be found to avoid any appearance of demotion.51 As the Bengal

government discovered to its chagrin in 1879, a total of 675 officials was required to maintain

462 ICS posts in the province.52 Such ceaseless transfers meant that in a district—the key

administrative unit of British India—as many as three or four different district magistrates

could be in charge during the course of a year, and in extreme cases as many as eight.53 ICS

officials in the districts therefore generally had little knowledge of local conflicts or

problems. In light, moreover, of the highly-stratified nature of colonial administration, with

promotion largely by seniority rather than merit, they had little incentive to do anything about

the problems that they were aware of (particularly since ‘The maverick who stepped out of

line inevitably stayed at the bottom of the heap’).54 For those with initiative, they often lacked

the wherewithal, especially new recruits, who not only ‘knew nothing about India or the work

they were to do’, but whose training was poor.55 Training consisted largely of the study of

written materials such as acts, rules and codes and observing officers in various departments

at work.56 As one Indian recruit, who joined the ICS in 1928, revealed, his training consisted

of ‘sitting for an hour or two in the courts of some twelve Deputy Collectors’, after which he

was given his own court room ‘to try cases as an Assistant Collector and Magistrate, third

class’.57

11
 The intrusion of Indian recruits into the citadel of the ICS highlights another problem

for the government of India in maintaining its ‘steel frame’, namely the growing process of

‘Indianization’, particularly from the 1920s. Indians were never technically excluded from

the ICS, but the obstacles they had to overcome to join it were so great that by 1888 only

twelve had managed to do so (with Satyendranath Tagore, the eldest brother of Rabindranath,

becoming the first to do so in 1863).58 By 1911 only five per cent of ICS posts were held by

Indians, although this had increased to thirteen percent by 1921.59 In spite of considerable

Indian nationalist pressure from the late nineteenth century to ‘Indianize’ the ICS, the process

did not begin in earnest until after the First World War when there was a severe shortage of

European recruits.60 With the publication of the Lee Commission Report in 1924, recruitment

shifted decidedly in favour of Indians (since forty per cent of ICS posts were to be filled by

Indian recruits via competitive examinations and nominations, with an additional twenty per

cent by promotion from the largely Indian Provincial Civil Service).61 This included a policy

of reservation for minority communities, a process that was ultimately ‘geared towards the

maintenance of stability and political loyalty’ (and was, moreover, highly gendered, based on

the perceived ‘masculinity’ of various communities).62 Constitutional reforms, such as the

1919 Government of India Act, which led to the devolution of legislative and financial

powers from the centre to the provinces, meant that British members of the ICS could,

moreover, find themselves working under Indian ministers.63 Political developments in the

1920s and 1930s, such as the Round Table Conferences and Civil disobedience movements,

offered a major challenge not just to the personnel of the ICS but to the values that it was

perceived to embody, which augmented and amplified the core elements of the bureaucratic

esprit de corps.64 This meant that the ICS remained highly racialized: even as late as the

1930s, former ICS officer R. C. Dutt (who joined in 1937) maintained that ‘discrimination

12
between the Indian and the British members was not only restricted to stray cases, but was

institutionalised’.65

As devastating as the process of Indianization may have been for the self-image of the

ICS, the ICS managed to stave it off for much longer than most other branches of the colonial

administration. One of the means through which this was done was the creation, in 1892, of a

Provincial Civil Service (PCS). Its formation was ostensibly intended to appease nationalist

demands, but since it had a much lower salary scale and less liberal rules of leave than the

ICS, and was to be staffed primarily by Indians, it served to maintain the ICS as a British

preserve.66 Its creation did, however, lead to a shift in the dynamics of power in colonial India

that was to prove far more profound than the later Indianization of the ICS. For since most

members of the PCS, unlike their ICS counterparts, remained in one district or area for the

bulk of their careers, they came to operate as what Aijaz Ahmad has termed ‘“intermediate

and auxiliary” classes’ who, while agents of the colonial state, also exercised a wide range of

important political and social interests of their own—recruitment to government service was,

for Indians, one of the key means to attain local influence.67

It was, therefore, subaltern officials who were the true source of power in colonial

India. This was not only because of their sheer numbers (by the early twentieth century there

were over 20,000 Indians in the lower levels of government service in India, and by the time

of independence the subordinate services had grown ‘to become one of the largest

machineries of state in the world’), but also because of the nature of rule at the core of British

administration in India—the district.68 There were roughly 235 districts in British India,

governed by individuals variously referred to as magistrates, collectors, or deputy

commissioners, whose ludicrously wide-ranging powers, which combined both executive and

judicial functions, included heading the magistracy, police, land revenue and general

administration over areas averaging 4000 square miles (and no less than 5700 square miles in

13
Madras) and containing between one to two million people each.69 The areas to be

administered were so immense that assistant collectors were expected to be on tour 210 out of

365 days of the year, although since districts were so large that meant visiting every village

no more than once in five years.70 In the patriarchal tradition of British rule, these men ‘on the

spot’ governed as virtually autonomous despots, and could hence ‘potentially rule by terror’.71

There were, however, at least a thousand subordinate Indian officials to every ICS officer in a

district (keeping tabs on the efficiency, integrity and loyalty of which added to the exhaustive

itinerancy of ICS officers).72 The impossibility of the task at hand—particularly in light of the

generally abysmal lack of knowledge of the areas over which they governed, including of the

local language(s)—meant that district magistrates were virtually dependent upon their Indian

subordinates. The colonial regime operated, therefore, through forging political bargains with

local collaborators, who then ruled on its behalf. This meant that although the British may

have controlled major policy issues and the legal framework of the Raj, when it came to the

everyday business of governance ‘it was Indians who did most of the ruling’.73

IV

BUREAUCRACY AND VIOLENCE

It was, moreover, largely Indians who operated the system of violence that ultimately made

British rule over India possible. This was sustained, as Arvind Verma argues, by a ‘brutal

criminal justice system’, elements of which included the infamous ‘Kala Pani’ (black water)

prison on the Andaman islands, the labelling of millions of people as ‘criminal tribes’, and

the terror unleashed by agencies such as the police.74 Indeed, rather than offering protection,

the foremost priority of the Indian police—as embodied through legal statutes such as the

Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Codes (1860–1), in which offences against the

state were accorded the greatest prominence—was to suppress the people through

14
‘develop[ing] a sense of fear of authority’.75 Such fear was heightened by the lack of

administrative oversight of the police (or, for that matter, over other subordinate officials,

such as revenue officers) at the district level. It was over-worked and ill-informed district

magistrates, completely dependent upon their subordinates, who were ultimately responsible

not only for the administration of the police in their districts but also for investigating and

adjudicating cases of violence committed by them. This meant that police brutality could

proliferate virtually unchecked.

The oppressive and violent nature of the Indian police was an open secret in colonial

India, documented from the early nineteenth century onwards through a rising tide of judicial

verdicts, the reports of various committees and commissions, parliamentary debates (where

most of the pressure to set up such committees and commissions came from), and the British

and later Indian press. The general tenor of these observations can be summed up by a

witness to the 1854 commission established to investigate allegations of torture in the

revenue and police departments in Madras, who scathingly declared that:

The police establishment has become the bane and pest of society, the terror of the

community, and the origin of half the misery and discontent that exist among the subjects of

Government. Corruption and bribery reign paramount throughout the whole establishment;

violence, torture, and cruelty are their chief instruments for detecting crime, implicating

innocence, or extorting money. Robberies are daily and nightly committed, and not

unfrequently [sic] with their connivance; certain suspicious characters are taken up and

conveyed to some secluded spot far out of reach of witnesses; every species of cruelty is

exercised upon them; if guilty, the crime is invariably confessed, and stolen property

discovered; but a tempting bribe soon released them from custody. 76

15
The British laid the blame for such oppression not on their despotic regime, but on Indians

since, in the words of the torture commission, ‘the character of the native when in power

displays itself in the form of rapacity, cruelty, and tyranny’.77

It was in the day-to-day realities of rural life that the injustice, extortion and tyranny

of the police, often in collusion with rural elites, was most manifest, particularly for the

poorest and most marginalized sections of the population such as the lower castes and classes.

As the report of the 1902 Indian Police Commission observed, although ‘corruption was no

more an essential characteristic of the constable than of the revenue peon, the process-server

or the forest chaprasi’, the corruption of the constable was more problematic than that of

other low-ranking officials because of ‘the greater opportunities of oppression and extortion

which his police powers afford, because of the intimate connection he has with the general

life of town and country, and because of the possibility of his being brought at any time into

special relations with the individual’.78 The police, moreover, carried out their duties in a

‘course and brutal way’.79 Such brutality extended to the routine practice of torture, which

was most commonly resorted to in order to elicit confessions. The Madras torture

commission detailed the myriad forms such torture took, including:

twisting a rope tightly around the entire arm or leg so as to impede circulation; lifting up by

the moustache; suspending by the arms while tied behind the back; searing with hot irons;

placing scratching insects, such as the carpenter beetle, on the naval, scrotum, and other

sensitive parts; dipping in wells and rivers, till the party is half suffocated; squeezing the

testicles; beating with sticks; prevention of sleep; nipping the flesh with pincers; putting

pepper or red chillies into the eyes, or introducing them into the private parts of men and

women […].80

16
Such violence was often carried out in collusion with rural elites. As a later member of the

Indian government noted: ‘In a very considerable number of the cases [of torture] that occur

the subordinate police are instigated and abetted in the ill-treatment by prominent villagers.’81

Since police torture was regarded as ‘a matter so deeply affecting the honour of the

British nation, and so utterly repugnant to the principles of government’,82 there were periodic

efforts to curb the problem.83 It nonetheless persisted, in part because very little had actually

been done to reform the subaltern elements of the police force primarily responsible for its

enactment. Moreover, as a member of the Bombay government complained to the

Government of India in 1908, the measures that had so far been adopted ‘instead of

improving, have produced a distinct change for the worse in the conditions of service of the

rank and file of the force’.84 Other critics were more scathing in their condemnation of the

failure of the Indian government to eradicate police brutality. Frederic Mackarness MP

(1854–1920), chairman of the executive of the India Civil Rights Committee and one of the

staunchest critics of the Indian government, declared in his 1910 pamphlet on police torture

(which was banned by the Indian government) that little had, in fact been done to eradicate

‘this intolerable oppression of our fellow-subjects’.85 Between 1906 and 1911—the only

period for which, thanks to parliamentary pressure, full data is available—120 policemen

were convicted of ill-treating prisoners or witnesses (although none were convicted of

murder, in spite of the fact that thirty-one of the victims died); an additional 158 cases of ill-

treatment were disposed of by enquiry rather than judicial trial and 424 cases were dismissed

by magistrates.86 The Indian police remained, therefore, ‘a terror to the people’.87

Why, in spite of so many apparent efforts to eradicate police brutality, did it persist?

The reasons were in fact well-known by the mid-nineteenth century, and were reiterated by

every commission, report and debate on how to stem the problem. The first problem was the

poor working conditions of the police and the calibre of the men thus recruited. To begin

17
with, police pay, particularly among the lower ranks, was woefully deficient.88 Although pay

scales were improved during the course of the nineteenth century, that of constables remained

so insufficient that it was ‘hardly equal to the market rate for unskilled labour’, which meant

that constables were forced ‘to choose between starvation and serious crime’.89 The lack of

adequate supervision over the lower ranks compounded the problem. Head constables, and

often even constables, were in charge of police stations and responsible for carrying out

investigations. Meanwhile their superior officers engaged in fruitless and time-consuming

work such as inspecting thanas (police stations) and touring, which led to absurd situations

such as ‘a Head Constable on Rs. 15 extorting a confession . . . while an Inspector on Rs. 200

is counting the pice in the pound fund, or measuring the size of the men’s puggries (turbans)

[sic]’.90 Even when police officers did conduct investigations, their lack of training (the first

detective training school was not set up until 1917)91 and use of so-called ‘Oriental methods’

of detection (which entailed ‘the assembling together of all the bad characters of the

neighbourhood and keeping them for days in a sort of informal custody, until somehow a clue

is gained’) meant that they were as prone to using violent and oppressive tactics in carrying

out their duties as their subordinates.92 Such charges were rarely levelled against British

officers, who were generally regarded as being ‘upright men’ who were ‘obnoxious to

blame’; but when it came to the perpetration of acts of violence like torture, there were

endless complaints about the calibre of the men recruited (which from 1893 was via direct

recruitment in England).93 The paucity of their numbers relative to the size of the force that

they administered meant, moreover, that they were able to exercise little authority.94

A second and arguably even greater problem was the administrative and judicial

system at the district level. The most glaring concern, and one that severely undermined

British claims to govern according to the ‘rule of law’, was the lack of separation of powers

between the executive and judicial branches of the colonial bureaucracy. The situation was

18
most extreme in Madras prior to the reformation of the Indian police in the early 1860s, since

‘all revenue, police, and magisterial authority [was] centred in one and the same set of

functionaries’, a concentration of powers that ‘destroyed that check which would have

resulted, had these powers been committed to two distinct bodies’.95 There were concerns as

early as 1826 that the lack of such a check meant that ‘”Acts of great atrocity may be

practised by the native officers, and the proceedings of magistrates and assistants may be

arbitrary and injurious, without any probability of their authors being called to account’”.96

But although a separate revenue establishment was formed in Madras, district magistrates

continued to function both as head of the police and as magistrate.97 This served to exacerbate

rather than relieve the problem of police violence, since as the 1886 public service

commission observed:

so long as the Magistrate continues to be the head of the Police Department he is bound to

uphold the action of his subordinates be they right or wrong, and … consequently the

magistrates instead of protecting the public from their natural enemies the police, are …

forced to countenance and even to encourage the misdoings of the force. 98

There was, in fact, ample evidence that district magistrates failed to ‘look into the internal

administration of the police in their district so much as they should do’.99 For those who took

their administrative duties in regard to the police seriously, endless transfers made such a task

impossible—a frequently-transferred district magistrate could know little of the police work

in his district or get to know his police subordinates when the district superintendent of police

was also repeatedly transferred. One district superintendent, for example, was posted to seven

districts in the course of five years, while another was rotated through no less than eight

districts in seven years.100 But even when, thanks to their sheer flagrancy or violence, cases of

police brutality came to the attention of district magistrates, they were notoriously lenient in

dealing with them, as well as for allowing confessions to be used as evidence (in some cases,

19
even as the sole evidence to form the basis of a conviction) without bothering to determine

whether such confessions were in fact voluntary.101 Yet in spite of all of the evidence of the

problems inherent in such a union of powers in district magistrates, nothing was done to alter

it, since it was seen to serve as ‘the connecting link between the executive and judicial

functions of the administration’.102

When it came to the legal framework of the Raj, district magistrates were not the only

problem in perpetuating police brutality. Victims of police oppression largely submitted to

such tyranny because of the impossibility of obtaining redress when a lawsuit in colonial

India was a ‘tedious, expensive, and uncertain process’.103 As a result of their belief in the

general dishonesty of ‘native character’, judges had a tendency ‘to discredit all assertions of

ill-treatment coming from the mouth of parties on their trial’, particularly in light of the

general lack of evidence to substantiate it.104 Judges, like district magistrates, were also

notorious for ‘the extraordinary lightness of the punishment generally awarded in those

instances in which the charge [of police torture] has been held to be proved’.105 It was for

these reasons that the verdict issued by the court of directors in 1826, that there was ‘hardly a

case wherein the sufferers who have had the courage or been in circumstances to enable them

to complain against their oppressors, have met with redress of their grievances’, held true

throughout the period of British rule.106

POLICE TORTURE AND BUREAUCRATIC COMPLICITY

A sample torture case from 1909 illustrates the nature of the problems that plagued the

colonial bureaucracy in India, the intersections between its lower strata and indigenous elites,

and its ultimate complicity in police violence in spite of all of the apparent efforts to put a

stop to it. This was a complex case, since in addition to entailing no less than three separate

20
inquiries by district-level officials and a jury trial, the gross injustice of the case and utter

incompetence with which it was handled was so extreme that it drew the attention of

parliament—rendering it one of the litany of scandals that beset British colonial regimes from

the late eighteenth century onwards for failing to live up to their civilizing rhetoric—and

thus, inevitably, of the local government, the government of India, and the India Office in

London.107

At midnight on 20 February 1909, one Hriday Nath Bose, a gomosta, or manager,

who worked for his second wife’s brother, was tortured in the cutcherry ghar (administrative

office) of the Raja of Naldangar by several of the Raja’s employees and a police chaukidar

(village policeman) in order to force him to confess to complicity in the theft of Rs. 300 in

money and jewellery from one of the Raja’s servants. Bose was tortured by a method known

as bansdola, which entailed compressing his chest with bamboo lathis (long sticks) and left

him with seven broken ribs.108 The torture was carried out on the orders of the Kaligunge

daroga (a police officer in charge of a station), sub-inspector Madhu Sudan Sen, and possibly

also the Raja’s son, and was witnessed by numerous individuals, including the Raja’s diwan

(chief minister) and his private secretary. Bose was then allowed to go home upon the

exaction of a considerable surety of Rs. 500 from his brother-in-law, Kunjo Sarkar (with

whom he lived and for whom he worked) that Bose would not make a complaint about his ill-

treatment. Bose seems, incredibly, to have travelled home on foot, because he was seen by his

wife Hari Dasi ‘walking homewards in a sitting posture with his knees bent to the fullest

extent’.109

In order to hide his condition Bose was not taken to hospital but was instead treated at

home, on the orders of a Dr Behari Lal Dutt (whose services were paid for by the Raja) with a

rigorous regimen of massage with turpentine (a treatment probably more excruciating than

the original torture, since it made Bose’s ribs, according to his wife Hari Dasi, make a

21
‘khuch-khuch sound’).110 After ten days of this agonizing treatment, and in fear of his survival

if he did not get to a hospital (another relative, Jogendra, claimed that Bose was bringing up

blood through his nose and mouth), Bose managed to get a message to his first wife

Ramrangini, who lived in another nearby village, begging her to go to the deputy magistrate,

Gyanendra Nath Chaudhuri, to lodge a complaint. Chaudhuri ordered Bose to be taken to the

Civil Hosptial at Jhenida (where the doctor treating him—who was either astoundingly

incompetent or in the Raja’s pay—claimed that Bose was suffering from bronchitis), and

initiated an inquiry.111 But when one Ambika Charan Mazumdar, a muktar (village head),

requested that he refrain from proceeding on the grounds that Bose was going to withdraw

the case, Chaudhuri concurred, provided that Bose appear personally to withdraw it.112

Though he was in no condition to leave the hospital, on 22 March Bose appeared in

the magistrate’s court to withdraw the case. But in spite of clear signs of foul play, including

the dire state of Bose’s health and his declaration that he was only withdrawing the case since

the witnesses were all under the influence of the Raja, Chaudhuri allowed the withdrawal.113

Upon returning home, Bose’s condition continued to worsen. Although on 18 April his

nephew Jogendra spirited him away from the tyranny of the police and the Raja’s men and

the incompetence of the local authorities to the Medical College hospital in Calcutta, such

salvation came too late, and an honorary magistrate was eventually summoned to record his

dying statement. In it Bose described the torture to which he had been subjected and by

whom, and declared that he had been forced to drop the case.114 He died on 13 May, and

although the post mortem revealed that he had seven broken (although by now reunited) ribs,

the cause of death was listed as pleurisy and pneumonia.115

There the matter would doubtless have rested had it not been for the verdict of the

coroner’s jury on 28 June that Bose had ‘met his death from the effect caused by the breaking

of the deceased’s ribs by violence, by certain members of the police and men of the Raja of

22
Naldanga’.116 The verdict led first to another enquiry, this time by the district magistrate and,

since the case had elicited parliamentary interest, the matter was not allowed to drop. But it

still took two more inquiries before legal proceedings were finally initiated, and only two

individuals, sub-inspector Madu Sudhan Sen and the victim of the theft, Sorojit Mukharji,

were committed to trial for torturing Bose—but not, notably, for causing his death.117

The judgment is a remarkable document. Although the case was tried by a jury (a rare

occurrence for a torture trial in this period),118 the judge, L. Plait, went to great pains to

discredit what can only be described as glaring evidence in favour of Bose’s claims, and to

pressure the jury to corroborate his views. He insisted, firstly, that Bose had broken his ribs

prior to his apprehension by the police, a claim that he based largely on the extremely suspect

medical evidence of the Jhenida doctor and of the post mortem doctor, Dr Jordan, who

discredited Bose’s claim about the bansdola by claiming that his fractures appeared to have

been caused by ‘kneading with knees and elbows’ rather than by having bamboo staves rolled

across his chest.119 Plait, moreover, found it impossible to believe either that Dr Behari Lal

Dutt would have prescribed such a torturous treatment as massage if Bose had actually had

seven broken ribs, or that a man in such a condition could possibly have endured such

treatment.120 He never, however, offered any suggestions as to how Bose could possibly have

received such major injuries if he had not been tortured.

Plait maintained, furthermore, that there were too many inconsistencies and

discrepancies in the evidence against the accused to justify conviction. He was particularly

distrustful of Hari Dasi’s evidence, since over the course of the many enquiries and the trial

she gave a number of conflicting statements as to what had happened to Bose. She, like her

brother, initially denied that Bose had been tortured, and although her brother told her that ‘I

live on the Raja’s land; it is your husband, you say what you like’, she was clearly terrified of

the consequences of speaking out against the Raja’s men, and appears to have been both

23
threatened by them and tutored to say that her husband had fallen from a cart.121 For Plait, not

only was there no evidence that she had ever been threatened or coerced, but Hari Dasi was in

fact the aggressor in the case, or rather its agent—she had, according to Plait, been used as a

tool ‘to frighten the Raja and his people’.122

What made the case further implausible, in Plait’s eyes, was the improbability that ‘a

man of Bose’s position in life’—he was, as Plait made clear, a member of the bhadrolok

(respectable people)—‘was likely to have been treated in this fashion; and if so treated,

whether he was likely to keep quiet for ten days before taking any steps’.123 There was no

evidence, he claimed, of the surety that Kunja Sarkar had purportedly given to ensure Bose’s

silence, or of Bose being forcibly prevented from seeking better medical treatment, as he had

alleged to Jogendra. For Plait there was, moreover, no motive for the police or the Raja’s

servants to treat Bose in such a fashion. One Bibhuti Bhusan Ganguly had already confessed

to the theft and all but Rs. 50 worth of the stolen property had been recovered from him at the

time the alleged torture occurred. As Plait informed the jury,

So far as my opinion goes (which the jury are not bound to accept), it seems to me incredible

that a police officer should run the risk of being arraigned for murder or grievous hurt, and for

what? Not for kudos . . . in detecting a case (for he had already caught the principal thief and

had recovered five-sixths of the stolen property), but to obtain a third share of the remaining

one-sixth of the stolen property. That means that only about Rs. 17 worth of stolen property

could be recovered from the man supposed to have been so maltreated as to have his ribs

broken—seven ribs broken. . . To suppose this torture would be to suppose wanton torture.124

It was at this point, according to Plait, that the jury ‘gave their verdict before I had finished

my charge, and practically stopped me’—a verdict, not surprisingly, of not guilty.125 For Plait,

the case was so clearly a false one that it should never have been committed to trial.126

24
 In light of the considerable attention the case had attracted, the Bengal government

was not pleased with the outcome. Although it refrained from critiquing Plait’s verdict—

whether because of the particularly tense relationship between the executive and judiciary in

Bengal, or because it did not regard Plait’s judgment as being as incompetent as it appears is

unclear—it maintained that ‘In India the fact that a case is supported by a large amount of

false evidence does not necessarily prove that the initial allegation was untrue’, and that had

Bose’s ribs been broken before the accident there would have been evidence of this since ‘In

an Indian village everyone lives in public and numbers of people must have known of such an

accident’.127 It focused its critique, instead, on the members of the district bureaucracy who

had so mismanaged it, namely the officiating superintendent of police, Babu Nand Kumar

Basu, the deputy magistrate, Gyanendra Nath Chaudhuri, and the district magistrate, an ICS

man named Mr Agasti. Chaudhuri and Agasti were regarded as the chief culprits. In the case

of Chaudhuri, he showed a ‘lamentable want of decision in failing to insist on a thorough

enquiry when the allegations were first brought to his notice’, and withdrew the case even

though ‘the fact that the accused persons were the servants of a powerful zamindar should

have aroused a suspicion that influence was being brought to bear to suppress [it]’.128 The

chief responsibility for the ‘dilatory and ineffective character of the proceedings’ lay,

however, with the district magistrate, since it ‘was his duty to have insisted at first on a

prompt and thorough inquiry’. Agasti failed, however, to initiate an enquiry even when he

was informed that Hriday Nath Bose was so ill that a magistrate had been called to record his

dying statement.129 But although Agasti was regarded as ‘notoriously a very bad officer’ and

‘the sort of man who ought to be got rid of’, since he was a member of the ICS doing so

involved an enquiry—which meant exposing the ICS to public scrutiny.130 No action was

taken, therefore, either in regard to him or to the other officials involved, apart from the

25
lieutenant-governor, Sir Edward Baker, having his ‘sense of displeasure at their conduct

placed on record’.131

Moreover, in spite of the fact that appeals against acquittals against individuals found

not guilty were admissible under Indian law, no further action was taken against the

policemen implicated in the torture of Bose. Had the case occurred just two years later, when

parliamentary pressure forced the Indian and provincial governments to take the most

stringent efforts to date to eradicate police torture, the situation might have been different.132

Nor was any further action taken against the Raja or his henchmen. Although the influence of

local zamindars (powerful landlords) over the police was well known and often decried—

village police had traditionally been servants of the zamindar, and zamindars still retained

considerable powers over them and over the system of policing, as a whole, in their localities

—, this was a power British officials nonetheless hastened to protect, both to preserve local

power structures and to diminish the responsibility of the colonial state for rural policing.133

In the end the Bengal government simply contented itself with the belief that such an obvious

failure of justice was ultimately the fault of Bose’s relatives, who ‘did their best to destroy

their case by false and malicious additions alleging clearly against the truth’.134

There are rare glimpses in the colonial archives that British officials were aware that

they were complicit in, if not responsible for, police brutality in colonial India. As one

witness informed the torture commission, not only did European officials refrain from

discussing the matter of torture, claiming that ‘We have nothing to do with that; that is all sub

rosa’, but since ‘torture had continued to be with ourselves the “institution” they had always

found it with our predecessors’, Indians were convinced that the government and its British

officers tacitly connived in and tolerated such practices.135 There is ample evidence that

British officials did indeed do so. For British bureaucrats in India the main consideration

when it came to the Indian police was the loyalty of its men, since as they were quick to point

26
out, ‘It must … be remembered that only [through] the loyalty and fidelity of the police can

we govern [India] at all.’136 As Arvind Verma asserts: ‘So long as the local police served the

British interests and did not become a burden on the British purse, the administrators

remained unconcerned about their failings, ill reputation, and depredations upon the

people.’137 Although this led to critiques of the oppressive nature of the colonial state, these

could always be met with the response, in the words of secretary of state for India, Viscount

Morley (1838–1923), that the ‘gentlemen’ who ran India were ‘Englishmen … and have the

same standards of what is just and right as we have in this kingdom.’138 Since the colonial

administration in India was run by English gentlemen, it was not possible to blame the

colonial ‘system of government’ for the plight of victims of police brutality like Hriday Nath

Bose. Colonial officials insisted, instead, that the conditions that led to such an abuse of

power were ‘none of our making, and no expenditure that is possible to contemplate will

remove them’.139 Blame was therefore to be laid upon ‘the instruments which it is necessary

to employ’ in order for that system to operate. This served to ensure not only the perpetuation

of a mode of violence that the colonial regime was allegedly pledged to eradicate, but the

systematization of torture as a technology of colonial rule.140

27
1
Quoted in L. S. S. O’Malley, The Indian civil service, 1601–1930 (London: John Murray, 1934), p. 173. That

Dufferin was not, perhaps, quite secure in his conviction was clear when he went on to say that the men of the

ICS were ‘absolutely free from any taint of venality or corruption’, and while they were ‘not of equal worth … if

the Indian Civil Service were not what I have described it, how could the government of the country go on so

smoothly? We have 250 million of subjects in India and less than 1,000 British Civilians for the conduct of the

entire administration’ (ibid., p. 173).

2
Cited in Spangenberg, BB, pp. 7–8.
3
David Arnold, Police power and colonial rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1986), p. 230.
4
O’Malley, The Indian civil service; and Philip Woodruff [pseudonym for Mason], The guardians (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1954). The title of the latter work is indicative of its ideology.
5
Spangenberg, BB, p. 347.

6
Potter, IPA, p. 21.
7
Much of the literature that does exist, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, focuses on issues such as

‘collaboration’ by local elites, or on urban municipal government. See, for example, David A. Washbrook,

‘Country politics: Madras 1880 to 1930’, Modern Asian Studies 7:3 (1973), 475–531; and David A. Washbrook,

The emergence of provincial politics: the Madras presidency, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976);

and C. A. Bayly, The local roots of Indian politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975). Robert

Frykenberg’s, Guntur district: 1788–1848: a history of local influence and central authority in South India

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), while it does not deal with the colonial bureaucracy, explores structures and

systems of bureaucratic power and local authority that continued throughout the colonial period.
8
For an overview state violence in colonial India in the twentieth century, see Taylor Sherman, State violence

and punishment in India (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).

9
This is not to say that practices like police torture did not exist in pre-colonial India, but rather that they were

systematized under colonial rule.

10
See, in particular, William Gould’s excellent recent study of bureaucracy and corruption in the late colonial

and early post-colonial era: Gould, Bureaucracy, community and influence in India: society and the state,

1930s–1960s (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). See also Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes: the mind of the
Indian civil service (London: Hambledon and London, 1993); and Potter, IPA.
11
This is a vast literature and far too extensive to consider at great depth. Notable works, however, include

Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Carol Breckendridge and Peter van der Veer

(eds.), Orientalism and the postcolonial predicament: perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Nicholas Dirks, ‘From little kingdom to landlord: colonial discourse and colonial

rule’, in Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 175–208;

Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and history: constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1994); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1996); and C. A. Bayly, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social

communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).

12
This is by now a huge literature: see, in particular, the eleven volumes of Subaltern Studies (1982–2000).
13
See, for example, Ranajit Guha, ‘On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India’, Subaltern Studies 1

(Delhi: Oxford UP, 1982); Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing post-orientalist histories of the third world: Perspectives from

Indian historiography’, CSSH 32:2 (1990), 383–408; Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, ‘After

Orientalism: culture, criticism, and politics in the third world’, CSSH 34:1 (1992), 141–67 (and Gyan Prakash’s

reply to this article, ‘Can the “subaltern” ride? A reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook’, CSSH 34:1 (1992), 168–

84; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton:

Princeton UP, 2000).

14
This is another literature almost too vast to list. Pioneering texts include Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh K. Vaid

(eds.), Recasting women: Essays in Indian colonial history (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); J. Krishnamurty

(ed), Women in colonial India: Essays on survival, work and the state (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989); David Arnold,

Colonizing the body: State medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993);

Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late

nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995); Bharati Ray (ed.), From the seams of history: essays on

Indian women (Delhi: Oxford, 1995); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and boundaries: women in

India’s partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); Lata Mani, Contentious traditions: the debate on sati in

colonial India (Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1998); and Tanika Sarkar, Hindu wife, Hindu nation: community, religion,
and cultural nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000).
15
See Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, vol. I: an introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage

Books, 1990); ‘Society must be defended’: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Bertani

and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997); Security, territory,

population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Snellart, trans. Graham Burchell

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and ‘The subject and power’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 777–

95.
16
See Partha Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1993), and Chatterjee, ‘Was there a hegemonic project of the colonial state?’, in Dagmar Engels and Shula

Marks (eds.), Contesting colonial hegemony: state and society in Africa and India (London and New York:

British Academic Press, 1994), pp. 79–84; Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Dominance, hegemony and the colonial state:

the Indian and African experiences’, in Engels and Marks (eds.), Contesting colonial hegemony, pp. 267–76;

Ranajit Guha, Dominance without hegemony (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1998); Gyan Prakash, Another reason:

science and the imagination of modern India (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999); U. Kalpagam, ‘The colonial state

and statistical knowledge’, History of the human sciences 13:2 (2000), 37–55; and Stephen Legg, Spaces of

colonialism: Delhi’s urban governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

17
See, for example, Peter Pels, ‘The anthropology of colonialism: culture, history, and the emergence of western

governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), 163–83; David Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’,

Social Text 43 (1995), 191–220; Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s culture: anthropology, travel and government

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of

sexuality and the colonial order of things (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995); and Deana Heath, Purifying

Empire: obscenity and the politics of moral regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2010).
18
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 13. See also Thomas Blom Hansen, The saffron wave: Democracy and Hindu

nationalism in modern India (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999); C. J. Fuller and John Harris, ‘For an anthropology

of the modern Indian state’, in C. J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (eds.), The everyday state and society in modern
India (London: Hurst and Co., 2001); Craig Jeffrey and Jens Lerche, ‘Dimensions of dominance: Class and state

in Uttar Pradesh’, in Fuller and Bénéï (eds.), Everyday state, pp. 91–114; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of

governance: colonialism and democracy in twentieth century India’, Modern Asian Studies 41:3 (2007), 441–70;

and Heath, Purifying empire.

19
Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’; and Nasser Hussain, The jurisprudence of emergency: Colonialism and the

rule of law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 61. As Nasser Hussain argues, while India was

on the verge of what Foucault termed ‘the birth of modernity’, namely ‘a shift from sovereign extraction to

governmentality’, this was accompanied by the promulgation of ‘emergency regulations’ to ensure the

maintenance of sovereign power (Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 61).

20
Seminal works that make such claims include Bernard Cohn, ‘The census, social structure and objectification

in South Asia’, in Cohn, An anthropologist among the historians and other essays (New Delhi: Oxford UP,

1987), pp. 224–54; and Nicholas Dirks, ‘The ethnographic state’, in Dirks, Castes of mind: colonialism and the

making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 43–60. Work on particular castes has, however,

called such claims into question: see, for example, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Popular religion and social mobility

in colonial Bengal: The Matua sect and the Namasudras’, in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Mind, body and society: life

and mentality in colonial Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. 152–92; and Philip Constable, ‘Early Dalit

literature and culture in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century western India’, Modern Asian Studies 31:2

(1997), 317–38.
21
The ‘content and character of modern law are’, as Nasser Hussain argues, ‘essentially normative’, since not

only does modern law consist ‘of rules stipulating expected behavior but also that such rules are themselves

validated out of a theory of power that is itself normative, that inscribes itself deep into social life and seeks its

legitimacy and validity by regulating that life in an expectant and improving direction’ (Hussain, Jurisprudence,

p. 12).
22
Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 6. Governmentality did not replace sovereignty or disciplinary forms of power;

modern power instead operates, according to Foucault, as a triangle of all three forms of power (Foucault,

‘Governmentality’, p. 102).
23
Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments, p. 10; and Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 6. Although the ‘rule of law’

was envisioned as treating all subjects alike, in India ‘a whole range of special exemptions and statuses divided

the legal domain’, both by race and religion. British rule in India was (as Radhika Singha terms it) ‘a despotism

of law’: Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 9; and Radhika Singha, A despotism of law: crime and justice in early

colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998).

24
As David Arnold argues: ‘Police power was often used to circumvent or supplement the legal process because

the latter was too dilatory or too scrupulous to satisfy the colonial need for prompt retribution and collective

punishment’; the police, therefore, ‘not infrequently usurped the role of judge, jailor and executioner’ (Arnold,

Police power, p. 3).

25
Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial justice in British India: white violence and the rule of law (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2010), p. 1.
26
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 74.
27
Ibid., p. 61.

28
Trade was distinguished from governance: revenue and judicial functions were separated; courts of civil and

criminal justice were established, including a supreme court; and officers engaged in revenue and judicial

administration were prohibited from engaging in commercial transactions. The central government was

strengthened (under a governor-general and council invested with executive and judicial powers); and the

company’s servants became subject to disciplinary control. An esprit de corps, moreover, began to emerge

among the ‘covenanted service’ (so called because recruits were required to sign a covenant to the company

ensuring their loyalty and good conduct service) as their training, pay and prospects were improved and the

service was Europeanized, with Indians—whom governor-general Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805) regarded as

being ‘unworthy of trust, especially as instruments of modernization’—excluded from key posts (Misra,

Bureaucracy, p. 57).
29
Ibid., p. 65.
30
Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, ‘Discipline and the other body: humanitarianism, violence, and the colonial

exception’, in Steven Pierce and Anumpama Rao (eds.), Discipline and the other body: correction, corporeality,

colonialism (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), p. 7.

31
Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 4.
32
Arnold, Police power, p. 12.
33
Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 5; Misra, Bureaucracy, p. 50. As John Stuart Mill famously argued: ‘Representative

government is not suitable to “a rude people” ’, since ‘though in some degree alive to the benefit of civilized

society, may be unable to practice the forbearances which it demands … in such a case, a civilized government,

to be really advantageous to them, will require to be in a considerable degree despotic’ (Hussain, Jurisprudence,

p.120).
34
Hussain, Jurisprudence, p. 89.
35
Misra, Bureaucracy, p. 57.
36
David Vincent, The culture of secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), p. 39. In Britain such

values led to the formation of what David Vincent terms the ‘non-bureaucratic bureaucracy’, in which ‘the

behaviour of individual officials was conditioned not by external regulation but internal moral imperatives’. This

in turn fostered the creation of a ‘culture of secrecy’, in which the ethical standards of civil servants were

believed to be a sufficient guarantee of their conduct (Vincent, Culture of secrecy, p. 28).

37
Cited in Potter, IPA, p. 72. See also E. M. Collingham, Imperial bodies: the physical experience of the Raj,

c.1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).

38
Cited in Spangenberg, BB, p. 145. A quarter of a century later, viceroy Lord Curzon denigrated the ICS as

being comprised by men who were ‘indifferent’ and ‘incompetent’, while the secretary of state Lord George

Hamilton believed them to be so motivated by self-interest that they exploited India for their own benefit rather

than serve it (Spangenberg, BB, p. 3).

39
It was for this reason that the competitive examination included a viva voce test, which former ICS member L.

K. Jha notes was ‘more an attempt to assess the personality and background of the candidate than his ability’ (L.

K. Jha, ‘Reflections on the civil service’, in Raj K. Nigam, Memoirs of old mandarins of India: the

administrative change as the ICS administrators saw in India (New Delhi: Documentation Centre for Corporate

& Business Policy Research, 1985), p. 115).

40
Spangenberg, BB, pp. 10, 19. Such a situation changed during the course of the twentieth century, and by the

interwar period three-quarters of all ICS recruits had attended Oxford or Cambridge (Potter, IPA, p. 71).
41
Spangenberg, BB, p. 16.
42
Spangenberg, BB, p. 43. Spangenberg attributes the cause of such a trend to the decline of the perceived perks

for ICS officers in the late nineteenth century, thanks to issues such as stagnation in promotion, the falling value

of the rupee, and the general disadvantages of an Indian career like health hazards, climate and separation from

family for long periods (ibid., pp. 45–52).

43
Potter, IPA, p. 45. This was at a time, moreover, when no more than several dozen Europeans were recruited to

the ICS each year (Potter, IPA, p. 85).

44
Cited in Potter, IPA, p. 88.
45
The governors of Madras and Bombay were generally political appointees from Britain and were in many

respects independent of the governor-general since they communicated directly with the Secretary of State in

London. They often used their position to defend their own interests and those of their associates over a central

government that they regarded as oppressive and remote and of colleagues (at least those in Bengal) who

regarded them as inferior (Spangenberg, BB, p. 81).

46
Cited in Spangenberg, BB, p. 94. Madras posed, for him, the most serious problem, since it was ‘a country

which does not belong to India, and over which the Government of India cannot exercise the smallest

influence . . . For all practical purposes it is to us a foreign state, abominably ill-governed’ (ibid.., p. 102).
47
Such tensions were a result of perceptions of the inferiority of the judicial to the executive branch of the ICS.

While the judicial branch resented the superior emoluments and status of the executive, the latter denigrated

what it regarded as the execrable training of judges (ibid., p. 113).

48
A. Earle, Memorandum, July, 1911, Home, Police, Deposit, 30 Aug. 1911, NAI.
49
Spangenberg, BB, p. 351.
50
Ibid., p. 62. Transfers could also, however, be precipitated by efforts to prevent officers from taking early

retirement, or because of illness, accident, or death. Bengal, for example, lost a number of men to terrorism in

the 1930s and was forced to send notices to other provinces appealing for volunteers (Potter, IPA, p. 31).
51
Potter, IPA, p. 28; Spangenberg, BB, p. 61.
52
Spangenberg, BB, p. 63.
53
The government of India prepared a chart in 1900 showing the number of times in the period 1898–99 the

charge of districts had changed. In 48 districts this had happened once; in 61 it had happened twice; in 49 it had

occurred three times; in 27 it had taken place four times; in 23 it had happened five times; in 6 no less than six

times; in 7 a ridiculous seven times; and in 2 an astounding eight times. The rate of transfers remained an

endemic problem: by 1936 two thirds of district collectors had held their posts for less than a year, and it was

rare for officers to be in the same district for over two years (Spangenberg, BB, p. 72, Potter, IPA, p. 27).
54
Potter, IPA, p. 33. As one disgruntled civil servant opined, ‘the men who are most successful are those who are

machines devoid of individuality, without original ideas, or who humour the ignorance … of their superiors’

(cited in Spangenberg, BB, p. 161).

55
Potter, IPA, p. 102.
56
Ibid., p. 111.
57
J. M. Lobo-Prabhu, ‘Commitment to covenant and country’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 175. The disturbing

ignorance of the job such training inculcated was not, furthermore, mitigated once recruits assumed their new

posts—another Indian recruit, R. A. Gopalswami, maintained that: ‘It was impressed on me very early in my

I.C.S. career that I should perform my official duty and exercise my official powers without seeking advice

beforehand from my superiors’ (Gopalswami, ‘Initiatives and implementation in ICS’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs,

p. 77).
58
Debash Das, ‘Contribution of ICS to national consciousness’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 49. While

parliament undertook a number of initiatives in the late nineteenth century to provide more opportunities for

Indians in the ICS, particularly once their exclusion became a target of animus of the nascent Indian nationalist

movement, British officials used their ingenuity to ensure they were kept out (Spangenberg, BB, p. 309).
59
N. C. Srivastava, ‘ICS and development administration’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 315.
60
Potter, IPA, p. 85.
61
Ibid., p. 81.
62
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 54.
63
Potter, IPA, p. 44. By 1937, following the implementation of the second Government of India Act, which led to

the virtually complete hand-over of power in the provinces, British ICS officers found themselves serving
provincial governments run by their political adversaries. David Potter, however, maintains that since ministers

were inexperienced in administration or in the ways of government, most of the decision-making power

remained with ICS men (Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 27; Potter, IPA, p. 45).
64
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 28.
65
R. C. Dutt, ‘The civil service before and after independence’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 61. Although inter-

racial mixing was more common in the districts, where officers’ clubs were generally open to Indians and

socializing was more acceptable (and doubtless necessary for the British), cities like Delhi and Calcutta

witnessed stringent racial exclusion up to the Second World War. This, not surprisingly, rankled many Indian

members of the ICS, but the increasing Indianization of the services also fostered a decline in interest among

Indian ICS officers to seek contact with British members, particularly in light of what many Indian ICS members

regarded as their own superior social and educational backgrounds vis-à-vis those of their British colleagues. M.

K. Kripalani, ‘Civil servants held the country together’, in ibid., p. 154; R. N. Banerjee, ‘Three decades in the

Indian civil service’, in ibid., p. 22; and Khub Chand, ‘Administration: backbone of a nation’, in ibid., p. 141.
66
Spangenberg, BB, p. 326.
67
Cited in Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 19.
68
Spangenberg, BB, p. 307; Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 19.
69
Spangenberg, BB, p. xii; Potter, IPA, p. 21; and Arnold, Police power, p. 21. It is not surprising therefore, that

the popular image of the ICS officer was of ‘the courageous and self-confident English gentleman doing his duty

in a remote rural district’ (Potter, IPA, p. 77).

70
S. D. Nargolwala, ‘Civil servants had to be generalists and specialists’, in Nigam (ed.), Memoirs, p. 239.
71
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 31.
72
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 31; and Potter, IPA, p. 40. Former ICS officer, J. M. Lobo-Prabhu, reveals the

ludicrousness of such an endeavour: on the way to each village the assistant collector would be met by village

officials, who brought the village revenue records for inspection, and these were ‘checked by inquiries from

farmers, who quickly collected’; but ‘the very multitude of entries made effective checking difficult if not

impossible’ (Lobo-Prabhu, ‘Commitment to covenant’, p. 176).

73
Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 43. As Anil Seal has aptly remarked, the terms of the bargain were that ICS Collectors

‘could depend on the collection of revenue, provided they did not ask too officiously who paid it’, and ‘they

might take public order for granted, provided that they themselves did not play too obtrusive a part in enforcing

it’ (cited in Gould, Bureaucracy, p. 43).

74
Arvind Verma, ‘Consolidation of the Raj: notes from a police station in British India, 1865–1928’, in Criminal

Justice History 17 (2002), 112.

75
Verma, ‘Consolidation of the Raj’, 112. As the commission appointed in 1860 to propose a reorganization of

the Indian police was informed, ‘the line that separates the protective and repressive functions of the civil police

from functions purely military, may not, always, in India be very clear’ (cited ibid., p. 112).
76
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture in the Madras presidency.

Submitted to the Right Honourable the Governor in Council of Fort St. George, on the 16 th April 1855 (Madras

(India: Presidency): Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture, Fort St. George Gazette

Press, 1855), p. 42.

77
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 40. Such beliefs remained

sacrosanct throughout the period of British rule; as viceroy Lord Hardinge (1858–1944) informed the Secretary

of State Sir Edwin Montagu (1879–1924) in 1911: ‘Hateful as the practice of torture is, it must not be forgotten

that it is a practice innate to the people of India’ (Hardinge to Montagu, 5 June 1911, Home, Police, A, July, 240,

1911, NAI).
78
Report of the Indian police commission, 1902-03 (Simla: Printed at the Government Central Printing Office,

1903), p. 14.
79
Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–3, p. 17. The commission detailed the manner in which

investigations were generally carried out: ‘A body of police comes down to the village and is quartered on it for

several days. The principal residents have to dance attendance on the police all day long and for days together.

Sometimes all the villagers are compelled to be in attendance, and inquiries degrading in their character are

conducted coram populo. Suspects and innocent persons are bullied and threatened into giving information they

are supposed to possess’ (ibid., p. 15).

80
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 34.
81
Sir Richard Craddock, Minute, 6 May 1913. Home, Police, A, July, 85–95, 1913, NAI.

82
Extract from the Minutes of Consultation, Public Department, 9 September 1854, IOR/P/311/44, BL.

83
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the company’s Sudder Foujdaree Udalut (criminal court) issued ten

circular orders on the subject of extorting confessions. This was followed by the Madras torture commission and

the police commission of 1860, both of which led to a major reform of the Indian police. There were numerous

further commissions that dealt with the workings of the police, many of which concentrated on reforming the

police in particular provinces, and periodic bouts of parliamentary pressure to put a stop to police brutality. It

was concern over such pressure that led the government of India in 1890 to request local governments to furnish

it with reports of all cases of police torture that were exposed in the press. Such requests were repeated over the

following two decades and in 1911 culminated, after a very vocal parliamentary campaign, in the government of

India keeping a register of all police torture cases and issuing the first substantive orders to local governments on

measures to curb the practice of torture by the police (Report of the commissioners for the investigation of

alleged cases of torture, p. 43; and H. Wheeler, Minute, 19 April 1912, Home, Police, Deposit, June, 20, 1912,

NAI; Home, Police, A, March, 150, 1917, NAI).

84
H. O. Quinn, Acting Secretary to the Government of Bombay, to the Secretary to the Government of India,

Home Department, 18 January 1908, Home, Police, A, May, 124–130, 1908, NAI.
85
Frederic Mackarness, The methods of the Indian police in the 20th century (London: National Press Agency,

1910), Home, Political, A, August, 159–170, 1910, NAI.

86
A. Earle, Minute, 25 November 1911, Home, Police, A, April, 37–100, 1912, NAI.

87
Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–03, pp. 15, 115.
88
A police constable in the mid-nineteenth century was paid as little as Rs. 3 per month..
89
Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated

6th June 1890. To enquire into certain questions connected with the police administration of the North-Western

Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1891), p. 70; and

Evidence recorded by the committee appointed by government under resolution (police department) no.

373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June, 1890, to enquire into certain questions connected with the police
administration of the North-Western Provinces & Oudh (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh

Government Press, 1891). By the early twentieth century, constables in some provinces were still earning as little

as Rs. 7 a month (Mackarness, Methods of the Indian police).

90
Evidence recorded by the committee appointed by government under resolution (police department) no.

373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June, 1890, p. 51

91
Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated

6th June 1890, p. 19; and Home, Police, A, February, 128-130, 1920, NAI. The first school was set up by the

Bengal government, in Calcutta. The government of Bihar and Orissa was the next to follow suit several years

later.
92
Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated

6th June 1890, p. 19. They may, in fact, have been more prone to use such tactics, thanks to the ongoing custom,

despite endless suggestions to eradicate it, ‘of promoting or degrading Police Officers solely on returns without

any reference to the general character of their work’, which made it ‘next to impossible for an officer . . . to

retain his appointment by honest work only’ (Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution

(police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 21).

93
European recruits were often accused of having ‘an imperfect knowledge of the language’, of being ‘out of

touch with the people’, of paying ‘insufficient regard to public opinion’ and of ‘fail[ing] to realise the importance

of their own duties’ (Mackarness, Methods of the Indian police, p. 15).

94
In Midnapur, for example, the district superintendent of police was responsible for administering an area of

5,186 square miles and supervising 9 inspectors, 79 sub-inspectors, 83 head constables and 778 constables, who

were employed in no less than 26 police stations and 21 outposts, some of which were ‘very difficult of access’

(‘The character of the Indian police’, pp. 15–16).

95
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, pp. 39, 40.

96
Cited in Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 46.
97
The immediate head of the police at the district level was the superintendent of police, but he was subject to

the authority of the district magistrate. Although the exact relationship between district magistrates and

superintendents of police was subject to considerable debate during the second half of the nineteenth century, the
ultimate outcome was the increase rather than the diminishment of the control of magistrates over the police

(Proceedings of the sub-committee, public service commission. Police department (Simla: Superintendent,

Government Central Press, 1887), p. 4).

98
Proceedings of the sub-committee, public service commission, p. 74.
99
Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated

6th June 1890, p. 75.

100
Evidence recorded by the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-

186A-2, dated 6th June 1890, p. 2.

101
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 7; and Report of the Indian

police commission, 1902–3, pp. 115–16.

102
Report of the Indian police commission, 1902–3, p. 82. As the 1860 police commission report observed,

although ‘there should be a complete severance of Executive Police from Judicial authorities’, so that ‘the Judge

and detective Officer should not be one and the same … an exception must be made in favour of the District

Officer’ [emphasis in original]: Indian police commission report, 1860, p. 13. Home, Judicial, A, Oct., 34-38,

1860, NAI.
103
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 8.
104
Ibid., p. 27. The lack of evidence of police brutality was due to factors such as the use of torture tactics that

did not leave visible marks (like ‘scratching insects, dipping in wells, starvation, prevention of sleep, and the

like’); ‘the facility with which witnesses are tampered with by means of bribes or intimidation’; or the fact that

‘far too great importance is often attached to trifling discrepancies’ in witness testimony (ibid., pp. 28, 35).
105
Ibid., p. 28. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, this generally amounted to no more than a fine of

a few rupees or the removal of the offender to a different district, although even later in the century considerable

acts of violence could be met with as little as a three month prison sentence.
106
Cited in ibid., p. 36.
107
The case attracted the attention of parliament thanks to Sir Henry Cotton MP, a former ICS officer and vocal

critic of the government of India. For more on colonialism and scandal see, for example, Nicholas Dirks, The

scandal of empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2006); James Epstein, The
scandal of colonial rule: power and subversion in the British Atlantic during the age of revolution (New York:

Cambridge UP, 2012); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850

(Carlton, Vic: Melbourne UP, 2004); and Steven Pierce, ‘Punishment and the political body: flogging and

colonialism in northern Nigeria’, Interventions 3:2 (2001), 206–21.

108
Sir Charles Allen, officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government

of India, Home, 7 Aug. 1909, L/PJ/6/943, File 2227–228, BL.

109
Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji.

110
Ibid.

111
Sir Charles Allen, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the

Government of India, Home, 7 Aug. 1909.

112
Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji.

113
Ibid.

114
Ibid.

115
Ibid.
116
Sir Charles Allen, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the

Government of India, Home, 7 Aug. 1909.

117
Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji.

118
A limited system of trial by jury existed in colonial India. First restricted to the three presidency capitals of

Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, it was later extended to a small range of other districts under the Criminal

Procedure Code (CPC) of 1861. Its operation, however, proved unsatisfactory, since ‘The judges from want of

legal training and inexperience were often incompetent to deal with juries, and, further, the verdict of the jurors

was often biased and perverse’. In 1872, therefore, changes were introduced to the CPC. In trials without a jury

appeals were henceforth freely allowed, but in jury trials if the judge disagreed with the verdict he could refer the

case on appeal to the High Court, while local governments were given the authority, ‘in certain carefully defined

and clear cases’, to appeal against acquittals—a procedure alien to British law but deemed ‘necessary under the

circumstances prevailing in India’. ‘Appeals against Acquittals’, p. 2, IOR/L/PJ/6/1368, file 1823, BL.
119
Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji. Plait claimed that: ‘A man may get his ribs

broken in all sorts of circumstances which may not transpire in evidence, and advantage may be taken of the fact

of broken ribs to make a false charge.’

120
Emperor vs. Madhu Sudan Sen and Sorojit Chandra Mukharji.

121
Ibid.

122
Ibid. While British colonial officials generally distrusted the truthfulness of the oral evidence of all Indians,

and thus sought to undermine such evidence, they regarded that of some segments of the Indian population—

particularly women and groups such as what the British referred to as ‘criminal tribes’—as being particularly

unreliable. See, for example, Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Rule of Colonial Indifference: Rape

on Trial in Early Colonial India, 1805–57’, Journal of Asian Studies 69:4 (2010), 1093–1117; and Ishita Pande,

‘Phulmoni’s body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian narrative on child rape in India’, South Asian

History and Culture 4:1 (2013), 9–30.

123
Ibid. The fact that Bose neither poor nor low caste was indeed a rare feature of the case for the time period.
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid.
126
Bose had, Plait was convinced, broken his ribs some time before his apprehension by the police and a

malignant ‘outside party’ used this to try to ‘get at the Raja’. He actually went so far, on absolutely no evidence

whatsoever, to declare the case part of an extremist plot against the Raja and the superintendent of police. Ibid.
127
Minute, 11 July 1910, L/PJ/6/943, File 2227–228, BL.
128
E. V. Levinge, esq., Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the

government of India, Home, 5 May, 1910.

129
Ibid.
130
Minute, 11 July 1910, L/PJ/6/943; and E. V. Levinge, Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal,

to the secretary to the government of India, Home, 5 May 1910; and Minute, 20 June, 1910, L/PJ/6/943, File

2227–228, BL.
131
E. V. Levinge, Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of

India, Home, 5 May 1910.

132
‘Appeals against Acquittals’. The legality of such a process also, however, came under considerable critique

in 1912 when three men were acquitted by a judge of committing a murder, but on appeal two of the men were

later sentenced to death and the third to transportation for life and the Local Government appealed. Between

1902 and 1911, twenty-seven people were sentenced to death on appeal who had been acquitted by subordinate

courts. Such proceedings were defended on the grounds that ‘In India the executive is more directly and singly

responsible for the security of life and property, and for bringing criminals to justice than the executive of a

country where society is strong, self-reliant and accustomed to range itself actively on the side of the law’, and

because ‘Defects in the personnel and methods of the police; defects in the constitution, the procedure, the

capacity, and sometimes the integrity of the subordinate Courts, exist in a degree and to an extent unknown in

[Britain], and result in frequent failures of justice’ (‘Appeals against Acquittals’, pp. 3–4).
133
Report of the committee appointed by government under resolution (police dept). No. 373/VIII-186A-2, dated

6th June 1890, p. 92.

134
E. V. Levinge, Officiating chief secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of

India, Home, 5 May 1910.

135
Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 97.

136
Minute, Sir Richard Craddock, May 6, 1913, Home, Police, A, July, 85-95, 1913, NAI.

137
Verma, ‘Consolidation of the Raj’, p. 121.
138
Excerpt from a debate in the House of Lords on ‘Indian Police Methods’, 16 March 1911, p. 518,

IOR/L/PJ/6/1070, File 831, BL.

139
Home, Political, A, August, 159-170, 1910, NAI; H. Forbes, Esq., Collector and Magistrate of Tanjore, to the

Torture commisisoners, n.d., Report of the commissioners for the investigation of alleged cases of torture, p. 11.
140
Resolution, Home, Police, March, 248–259, 1905. IOR/L/PJ/6/716, File 998, BL.