DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY : UNIVERSITY OF CALCUTTA MONOGRAPH 12 THE GOONDAS TOWARDS A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CALCUTTA UNDERWORLD SURA NJAN D A S JAYANTA RAY K . FIRMA KLM PRIVATE LIMITED C A L C U T T A O 1 9 9 6 Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Published by Firma KLM Private Limited 257-B, B. B. Ganguly Street Calcutta- 700 012 INDIA First Published : Calcutta, 1996 © Department of History, University of Calcutta, and Authors Jacket Design : Sribas K. Sen ISBN 81-7102-056-9 The publication has been subsidised by the UGC Special Assistance Programme, Department of History, University of Calcutta. Price : Rs. 175.00 Printed by : Radical Impression 43 Beniatola Lane Calcutta- 700 009 Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN L ifl f»7o- 17 /»- ? - CONTENTS PREFACE ................. V INTRODUCTION................. 1 Suranjan Das CASE-STUDIES (Based on GOONDA FILES’) 21 Jayanta K. Ray G oo Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY OF CALCUTTA Department of History, Monographs 1. Internal Migration of India : A Case Study of Bengal by Haraprasad Chattopadhyaya, K. F. Bagchi. 2. Political Activity of the Liberal Party in India by Hasi BANERJEE, K. P. Bagchi. 3. The Tribal Protest Movements in Eastern India 1760—1922 : Origin, Ideology and Organisation by Binay Bhusan Choudhury (in Press), K. P. Bagchi. 4. The Agrarian Economy of Tamilnadu 1820-1855 by Arun Bandopadhyay, K. P. Bagchi. 5. Caste, Politics and the Raj : Bengal 1872-1937 by SEKHAR Bandyopadhyay. K. P. Bagchi. 6. From Marsh to Township, East of Calcutta : A Tale of Salt Water Lake and Salt Lake Township (Bidhan Nagar) by Haraprasad Chattopadhyay, K. P. Bagchi. 7. Essays in Indo Nepal Trade : A Nineteenth Century Study by Jahar Sen, K. P. Bagchi. 8. Caste and Communal Politics in South Asia edited by Suranjan Das and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, K. P. Bagchi. 9. The Working Class Movement : A Study of Jute Mills of Bengal 1937-47 by Nirban Basu, K. P. Bagchi. 10. Civil Society in Bangladesh : Resilience and Retreat by MUNTASSIR Mamoon & Jayanta Kumar Ray, Firma KLM Private Limited. 11. Migration Between India and Nepal : A Sociocultural Study by Haraprasad Chattopadhyay , Firma KLM Private Limited. 12. The Goondas : Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld by Suranjan Das & Jayanta Kumar Ray, Firma KLM Private Limited. Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN P R E F A C E This volume has a limited aim. It seeks to acquaint the scholars interested in ‘Crime Studies’ with a set of hitherto unutilised police files on a segment of the Calcutta underworld, popularly known as ‘goondas’. Categorized as Goonda Files, they lie bundled in the Record Room of Lai Bazar, the headquarters of the Calcutta Police. We are aware of the availability of another set of Goonda Files in the Home (Confidential) series of the West Bengal State Archives. But the Files under present consideration were never transferred to the Archives. They had thus remained inaccessible to researchers. Besides, while the Files preserved in the State Archives are mostly confined to the years between 1926 and 1930, the Lai Bazar collection encompasses a much longer period from 1946 to 1971, and hence is richer both in terms of time and content. Accordingly, when we received the permission to examine one hundred and twenty-three of these hitherto restricted Files we thought it would be worthwhile to present an overview of these documents so that future researchers could profitably use them for reassessing the relationship between crime and society in 20th century Calcutta. The book is organized in two parts. The Introduction identifies major themes which emerge from an analysis of the 'Goonda Files'. Case Histories of the convicts and accused based on 'Goonda Files' form the second part. Our research was supported by the UGC Special Assistance Programme of the Department of History, University of Calcutta, and we are most grateful for this. We would also like to record our thanks and appreciation for the research assistance received from Dr.Ashim Mukhopadhyay. This work would not, however, been possible without the active cooperation of Mr. Tushar Talukdar, Commissioner of Calcutta Police, Mr. S.I.S. Ahmed, former DC(DD) of Calcutta Police, and Shri Nihar Ray, O.C., CRS Detective Department, Lai Bazar, all of whom went out of their ways to make the Files available to us. To our colleagues in the Department — especially Dr. Arun Bandopadhyay, Dr. Hasi Banerjee, Dr.Basudeb Chattopadhyay, Dr. Hari Vasudevan and Shri Bhaskar Chakrabarti — we are grateful for constant help and encouragement. Thanks are also due to Firma KLM Pvt. Ltd. for publishing this monograph within a remarkably short period of time. Department of History SURANJAN DAS University of Calcutta. JAYANTA K. RAY Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INTRODUCTION I. Studying Crime and Criminality Why do we study crime V There is certainly a popular appeal of crime in all societies, a"trend commercially exploited by western movies and their counterparts in the developing world. As one commentator puts it: There is the mystery of the criminal act itself and the ritualized conflict of the courtroom, where the innocent are separated from the guilty. There is the timeless excitement of the chase — the pursuit and capture of the man outside the law. And there is the fascination of the prison, where walls not only shut in the criminal, the contaminated man, but also shut out the public”.2 To a social scientist, however, crime is essentially a social problem. It represents a form of social deviance; it provides us with an entry point to comprehend the changing relations between the citizen and state, especially in the realm of regulating social behavior. Researches on the history of British and American crime have shown how at particular historical conjunctures crime can either ‘become politics’, or represent a ‘conscious and articulate resistance by the dispossessed’.3 It has been, for example, demonstrated how in England poaching and smuggling illustrated hostility to the emergence of class society, how infringements on enclosures of land represented protests against the violation of traditional rights of the commoners to use pastures, commons and forests, and how food rioting expressed popular anger caused by the erosion of a moral economy based on collective bargaining. For India, too, studies on crime and deviance could provide unofficial commentaries on the social past. Such insights might not, however, always shed light on historical reconstructions of popular struggles. For, the subjects of crime could very often be conformists than challengers to the establishment. But, as G.M. Jones reminds us, a historian on the left should “not ... confine attention to the history of labour movements, oppressed classes or parties of the left, but rather.... reconstruct historical totalities”4. It is in this context that I intend to analyse some police files on ‘goondas’, traditionally viewed as the ‘casual residuum’ of Calcutta Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ■> THE GOONDAS : TOWARDS A RECONSTRUCTS- society which generated and continue to provoke fear and anxiety, especially among the propertied classes. Historical reconstructions based on such police papers are bound to be partial. They require to be corroborated and supplemented by other official and non-official sources of information. We have to particularly search for confirmatory evidence in oral testimonies and vernacular literature, or what Chevalier calls ‘qualitative evidence’5, which has been so effectively used to recapture the perilous'details of the criminal world in London and Paris. One is instantly reminded of Jones* study of ‘Outcast London’ or Chevalier’s ‘Dangerous Classes’ in Paris. 2. The Goonda File: Its Structure Lawless social groups certainly existed in India before the coming of the British. What, however, occurred under colonialism was their classification into neat legal categories such as goondas, thugs, dacoits, criminal tribes, etc. This social engineering was related to the new colonial perception of crime. While the traditional indigenous understanding of crime was “based on sin and paternalistic beliefs about authority’’, the colonial state “separated the criminal from the rest of tb. society” who was not only to be punished, but reformed and controlled through police and prison.6 Following Foucault’s paradigm it may be contended that this colonial exercise was an aspect of a new mechanism for the exercise of power.7 Bengal government’s Goonda Act of 1926 made it mandatory for the police to maintain under an umbrella term ‘goonda’ the files on convicted or suspected deviants of a broad spectrum — thieves, gamblers, pickpockets, smugglers, thugs, cocaine dealers and even political activists. The ostensible purpose of the Act was to ensure forced extemment from Calcutta of the alleged criminals labelled as ‘goondas’. Each File conforms to a structure laid down by the Act. It contains a cover note introducing the convict, reasons recommending his extemment, the Heads of Charges against the accused, and a History Sheet of the ‘goonda’. Representations and depositions of local residents against the ‘goonda’— used as evidence for classifying the accused or convict as ‘ a danger to ordinary peace-loving citizens’ — are often appended to a File. Even the language used in the Files bears an imprint of similarity. In official discourse the ‘goonda’ came to be “more described than defined”. The goondas were perceived as a community whose mode of Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INTRODUCTION 3 living and codes of behaviour posed a challenge to the existing socio­ political order and provoked fear amongst the established sections in the society. -A ‘goonda’ was thus to be controlled and subjected to state power rather than understood. A particular vocabulary was accordingly invoked to homogenize the act of labelling a 'criminal’. To quote a perceptive comment : Accordingly, goondas are presented as socially unplaced and the ultimate effect is to create an image of the man, and of a group of men, as brought up outside the sphere of normal society—to periphelize them.8 In the process of constructing this image as ‘invisible and peripheral’ an alleged ‘goonda’ was defined as “someone not only expendable and undesirable, but also outside the worthy citizen-community which it was the British police force’s job to protect’’.9 Significantly, the same police perception survives in independent India. Before examining the Goonda Files .it will be perhaps pertinent to draw parallels between the way officials in England and India respectively used the terms ‘hooligan’ and ‘goonda’. The expression ‘hooligan’ registered an ‘abrupt entry’ into English vocabulary during the “hot summer of 1898” to describe the rowdy youth.10 But official and media discourses converted ‘hooligan’ and ‘hooliganism’ into terms of ‘more general notoriety’ so that they became ‘controlling words’ for any unexplained crime. Both ‘hooligan’ and ‘goonda’ “embarked on a remarkable career, appearing in name, if not in person, before numerous governmental and semi-official bodies of enquiry” as the main subject of, what has been called, ‘respectable fears*. 3. Deciphering the Goonda World Reconstruction of Goonda Files dispels some popular myths about the Goonda world in Calcutta. For instance, the notion of a well- structured homogenous Calcutta goonda community does not appear to be ‘total’. One is struck by a considerable heterogeneity in the social background of convicts, the factors behind their criminalisation, their links with institutional politics, and the pattern of crime committed. Interestingly, however, the 123 Files covering the period 1946-1971 made accessible to us refer to only eighteen ‘Muslim goondas’." But this could have hardly been a historical reality. In an earlier work12 I have Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 4 THE GOONDAS : TOWARDS A RECONSTRUCTION already indicated the connections between Muslim League politicians and the Calcutta Muslim underworld which particularly came to the fore during the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946. A possible conjecture on the conspicuous absence of Files on Muslim ‘goondas’ is their disappearance during the Muslim League ministry in Bengal Presidency.1' Within a particular ‘gang’, however, loyalties did cut across religious lines. We have even two Anglo-Indians — Eric Mitchell and Charles Neville Chambers — and a Chinese with foreign passport amongst the ‘prominent goondas’.14 There is also the instance of a female ‘goonda’ leader, Nirmala Dasi (alias Shanti). She spent her childhood in Midnapore amidst extreme financial distress due to an untimely death of her father. At the age of sixteen she was deceived by a man who brought her to Calcutta on the pretext of arranging a decent marriage but was, instead, dumped in a prostitute’s den. Henceforth, Nirmala earned her living by soliciting and other criminal activities in and around Masjidbari Street(Central/North Calcutta).15 3.1. The Goonda: a Social Victim? The History Sheet in a Goonda File can be an useful index to why and how someone turned a ‘goonda’, although any explanation of ‘criminal’ deviance is likely to be subjective. The deviant himself as well as his primary group — his ‘gang’, family and circle of friends — may with all seriousness believe that either he/ she was not committing a ‘crime’, or he/she was justified in violating the established social rules. As Gersham Sykes warns us: The definition of ‘criminal’ activity as wrong ... is not an all-or-none affair; it is a matter of degree, subject to the influence of rationalizations, personality disturbances, subcultural traditions, the exigencies of the situation, and so on. Committing violent acts and taking the property of another may be viewed as only quasi-‘criminal’ by many people, under certain circumstances; and for some offenses against public safety and morals, this may even be more true.16 It is also ahistorical to categorize any individual or a social group as abnormal or biologically prone to violence. As early as 1842 Karl Marx had drawn our attention to how civil law or liberal legislations could Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN