The goondas : towards a reconstruction of the Calcutta underworld

111 Pages·1996·2.722 MB·English

by  Suranjan Das, Jayanta Kumar Ray

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