Warburton and the racialised world of the colonial police

How did Warburton come to occupy such an important place in indigenous literary imagination? To answer this question, a brief consideration of his life is necessary. He straddled the world of the colonised and the coloniser in both his personal and professional life. Born in Kabul during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842), his mother, Shah Jahan Begum, was an elite Afghan woman, and his father, Sirdar Faiz Talab Khan, was an Afghan noble.Footnote ¹⁷ During the British occupation of Kabul, British soldiers stationed there were notorious for their excesses, including making sexual advances towards Afghan women. As a result, in 1841, there was an anti-British outbreak that eradicated the entire British contingent in Kabul within a short period of time.Footnote ¹⁸ However, Begum, we are told by Martineau, ‘divorced’ her Afghan husband and ‘married’ a British artillery officer, Robert Warburton. Robert renamed Jahan Dad Khan as John Paul Warburton.

According to Martineau, J. P. Warburton studied at ‘an indifferent Roman Catholic establishment at Agra’ before joining the police department in 1862.Footnote ¹⁹ Several contemporary sources suggest that he was fluent in English, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian, and perhaps other northern Indian languages, and had ‘a deep knowledge of the character of the people among whom he had lived since infancy’.Footnote ²⁰ He was also largely accepted in European circles. According to his biographer, although as a child he dressed like an Afghan, he became highly Westernised in appearance as he grew up and was somewhat fastidious about Victorian ideals of dress and etiquette. He married a European widow and had a large family of 12 children, including two stepsons and two orphans from his wife’s family.

In his professional life, one of the most striking aspects of Warburton’s position within the colonial police hierarchy was that he was not white. Indeed, Warburton’s mixed Anglo-Afghan heritage and upbringing in northern India may have given him an advantage in his police career. The historian Michael Silvestri has argued that familiarity with Indian languages and society was crucial for the success of detectives like Warburton.Footnote ²¹

He joined the police in Punjab as an assistant superintendent of police in Karnal in 1864, a time when the British colonial rule was transitioning from a domination of the British Indian Army to the one upheld by judges and policemen after the 1857 rebellion.Footnote ²² The basis of Warburton’s appointment as assistant superintendent of police, a high-ranking position, despite his Afghan ethnicity, remains a mystery. The reorganisation of the police in 1861 reflected the racial divide that underpinned the British Indian empire.Footnote ²³ While at the bottom the majority of the police force was composed of ‘native’ constables, at the top level, to supervise the Indian constables and the intermediary ranks, a small number of European officers were directly appointed by the colonial government, who dominated the system.Footnote ²⁴ In the nineteenth century, police superintendents, who were responsible for maintaining overall law and order in their districts, largely came from the British middle classes.Footnote ²⁵ Within this racialised world, ‘natives’ were rarely appointed to well-paid, supervisory positions like that of assistant superintendent.Footnote ²⁶ Warburton was able to join as an officiating assistant superintendent of police at Karnal, perhaps through the influence of his stepfather.

J. P. Warburton served as district superintendent of police for much of his life in Ludhiana (1872–1885), Amritsar (1885–1890), and Sialkot (1890–1894), retiring in 1900 as deputy inspector general of the railway police of Punjab (1894–1900). After his retirement, he was re-employed as the inspector general of police of the princely state of Patiala (1900–1909). He died in 1919 at the age of 80 in a horse-riding accident in Kasauli.

During his career, he allegedly solved several high-profile cases, including the Sharfuddin poisoner’s case (1881).Footnote ²⁷ He is also credited with establishing and heading the first ‘special branch’ in India for intelligence gathering—a precursor to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID)—which the government of India later adopted as a model across the country.Footnote ²⁸

In 1873’s annual police report, the deputy commissioner of Ludhiana district credited Warburton for all the success in solving crime in the district that year. Lauding Warburton’s ability ‘especially as a detective’, he noted,

His extraordinary ascent within the police hierarchy was not without challenges. Although the colonial state honoured him with the title of companion of the most eminent order of the Indian empire (CIE) and established a town and a railway station in the Gujaranwala district in 1913 bearing his name, a section of Europeans in Punjab remained openly hostile to him because of his ‘native’ origins.Footnote ³⁰

Yet his ‘mixed’ heritage and his familiarity with local culture enabled him to build important relationships with subordinate colleagues and to draw upon informal information networks.Footnote ³¹ His upbringing in northern India also likely gave him an edge over European police officers who often struggled to understand even basic conversations with their subordinate colleagues. But even more importantly for my purposes here, he was also able to make connections with indigenous literati. Warburton became a popular hero of bardic literature in Punjab in his own lifetime.Footnote ³² Stories about him—real or imagined—circulated in the forms of songs and ballads that were sung from the plains of Punjab to the hills of the Frontier.Footnote ³³ Amid widespread rumours of his prowess, he became a household name in Punjab. The mythic figure of Warburton, as represented in literature and rumours, was thus perhaps better known in Punjab than the real-life individual. Not only did he enjoy the status of a ‘hero’ in the bardic literature of Punjab, but he also engaged with and patronised this same tradition.

Orality, Punjabi literary culture, and Warburton

To understand why indigenous notions of justice and the just ruler associated with Warburton resonated so strongly among Punjabi subjects, it is important to view printed literary texts about him as rooted in the local oral traditions of late nineteenth-century Punjab, where they were also intended for oral performance.Footnote ³⁴ Although this article focuses on these printed texts, any analysis would be incomplete without recognising the vibrant oral culture surrounding Warburton, within which they were produced and circulated.

Indigenous Punjabi literary culture thrived in the late nineteenth century, a period the historian Farina Mir has described as the ‘golden age’ of indigenous literature. As Mir has argued, vernacular oral literature in verse, composed in indigenous genres, gradually adapted to the printing press. These printed texts—unlike newspapers or novels—were not intended for ‘silent reading’ but for being sung and publicly performed with musical accompaniments before audiences. Although indigenous literature was largely confined to tales of romance, especially the Qiṣṣa Hīr-Rānjhā (Qiṣṣa of Hīr and Rānjhā), literati also experimented with new subjects, such as the adventures of Warburton.Footnote ³⁵ Within this emerging entanglement of print and oral cultures, the literature on Warburton, which also had oral origins, circulated even more extensively orally than in print. For example, Roshan Din’s Qiṣṣa Mauẓaʿ Bastī Sōhal (1892), which deals with Warburton’s suppression of the alleged criminal activities of the village Sohal in Amritsar district, explicitly demonstrates the links between print and oral cultures. The qiṣṣa suggests Din as a poet transitioning from an oral to a print culture, as he emphasised listening (not reading) to his audience and spoke about the need to memorise his work:

Din first composed and performed this text orally in the village of Chotti Ghumman (qiṣṣa Roshan Din banāyā, Chhottī Ghumman sunāyā) and then sent it to a printing press (qiṣṣa chhāppē vich chhapwānwā). The word sunāyā (read aloud, likely before a gathering) also clearly suggests that the printed texts on Warburton were rooted in orality and were meant not for silent reading but for oral transmission. In a similar vein, Sheru Ram’s text also emphasised listening, as he wrote, ‘Suno lok Hindū Musalmān jī’ (Please listen, Hindus and Muslims).Footnote ³⁷ They were thus contributing to and further nurturing the emerging oral culture surrounding Warburton.

The printed literature on Warburton also retained strong aural and performative dimensions. In 1919, when Edmund Candler—the Victorian writer and Warburton’s friend—wrote his obituary, he referred to these dimensions as ‘the Button tradition’ of Punjab, in which,

Against this testimony of the thriving ‘Button’ tradition in early twentieth-century Punjab, there are only a handful of surviving printed literary works on Warburton, which perhaps suggests that they were considered too insignificant to be archived. This indicates how an excessive focus on colonial archives can serve to marginalise indigenous literature.Footnote ³⁹ It also suggests that the printed materials represent only a tiny fraction of the actual compositions on Warburton, and the majority of the works on Warburton may have remained confined to the oral realm. While comparing John Paul Warburton’s achievements with those of his younger brother, Sir Robert Warburton, who served as a commissioned officer in the British Indian army, Candler wrote: ‘[Whereas] The adventures and achievements of Robert Warburton have been published to the world; those of John Paul Warburton live, like rumour, from mouth to mouth, but they carry a greater tradition.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Candler thus alludes to a robust oral tradition around Warburton in early twentieth-century Punjab.

This oral tradition preceded and also outlived the print tradition. The example of the ballad Qiṣṣa Rūpalon (Qiṣṣa of Rūpalon) supports this conclusion. This qiṣṣa dealt with Warburton’s investigation of the murder of a woman named Parbati in Ludhiana in the late 1870s.Footnote ⁴¹ Several instances suggest that this qiṣṣa was popular within the oral culture of Punjab. Inspired by its popularity and drawing upon a bardic version of the narrative, Candler wrote a ghost story, ‘The testimony of Bhagwan Singh’ (1911). In this short story, while describing Parbati’s beauty, Candler alludes to bardic performances, writing, ‘Parbati was fair, if there is any truth in the bards’, and he cites lengthy translated couplets through which the bards praised her beauty.Footnote ⁴² In the story, the police officer Carpendale—based on Warburton—locates Parbati’s remains in the sand-dunes of Ludhiana, where her murderers had buried her body, with the help of the ghost of Bhagwan Singh, Parbati’s deceased husband.Footnote ⁴³ Carpendale, who is also portrayed as an avid listener of bardic performances, first learned about Parbati from a bard, even before being approached by the ghost of Bhagwan Singh:

On 16 May 1900, in an address by the prominent inhabitants of Ludhiana marking Warburton’s retirement, they mentioned: ‘The famous Rupalon Murder case, which you unearthed after an investigation of two years, is still a household word and is a theme for the ballads of the Jats of this district.’Footnote ⁴⁵ However, Qiṣṣa Rūpalon—a potent combination of romance and murder mystery with Warburton as lead detective—while widely circulating in oral form, does not appear to have been printed.

Although printed works on Warburton began to appear in the late 1870s, orality remained the predominant medium through which he was celebrated. In 1890, the editor of a vernacular newspaper from Lahore emphasised the popularity of Warburton in Punjab, while referring to ‘vernacular books of poetry eulogising his work’. This editor further remarked that ‘there are some of the most popular Punjabi songs in his praise, which can be heard … in many villages of the Province’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Writing almost five decades later, by which time printing of indigenous literature on Warburton had perhaps ceased, Anthony Clyne noted that ‘even-today village bards in the Punjab still recite ballads about the astute and ruthless criminals he [Warburton] worsted, his uncanny gift of disguising himself and his thrilling adventures tracking down malefactors’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The vast popularity of the historical Warburton in Punjab was certainly not ‘accidental’.Footnote ⁴⁸ What distinguished him from his contemporaries among colonial officials was his engagement with Punjab’s bardic tradition. He was not only a heroic subject of this literature but also its patron and audience. Warburton attended and enjoyed such bardic performances, while his knowledge of local languages and culture enabled him to patronise the literati. Referring to the Qiṣṣa Rūpalon, Martineau wrote that ‘the village poets and bards … composed a lengthy ballad, describing the whole tragedy of Rupalon, and would come and play it on their instruments as an accompaniment to the singing on the verandah [of Warburton’s house in Ludhiana] at Christmas’.Footnote ⁴⁹ These examples seem to allude to a symbiotic relationship that existed between the ruling elite and bards in pre-colonial society.Footnote ⁵⁰ Shah Jahan Begum, his mother, too, was celebrated for ‘her entrancing singing of Persian love lyrics and heroic ballads’, and who might have nurtured a taste for Persian poetry in her son.Footnote ⁵¹

Again, Roshan Din’s Qiṣṣa Mauẓaʿ Bastī Sōhal also suggests that Warburton was both an audience member and a patron of this literature, writing:

Warburton was portrayed here as a patron who rewarded the indigenous literati. In a similar vein, Fauq’s qaṣīda, which is addressed to Warburton, was likely written with the motivation to receive a reward from him. His text, which was intended for a limited Persian-speaking audience in Punjab, portrayed Warburton as someone well-versed in Indo-Persian culture and capable of appreciating Persian poetry.

In other words, Warburton enthusiastically participated in the oral literary culture of Punjab, in which he was represented not as an outsider but as an insider who could understand and fulfil his subjects’ aspirations—a theme widely reflected in the printed literary texts on Warburton discussed below.

Justice and Warburton in print

The printed indigenous literature on Warburton reveals popular notions of justice and just rule in colonial Punjab. Warburton’s fearsome masculinity in the literature is imbricated in the indigenous literati’s conceptions of justice. The texts are, thus, less reflective of the actual police administration associated with historical Warburton than revelatory of the kind of administration the literati imagined and yearned for.

A central theme that emerges from this literature is that Warburton is disentangled from the colonial structure and is imagined beyond the institutional framework of the colonial state. The literati reimagined him as a hākam, which was not merely an act of linguistic rendering and had deeper implications. When disentangled from the very structures of the colonial criminal justice system he actually served, Warburton is repositioned in indigenous idioms of ethical rule.Footnote ⁵³

Hākam Warburton—more than just a police officer—emerges as a dispenser of justice. This imaginary also resonated with the popular literature and folktales of Punjab, which presumed that a true hākam was someone who dispensed justice in an impartial manner.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indigenous conceptions of rulership, as the historian Robert Travers has recently noted, were rooted in a ‘Persianate political culture’ that underlined ‘the duty of the ruler to be accessible to the numerous petitions and representation of needy subjects’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Within this framework, unlike the impersonal and dispassionate colonial criminal justice system, the ruler’s own person dispensed justice, where dispensation of justice demonstrated a ruler’s power and legitimacy within society.Footnote ⁵⁶

A survey of printed literary texts on Warburton reveals this process of recasting in action. Composed in verse in indigenous genres like qiṣṣa, bārāmāsā, and qaṣīda, these texts are available in Punjabi (Shahmukhi), Hindustani (Gurmukhi), and Persian (Nastaliq). As earlier discussed, they also possessed a performative dimension and were intended for singing.Footnote ⁵⁷

Fauq’s qaṣīda on Warburton draws on popular motifs of justice rooted in Indo-Persian culture. There is no information available about the poet himself, though his name suggests he may have belonged to a Punjabi Hindu Khatri background. He likely lived in Lahore or Amritsar and belonged to the last generations of indigenous scholars who wrote in Persian, and who would have been familiar with Persian history and literary classics such as Ferdowsi’s Shāh-nāma. Written in Islamic idioms, his qaṣīda reflects the ‘fluid’ cultural world of late nineteenth-century Punjab, where identities had not yet fully coalesced around distinct languages and religions.Footnote ⁵⁸

Fauq’s qaṣīda, which is based on exaggeration and an ornamental style, draws on a rich repertoire of Indo-Persian legends. As earlier noted, Fauq reimagines Warburton as a hākam, as he wrote, ‘how could I not speak of the magnificence of the ruler of auspicious character’ (chon nagoyam manishin-i ḥākam-i farkhunda-khuy).Footnote ⁵⁹ In several couplets of his qaṣīda, he reimagines him as a hākam who dispensed justice:

Thus, he reimagined a colonial agent as a ruler who dispenses justice. By portraying Warburton as superior to the legendary Persian ruler Noshīrwān the Just of the Sasanian Persian dynasty, celebrated in Persian tradition for his justice, Fauq positioned him outside the institutional logic of colonial policing despite the latter’s deep complicity in enforcing it. Rather than directly condemning or celebrating the authority of British rule, Fauq instead resituated Warburton in an alternative moral order that he appears to have regarded ethically superior to colonial rule.Footnote ⁶¹

This urge to place Warburton beyond the British colonial context is reflected throughout the qaṣīda. In praising his bravery, Fauq compares Warburton’s strength with the legendary Persian hero Rostam, claiming that if he were brought back to life (gar bayā shuda- zinda aknūn Rostam), he would not be able to match Warburton’s courage (delīrī). In several other couplets, he compares him with Alexander the Great and imagines him as someone whose fame had surpassed the latter’s glory (ḥashamat-i Iskandarī).Footnote ⁶² In his rendering, Warburton’s fortune exceeded that of Alexander himself:

In this way, within the imagined space of his qaṣīda, Fauq removed Warburton from his immediate British colonial context and situated him within ancient Persian historical and mythic traditions, thereby exercising a form of imaginative autonomy.

Hākam Warburton’s rule also reflected the idioms of rule associated with the legendary Persian hākams. In his just rule, Fauq suggests, everyone lived in peace and without any fear. As a result of which, his popularity had reached the skies (shuhra-i zad tā āsmān). Hākam Warburton could establish peace and rout criminals, as he possessed superhuman powers (perhaps like Rostam) and he could identify criminals from their faces (az qiyāfa-i mī shināsī rāz-hā-yi- nek-o bad ‘from a person’s face you can discern the secrets of good and evil’). Fauq argued that Warburton had established peace not only in Punjab but in the whole of Hindustan:

In his rule, people could travel without any fear:

Fauq, however, did not elaborate extensively on the conception of justice associated with Warburton’s rule, except in a few couplets in which he portrays his rule as terrifying to the powerful, restraining their oppression, yet protective of the vulnerable:

On the whole, by disengaging from the colonial state, its history, and Warburton’s place within it, and by situating him within Indo-Persian cultural traditions, Fauq reimagined Warburton’s administration as one rooted in the ethical rule of hākam Warburton. In this rendering, justice appears not as procedural or institutional but rather as personal and ethical.

Unlike Fauq’s qaṣīda, popular notions of justice and the just ruler emerge more prominently in Sheru Ram’s Bārāmāsā Wārbuṭoṅ Sāhib (1877). Little is known about Sheru Ram beyond his self-identification as a resident of Ludhiana. Much like Fauq, he was also likely a Hindu. He composed his bārāmāsā in Hindustani, heavily inflected by Punjabi and Indo-Persian idioms and written in the Gurmukhi script, which again reflects the culturally fluid world of late nineteenth-century Punjab, where languages and scripts had not yet been sharply divided along religious lines.Footnote ⁶⁷ As discussed below, this cultural fluidity was not of peripheral concern, as it also informed the literati’s conception of justice and the just ruler, who was portrayed here as an impartial ruler.

Although Sheru Ram remained aware that Warburton was a police officer, he nonetheless reimagined him as a hākam and khudāvand. Drawing on indigenous idioms, he subtly disengaged from the institutional framework of colonial policing:

In Sheru Ram’s rendering, Warburton, as a hākam, personally identifies and punishes criminals.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the bārāmāsā, there is no mention of the intricate colonial legal machinery—law, courts, lawyers, and judges—and Warburton’s engagement with them. Instead, justice appears rooted in the ethical authority of the ruler himself, suggesting a deliberate disengagement from the colonial criminal justice system.

In hākam Warburton’s just rule, peace and prosperity prevailed. Sheru Ram repeatedly mentioned how, on his arrival in Ludhiana, ‘criminals’ had abandoned that city. In this rendering, it was not the complex colonial legal machinery but the person of the ruler whose physical presence ensured peace and order. Sheru Ram wrote,

From Sheru Ram’s bārāmāsā, at least five key attributes of justice and just rule associated with Warburton’s rule emerge. First, in hākam Warburton’s incorruptible administration, everyone got justice and lived in peace and happiness (aman-ćain). Sheru Ram shares several anecdotes in which Warburton, with his intelligence, nabbed and punished notorious criminals. For instance, the notorious powerful characters of Ludhiana—zamindar Tara Singh and Tani—were arrested and sentenced by Warburton to the district jail (z̤ila). Further, according to the bārāmāsā, Tara Singh tried to bribe Warburton, but the latter was incorruptible and warned Tara Singh before he was finally caught and punished. Second, Warburton did justice to the innocent, especially the weak and the poor. Sheru Ram calls him ‘benefactor to the poor’ (g͟harīb parwar).Footnote ⁷¹ Warburton not only protected the people of Ludhiana from the depredations of criminals but also from oppressive policemen who wrongfully arrested innocents. For example, in the concluding anecdote, Warburton rescues innocent persons from their wrongful confinement by the subordinate police and catches the actual culprits. Third, hākam Warburton was intolerant of any indiscipline among his subordinates, who were terrified of him:

Or

Fourth, according to these accounts, Warburton treated everyone equally, irrespective of the social backgrounds of the subjects. Under his administration, the powerless (ʻājiz), the lowest (adnā), and the pre-eminent (aʻlā) subjects received equal treatment, and justice was available to them all. In Sheru Ram’s composition, people from different class backgrounds enjoyed peace and harmony under Warburton’s rule, since:

Finally, hākam Warburton is portrayed as an impartial ruler who protects both Hindus and Muslims. The absence of any religious riots (daṅgāh bakhēṛā) during his tenure in Ludhiana is celebrated as a marker of just rule, which contributed to his popularity across communities:Footnote ⁷⁵

In this imaginary, hākam Warburton was an impartial ruler who provided justice, protected both the weak and the powerful, and treated Hindus and Muslims equally. In Sheru Ram’s rendering, hākam Warburton’s rule had brought prosperity to Ludhiana (Sherū kā shahar ābād kiyā) and ensured peace and safety (aman-ćain) in the whole country (mulk).

These notions of justice and the just ruler reflect indigenous popular idioms of rulership. Although Sheru Ram did not remove Warburton from his colonial context to place him alongside the legends of Indo-Persian culture, neither did he engage with British colonial rule, its history, and its administration. The bārāmāsā remains centred around the person of Warburton and his rule in Ludhiana. Unlike colonial writings, which portrayed Warburton as the embodiment of colonial police in India, in the indigenous recasting, hākam Warburton—as per the ethos of Indo-Persian conceptions of rulership—fulfilled his subjects’ quest for peace, communal harmony, and justice.Footnote ⁷⁷

Unlike Sheru Ram’s bārāmāsā and Fauq’s qaṣīda, the qiṣṣa literature on Warburton, more deeply rooted in oral traditions of storytelling, was less laudatory and more oriented towards popular entertainment. Yet this body of work also reflects a disengagement from the colonial order by reimagining Warburton as a hākam.

What Sheru Ram imagined for Ludhiana, Akbar Ali’s Qiṣṣa Wārburṭoṅ Sāhib imagined for Amritsar. He associated Warburton’s rule in Amritsar with popular notions of the just ruler, under whose authority everyone lived in peace and criminals were duly punished. Written in a humorous tone, the qiṣṣa is structured around the theme of the fear Warburton provoked among criminals in Amritsar. Again, little is known about Akbar Ali himself. The text mentions his name as Sheikh Muhammad Akbar Ali ‘shāʻir-i-Panjāb Amritsar’ (the poet of Punjab from Amritsar). Unlike the other texts discussed in this article, we have evidence that this work was printed several times since its first appearance in 1886, suggesting its popularity.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the qiṣṣa, Akbar Ali uses the colloquial form of Warburton’s name, Bār Baṭaṅ, drawing on the name which circulated in oral culture. He praises him for his intelligence, as he wrote,

In the qiṣṣa, he imagines an order in which criminals are compelled to abandon their evil ways and adopt honest means of livelihood. Such was the terror Warburton inspired among criminals that, upon hearing of his arrival in Amritsar, they convened a jalsā (meeting) to discuss how to escape their impending doom. As the refrain of the qiṣṣa mentions: ‘on hearing Warburton’s name, thieves and gamblers plunged in sorrow’ (Bār Baṭaṅ dā sunndiyāṇ nām, chor juārīē sog tamām),

In the meeting, they proposed several honest means of livelihood, for instance,

Akbar Ali’s qiṣṣa also demonstrates disengagement with the colonial order. References to colonial institutions such as the police, law, and bureaucracy are largely absent. Instead, the qiṣṣa remains centred around hākam Bār Baṭaṅ Sahib and his authority in Amritsar. Although Akbar Ali and his audiences knew that Warburton was a police officer, the word ‘police’ does not appear in the text even once.

Roshan Din’s Qiṣṣa Mauẓaʿ Bastī Sōhal also imagines Warburton as a hākam (naṛ hākam) who not only upholds just administration but enforces it by punishing the evildoers. The qiṣṣa, based on a historical incident, describes how Warburton taught a lesson to the inhabitants of the ‘cruel village’ of Sohal in Amritsar district. Upon learning that there was such a village where the subjects indulged in criminal activities, Warburton resolved to punish its inhabitants (Bār Baṭaṅ nū khabar jō hoi, aisā jālam piṇḍ hai koī) to instil fear among them.Footnote ⁸² In the text, Warburton emerges as a hākam whose powers seem to have no limits. Like Akbar Ali’s qiṣṣa, this work also imagines Warburton outside the institutional logic of the colonial criminal justice system and caters to the popular imagination that Warburton punishes evildoers and upholds peace and justice.

On the whole, the literature on Warburton portrays him as a just ruler situated outside the colonial order. Other contemporary vernacular texts lauding Warburton also reveal an urge to disentangle him from the colonial order and to situate him within an alternative moral and political order. For instance, on his retirement and reappointment as the inspector general of police of the princely state of Patiala, the Durani Afghan nobility, who lived in exile in Ludhiana, presented Warburton with an address reminding him ‘of what an illustrious family you are a member, a family whose dominion and rule have been on people’s lips since the time of Ahmed Shah Durrani’. They further expressed hope that the maharaja of Patiala would not forget ‘the relations which existed between his ancestors and yours in the time of Ahmed Shah Durrani’.Footnote ⁸³ Rather than engaging with the colonial order and Warburton’s place within it, the address foregrounded his Afghan lineage. Unsurprisingly, they also reimagined his authority, where they repeatedly celebrated his justice: ‘Though time may efface from the archives the records of your justice, it is impossible to obliterate them from the memories of the people.’Footnote ⁸⁴

To sum up, the indigenous literature on Warburton was deeply rooted in the ethos of Indo-Persian culture. Within this tradition, literati often praised rulers and patrons through poetry while also subtly reminding them of the ethical obligations of rule.Footnote ⁸⁵ The bardic tradition of Punjab, which had lost the patronage of the pre-colonial ruling elite, suffered under the transition to colonial rule.Footnote ⁸⁶ Attached to what the British disparagingly described as the ‘Rule of Men’, this tradition remained embedded in the familiar moral universe which was rooted in pre-colonial lore and ethos on justice. By contrast, the British claimed that their rule had replaced the ‘Rule of Men’ with ‘Rule of Law’. The historian Scott Kugle has noted that this change was ‘fuelled by the creation of the institutional courts which were unrelated to the local society over which they ruled, [and hence were] unswayed by local conflicts and uninformed by local conditions’.Footnote ⁸⁷

The literati found in Warburton an interlocutor and patron, a ruler who spoke their languages, understood their poetry, and valued it. In this literature, he emerges as an alternative figure to the alienating and oppressive order associated with colonial policing. Although the laudatory literature surveyed in this article was partly produced to earn rewards and generate income from the sale of printed texts, its authors neither directly engaged with nor celebrated the colonial order and its history. In their texts, only hākam Warburton is worthy of their admiration when imagined as upholding an alternative moral order beyond the colonial one. By confronting the colonial order, these figures risked repression, and by admiring it, perhaps they risked alienating their audiences, who experienced oppressive workings of the colonial criminal justice system in everyday life. Therefore, their texts reflect deliberate disengagement, a form of refusal to engage with the colonial criminal justice system. By reimagining Warburton, they articulated attachments to alternative conceptions of justice rooted in indigenous notions of ethical rule.

It is no coincidence that these indigenous notions of just rule also emerge from other vernacular laudatory literary texts on policing. For instance, in a poem by Sodhi Ram dedicated to Herbert William Waite (1887–1967), who seems to have been a popular police officer like Warburton, unfolds in a similar style to those surveyed above:

In the poem, he also praises him for suppressing the systemic corruption and authoritarian high-handedness of the police:

Although this poem belongs to a later period than the texts examined earlier, the poet emphasised similar ideas of justice and equality in treatment seen in the lauding of Warburton. He also wrote that Hindu, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians alike admired Waite’s administration (Īsāī, Hindū, Muslim, Sikh, sab ko tū bhāyā hai). Though likely unfamiliar with Enlightenment philosophies of equality or secularism as conventionally associated with Western political thought, the indigenous literati’s notions of justice and just administration, as reflected in their works on Warburton and Waite as rulers, foregrounded the ruler’s responsibility to maintain peace and to ensure justice for all subjects, irrespective of class, caste, or religious background. Within these texts, emphasis was laid on the protection of the innocent and the marginalised, where both ‘the lion and the lamb’ thrived in peace, a symbol often associated with the Mughal ideals of just rule.Footnote ⁹⁰

Literary imagination and Warburton in the archives

In contrast to the conceptions of justice associated with hākam Warburton’s rule in indigenous vernacular registers, where he is positioned as an exemplar of ethical rule, a different imaginary of policing and justice surrounding Warburton emerges from a critical reading of colonial archival sources, in which he appears as unjust and oppressive. The comparison here is not intended as a historical evaluation of the imagined figure of Warburton against the colonial order; rather, it draws attention to the divergence between two distinct imaginaries. The contrast reveals that the literary texts operated, to a great extent, independently of his policing, suggesting that the literati exercised a degree of autonomy in reimagining Warburton. By singing and sharing songs about the imagined rule of Warburton, the literati and their audiences gave expression to an alternative vision of moral authority that existed alongside colonial authority and which was rooted in a distinct genealogy.Footnote ⁹¹ Rather than extolling, confronting, or resisting the colonial criminal justice system in their songs, they turned to a different moral order through which they could exercise an imaginative form of sovereignty.Footnote ⁹²

While an exhaustive discussion of colonial policing and Warburton’s role within it lies beyond the scope of this article, the section briefly engages with archival sources on police administration in Amritsar between 1885 and 1890, when he served as district superintendent of police there. By examining how Warburton’s policing emerges from these sources, the discussion below suggests that his policing was indistinguishable from the colonial policing that he represented.

In contrast to the idea that hākam Warburton had established peace and prosperity by suppressing crime in Punjab and beyond, the available accounts of the period reveal that crime and criminals thrived.Footnote ⁹³ Ironically, the most detailed accounts of widespread crime come from the texts authored by close associates of Warburton. For example, Sergeant Ghulam Muhammad and Sergeant Bishen Singh, who had worked under the supervision of Warburton, suggest in their memoirs that crime had increased in late nineteenth-century Punjab, where people were often exposed to thefts and petty frauds while travelling or attending public places like fairs and markets.Footnote ⁹⁴

In contrast to the literary portrayal of hākam Warburton as incorruptible and who does not tolerate indiscipline among his subordinates, historical records reveal the widespread police corruption in colonial Punjab.Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, the systemic corruption under Warburton himself was an open secret, and he was accused of corruption. During his tenure in Amritsar, he allegedly received 70,000 rupees in ‘loans’ from prominent ‘native’ bankers and merchants in Punjab, in an open violation of departmental rules.Footnote ⁹⁶ The emerging Indian middle-class leadership, which disliked Warburton and was disgusted by his hero worship in Punjab, accused him of abusing his position to force the merchants to issue those loans. Based on the findings of the official inquiry committee’s report, the colonial government in Punjab, while sympathetic to Warburton, nonetheless blamed and punished him by transferring him from Amritsar to Sialkot.Footnote ⁹⁷

While in the literary materials, hākam Warburton caught criminals with his intelligence and relied on extraordinary intuitive skills to apprehend them, the police in colonial Punjab often relied on violence and torture to secure confessions.Footnote ⁹⁸ The details of Warburton’s police work reveal that his policemen in Amritsar also often relied on what the late scholar Lee Ann Fujji calls ‘violent displays’—violence committed for the public to view—to maintain the dominant social and political order.Footnote ⁹⁹ For instance, the archival sources on the ‘Amritsar Police Case of 1890’—an important case completely ignored by British colonial writings on Warburton—reveal that Warburton’s subordinates, on his orders, routinely indulged in excessive acts of violence in Amritsar.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sitlakant Chatterji, the nationalist editor of the Tribune, called Warburton’s policemen ‘brutes’ and ‘animals’ who indulged in violence to extract bribes.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Chatterji called Warburton ‘the author of innumerable cases of outrage and oppression’.Footnote ¹⁰²

In contrast to the lauding of hākam Warburton’s administration in the literature, under whose rule both the weak and the powerful were imagined to be thriving, colonial policing often oppressed the weak and the marginalised.Footnote ¹⁰³ The court testimony by Abinashi Khathīk, a resident of Amritsar, who was a tanner by caste, reveals how the police harassed the marginalised on an everyday basis. Warburton’s subordinates made him sit for long hours in the police station and threatened that, unless he testified in Warburton’s favour during the trial of the Warburton Defamation Case of 1890, they would implicate him in a false case, arrest him, and send him to prison.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In fact, in some of his writings, Warburton himself justified high-handedness and police violence against persons belonging to ‘non-respectable’ sections of society, which usually meant people belonging to lower castes and classes.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Another motif which emerges from the literature is that hākam Warburton was impartial to both Hindus and Muslims, whereas the archival records suggest that the police in Punjab were alleged to be a partisan force which victimised non-Muslims, especially during the Hindu–Muslim riots. This allegation was also rooted in the fact that the police in Punjab were always a Muslim-majority force.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Even if these allegations were only reflective of the emerging religious-nationalist politics of late nineteenth-century Punjab, it is noteworthy that for the first time in Punjab, allegations of securing a Muslim preponderance in the police force were levelled against Warburton in Amritsar, where he was accused of replacing more educated Hindus with less educated Muslim men.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A high-ranking Punjab bureaucrat also acknowledged that the Hindu and Sikh populations of Amritsar were ‘generally against him’, and they certainly disliked him for his partial handling of some incidents of Hindu–Muslim violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

While indigenous literary imaginations portray Warburton as serving the people, archival sources suggest that his policing was inseparable from colonial domination and oriented towards maintaining colonial rule through the violent suppression of potential challenges.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For instance, Warburton’s role in the ‘Patiala Sedition Case of 1909’—another case missing in British celebratory writings on Warburton—clearly reveals the oppressive nature of his policing.Footnote ¹¹⁰ During the crackdown, he arrested hundreds of members of the Arya Samaj in Patiala under the notorious sedition law on allegations that they were conspiring against the British rule in Punjab. Sections of the emerging nationalist press criticised Warburton for his high-handedness and oppressive conduct during the proceedings of the case.Footnote ¹¹¹

Unlike the portrayal of hākam Warburton, which dominated the literature, the historical Warburton’s everyday policing was largely indistinguishable from the broader workings of policing in Punjab, where policemen were widely despised. Sergeant Ghulam Muhammad, for example, observed that ordinary people in Punjab did not rent their houses to policemen in order to avoid their presence in the neighbourhood.Footnote ¹¹²

Further, the colonial criminal justice system in Punjab, which was inaccessible, unreliable, and often dominated by the socially powerful, to borrow a phrase from the historian Radha Kumar, solidified ‘the broader axes of class, caste, and gendered authority’ in the society.Footnote ¹¹³ The powerful rural landlords, who could not be touched by the police, controlled the local police stations.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As the colonial official Frank Brayne, a contemporary of Warburton, wrote, in colonial Punjab there was a belief that ‘the law courts belonged to the thieves’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In this background, the literary portrayal of hākam Warburton as an egalitarian, just, and impartial ruler perhaps resonated with audiences of indigenous literature.

What certainly distinguished Warburton from many of his contemporary British colonial officials, which enabled him to occupy a unique place both within the colonial criminal justice system and indigenous literary culture, was his Janus-faced personality. He successfully navigated the interface between the worlds of the coloniser and the colonised, a dimension that colonial writings have underestimated. Colonial accounts largely portray him as highly anglicised and deeply committed to the service of the British empire, an image he himself cultivated by adopting an anglicised lifestyle and by making regular donations to imperial causes until the last days of his life. This imperial image was perhaps most clearly commemorated by his daughter, who, following his death, instituted the ‘John Paul Warburton Scholarship’ to be awarded for higher studies only to European or Anglo-Indian pupils of European schools in Punjab.

Far less known, however, is the extent to which Warburton cultivated a close relationship with Punjab’s indigenous literati through seemingly generous patronage and, above all, by participating as an audience member in bardic and performative traditions, a strategy which paid off.Footnote ¹¹⁶

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In 1913, to honour Warburton, the colonial government granted him an estate and appointed him as honorary magistrate in Gujranwala district, after which local residents began reporting an unusually large number of cases to the police.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The district magistrate, F. W. Kennaway, attributed this enormous reporting of crime to ‘the universal regard in which Mr. Warburton’s name is held’. The complainants, ‘who had never been able to … report cases of crime’, and those ‘who had never been to Court’ to seek justice, believed that Warburton would provide them justice. ‘Nearly all the complaints filed’, which ran in the thousands, Kennaway wrote, ‘contained a prayer that the complaint be sent to Mr. Warburton’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

This episode perhaps best demonstrates the social reach of Warburton’s vernacular literary image. The people of Gujranwala appear to have encountered him less as a colonial official, especially since he had never served there before, than as the hākam celebrated in songs, ballads, and vernacular literature, whose intervention always guaranteed justice. The unusually high reporting of cases suggests that many viewed his arrival as an opportunity to seek justice, which was otherwise inaccessible. In the popular imagination, only hākam Warburton, as they imagined him, could ensure justice.