Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎7r] (13/118)

people, more indeed than in any other district of British India. More people
too were murdered per thousand population and Mymensingh seemed to be outsize
in most respects. I went from department to department of the district office
and from court to court, but only trying my own hand at minor cases within the
limits of my powers of sentence which would grow with seniority. Claims to
land were at the root of many criminal cases since it was easier and cheaper to
establish a civil right by bringing a case, often contrived with the connivance
of suborned witness, for criminal trespass, assault or the like. I was to
understand land questions better after settlement training camp near Dinajpur
where with other Assistant Magistrates of my year I learned to measure the
peasant's land and to understand his different crops and their mode of cultivation.
In addition, by the end of my first fifteen months I had seen something of
revenue collection, public works, health, education and prison administration.
I had begun to understand the crowded local scene from peasant to landlord and
our only maharajah: and had seen enough to know that the breadth of interest and
responsibility would never allow me to think my work was not worthwhile.
The social life was narrow - occasional tennis, bridge and a peg or two of
whisky at the small rather dilapidated club where at most three or four couples
and myself (the sole bachelor) might gather and this was not every evening. The
senior Indian officials attended more for tennis except for the bridge-playing
Additional District Magistrate, a well-travelled Indian Christian who complained
that New York in summer equalled Bengal for heat and humidity but in the thirties
lacked fans and airconditioning and was harder to bear. The Bengali Hindu
Sessions Judge played tennis but preferred, as I did fresh from my regular
Saturday night mental free-for-all at my college Debating Society, lively,
uninhibited discussion to the emollient, evasive niceties of English social
conversation. I say this uncensoriously since tact and the avoidance of thorny