How a Murder in Colonial Bengal Sparked a Forensic Revolution

The murder of Hridaynath Ghosh seemed unsolvable until a brown smudge on a calendar and a classification system devised in Kolkata rewrote the rules of justice.

William James Herschel

It was August 15, 1897. Hridaynath Ghosh, the manager of the Kathalguri Tea Estate in the district of Julpaiguri on the Bhutan frontier, was found dead in the bedroom of his bungalow. His throat had been slit. His dispatch box and safe had been rifled and several hundred rupees taken. There were no witnesses to the murder. But it was said that Ghosh had made an enemy out of a former servant of his, a certain Kangali Charan. On a calendar in book-form in the dispatch box, Bengal Police discovered two faint brown smudges. Under a magnifying glass, one of these smudges was identified as having been left by one of the digits of someone’s right hand.

(Left) Hem Chandra Bose and (Right) Azizul Haque

The timing could not have been better. In 1892, Sir Francis Galton had published the first book on fingerprints, confirming that not only were a person’s fingerprints unique to themselves but they remained unchanged from birth until death. Galton also realised that these unique print patterns could form three distinct categories: loops, whirls, and arches. In 1894, Sir Edward Richard Henry, Inspector General of the Bengal Police, and two of his inspectors, Khan Bahadur Azizul Haque and Rai Bahadur Hem Chandra Bose, worked with Galton to devise a system where fingerprints could be easily filed and then searched through without prior scientific training. After comparisons had been made with the anthropometric method to identify an individual as developed and promoted by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon – width of head, length of index finger, etc – it was decided that fingerprinting was far superior. In 1897, the Governor-General decided that the Henry Classification System, as it came to be known, would be the sole means of criminal identification in British India. And so it was that the world’s first fingerprint bureau was set up in Kolkata.

This was an unhappy event for Ghosh’s former servant, Kanglai Charan. Having recently being released from jail for theft, his fingerprints were already on file in Kolkata. Arrested some hundreds of miles away, Charan was brought to Kolkata where his fingerprints were taken again – his right thumb print exactly matching the bloody fingerprint on Ghosh’s calendar. He went on trial in May 1898, charged with theft and murder.

In China, palm prints, finger prints, and the tracing of interphalangeal joints have been used as a means of identification on contracts and other legal documents for thousands of years – a practice that had spread to Japan by the 8th Century, and also to India by the 17th Century where royalty would use palm prints as a means of proving authenticity of authorship on documents. Though there is evidence that some Chinese officials might have understood the usefulness of fingerprints, or at least bloody hand marks, for criminal investigations as far back as the Qin Dynasty during the Third Century BCE, there is nothing to suggest that the Chinese really understood the unique properties of fingerprints – the loops, whirls, and arches – and how useful they were going to prove to be. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1904 when German police introduced the Henry Classification System to the foreign concession of Qingdao that the forensic promise of fingerprinting finally began to be realised in China.

The first written assertion of fingerprint uniqueness came from German anatomist J.C.A. Mayer in 1788. But it was Sir William James Hershel, a British official in colonial India, who turned theory into practice. To combat fraud, he began using fingerprints as signatures, and by 1877, as magistrate of Hugli-Chuchura, advocated their use for identification in what became known as the “Hooghley Letter.” He studied their permanence until his death.

But it would be a Scottish medical missionary in Japan, Henry Faulds, who would first publicly state, in a paper to the journal Nature, that fingerprints should be used for criminal investigations. He had been conducting private research in Japan between 1873 and 1885, taking the fingerprints of both people and monkeys – all primates have fingerprints – and had passed on his findings in a letter to Sir Charles Darwin, cousin, as it so happened to Sir Francis Galton, who would very quickly have been informed!

In 1840, after reading about the murder of Lord William Russell in his bedroom at his mansion in Mayfair, London – a crime that scandalised and panicked the Victorian aristocracy – Robert Blake Overton, a surgeon from Norfolk, wrote to Scotland Yard advising them of the personal study he had been making of uniqueness of fingerprints and how they might go about identifying the culprit. Sadly, his letter would remain undiscovered in Scotland Yard’s files until 1890. Alas, what might have been! It was not until 1900 that British police would adopt the Henry Classification System – soon to be adopted by all English-speaking countries – and achieve their first conviction using fingerprint evidence in 1902.

It was in Argentina that the first recorded solving of a homicide using fingerprints took place. In 1891, Jean Vucetich, a statistician with the Central Police Department in La Plata, had studied Galton’s research and devised his own fingerprint classification system. In 1892 Buenos Aires, Francisca Rojas claimed a man named Velasquez had murdered her two children. But a bloody thumbprint on a door, matched by Inspector Eduardo Alvarez who had trained under Vucetich, revealed the killer was Rojas herself - who confessed at once.

But back to Kolkata and the Kangali Charan trial of 1898. The Court, perhaps wary of the new forensic science of fingerprinting, found Kanglai Charan guilty of the theft of the rupees from Hridaynath Ghosh but not of his murder, believing that to convict him of such when there were no witnesses would be unsafe – a decision upheld by the Supreme Court. So Kangali Charan will forever remain the first human being ever to be convicted of a crime using fingerprint evidence, even if he escaped punishment for the murder he had almost certainly committed.

(The author is a novelist and retired investigator with an abiding passion for Chinese history. Views personal.)