WhOne doesn't have to be a practising policeman on a long weekend to enjoy Chandak Sengoopta's Imprint of the Raj, a well-researched and stylish account of how fingerprinting was born in colonial India. Any eclectic reader will find the book a heady mix of nostalgia, history, science and, above all, a compelling read. How many of even those connected with law enforcement in India know that fingerprinting, the ultimate and cheapest form of identification, was developed in the 1860s in colonial Bengal by William James Herschel, a middle-ranking British administrator? It may also be a revelation that the initial impulse had nothing to do with crime investigation but everything to do with the colonisers' utter distrust in their subjects. The view that deceit was inherent in lower-class natives was common during the Raj.

IMPRINT OF THE RAJ: HOW FINGER-PRINTING WAS BORN IN COLONIAL INDIA By Chandak Sengoopta Macmillan Price: £9.95 Pages: 228

In this backdrop, Herschel (1833-1917), an ICS officer, was posted as a magistrate in Nadia district of Bengal at the height of the indigo agitation, which had given rise to a great deal of violence, litigation and fraud. Forgery and perjury were rampant. To secure absolute proof regarding the identity of the planters and the ryots who entered into contracts, Herschel found the use of palm prints and thumb impressions of immense value. Sengoopta's engaging treatise gives a graphic account of the long journey of fingerprinting from dusty and distant Bengal first to Britain and then to its status as a universally accepted system of criminal identification. This voyage was never smooth but the sheer merit of the discovery was enough to guide it to its final destination.

Taking us through this fascinating journey, the author brings us face to face with the complexities of how the colonisers perceived their Indian subjects, how the tedious system of anthropometrics-measurement of a criminal's body features introduced by Bertillon, a French police clerk, -gave way to the much simpler system of fingerprinting, how people like Dr Henry Faulds tried to take credit when it was not their due and how legal battles had to be fought for it to be brought into the forensic domain. While the author has kept the technicalities to the barest minimum, readers who are not familiar with the world of loops, whorls and arches, the distinctive patterns on our finger marks, may find some portions demanding. I am also not too sure whether the contributions made by Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, sub-inspectors of the Bengal Police, to the development of the 10-digit classification system that eventually made fingerprinting a workable procedure for criminal identification, are adequately highlighted.

There is formidable scholarship here, and it is written with a panache not commonly seen in books of this genre. It is a must-read not only for law enforcers, students of history and those forever fascinated by the nostalgia of the Raj but also for anyone who knows he is holding an extraordinary book as soon as the first paragraph is read.

AUTHORSPEAK NEELIMA DALMIA ADHAR

Sins of the Father

Book reviewers tend to use the word "honest" loosely, usually pinning it upon any and every collection of angst-ridden homilies. Yet it is difficult to escape the word when assessing Neelima Dalmia Adhar's Father Dearest: The Life and Times of R.K. Dalmia (Roli). Amid admittedly overdone literary flourishes, there emerges a raw and complex story at the centre of which is a raw and complex man. In a society wedded to hagiographies, Adhar, 52, has committed heresy. Father Dalmia does not come across as an agreeable sort. He married six times, his money and odd charisma drawing a series of confident, young women into a lifetime of insecurity, servitude and extended family intrigue. Dalmia also fathered 18 children. To most of them he was more occasional visitor than parent. To all of them he passed on "an enviro-genetic dysfunction". Writing about him was, for Adhar, a "form of cleansing, even empowerment". Her relationship with her father remains a strange one. He died in 1975 but in many ways, she says, she understands him better now. Dalmia was a sort of Marwari hustler, a gambler who made killing after killing on the silver market and then graduated to the status of industrialist. He funded the Congress-owned, at different times, National Herald and The Times of India. Post-1947, he became a trenchant critic of Nehru, seeing him, rather immoderately, as a rival. Dalmia was typically untypical. His campaign against cow slaughter, for instance, was headquartered in the house he bought from an old friend, one M.A. Jinnah. His public profile was smeared when he was jailed for a financial swindle. Adhar's book is not, however, a compendium of facts and figures: "My interest is only human behaviour. My father may come across as hateful, yet he was free spirited ... And even negative feelings can be very alluring." The book is cathartic, recounting a crazy childhood that, while it was being lived, seemed perfectly normal. The many wings of the Dalmia clan are still distant from each other. Adhar hopes her book will "break barriers". Like her father, she seems to love challenges. — Ashok Malik