9.  The funeral obsequies which are everywhere offered up to the manes of parents by the surviving head of the family during the last fifteen days of the month Kuar (September) were never considered as acceptable from the hands of a soldier in our service who had been tied up and flogged, whatever might have been the nature of the offence for which he was punished; any head of a family so flogged lost by that punishment the most important of his civil rights—­that, indeed, upon which all others hinged, for it is by presiding at the funeral ceremonies that the head of the family secures and maintains his recognition. [W.  H. S.] I have invariably found that natives of India, enjoying a good social position, who happen to be interested in an offender, care nothing for the disgraceful nature of the offender’s crime, while they dread the disgrace of the punishment, however just it may be.

10.  The worst feature of this abolition measure is unquestionably the odious distinction which it leaves in the punishments to which our European and our native soldiers are liable, since the British legislation does not consider that it can be safely abolished in the British army.  This odious distinction might be easily removed by an enactment declaring that European soldiers in India should be liable to corporal punishment for only two offences:  first, mutiny, or gross insubordination; second, plunder or violence while the regiment or force to which the prisoner belongs is in the field or marching.  The same enactment might declare the soldiers of our native army liable to the same punishments for the same offences.  Such an enactment would excite no discontent among our native soldiery; on the contrary, it would be applauded as just and proper. [W.  H. S.] Subsequently, corporal punishment in the Indian or native army was again legalized.  The present law is thus stated by Sir Edwin Collen:  ’A “summary court martial"... may pass any sentence allowed by the articles of war, except . . . and may carry it out at once.  Corporal punishment not exceeding fifty lashes may be given for certain offences, but is rarely awarded, and the amount of military crime is, on the whole, very small in the native army.  The native officers have power to inflict minor punishments’ [I.G. (1908), vol. iv, p. 370].

Flogging in the British army in time of peace was prohibited in April, 1868, by an amendment to the Mutiny Bill, and was completely abolished by the Army Discipline Act of 1881.

11.  The author also gives the Hindustani word as ‘kaelkur-hin’, which seems to be intended for qail karen, or in rustic form karahin, meaning ‘confute’.

12.  No wonder that the native army, pampered in this sentimental fashion, gradually became more and more inefficient, till it needed the fires of the Mutiny to purge away its humours.  No army could be efficient when its subordinate officers on the active list were men of sixty or seventy years of age.