|
|
| |
BOOK REVIEW
The burden of prints
Imprint of the
Raj: The Colonial Origins of Fingerprinting and its
Voyage to Britain by Chandak Sengoopta
Reviewed by Jason Overdorf
 In an obscure
village in Bengal in 1858, Sir William James Herschel,
then a member of the Indian civil service, experienced a
momentary flash of inspiration that would revolutionize
the field of criminal investigation.
In an
effort to discourage a local businessman from reneging
on a supply agreement by repudiating his signature,
Herschel prevailed on the Bengali contractor to stamp
the document with a print of his left hand. The success
of the ploy - conceived as a bluff only - fired the
imagination of the colonial administrator, making of him
the first amateur student of fingerprinting, and, as
Chandak Sengoopta argues in Imprint of the Raj,
the technology's true pioneer.
In his first work
of popular history, Sengoopta, who received his
doctorate in the history of science from Johns Hopkins
University, recounts the tortuous path fingerprinting
took from colonial India to today's forensic
laboratories with a fascination and thoroughness
reminiscent of Simon Winchester's The Professor and
the Madman and Dava Sobel's Longitude. Born
and raised in Kolkata, where he qualified in medicine
and psychiatry, Sengoopta brings a welcome breadth of
knowledge and experience to his subject.
It was
no accident that fingerprinting technology was first
applied successfully in one of the far-flung outposts of
the British Empire, and not in Britain itself, according
to Sengoopta. While the science of the day remained
convinced that crime was a hereditary aberration,
Britain, with its belief in personal liberty, was
reluctant to measure and catalogue its citizens. Not so
its colonial subjects. Here, Sengoopta points to the
colonial obsession with studying, documenting and
measuring the darker denizens of the Empire. To begin
with, this effort was simply good business. "The East
India Company was not simply a trading corporation and a
virtual government - it was also a full-fledged
knowledge gathering enterprise staffed by active, if
variably talented, learners, explorers and
investigators."
But as this knowledge gathering
became more academic and more closely affiliated with
the budding techniques of science - then still an
amateur pursuit - it also became an integral tool for
the justification of the Empire. As Edward Said has
argued, the Orientalists' investigation became part of
the mechanism of control as they sought to "divide,
deploy, schematize, tabulate, index and record
everything in sight (and out of sight) ... make out of
every observable detail a generalization and out of
every generalization an immutable law".
After
languages and geography, the natural subject for study
was the people. With race the obsession of the era, it
is not surprising that the first projects involved
cataloguing the customs of India's many castes and
seeking to separate them into races through careful use
of the calipers - the physical anthropologists trusty
companion. But it soon became apparent that for the
businessman, the individual was of far more importance
than the group. "Sciences such as ethnology or geology
facilitated control only in broad economic or
sociological terms," explains Sengoopta. "These forms of
knowledge failed to reach that level where the
day-to-day business of the empire was conducted." For
that, it was necessary to be able to identify the
individual.
Herschel proposed that fingerprints
provided a "signature of exceeding simplicity" that even
Bengalis, whom the British considered duplicitous beyond
compare, could neither forge nor deny. By requiring the
colonial subjects in his charge to sign documents with
this method, he virtually eliminated pension fraud - a
practice that he believed had been general, since the
British couldn't tell one Bengali from another. He
greatly reduced the conflicts over deeds, reporting that
the new technique "lifted off the ugly cloud of
suspiciousness which always hangs over [registration
offices] in India. It put a summary and absolute stop to
the very idea of either [im]personation or repudiation
from the moment half a dozen men had made their marks
and compared them together."
For all his
pioneering work, however, Herschel was not able to
convince other administrators of the value of
fingerprinting or to bring the technique back to
Britain. Nor did he foresee its usefulness in criminal
investigation, although he urged the inspector of jails
to use fingerprinting to verify the identity of
prisoners. What was missing was a useful method of
organizing the fingerprints on file.
For some
time, therefore, fingerprints could be used once a
suspect had been found, but were no help in finding an
unknown culprit. It was another colonial administrator
who, along with his Indian assistants, developed the
method of classification that made fingerprints the
cornerstone of criminal investigation they are today. As
inspector general of the Bengal police, Edward Henry
introduced his classification system in 1897. He brought
it with him to London four years later, where he applied
the innovation as assistant commissioner of the
Metropolitan police. There the technology was
immediately instrumental in solving several high-profile
murder cases, and soon entered the Sherlock Holmes
stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fingerprinting had
arrived.
But the investigative technique
retained the taint of its origin in an atmosphere of
xenophobia and anxiety about the racial "other". After
establishing fingerprinting technology in London, Henry
was seconded to South Africa, where he implemented a new
labor pass for "colored" laborers that included their
fingerprints. Later, Indians, Arabs and Chinese were
required to register their fingerprints and "were
subject to arrest without warrant if they could not
produce their registration certificate with fingerprints
on demand". Mahatma Gandhi, who was then still working
as a lawyer in Johannesburg, protested that documenting
the identity of "non-whites" using a technique otherwise
reserved for lawbreakers "reduced all 'Asiatics' into
criminals".
Sadly, even if we flash forward more
than a century, the same ignorant double standard
prevails. Last year, the United States announced that
visitors from up to 35 countries would be required to
register with the government and have their fingerprints
taken, implying once again that a criminal is not
characterized chiefly by what he does but by who he is.
What's next, measuring noses?
Imprint of the
Raj: The Colonial Origins of Fingerprinting and its
Voyage to Britain, by Chandak Sengoopta, Macmillan
February 2003. ISBN: 0333989163. Price US$26, 224 pages.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact
content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
