How Bengal helped create the modern world of biometric identity

These developments have heightened concerns over voter identification, Aadhaar-linked biometric verification, beneficiary authentication for welfare schemes, fraudulent citizenship claims, and the broader issues of identity and illegal migration.

Behind these contemporary concerns, however, lies an old and unresolved question that modern governments around the world continue to confront: how does the state reliably establish who a person really is?

The question is no longer confined to paper records and signatures. Every day, billions of people around the world unlock their cellular phones, leave digital footprints, and verify their identities through biometric systems. Fingerprints, retinal scans, and facial recognition technologies have become a decisive part of our everyday lives.

Yet few pause to ask where and how this vast architecture of identification began, or why modern states became so deeply invested in making human beings measurable, classifiable, and permanently traceable.

A very important part of the answer lies in West Bengal.

Oil ink and a contract paper 

Long before Aadhaar databases and digital verification systems, including fingerprinting and facial recognition, transformed governance in contemporary India, a young British civil servant stationed in the Murshidabad district of undivided Bengal found himself confronting a simpler yet persistent problem: how does a government prevent impersonation, fraud, and documentary deception in a vast and complex country like India? The answer he stumbled upon would eventually reshape modern forensic science globally.

In July 1858, as the Great Revolt was still raging in Northern India, William James Herschel, then serving as Jangipur’s sub-divisional officer (SDO), prepared to finalise a government contract with a local supplier of road-building materials, Rajyadhar Konai. At the last moment, almost impulsively, Herschel asked Konai to place the impression of his entire palm on the reverse side of the government’s contract agreement.

William James Herschel (Wikipedia)

Using the oil-ink from his official seal, Herschel pressed Konai’s inked palm firmly onto the contract paper. Years later, Herschel admitted, with characteristic candour, that the original intention had merely been “… to frighten [Rajyadhar] out of all thought of repudiating his signature.”

The handprint seemed uniquely personal, impossible to imitate convincingly, and, in a way, strangely authoritative, as signatures often were not. Soon, Herschel began insisting that all government contractors within his jurisdiction provide palm impressions. Gradually, what had begun as an improvised administrative tactic evolved into something much larger.

Nineteenth-century colonial governance relied heavily on records and documentation. Land deeds, pension records, prison registers, government contracts, mortgage deeds, and rent receipts formed the administrative skeleton of the British Empire in India. Yet these systems were constantly vulnerable to fraud and malicious alterations.

Forging identity in the Raj 

Transferred later as the district magistrate of Nadia in British Bengal in the aftermath of the Indigo rebellion in 1860, Herschel encountered forged godown rent agreements, fabricated receipts, and manipulated land records, submitted by zamindars and moneylenders with alarming regularity to the government’s district treasury for reimbursement. Signatures were altered or forged; names were changed with varied spellings, and false identities circulated with relative ease. Illiterate peasants were often the principal victims of these unscrupulous people.

The district’s prison system posed another challenge for him. Hardened criminals released on furlough occasionally arranged for substitutes to serve their sentences, either through coercion or monetary inducement. The colonial state increasingly faced a basic administrative issue: how could they be conclusively identified? Fingerprinting emerged as the solution to this problem. Herschel demanded that criminals released on furlough provide palm prints and fingerprints.

Fingerprints taken by William James Herschel between 1859-1860 and indexed by him (Wikipedia)

In 1863, convinced of its usefulness, Herschel urged the then-provincial Bengal government, under the British crown, to adopt fingerprinting across official institutions for the first time. The proposal was rejected. The memory of the Revolt of 1857 remained fresh, and the British administration feared that compelling Indians to smear their hands with oil-ink might provoke resentment or political suspicion, as it had happened before during the Great Revolt with cartridges.

The problem of identity fraud intensified when Herschel later served as the district magistrate of Hooghly. There, he uncovered widespread impersonation in the collection of government pensions. Relatives and intermediaries frequently drew pensions on behalf of deceased beneficiaries. Fraudsters exploited weaknesses in the system, and the administration struggled to verify identities with certainty. Herschel responded by requiring every pensioner in his district to provide a palm print before each payment. Fraud cases declined sharply.

Buoyed by his success in using fingerprinting and palm prints as a foolproof means of personal identification and in their practical applications, Herschel pushed his case. In August 1877, as the district magistrate of Hooghly, he once again urged the Bengal government to grant official approval to fingerprinting. However, the Bengal government remained unsure about this new process and did not agree.

Herschel returned to England soon after.

In search of the fingerprint pioneer 

Ironically, while Herschel was quietly experimenting with fingerprints in Bengal, another man, Dr Henry Faulds, thousands of miles away in Japan, was arriving independently at similar conclusions. In 1880, Dr Faulds, a Scottish missionary doctor working in Tokyo, wrote a scientific paper, titled “On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand”, in the multidisciplinary science journal Nature.

Faulds argued in his article that fingerprints were unique to each individual and could therefore be used for both identification and criminal investigation. The paper caused immediate excitement worldwide.

Dr Henry Faulds (Wikimedia Commons)

Among those who read it with deep alarm was Herschel himself. Herschel believed that Faulds was claiming priority for discoveries he had made years earlier in India. A bitter scientific dispute followed, one that would continue for many decades. The controversy soon drew in one of the most famous names in scientific history: Charles Darwin.

Faulds had originally written to Darwin to describe his fingerprint research and sought his opinion. Though elderly and in declining health, Darwin recognised the unusual nature of the claim and forwarded the correspondence to his cousin Francis Galton, the celebrated Victorian polymath. Galton would later become deeply involved in fingerprint research himself and eventually devised the first systematic method of fingerprint classification.

But Darwin and Galton’s entry further complicated matters.

Herschel insisted that he had pioneered fingerprint identification in Bengal decades earlier. Faulds argued that he had independently recognised the forensic value of fingerprints in Tokyo. Galton, meanwhile, increasingly cast himself as a central figure in the arbitration, as fingerprinting gained scientific prestige. What had begun as an administrative improvisation in 19th-century India had now become an international scientific controversy involving some of the era’s most prominent intellectual figures.

By the early 20th century, however, a broad consensus gradually emerged. Herschel was generally credited with being the first person to use fingerprints systematically for personal identification in India, while Faulds was recognised for their forensic applications. Galton’s contribution lay in developing systems of classification that enabled fingerprinting to be administratively scalable.

Soon, police departments and governments across the world adopted the technique with remarkable speed.

The world’s first Fingerprint Bureau is established 

There were two more Bengal connections in the history of modern forensic science, both of which Kolkata herself still carries in her institutional memory.

In 1868, during the investigation of the Amherst Street murder case involving Rose Brown, Inspector Richard Reid of the Kolkata police used photographic evidence (Evidence Photography) for the first time in the world. And, in 1897, the world’s first Fingerprint Bureau was established in Kolkata under the Bengal Police.

Left to right, Indian sub-inspectors Hem Chandra Bose and Azizul Haque (Wikimedia Commons)

The Bureau’s groundbreaking system was developed by two Indian sub-inspectors, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, along with their supervisor, Inspector-General Edward Richard Henry. The Bureau operated from the Writers’ Building, the great red administrative headquarters of colonial Bengal that long symbolised governmental authority in the state and still exists. The fingerprint classification systems developed in Bengal would influence policing practices worldwide.

The larger historical irony is difficult to miss. Colonial India, often viewed merely as a governed territory, became one of the earliest experimental laboratories for technologies of mass identification that were later adopted worldwide. The administrative need to classify, verify and monitor the population helped produce systems in Bengal that modern society now takes for granted.

Today, fingerprints unlock smartphones, authenticate Aadhaar records, verify voters, regulate welfare transfers, secure financial transactions, and authenticate identity and citizenship. Facial recognition cameras monitor public spaces. Digital databases increasingly determine access to citizenship, global mobility, and state benefits.

At the centre of this vast universal story stands an almost-forgotten moment in Jangipur, Murshidabad, in Bengal, in 1858, when the Indian contractor Konai pressed his inked palm to the back of a government contract. Neither Konai nor Herschel could have imagined what that gesture would eventually become.

(Devasis Chattopadhyay is a Narrative History Writer and Columnist)