Abstract
Chapter 3 examines a few of Daroga Priyanath Mukhopadhyay’s “true crime” first person accounts of personally solved cases from Darogar Daftar in which women are victims of crimes like cheating, spousal assault, abduction and homicide. The writings about the investigation of these cases have been examined alongside similar archived cases of wife killing, assault and abduction culled from contemporary Bangla and English newspapers and court records. The stories that surface in the investigation around the evidence of the battered, brutalized, killed or abandoned female bodies undermine or nuance contemporary cultural stereotypes of so-called “Hindu” femininity either as impossibly virtuous or as pitiable and passive victims of untold suffering and of the “Hindu” home as a sacrosanct space. These accounts show how despite the gendered biases and stereotypes that shaped the putatively “objective” investigative process as well the narrating of it, the ejahars and jabaanbandis (statements) of the women as witnesses, reveal astonishing stories of how women had stepped out of prescribed roles, asserted sexual agency, formed unconventional bonds, and even manipulated the contradictions between patriarchal norms of conduct and colonial law.
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- 1.
The words of scholar and librarian at Bengal Library Haraprasad Shastri (who wrote brief summaries of the Bangla texts collected in the erstwhile Bengal Library) introducing the writings of Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, can be found in the 1892 Bengal Library Catalogues (India Office Collections): “The most noticeable feature of the literature of the year in fiction is the appearance of a large number of detective stories in Bengali, entitled Darogar Daftar, by Babu Priyanath Mukharji, an officer of the Detective Department of the Calcutta Police. The stories are clever and smart…They show the usefulness of native talent in detecting crimes in native society. Haraprasad Shastri, Catalogue of Bengali Printed Books (London: J.F. Blumhardt, 1892).” Subsequently in 1894 he writes: “Babu Priyanath Mukharji continues to write his experiences as a detective officer, and has published nearly a dozen short stories during the course of the year. His stories, which appear in monthly parts, are exceedingly popular.” Ibid., 1894.
- 2.
Ironically enough, the restitution of conjugal rights––that mandated that a wife had to return to and live with her husband––which Bengali bhadralok (and many other Indians) defended hotly, was a form of legal action that derived from British law. “It was first deployed in cases involving Muslim personal law as well as Parsi matrimonial cases in the middle of the nineteenth century. Within a few decades, it was applied in cases involving Hindu Law” (Sturman, 140). The bhadralok that fiercely resisted any form of perceived interference in shastric injunctions when it came to personal law, welcomed this form of legal action which expanded their patriarchal powers, with immense alacrity.
- 3.
“Wedlock or no Wedlock,” 17 September 1888, Hindoo Patriot, 449. In the article, the writer even talks of how incompatible marriages can end with “the use of the dao (chopper) and axe” and that “in the higher walks of life there may not be the same frequent resort to instruments of torture of destruction; but the mental suffering is all the same.” And yet the writer insists that such suffering has little to do with marriages being non-consensual despite what Rukma’s case might suggest.
- 4.
“Stree Shikkhhaa” Anusandhaan, pp. 424–427. Such was the power of the idealized image of the Hindu wife who would quietly suffer continual spousal abuse rather than protest, that even a gender-sensitive writer like Tagore in his political novel Ghare Baire (1914) represents his introspective, liberal protagonist Nikhilesh lauding the “purity” of his cousin Munu who passively endured her drunk husband’s beatings everyday. It is true that Nikhilesh’s wife Bimala writhes in anger while writing about the spousal cruelty. “When my sister in law Munu’s husband would beat her up in a drunken frenzy and later howl in regret and vow never to touch alcohol again only to sit down again with his drink the next evening––my entire being would burn with hatred.” Cited in Saswati Sengupta, “Goddesses, Women and the Clutch of Metaphors in Ghare Baire” in Towards Freedom: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire, ed. Saswati Sengupta, et al. (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), 91. But since the text privileges Nikhilesh’s calm reflections over Bimala’s impassioned responses to most things, Munu remains a discomfiting sign of the how it is women’s vulnerability and silence that are constructed as making them more attractive than their empowerment.
- 5.
In this I extend the argument made by Padma Anagol who in her examining of the criminalizing of infanticide sees “impersonal” colonial law as having uniformly left Indian women exposed and vulnerable without the benefits of the “flexibility” of traditional institutions. In the cases that I examine it is the impersonal nature of the colonial law that compels the darogas to investigate to a full extent the suspicious deaths of women within bhadralok homes that then opens up a pandora’s box of related issues of guilt (Padma Anagol, “The Emergence of the Female criminal in India: Infanticide and Survival under the Raj” History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 73).
- 6.
In fact Bengalis “till well into the twentieth century referred to their city residence as basha, reserving the more intimate bari for the ancestral village home.” See Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History, 176. The more Sanskritized griha was largely used in writings that essentialized the Hindu home in order to deploy it for arguments related to cultural identity and nation.
- 7.
“Unlike the landless peasant or the poor cultivator, the bulk of persons who migrated (to Calcutta) were those who had some small petty landholdings in their villages and who moved to the city in search of kerani/clerical jobs. Needless to say this section also comprised the upper castes as their social power in the villages would enable them to avail the opportunities in the city. The census figures of 1891 show that “one third of the shopkeepers, a tenth of the schoolteachers, one fourth of the doctors, pleaders and lawyers and one sixth of the clerks had some interest in land, generally as intermediate tenants.” See Sharmila Purkayastha, “Contesting Modernities: the Two Men in Ghare Baire” in Towards Freedom, 122.
- 8.
“We are a colonized race,” the Daroga says to his readers ruefully, “We have no choice but to obey orders.” Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, GirijaSundari, Darogar Daftar Vols. I & II (Kolkata: Punashcha, 2004) vol. I, 220.
- 9.
The word chaakri “by the late nineteenth century had come to signify all that was demeaning and oppressive in colonial bhadralok life.” See Sarkar, Writing Social History, 176.
- 10.
Reductive stereotypes about female charitra (character) shape the deductive reasoning that is displayed during the investigative process as well. In a case involving the investigation of an unidentified woman’s murdered corpse in a zamindar’s holiday home the daroga describes his initial response to the sight of the corpse with these words: “If the murder had either been committed by Bijoy babu or with his knowledge, then the reasons for the crime are not robbery but the character of the woman or something related to it.” Adbhhut Hatya (Strange Murder) 25.
- 11.
Despite all his agonizing over the appropriateness of writing of domestic crimes within bhadra homes, it is, however, only the cases of violence related to female sexual infractions in upper-caste/class households that are the obsessive focus of the daroga’s writing.
- 12.
Elopement by a woman signalling her decision to step outside the kula led to her severing all hopes of ever returning to her natal home since both her family as well as the larger community to which the family perceived itself as belonging would not allow her to re-enter the fold. For a widowed young woman to take such a step would have been considered an even greater sin.
- 13.
Under the IPC, 1860 “Whoever kidnaps or abducts any woman with intent that she may be compelled to marry any person against her will or in order that she may be forced or seduced to illicit intercourse or knowing it to be likely she may be forced or seduced to illicit intercourse, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 10 years and shall also be liable to fine.”
- 14.
Sections 494–98 of the IPC were listed under the category titled “Offences relating to Marriages.” According to section 498, “whoever takes or entices a woman who is, or whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of any other man or from any person having the care of her, with intent that she may be induced into sexual intercourse with any person or conceals or detains with that intent any such woman shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 2 years or with fine or both” (IPC, 1860). Women are therefore read entirely in terms of being passive objects of male protection/invidious actions who are “in the care of “ families from whence she can be “enticed away” and “induced” into sexual intercourse. Contemporary official judicial reports of such “offences” however belied such assumptions for they talked of women who had “run away” from their lovers or husbands. (See Resolution on the Report on the Administration of the Police dept. from the year 1885, reprinted from pages 2242–2262 of the supplement of the Calcutta Gazette, 17 November 1886.) The report also talks of how “Hindu husbands of good caste are not too ready to institute prosecutions which cover them with shame and often cause their degradations of caste. The fact that adulterers are often charged with lurking house trespass with intent to commit theft and that the native police sent up the cases as theft though their investigations must have made them aware of the real facts, show the direction in which native feelings and sympathies lie.”
- 15.
In one of his case accounts (titled Kencho Khhuritey Shaap: Kulotaar Budhhi—Paap er bhhishon porinam (A Snake found while digging for a Worm: The Deviousness of a Fallen Woman—the Terrible Wages of Sin)). Munshi Bankaullah talks of chancing upon a pair of robbers and con artists who he soon discovers had eloped together many years ago. The woman Premada had been a Brahmin widow and she had forfeited her kula to escape with her lover Harish and was keen to preserve the alternative familial arrangement that she had created with Harish and his aunt. Daroga Bankaullah however triumphantly records the manner in which he convinces them to surrender themselves for their crimes (including that of “abduction” for Harish) with the assurance that their punishment would be deportation to a penal colony where they can live happily together, and ends the narrative by informing his readers that the court in fact punished them in a manner that led to their separation for the rest of their lives. See Bankaullahr Daftar, 98–109.
- 16.
In yet another stunningly spectacular case of female intrepidity, a young kulin Brahmin girl, it was reported, had not only arranged her own match but had then gone ahead and married the young man of her choice. “A few days ago a strange wedding took place in the village of Habibpur. In that village lives a kulin Brahmin called Bhoboshonkor Bhattacharya with a young daughter called Giribala. Bhoboshankar would brag to his neighbours that he would marry his daughter to a Kulin Brahmin. But he had secretly planned to marry her to a rich man, hoping to ensure a comfortable life for himself in his old age…(Realizing her father’s motives). Soon the girl began to look for a groom for herself. She then decided she wanted to marry her neighbour, a young man called Dinanath Bhattacharya and she even got some acquaintances to convey her wishes to her father. The father instead of giving a proper answer simply said, “We will decide the matter in the next few months.” Giribala then eloped with the young man last week and sought shelter in her father’s cousin’s house in a distant village called Birnagar. Her father’s cousin arranged the wedding immediately…Meanwhile the father of the bride has gone to the police saying that Dinanath and his family had lured his daughter into running away with him (at present the girl and her husband have been arrested and are awaiting trial at a Sessions court) (1871, ABP, vol. 4, issue 39, 21st Dec, p. 7). In another bold case of elopement, a young girl Janaki was reported to have eloped with a pundit when she heard that her husband had taken a second wife. “This annoyed Janki so much that she married the pundit.” Janki was then arrested and punished for bigamy (Hindoo Patriot, 17 December 1894: 2).
- 17.
Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, Kubudhhi, Darogar Daftar, vol 2, 333.
- 18.
The rhetoric of olpobudhhi (dim-wittedness) here seems to echo that of the colonial government which in its earlier regulation about enticement/elopement/adultery had stated that the woman in such cases had to be treated as a “deluded object” incapable of determining her own interests. See Radhika Singha, Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: OUP, 1998), 140.
- 19.
Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 44.
- 20.
“Bodies (corpses) are never neutral” according to Gil Plain, for “they inevitably bear the inscriptions of their cultural production-socially determined markers of gender, race, sexuality and class that profoundly influence the ways in which they are read by witnesses, police, detectives and readers.” Plain also calls them “corpse as texts” that offer readings of the crime. See Gill Plain, Twentieth Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Chicago, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), 12–13. In the case of upper caste Hindu women the physical location of the corpse can also become significant in reaching conclusions about her charitra (character). Thus Daroga Bankaullah describing what he deducted while examining the body of an upper-class Hindu woman called Bidhhumukhi lying in the garden outside her house, talks of getting a glimpse of her charitra.” It was Bidhumukhi’s character that we regarded with some suspicion. For why, if she was not a woman of questionable morals, would she be lying there in that manner?” See “Haathkata Harish” in Bankaullah r Daftar, 30.
- 21.
Mukhopadhyay, “Aasmani Laash,” (The Mid-Air Corpse) Darogar Daftar, vol. I, 63.
- 22.
Besides being arrested in a manner that was humiliating and degrading, women of non-bhadra classes were also subjected to other kinds of oppressive behaviour by the police. In a case reported in the newspaper ABP “a Baishnab of Saltora has complained to the District Magistrate of Bankura to the effect that a police officer attached to the Saltora outpost came to his house one night and outraged the modesty of his sister. On being remonstrated with by the complainant, the officer is reported to have said that the police had every authority and power to do whatever they liked” (ABP, 13 February 1898).
- 23.
Resolution on the report on the administration of the police department for the year 1885 (reprinted from pages 2242–2262 of the supplement of the Calcutta gazette dated 17th Nov 1886) cited in Judicial Proceedings, 1893, p 107: The figures under the head “offences relating to marriages” indicate that different magistrates must have very different views regarding these prosecutions. There were 3434 cases of which 2096 were processed. Only 1609 persons appeared before court of whom 428 were discharged after appearance, 859 acquitted and only 24 convicted…The magistracy cannot exercise too great a caution in taking up and dealing with these cases. But the above figures indicate in many cases an unwillingness or even a refusal to administer the law as it stands. No doubt false charges are often instituted by men whose concubines have run away from them, but as evidence of reputation (Evidence Act Section 50) is excluded in prosecutions under sections 494-498 of the Penal Code and the fact of marriage has to be strictly proved, the falsity of such charges is easily detected. Hindu husbands of good caste are not by any means too ready to institute prosecutions which cover them with shame and often cause their degradation from caste.
- 24.
In a similar case filed in the 1889 Calcutta Case reports, one Koilash Chakraborty accused in a case of criminal trespass with intention of robbery claimed that he had visited the house since he was involved in a secret liaison with a young widow Bhaba Sundari staying in that house. Since the Courts found there was “no grounds for the aspersions cast on the character of Bhaba Sundari” the prisoner’s clam that “he had interfered with the amours of the young widow” was proved false and he was therefore found guilty under section 441 of criminal trespass (16C 657. Criminal Revision, Before Mr Justice Prinsep and Mr Justice Hill/ In the matter of the Petition of Koilash Chandra Chakraborty vs. The Queen Empress (20th May 1889)). The Indian Decisions (New Series): being a Reprint of all The Decisions of the Privy Councul on Appeals from India, Calcutta, vol. VIII, (1889–1890), Indian Law Reports, 16 & 17 Calcutta (Madras: Row and Row, 1914) 434-6.
- 25.
See K. Carrington, “Feminism and Critical Criminology: Confronting Genealogies” in K. Carrington and R. Hogg eds., Critical Criminology: Issues, Debates, Challenges (Cullompton: Willan, 2002) cited in Karen Evans and Janet Jamieson eds, Gender and Crime: A Reader (New York: McGraw Hill, Open University Press, 2008), xx.
- 26.
Even in one of the first women’s fictions to be published in Bangla, Manottama (1866), the eponymous female protagonist Manottama’s admirable heroism is tied to her stoic ability to endure spousal abuse in an uncomplaining manner despite being educated. A young and educated girl Manottama is forced into a disastrous marriage to a much older, illiterate and aggressive man who feels threatened by her. All her attempts at reasoning with him are met with vicious verbal abuse and kicks. Yet even though the narrative talks of her perpetual state of melancholy, it also extols her passivity in the face of the continued violence. “Does the thing that is sweet in its essential nature, discard its sweetness despite being repeatedly battered by men? Does the sweet nature of sugarcane become distorted when its cut into several pieces by us? Does sandalwood lose its fragrance when its ground into a paste? Just as these things are simply not possible, similarly it would be impossible for Manottama to discard her virtuous and devout nature despite all her education. If that had not been the case she would never have silently borne Neelbrata’s (her husband) verbal abuse and repeated kicks.” Virtuous femininity is thus made synonymous with acceptance of spousal violence since any form of protest is represented as being kulokolonkito kora (disgracing the kula). Manottama: Hindu Kul Kamini pronito (Written by a respectable Hindu woman, first pub. 1868), edited and introduced by Adrish Biswas (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers 2011), 83–84.
- 27.
Interestingly in the same year that this account was published (1894) Tagore’s fascinatingly dark short story Shaasti (Punishment) about spousal murder(s) was also published. A highly complex story that deploys crime and the legal procedures that follow, in order to examine familial and conjugal relations, it is about two brothers and their wives in a village, and begins with one of them (Dukhi) killing his wife in a fit of sudden rage. Subsequently his brother Khadim who has a turbulent (though not loveless) relationship with his own wife, Chandara decides to frame the latter for the murder. He thinks to himself, “Bou gele bou paabo” (I can get another wife even if this one goes).” The remaining story is about Chandara’s shock at her husband’s decision and subsequently her cold determination to go through with the death sentence born of overwhelming bitterness and sense of hurt. By the end of the story even as Khadim writhes in guilt, Chandara remains unmoved. And the final word she utters when the prison officer tells her that her husband had come to see her is the near untranslatable “Maran!” I am grateful to Prof. Shirshendu Chakrabarti for reminding me of this short story by Tagore about spousal murder.
- 28.
Clearly the keenness to “rescue brown women from brown men” once abandoned was replaced by a stout refusal to offer legal support to women who would not suffer and be still. Thus even in this case in the typically cautious and status quoist manner favoured by the colonial government when it came to gender-related legal decisions, the judges asseverated, “Although we entertain no doubt that as a matter of law, a suit for restitution of conjugal rights may be maintained by a Hindu in this country we are not at all prepared to say, that the same state of circumstances which would justify such a suit or which would be an answer to such a suit in the case of an European would be equally so in the case of a Hindu. The habits and customs of the native community, especially as regards the marriage state are so different from ours that we think in such a matter as a suit for the restitution of conjugal rights the Hindu and the European cannot always be fairly judged by the same rules.”
- 29.
Hurrydoss vs Jogendrranundini etc. Even though the judges aver that they feel compelled to judge such cases of cruelty differently from the ones that are tried in Europe/England, the fact is that spousal cruelty drew very similar responses from judges in England. Over the latter half of the nineteenth-century, judges in England did however begin to view complaints of lifelong persecution by wives with some sympathy. (A. James Hammerton, Victorian Marriage and the Law of Matrimonial Cruelty, Victorian studies, vol. 33, no. 2 (winter 1990, 269–292)). A more sympathetic attitude is reflected in the verdict of the High court in the case of Matangini Dassi Vs. Jogendra Chundra Mullick in 1891 in which a suit of maintenance was brought against the defendant Jogendrunath by his wife Matangini who had decided to live in her natal house in order to escape her husband’s unrelenting abuse. Overturning the judgement of the Lower court that refused to grant Matangini the right to live separately from her abusive husband or demand maintenance from him, the High court in its ruling both upheld the Hindu husband’s law-ordained right to demand veneration and obedience from his wife but also asserted that this was an exceptional situation: “The Hindu Law, while it enjoins upon the wife the duty of attendance on, obedience to and veneration for the husband inculcates that the husband must honour the wife…The husband is no doubt entitled to restrain the liberty of the wife and she is bound to refrain from going to any place where her husband forbids her to go…But it is nowhere laid down that the wife is bound to live with a husband who habitually treats her with cruelty” (Matangini Dassi and Anr. Vs. Jogendra Chunder Mullick and Ors on 28th July 1891, Calcutta High court, Bench, Tottenham and Ghose).
- 30.
Swati Chattopadhyay talks of Elokeshi’s deceased body as “appearing as evidence of several transgressions in court. It is through the constant reference to these bodily functions that the legal proceedings can continue.” See Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 235.
- 31.
Contemporary accounts about babus who had become enthralled by prostitutes and been consequently reduced to penury, abounded in journals. The crimes that they then attempt to commit are tied to the insatiable appetite for wealth of their wily mistresses. More often than not the latter are also contrasted to the obhhaagini Hindu kul er kul naari (unfortunate, upper-class/caste Hindu women) who despite being battered, humiliated and robbed of their stridhhan by her husband, are idealized for making determined efforts to appease their husbands (see for instance “Opoorbo Puroshkaar” (Wonderful Reward), 29th March 1890, 347).
- 32.
“The resplendent anthropomorphic icon of the mother goddess Durga during the modern festival of Durga pooja—aggressively visibilised the contradiction where the female icon hypostatised in the act of driving the trident into the male asura is still a mother as she is flanked by her four children with a benign husband…the myth of sati had traditionally been pressed into the service of domesticating the militant mother goddess.” Saswati Sengupta, Towards Freedom, 87.
- 33.
Even though contemporary writings did at times carry representations of friendship between the porichaarika (the domestic worker who remained attached to a wealthy household, rather than the jhhii who would work in several houses in the city and return to her own house) and her female employer, more often than not, it would be suggested through the course of the writing, that the bond was actually merely a subterfuge for each to exploit the other for selfish, even nefarious purposes. In a farce meant to vilify the educated nobeena titled Bou-Babu (Bride Babu), the female protagonist Malati who persecutes her parents-in-law in her husband’s absence is shown as saying to her maid that she (the maid) is her only real friend. “Please stay with me for a while.” Malati importunes the maid, “There’s not a single person in this house with whom I can sit and talk. Ever since he (my husband) has gone abroad, I have not found anyone, be it at night or day, with whom I can share my thoughts and feelings. You are my maid but you are also my companion! Who will I unburden myself to, if not to you?” See Bou-Babu in Hardikbrata Biswas ed. and collected, Prahashan e Kalikal er Bangamahila (The Bengali Women of Modern and Corrupt Times in Farces, 1860–1909) (Kolkata: Charchapada, 2011), 254.
- 34.
In the proliferating popular fictions of the late nineteenth century the figure of the female domestic worker would often be deployed (by bhadralok writers, needless to say) as a censorious voice, sanctimoniously condemning the shocking absence of moral standards in upper-class antahpurs. In Kaliprasanna Chttopadhyay’s, Sansar Sarvari o Bhavasagar er Guptakatha, Haridasi the protagonist who works in the houses of several babus as a maid declares scathingly, “I was horrified to see the things that went on in that house! They were the kinds of things that one would normally shut one’s ears to being described; they were things for which there are no purification rituals prescribed by our shastras. And yet these people were living amongst us and doing all this with great nonchalance. Everyone around them knows what they are up to but they are aristocratic people with money and hence nobody dares to utter a word” (Biswas & Acharya, Bangalir Battala, 212–213). Haridasi’s remarks also associate the moral delinquency of her upper class employers with brazenness that comes with class-related privileges. A voice like Girija’s so full of empathetic understanding for her employer’s young daughter based on their shared gendered experience of the pains of Hindu widowhood thus disrupts this stereotype.
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Roy, S. (2017). Wanton Wives and Widows: Offending Female Bodies in the Daroga Accounts of Priyanath Mukhopadhyay. In: Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives. Palgrave Advances in Criminology and Criminal Justice in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51598-8_3
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