MANUAL OF THE NILAaiRI DISTRICT. 411 



CHAPTER XXII. 

 POLICE DEPARTMENT. 



The village system. — Crime. — Reforms necessary. — New constabulary. — Present 

 organization. — Stations on the Nilagiris — in Wain4d section. — Proportion of 

 Police to population, &c., &c. — Appendices. 



In respect of village police arrangements this district is pecu- CH. XXII. 

 liar ; although there are headmen of rural divisions termed grama p^^e. 



maniyagar, and subordinate headmen, id maniyagar, ruling in 



hamlets, many of which have grown into considerable villages, yet '^^^ village 

 they have hitherto retained under them in many cases no regular ^^ 

 village servants, as in the villages in the plains. Every able- 

 bodied villager is required to obey the behests of his village 

 chief, and to perform such customary duties as the exigencies of 

 the village or district administration may demand. The result 

 of this communal system is that intra-village crime is almost 

 unknown, whether it concerns offences against person or property, 

 and extra-village crime is even now almost wholly confined to 

 crimes of intertribal violence, and seldom relates to property, 

 except where land disputes are concerned. 



Violent offences are generally connected with superstitious Crime, 

 feehngs. The object of most of these assaults is the Kiirumba, 

 and in such attacks all the other hill-tribes, and probably also 

 some of the more recent Kanarese immigrants, are usually ready 

 to take a part. The vaguest notion of their duties as village 

 magistrate or police officer prevails among the headmen. So far 

 from their understanding that it is their duty to repress such 

 crime, they seem to regard it almost as a sacred duty not only 

 to countenance and shield the wrong-doers, but even to aid iu 

 the perpetration. We may infer from this state of things that 

 the Nilagiris, prior to our advent, had remained apart from the 

 general police system of the neighbouring Kanarese and Tamil 

 countries, for rough and rude though that system was, yet it had 

 succeeded in training each village not only to do what was 

 necessary to secure the lives and property of its members, but 

 to take a share in protecting the lives and property of its neigh- 

 hours, and in so doing to be ruled by a moral law of communal 

 obligation which had grown, not out of the village Hfe, but out 

 of the wider life of a rdj or state. 



