“The answers were given as if they had related to common matters. We went no further in the list. An Indian prison is marvellous for its mixture of races. The Hindu cannot eat with the Mussulman. To step inside a cookhouse is to defile it even for prisoners. Yet even Brahmins, old offenders, had been known to beg for the office of mehtars (sweepers, lowest menials), so great was their dread of the hard labour.
“What were called the ‘non-habituals’ were employed as at Alipore and taught trades where necessary. I noticed particularly an intelligent Chinaman busy at the lathe. I said, ‘He never gave you any trouble?’ ‘No; he was entrapped into a robbery, caught and convicted, and he immediately made the best of his position. He is a quiet, respectful, intelligent man.’ He spoke English like an Englishman. There were several Chinamen in the prison and all of the same class. We came to a long line of men, seated on the ground, engaged in hand spinning; the fourth from one end was old Ameer Khan, the Wahabee. He was a tall man, I should say nearly seventy years of age, stout, with flabby cheeks, a rather fine forehead and an extraordinarily furtive eye.”
The trial of Ameer Khan, the Wahabee, caused a great sensation in the Indian law courts in the year 1870. The Wahabees were a sect founded by a young Arab pilgrim of Damascus, named Abd-el Wahab, who endeavoured to reform the Mohammedan faith by denouncing the corruptions that had crept in and by calling upon Mussulmans to “return to their primitive church with its simplicity of manners and purity of morals.” The movement spread into India, where it gained great success with the Sunnis, themselves puritans, but it was fiercely hated by the Mohammedans, who had deteriorated greatly under the English rule, and there was great danger of an insurrection. In 1858 Sir Sydney Cotton had stormed the stronghold of the Wahabees at Sittana and razed the villages of their allies to the ground. In 1869 the government received information that the Wahabees had issued a propaganda from Sittana and Patna which was to be spread throughout India, and again found it necessary to take steps to suppress the Wahabees. Among others, Ameer Khan, a Mussulman banker and money lender of Calcutta, was suddenly arrested in July, 1869, on no stated charge. He applied for a writ of habeas corpus, but was refused. He appealed to the Supreme Court, and then began the famous trial which lasted six months. In December Ameer Khan was released from Alipore gaol, but he was immediately rearrested, as it had been discovered that he had been apprehended by a warrant about which there was some question. He was then tried before a civilian judge at Patna, where the offences were alleged to have been committed, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. He was found guilty of acting as agent and supplying money for the Wahabee propaganda.
The religious tenets of the Wahabees are still professed by many of the Arabs and are admitted to be orthodox by the most learned of the ‘ulamas of Egypt. The Wahabees are merely reformers, who believe all the fundamental points of El-Islam and all the accessory doctrines of the Koran and the “Traditions of the Prophets;” in short, their tenets are those of the primitive Moslems. They disapprove of gorgeous sepulchres and domes erected over tombs; such they invariably destroy when in power. They also condemn as idolaters those who pay peculiar veneration to deceased saints; and even declare all other Moslems to be heretics for the extravagant respect which they pay to the prophet. They forbid the wearing of silk, gold ornaments and all costly apparel, and also the practice of smoking tobacco. For the want of this last luxury they console themselves in some degree by an immoderate use of coffee. There are many learned men among them, and they have collected many valuable books, chiefly historical, from various parts of Arabia and from Egypt.
The Montgomery gaol in the Punjab, one of the largest in India, was recently visited by Captain Buck of the Indian army, and his description of the details of prison life there is exceedingly interesting.
Attached to the gateway are not only the prison offices, barracks for the warders and an armory, but a queer looking room where well-behaved prisoners may receive friends once in three months. The room is divided by bars into three parts. In the portion at one end the prisoner squats, his visitor stays in the part at the other end and a gaoler or assistant sits in the middle space, where he can make sure that no smuggling goes on or that no attempts at escape are made.
The prisoners become very clever and use all sorts of devices to smuggle in coins, tobacco, opium and other drugs and dice. They are allowed to wear their own shoes, but these are examined very carefully, for the soles are frequently found to be made of tobacco, four-anna pieces and other things than leather. “A common dodge,” says Captain Buck, “among the prisoners for concealing coins and other small things is to make a receptacle in the throat by means of a leaden weight about the diameter of a florin and half an inch thick; this is attached to a string some six inches long, a knot in the end being slipped between two teeth to prevent it sliding down the throat. By holding the head in a particular position for some time every day, ‘waggling’ the weight about, and from time to time altering the length of the string, a pouch can be formed in the throat suitable for holding as many as fifteen rupees. The possessor of this strange ‘safe’ is able to put in and take out his treasure with facility, but it is exceedingly difficult to make a man disgorge the contents against his will, or even to find out whether he possesses the pouch at all without the use of the Röntgen rays.”
The Montgomery gaol is as large as a small town, and contains two great enclosures surrounded by a high outside wall, three spaces at the back for work shops, a separate yard for the female ward and such other buildings as storehouses, pumping stations and granaries. All of the buildings are constructed of burnt brick, but the walls are made of sun-dried brick and are kept in repair and plastered by gaol labour. The menial work is performed by the prisoners, and caste prejudices have been consulted in apportioning this work to the different classes of prisoners. The lower castes do scavengering and general cleaning, while the dyer, washerman, barber, tailor, blacksmith and weaver are all, as far as possible, employed at their respective professions. Other prisoners who have worked at trades which the gaol does not afford are given work in the factories.
The factories are the most interesting part of the gaol at Montgomery. Carpets are made in many beautiful patterns. A carpet over fifty feet wide can be woven on the largest loom, and it is an interesting sight to see a row of twenty-five men engaged in pulling the threads from the many coloured balls of wool above their heads, slipping them into place and with a small curved knife cutting off the ends, pressing down the stitches with a wooden fork, and never making a mistake. The pattern is read out by convicts stationed behind a loom, sometimes from patterns, sometimes from books and often from memory. To the uninitiated these instructions are incomprehensible, for there is such a confusion of sounds that it is difficult to distinguish any one voice. The marvel of it is how each man knows what colours to use and where. Somehow or other, in spite of all the noise and confusion, dust and glare, these lovely carpets are produced. The ordinary woollen carpet costs from sixteen to twenty-four shillings a square yard, according to the number of stitches to the inch, but the prices range higher for specially selected wool, while the price of a silk carpet is almost a small fortune.
Another part of the factory contains the cloth looms. The weavers rig up their looms in the same manner as they would in their native villages, and consequently the yard appears to be in considerable disorder; “each weaver sits at his own little loom with his legs in a hole in the ground and flashes the spindle backwards and forwards, seldom wasting his time for fear he may not finish his day’s job, and thus lose marks or fail to gain any. One man, in training, has to complete nine yards of the duster-cloth, three-quarters of a yard wide, in a day; fifteen yards of blanketing four feet, eight inches wide, is another task; while a man working on a carpet, ‘munj-mat,’ or cotton mat, has to work on a width of two feet and complete four inches, twelve feet and two feet respectively in one day.” If a prisoner is able to do extra work he obtains marks and gains some remission from his sentence.
The dormitories contain curious looking long rooms with passages down the middle and on each side rows of couches made of hard baked mud. The prisoners are provided with blankets and mattresses made of rice straw, and they can be fairly comfortable. Even beds made out of such material have been diverted to other uses by the ingenious inmates. A convict is said to have made a pipe out of his bed. By hollowing out a place near the head of the bed and plastering it over, he made two holes, one to hold the tobacco and ashes, and the other