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Control of identity
THIS is a pleasant narrative of discovery, that of fingerprints as an "infallible" technique of individual identification. Chandak Sengoopta focuses on the flow of ideas, evidence and administrative practice from colonial India to the metropolis which persuaded men of science, government and the public of the value of the fingerprint.
In Britain fingerprint identification was compulsory only for criminals and undesirable aliens. In India it became a compulsory form of signature for an astonishing range of official and civil transactions, as in the registration and pension departments and contracts for labour and commodities. The difference, Sengoopta argues, lay in the combination of despotic rule and intense insecurity which characterised the Raj. Pervasive fears of being deceived by the populace made it necessary to search for new techniques of identification. The perception that Indians were an inferior people made it possible to experiment and apply these techniques extensively. In measuring people for anthropometric data in Madras, "one could jump on people with goniometers; in London, one could only seek voluntary experimental subjects."
Sengoopta unwinds his story through the three figures usually credited for this discovery. William Herschel, of the Indian Civil Service, appointed the colonial god-king of Hooghly district in 1877, began to take fingerprints as a signature for official purposes. Francis Galton, scientist and eugenicist drew upon this data to establish the life-long permanence of fingerprints. He estimated the chance of two individuals having identical fingerprints as "one in about sixty-four thousand million." Edward Henry, Inspector General of the Bengal police, took the limelight for a workable system of classification, by which a set of fingerprints could be recalled from a large archive and compared with an unknown set. This development propelled his career outwards from India to Johannesburg where fingerprint identification technique was worked into a more rigorously raced regime in South Africa, and finally to Scotland Yard.
The skirmishes for credit broke out from 1880, and expanded. In England Henry spoke of the classification system worked out in the Bengal Anthropometry Bureau as "his" discovery. In India, under the scrutiny of his fellow officers, he acknowledged teamwork, and said sub-inspector Aziz ul Haq had contributed "in conspicuous degree". Did Henry nick the classification scheme from his Indian subordinates? Sengoopta concludes that the evidence is not authoritative. The debate over individual credit can remain inconclusive. However differences in social location allow some individuals to patent their claims more effectively and to profit more fulsomely. More revealing are the changes and elisions that emerge as stories of "discovery" are recounted. As the eminent historian Carlo Ginzburg suggests, the authority of science re-organises narratives of discovery. And so does race power.
Let me illustrate this through Herschel's account of his quest. When Herschel investigated the receipts which European planters produced for indigo advances he found that a startling number were fabricated. Writing to the Commissioner of Nadia he said he had begged one European factory manager "not to identify himself and Europeans generally with a system of forgery which every moment showed to be more and more appalling." Yet in his 1916 publication, The Origin of Fingerprints, Herschel never uses the word planter in describing the fraud which threaded the indigo disturbances. He uses the word zamindar instead — technically correct, but also less embarrassing. As the scientific credentials of fingerprint identification got stronger, Herschel, and Henry Faulds, distanced themselves from their earlier curiosity with oriental palmistry. Yet in 1858 when Herschel asked a native, Rajyadhar Konai to put his inked palm print on a petty contract, thinking to bind him to it by superstitious awe, he also studied the impression with Konai "with a good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on another impression." Thereafter Herschel did not in fact introduce fingerprints to official procedure in the 1850s and the 1860s as Sengoopta states. He collected fingerprints as a hobby "among the Society of the Station" and Indians. Among the notables he netted was the Maharaja of Nadia "the highest of the old nobility of Bengal. He was much struck, as I was, by the remarkable symmetry of the `pattern' on one of his fingers at the core." What seems to merge here is an interest in palmistry which could be shared with natives, the contemporary scientific interest in comparative anatomy and the related popular fascination with the idea that character and attributes, individual and hereditary, could be read off the body.
The author declares he is the only one to have examined colonial control through individual identification instead of through the collective stereotypes usually discussed. Historians of fingerprinting, he writes have "never noted, let alone explored", the connection between the indigo disturbances of the 1860s and the story of fingerprinting. I am a little puzzled. The author has read my article on individual identification practices in colonial statecraft. It draws inevitably upon the same indigo enquiry commission and Herschels' testimony of July 9, 1860 where he suggests that finger impressions could provide a signature, "all but impossible to deny or to forge." Perhaps, like the key figures of his story, the author had to make a strong claim to originality. Whether it is the examination of a native's back for the scars of a judicial whipping or Gandhi's South African campaign against ten-fingerprint registration, we seem to have a common field of interest. A more liberal author might have acknowledged this. However generosity does not make for scintillating blurbs on a book cover.
Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India, Chandak Sengoopta, Macmillan, 2003.
RADHIKA SINGHA
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`Chandak Sengoopta focuses on the flow of ideas, evidence and administrative practice from colonial India to the metropolis, which persuaded men of science, government and the public of the value of the fingerprint.'
