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CHAPTER IV WHY MEN ARE HANGED The following few cases, selected at random from among the inmates of five prisons, clearly reveal the social background on which “crimes” are corrutted in India. Everywhere crime is a social phenomenon. Crimes are committed not against society by individuals who are punished as criminals. They are crimes of the society. The victims of social injustice are punished by the rules of society. Since crime is the ugly bastard of social injustice, its forms are largely determined by the specific social structure of the country. The cascs I have selected are typically Indian. They could be committed only in the peculiar social atmosphere of this country. Placed under clifferent social environments, these men and women would not be hanged or otherwise punished. The notive of crimes committed by them springs from the established relations and traditional taboos of Indian society. It is to be traced not to human nature, but to Indian nature, which is the product of the Indian mode of living, and is dominated by the Indian mode of thought.
It was a bright lad, hardly above twenty, horn of a high-caste family of small landowners. His 188
