Posing as 'spirited' cops

The colonial police and the community's bootleggers co-existed for mutual gains.

One of the headlines in the papers this morning was: “Gang posing as cops busted after chase”, and this triggered a forgotten story of times past. I had heard it literally from the horse’s mouth! As a youngster, my dad had a best friend, the two almost inseparable; and a legion are the tales of their exploits together – many of them quite  innocent, but some definitely not so!

It was British India and prohibition had been enforced by the colonial police. And the police, being used by the rulers to oppress and overawe people to suit their designs, were a hated lot. It was a profession that decent families apparently considered infra-dig to let their offsprings join or be a member of. A kind of negative legacy, to this day, the Indian police have not been able to shake off!

One of the areas of police interventions most feared was the liquor raids to enforce prohibition – feared by a people whose love for the tipple was legendary. This was especially true of the Mangaloreans, who enjoyed an insatiable thirst for guzzling down ‘sorro’, a locally brewed elixir. It didn’t matter that in the absence of availability across the shop counter, it had to be only totally illegal.

I suppose there existed some sort of a balanced co-existence between the colonial police and the community’s clandestine bootleggers for mutual benefit; which did not necessarily make the police less feared! So, in one of his lighter moments, dad had narrated this one story of his younger days about how his best friend and he devised their own way to ensure that their regular supply of the-brew-that-lifts-the-spirits never dries up!

Every weekend, they would just dress up in khaki divided-skirt shorts et al, and take a ride on their bicycles into untrodden neighbourhood villages and paddy fields. There would invariably be some bootlegger poor soul who would sight them from afar, quickly abandon his basket – a full head load meant perhaps for his clandestine clients – and scoot for dear life! For dad and his friend, it was  just a matter of picking up the abandoned stuff (with no guilt feeling whatsoever) and emptying the contents down their throats; and narrating their dubious adventure on their return, to the merriment of friends and colleagues!

You may have noticed I have refrained from mentioning the name of dad’s best friend. Well, the two went together to erstwhile Madras to appear in a competitive test for a government job. Both qualified – one for the judiciary which service he joined, and went on to become a famous judge in Mangaluru known for his integrity!

Strangely, it was dad, who in the later 1920s, had qualified for the police services, which he could not, and did not, join; apparently his parents and family were too horrified to even dream of letting him join a service then hated and considered of ill-repute!