Introduction
Bengal's district police and its function throughout rural Bengal evolved from a colonial model. It was implemented as part of a unified policing presence on the subcontinent in 1861, the design of which was tied to the exigencies of the colonial state. The constraints of colonial rule required that administrative bodies in India were small and worked through existing infrastructure. This kept the cost of the colonial state low, as well as being aimed at obscuring its foreignness. The intended function of the new police in Bengal, and its interactions with the rural villages, were co-constituted with the limited capacity of the colonial state. The district police were to be kept separate from the village, and were intended for the purpose of securing order in the cities, towns, and surrounding suburbs. The villages were to be policed by locals, and free from the intervention of the British-controlled district police. This reflected a sanctioned model of police administration, which has been defined in scholarly research on Indian policing, especially with regards to Madras and Bombay.Footnote 1
Yet, to begin to understand the development and quotidian function of rural policing in Bengal after the introduction of the new police, it is necessary to look beyond the exigencies of a codified model of police administration. From the 1870s, Bengal's high-ranked police executive sought to establish a workable system of rural policing that outwardly protected the idea of village autonomy, but in fact entwined the village with the district police through layers of supervision. This occurred due to the weak structures of supervision that the British had initially trusted in the village, namely the panchayat (council). Recognizing that village elites did not adequately supervise the village police, Bengal's police executive implemented unofficial structures of police supervision in the village which would later gain official support. By the end of the nineteenth century, the philosophical constraints of the colonial state, which the police administration initially reflected, had been subverted by reforms led by Bengal's police executive. This article examines such reforms, and in so doing problematizes and expands upon current research which situates Indian policing within customs of British governance in the subcontinent.
Colonial policing in historiography
The implementation of a unified police force in India is a well-known story. The experiments in policing carried out in the late eighteenth and early twentieth century by the East India Company were overhauled by the Indian Police Act of 1861, which introduced a consolidated police force into India.Footnote 2 The police were organized at a provincial level and kept mostly unarmed; indeed, a chief reason for the introduction of a new police force was to separate the army from the task of securing public order.Footnote 3 Under Act V, the police were ostensibly intended as a civil force for the prevention and detection of crime and disorder and the protection of the life and property of the Indian population under British rule.Footnote 4
While the story of how the British implemented and organized the new police force in India is well documented, the subject matter has tended to revolve around the political function of the new police. In current police historiography, it is widely held that the aims and function were tied directly to the task of maintaining colonial rule. The formation of the new police in India is understood as a by-product of changing notions of government responsibility that were evident by the mid nineteenth century. As David Arnold has noted, the idea of imperial hegemony was underpinned by a bureaucratic ideology that stressed that the colonial state, largely established by the army, was to be maintained by administrative and civil power.Footnote 5 It was through the army that Britain had acquired India as a colony, yet it was through the rationalization of a legal code and the establishment of a civil police force that the British sought to exercise control over it.Footnote 6
The rebellion of 1857 is used to contextualize the idea that a civil force had become necessary to support a changed concept of colonial power. Anandswarup Gupta notes that the rebellion highlighted to the British the fact that the ‘effective “occupation” and administration of the country with minimum expense, the prompt suppression of all challenges to British power and authority and the realisation of the maximum revenues from all conceivable sources’ required a civil, uncostly, and ubiquitous police force.Footnote 7 While momentarily diverting the attention of the Government of India from the question of police reform, the rebellion exacerbated an existing urgency to remould and strengthen the civil administration of India, via the establishment of a uniform Indian police force.Footnote 8 The ‘new police’ idea, it is argued, was developed within a broader context of establishing British administrative, legal, and civil hegemony in India, and so the evolution of the police continued to support these purposes.
According to Peter Robb, Indian police forces were intended to demonstrate the importance and supremacy of the state and defend its interests, and performed little in the way of investigating and preventing crime.Footnote 9 Police inspectors were more likely to hold court to try a defaulting zamindar, or suppress instances of rural insurrection or political upheaval, than to attempt to catch a thief.Footnote 10 Police agents were viewed as serving directly the interests and allies of the ruling power and the desire to consolidate administrative and civil power throughout India. The police, therefore,
long remained a largely symbolic representation of power and order, playing its part alongside other such instruments rather than being a force for the detection and reduction of crime.Footnote 11
This predisposition to discussing the political or imperial purposes of policing in India is particularly true for studies with a provincial focus on Bengal. Of course, by the early twentieth century and the onset of a nationalist threat and the Swadeshi movement, the role of the Bengal police as a bulwark of the colonial state was undeniable. In fact, the year 1905 has been viewed in historiography as a watershed for the character and purposes of colonial policing in Bengal.Footnote 12 At this time, police work became concerned almost exclusively with the investigation of political crimes committed by the bhadralok.Footnote 13 The (apparently minimal) role played by the police in preventing and detecting crimes, ‘became a casualty with the increasing preoccupation of the police with the suppression of political movements and clandestinely-inspired communal conflict’.Footnote 14 In police studies, the Bengal partition years therefore ‘stand out as the “great divide” between one era and another in more ways than one’, marking the onset of the revolutionary or nationalist period on one hand, and the narrowing of the strength of the police entirely onto political crime on the other.Footnote 15 This analysis has dominated Indian police historiography, tending to focus on how the police were geared to fulfil an abstract imperial purpose on the subcontinent.
This article does not directly challenge the wisdom that the police force that was introduced into Bengal was a bulwark for newly defined colonial power, nor that it continued to exhibit such characteristics throughout Britain's rule over India. However, it suggests that such analysis ignores the reforming energies of the police executive, its desire to find the appropriate framework for policing in India, and the effect this had on the quotidian function of the police. The article therefore refocuses policing discourse onto the non-political function of the Bengal police. In particular, it highlights the imperatives placed on the Bengal police by the existing customs of the colonial state, and the role the police executive played in subverting these imperatives, giving the police a unique shape. For this task, a corpus of literature regarding the influence of British customs of governance and administration is discussed and problematized.
Policing and customs of governanceFootnote 16
An underlying principle behind the British construction of the colonial state was to cloak its foreignness in the ‘familiarity of old institutions, practices and personnel’.Footnote 17 Although the nature of British governance in India is contested territory in historiography, useful to the subject matter of this study is the notion that ‘rule from afar’ was fundamental to the functioning of the colonial state. There have been various articulations of this idea in South Asian historiography.
Bernard Cohn's idea that the ‘British appear[ed] in the nineteenth century to have felt most comfortable surveying India from above and at a distance—from a horse, an elephant, a boar, a carriage, or a train’, or anywhere away from ‘the narrow confines of a city street, a bazaar, a mela’, is a useful metaphor through which the nature of British governance in India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be understood.Footnote 18 It highlights the efforts of the British to distance themselves as foreign rulers from the population in strategies of rule that dispersed the business of governance among Indian collaborators.
By discussing a variety of administrative sites, historians have demonstrated that rule from afar was an important component of the ideological infrastructure of colonial rule. Cohn himself has shown how, during the Company era, the administration of criminal and civil justice in Bengal was run in collaboration with indigenous elites to ensure the law was administered according to British understandings of Muslim and Hindu practice. An indigenous legal system prevailed in two courts until 1864, when the reform of the judicial system established provincial high courts, abolished the Muslim and Hindu law officers of the various courts, and replaced customary legal systems with English law.Footnote 19 Similarly, Anand Yang has demonstrated that in the Saran district of Bihar the British Raj collaborated with the maharaja of Hathwa in the late nineteenth century to collect revenues and perform miscellaneous duties associated with the local governance of Saran.Footnote 20
Recent studies in policing historiography similarly demonstrate that the colonial police force was designed to stand aloof from rural society, especially the village, preferring to collaborate with local intermediaries in order to stretch limited resources, and to protect a veneer of indigenous autonomy throughout the countryside.Footnote 21 Foremost in this argument have been Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and David Arnold, who have examined the rural policing structures of Bombay and Madras respectively. Both have delineated similar policing structures that were underpinned by the idea of salutary neglect.Footnote 22 In Arnold's words, it was a general policy of distancing foreign rulers from ‘all but a fraction of the population’, for reasons of economy and a lack of human resources.Footnote 23 It was part of an overall colonial strategy ‘that made possible the governing of the subcontinent for one hundred and fifty years by a relatively small number of Europeans’.Footnote 24
Both Chandavarkar and Arnold essentially focus on the removal or absence of British-controlled police from villages, and the subsequent reliance on local networks to police the colonial periphery.Footnote 25 Admitting that the costs of building and maintaining public order in India, especially after the rebellion of 1857, could potentially bankrupt the state, rural villages were omitted from the administrative design of the district police force in India.Footnote 26 The police therefore sought neither to intervene in nor to disturb too greatly the informal social networks and local power structures that had traditionally (if inadequately) dealt with offences against person and property.Footnote 27 In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of Indian policing, both argue, was its disinterest in controlling crime in the village.Footnote 28 Indeed, low rates of crime reporting to the district police indicate that crime control was generally left in the hands of the neighbourhood in Bombay, and that little interaction between informal and formal policing bodies existed. With regards to Madras, Arnold demonstrates that from the mid nineteenth century, the police had utilized local agents to perform police work in the village, and to report directly to the district police.Footnote 29 This strategy was extended and formalized following the report of the Indian Police Commission of 1902–1903, when the responsibility for reporting crime and watching suspects in the village was devolved entirely onto village headmen and the talaiyari (traditional watchmen).Footnote 30 A common theme, then, is that the ‘colonial regime had little interest in village society so long as taxes were paid and the government's authority was unchallenged’.Footnote 31 Overall, both tend to argue that the colonial police seemed content to look after the towns and cities in the presidency, leaving the village largely to its own devices. Salutary neglect was therefore formalized during the nineteenth century in British approaches to public order, becoming manifest especially in the policing infrastructure of India.Footnote 32
Work in this area can be extrapolated to explain the principles upon which the Bengal police was initially based, a topic that has remained unexplored in the literature. Using a similar analysis to that summarized above, this article demonstrates that the police in Bengal were initially constrained by the ideological preferences of the colonial state. In order to save money, and to ensure that the notion of village autonomy was preserved, an official police presence was kept distant from the village. However, as will be shown, the case of Bengal problematizes such an analysis. In Bengal, the police subverted and reformulated the customs of governance that limited the district police elsewhere in India and established for themselves informal control (which was eventually confirmed by the government of Bengal) over village elites and traditional policing institutions. This was achieved in an ongoing struggle with the state itself, which was most notable in the last 30 years of the nineteenth century. The fact that the Bengal police subverted a model of salutary neglect requires careful and separate consideration for the province, and for such to be considered as an elaboration upon, not necessarily a rebuttal to, the works of Arnold and Chandavarkar.
Strangers in the village? Rural policing in Bengal
The remainder of this article focuses on rural policing in Bengal and the police executive's interaction with the traditional structures of the village police. It seeks to include Bengal's policing administration in discussions about the customs of governance used in colonial administration, but qualifies this inclusion by demonstrating that the Bengal police negated customary modes of colonial governance in the village and an initial model of police administration.
First of all, it is shown that a desire to separate the police from the village underpinned the design and early implementation of the Police Act V, which introduced a unified police body into Bengal in 1861. Second, it examines the introduction of the Chaukidary Act VI (of 1870) and its provisions for co-opting an existing village police structure, in light of an insufficiently staffed enrolled police. Acts V and VI are shown to reflect official discourses which stressed frugality and a preference for indigenous collaboration. The final section of the article, however, focuses on the role the police executive played in subverting these official customs of governance between the 1870s and 1890s. By the end of the nineteenth century, the non-compliance of supervisory councils with British demands led to the grafting of a layer of British supervision onto so-called traditional modes of village policing, at the insistence of the Bengal police executive. The police executive is therefore shown to have successfully reformulated customary ideas about village policing and administration in colonial Bengal. An area of police history that has been paid only a cursory glance is examined in detail, with the hope of encouraging further investigation into the nature of policing in India.
The Indian Police Act
On 17 August 1860, the Government of India passed a resolution appointing a committee to enquire into the state of the police throughout British India and to sketch the design for a police force that could be introduced into each province.Footnote 33 In March the following year the draft act submitted by the committee became the Indian Police Act (V of 1861). Both the Police Act and the recommendations of the Police Commission can be used to examine how dominant notions of governance held by the ruling power informed the administrative structure of the ‘new police’ in Bengal.
It is important to note the structure of the committee and how it related to Bengal's specific problems and administration.Footnote 34 The committee comprised members who had direct experience of the police systems that existed within Bengal, Madras, Punjab, Oudh, and the North Western Provinces. This was so that the information collected about the specific circumstances and requirements of the various provinces could be compared in order to inform proposals that would suit the whole of India.Footnote 35 The following analysis draws mainly upon the sections of the report that deal specifically with Bengal, which were based on the ideas of Samuel Wauchope, the commissioner of the Calcutta police (1856–1868), who represented Bengal within the police committee.Footnote 36
From the outset, a chief objective of the Police Commission was to reduce the size of the British-controlled police force in India. Though recognizing that a specific number could not be forced upon each province given the different ‘area, population, revenue, or character of the country and people’ in each, the resolution required the committee to adhere to the ‘general rule’ that ‘the Police are too numerous for the duty they are required to perform, and that their numbers must be reduced’.Footnote 37 A general aim of the committee was therefore to devise a police system that was ‘likely to increase efficiency, but diminish expense’.Footnote 38 They aimed at proposing a system that, as it became more efficient, would allow ‘the reduction of cost and numbers to advance month by month’.Footnote 39
This was to be achieved in Bengal by transforming the tasks currently performed by police officers. First, the regular police would be required to perform an expanded set of duties, which would allow more work to be conducted by fewer personnel. In particular, a unified civil police would subsume the duties of an existent military police.Footnote 40 During the rebellion, 6,000 privates made up a police branch of the army, and were employed to guard prisons, escort prisoners, and suppress minor disturbances that did not require the army.Footnote 41 It was considered that these duties were of a civil nature and could easily be conducted by a uniform and unified regular police.Footnote 42 After the organization of an efficiently organized and properly drilled and disciplined civil police, it would no longer be necessary to maintain a police branch within the military.Footnote 43 This was desirable for two reasons: the inevitable expense of organizing a new police force would be offset by the abolition of the military police, and the political and coercive associations of the army would be eliminated from a newly organized civil police force.Footnote 44 Abolishing the heavy and needless expense of the military police simplified the task of reducing the strength and cost of a new police force.
Second, removing certain duties from British-controlled police officers and reassigning them to non-enrolled village police officers would allow the numbers of the enrolled police force to remain low. For the province of Bengal, the committee recommended that the responsibility of darogahs (police superintendents under the later police regulations of the East India Company, with limited jurisdiction and in command of a small contingent of village police; they would later be replaced by police inspectors in a new police hierarchy) to control the village police should be transferred to indigenous elites and headmen in the village. From the late eighteenth century in Bengal, darogahs had taken charge of a variety of stipendiary village police officers throughout Bengal.Footnote 45 The darogahs were placed in charge of ‘all native watchmen of the village establishments’, who were required to forward apprehended suspects or information regarding suspicious persons and vagrants, and threats to the peace direct to the thana (police station).Footnote 46 Lord Cornwallis had introduced these arrangements at the time of the Permanent Settlement in order to transfer zamindar control over the village police to the British.Footnote 47 Regulation XXII of the Permanent Settlement had effectively removed zamindari power over the village police by forcing them to disband their private police force and by introducing the darogah as police inspectors.Footnote 48 District magistrates were placed in charge of police jurisdictions, or thanas, of ten coss Footnote 49 square, which were to be guarded by a darogah or police inspector.Footnote 50 Subordinate to the darogah was an establishment consisting of a jemadar (an Indian officer of the Company's army), a mohurir (clerk), and a few burkandazes (constables).Footnote 51 This system had been introduced as part of the Company's effort to break up the power of the landed elite, who, prior to the Permanent Settlement, had controlled the village police in Bengal.Footnote 52
By the mid nineteenth century, in light of the woeful state of police organization in India, transferring this control back to village elites was viewed by the police committee as necessary, because it was felt that an ‘organised Police cannot be informed of all that occurs’ within the village, due to their connection with the imperial power.Footnote 53 The committee therefore recommended the perpetuation of the office of ‘Village Watchmen as contemplated by the regulations passed at the time of the Permanent Settlement’.Footnote 54 However, wishing to minimize the contact that a regular police officer had with villagers, they recommended that the village police were to be ‘regulated as far as possible by local custom’, and thus separated entirely from the official police hierarchy.Footnote 55 While the village police would be required to obey the orders of the organized police and would still furnish them with important information, their appointment, supervision, regulation, and payment were tasks to be carried out by local indigenous elites, rather than by darogahs or an equivalent inspector of the police.Footnote 56 British-remunerated police officers would not visit the village for the investigation of crimes or for the control, payment, or supervision of the village police.Footnote 57 The village system would function independently of a regular police, whose presence and indeed existence, unless absolutely necessary, would be obscured from the village.
This collaborative approach to policing would be achieved in Bengal after 1861 first by reducing the number of enrolled police officers, and subsequently by expanding the duties of existing village police establishments. If one considers the strength of police for which Act V provided, Bengal was evidently ‘under-policed’; the overall population was around 40 million, and the strength of the regular police force remained low at around 25,000 men.Footnote 58 At the executive level, Act V had appointed one inspector general to be placed in charge of the province, who was to be assisted by between six and eight deputy inspectors general, depending on the workload that manifested in the years following enactment. The province was separated into police districts, which ranged between 1,000 and 5,000 square miles, and were allocated one district magistrate each, who could request the provision of one or two assistants.
The strength of the subordinate constabulary was similarly paltry. Using the example of Patna, which was part of the most populous division in Bengal, the low concentration of the district police force is clear. Patna was one of the first districts to which the Police Act was extended in 1861.Footnote 59 With an area of 1,828 square miles and a population of 1.2 million, it was allocated around 1,520 new police, 1 district superintendent, 3 assistant district superintendents, 22 inspectors, 40 sub-inspectors, 51 head constables, and 1,362 constables under the act.Footnote 60 On average, this meant that one policeman was responsible for a population of 787 people and for patrolling 1.20 square miles (see Figure 1). Bhaugulpore, a much larger district within the division of the same name, with an area of 7,803 square miles and a population of 2 million, was allocated a mere 532 enrolled police officers in 1862, which provided one police officer per 14.66 square miles, or one per 3.740 people (Figure 1).Footnote 61 Though George Trevelyan would write in 1864 that ‘a policeman in a bright blue tunic, yellow pantaloons, and a red pugree [turban, worn as part of the police uniform]’ could be encountered ‘at every turn of the road’ over ‘the whole Bengal Presidency’, it is evident that the aims of the police committee to introduce a small enrolled police force had been realized in the first years after the passing of the Police Act.Footnote 62
Figure 1: ‘Appendix A’—Statement Showing the Number and Cost of New Police, in 1863. Source: ‘Report of the New Police in Bengal’, p. ii.
Consequently, a small regular force was ‘linked to the Village Police, so as to make the latter a useful supplement to the former’.Footnote 63 While the specific application of these principles in Bengal would be worked out within the Chaukidary Act (VI of 1870), the Police Act initially provided the guidelines for utilizing the village police in rural Bengal. It stipulated that the provincial police forces were reliant on existing village police establishments throughout India, members of which would not be ‘enrolled as police-officers under this Act’.Footnote 64
A clearer indication of how two policing establishments were intended to operate alongside one another was provided by the proceedings of the Legislative Council of India during the first readings of the bill. As Sir Barnes Peacock stressed when the Police Act was read at the Council, the village or local police establishments would take care of general police duties within the village, so the general stipendiary constabulary need not bother with the watch and ward of the village. ‘Inspectors of Police, Head and Deputy Constables and Privates’ would patrol and watch the highways, open country, and areas surrounding the station, whereas the village, and subsequently, the majority of the populace, would be policed by the village police, who were arguably a more familiar and tolerable agency.Footnote 65 Daily communication between the village and regular police was, however, desirable in case serious crime, riot, or disorder required the strength of the village police to be reinforced.Footnote 66 These arrangements allowed the regular police to confine their work to policing towns and rural tracts unless it became necessary to supress crimes that seriously threatened colonial order. With the support of non-enrolled and much larger establishments of village police officers, the regular police could remain small, but above all, distant from the village—highlighting a chief aim of the colonial state to reduce its official presence in rural India.
The Village Chaukidar Act in Bengal
The specifics of the relationship between the enrolled and non-enrolled police agencies in Bengal were worked out more thoroughly in The Village Chaukidar Act (VI of 1870). In its various modifications, the Chaukidar Act remained the principal enactment to control, pay, and supervise the village police in British-ruled Bengal.Footnote 67 In essence, it confirmed the division between a regular and village police that Act V had recommended.Footnote 68 In 1869 a committee was appointed to draft a bill for the control of the village watch on the principle of affirming the ‘municipal character’ of the rural police.Footnote 69 The bill submitted to the Legislative Council on 22 January 1870 by committee member Sir Rivers Thompson recognized that the village chaukidar was once ‘purely a village servant employed for the protection of the lives and property of the villagers’ and provided the means to re-engage them as such.Footnote 70 Control of stipendiary chaukidars was invested in an authority that was tied neither directly to the central government, nor to a landholding elite. Instead, the village police were placed under the supervision of a village panchayat, or council, comprised of so-called respectable members of the village in which the chaukidars resided.
Such supervisory village panchayats consisting of influential or propertied members of the village community were intended to ensure that the chaukidar conveyed relevant information to the police, kept an eye on suspected and actual habitual criminals, and disseminated relevant criminal information throughout the village.Footnote 71 Their job was to pay, nominate, dismiss, and punish what was essentially a decentralized, local network of ‘government sp[ies]’.Footnote 72Panchayats had in the past functioned as decision-making bodies for village courts prior to the introduction of a criminal administration system which was based on English principles.Footnote 73 In 1816, however, their consultative role had been transformed into a tax-assessment body for the village police fund within the Company's new police administration. Regulation XXII required panchayats to regulate and fix the rate of assessment to be levied from the people for the maintenance of the village police, and stipulated that they were to nominate and appoint chaukidars under the general supervision of magistrates.Footnote 74 Act VI would draw the chaukidars more comprehensively under the control of the councils by stipulating that the village police were bound to obey the orders of the panchayat. Each panchayat, consisting of between three and five members for each village that contained 60 or more houses, were required to appoint, fine, and dismiss the village police, and to supervise and report on their work to the magistrate.Footnote 75 An extension of their role from merely a tax-assessment body to one that paid the chaukidar directly consolidated this supervisory role. Under Regulation XXII, the panchayat had been required merely to determine the salaries of the chaukidars within the range of Rs. 3–6 per month, which they would assess and collect from the village under their charge.Footnote 76 After the passing of Act VI, panchayats were invested with the responsibility to pay the village police. An expanded supervisory role for the panchayat would thus replace Cornwallis's darogahs as the controlling body of the village police, providing a supervisory body that was not connected to the provincial police.Footnote 77
Under Act VI, the panchayat was intended as an agency that would collaborate with the British for the control of a decentralized system of village policing. While Act VI vested supervisory control over the chaukidary in the councils, it stipulated that the district magistrate held ultimate power to fine, dismiss, and reappoint members of the council if they were perceived to be neglecting their supervisory duties. By empowering independent local elites to take care of matters of law and order in the village, ‘meddling Peelers’ had no need to interfere with rural policing, yet were provided with recourse to intervention if necessary.Footnote 78 In principle at least, Act VI delineated an administrative preference for separating official power from the colonial interior and for collaborating with ‘respectable’ elites. In light of an under-staffed police force, it provided for the utilization of village police officers and co-opted village elites for their supervision on behalf of the British, who could intervene if necessary.
Subverting custom, 1870–1892
In the first decade following the passing of Act VI the inadequacies of panchayat supervision in Bengal were brought to light. The Act was extended experimentally across Bengal from 1870; it was initially introduced into six divisions, namely Bhaugulpore, Patna, Dacca, Rajshahi, Chittagong, and Birbhum.Footnote 79 Different experiences of the working of the Act were reported each year in Bengal's annual police reports. In particular, the police focused on the role played by the panchayat in supervising the village police. In the first years of its introduction into Patna, where, by 1872, the Act had been introduced into a selection of villages within the Patna, Birbhu, and Bhaugulpore districts, ‘results were not encouraging’.Footnote 80 In Birbhum, some panchayats had been convicted of embezzlement of the chaukidar fund; in Patna, members of the council were reported to be inattentive to their duties, and many had resigned from the council; and in Bhaugulpore it was difficult to find ‘good men’ to serve on the councils in the first place.Footnote 81 The police reported that the requirement to collect the chaukidar tax door to door was abhorrent to some members because it entailed collecting tax from persons of inferior caste, making it difficult to attract ‘the right men’ to the post.Footnote 82 These problems were not necessarily unique to each division, and similar problems were reported throughout Bengal as the Act was extended during 1870s. Indeed, such reports were corroborated by the general remarks made in 1875 by the magistrate of Nadia about the ‘difficulty in getting panchayats to accept their responsibility’ and to carry out the ‘full nature of their duties’.Footnote 83 A more detailed report about panchayat non-compliance by James Monro, the inspector general of police, appeared in 1877. He wrote:
What I saw on my last cold weather tour led me to believe that unquestionably, on the whole, the chaukidar does not get the supervision he is supposed to get; that the accounts of the panchayat are fictitious . . . and that the panchayat are in many instances unfit to have anything to do with a post which gives them a control over village crime in which they may be interested.Footnote 84
Overall, these cases were used by the police to argue that it was ‘a great danger and a practical mistake’ to separate the supervision of the village police from the regular police.Footnote 85
The reluctance of the panchayat to perform their duties gave impetus to the police to reformulate the structures of supervision over the village police. A police body who ‘object[ed] to the fact that the law [gave] the district superintendent no power over the chaukidar’, often interfered directly in their supervision and control.Footnote 86 In Patna, for example, it was reported that the police made the majority of chaukidary appointment recommendations because the panchayats had generally failed in this task.Footnote 87 Similarly, the introduction of chaukidary parades which forced the village police to regularly report to the station meant that the police had closer control over their daily operations. Act VI had stipulated that the panchayat was to collect criminal information from the village police and furnish relevant information to the station police. Yet a direct interaction with mustered chaukidars at the station was a far more reliable way to obtain information about the crimes committed and punished in the village. By establishing ‘frequent personal communication between the village police and the district superintendent and his subordinates’, the police were provided with ‘the means of gaining an intimate knowledge of local information bearing upon crime, and specially every fact connected with the bad characters of the locality’.Footnote 88 Local policing initiatives that forced the village police and the regular police into close alliance demonstrated that the police had in some cases subsumed the task of supervising the village police.
By the 1880s, the police sought official recognition of this role and the legalization of unofficial modes of supervision over the village police. In fact, the idea that the police should supervise the chaukidary informed the framework for the recommendations of two key police reform committees held in 1882 and 1890.Footnote 89 Each dealt broadly with the reform of the village police, but focused particularly on the necessity of legalizing police supervision to secure chaukidary compliance in the delivery of information to the station. Late in 1881 the government of Bengal had appointed James Monro, former inspector general of police, to lead a committee of enquiry on the subject of the improvement of the village police.Footnote 90 The formation of the committee had been prompted by the complaints made by the inspector general in his 1881 annual report about the unsatisfactory working of the village police in Bengal and the necessity of bringing them under the closer supervision of the police.Footnote 91 Additionally, a request for an opinion on the working of Act VI from the government of the North West Provinces provided further impetus for the formation of the committee.Footnote 92 So, in consultation with district magistrates and superintendents across Bengal, Monro and his committee made local enquiries into the material benefits, if any, that Act VI had introduced, and what reforms the police believed to be necessary to raise the status and efficiency of chaukidars paid under the Act.Footnote 93 The police opinion that was revealed during their enquires was that provisions for legal police supervision of the village police were urgently needed.Footnote 94 The information provided by the police highlighted that any punctuality or efficiency in the working of the village police had been secured through illegal magisterial and police supervision.Footnote 95 Improvements in the efficiency of the village police were due not to ‘local initiative or voluntary action on the part of village communities’ but to ‘official pressure’.Footnote 96 The panchayat had generally been found to be apathetic and inattentive to their duties, so it seemed obvious that the police and magistracy should overtake their supervisory role, thus legalizing the practices that were carried out in parts of the Bengal countryside in any case.Footnote 97 The committee argued that:
the time has come when the Government of India should recognise the very important part which the village chowkidar [sic] plays in the criminal administration of the district. It is on the information of the village chowkidar that the regular police act; the real work is done by the village watchman and the more they are improved the better will be the criminal administration of the country.Footnote 98
To ensure that the village police continued to cooperate with the Bengal police, the committee sought to strengthen police control over the village police by legalizing existent practices of supervision.
Based on their recommendations, an amended chaukidary bill was submitted by Monro in April 1883, which sought to define a supervisory role for the district superintendent of police over the village police.Footnote 99 In this version of the Act, the superintendent was to oversee the payment of the chaukidar at the station and was vested with powers to fine, suspend, punish, and dismiss the chaukidar. The duties of the village police remained unchanged, except that they were to report crime directly to the station, without any reference to the panchayat. Monro in particular had argued that it was desirable to invest these powers in the district superintendent in order to establish the chaukidar as the ‘executive right hand’ of the police, rather than allowing an ineffective supervisory body too much control.Footnote 100 The notion that a decentralized and non-aligned village system would remain intact was still outwardly important, thus the bill sought to protect village control over policing. The police replaced panchayats as supervisors, yet tehsildars (revenue administrative officers, who responsible for collecting taxes from their administrative unit) were selected from the panchayat to collect the chaukidary fund to ensure the village police were still paid by and loyal to the villagers they supposedly served.Footnote 101 The bill amounted to a reconfiguration rather than an overhaul of the idea of separation between the district and village police agencies. Links in a chain of command that were deemed ineffective would be replaced with those more closely aligned with British authority, but a system of village policing by non-official agents would be preserved.
This policy of tighter control by the police failed to convince the government, and the oppositional positions held by the police and legislature on the matter of supervision were revealed in a significantly watered-down amending act. When it was brought to the legislative council, it was passed into law in a highly modified form.Footnote 102 Many of the important suggestions, including the increase in power of the district superintendent, the transferral of the power to appoint chaukidars to the magistrate, and their payment at the thana, were strongly opposed in the Council.Footnote 103 When the bill became law as Act I (B.C.) of 1886, a tension between government and police policy was obvious. The Act rejected the police plan for greater control of the village police and council, and highlighted a course of action that favoured maintaining the existing system of supervision. The panchayat retained their supervisory function, and the only curtailment to their power was that the magistrate, who was required to visit each village to explain the terms of the Act, was empowered to appoint the fittest and most respectable villagers to the watch.Footnote 104 The new Act reiterated a government belief in collaborating with village elites to supervise an independent village police administration. At the close of the first stage of reform of the village police, a desire to protect autonomous village control at the expense of the overall functionality of the system was reiterated in amending Act I against the recommendations of the police. Although the police had unequivocally denounced the panchayats as an unsuitable supervisory body who failed to adhere to British demands, the government of Bengal was still convinced that centralized supervision was unfavourable.
The amendment of the Chaukidary Act in 1886 did not end the debate, however. In the aftermath of the passing of Act I, the Bengal police continued to pressure the government to endorse existing police initiatives for supervising the village police. The appointment of a police committee in Bengal in 1889 would provide the police with renewed opportunity to bring the chaukidary under their supervision.Footnote 105 Its appointment was the result of police and judicial complaints sent to the government of Bengal that ‘crime was still imperfectly repressed’ and that ‘a considerable increase of crime’ was notable throughout Bengal.Footnote 106 Though a closer inspection of the crime returns for Bengal would demonstrate that between 1875 and 1886 crime had not increased, the resolution appointing the committee acknowledged the increase in certain types of crime, especially ‘dangerous offences against property’, which were assumed to be committed by repeat offenders.Footnote 107 The committee was therefore asked to conduct a ‘careful enquiry into the causes of this state of things’.Footnote 108 Led by John Beames, John Stevens, and James Veasey, who at various times had been members of either the Bengal police or the civil service, the committee consulted extensively with Bengal magistrates, police superintendents, and indigenous members of prominent associations, such as the British Indian Association. This provided the police in particular with the opportunity to appeal to the government to reconsider the question of supervision over the village police.
At the close of their enquiries, the police committee concluded that the poor state of criminality in Bengal was connected with the inadequacies of the village police, and therefore reiterated their desire to reform the means of supervision.Footnote 109 Their report was based largely on the testimony of magistrates and superintendents, who argued that the village system, supervised by panchayats, was ‘almost an entire failure’.Footnote 110 The ‘general opinion’ was that ‘panchayats have rendered practically no assistance to the administration’, and the ‘chaukidar’, ‘dependent entirely on the supervision he gets’, was therefore poorly utilized.Footnote 111 Despite local initiatives which had established close and daily interaction between official and non-official police agents, police utilization of the village police was felt to be ‘imperfect’ because, as was argued previously, without official support, their initiatives could go only so far.Footnote 112 The chaukidar was ‘the unit of one enormous administration on whom [the police were] so dependent for the prevention of crime in the village’ but who were difficult to control by a ‘force whose interference law does not recognise’.Footnote 113 In cases where the village police or panchayat refused to carry out their duties, the police had no power to compel compliance through punishment or dismissal. The magistrate held nominal power to fine and dismiss chaukidars, but it was difficult to enforce because it could only be exercised through the panchayat.Footnote 114 The district police, on the other hand, ‘came into daily contact with [chaukidars], and were an obvious choice for supervision’.Footnote 115 To rectify this, the committee once more advocated the legalization of modes of chaukidar supervision that the police had introduced themselves, which were oppositional to an official policy of salutary neglect.
The revised bill embodied and expanded the recommendations of the police committee and presented the police argument for supervisory power, which had been developing since 1870, in the clear and concise manner needed to convince a reluctant government. It argued that in order for the village police to become a useful adjunct to the district police, they needed to be ‘under the immediate supervision of the district superintendent’.Footnote 116 It argued that the government's resistance to police supervision had proceeded on the ill-founded principle that strong executive control was antithetical to the integrity of an autonomous ‘village system’. Yet supervision allowed for the maintenance of the divide between official and non-official police power and supported the notion that the ‘existing constabulary has virtually no other functions to discharge in the village than those of escort and guard’.Footnote 117 Without supervision the ‘precious’ system of village policing had proven ineffective.Footnote 118 It was a fallacy to view efforts to place the village police under executive authority as disruptive, because it was immeasurably disruptive to public order to have a village police force controlled by councils who had no interest in doing so, especially since it was obvious that the village police would not perform their work unsupervised. Without executive intervention (which in various places happened in any case), it was argued, a local village system would cease to exist. The replacement of an inefficient panchayat with direct powers of intervention for the magistracy and the police was required to repair an inefficient yet essential policing agency.
On the strength of this argument, the bill was passed in 1892 as amending Act II (1892).Footnote 119 Most significantly, it defined the district magistrate as the powerbroker, but allowed for him to delegate power to the district superintendent of police, who usually had a much closer relationship with the village police.Footnote 120 Magistrates who felt burdened with their already expansive workload and who recognized the existent familiarity between the district superintendent and the village police readily resorted to this provision.Footnote 121 In most districts it was deemed appropriate and desirable to hand the power to control the village police to the most likely supervisory body—the station police, under the control of the district superintendent. Where total delegation of this responsibility had not occurred, the district superintendent supervised matters conjointly with the magistrate at district headquarters.Footnote 122 By 1899, many district superintendents were operating in an official supervisory capacity over the village police, either independently or mutually with their magistrate. In Jessore and Darbhanga, for example, the district superintendent worked closely with the magistrates.Footnote 123 However, in Tippera, Noakhali, Muzaffarpur, Bhaugulpore, Balasore, Bankura, Hooghly, 24 Parganas, and Saran, the power to appoint, fine, reward, suspend, and dismiss chaukidars had been placed solely in the hands of the superintendent.Footnote 124 The widely utilized power of delegation fulfilled a central objective of the police which had been gathering pace since 1870: to be able to ‘free [the village police] from the supremacy of village elites, and to make them responsible agents in the police administration of rural tracts’ under the control and supervision of the district police.Footnote 125
The passing of the amending Act II in 1892 enabled legal police control over a closely aligned village police, without the need to rely on the support and acquiescence of village councils. Indeed, it marked the point at which police opinion on chaukidary supervision matched the government's official posturing on the matter. Control by district police, which had existed informally since the 1870s, would be formalized through a system of supervision that required chaukidars to regularly report to the police station. This was, in essence, a culmination of a long campaign by the police to legalize informal supervisory measures and to subvert a policy of salutary neglect that was embodied in the early administrative design of the new police.
Conclusion
This article has used current understandings of British administrative preference and custom to frame a discussion of the development of police infrastructure in rural Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century. It has argued that the establishment of a small district police force in colonial Bengal and the co-opting of existing village police structures reflected an official police force of salutary neglect. Yet, this article has demonstrated that beyond the official articulations of a policy of disinterest in village policing, the district police were unable and unwilling to leave the village police to their own devices. This occurred due to the belief that a colonial model of non-intervention had produced corrupt systems of village policing which were antithetical to notions of public and colonial order. In order to establish workable systems of policing in the villages, the district police introduced layers of police supervision into them, unofficially at first. By the end of the nineteenth century, the police had gained official recognition of their supervisory role over the chaukidary, thus formalizing police control. The ongoing reform of village policing in Bengal in the last 30 years of the nineteenth century therefore points to a wavering, rather than steadfast and total commitment to salutary neglect across the policing infrastructure of India.
