As I have argued throughout this book, white violence was not exceptional but an everyday part of British rule in the subcontinent.
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In the late nineteenth century, Europeans were routinely acquitted in cases where the evidence against them was more than compelling. In 1885, two British planters in Assam (Hext and Bragg) were acquitted in the murder of an Indian boy who enraged them by failing to dismount from his horse as their carriage approached. Hext and Bragg horsewhipped and kicked the boy and then ran him over with their carriage, killing him on the spot. In court, death was determined to be an accident and Hext and Bragg were released. As Pataka remarked, “Beasts are killed for the sport of Englishmen, and natives are killed for the pacification of their anger.
Between 1880 and 1900, there were eighty-one reported “shooting accidents” in which European defendants claimed to have mistaken their Indian victims for animals such as monkeys, birds, and buffalos. Som Prakashnoted that “Anglo-Indians now hunt natives under the mistaken impression that they are birds or beasts.” Samvad Purnachandrodaya remarked that: “shooting natives has become something like a disease with them. They are tried by their own countrymen, so they are generally acquitted after shooting natives.” And Karnatak Patra wondered how the courts could let them get away with this: “Has the Government not heard that a Native is made to assume the form of a beast or a bird in order to be murdered with impunity by his European conqueror? Has it not been sufficiently public that blood stains on the clothes and person of a European charged with the murder of a native constitute no evidence to prove his crime?”
Indian-killing was likened by critics to other violent colonial sports such as pig-sticking and tiger-hunting. In reference to a case where a European boy shot an Indian dead and was fined Rs. 10, Sulabh Dainik remarked: “The English are the ruling race in this country and India is their sporting ground. Englishmen come to India to make money and to make themselves merry. Here shooting of tigers and bears is not sufficient sport; there can be no full sporting without occasional indulgence in native shooting.” In 1885, Amrita Bazar Patrikasarcastically compared the plethora of European shooting accidents to the total absence of Indian accidents, “it is strange that natives, many of whom use guns, so rarely shoot at people by accident. The reason doubtless is that, while natives fear the punishment prescribed by law for such offenses, Europeans are quite free from such fear.”
