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Sir Penderel Moon, The British
Conquest and Dominion of India, pub. Duckworth 1989/1990 |
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P9 The gradual extension of Pax Britannica throughout the country
saved them from depredations by military marauders; but they began to fall
victims to scarcely less voracious sharks, the lawyer and the moneylender,
ytwqo unfortunate concomitants of British rule, and from these the British
were never able to rescue them. P425 It is said that when Lake was advancing on Agra, the
populace fled in terror, not of a brutal and licentious soldiery, but of the
dreaded High Court that was thought to accompany him. Lord Hastings, after his tour through the Upper
Provinces, became very conscious that the English legal paraphernalia
introduced by Cornwallis was unpopular and inappropriate. He wrote in his
Private Journal: Nothing can more strongly mark the prematurity of our attempt to force upon the Indian population our judicial system than the abhorrence which every man of family among the natives entertains against being summoned, even as a witness, into one of our courts. On this account, it is almost impossible to obtain the testimony of any of them in criminal cases, where they have been present at the perpretration of the act …. With the lower classes the system is equally unpopular. The security which they enjoy in person and property is duly estimated by them; but that they refer entirely to the principles of Government. The inconvenience, the expense, and the delay which they experience in our civil proceedings, make them unreservedly lament that they are not subjected to military decision. Yet despite the general condemnation of the [East India]
Company’s courts and legal systems, they continued substantially unaltered.
…. . P623 …. But the Board soon felt it necessary to introduce
some simplified rules of its own and it was not very long before both the
spirit and the letter of regular British codes and procedures prevailed, with
the inevitable result, in a society unsuited to them, that Courts of justice
were perverted into unjust Courts of law. …. The burning of widows and the burying alive of lepers
were effectively checked, but among some sections of the population female
infanticide persisted to some extent unchecked until the last years of
British rule. P663 …. Sleeman …. Thought that most people in Oudh wanted to
be brought under the [East India] Company’s rule – though he admitted they dreaded
the British Courts of law which were ‘our weak
point in the estimation of our subjects’. …. …. British rule brought benefits …. These benefits were
in course of time to some extent offset by the subjection of the peasantry to
exploitration by moneylender and lawyer. P797 A radical reform of the courts of law was a second
proposal put forward in the hope of making the British Raj more attractive to
the mass of the people. For years ‘the complicated, vexatious, and costly
proceedings in our courts’, as Canning put it, had been denounced by British
officials and been a cause of much popular discontent. |
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