pickpockets constitute the entire population of
several villages, and carry their depredations northward to the banks
of the Indus, and southward to Bombay and Madras.[10] But colonies of
thieves and robbers like these abound no less in our own territories
than in those of native states. There are more than a thousand
families of them in the districts of Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, and
Meerut in the Upper Doab,[11] all well enough known to the local
authorities, who can do nothing with them.

They extend their depredations into remote districts, and the booty
they bring home with them they share liberally with the native police
and landholders under whose protection they live. Many landholders
and police officers make large fortunes from the share they get of
this booty. Magistrates do not molest them, because they would
despair of ever finding the proprietors of the property that might be
found upon them; and, if they could trace them, they would never be
able to persuade them to come and 'enter upon a worse sea of
troubles' in prosecuting them. These thieves and robbers of the
professional classes, who have the sagacity to avoid plundering near
home, are always just as secure in our best regulated districts as
they are in the worst native states, from the only three things which
such depredators care about--the penal laws, the odium of the society
in which they move, and the vengeance of the god they worship; and
they are always well received in the society around them, as long as
they can avoid having their neighbours annoyed by summons to give
evidence for or against them in our courts. They feel quite sure of
the goodwill of the god they worship, provided they give a fair share
of their booty to his priests; and no less secure of immunity from
penal laws, except on very rare occasions when they happen to be
taken in the tact, in a country where such laws happen to be in
force.[12]

Notes:

1. December, 1835.

2. Raja Parichhit died in 1839.

3. The word gram (_Cicer arietinum_) is misprinted 'grain' in the
author's text, in this place and in many others.

4. Bundelkhand exports to the Ganges a great quantity of cotton,
which enables it to pay for the wheat, gram, and other land produce
which it draws from distant districts, [W. H. S.] Other considerable
exports from Bundelkhand used to be the root of the _Morinda
citrifolia_, yielding a dark red dye, and the coarse _kharwa_ cloth,
a kind of canvas, dye