[Illustration: INDIAN POLICE AND THEIR METHODS (p. 316).]
It may be interesting to make a short digression here and recount some of the modes of extra-judicial torture that have prevailed throughout India. There is abundant evidence that this atrocious custom was, and probably still is, common among all sects and classes of natives in India. Dr. Cheevers gives it as his opinion that "the poor practise torture upon each other; robbers on their victims, and _vice versâ_; masters upon their servants; _zemindars_ upon their ryots; schoolmasters upon their pupils; husbands upon their wives; and even parents upon their children." "The very plays of the populace," says another authority, "excite the laughter of many a rural audience by the exhibition of revenue squeezed out of a defaulter coin by coin through the appliance of familiar provocatives." Colonel Lewin, already quoted, details some of the devices which he discovered had been in use among the old police. They would fill the nose and ears of a prisoner with cayenne pepper; stop the circulation of the blood with tight ligaments; suspend their victim head downwards in a well; and in cases of great obstinacy immerse the body repeatedly in the water until insensibility, but not death, was produced.
Dr. Cheevers has been at great pains to collect details of the various processes. They are torture by heat--by a lighted torch or red hot charcoal or burning tongs, or by boiling oil, which sometimes was poured into the ears and nose; torture by cold; suspension by the wrists, by the feet, by the hair, by the moustache; confinement in a cell containing quicklime; blinding by the _bhela_ nut; placing on a bed of thorns; rubbing the face on the ground; employing the stocks; tying the limbs in constrained postures; placing stinging or annoying insects upon the skin; flogging with stinging nettles; sticking pins or thorns or slithers of bamboo under the nails; beating the ankles and other joints with a soft mallet--a devilish invention from Madras. The list is long and horrible, but before leaving the subject we may mention milder methods, as they seem, because the ill-treatment leaves no mark, but in which the agony is nevertheless extreme. Exposure to the sun is one of these, starvation another, pinching a third, and "running up and down" a fourth, as practised in Madras till quite recently, according to a report under date 1870, where the police, unable to obtain evidence, made it their business to "walk the prisoner about." This was not done, as was pretended, out of mere wantonness, but with the ostensible purpose of obliging him to show where certain stolen property was hidden. The police relieved each other every two hours or so, but the prisoners were kept perpetually in motion. After a night's unceasing promenade the craving for rest and sleep becomes imperative, especially in a native who is always ready to sleep, and is often awake for no more than eight hours out of the twenty-four. Other refinements of torture are the infliction of degradation and mental suffering by breaking caste, and by exposing the victims to various indignities.