Some horrible stories are preserved of the ruthless administration of poison by the Mohammedan sovereigns in India. Thus Tavernier, the French traveller in the seventeenth century, says of the great state prison of Gwalior that the emperor Aurungzeb was so sensitive lest he should be stigmatised as a cruel prince he never suffered any great subject to survive long in prison; at the end of the ninth or tenth day the captive was removed by poison. No doubt Hyder Ali poisoned a number of his English prisoners, and the inhuman murder of General Mathews by Tippoo Sing is told by James Bristowe, who suffered a long captivity under the same merciless monarch. The general was poisoned under the most abominable circumstances. He was starving himself to death rather than partake of the food issued to him, which he had discovered contained poison. He studiously abstained from food for several days until at length, tortured by overmastering hunger, he devoured a plate of poisoned victuals and expired a few hours later in violent convulsions. Another officer, Captain Romley, who saw himself constrained to swallow poison, preferred to commit suicide by some other means. Yet again, Lieutenant Fraser had poison forcibly poured down his throat.

The traditions of the native states as to poisoning were preserved in at least one till a late date in the last century. In Baroda, a Rajput ruler, the Gaekwar Mulhar Rao, was the centre of a nest of criminal intrigue rivalling anything in the past, as great a miscreant as any one in his depraved court and more guilty than any of his subjects in the use of his despotic power. Crime was the very breath of his princely house; its members hated one another with bitter animosity; assassination, largely by secret poisoning, was the chief avenue to the throne, but all kinds of flagitious means were employed to secure succession; charges backed by elaborate perjury were as often used to upset a rival aspirant, as powdered arsenic or diamond dust to remove him permanently to another sphere.

In the generation to which Mulhar Rao belonged, violent deaths had constantly paved the way to the throne. One of five sons reigned in 1847. Two of his brothers died suddenly, and the prince himself a few years later. He was succeeded by the fourth brother, Khander Rao, whom the fifth, Mulhar Rao, at once attempted to poison, but he was detected and taken into custody. Then Khander Rao sought to protect himself by appealing to sorcery and black arts, and finding no certain security, consulted a Brahmin who strongly recommended human sacrifices. Whereupon Khander Rao selected thirty-five prisoners in his gaol of Baroda, whom he ordered for execution at the rate of five daily. Twenty-five had suffered before the butchery ceased. Mulhar Rao still lived, and recourse was had to simpler methods; his cook was suborned and provided with powdered arsenic, the most commonly tried drug, but the poison failed in effect because, although the noxious food was consumed, remedies were applied in time.

False testimony was next adduced, and Mulhar Rao was accused by perjured witnesses of plotting to have his brother Khander Rao shot by a European soldier, and on this flimsy pretence he was closely confined in the prison of Cadra. He had sympathisers and they soon felt the weight of Khander Rao’s hand. Four of them were seized, accused of holding secret communication with the prisoner, and sentenced to various forms of capital punishment. One was hanged, another beheaded, a third blown from the mouth of a gun and the fourth was thrown under the feet of an elephant to be trodden to death. Suddenly Khander Rao himself died, not without suspicion of foul play, and Mulhar Rao walked straight from the gaol to the throne, where he was soon to emulate the misdeeds of his predecessors.

The new Gaekwar had no claims upon the regard of his subjects. Almost wholly uneducated and with no mental gifts, he failed to inspire respect or devotion. He was not without astuteness, but was obstinate as a mule and fierce as a tiger. His person was unattractive; he was undersized, of mean appearance, with a coarse, swarthy complexion; he squinted, and from his large sensual lips black teeth protruded savagely. Unlike his brother Khander Rao, he had no taste for field sports, and he had converted the race course at Baroda into a carriage drive for the ladies of his zenana.

Mulhar Rao’s private life was desperately evil. In his early years he was often thought to be mad on account of his passionate and ungovernable temper. Even as a child he committed crimes, impelled by fierce hatred and lust for revenge. His youth was made up of poisonings and attempts to poison. When he came to power he destroyed his enemies, real or fancied, wholesale. His gaolers collected victims in a row, and one by one poison was poured forcibly down their throats. One of those he most cordially detested was offered poisonous pills, and when he refused to swallow them he was despatched in a more expeditious fashion by being squeezed to death in a special machine. This man’s chief crime was that he had been a creature of Khander Rao’s.

The new Gaekwar’s victims were so numerous that it was a current phrase in the city, “Has he killed many to-day?” He spared no man in his anger, no woman in his lust. Justice was bought and sold, the claimant who had the longest purse always won his case; public business was neglected; the most unworthy were advanced; bribery and corruption were the rule in every branch of administration. The crown and finish to Mulhar Rao’s offences was his alleged plot to poison the British resident, Colonel Phayre.

There had long been distrust between the Gaekwar and the representative of the British government, whose profound disapproval of the prince’s proceedings was soon made manifest. A more serious difference arose when the Gaekwar insisted that his infant son, born of his latest marriage, should be recognised as the next heir to the throne. There were grave doubts of the child’s legitimacy. His mother, Luxmeebee, had been forcibly abducted from another husband who was still alive at the time of its birth. Colonel Phayre refused to acknowledge the child and Mulhar Rao vowed vengeance. One of his first dastardly attempts was to poison all the inmates of the residency by causing a pound of arsenic to be mixed with the ice sent in for daily consumption. This device failed, and the next attack was aimed directly at the resident through his own body servants.

Colonel Phayre was in the habit of drinking a glass of sherbet every morning when he came home from an early walk. It was awaiting him on the hall table and was prepared with sugared water and fresh pumelo juice. One day he swallowed only a mouthful of this drink, disliking its taste, and threw the rest out of the window, when he detected a small amount of sediment in the bottom of the glass. When analysed subsequently, this was found to contain arsenic and diamond dust. Suspicion was at once aroused, and the possession of the powder charged with these ingredients was traced to a havildar of the military guard of the residency, who kept it concealed in his waist belt. It was not believed that any subordinate and impecunious person could have afforded to buy diamond dust, and attention was at once diverted from the havildar to the prince, whose bitter feeling toward the resident was well known.

Evidence so damnatory against Mulhar Rao was collected that the government of India attached his person and decided to prosecute him. A special court of inquiry was appointed, composed of three English and three native commissioners, the first three leading lights on the Indian bench, the second three Maharajas of the highest rank. The Gaekwar was permitted to engage counsel, and was defended by one of the most eminent of British barristers at that time, Sergeant Ballantine. The arraignment of a reigning prince for the crime of murder by the supreme power to whom he owed allegiance caused a great sensation in India, and the issue of the protracted trial was watched with great interest at home. In the end the three English commissioners were of opinion that the Gaekwar was guilty through his paid agents of an attempt to poison Colonel Phayre, and on the other hand, their three native colleagues considered that the charge was not proved. The result was much criticised and indeed condemned, but the adverse finding was accepted by the then viceroy, Lord Northbrook, who forthwith deposed Mulhar Rao and deprived him and his issue of all rights to the throne. The decision was based upon “his notorious misconduct, his gross misgovernment of the state and his evident incapacity to carry into effect the necessary reforms,” the chief of all being the reform of his own evil nature and personal character.

Sergeant Ballantine dissented from the view taken by the English commissioners and disapproved of Lord Northbrook’s action. Following the old legal axiom that the best course of an advocate whose case is bad is to abuse the other side, the learned counsel threw the blame chiefly upon Colonel Phayre. “He (Colonel Phayre) was fussy, meddlesome and thoroughly injudicious,” the sergeant wrote in his memoirs. “There were two adverse parties in the state, and instead of holding himself aloof from both, he threw himself into that opposed to the Gaekwar and was greedy to listen to every accusation and complaint that with equal eagerness was gossiped into his ears.” But these last were by no means imaginary. Mulhar Rao’s vile conduct was never in doubt, and it was clear that he had tampered with the resident’s servants.

As regards the diamond dust which played a somewhat exaggerated part in the affair, there is nothing to substantiate the common belief that it is a deadly poison, any more than ground glass, which has an equally bad name. It is an old and exploded superstition. The notorious “succession powder” of the old Italian poisoners was supposed to be diamond dust. Voltaire tells us that Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, died of acute irritant poisoning, the poison being diamond powder mixed with pounded sugar and strewn over strawberries.

It may be noted here that the abominable practice of widow-burning seems to have originated as a check upon the wife’s desire to get rid of her husband. The practice dates back to the time of Strabo, who gives the above origin for it. It was so common, says Mr. William Methold, that a law was passed insisting that the wives should accompany their deceased husbands to the funeral pyre. According to one authority, poisoning by wives was so frequent that, in any one year, four men died to every woman. Originating as a deterrent, the burning of widows became in due course an act of pious devotion, a deed of self-immolation acceptable to their bloodthirsty gods. But the original reason is often quoted in the ancient writings, and the remarks of a traveller, Robert Coverte, may be quoted in point. “The cause why this law was first made was for that the women there were so fickle and inconstant that upon any slight occasion of dislike or spleen they would poison their husbands; whereas now the establishing and executing of this law is the cause that moveth the wife to love and cherish her husband and wisheth not to survive him.” It is very much to the credit of the old East India Company that it sternly suppressed the practice of suttee with the other iniquitous forms of wrong-doing, such as Thuggee, sacrificial suicide, infanticide and so forth. A crime so largely practised through the ages by rulers and prominent personages was likely to be generally imitated by commoner people.

The general use of drugs to compass murder which still commonly obtains is not a little due to the facilities with which poisons may be procured, not only from the unchecked sale, but because they may be picked up, so to speak, on every hedge. Quoting Dr. Cheevers, the varieties of poison used are very limited and may be briefly described. The most common are the preparations of arsenic, aconite, nux vomica, opium, oleander, datura and ganja, or Indian hemp. Many more drugs are, however, procurable in Indian bazaars, and Dr. Cheevers has compiled a list, more or less incomplete, of upwards of ninety, including those already mentioned. Of late years the large increase in dispensaries and the wide importation of chemicals has led to poisoning by sulphate of zinc, Prussic acid, strychnine, cyanide of potassium, belladonna and chlorodyne.

Some remarkable cases of poisoning were brought to light in Bombay a few years ago, chiefly through the strenuous efforts of highly intelligent native detectives. A diabolical plot to destroy a whole family, of which four died and several were nearly killed, was the so-called De Ga conspiracy in 1872. An unknown messenger delivered two confectionery cakes as a gift with the compliments of a near relation. Fatal results ensued with all who partook of the sweets. Suspicion at last fell upon a brother of the De Ga family who hated his relations and who accomplished the deed, assisted by an accomplice and especially by his father who pretended to invoke the aid of sorcery.

Twenty years later a family of five persons was destroyed by one of the sons, Bachoo, a spendthrift and gambler, who wished to expedite his inheritance. Strychnine was the drug used, and it was administered by the cook in the food he prepared. Bachoo’s father was the first to succumb, and he was quickly followed by the rest of the family. When the strychnine was found in the exhumed bodies, the police cleverly traced its purchase by Bachoo from the druggists, and he and his confederate were tried, convicted and hanged.

The quick-witted Hindu criminal soon adopted the European method of securing ill-gotten gains by the insurance and murder of unsuspecting victims. Palmer of Rugeley and La Pommerais of Paris had many imitators in the East. A poor creature of weak intellect, Anacleto Duarte by name, was done to death in this way by a friend and patron who pandered to his vices and often lent him small sums to be spent in drink. At last the latter, who was a bailiff in one of the Bombay courts, contrived that Duarte should be insured in the Sun Life Office of Canada for the sum of 10,000 rupees. Fonseca, the bailiff, paid the premiums and was named in the policy as the beneficiary to receive the amount insured if it became payable. After Duarte’s death the agent of the insurance company, suspecting foul play, refused to hand over the amount and the police were called in. It now appeared that Fonseca and Duarte had visited a liquor shop together; that when two glasses of rum were served to them, Duarte complained that his had a bitter taste, caused no doubt by the addition of a pill which he had seen Fonseca put into his glass. When Duarte’s body was exhumed, the existence of strychnine in the viscera was verified, and it was shown that Fonseca had bought it ostensibly as a poison for rats. Fonseca was found guilty and duly hanged.

The criminal operations of the Dacoits who relied upon datura have been already detailed. There were also gangs in Bombay who made it their business to arrange marriages for well-to-do men with suitable spinsters of great attractions supposed to belong to respectable families. After the marriage the happy bridegroom found to his cost that he had been deceived, and he woke up one fine morning without his wife, who had fled with her accomplices, carrying off all his jewels. In these cases datura again had been the drug used. A company of poisoners long flourished in the province Scinde. These villains were in the habit of disguising themselves as fakirs who visited people of known wealth and offered them food in God’s name. It was generally accepted and piously consumed with fatal results, after which their houses were plundered. The impunity with which this crime was everywhere perpetrated was one of the greatest evils from which India has suffered.

It is generally believed that many more brutal murders are committed than are actually brought to light. The police custom of dragging witnesses from their houses for long periods encouraged those dwelling in the neighbourhood of the crime to combine in concealing the circumstances and, if possible, the actual fact. It was the habit of the police at one time to pounce down upon a suspected village, assemble the residents, and harangue, browbeat and threaten them with pains and penalties to extort unwilling confessions. Worse still, these witnesses were dragged great distances, a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, to appear before the courts to give evidence. A great improvement has, however, taken place in recent years. Good roads and railways have greatly facilitated communication, the magistracy is active and efficient and criminal sessions are held monthly even in the most remote districts.

Murder by violence was quite as common in India as by poisoning and committed often by peculiar and unconventional means. Various kinds of weapons were employed. Among them were the bludgeon and the club or lathi, the stout and weighty bamboo staff which, when the thick end is bound with iron, becomes a tremendous weapon of offence. The head is most frequently assailed, and deadly blows result in broken scalps or crushed-in skulls with frightful injuries affecting also the heart, liver and spleen. The club is made of hard wood and in shape is not unlike an exaggerated rolling pin. In one case a stone pestle was used to pound in the victim’s head.

The favourite cutting weapon was the tulwar, or curved sword, which could slash a person almost to pieces with clean-cut saucer-shaped wounds. The tulwar has a sharp point, but was seldom used to stab. The halberd had a crescent blade set in a heavy wooden handle. A chopper could do terrible mischief, the axe likewise, and the bill or hatchet with a hooked point. Death could be given with a spear head, arrow or dagger, the kris or the aro, a three-pronged striking instrument like a trident. Fatal wounds have been inflicted by a strip of split bamboo long and sharp pointed.

Strangulation has been practised in other ways than by throttling with the handkerchief. It was the custom when killing children for their ornaments to squeeze or compress the throat with the hands, assisting the process with the pressure of the knee or foot, and more violence was often employed than was necessary to cause death. Sometimes one bamboo stick was placed over the throat and another under, so that the compression between became fatal.

Suicide by hanging is common in India, and sometimes murderers, having accomplished their purpose by cruel blows, have been known to suspend their victims by the neck to give the impression of self-destruction. Murder by hanging is not unknown in India. There are several cases on record where persons, after being cruelly misused, were hanged while still alive.

Homicide by exposing the victim to be bitten by poisonous snakes was practised in the olden times and was known to the penal code as a method of inflicting capital punishment. “Witches were crammed into a small chamber full of cobras, where they first half died of fright and then quite died of snake bites.” A Gentu prisoner in 1709, after inconceivable torture in the scorching sun by day, was cast by night into a dungeon with venomous snakes to keep him company. It is mentioned in history that Hannibal during a naval action with the Romans launched earthen pots filled with snakes into the enemy’s ships.

The high intelligence of the elephant enabled the native to train it to become the executioner of criminals in India. The great beast would obey the orders of his mahout, whether to kill instantly by the pressure of his foot or to protract the culprit’s agony by breaking his bones one by one and leaving him to die by inches. A parricide, bound, was fastened by his heels with a small iron chain to the hind leg of an elephant and dragged two miles across country till all the flesh was worn from his bones. At Baroda, in 1814, a slave who had murdered his master was similarly made fast to the right hind leg of an elephant, and at every step of the beast it jerked the victim forward so that in a few moments every limb was dislocated. He was as much broken as on the wheel after being dragged five hundred yards. The man, covered with mud, still showed signs of life, and was suffering excruciating tortures. In the end the elephant, as he had been trained to do, placed his foot on the criminal’s head and at once killed him.

The criminal records are full of the forgery of banknotes, the coining of false money, of daring robberies committed when houses are broken into, bank premises invaded and iron safes are forced. Sharpers and swindlers, rivalling the most astute in Europe or America, have flourished and defied the pursuit of the police. Some very notable manufacturers of spurious currency notes have spread dismay in financial circles. One of the most active and successful was a certain Vancutta Chellummyab, whose arrest in Madras in 1872 caused a great sensation throughout India. A vast amount of false Madras currency notes were in circulation in the three presidencies, to the total face value, it was said, of four lacs of rupees. The fraud was discovered at Benares, when a pretended agent of a Madras rajah paid for extensive purchases of jewelry with spurious notes. The chief forger, Vancutta Chellummyab, when finally arrested in Madras, had notes in his possession concealed in an old portmanteau to the value of upwards of two hundred thousand rupees. A few years later Bombay was the centre of operations, and a large quantity of the most perfectly imitated notes were fabricated and in circulation. Information was given by one of the principals in the fraud to divert attention from himself, and a descent made by the police secured a quantity of tools and materials for engraving counterfeit notes and coining bad Australian sovereigns. There were dies, moulds and stamps and a number of coins, foreign and native, manufactured out of the baser metals.

One of the most expert forgers of any age or country was a man named Govind Narayen Davira of Bombay. He came of a family of forgers, the son and grandson of forgers, and did a large business in his nefarious art. A single scrap of handwriting sufficed to enable him to fabricate a whole document. He knew all about the action of chemicals on paper and could erase all traces of original writing to give a clean sheet for a fresh fraudulent statement. He was known to have converted a government promissory note of 5,000 rupees into one of double the amount. His frauds extended over a period of five or six years and were finally exposed by the failure of an attempt to blackmail.

Davira was a popular person because he was liberal to his poorer confederates. But he fell at last into the hands of the police and was lodged in Poona gaol. Here, being resolved to avoid trial, he compassed self-destruction in a very reckless fashion. A kerosene oil lamp was kept constantly burning in his cell, rather rashly. He contrived to saturate his clothing with the oil and then set fire to himself with the result that he was practically burned alive.

One of the cleverest frauds was the forgery of postage stamps in Bombay. A forged stamp came into the possession of a London collector, by whom the fact was reported to the postmaster-general in Bombay. The forgery was the work of one of Davira’s gang and was traced to a Brahmin, Shrida, who had succeeded in producing an excellent imitation with the clumsiest implements. He first printed the stamp on a lithographer’s stone and then coloured it so exactly that it deceived even experts. Many hundreds of these stamps were seized when Shrida was arrested.

The ingenuity of the cheats and swindlers in planning their frauds was only equalled by the simplicity of their victims. Over and over again the revelation of hidden treasure was made to dupes, who paid for the knowledge of the whereabouts of the secret hoards, said to be the property of dead rajahs, or the proceeds of great robberies which had to be temporarily abandoned. Credulous fools were imposed upon by fictitious fakirs claiming the alchemist’s power to transmute the commoner metals into gold and silver, or religious impostors played upon their superstitious disciples to acquire a similar power. There were at one time thirty-five different gangs of swindlers who preyed upon goldsmiths, pawnbrokers and money changers. One of these confederacies was called the “golden gang,” the members of which uttered false money or made large purchases of jewelry for imaginary governors and rajahs, for which they evaded payment, or raised money upon sealed packets, the valuable contents having been spirited away by sleight of hand.

Until the middle of the last century very extensive frauds were practised by the misappropriation of timber in the large forests of India. The natives seemed to have believed in their prescriptive rights to what was really the exclusive property of the state. Thousands of people were engaged in cutting down trees for firewood, when it was within paying distance of removal by road or rail to some neighbouring city. These depredations have now been checked by the establishment of an effective, well-organised forest department, the officers of which control and supervise large tracts of timber, cutting down when desirable and planting afresh to ensure future supply. The reader will remember Rudyard Kipling’s graphic account of the Indian forest officer and his remarkable native assistant, Mowgli, of the story, In the Rukh, in the volume entitled, “Many Inventions.”

Housebreaking is among the minor crimes of India which is especially troublesome. Earthen walls and foundations facilitate the operations of the thieves who are commonly known as “wall-piercers.” These depredators are in the habit of making a hole through the walls, driving a gallery, in fact, into the interior of a house through which they can wriggle into the strong room, generally situated about the centre. As it is always understood that the owner of the house may be on the alert and in waiting to receive the thief, as a matter of precaution he will either emerge feet foremost or push before him an earthen vessel having something of the shape of a man’s head to receive the first blow of the tulwar, or other defensive weapon. The Indian housebreaker is a slippery customer, difficult to seize, for he is usually naked, and has carefully oiled his person so as to easily slip through the fingers of any one who lays hold of him.

I cannot bring this account of crime in India to a close without mention of an atrocity which is unequalled in the annals of human oppression.

What imprisonment may mean in the East, when inflicted in defiance of the most elementary conditions of health in a tropical climate, has been recorded in letters of blood in the awful story of the Black Hole of Calcutta. The miscreant responsible for the crime was the Nabob of Bengal, Surajah Dowlah, who had gained a fleeting triumph over the early English settlers, and having captured Fort William at the mouth of Hugli, and made all the occupants prisoners, he turned them over to his savage followers. For security they were incarcerated in one small room or chamber some eighteen feet square. The season was the height of summer; the room was closed to the eastward and southward by dead walls and to the northward by a wall and door, so that no fresh air could enter save by two small windows, strongly barred with iron. Into this limited space 146 human beings were crammed, already in a state of exhaustion by a long day spent in fatiguing conflict, and several of them seriously wounded. Piteous entreaties were made to the guards on duty to diminish the numbers imprisoned by removal elsewhere; large sums were offered as the price of this boon, but with no effect. No step could be taken without the permission of the Nabob, who was asleep, and none dared wake him. After vain attempts to break open the doors and fruitless appeals to the mercy of the sleeping Nabob, “the prisoners went mad with despair.” The rest of the story can best be told in the words of one of the masters of the English language, Lord Macaulay. “They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them. The gaolers in the meantime held lights to the bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. But it was some time before the soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up on each side the heaps of corpses on which the burning climate had already begun to do its loathsome work. When at length a passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnel house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously and covered up.

“But these things which, after the lapse of more than eighty years, cannot be told or read without horror, awakened neither remorse nor pity in the bosom of the savage Nabob. He inflicted no punishment on the murderers. He showed no tenderness to the survivors. Some of them, indeed, from whom nothing was to be got, were suffered to depart; but those from whom it was thought that anything could be extorted were treated with execrable cruelty. Holwell, unable to walk, was carried before the tyrant, who reproached him, threatened him, and sent him up the country in irons, together with some other gentlemen who were suspected of knowing more than they chose to tell about the treasures of the Company. These persons, still bowed down by the sufferings of that great agony, were lodged in miserable sheds, and fed only with grain and water, till at length the intercessions of the female relations of the Nabob procured their release. One Englishwoman had survived that night. She was placed in the harem of the prince at Moorshedabad.”

It is told in history how the merciless Nabob was eventually called to strict account. The English at Madras vowed vengeance, and an expedition was forthwith fitted out for the Hugli, small in numbers, but full of undaunted spirit, and led by one of the most famous of British soldiers, Lord Clive. The victory of Plassy, which consolidated the British power in India, overthrew Surajah Dowlah, who expiated the crime of the Black Hole when captured and put to death by his successor Meer Jaffier.