The Magistrate's Indian Diary: A Tour of Inspection

I

I STARTED off, a week ago, for a tour in camp which will — if the gods are good — last for many months. ‘For lo, the summer is past, the rain is over and gone,’ to paraphrase Solomon. We in India have more excuse for writing about the weather than Solomon had; for, when all is said and done, climate is one of the basic inescapable facts that govern, in the last resort, everything of importance here. Through the long ages it has made men of our own stock into the Indians of to-day. Looked at from a more personal angle, it changes India in a couple of months from a land where joy can run high to a field of strife where, at times, the balance sways uneasily between human beings, and insects and all manner of creeping things; where life is one long misery of physical unhappiness; where the will doggedly holds on, and week after weary week drives the reluctant body along the mapped-out course.

But all that, I thank whatever gods may be, is over and done with for another six months. I am lapped in coolth; around me are fields of an incredibly vivid green; the air, night and morning, has the unmistakable tang of the fast-approaching cold weather; the age-old scent of wood fires permeates everywhere; and in the early mornings it is now cold enough in tents to afford one the delicious joy of sending down an exploratory foot to the cold recesses of one’s bed, and of drawing it up hastily again to the warmer regions of the equator. Sounds childish, but none the less it is as deliciously enjoyable as childish things usually are. ‘The hot weather,’ ‘the rains,’ are now but dim, unhappy, far-off’ things, and there are six months of glorious camping before me; vast plains to ride over, much interesting work to do, forests to hunt in, rivers to fish in, camp fires to talk by. Could one ask for more?

You, I gather, are perturbed about India. You have been shocked by Mother India; Gandhi has shaken your faith; Moti Lai Nehru has unsettled your beliefs; you wonder whether Sir John Simon and his Commission can do anything helpful; and you feel more than a little doubtful whether England’s right hand has not lost its cunning. Is the old faith dimmed? Do the English, in their relations with India, still love righteousness and hate iniquity? Are they prepared to hold fast, through good report and evil report, to the basic principles that most Americans and Englishmen agree in considering fundamental? Are they resolved to build deep and strong, sure in the faith that their edifice will one day stand foursquare to the winds of heaven? Or will they ‘baulk the end half-won for an instant meed of praise’?

Much that you ask I cannot answer. I do not suppose that anyone can. But I feel quite certain that the most important question — and the one regarding which there is least knowledge and least information — is howmatters go in the districts. That is the vital point of contact. It is in the districts that the Government really touches the people. Probably 85 per cent of them do not know what the system of government is. For them ’the Government’ is the district officer; they look no further. If things are well in the districts, then 85 per cent of the people are reasonably contented and happy; if things are wrong in the districts, then assuredly the end of the present system — probably the end of any possible system based on English ideas — has come. I have no intention of embarking on a political discussion; it may, however, assist in giving you some sort of living perception of how The wheels go round’ in India if I take you with me, as it were, on my tour through the district.

Dr. Johnson’s explanation on a famous occasion, ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance,’ has a wide application as regards most things Indian. The cold-weather visitor talks disparagingly of the supineness of the Government, to take the first illustration that comes into my head, because an important river, possibly 150 yards wide in its winter bed, is left unbridged; he would revise his opinion if he could see that same river leaping down from the hills, fourteen miles from bank to bank, and these banks falling in, in hundred-yard slices, with a noise like fifteen-inch guns. Even from the safe shelter of a high bank, it is terrifying to watch the Ganges in flood stoop down to some impertinent groyne in one long, smooth, powerful spring, and hear — a mile away — the screech of the grinding boulders. But I apologize; my business is to get on with the washing!

II

Spartan and I, then, left headquarters just seven days ago for a tour that will, I hope, last for five months at least. Let me introduce you to Spartan. A Waler, fifteen hands two inches, bright chestnut — with the traditional temper of the bright chestnut. His trot is a devastating earthquake; his canter is powerful, but infernally rough; his gallop is as smooth as oil.

A notable steeplechaser in his day, his heart is entirely in the right place; and if St. Paul’s Cathedral came in front of him he would try to jump it, if asked to do so. He reaches out, with effortless ease, tucking his great thighs under him at every stride. All round, the country is emerald green — the vivid green of the young wheat or barley that has just pushed through the soil. The land is flat, almost dead flat; there are scattered trees, mostly mangoes with their dull, heavy green foliage, which in the mass, and over the distances that one has here, produce the impression that one is always at the centre of a great plain ringed round by dark green forest. On my right, throughout the ride, the Himalayas jut up, white and glittering, into the pale blue sky. One will lose them soon, when the dust dims the air; but for some weeks the rain-washed atmosphere is incredibly transparent, and Trisul, Nunga Devi, and the other giants of the north peer out from the roof of the world over the green plains of Hindustan.

One rides from village to village, carefully choosing a route by which one is not expected. If one goes about surrounded by a cloud of subordinates, one learns little or nothing. I always cut out all that by riding seven miles or so out of my way, and then taking a line for camp. When I am alone, the talks with the villagers are delightful — and informative. The other morning, for example, I pushed into Talpore, when I was officially expected ten miles off’. The Muhammadan whom I met outside the village — tall, straight as a ramrod, courteous in his manner, with a long beard dyed a bright henna-red — gave me his views on education.

‘There is but one thing worth knowing— the Koran. That contains the sum of all human wisdom. Your schools! They teach little worth learning, and that badly. It is all deceit and make-believe. Religion is shaken; respect for the aged and for parents is destroyed. We Muhammadans cannot make our brains turn and twist like the Hindu — nor is that a man’s work.’

There was a lot more of it, of course. I asked him if he had boys. ’Yes — three.’ Were they at school? ‘No.’ ‘Why? Any special reasons?’ To that I could get no reply that was not a masterpiece of nebulous evasion.

I left him, and wandered along to find the school; things promised to be interesting. The first man I met did n’t know where the school was, though it was quite a small village; he did n’t think there was a school. Gradually the usual little crowd tacked on; and by dint of repeated questionings I got ‘warmer and warmer,’ as the children say. At last I found the school. It was a rather decent building, as rural schools go in India; but it seemed strangely silent and deserted. Again as usual, the people gave no assistance, volunteered no information. I entered the main classroom, to find no boys, but two well-fed and sturdy-looking country ponies! The other rooms were locked. Of course no one had the key, or knew where it could be found; so I solved the problem by getting the village blacksmith to wrench out the staple. One room was used as a storehouse for cheap cloth; in the third I found the school furniture, registers, and so on.

Without comment, I went through the attendance register with the crowd. It had not been written up for twenty days. ‘Who is Ram Sahai, son of Ram Lai?’ ‘There is no such person in the village.’ ‘And Maqbool Husain, son of Abdul Ghani?’ ‘There is no such person.’ ‘Dullo, son of Kesri?’ ‘Ah, yes; but he died four months ago of the evil eye.’ And so it went. Roughly, out of thirty-odd names, twenty-five were fictitious; there were five pupils only, and they enjoyed what was practically a perpetual holiday.

When the facts were clear, the crowd — again as usual — became informative. The teacher kept school occasionally, but usually he sold cloth in the surrounding villages. That was what the ponies were for. There might, possibly be five pupils. The registers were fudged — the people evidently thought that reflected the greatest credit on the teacher’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. ‘Oh, yes — the inspector sahib has been here quite often to inspect. When he comes, the school is always full. The teacher arranges with relatives of his, teachers in villages not too distant, to send boys over, so that the classes will be full, and the inspector sahib will have boys to examine.’ Everyone in the village knew of the fraud; no one did anything to stop it. The hard-working inspectors of schools, with an enormous area to cover, and dependent to a large extent in practice on local hospitality, could not make surprise visits. Everything fitted in nicely — but no one in the village got any education.

The people thought the Government had a bee in its bonnet on this matter; it preached the virtues of learning, in season and out of season. But the villagers were not impressed with the ‘educated’ products of the system; and boys were useful, from a very early age, in herding goats, doing odd jobs about the house or the farm, playing with and looking after the younger children. The parents had got on without being able to read or write; that was, quite dearly, the business of the priest, or of the village accountant. One could not do everything. To send their children to school meant some hardship — some inconvenience, at any rate; and this thoughtful teacher had evolved a sound method which conciliated village opinion, avoided all difficulties with the powers that were, and incidentally gave the villagers something of a hold over him, which, they doubtless hoped, might materialize into cloth fractionally cheaper than otherwise obtainable.

III

At one of the smaller towns I have been visiting there is a very famous Hindu shrine, which attracts pilgrims from all parts of the country. I have the mythical history of the place rather mixed, but the essentials are that Krishna, in one of his incarnations, amused himself there, — there must have been many milkmaids in the vicinity in these days, — and when he left, pushing off to ascend to Heaven, his foot struck a deep hole in the solid earth. The temple is built over the hole, and adjoining it there is the inevitable and essential sacred tank for the bathing of the devout.

The temple is a source of considerable revenue — I happen to know, as for various reasons I, in my official capacity, have a fourth share in the proceeds! One passed along in a constant stream of pilgrims, through narrow, tortuous passages, turning rightangled corner after right-angled corner, till one came to the central core — the little white temple, pierced with four openings at the ground level, and of the typical Hindu form. Inside, one descended a few steps to the holy of holies. The floor was of black and white marble; in the centre, under the vaulted, flat-arched roof, blackened with soot from the saucers of cocoanut. oil, each with its little wick overlapping the edge, which constituted the sole illumination, there was what looked like a well, the rim being of alternate squares of black and white marble. This rim stood perhaps a foot and a half above the floor; the mouth of the well was about a yard and a half across; and each marble square had a golden sovereign inlaid in its centre! Occupying the central position in the well was the usual vertical and roughly cylindrical stone, the top of this reaching to within six inches or so of the level of the rim. Inside the well was a disgusting mass of flour, clarified butter, water, red dye, marigolds, and heaven knows what else. And deep down under all that lay the rupees and the smaller silver, the copper and the nickel, all the mass of coins which the faithful threw in with prayers and devotion, and which the practical realists grubbed out each evening and solemnly divided.

The priests of that particular temple — and for various reasons I had to know them intimately — were a peculiarly hard-bitten lot. On one occasion, when my partner the chief priest was enjoying the hospitality of the local jail in connection with a peculiarly bad case of murder and dacoity, I had to keep him alive with laudanum. He was a confirmed opium eater — the only one, by the way, that I ever encountered in all my time in India. But all that, which was of course common property, naturally made no difference whatever to the sacredness of the temple.

One sees the Indians at their best during these religious pilgrimages. They come in family groups, usually: papa, maman, et bébé. The womenfolk are decked in their best and wear all their jewels. They glance up coyly as one looks at them; shift their position to make their silver anklets jangle and ring; and the sari, a corner of which they hold in their teeth to hide their face, performs its functions but halfheartedly. In that intense sunlight and in that variegated crowd one seldom sees colors out of tone or harsh. It is like a flower garden — all beautiful, and all harmonious.

The streets are lined with thousands of small booths, and the happy crowd pushes round the popular stalls in an unending flux and change. It is like a bed of flowers swayed by a wind. Behind the shops creaks, everlastingly, the merry-go-round; four uncomfortable little square boxes are hung to four rough-dressed wooden arms, and the owner grinds perspiringly at a crank that turns the crazy contraption round and round, while the children in the ascending and descending boxes squeal and shriek with joy. The crank man is naked to the waist, and his bronze muscles ripple and bulge in the sunlight. Everything is incredibly cheap — and incredibly nasty. The thumb rings that the women buy are made in Birmingham; they are scarlet and green and gold, have a little mirror about the size of a shilling in the centre, and cost about tenpencel The glass bangles run about twopence each. Prints from Manchester and Japan, cheap scent from Kobe, mysterious foodstuffs, beads of every color, and the everpopular ‘ ring game’ and lottery wheels, which we frown on and usually eject from the fair. The people are too simple to make anything that savors of gambling safe or desirable. And through it all the crowd moves and flows, cheerful and talkative, happy in the knowledge of having combined religious duty with pleasurable excitement.

A fair of this kind requires a good deal of arrangement. Cholera is a spectre one cannot ignore. Sweepers have to be collected from towns often hundreds of miles distant, and special police have to be provided. The plausible stranger, of their own caste, who marks down the prosperous family party and persuades them to cat the sweetmeats he provides — sweetmeats containing the deadly dhatura — is a standing feature of every big fair. He is a professional poisoner, and often reaps a rich harvest. He robs his victims as soon as they are dead or unconscious — little he cares which — and disappears again into the countless millions of India. And so special police, knowing some of these men by sight, are posted on all roads and at all the stations; the roads to and from the fair are patrolled by mounted and unmounted men; and the ‘criminal tribes’ within striking distance are held firmly at their own settlements. But, when everything that can be done has been done, there arc always some who get through the net; and each fair has invariably its record of petty and serious crime.

I visited the chief school at this centre shortly after the fair. The boys in the highest class were eighteen to nineteen years of age, and at the end of their — purely vernacular — education. They had been taught, from the age of about seven, in their own tongue. Of the thousands who had been poured into the funnel, perhaps fifty had emerged. I was particularly interested in this final product. At mental arithmetic they were astonishingly good — far better, low be it spoken, than I myself. And yet they were not nearly good enough for the local bunnias and shopkeepers; they wanted something much better than the school could produce. The customer in India buys in ridiculously minute quantities, and the arithmetical problems are disturbing in their complexity. So the local people had set up a school of their own, and the results were amazing. The most complicated calculations — which would have taken me minutes to do, with a pencil and paper — were solved instantly, and correctly, by boys of fifteen or thereabouts. They wrote the cramped Hindi, which is the language of the accountant here, with extraordinary ease. And, apart from these two acquirements, they knew nothing. They were not interested in anything else, nor were their parents.

In the government school, the spreading of effort seemed to have produced even less result. The boys could read — even read well; but they seldom knew the meaning of the words they used. ' What does intizam mean?’ Followed a succession of shots, most of them very wide of the mark. The boys were told, given synonyms. ‘And huqqiqat? ’ Même jeu. One wondered that the mere context did not give some idea—but it didn’t. I would then make them close their books and repeat, in their own words, what they had just read. Off they would start, pell-mell, reproducing the lesson word for word, without a slip. But they could not give the substance in their own words; they did n’t really know what it was all about. Memory — and nothing else.

I asked them who the Emperor of India now was. One boy finally hazarded the opinion that he was called Akbar! When it came to geography, things were more amusing. By chance, I asked if the sea was deep. Instantly they all burst into song; the deepest sounding was 5674 fathoms — or whatever it was. That was in the Pacific. I then asked how one went from Bombay to England. That was a ‘stock question’ too; they simply rushed to Aden, and the Canal; told me how many miles long it was, — which I did n’t know myself, — how one turned round at Gibraltar, and all the rest of it.

‘What about the nighttime?' I asked. ‘Oh, the ship ties up then.’ ‘But you showed me on the map how it went direct from Bombay to Aden. That is all sea. What does it tie up to?’ ‘There are barrels to which it ties up.’ ‘Why should it tie up at all?’ ‘Well, no one can see to go in the dark.’

‘And what are the barrels tied to?’ No one could answer that. They finally agreed, after much discussion, that the first answer was wrong; the ship must clearly creep round the coast, tying up at night where it found itself.

‘ What makes the ship go?’ They did not know. ‘How can it find its way to Aden? One can’t see Aden from Bombay.’ Again they did not know.

They were very learned about the submarine cables shown on the map, and pointed out the route they took to London. ‘How are these cables laid? How are they arranged?’ They were carried on poles! We hunted up the soundings given on the map, and I urged that it would be difficult to find poles 18,000 feet long. They saw that, and then suggested that the cables were hung on poles which were supported on barrels. I sent for a cork and some matches; and they tried to make the cork, with a match stuck in it, float upright. It was also suggested that cables hanging from poles supported in barrels would hinder shipping. Every effort to make them think it out failed. Their final solution, which is typical, was ‘Ap log sab chiz Karsakte hain’ — ‘You people can do anything.'

Curiously enough, they were in general very good at mathematics. But they seemed to have no capacity for reasoning, apart from mathematical subjects. In one of the lessons they read, a reference occurred to the Himalaya; and there was a rather good description of the hills as seen from a distance, and then again close at hand, as one climbed the lower slopes. ‘Where is the Himalaya?’ They did not know. And we were sitting outside the schoolhouse, in the shade, with the giant peak of Trisul cleaving the sky in front of us! ‘Have you ever seen the Himalaya — the home of snow?' They had not — and they were n’t interested in it, either.

I agree with Roosevelt, — was n’t it he? — who said that the Romans had never done anything half so fine as the English achievement in India; but ‘this person,’ as Kai Lung would say, thinks that on their roll of honor the word ‘education’ will not be found.

IV

I had another glimpse into Indian mentality the other day which amazed me, hardened as I am to these surprises after twenty-odd years of them. I had to go back to headquarters for two days, to count the cash, stamps, and so on, in the treasury. The district officer is personally responsible for every rupee in the government treasury — and there are usually well over a million of them! He must count them, with his own fairy fingers, once each month; but when he is on tour, and as a special act of grace, he can depute someone else to perform that uninteresting task for one month — not more. So back I had to go.

My bearer accompanied me. He has been with me for many years; he is well educated, learned some English at a mission school, reads and writes his own language fluently and easily, and has been living with better-class English people all his life. Well, I gave him an urgent letter to post one evening. The post office was perhaps three hundred yards away. The sun had just set. Half an hour or so later, I asked him if the letter had been posted. He said it had; but his manner suggested to me that it had not. I pressed him, and he finally admitted that he still had it. When I ‘pitched into him’ he gave as his excuse the following extraordinary reason: —

‘Sahib, it is my fault. I admit it. I have done wrong. But I had not the courage to go to the post office. The momai-sahib is about. That — the chance of meeting him — made my bones water and my liver melt. Even for you, I cannot do it. Fear has eaten me up.’

‘Who is the momai-sahib?’ Even as I asked there came back to my memory, like an underdeveloped plate struggling to build up an image in the solution, something I had read in Sleeman many years before.

‘The momai-sahib! Ah, he is terrible. He is all-powerful. One is like a reed in his strong hands. He has authority from the Government to wander about, like a bat in the evening, choosing his own path. He takes those he likes. There is nothing to mark him; he is like other sahibs. But, as one meets him, he slowly pushes near your face a little stick — a tiny little stick like the chewed twig we folk use for a toothbrush. And he looks at you, without saying a word. Then you become senseless. Fear eats you up and overpowers you; you cannot cry or speak; and you must follow him wherever he leads. Your liver melts; your head swims; but you walk on, walk on, with him striding in front, never turning round, never speaking. Passers-by do not see you, or him, once he has secured a victim. You pass invisible.

’He leads you on and on to the deserted places — anywhere far from the town, where there is a tree. When you get there, you lie down. He takes from his pocket a little pick; and he drives, with one swift blow, a small round hole in the top of your skull, at the place where we Hindus wear the choti [the unshaven tuft at the top of the head]. Then he strings you up by the heels to the tree; your head is in the middle of an iron pot that he has ready there; he lights a fire of wood beneath; and your brains drip out slowly, slowly, into the pot, and sizzle and splutter there till your skull is empty. You die slowly, and the pain is great.’

‘And what is all this for?’ I asked.

‘The roasted brains make a very powerful medicine that the Government uses in all its dispensaries. It is a medicine of very great price, and without it many miraculous cures could not take place. It is wonderful medicine. The Government must have it, to cure the sick; the English doctors cannot work without it. That is why the Government every now and then allows the momai-sahib to walk abroad in the land. The bodies of his victims are never found; no one ever sees them following him to the fire. They are never burned us Hindus should be, nor can their sons perform the funeral rites. That is a very great calamity.’

Now think what this means. Here was my faithful bearer quivering with fright at the mere recital of the awful activities of the ‘momai-sahib’ — which, by the way, means the ‘sahib who makes wax.’ After twenty years of life and work with Indians, I had stumbled on the real hidden motive for what would at first sight have seemed to be merely a careless neglect of duty. Would any European have conceived that a man could believe such a farrago of nonsense who had lived with English people all his life, who had been educated mainly by English teachers, who had unrivaled opportunities for observing the principles on which English people act, their outlook on life, their invariable kindness, and their revulsion from acts of torture or cruelty? Yet believe it he did, and all my efforts to shake that belief were useless. He still believes the story; and I have no doubt that his son’s son’s son’s son’s son — to the nth — will believe it, and shake with palsied fright when the rumor goes forth that the momai-sahib is wandering about at the hour of the going down of the sun.

V

If you are not surfeited with horrors, you may be interested in the details of a characteristic little murder which took place near here recently. It is interesting because it is typical, and because it discloses the working of one of the safety valves which the operation of our laws possibly renders necessary.

Ram Gopal was a bunnia, about forty years of age. He came, ten years ago, to the little village of Kumheria, which nestles among the nim and pecpul trees close to the bank of the big river. Behind the village the forest begins; it stretches on, for miles and miles. Kumheria is, as you sec, rather isolated; with the river in front and the impassable forest behind, the only approaches are parallel to the river, and the nearest villages arc many miles away, over rough and difficult ground.

Ram Gopal had prospered exceedingly. He lent money, and he lent grain for sowing; he sold cheap cloth; he supplied funds when a marriage or a death forced the cultivators to spend largely in order to maintain their prestige, to follow the custom of their fathers, and to conform to the rules of their caste. The normal interest he charged was 60 per cent; but sometimes he did much better than that. Further, he kept the accounts; his clients could neither read nor write.

In brief, Ram Gopal was greedy and cunning, and entirely without bowels of compassion. Little by little he got the whole village into his power; they must work hard, all their lives, for him; and when they died their sons, and their sons’ sons, must still carry the burden. All that they bore, patiently, though it was grievous enough. But when Ram Gopal had squeezed the village dry as a gourd in the hot weather, he felt that something more was wanted. He began to insist on ‘payment in kind’ — to interfere with their women. When that stage was reached, matters developed rapidly.

One fine night Ram Gopal was murdered. His body was found on the charpai, or string bed; the throat was cut so deeply that the head was almost severed from the body; the small room in which he had been sleeping was a shambles.

As usual, the police got hold of the kachchha hal — the ‘raw facts’ — very quickly. Ram Gopal had been murdered after a village council had been held on the subject; the murder was, as it were, a communal affair — all were in it. Not an atom of information, or of evidence, could be obtained. No one knew anything. No bloodstained clothing could be discovered, no bloodstained knife; no one could give any clue; nobody was suspected. All the account books had been burned — which, I may say, is an almost invariable feature when a bunnia is killed.

I went to the village myself to verify the position. The facts were as reported by the police. I spoke to dozens of people, old and young, taking each alone. They were not uneasy; they showed no undue anxiety — but they knew nothing! It was of course distressing that the bunnia had been murdered; it was possibly unusual that they knew nothing about it; but these were the facts. No strangers had come to the village — though of course dacoits might have been prowling about; one never knew. They, at any rate, had seen nothing and knew nothing. And that was that; it was impossible to get further.

I did a little duck shooting along the river banks, and took the village chaukidar with me. The chaukidar is the representative of the police — of law and order generally — resident in each village. It is customary for him to accompany sahibs when shooting, as he knows the ground and the local conditions better than anyone else. When we were well away from the village, and alone in the wide spaces that flank the cold-weather bed of the river, I began to talk of Ram Gopal.

Yes, he had been a hard man. He gave unwillingly. He took heavy interest. He ground them as the barley is ground between the millstones.

Bit by bit the chaukidar became more talkative. I then put it to him that he must know what had happened. He must have been in the village that night; it was small enough for everyone to know all that happened — and this was a big happening. I told him I wanted to hear the story from him; I was not going to use it, but I wanted to know what had happened. He told me, frankly enough, the details.

Matters came suddenly to a head when Ram Gopal demanded that the young and good-looking wife of the potter should come to his house at night. Kallu, the husband, went immediately to the village elders. A special council was called; they did not debate long. Ram Gopal had earned death a thousand times; he must be killed. The whole village — a small one of about ninety people — was with them in that decision. They rapidly arranged the details.

Three young men were chosen as the executioners. They were to enter the house at a fixed time, naked except for small loin cloths, provided for that purpose by one of the council. After the execution, these loin cloths would be burned; and the young men would swim in one of the great pools left near the village by the shrinking river. In this way there would be no bloodstains. Further, each would still have his own loin cloth, and clothes, unmarked by blood. Each of the chosen three was also provided with a cloth mask (a most unusual feature, this, in my experience) so that they could not be identified by the bunnia or his family.

They had explicit instructions. The whole v illage would assemble, opposite the bunnia’s house, under the great peepul tree, and would sing bhajans (hymns) there. This would drown any outcry. The three would dress in their own houses in the new loin cloths, and would fix their masks; one of the village elders would see that this was properly attended to. They would then pass by the singing crowd, and would enter the bunnia’s house by the main gate. They knew his sleeping room; they would, if possible, cut his throat while he was asleep. If they could not, he must be dispatched, somehow or anyhow. Then the account books must be taken and burned in the courtyard. The three executioners had to do this, and the bhajans would continue until they had returned. The bunnia’s family was not to be interfered with. The servants would be decoyed away if possible; but they would doubtless oiler no opposition, and in any case the crowd would guard the door if necessity arose. If anyone else had to be killed to prevent detection, the three young men must kill him.

It all worked out according to plan. The crowd started its hymn singing; the three young fellows — chosen for their strength from among those with special reason for hating Ram Gopal — entered the house under cover of the noise, found the bunnia asleep in his usual room, and cut his throat. They had little difficulty in forcing the recess where the books were kept, and they burned them in the courtyard of the house. Gory with blood, they walked past the singing crowd, followed by one of the village elders. They swam for an hour in the great pool, while their loin cloths and masks were burned by the old man who accompanied them. They took their knives in the water, and also cleansed them by plunging them into the sand of the river bed. The police found no finger marks of any kind — that too had been attended to!

The chaukidar, of course, knew everything. But he too had his private interest in the disappearance of Ram Gopal; and he was told that if he disclosed the facts he would share the same fate. The village felt safe — and with reason. Clearly there was nothing which one could put before a court. The chaukidar was willing to tell me the facts, privately; he had undoubtedly given them to his subinspector of police; but, even had we been stupid enough to try to get him to give evidence in court, he would have denied all knowledge of the affair, rather than run the risk of reprisals by the villagers.

There, you see, is the safety valve which has been evolved! When oppression becomes intolerable, when forbearance has been pushed to the limit, there is what one might call a communal murder. On the theoretical side one could deal with it easily enough; on the practical side there seems — for the time being, at all events — no practicable solution. And yet — murder as a kind of unofficial safety valve gives one furiously to think! It is a disconcerting idea, but the actuality exists, all the same. Such cases are rare, but they occur.

(Succeeding papers will deal with other aspects of India to-day)