Charles Forjett[60], who was appointed Superintendent of Police in 1855, was of Eurasian (now styled Anglo-Indian) parentage and was brought up in India. His father was an officer of the old Madras Fort Artillery and had been wounded at the capture of Seringapatam in 1799. In _Our Real Danger in India_, which he published in 1877, some few years after his retirement, Forjett states that he served the Bombay Government for forty years, first as a topographical surveyor and then successively as official translator in Marathi and Hindustani, Sheriff, head of the Poona police, subordinate and chief uncovenanted assistant judge, superintendent of police in the Southern Maratha Country, and finally as Commissioner of Police, Bombay. He first earned the favourable notice of the Bombay Government by his reform and reorganization of the police in the Belgaum division of the Southern Maratha Country; and there is probably considerable justification for his own statement that the peace and security of the southern districts of the Presidency during the period of the Mutiny were chiefly due to his constructive work in this direction.
He owed his later success as a police-officer to three main factors, namely his great linguistic faculty, his wide knowledge of Indian caste-customs and habits, and his masterly capacity for assuming native disguises. Born and bred in India, he had learnt the vernaculars of the Bombay Presidency in his youth, and had been familiar from his earliest years with those subtle differences of belief and custom which the average home-bred Englishman knows nothing about and can never master. His black hair and sallow complexion—in brief, the strong “strain of the country” in his blood—enabled him, when disguised, to pass among natives of India as one of themselves. A story is told to illustrate his powers of disguise. He once told the Governor, Lord Elphinstone, that in spite of special orders prohibiting the entrance of any one and in defiance of the strongest military cordon that His Excellency could muster, he would effect his entrance to Government House, Parel, and appear at the Governor’s bedside at 6 a.m. Lord Elphinstone challenged him to fulfil his boast and took every precaution to prevent his ingress. Nevertheless Forjett duly appeared the following morning in the Governor’s bedroom—in the disguise of a _mehtar_ (sweeper). With these special qualifications for police work were combined a strong will and great personal courage.