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John Matthai's Study of Village Police in Pre Independent India

John Matthai, India's first Railway Minister (and later Finance Minister), did his Ph.D from London School of Economics and Political Science on the topic Village Government in British India. This is a summary of the Chapter Watch and Ward from the thesis. It covers not only the rural policing in British India but provides a small yet impressive survey of village police in India from ancient times.


In the ancient village community, the headman directed the watch and ward. His chief executive assistant was the village watchman β€” practically his personal servant, typically from a menial caste, often given to criminal habits, living on the village outskirts, and combining police with sanitary duties. He was responsible, under the headman's supervision, not merely for discovering lost property but for replacing its value when it was not found. In the joint landholding communities of Upper India, this responsibility was shared collectively among the landowners. Villages were everywhere held jointly responsible for offences within their limits, with penalties mutually apportioned (Matthai draws a parallel with the practices existed in the later Saxon English townships, citing Vinogradoff's The Growth of the Manor). On a serious theft, the watchman, aided by villagers, pursued the thief by trail until he was traced to an adjacent village, when responsibility shifted there β€” in effect a "hue and cry."

Elphinstone's account of the Maratha country narrates the watchman's duties: night watch, reporting strangers, knowing each villager's character, detecting thieves, and tracking by footsteps. He was paid partly in a grain share, per house. A watchman who failed to restore lost property had to make up its value, the indemnity being limited by his means, with the remainder levied on the village. Refusal to pay risked transfer of his assigned land to a relative, a fine, imprisonment, or corporal punishment. Remuneration came from grain-fees, perquisites, and land endowments (an 1858 Madras Commission cited nine cases of ancient grants).

Above the village ran a rough hierarchy: officers over groups of villages with armed followers, then district officers, then the provincial governor. The intermediate ranks were the weak link:

The Palegars and the Fee System

The Palegars, the old police chieftains of Madras Presidency had two capacities β€” district watchers and village watchers β€” with two corresponding fees: Desha Kaval (district) and Stallum Kaval (village). The village fee was really the community's contribution for its own watchmen, but the Palegars' retainers drove them out of occupation: in Tinnevelly's 2,000 villages, only 477 still had watchmen of the ancient communal type in 1799 β€” and even these kept their places only on condition of sharing their emoluments. The district fee was sometimes the king's gift, but often extorted from defenceless villagers β€” paid partly against roving plunderers and partly to stop the Palegars themselves from plundering. Collection (in money, grain, ploughs, cattle, and other articles) was by armed peons, unregulated, depending "on the conscience of the Palegar," and "sometimes enforced by torture and the whip," with whole villages confined and every occupation interdicted.

The β€œPrivate Police" System

The antecedents about this are ancient: the Arthashastra lists wild tribes (Aranyachara) among those who may protect the kingdom's interior, and a fourteenth-century South Indian inscription records a village assembly selling the right of Padikkaval β€” village-guarding β€” often in essence payment "for kindly desisting from robbery."Villagers engaging robber chieftains for protection was, the author says, part of an extensive system of "private police," prevailing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amid a universal breakdown of governments and dynasties. The Palegars were no different in method or origin from the Marathas, the Pindaris, and the Thugs. Surviving forms included the Kallars and Maravars of Madura and Tinnevelly with their Tuppu-Kuli and Kudikaval arrangements, the Gujars and Jats with the Languri in the United Provinces, the Ramosis in Bombay, the Pyan-pe in Burma, and Bunga cash gratuities in the Punjab. Pre-British policing thus had two branches: the village watch against offences within, and the private guard against danger from without.

The Kallars

Vincent Smith suggested the Kallars may be kin to the Pallavas; their plunder-and-tribute methods paralleled the celebrated Maratha Chauth. Kallars even fought alongside the Maratha general Raghoji Bhonsla at Trichinopoly, and profited from Haidar Ali's 1781 invasion. Their arrangements were two-sided: Kudikaval (the joint village watch, preventive) and Tuppu-Kuli ("clue-hire," restoration and compensation β€” "police and insurance" combined), usually tied to cattle theft, cattle being the most valuable movable property. Agreements were often written, with witnesses, the parties represented by agents. Tanjore fees were moderate β€” 4 to 8 annas, sometimes a rupee a year per pair of bulls; villages that resisted suffered surreptitious looting: burned crops and stolen bullocks. Popular resistance was rare β€” the exception being the Madura revolt of 1896–7 against the Kallars, with oaths sworn on ploughs, compensation funds, night patrols with horns, and fines for non-turnout β€” but it achieved no permanent result. Real improvement came from the regular police (special parties, security proceedings against gang leaders, registration of cattle sales, branding) plus attempted reform through rice cultivation and co-operative credit societies.

British Policy towards the Village Watch

A long line of British authority upheld the village watch: Lord Hastings in 1815 called it the foundation of all possible police; Munro's Minute of 1824 opposed absorbing it into the regular force; the Bombay Administration Report of 1882–3 called it the real backbone of the detective police; and the Fraser Police Commission of 1902–3 agreed.

Bengal was the exception β€” there the watchman had degenerated into the zemindar's servant. Under Mughal rule, then the Company after Clive's 1765 Diwani, and formally under Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement of 1793 (which transferred watchmen to the darogahs), the zemindar's grip persisted: the watchman was "by law under regular police, in practice the zemindar's man." Eastern Bengal watchmen were modern creations, as Regulation XX of 1817 confirmed when it vindicated the district officers. The test of the office β€” old land-assignment pay versus new cash payment β€” was settled by the Privy Council in Joykissen Mookherjee's Case: partly public, partly personal service. Earlier reform attempts (Ricketts 1859, Hobhouse 1863, Macneile 1866) all failed until the Bengal Chaukidari Act of 1870, the "municipalization" of the village watch: a magistrate-nominated panchayat fixed salaries and numbers, assessed the funds, and appointed and dismissed watchmen, with fines, distraint, and Lieutenant-Governor's rules as checks. Complaints followed (Bengal Police Committee 1891): wages rose only through magistrates, compulsory panchayat service was unpopular, the best men were excluded, and assessments were unfair. Amendments in 1886 (collection by paid agency, the magistrate appointing and punishing watchmen, cash salaries, a Village Watchmen's Fund) and 1892 (magistrate fixing numbers and salaries, elected panchayats β€” "difficult to say the change has proved a success") completed a five-stage evolution.

The System Prevailed in Early Twentieth Century

Everywhere there were three organs: headman, watchman, and village body. The headman was police head of the village everywhere except Bengal, with duties under section 45 of the Criminal Procedure Code; Munro had defended the union of revenue and police functions in one officer. Madras: Munro's Regulation of 1816 kept the watch intact; the Village Beat System was later abolished; defects were illiteracy, local quarrels, and alliances with criminal tribes. Bombay: District Magistrate control from 1852, the Village Police Act of 1867, the police patel, with improvements recommended by the 1902–3 Commission; Sind had no village police at all β€” landowners assisted, with pagis (trackers) paid ten or five rupees a month, per Frere's 1859 memo. The United Provinces had lambardars and mukhiyas; the Punjab ala-lambardars, zaildars, and inamdars; the Central Provinces mukaddams and patels. Remuneration by land or grain fees versus cash was debated β€” the Commission favoured the former. Deliberate policy kept watchmen out of subordination to the regular police (Sir Murray Hammick was the advocate); the spread of badges, staves, and talayari meetings was discountenanced.

Community Responsibility and Spontaneous Organization

Joint-responsibility fines operated in Burma, the Punjab, and Sind; rewards supplemented them; and in the Punjab the "Dua Khair" combination was used against police oaths.

Tikri Chaukidari, Amritsar, 1897: the names of all adult males, irrespective of caste or position, were written on scraps of paper (tikri) and dropped into locked receptacles; daily, names were drawn at hazard to select the nightly watchmen, to whom cudgels (lathis), the batons of office, were sent. Those who had done a night's watch were exempt until all had taken their turn. The system later declined almost to abeyance; Sir J. M. Douie argued for legalizing it, observing that watch and ward is "the proper task of the young unmarried men" β€” married men of the landowning classes could hardly be expected to serve.

Central Provinces, 1883: an anti-dacoit scheme β€” lists of all able-bodied men, an alarm sounded on the dacoits' approach, mass defence at a prearranged point, and red paper discs issued to headmen, on whose backs intelligence of the dacoits' movements was relayed from village to village, each turning out en masse to watch.

Bombay, 1899, during prolonged agricultural scarcity: village police and patels, with willing villagers, spent the nights β€” particularly the dark half of the month β€” in the chavadis with slings, stones, and sticks handy, ready to give dacoits a warm reception; the Inspector-General reported the effect on the crime returns "extremely encouraging."

Baluchistan: Sir Robert Sandeman's levy system β€” a small number of tribal horsemen taken into government service, later extended by headmen's allowances for maintaining a certain number of armed horse and foot, by whose means they kept order in their tribes and produced offenders when crime occurred.