“There was a case in which a youth named Haragobinda, scion of the wealthy Basak family of Calcutta, was sentenced to life imprisonment for torturing and raping a minor girl called Kshetramoni. That a boy whose father owned lakhs worth of property could be serving a sentence for raping a poor village girl was unheard of! Girls like Kshetramoni had been bought and sold for twenty or thirty tankas only a few years ago. Natives respected this aspect of British rule.”
