Introduction
Darogar Daptar or The Diary of A Policeman is a series of real life criminal accounts by former police officer Priyanath Mukhopadhyay (1855-1947). He worked as an inspector in the detective department of Calcutta Police under British Government.
Darogar Daptar (দারোগার দপ্তর) was started in 1892 as a serialized monthly periodical and quickly became popular in the contemporary Bengali culture. Priyonath was unique because his accounts, unlike most of our favourites from the Bengali detective, were not fictionalized. And yet, they do not become cut-and-dried narratives found in other contemporary real-life author detectives writing out of Bengal. While his perspective remains that of an impassioned inspector , he goes out of his way to ensure that the proceedings of a criminal case are simplistically, and perhaps more importantly, entertainingly narrated to his uninitiated reader. His collection can, in fact, be considered as a forerunner of crime fiction stories in Bangla, for the thrilling peek it offers into the world of crime-solving and lawkeeping.
But the thing that makes us turn to Darogar Daptar today, in this ongoing series of ours, is not its historical role in the grisly cannon of Bangla detective fiction, but its insights into the city itself. Dacoits to conmen, fraudsters to murderers, Priyonath’s accounts lets us follow every kind of crook trying to get away with their crime in the seedy bylanes of 19th century Kolkata, showing us a grim social history of a city caught in the middle of change, that is often left out during nostalgic retellings of its past glory.
This particular short story is relatively tamer – it does not have any severed heads, or limbs, for one – yet in its crisp, witty span, it manages to paint a portrait of the city and time. There are pawnshops, and horse drawn carriages, dimly list gullys that offer vices, and glittering bazaars jostling with crowds, and through all of it, a jovial detective following a crook whose crimes include, among all else, presenting himself as an upper class “babu”.
One day as I was sitting somewhere in Mechhuabazaar at dusk, I saw Harimohan Mukhopadhyay selling a gold ring to a poddar in the area. I knew him fairly well. So I grew suspicious on seeing him sell the ring. I thought he must have stolen the ring from someone. Consequently, I caught him red-handed with the ring, and on investigating, found out that this Harimohan Mukhopadhyay was a well-known crook in Calcutta. He has even been to prison a couple of times; but for those who don’t know who he is, neither his appearance, nor his disposition would ever betray his real identity, that he is a fraudster. He is around 27-28 years old; his complexion is clear, and quite pale. His features are comely; he is always dressed in first-rate clothes; at first glance, he would definitely appear to be a wealthy person from a respectable family. But he inhabits an exceptionally base position in society, his soul corrupted by his association with a fallen woman from Harkatagali. Rumour has it that he eats from the same plate as she; and he has adopted a variety of dishonest means to satisfy his mistress’s whims.
Today, her demands had been for a blue ring. Harimohan must get it for her. To her face, Harimohan had agreed, “All right.” However, in his head, he kept thinking, “I don’t have a single penny in my pocket. How am I going to pull this off? But be it as it may, I have to figure something out. Now let’s see what I can do.” He contemplated and then went out of the house. He ambled out of Harkatagali and soon reached the busy crossing at Bowbazaar.
He had been standing there for a few minutes when a second-class “Compass” carriage came his way. It didn’t have a groom. The coachman, on seeing the babu waiting, asked him, “Babu, do you need a ride?” Harimohan replied, “Yes, I do.” The carriage came to a halt. Harimohan took his pocket watch out, remarked, “It’s still a quarter hour to three,” and then stepped inside the carriage. The carriage rolled north and Harimohan dropped by a number of places. At 5, he reached a poddar’s establishment in Taltala. He looked at several pieces, finally settling on a seal ring, and asked its price. The poddar invariably seized the opportunity and quoted a prize befitting his wealthy customer. Harimohan too agreed to pay fifteen rupees for a ring worth ten. Then he immediately said to the poddar, “I don’t have any money on me right now. Give me one of your men, he can accompany me to my house and learn my address, and I can give him the money there.” The poddar stood to make a profit of five whole rupees out of the deal, so he gave in to the temptation and agreed to this proposition.
Thereafter, one of the clerks from the pawnshop was sent to accompany Harimohan. But before leaving, the poddar whispered something in the man’s ears. The ring remained with Harimohan while the collector got into the carriage with him. The carriage turned towards Dharmatala, and eventually reached the southern gates of Chandni Bazaar. Harimohan got down from the carriage, expressed his intention to buy some clothes, and so saying, entered straight into the bazaar. The clerk followed close behind. Harimohan sat inside one of the cloth stores in the market and started looking at various kinds of cloth, choosing carefully, haggling for the right price. But nothing suited him. Suddenly, it seemed as if he was beginning to feel somewhat ill and squeamish. Looking almost ready to puke, he took out a coin from his pocket, placed it on the clark’s palm and said, “Quick! Get me a paan!”
And the dimwitted clerk, without thinking it through, hurried to do just that. He procured the paan and returned quickly enough, only to find his Babu gone. He combed through the markets but his search remained in vain. Harimohan was nowhere to be found. What could he do, then! Feeling helpless, he returned to the carriage and told the groom, – “Since this babu came to our establishment in your carriage, you must know his address! You have to take me there.” But the groom told him instead, “Babu is gone. But you were riding my carriage too, so now I will collect the whole fare from you.”
And so, the two started bickering and then swearing at each other. Eventually, it even came to wrestling. Thereafter, both were arrested by the police authorities for fighting in the middle of a public road and taken to the station.
That evening, I, too, reached the police station, with Harimohan. The poddar, his clerk, and the groom all identified him. The very next day, the magistrate found him guilty of willful deception, and sentenced him to 6 months of hard labour in prison.
The pawnbroker got his ring back. But the groom of that fateful carriage never received his fare.
