TY - JOUR
AU - Campion, David A.
AB - Abstract This article examines police administration and the experience of colonial policing in the villages and towns of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, one of the largest and most important regions of British India in the early twentieth century. During this time it was the inefficiency and weakness of the British in their policing methods, rather than the brutally effective use of the Indian Police Service, that fuelled resentment among the population of colonial India and led to widespread discontent among European and Indian officers and constables. Yet throughout this period, the police remained the most important link between Europeans and Indians, and were a frequent conduit for social exchange as well as a point of bitter conflict. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Indian Police Service was in trouble. Decades of inefficient operation, poor leadership, rampant corruption and brutality, and the incompetent investigation and prosecution of crime had earned the force the contempt and derision of all levels of Indian society and made it the embarrassment of British administrators from Calcutta to London. The growth of communication and rail networks in India during the latter half of the nineteenth century had generated new and sophisticated forms of crime, which the police had proved increasingly incapable of handling. The growing number of Indian newspapers and political groups, like the Indian National Congress, were becoming increasingly adamant in their demands for police reform, specifically the greater accountability of provincial governments for the behaviour of constables and the more widespread inclusion of Indians in the superior ranks of the force. Congressmen in particular decried the unsuitability of the Europeans, whom they described as ‘baby-faced lads’, who filled the ranks of the Indian Police, and whose arrogance and immaturity, they claimed, were generally overlooked by British officials searching for a place to send sons and nephews whose prospects for success in any other profession were limited at best.1 The long-suffering people of India, they complained, deserved better. British imperial administrators, seeing a steady increase in crime and public discontent, and the rise of nationalist sentiment, began to consider measures to correct the long-standing problem of the police. Ranajit Guha has drawn attention to the paradox that Britain in the nineteenth century was simultaneously the world's leading liberal democracy at home and its largest autocratic state in colonial India; ruling one society by popular representation and consent and the other by executive fiat and coercion.2 Guha describes this phenomenon in India as ‘dominance without hegemony’. The ramifications of this dichotomy between consensual and coercive control are central to understanding colonial policing in British India and elsewhere in the empire, since the police were the primary instrument of state control and, unlike the military or civil service, they came into daily contact with the population. This article will address some of the central problems of colonial policing in the United Provinces from the beginning of the twentieth century to the rise of the Non-Cooperation/Civil Disobedience campaigns of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Attention will be paid not only to the increasingly antagonistic relationship between the police and the people, but also to the corporate identity of the police itself as an organization beset with internal conflict and harbouring its own resentment and bitterness toward the colonial government. In 1902, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, convened a commission to address what he had long perceived to be the weakest link in the chain of the British Raj: the Indian Police. In the months that followed, the Indian Police Commission heard testimony from hundreds of people throughout India and from all levels of society.3 The final report of the commission told a tale of corruption, brutality and incompetence so damning that Lord Broderick, the Secretary of State for India, urged Curzon to suppress its publication for fear that it would undermine British authority and give ammunition to the increasingly vocal Indian critics of the British Raj in the Congress and elsewhere.4 The report itself refused to impugn the integrity of the British police officers and blamed corruption in the subordinate ranks on the fact that for decades Indian constables had been paid less than a living wage. It insisted that even the most honest and upright constable or sub-inspector with a family to support would sooner or later give in to temptation and accept the benefits of petty bribery and other forms of corruption for which he had already been assigned guilt in the public mind.5 The British members of the commission also argued that corruption and despotic tendencies were a pathological part of oriental cultures in general, which British officers could at best keep under control, but never entirely eradicate. Indian critics dismissed this explanation, arguing that it conveniently absolved British police officers from real accountability in the supervision of their men, a responsibility they could never truly fulfil because of inherent linguistic and cultural differences.6 These critics claimed that the real root of inefficiency and corruption in the Indian Police was British administration. Only the appointment of qualified Indians to the rank of district police superintendent and above could alleviate this chronic problem and build the public's confidence in their police. Building confidence in the Indian Police had been a concern of the government of India for many years prior to Curzon's Police Commission. In 1893, the government, under the viceroyalty of Lord Lansdowne, had instituted a competitive examination for Indian Police Service candidates in England modelled on that for the Indian Civil Service. This reform was long overdue, and the new standardization of entrance requirements combined with the competition for limited places rapidly increased the quality of the probationary police officers arriving in India, and was a vast improvement over the system of nominating candidates in India. Previously, candidates had petitioned the Secretary of State for India through the viceroy for appointment to the Indian Police. This means of recruitment had proven hopelessly vulnerable to the arbitrary and nepotistic manoeuvrings of influential Anglo-Indian families and sympathetic administrators. The result had been that the Indian Police became a refuge for the sort of men that the novelist Anthony Trollope described as the mediocre younger sons of prominent English families; ne'er-do-well boys who lacked the ambition or ability to secure for themselves a commission in the army or a place at university and whose families were at a loss for what to do with them.7 The arrival of the ‘exam-wallahs’, many of them lower middle-class grammar school boys selected by competition, soon raised the level of professionalism and intelligence among the junior officers.8 Nevertheless, it would take years for their talents to be felt at the most senior levels, and substandard police leadership in the United Provinces and elsewhere in India continued to be a problem that drew the criticism of Indians and Europeans alike. Among European police officers during this period cases of bribery and corruption were rare, while indebtedness, drunkenness and professional incompetence were the reasons for most of the disciplinary action taken against them. Mental instability, exacerbated by the considerable strains of police work, was occasionally at the root of the problem. An interesting case is that of R. R. Beadon, police superintendent of the Hamirpur District in U.P. In 1914, he was brought before a disciplinary review board for a case of misallocation of funds in his office, and a review of his service record showed a career marked by numerous warnings and reprimands.9 The source of the trouble seems to have been a mix of Beadon's poor judgement, his eccentric and erratic personality, and his odd brand of Roman Catholic zealotry. His crusader's zeal was directed primarily at his Muslim inspectors who bore the brunt of his abusive treatment and religious fanaticism. He had also been heard to make disparaging remarks about the British empire and compared the plight of India under British rule to that of his native Ireland. An inquiry was held into Beadon's conduct, including an evaluation by the medical officer in charge of the Agra lunatic asylum. His record of service and evaluations showed a history of mental imbalance and frequent reassignment for substandard performance. Numerous police officers who had served with him testified to his long-term unfitness for duty and wondered how such an officer could have been retained in the service for so many years. The inspector-general, Douglas Straight, in a fit of exasperation described him as an ‘absolute waster’ and a ‘religious crank’. Beadon's own rambling ten-page statement of self-defence, in which he compared himself to John the Baptist silenced by Herod and Christ tried by Pilate, did not help his situation. He was quickly and quietly forced into early retirement. For British police officers in India, the physical and psychological strains of a difficult assignment were considerable. There was the oppressive climate and the discomforts of being constantly on the move; the frequent outbreak of dangerous disturbances, which officers were required to control; investigation of grisly crimes; and the paper chase of running a police district up to rigorous inspection standards. The modest salaries of police officers often added financial and material privation to their troubles. The most dreaded aspect of a life in the Indian Police, however, was the agonizing and seemingly endless loneliness of a remote posting. One officer, in his letters, described himself as a ‘lonely alien’.10 None of these points, especially the last, should be underestimated by historians of empire. The language of psychiatry was fairly rudimentary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but a study of the records of the Indian Police shows a telling pattern of European officers relieved of their duties and sent on medical leave to sanitariums in the hill stations after suffering ‘shattered nerves’ or ‘losing their wits’. One young police officer, Patrick Biggie, in a letter to his fiancée in England, shared with her the news that he was being given charge of the Azamgarh District, one of the most dreaded assignments in U.P. He expressed more than a little concern at the fact that the four previous superintendents had been relieved of their duties after having ‘cracked up’.11 It is true, of course, that many young officers of the Indian Police thrived in such an environment, perhaps by temperament as well as good luck in having competent Indian subordinates, but others did not. Many officers experienced depression and some suffered nervous breakdowns, while others disappeared into an alcoholic haze. Suicide was not uncommon, and in most cases the victims shot themselves, since a Webley revolver and holster were a standard part of the police officer's uniform and were, presumably, within easy reach in moments of despair.12 This is an aspect of the Indian Police that has been given little attention in academic writing and is played down in the memoirs of the officers themselves. However, as David Anderson and David Killingray have written in their volumes on policing and empire, if historical scholarship has given limited attention to the psychological burdens of colonial policing, then the pages of fiction have been far more generous.13 One sees the frustrations and resentment of the colonial police officer in the character of Ronald Merrick, the self-hating and sadistic police superintendent in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet novels, or in Flory, the protagonist of George Orwell's Burmese Days, whose cynical observations on imperialism were based largely on Orwell's own brief and unhappy career as an officer of the Indian Police serving in Burma.14 Equally revealing is MacBryde, the strident and bigoted police officer and prosecutor of Dr. Aziz in Forster's A Passage to India.15 The historian may be quick to dismiss these examples as flights of literary fancy with no basis in historical fact. However, it should be remembered that in each of these cases, the authors spent the earlier years of their lives in some sort of administrative capacity in India and their fictional characters were as much the product of keen observation as they were of literary flair. At the recommendation of Curzon's Police Commission, the Indian Police established the rank of deputy superintendent of police – reserved for experienced and able Indian inspectors and qualified Indian men recruited directly from the population. The deputy superintendents would work alongside assistant superintendents newly arrived from Britain. On paper, the deputy and assistant had almost identical job descriptions: to assist the district superintendent of police. However, in practice they had very different roles. Many deputy superintendents, almost all of whom were Indian, were carefully selected from the subordinate ranks based on their experience and proven ability. They were at the middle to end of their careers and their appointment identified them as the best among their peers. The assistant superintendents, on the other hand, were all European. These were entry level positions filled by young men (little more than boys actually) newly arrived in the country and with no first-hand acquaintance with the language or culture. In practice the deputy served as an administrative workhorse of the district police office, shouldering much of the paperwork burden – especially translation duties – while the assistant served more in a learning capacity and was rotated through the various duties of the superintendent, under his instruction, with an eye toward grooming him for the eventual charge of his own district. The conflict this created between the Indian deputies and British assistants in the superior ranks of the police is not difficult to imagine and was illustrated in the case of Deputy Superintendent Mamnun Hasan Khan.16 In 1908 Khan was among the first Indians in U.P. promoted to the rank of deputy superintendent. Upon assuming his new duties he found that the district superintendent and his assistant were saddling him with a disproportionate share of the office work, particularly the onerous and tiring duty of translating police reports and station diaries from Urdu into English. The situation became so intolerable that Khan filed a written complaint with the department. He cited the uneven distribution of paperwork between himself and the British assistant, complained that he spent all his time in the office and said that he had even become something of a laughing-stock among his former colleagues in the inspectorate, who said that he had been promoted from being a pukka[proper] policeman to being the superintendent's clerk. Khan argued that the translation duties in particular should have been given to the British assistant, since he was the one who needed the practice. Williams, Khan's district superintendent, in his own defence, argued that the drudgery of paperwork was an inescapable part of the routine of the superior police officer and that if Indians wanted to rise to the highest levels of administration they had no cause to complain about added paperwork. Williams further maintained that it was not wrong to give Khan a greater share of translation work, since he could do it with greater accuracy and in a fraction of the time it took the assistant. This would allow the superintendent to make the most efficient use of the limited man hours available in his understaffed office. The complaint was reviewed by the inspector-general of police, who sided with Deputy Superintendent Khan. Superintendent Williams was reprimanded and instructed to make proper use of his Indian deputy. This was not an isolated case. Several of the Indians promoted to deputy superintendent had similar experiences, and some of them became cynical. Their appointment had been a measure intended to identify the best subordinate Indian Police officers and mark them for positions of greater responsibility and to recruit directly from among the best young men that Indian society had to offer. Instead, they claimed that their skills were being exploited by British police officers, who shifted the burden of paperwork onto the deputies so that they and their assistants could spend more time out of their offices doing real policework. The first steps toward the Indianization of the superior police ranks were complicated by several other factors. The first was that the Indians directly recruited as deputy superintendents were often drawn from a wider pool of talented candidates than existed in Britain, where the assistant superintendents were recruited. Selection of deputy superintendents in U.P. was extremely competitive and, unlike the British officers, almost all Indians directly appointed were university graduates. Some even had law degrees and had been admitted to the bar in Allahabad. Many of the British candidates, on the other hand, had joined the Indian Police after failing to gain admission into British universities or military academies like Sandhurst and Woolwich. Most Indian candidates, in their qualifying examinations, elected to test in criminal and constitutional law or in Indian languages – topics directly relevant to their future police duties – while most British candidates picked European history, English literature, Latin and Greek or other subjects that had been part of their earlier school curriculum.17 Given the overtly masculine culture of the British imperial police and military services, Indian candidates who had been football or rugby team captains in school highlighted this point in their applications. Consequently, many of the Indians selected were in better shape and more physically robust than their British counterparts. This immediately created resentment among some British policemen, who had long maintained that Indians were by nature less suited than Europeans for the responsibilities and challenges of police leadership. The early results of Indianization seemed to prove the opposite. In 1912, the public services commission led by Lord Islington called for the admission of Indians as assistant superintendents of police by competitive examination in India. The second complication of Indianization of the police was the impact of the First World War. In 1916, all recruitment in Britain for the Indian Police was stopped in support of military recruitment. Some British police officers serving in U.P. and other provinces were released for military service, but the government of India soon discontinued this policy because of the resulting manpower shortages. Vacant district superintendent slots were filled temporarily by experienced Indian deputies. These temporary appointments lasted longer than expected as the war dragged on, and during that time the Indian acting superintendents proved themselves fully capable of shouldering their additional responsibilities. The end of the war saw the resumption of recruitment in Britain for the Indian Police, and the demobilization of thousands of young British men looking for work. Additionally, the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the dissolution of the Royal Irish Constabulary saw the arrival in India of police officers from Ireland looking to finish their careers in the Indian Police. These unexpected developments threw the process of Indianization into complete disarray and led to bitter competition between Indian and British officers for the higher ranks, in which the British generally had the upper hand. In 1920, the Indian Police opened a limited number of probationary assistant superintendent slots to Indians selected by an examination given in India. One of these men, Bishwanath Lahiri, later described part of his initiation at the U.P. police training school in Moradabad. One evening he was forced to stand on top of the dining hall table and sing in his native Bengali while his fellow officers mimicked him and pelted him with pieces of bread if his singing voice was not sufficiently high-pitched. In his memoirs, Lahiri made the point that this was no worse than the hazing and humiliation that his British classmates inflicted upon each other and, in the adolescent and pseudo-military atmosphere of the police barracks, to be excluded from such treatment when everyone else was forced to undergo it would have been more of an insult than to be subjected to it.18 Lahiri's police career was a distinguished one and he eventually became the first Indian inspector-general of police in Uttar Pradesh after independence. Yet, despite efforts to open up superior Indian Police billets to Indian candidates during the nineteen-twenties and early nineteen-thirties, Indianization during this period continually lagged behind the percentages set forth by the various public services commissions. Statistics for the number of Indians serving in the police are given in Table 1. They are somewhat misleading, however, since they do not account for Indian deputy superintendents in temporary charge of districts when the district superintendent was on leave or special deputation, or in the event of his illness, injury or unexpected death. In 1922 alone, twenty-four of the thirty-four districts in U.P. were under the charge of an officiating deputy superintendent for at least part of the year (and thirteen of those for more than six months).20 In almost all cases, Indian deputies filled these vacancies – some for a few days, others for months at a time. In assuming temporary charge of a district, they were not merely acting as administrative substitutes. Police emergencies could arise with little or no warning and, in such cases, acting district superintendents had all the executive powers of the permanent ones. This included authorizing constables to open fire on rioting crowds, giving the police emergency powers to detain without charge, deploying reserve units of police and (with the concurrence of the district magistrate) requesting military reinforcements or imposing punitive policies. However, during this time officiating superintendents received neither the pay nor the official recognition given to those permanently appointed. Table 1 Indianization of the Indian Police Service in the United Provinces and British India (European:Indian)19 Open in new tab Table 1 Indianization of the Indian Police Service in the United Provinces and British India (European:Indian)19 Open in new tab Apart from the establishment of the deputy superintendent grade, Indian officers who advanced into the superior ranks of the police often did so through service in the Criminal Investigation Department, or C.I.D. This office within the police was the cornerstone of the surveillance and intelligence function of the government of India, and it was here that Indian officers proved particularly indispensable. Christopher Bayly has described the various undercurrents of information and intelligence that flowed through North Indian society, and to which British officials remained largely oblivious unless regularly informed by reliable Indian sources.21 The daunting responsibility of ‘knowing the country’– its landscape, people and culture – fell largely to the police. They were expected to amass a comprehensive body of knowledge on all aspects of Indian society, particularly relating to security issues, and to update this information regularly. British officers, no matter how experienced or well-trained, would never be suitable for undercover work and the best Indian detectives, drawn from respectable society, would never agree to infiltrate criminal gangs since to associate with such low segments of society over long periods of time, to eat and drink with them and imitate their habits, would be polluting to their caste or otherwise too degrading. Thus the police in U.P. and elsewhere in India fell back upon the traditional system of informants and message runners. Until 1902, all police surveillance and investigation was conducted locally by the district police and involved little interaction between provinces, or even between districts within the same province. By the end of the nineteenth century, the patchwork quilt of local police surveillance and investigation bodies that blanketed British India had proved hopelessly worn and unmendable. This was especially true in the United Provinces, with its central location and large transient population. Almost all major rail networks and telegraph lines in North India passed through U.P. and many had their connections there. Religious sites in Hardwar, Benares and Allahabad ensured a steady flow of thousands of pilgrims from all parts of India. The large tracts of farmland across the Gangetic plain and the rise of industry in commercial centres like Kanpur, Agra and Lucknow insured a steady back and forth movement of seasonal labourers between the urban and rural areas. Additionally, U.P. shared borders with numerous princely states to the west and south, and to the north it possessed a frontier with Nepal and parts of Tibet that ran for hundreds of miles through some of the most inhospitable terrain in the continent. The proven inadequacy of local police surveillance in this environment prompted the establishment of a provincial C.I.D. in Allahabad and a Criminal Intelligence Department in Calcutta. The C.I.D. in U.P. and other provinces was an innovation of Curzon's Police Commission and was modelled roughly on a similar organization in the London Metropolitan Police. Like the London C.I.D., the one in U.P. was divided into two sections: the first was the Crime Branch, which investigated non-political crime such as murder, robbery, rape, dacoity (an Indian form of banditry), counterfeiting and other forms of racketeering; the second was the Special Branch, which investigated political crime, collecting information and compiling dossiers on all known revolutionaries, terrorists and foreign agents, or any journalists, lawyers, educators or religious leaders whose political sympathies were suspect. Both offices were supported by a fingerprinting and forensics laboratory that was staffed entirely by Indians. Information gathered by the provincial C.I.D. was forwarded to the Intelligence Department in Calcutta (later Delhi), where it was combined with information from other provinces and from the British political agents in the princely states, and then disseminated back to the provincial police departments. In 1913, a special section was added to the U.P. C.I.D. for the surveillance and study of the so-called Criminal Tribes. In U.P., the Special Branch remained the smallest of the C.I.D. offices, but its significance would grow during the rise of Non-Cooperation/Civil Disobedience and other nationalist activism of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. From the perspective of the U.P. police, the Khilafat/Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–1 was not entirely a negative development. For one thing, the suddenness and intensity of Gandhi's Civil Disobedience campaign frightened government officials at the highest levels and this gave the police associations extra leverage in negotiating salary increases and other benefits. Also, given the underlying fear of communal violence that was so deeply impressed upon the minds of the U.P. police officers at headquarters and in the districts, any sort of public activity that called for active co-operation between Hindus and Muslims and promised to diminish communal tension was viewed as a positive trend – even if the activity itself was directed against the government and created problems that the police then had to confront. At the outset, non-violent Non-Cooperation – provided that it remained non-violent – was really more of a nuisance to the police than anything else, adding thousands of extra hours of work to their routine and forcing constables and their officers to work double shifts to cope with mass arrests, attending to overcrowded jails and processing the mountains of paperwork that resulted. Even so, the campaign's non-violent character rendered it less menacing than the ever-present spectre of communalism. Senior officers, like Leslie Robins who served as police superintendent in Lucknow and director of the C.I.D., later recalled that apart from the Quit India agitation of 1942, at no point did nationalist activity, by itself, ever constitute the greatest source of anxiety for U.P. police officers. Instead, their worst fears often revolved around the preparations for, and sensitive handling of, religious processions and ceremonies like those during the festivals of Ramlila, Mohurrum and Eid. The prospect of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, or in some cases sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Lucknow and other large urban areas, remained the single greatest concern of police superintendents and magistrates in the United Provinces in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. During this time, Indianization of the inspectorate and superior police grades in U.P. was undertaken with a careful eye towards keeping as even a balance as possible between Hindu and Muslim officers (see Table 2). Table 2 Racial and religious composition of the United Provinces police, 192222 Open in new tab Table 2 Racial and religious composition of the United Provinces police, 192222 Open in new tab The rising nationalism of the nineteen-twenties signalled a new relationship between the police and the people. There was an increased incidence of riots and other confrontations in U.P., in which the police themselves became the focus of violence rather than intermediaries among divided communities. The attack on the Chauri Chaura police station in the Gorakhpur District in 1922, in which twenty-three Indian policemen were burnt alive or beaten to death, is the most well known case, although it was by no means the only one.23 That incident, though, is significant since it prompted the unilateral suspension of the first Non-Cooperation campaign at Gandhi's insistence. For Congress activists and other Indian nationalists who had embraced non-violent Non-Cooperation, the depth of hatred felt towards the police by the population was problematic since it constituted a force so potent that they could not control it once it had been let loose. The role of the police as a catalyst for the violent resistance of village and urban communities to British authority casts uprisings of this period in an interesting light. Rather than emerging entirely from some conscious group identity or from a natural popular affinity for the political agenda articulated by visiting Congressmen, such violence can be viewed as having a strong basis in the localized and highly personal grievances of individuals and families against particular constables and sub-inspectors at whose hands they had suffered years of extortion and abuse. These long-standing patterns of police harassment and oppression were how many residents of U.P.'s towns and villages perceived the injustices of the British Raj, and when nationalist activism created an atmosphere that allowed them to vent these frustrations, the police were the first target. Such instances of violence often escalated into larger conflagrations, quickly prompting a severe police crackdown by nervous British officials on all nationalist activity in the name of restoring law and order. Violent confrontation with the police brought the first campaign of Civil Disobedience to a grinding halt and gave rise to sharp disagreement among nationalist leaders as to how to continue. In any event, dealing with the police now became a problem that successive Civil Disobedience campaigns would have to address. For the police, on the other hand, it was a case of reaping the bitter harvest of decades of incompetent and aloof leadership, and abuse and arrogance toward the communities among whom they had patrolled. The antagonistic relationship between the police and the people became particularly acute in 1930 and 1931 with the onset of the second Civil Disobedience campaign. Radical elements within the Congress and other Indian nationalist movements, like earlier Irish revolutionaries, articulated the belief that to strike at the heart of a government was to target its police. In U.P., however, unlike other provinces such as Punjab and Bengal, this rarely consisted of violent confrontation with the police.24 Instead, many police thanas[stations] were subjected to an economic boycott. This tactic was particularly effective given the dependence of the police on the local community for the procurement of supplies. Some items like firearms, cameras, microscopes and other forensic supplies, were imported directly from Britain and Ireland. Others, such as uniforms, riding equipment and training manuals, were manufactured or printed in India under government licence. However, local police stations – many of them in remote locations – were usually authorized to contract with local merchants to procure food, office supplies and furniture. An economic and social boycott of the police by the local community could bring the smooth running of a police station to a complete halt.25 In such cases, policemen moved their families into the station for safety. The logistical operation of the police, already strained to capacity and on the brink of crisis, became even more problematic as food shipments had to be hastily arranged for isolated and hungry constables and their families. Given these circumstances, the Indian Police can be seen less as a body of men linked by a common profession and more as a social group, including wives and children, who had been steadily ostracized from their communities partially for their occupational allegiance to the colonial government, but mostly for their disreputable conduct and a long-standing pattern of brutality. The government of India, sensing that the continued functioning of their Raj now rested precariously on the shoulders of an undermanned, overworked and publicly despised police force, took measures to bolster flagging morale within the service. The King's Police Medal, a decoration for bravery that had been instituted in 1911 for police forces throughout the empire (a sort of Victoria Cross for imperial policemen), was now awarded to British and Indian policemen more frequently and with greater fanfare than had been the case previously. The medal came with a survivor's benefit to widows and children if awarded posthumously, as it often was. The payment was the equivalent of a constable's monthly wage and was the medal's only real value to many of the men.26 In U.P., district police football and hockey clubs competed in intra-provincial tournaments in an effort to maintain an esprit de corps. Athletic competitions, parade reviews, award ceremonies and rallies were often held in which the provincial governor and other British officials gave speeches to the assembled policemen singing their praises and expressing the gratitude of the state they served. The image of the Indian policeman as a stoical and selfless hero, a loyal and long-suffering guardian of an ungrateful and spiteful people was actively promoted by the U.P. provincial government – as it was throughout India. In 1922, the inspector-general of police and senior officers unveiled the Chauri Chaura Police Memorial on the site of the burnt-out station. The provincial government had originally planned to name it the Chauri Chaura Martyrs' Memorial – after the charitable fund established for the victims' families – giving the police an aura of almost spiritual sacrifice and heroism. However, given the volatile political situation, the name was changed to the less confrontational and more professional-sounding ‘police memorial’.27 Yet despite all these measures, during this time salaries and benefits in the force remained well below the minimum level requested by both the Indian and provincial police associations. Vacancies in the subordinate ranks increased and the growing burdens of policing fell to fewer men, leading to longer hours and frequent cancellation of leave. Indianization of the superior ranks continued to lag behind the timetable set forth by the various public services commissions. Even a meeting in 1931 between the viceroy, Lord Irwin, and a delegation of senior police officers brought little more than half-hearted assurances that police grievances would be given future consideration by the government.29 Poor pay and benefits were not the only complaints voiced by police officers: retirement policies were also the cause of much discontent. Officers of the Indian Police argued that since theirs was the only superior service that did not require a university degree from its members, they arrived in the country at an earlier age than members of other services. Their terms of service, however, did not compare favourably with other Indian services or home police organizations (Table 3). Table 3 Comparative entry and retirement ages for British and Indian services, 190828 Open in new tab Table 3 Comparative entry and retirement ages for British and Indian services, 190828 Open in new tab Officers in the Indian Police were eligible to retire only after thirty years, and could not retire early on a proportionate pension like those in other services. This was especially unfair, they argued, since the work of the police officer was generally the most physically demanding and dangerous, and its long-term effects on health and mind more acute than in other services. Police officers, barely able to support a family, educate children and provide for retirement on their monthly pay, were forced to stay in the service for the length of their working lives rather than retire early and take up other full-time employment while collecting a reduced police pension. Thus the upper levels of the police remained filled with senior officers who could not retire early. This in turn led to stagnation in promotion throughout the force, and junior officers advanced to higher posts only when vacancies slowly became available. It also slowed the process of Indianization of the superior ranks. Under these conditions, a police officer could expect to spend a large portion of his career in the lower pay grades, while his counterparts in other services, who were paid better to begin with, advanced at a faster pace. The nature of policing, with its need for local knowledge and linguistic proficiency, meant that the Indian Police could not alleviate disproportionate advancement by transferring officers from one province to another, as could most of the other services and the army. Financial hardships of police officers were exacerbated by the fact that government-subsidized insurance for policemen was never instituted, as had been done by Indian Civil Service administrators for their own employees.30 Given the nature of their work, insurance against accidental death, illness or injury was indispensable for police officers with families, and since government insurance was not available, they were forced to take out private cover at exorbitant rates. Senior officers of the police also added to their own complaints accounts of the often desperate financial straits of their subordinate Indian constables, whose standard of living and conditions of service remained miserable by even the most charitable description (refer to Table 4 for relative pay rates). Table 4 Pay rates of the police in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (U.P.), 1892 (European and Indian)31 Open in new tab Table 4 Pay rates of the police in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (U.P.), 1892 (European and Indian)31 Open in new tab These grievances were as detrimental to police morale as were the worsening political situation and the growing perception of the police by many in Indian society as the enemy of the people. Vacancies in the constabulary remained numerous, and resignations increased. Small salary increases did nothing to encourage young male residents in U.P. to join what was arguably the most hated group of people in Indian society. Inability to recruit a higher calibre of constable was reflected in incidents of corruption and incompetent policing, which remained consistently high. When the government introduced proportional retirement for twenty-five years of police service, many senior officers quickly took advantage and left. The U.P. government and those of other provinces in British India saw many of their best European and Indian Police officers siphoned off by the princely states. Princes who wished to obtain the best police administration possible offered salaries and benefits to those officers that British India simply could not match. For example, Samuel Hollins, inspector-general of police in U.P., retired early in 1935 and accepted an offer to head up the police of the princely state of Hyderabad at a starting salary that equalled that of the highest paid inspector-general of the Indian Police.32 He was given a house, car and driver, and leave allowance in addition to his pay, all supplemented by his reduced Indian Police pension. For Hollins, though, the real benefit of his new post was the freedom to administer the police free from the bureaucratic micro-management and Byzantine regulations of British India. He was accountable only to the nizam of Hyderabad, who would be satisfied with efficient policing and not inclined to interfere unnecessarily in a smoothly running organization. Many U.P. police officers during their careers had established good working relations with the police of bordering princely states. Issues of jurisdiction, cross-border investigations, pursuit and extradition of fugitives and criminal gangs, had brought individual officers into contact with the princes and their ministers. To foster goodwill, the U.P. government had often ‘loaned’ its police officers to princely states eager to improve their police forces. The end result was that many princes were able to secure on relatively generous terms the services of the most able and experienced police officers in India at the expense of the British administration and at a time when the government of India needed them most. Other officers served their full thirty years and then joined the princely forces at lower ranks or took up other security work. This allowed them to continue working within their profession and remain in India, enjoying a standard of living that would have been impossible in Britain on their pensions and savings. Traditional accounts of British policing in India, like those of policing in Britain, have tended toward narratives of progress and professionalism and the steady triumph of reason and order over chaos and crime.33 Most of the first histories of the Indian Police were written as memoirs by the retired officers themselves. Revisionist accounts of the police by David Arnold and Kirpal Dhillon have countered this perception by showing the police to be primarily instruments of political control and the enforcing arm of an alien government.34 Indian nationalist historiography has often assigned to the Indian policeman the role of colonial lackey and baton-wielding thug – to be met with violent resistance or won over by the Gandhian force of love. Yet, to identify the abuses and instances of police coercion and violence, and then present them unproblematically as examples of the colonial regime, without adequate comparison to the policing of the mother country or other western nations, reveals no more about the nature of colonialism than it does about the problems of policing in general. The use of deadly force and the surveillance of the population, under certain circumstances, was and remains a legitimate function of the police of even the most progressive and benign governments. For example, even at the height of the Civil Disobedience campaigns, one would be hard pressed to find in India instances of police coercion or confrontation with the will of the people as severe as that which occurred among the British police during the General Strike of 1926. For all its flaws, policing in India during British rule saw the introduction of extraordinary advances in criminology and forensic science. Innovations in ballistics, photography, metallurgy, pathology and communication were exported from Britain to India, while others, like fingerprinting, were invented in India, refined in Britain and then reintroduced in India and throughout the empire. Nevertheless, all of these advances were overshadowed by the inherent weaknesses of the imperial police model. For many in Indian society, the police were not merely the enforcing arm of the government; they were the government. In the more remote villages of U.P. and other parts of British India, the patrolling constable and local sub-inspector were the living embodiment of the authority of the state. The local residents knew no other. Often the superintendent of police or his assistant on tour of the district was the only European this segment of Indian society ever saw, although they hardly ever interacted with him. The central pathology of the colonial police model is that it placed an enormous amount of responsibility and authority upon the shoulders of relatively young and inexperienced European officers, and with it the expectation that they would successfully carry out a specific type of work that required an intuitive knowledge of the language and culture with which they were just becoming acquainted. These junior officers, bewildered by their new environment and overwhelmed by the volume of their administrative responsibilities, more often than not quickly developed an unhealthy dependence upon their experienced and multi-lingual Indian inspectors, and later deputy superintendents. The support of Indian subordinates early on was vital to the career advancement of British police officers. Often these officers tried to arrange to have particular Indian inspectors, upon whom they relied, transferred with them when they advanced to higher levels and relocated to new posts. It is natural for the inexperienced and uncertain newcomer to defer to the judgement of a seasoned veteran. This is especially true in the business of policing, with its interaction with all elements of society, and the need to know intimately the land and people well enough to outsmart the cleverest and most deceptive of its inhabitants and win the confidence and respect of everyone else. Compounding this problem was the fact that those upon whom these junior officers relied, the Indian subordinates, knew very well that, regardless of their experience and skills at police work, they would be systematically excluded from the highest levels of service for reasons entirely out of their control. Police billets with the best pay and benefits, the highest prestige, and the chance to influence police administration and policy-making were, up until the nineteen-twenties, the exclusive preserve of a foreign élite whose natural aptitude for policing in India, and even their educational qualifications, were often markedly inferior. Even the best Indian policemen, badly paid from the outset and seeing themselves denied the rightful rewards of competent and faithful service, might choose to reward themselves in other ways. The existence of corruption was practically guaranteed. The dilemma of the colonial policeman did not end there. He was expected to preserve the status quo of a social and economic structure in which he himself, whether Indian or British, at times felt increasingly under-appreciated and marginalized. His profession placed him in a position where he could observe first-hand the inconsistencies and ill-effects of certain colonial policies, while at the same time be duty-bound to act as their most strident enforcer. His strength and vigilance helped to preserve the insularity of the British administrators in the civil service whose law he was then, in turn, expected to apply. He had to safeguard the power and privileges of the European administrative and commercial élite, often at the expense of the population, while simultaneously being expected to embody the English ideal of blind justice and impartial and professional law enforcement that was enshrined as one of the chief blessings of British rule in India. However, the most significant dilemma facing the officer of the Indian Police was that policing in the colonial state combined two incompatible functions: one political and the other to do with public safety. In India, the political function of the police included the surveillance of nationalist and religious leaders, the enforcement of censorship laws, mass arrests and the dispersal of political assemblies, often for the content of their rhetoric as much as for the conduct of their participants. The political function of the police is one that assumes an antagonistic relationship between them and the community; one in which public co-operation and a spirit of mutual goodwill are neither required nor expected. The public safety function of the police, however, involves preventing and prosecuting non-political crime such as murder, theft and assault, and waging a constant battle against professional criminals who seek to victimize the overwhelmingly law-abiding population. This function is one that presupposes an amicable relationship between the police and the people. It requires for its success the active and voluntary co-operation of the people in the prevention and detection of crime and, ideally, it relies on enfranchised individuals in society, imbued with a sense of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, coming forward to assist the police in their investigations and to testify as witnesses. In this sense, the constable as a public servant enforces the people's law and works in partnership with the community for the good of the commonweal. Thus it fell to the policeman in British India to carry out on a daily basis these two fundamentally incompatible missions of colonial rule: the preservation of political stability and the maintenance of public safety. In the police of totalitarian states like those of the fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century, the political element predominates; in the police of democratic societies, the public safety function predominates – although neither entirely to the exclusion of the other. British India, and U.P. in particular, however, was neither a police state, in the most widely understood sense, nor was it a democracy. It was a society ruled by a linguistic, cultural and racial minority whose numbers were so relatively small that public co-operation and collaboration remained a cornerstone in the enforcement of the laws that safeguarded their political and social privileges while maintaining civil order. Regardless of how they were mixed, these twin duties of the Indian policeman, like oil and water, would never coalesce. For the policeman to do one of these jobs well was invariably to make the other job more difficult. The questions of colonial or imperial policing are not merely of academic interest to historians and other specialists in the field. They are directly relevant to today's issues of policing, government policy, public consent and resistance in the post-colonial societies of India and Britain alike. Although India today is the world's largest democracy, its police apparatus remains very much an imperial institution both in structure and in spirit. Kirpal Dhillon rightly maintains that the police in India are still imbued with a ruler-supportive ethic – one that encourages the police to do the bidding of the political leadership rather than to stand as impartial guardians of the people's democratic rights.35 It is no exaggeration to suggest that the present-day Indian policeman is generally viewed by the public with the same loathing and fear as were his imperial predecessors. Many of the problems of the present-day Indian Police Service have their roots in that organization's imperial past, and can only be fully understood in relation to that legacy. On the other side of the globe, the demography of modern Britain is changing dramatically and its largest cities are now populated by growing numbers of immigrants from the former empire, especially South Asia. In recent years, the lessons of imperial policing, albeit in different forms, have been learned, forgotten and relearned – often painfully – in neighbourhoods like Brixton and Notting Hill in London and Toxteth in Liverpool.36 The Metropolitan Police and other law enforcement agencies in Britain have responded to this challenge, not unlike their colonial counterparts of an earlier age, by attempting to establish a rapport with ethnic or religious community leaders and by recruiting into their ranks and promoting to supervisory levels some of the men and women from the ethnic communities among whom they patrol, and with whom their relations have at times been acrimonious and openly hostile. Nor has the experience of the colonial police officer in maintaining an appearance of impartiality and civil order among communities divided along sectarian or religious lines been consigned to Britain's imperial past: a variation of it is played out annually in Northern Ireland on the roads of Portadown and the streets and alleyways of West Belfast. The policing of a society by a colonial power with its own distinct and different traditions of law and civic order, by a ruling élite skilled in administration and groomed for command but alien in culture and understanding from the population it controls, and by a government and police force ‘dominant’ but not ‘hegemonic’, are all issues that are as relevant today as they were a century ago, when the government of British India took its first serious steps towards the reform of its police. Footnotes * A version of this article was presented at the British Imperial History Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, in Apr. 2001, and was subsequently awarded second place in the Pollard Prize for that term. The author is grateful to P. J. Marshall, Andrew Porter, Glyndwr Williams, David Killingray and Sarah Stockwell for the opportunity to present a paper at their seminar. Thanks are due also to David Arnold, Avril Powell, John F. Richards and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar for their comments and suggestions. 1 New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter N.M.M.L.), All India Congress Committee Reports, Proceedings of the 21st Indian National Congress, Benares, 27–30 Dec. 1905, from a speech by Nargunti Kar, Congress delegate from Belgaum. 2 R. Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge Mass., 1997). 3 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902–3 (Simla, 1903). 4 British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection (hereafter O.I.O.C.), Curzon Collection, MS. Eur. F111/281, India Office, Judicial No. 6, Broderick to Curzon, 4 Mar. 1904. 5 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902–3, p. 40. 6 N.M.M.L., All India Congress Committee Reports, Report of the 20th Indian National Congress, Bombay, 26–28 Dec. 1904. 7 Trollope, cited in J. C. Curry, The Indian Police (1932), pp. 54–5. 8 University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies (hereafter C.S.A.S.), Foster Papers. 9 New Delhi, National Archives of India (hereafter N.A.I.), Government of India, Home Department, Police Proceedings-A, nos. 38–43, ‘Compulsory retirement of R. R. Beadon, an imperial police officer in the United Provinces’, July 1914. 10 C.S.A.S., Biggie Papers, Patrick Biggie, letter of 10 Apr. 1942. 11 C.S.A.S., Biggie Papers, Patrick Biggie, letter of 4 March 1943. 12 O.I.O.C., Robins Collection, MS. Eur. R178, Leslie Robins interview, 2:2. 13 D. M. Anderson and D. Killingray, ‘Consent, coercion and colonial control: policing the empire, 1830–1940’, in Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940, ed. D. M. Anderson and D. Killingray (Manchester, 1991), pp. 1–15. 14 Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet (1975); George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934). 15 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924). 16 Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh State Archives (hereafter U.P.S.A.), United Provinces Appointments Department, F.398/1908. 17 N.A.I., Government of India, Home Department, Police, F.20/XVIII, ‘Candidates for 1925 I.P.S. competition in India, United Provinces’. 18 B. N. Lahiri, Before and After: the Life of a U.P. Police Officer (Allahabad, 1974), p. 15. 19 O.I.O.C., Indian Police Collection, MS. Eur. F161/204, p. 2. 20 Report of Police Administration in the United Provinces, 1922 (Allahabad, 1923). 21 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996). 22 N.A.I., Government of India, Home Department, Police, 1923, F.35/23. 23 The most sophisticated historical treatment of the Chauri Chaura incident is S. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–92 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995). 24 S. T. Hollins, No Ten Commandments: a Life in the Indian Police (1954), p. 222. 25 O.I.O.C., Robins Collection, MS. Eur. R178, Robins interview, 1:2. 26 O.I.O.C., Robins Collection, MS. Eur. R178, Robins interview, 2:1. 27 U.P.S.A., United Provinces Police, F.347/1922DO no. O-333, L. M. Kaye, inspector-general of police to G. B. Lambert, chief secretary, U.P. government, 11 March 1922, ‘Fund to help victims of the Chauri Chaura tragedy’. 28 U.P.S.A., Indian Police Association Petition, U.P. Appointments Department, F.788/1908. 29 N.A.I., Government of India, Home Department, Police, F.106/I, ‘Deputation of the Indian Police Association to His Excellency the Viceroy to discuss certain grievances felt by the Indian Police Service’. 30 O.I.O.C., Indian Police Collection, MS. Eur. F161/163, Indian Police Association pamphlet, ‘Unrest in India and the Indian Police’, 5 Dec. 1922, p. 11. 31 N.A.I., Government of India, Home Department, Police Proceedings-A, nos. 37–9, July 1889; nos. 56–62, Jan. 1892. 32 Hollins, p. 260. 33 Traditional histories of the Indian Police include Curry's, The Indian Police, which was written by a former I.P.S. officer and published at the height of the second Civil Disobedience campaign; P. Griffiths, To Guard my People: the History of the Indian Police (1971), which was written by a retired I.C.S. official decades after Indian independence; and On Honourable Terms: the Memoirs of Some Indian Police Officers, 1915–48, ed. M. Wynne (1985), which is a collection of anecdotes based on interviews and letters from a dozen retired I.P.S. officers. Griffiths's book remains the most detailed and extensive historical account of the Indian police. 34 D. Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986); K. S. Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment: Ruler-Supportive Police Forces of South Asia (Simla, 1998). 35 Dhillon. 36 This is a point brought up in R. S. Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c.1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 6, esp. pp. 180–233. © The Author(s) 2003. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of lnstitute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2003. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of lnstitute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Authority, accountability and representation: the United Provinces police and the dilemmas of the colonial policeman in British India, 1902–39
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.00173
DA - 2003-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/authority-accountability-and-representation-the-united-provinces-aC59hjrXwj
SP - 217
EP - 237
VL - 76
IS - 192
DP - DeepDyve
ER -