A manual of medical jurisprudence for India : including the outline of a history of crime against the person in India / by Norman Chevers.

  • Norman Chevers
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of medical jurisprudence for India : including the outline of a history of crime against the person in India / by Norman Chevers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    ago arrived, at which the true nature or Pathology of Crime in India might be investigated with advantage both to the people and to their law- givers. The officially printed Police Reports, and the Reports of the Courts of Nizamut Adawlut of Bengal, the North-West Provinces, and Bombay, and those of the High Courts, afford abundant materials for a history of crime in India. Such a work, ably and carefully compiled, and deeply reasoned out by one of truth-seeking, moderate and philosophic mind, and of long and extensive judicial experience in this country, while it would materially aid the daily investigations and decisions of every Judicial Officer in the land, would, probably, go further than any other book that has appeared since the commencement of the century in advancing the progress of civilization here, by enabling us to detect and grapple with those deeply-rooted errors in the native character which now, in eluding our notice, most effectually baffle all our best-laid schemes of improvement. For this noble task I am not fitted ; but, with this view, I have ventured, in several of the following pages, to digress somewhat from the direct line of my subject, while endeavour- ing to show the Causes, Antiquity, and Prevalence of the criminal practices which are brought under consideration. Every one who has spent even a month in Iudia will have learned how strong an influence custom has over the conduct of natives of all classes, in all the opinions and actions of their lives.* This traditional Custom —throughout the details of which scholars may still detect the faint but indelible traces of ancient laws—is inextricably interwoven with the native's religion. He does not always pause to consider whether this act or that is right or wrong, or will be viewed in the same light by the English as by the Hindu or Mahomedan law;—he is satisfied to act precisely as his forefathers have acted for centuries.f * In their Report of 1838, the Committee on Prison Discipline remark:—The general morals of the people may possibly be bad enough, but an Indian criminal is probably a better man than any other criminal of the same sort. His general character certainly differs less from that of the mass of his countrymen than would be the case in more civilized and moral countries. A large proportion of the crimes in this country are committed by persons whose tribe have done the same time out of mind, and they are almost as naturally the result of birth as another man's honest trade. Many more are committed, as it were professionally, by the members of immense confederations, who are not much worse than other people in matters unconnected with their profession. Owing to feelings and principles which we can never [?] comprehend, there is little or no consciousness of moral guilt amongst these classes, on account of the exercise of what they regard as their proper business. t Many years after the above was first written, the same observation preseuted itself, in his daily experience, to the mind of my friend, Mr. W. W. Hunter, who says, in the Dissertation which precedes his Comparative Dictionary of the Non-Aryan Languages of India and High Asia:—As a magistrate I came in contact with prejudices and traditional convictions which, however unfounded they may seem to us, nevertheless amount to a sense of duty, and supply motives of action to millions of British subjects; prejudices and convictions for which English criminal justice makes no allowance, yet which, as I shall show, sometimes affect English Officers with a sense almost of sickness in administering the law.