Of Crime in Colonial Calcutta

Anindita Ghosh

he Wicked City is yet another t r emendously rich and exciting contribution from a veteran of the 19th century Calcutta archives. In this book, Banerjee paints an unremitting picture of Calcuttas crime world from the late 18th to the early 20th century. We learn both of a range of crime and criminals from e mbezzlers and swindlers to ruthless murderers as well as the surveillance regimes instituted to check them. While Part 1 of the book focuses on the social history of crime in the city, the second half is an account of the institution of the metropolitan police in Calcutta, and the penal web of criminal justice courts and the prison system. Two themes underline this study: one, the disparities of colonial poli cing with its inevitable slant t owards E uropeans, and two, the bitter socio- economic circumstances of colonial crime itself. The book is further an indictment of the classstructured social and political order of 19th century Calcutta a critical position also patently apparent in Banerjees earlier works that dened the concept and categories of crime. Social changes and dislocations that accompanied the establishment of the colonial o rder as well as the privileging of certain social tiers and aggressive materialism in the urban world, according to the author, were as much responsible for the crimes committed as the criminals themselves. In the process, Banerjee manages to huma nise even the most heinous criminals of the colonial police records.

book review
The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta by Sumanta Banerjee (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan), 2009; pp ix + 643, Rs 795.

of the city including sailors, servants, soldiers, slaves and vagrants. The brutal murders of disloyal wives, lovers and prostitutes constitute the theme of chapter four and offer a disturbing image of violent and r etributive justice meted out by a rmly patriarchal society, sensationalised in turn by the contemporary popular press. Homicide as a punishable crime and its perpetrators thus caught the imagi nation of the citys residents, augmented the p olice administration, and drove further wedges both social and moral between the different social classes. Part 1 of the book also showcases the remarkable innovations in crimes in the city from gambling on the rain to tricking people on the streets, as well as the construction of new offences by the colonial municipal admi nistration in areas of sanitation, transport and house-construction. It is a dense and fascinating account of new categories of crimes unfolding in tandem with a developing city. This section is also remarkable for its focus on female criminality, including the case of the infamous Trailokya a serial killer and prostitute who operated in the 1880s, robbing and drowning her victims mercilessly for private gain.

emerges as a hierarchically o rdered law enforcement agency racially ordered with white ofcers at the top and an army of poorly paid indigenous subordinates at the bottom and a ercely coercive machinery riddled with corruption and wrongdoing. Not unsurprisingly, the cornerstone of such a punitive and racially biased regime lay in the stereotyping and segregating of populations and criminals, typied in the proposals of the chief magi strate of Calcutta in 1842 who broke up the city into pocket-size wards on the b asis of communities residing in them for closer and effective policing, complete with watch-houses. A uniform legal system also played a v ital part in the process, incorporating we stern modes of investigation, prosecution and punishment, aided in turn by the rapid development of forensic sciences (post-mortem, ngerprinting, etc) during the period. The nal chapters are devoted to the penal system that completed the disciplinary cycle and was serviced by jails, awe-inspiring visual reminders of harsh incarceration set up in the heart of the city including one that was set up in the central Maidan to strike fear in the hearts of potential offenders. The dismal and ruthless treatment of prisoners forced to work in chain-gangs (literally chained together in work team formation) in road repair and construction, supplied with very little food, and exposed to the most inhuman and insanitary conditions within the jails was criticised in contemporary o fcial circles but little was done to change the situation. As Banerjee points out,
Of the three major generally professed o bjectives of incarceration punishment, deterrence and reformation, the rst alone remained the constant determinant in the prison policies of the government (p 589).

The Colonial Penal System

In the second half of the book, Banerjee outlines the penal system that was put in place by the colonial authorities for t ackling the crimes described in the rst. He traces the evolution of the Calcutta p olice from its post-Mughal remnants to a modern machinery of suppression and surveillance fully in touch with its metropolitan base in London and seemingly c apable of dealing with the toughest of unrest. The institution

Crime in a Developing City

In the rst half of the book we are introduced to a vast and vivid array of crimes and criminals specic to 18th and 19th century Calcutta, not just amongst the indigenous community like the legendary Bengali dakaits (dacoits), but also the sizeable, mobile and extremely volatile world of white and mixed race inhabitants

Racist bias in the administration of j ustice was rampant, an aspect that the book seeks to systematically though a little unproblematically expose. Inequity in pay scales, housing and promotion in the police were obvious. Indian inspectors were not even allowed to question E uropean suspects. Racial discrimination was further

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BOOK REVIEW

practised among prisoners in jails with better living conditions being reserved for Europeans while Indians were herded into overcrowded cells as r evealed in two contemporary reports that were produced in 1865. There was just one exception to this, however. Educated middle class Bengali detectives became the desideratum in colo nial policing in the 19th century, prized for their superior local knowledge and intellect, as compared to mere informers. A Bengali darogah, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay (1855-1907), trained as a detective and had a remarkable career in the Calcutta police. His memoirs record his experiences as a darogah, an extra ordinary testament of personal courage

and professional skill, narrated simultaneously as a thriller and a moral statement. Mukhopadhyays interrogations of criminals and his own quintessentially male middle class reections on the conversations offer an interesting glimpse into the contemporary bhadralok conscience.

Stimulating Further Research

This is a valuable survey of crime and puni shment woven in the context of a very 19th century Bengali milieu. It is captivating and intricate in its details, spun from a wealth of contemporary sources and o ffers a compelling narrative. What is missing, however, is a wider take on related histories, spaces and peoples. How does crime transform the social and cultural spaces of

the city? In what ways do women emerge as mere public spectacles in law courts and jails within the states penal system? Can the history of labour unrest be simply clubbed together with nationa list mass strikes? Another interesting avenue of i nquiry could be the relationship b etween journalism, print and crime, for as a lways criminals are often made by the media, and 19th century Calcutta was a fter all a very vibrant scene for sensational print journalism. The book nevertheless opens up all these questions for future r esear chers and is all the more valuable for d oing so.
Anindita Ghosh (anindita.ghosh@manchester. ac.uk) is at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

The Historian as Competing Voice

Ashoak Upadhyay

iven Mumbais importance in the material and mental landscape of this country for two centuries it is surprising that it has not claimed the a ttention of historians, sociologists, nonction and ction writers in quite the way that New York, London or Paris have. Books on Mumbai would barely ll a d ecent-sized shelf; one could virtually count off the titles on ones ngertips. Gyan Prakash teaches history at the Prince ton University and his latest book, Mumbai Fables has the advantage over other books on the city in the elegance of his prose and the perspectives he brings to bear on his project: To ask what lies behind the very powerful fable about the citys past and its present His goal he asserts is not to separate fact from ction, not to oppose the real from the myth but to reveal the historical circumstances portrayed and hidden by the stories and images produced in the past and the present (23). It is unclear which powerful fable Prakash is referring to but the project at once marks him out from the extant works on Mumbai that have largely focused on e ither the cultural/ctive representations of the city or its socio-economic histories. By blending stories, lm themes and songs

Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash (India: HarperCollins Publishers), 2010; pp 396, Rs 599.

and urban poetry into the narrative of h istorical circumstances, Prakash breaks new ground in Mumbais historiography covered earlier by Sujata Patel and Alice Thorners (1995) pioneering collection of writing on diverse aspects of the citys life and times. That cross-disciplinary, non-chronological style suits the study of
the narratives of change from Bombay to Mumbaithe transformation of one historical stage to another, from the bounded unity of the city of industrial capitalism to the generic city of globalisation, from modernity to post-modernity, from cosmopolitanism to communalism (22-23).

Prakash tells us that these changes are deeply awed. At the outset, the historian who plans to u nfold the citys ensemble of histories has already passed judgment. But which one does he nd deeply awed: the journey from industrial capitalism, from modernity to postmodernism or all of them? One gets the distinct i mpression that all but the move from c osmopolitanism to communalism were awed. The citys passage away from

cosmopolitanism has been the favourite villain of not just sociologists eager to nd traces of neo-fascism on the sub continent but of the articulate middle class yearning for that mythic city which P rakash attempts to show died long before the Shiv Sena came to power. At rst glance, the idea that every change was awed excites the reader: almost no one has described the slide to communalism thus. By the end of the book, however, the reader is disappointed for Prakash views the emergence of communalism as a awless demolition machine, relentlessly trampling, rst the leftists, and then the cosmopolitan spirit of the city. In the process, Prakash bows to the accepted wisdom that has identied the Shiv Sena and its nettlesome offshoot, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena as symptoms of neo-fascism hastening the citys degeneration. Had he scratched the surface of this nativism he would have found that the intrusion of alien elements (234) that Bal Thackeray has persistently ranted against never had the ring of an authentic sons-of-the-soil world view so prevalent in the north-east and in the Kashmir Valley. It smashed trade union militancy and the cultural tradition that fed off and nurtured it to the late early 1980s when the last great general strike led by Datta S amant ended forever the industrial character of the city. But the death of industrial capitalism and the emergence of globalisation

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december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52 EPW Economic & Political Weekly