Jack the Ripper. Indian

DID JACK THE RIPPER flee to India after his murder­ous spree in 1888 and 1889 in London? The Times of India’s headlines—‘An Indian Jack the Ripper: A horrible Tale Unfold­ed’—certainly seems to suggest that in December 1890, the Rip­per had popped up in Hyderabad. Did he?

For those who are unaware of Jack the Ripper, this was the nom de guerre of a killer who preyed on poor women living alone and plying their trade in the Whitechapel neighbour­hood of London in 1888 and 1889. Thirteen murders were attributed to Jack’s blood lust triggering the most famous manhunt in history. Vicarious horror clung to the Ripper’s mention in London and other parts of the world. A July 1889 editorial in the Times of India said: “A Reuter’s telegram an­nounces another Whitechapel murder, complicated with all the nameless horrors associated with each of the long series of similar crimes which preceded it. The unhappy victim is a woman of the same class as the others and the throat has been cut in the same manner and the body subjected to the same indescribable mutilations.” Another newspaper article char­acterised the women as “unfortunate and lonely, if not almost friendless, persons,” and even blamed the victims for putting themselves “voluntarily at the mercy of the murderer, and unconsciously assisted him” in avoiding detection. That was Victorian society for you when it came to brutalities against the fairer sex. Blame the victims and call them prostitutes. More recent research by historian Hallie Rubenhold, though, reveals that the Ripper’s victims were maids or servants.

With each murder, all done in a small neighbourhood and some in quick succession, including two on the same night, the immediate reaction was one of bewilderment, terror and a desperate search for a motive. Surely, there had to be a reason to kill in such a horrific way, the public exclaimed. Robbery, perhaps? None of these women were robbed, though, not even of the pitiful clutch of coins in their purses.

As one reporter put it, with any murder, the way one dis­covered the culprit was through the motive. The police would find out what drove the killer—avarice, revenge, lust or some other human passion—and catch him. “In the Whitechapel murders, it is pretty clear that no motive has been at work except a disgusting, and happily rare, desire of miscellaneous butchery. There is no reason whatever to suppose that in any of these cases the murderer had any personal ill-will against, or indeed any personal knowledge of his unfortunate victim. In every case, any other woman would have answered his purpose equally well.” (The Saturday Review, July 20, 1889).

This was among the first public instances of a murder where the motive was not personal or even understandable. Today, we are aware of the existence of psychopaths and sociopaths and their physiological characteristics (a defi­cit in the functioning of their amygdala). For the Victorian public, though, this was a new phenomenon, evoking grave fear. “London lies today under the spell of a great terror….a nameless reprobate—half man, half beast—is daily gratify­ing his murderous instincts,” reported Star newspaper on September 8, 1888.

THE POLICE’S TASK was made harder by pranksters who jumped out at unsuspecting ladies or dashed off letters purportedly from the Ripper. Young and beautiful Miss Milligan was walking with her friends in county Down, Ireland, when a ruffian jumped out at them and said “I’m Jack the Ripper,” and disappeared. The next day, fever came, and within days, the beauteous damsel had de­parted for the heavens. Another young lady who worked in a draper’s shop was arrested for sending a prank letter. Her defence—she did it simply to cause a sensation. The editorials had several caustic things to say about teaching proper behaviour to young ladies.

More letters showed up at the newspaper offices and the police stations. Among them, those starting with “Dear Boss” were taken more seriously by the police. “I have ar­rived in your city as London is too warm for me just now,” said one letter with a Belfast postmark. “Belfast had better look out, for I intend to commence operations on Sunday night (Oct 14). I have spotted some nice fat ones who will cut up well. I am longing to begin for I love my work.” It was written in red ink to mimic blood.

For such heinous crimes, someone had to be blamed. Who better than a foreigner? A superintendent received information that an Austrian seaman had signed some let­ters and posted them before boarding his ship. The news spread that the Ripper was a foreign sailor.

THIS WAS THE era of gothic novels where the demonic and the supernatural threatened law-abiding English heroes and heroines. Richard Marsh’s The Beetle even outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the mid-1890s. The Beetle is a thrill­ing horror novel of mesmerism, murder and shape-shifting terror where a creature from the depths of ancient Egypt ar­rives in London to take revenge for crimes against an Egyptian cult. The description of the Beetle—half-man, half-demon— pointedly notes its resemblance to a non-English race. “He was not a flattering example of his race, whatever his race might be. The portentous size of his beak-like nose…his lips were thick and shapeless,” and so on.

Ironically, the public in England and in the colonies agreed that the Ripper killings were demonic and done by a foreigner. But who was the foreigner? The English race, said the newspapers in the colonies and put the blame on the incompetence of the English police. An 1889 Times of India editorial called these murders the blood mania of Jack the Ripper.

“Castle Street, where this last crime was committed, is within the quarter-mile radius in which it is known that at least eleven other women have been butchered, and every street, court and alley in this locality has been patrolled by constables whose beats are limited to twenty yards…Thirteen successive murders are committed in the most congested dis­trict of London, in each case…not less than from ten to fifteen minutes have been occupied in the ghastly details of each crime.” In each case, the murderer “has got away.” The edito­rial concluded Hamlet-like, “plainly there is something terri­bly rotten about the police administration of the metropolis.”

The editorial doesn’t bother to hide the glee of the colo­nised toward the imperial metropolis. That the Metropoli­tan police were unable to catch a murderer in their own backyard, that too in a crowded locality, spoke volumes about the police’s ineptness, was the verdict in the colonies.

It is in this context the headline “An Indian Jack the Rip­per” should be understood. The article was in fact about a gruesome murder in Hyderabad in 1890. The victim, an at­tractive Christian convert who taught in the zenana school accompanied the murderer, Abdool Hoosain, who’d asked her if she could teach his children. She agreed and came to his house where he and his accomplices “divested her of her jewellery, attempted an outrage on her and finally murdered her.” Hoosain placed her body in a wicker basket, and packed it in a brand new cotton carpet, securing the whole with a rope. He then hired a cartman to take it to the railway station and despatch it on the goods train to Lahore. Unfortunately for Hoosain, the cartman missed the train and the parcel had to be left in the warehouse where the foul odour from the decomposing body drew the attention of the stationmaster. On discovering the body and after interview­ing the cartman, Hoosain was arrested. He was branded an Indian “Jack the Ripper”.

Richard Marsh’s the Beetle is a thrilling horror novel of mesmerism, murder and shape-shifting terror where a creature from ancient Egypt arrives in London to take revenge for crimes against an Egyptian cult. The description—half-man, half-demon—pointedly notes its resemblance to a non-English race

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In another series of woundings in Secunderabad in 1894, a madman wandered about in the servants’ quarters of the mansions in the small hours of the morning and slashed with a knife or a sword anyone he encountered. “The natives are in a dreadful state of fright; and the ladies are not much better…We sleep with a shotgun handy and the servants are provided with axes…The wretched police have not had a night in bed for nearly a month.” The newspapers promptly christened the maniac the “Secunderabad Jack the Ripper”.

It was the nature of murder—no personal connection to the victims, the random choice of victims in the Secun­derabad case, and the brutality of the wounds in both in­stances—that evoked a comparison with Jack the Ripper. The subtext being, this sort of murder was perhaps under­standable in the wilds of Whitechapel, but not in a civilised place like India.

They had, of course, forgotten that five years before the Ripper carnage, Bengal had its own serial killer in Troilokya, a prostitute from an upper-caste family who killed several men and women for their jewellery and wealth. She was finally nabbed by a Calcutta policeman and hanged in 1884. The Troilokya case, though reported as a Ripper-like case only in the 1920s, differed from the Whitechapel case in one key aspect: motive. Troilokya murdered for wealth, and in fact, had more in common with the Thuggees than the Ripper who did not have a discernible motive. The Thug­gees were a tribe who preyed on travellers in the Deccan countryside for much of the 19th century. They strangled the victims and absconded with their cash and jewellery.

When attempts were made in the British newspapers to suggest that the prior Thuggee-hunting experience of the official in charge of finding the Ripper ought to be used, the Times of India firmly trashed the suggestion. The man in charge of the Ripper investigation in 1891 was Sir Edward Bradford. The Times of India pooh-poohed the statement that Sir Bradford intended to use his experience in the Thuggee Department in India to track the Ripper.

No amount of experience in stamping out the Thuggee is likely to be of much service in solving the Ripper murders, the editorial opined. The crimes did not have a single point in common. “The Thugs did their deadly work in gangs and in lonely places; the Whitechapel murders have all been committed in the very heart of a congested neighbourhood thickly guarded with police. The present [murder] is, we believe, the thirteenth of the series and amid the wildest of theories not the faintest suggestion of a clue to the murders has ever been obtained.”

The editorial ended with a scathing comment on the in­eptness of the British police. “During the panic which has ensued on each of the previous Whitechapel murders, the police seem to have lost their heads and to have made arrests on the most inadequate grounds.”

IF THE COLONIES saw in the Ripper killings a barba­rism that they firmly associated with the colonial rulers, in England, the reverse view ruled. The scapegoat was firmly the foreigner—foreign seamen and Jews. Jews were the primary target of the newspaper reports, and many immigrants from Europe lived in Whitechapel on whom English insecurities were being wreaked. The newspapers made a great hulla­baloo out of the testimony of a Mrs Long who saw the back of a man with one of the victims and asserted that he was foreign in appearance. It didn’t help the law-abiding Jewish immigrants that the police sketches exaggerated the facial characteristics, making the Ripper resemble their race.

The final proof of foreignness, as far as the London public was concerned, came when a package sent to the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee contained half-a-human kidney and a letter that implied the killer had fried the other half and eaten it. Of course, only heathen foreign­ers were cannibals; no Englishman would stoop to such barbarism! The public was united on this point.

The irony is that while the press, public opinion and po­lice theories at that time focused primarily on non-English suspects like Aaron Kosminsky and Seweryn Klosowski, sub­sequent theories pinpoint more suspects who were quintes­sentially English and even connected to the Crown (Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, his tutor James Kenneth Stephen, the Royal physician Sir John Williams, English composer Michael Maybrick, and Royal Wigmaker Willy Carson, among others).

ALONGSIDE THE “Ripper is a foreigner” theory, a second narrative was taking shape in the pub­lic’s imagination. This was the bloody doings of the rich and wellborn lot. In the news­paper caricatures, the Ripper was depicted in a top hat and a black opera coat. Whispers abounded about witnesses sighting a high-born royal in the vicinity of the murders. Collars and cuffs were in­volved, it was murmured, a name given to Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Queen Victo­ria’s favourite grandson and a future king of England. When the prince was implicated in the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, one that involved him visiting a house with male pros­titutes on Cleveland Street, the Palace packed him off on a royal tour of the colonies, including India and Hyderabad.

TEA, SCANDAL AND the Ripper’s Shadow by Eduardo Zinna carries a more extensive account of the duke’s involvement and the palace cover-up.

“On 4 July, 1889, the police questioned a telegraph boy who seemed to have far more pocket money than he could have earned toiling away at his job. He told them that gentlemen he had met at the house of one Mr Hammond, 19 Cleveland Street, had given him the money. Two days later, Chief Inspector Abberline [who was part of the Whi­techapel investigation team] went to Cleveland Street to arrest Hammond. But he was too late. Hammond had fled to the Continent. Abberline arrested one of the telegraph boys, fittingly called Newlove. Annoyed at his misfortune, the boy said he would name names. And did.

Among those he named, Zinna says, were the Earl of Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset. Ernest Parke, the twenty-nine-year-old editor of the North London Press, published these names and hinted that they had been allowed to leave the country because their pros­ecution would disclose the fact that a far more distinguished and higher placed personage than themselves was inculpated in these disgusting crimes.”

Parke was echoing the rumours—widely spread in Britain and freely printed in newspapers abroad—that Prince Albert Victor, the heir to the throne, had been a visitor to Cleveland Street. The prince was packed off for an extended tour of India, while Euston suc­cessfully sued Parke for libel.

SO, TO THE question—did Jack the Ripper visit In­dia—the answer depends on whether you believe that the Ripper was the prince. There are some telling details—his title was never assigned to any­body else after his death in 1892 at the age of 28. Yes, conspiracy theories have cottoned on to the suddenness of his death and claimed that the prince was put away in an asylum by his family, and that he actually died in the 1930s.

Recent DNA evidence from a bloodstained shawl found by the mutilated remains of one of the Ripper’s victims is a match with Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish barber who had been named as a prime suspect by the Ripper investigation team. They, however, didn’t have enough evidence then to convict him. The DNA evidence, though, has been disputed by sceptics. And thusly, the mystery of the Ripper lingers on, as does the finger-pointing at the furriner!

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes