POLICE IN SOUTH INDIA 5 them in garrison towns., keep them under tight discipline and close supervision. Troops were also considered too expensive to be used as policemen, and it was felt that their proper role was as a reserve when other instruments of control had failed. In the context of southern India a further reason for constituting modern police forces was the remoteness and vulnerability of the administration as it then existed. This was most clearly demonstrated by the assassination ofConolly,the District Magistrate of Malabar, by a gang of Moplahs in September 1855.5 The assassins^ intention had been widely known in Malabar for several weeks before the murder was committed, but the district and provincial authorities had received no information about this and had seen no reasdh to keep watch on the gang. It was, therefore, the shock of Conolly's assassina-tion, coupled with similar indications that the administration was quite out of touch with the mood of the people, which prompted the Government of Madras to set up a police constabulary. Its function was to be "the eyes and ears" of the colonial regime, acting as a channel by which information could be gathered and conveyed to the government, and also as a repressive force, capable of replacing troops in suppressing minor disturbances.6 For reasons of economy and familiarity with local languages and society, it was necessary to recruit the police rank and file from the local population, but senior posts were reserved for Europeans. In this way the police acted as a second agency of European control in the districts while remaining directly responsible to the district magistrates. At the lowest level of the police organization it was intended that the constabulary would interlock with the village community through close cooperation between the talaiyari (watchman) and constables on rural beats and through the appointment of non-official inspectors for every group of villages.7 - Pro-landlord Bias The Madras police failed to live up to the expectations of its founders. The attempt to interlock the constabulary with the villages through village inspectors was soon abandoned as impractical and it proved impossible to maintain the constables' rural beats or to gain useful information from their brief village visits. Such an ambitious scheme of rural policing would only have been possible if the size of the force (which numbered about 21,000 between 1860 and 1900) were considerably increased; but a colonial government would not spend more than it felt essential to preserve its authority. Following the recommendations of the Indian Police Commission of 1902-03, village patrols were officially abandoned in the Madras Presidency in 1905; many existing police stations were converted into outposts; and responsibility for reporting crime and watching suspects in the villages was placed on the headman and the talaiyari^ This w^s, in effect, an admission that the colonial regime had little interest in village society so long as taxes were paid and the government's authority was unchallenged. In consequence