It is easier to catch a thief if you know him. Or her. Therein lies the seed of an idea that has captured human imagination for centuries and, along the way, beguiled millions with iconic fictional characters and their equally iconic sidekicks.

There is something about the fingerprint. A hundred questions spring up and yet not one is countered on the double. Human mind being what it is – incurably curious, a profile soon begins to take shape. Whose fingerprint is it – burglar or relative, man or woman, young or old, blue- or white-collared?

The art of profiling possibly began with bemused neanderthals staring at a cave painting, wondering who among them possessed the artistic streak in addition to a human spouse. The chants of a hymn, the metre of a poem, the strains of a musical composition – they tickle unbound curiosity within us; profiling is but the next logical step. It is the same with prose. The use of a language, the rhythm of the sentences, the distinctiveness of their construction – one can tell a great deal about the writer by reading him or her. Indeed, one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, the Unabomber, was caught simply by analysing how – not what – he wrote. But fingerprints at first glance tell us little. Or so we thought.

In 2015, two Indian scientists, Jasmine Kaur Dhall and Anup Kumar Kapoor, made an astonishing advance in criminal anthropology. Just by studying the ridge density of a fingerprint, the scientists claimed they could, with an accuracy of up to 98 per cent, identify whether it belonged to a man or a woman. Their discovery holds great promise for investigators and criminologists alike. Rather fitting, too, that two Indians have advanced the field of forensic science, for 120 years before Dhall and Kapoor, two other Indians had not just advanced the field of forensic science but given birth to it.

This is their story, the story of those two Indians. It is a story of triumph and tragedy, of remembered villains and forgotten heroes, of conquering nations and of nations conquered, and like most such stories, it begins with war.

Part I

It is the summer of 1853. The battle between the great empires of the world has just begun in the Crimea. Meanwhile, away from the blood-soaked arena where a million men would soon lose their lives, large crowds have gathered at Boribunder in Bombay to view an unearthly spectacle. Many are carrying offerings of coconuts for the demon or god shortly to emerge from this miraculous contraption that doesn’t need bullocks or horses to be pulled along. It runs on fire and steam. They are calling it the aag gadi. Fourteen carriages full of white men and women are readying themselves for the lavish banquet that awaits them at Thane to commemorate the aag gadi’s maiden run. The railways have arrived. The London Illustrated News reports it as a victory greater than that of Plassey, Assaye and Gujarat. Who would have thought that amid this frenzy and euphoria, Mangal Pandey’s doomed war cry was just four years away? Certainly not the men and women of the Company. It is the time to explore, to cash in, and to open the floodgates for the sons and daughters of the mother country.

One such son, William James Herschel, has just landed on Indian shores along with his steel trunk. He is joining the Bengal Presidency cadre of the Company as a writer, having graduated from the East India College at Haileybury. Like any other graduate of this Indian Writership Programme, he carries with him an air of high worth and moral superiority. After all, he is going to be a cog in the wheel of the world’s greatest corporation, ridiculously well-compensated too, compared to an equivalent position back home. The further you are from the beating heart of the empire, the more blood it pumps at you. Civilising the savages presumably requires adequate TA/DA. Cushioned in all the worldly comforts colonial India has on offer – comforts a young Englishman can only dream of back home amid crushing poverty, class wars, and cholera outbreaks – William Herschel takes to India like duck to water. Bengal becomes his only home.

It is now the summer of 1858. The Russian Empire has lost the Crimean war. Mangal Pandey has lost his life. And, no longer a fresh-off-the-boat sahib, young William has lost his sense of purpose. He is depressed.

So, too, is Bengal.

Indigo has robbed Bengal’s soil of its vitality and the Bengalis of their dignity. Riding on Europe’s enchantment with the blue dye, the East India Company has quietly been fuelling a formidable plantation economy in Lower Bengal. As indigo becomes the Company’s top export item (next only to opium), indigo farmers, or ryots, are sucked into a downward spiral of poverty and hunger. Cultivating indigo over rice has raised the production cost by an exorbitant Rs 7 per bigha. It is daylight robbery, and ryots and zamindars alike are having to choose between death through either starvation or debt. Resistance means getting on the wrong side of the well-built lathiyals of the Planter sahibs; it means braving a leathered Shamchand or a bladed Ramkant.

It was not always this bad. Just a year ago, Mangal Pandey’s bravado in Barrackpore had sparked a flicker of hope. Could the revolt, gathering speed as it relayed along the Ganga from Bengal to several north-western provinces, end years of misery and oppression? Truth be told, the sudden uprising had jolted the British; they just didn't see it coming. Natives were supposed to be tanned automatons that worked only when keyed. Why were we not told otherwise – did someone forget to update the Great British Hindoostan Manual?

As the fire raged, soldiers, writers, accountants, assistants and administrators of the Company were ordered to drop everything and rush to douse it. Many officers scurried back from their Himalayan retreats, hearing blood-curdling reports of their families being massacred by the rebel sepoys of their own battalions. The brutal and systematic execution of Brigadier-General Lawrence’s office staff at the Lucknow Residency had stunned the Company. Soon followed the cold-blooded slaughter of British women and children held captive at Bibighar in Kanpur. When the news reached London, all hell broke loose. Everyone from the Queen to Dickens cried blood. Some wanted to go further and propose a bill for the flaying alive, impalement, and burning at the stakes of the Indians. “The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening.”

The payback was savage. Lucknow, Kanpur, Delhi, Jhansi, Bengal, Arrah – one by one they fell to the bloodthirsty British. The Company enforced Act XIV, empowering officers to pass a death sentence “on the spot” for sedition. Villages were torched at will across the length and breadth of the country, to thwart the slightest chance of retaliation. New torture methods were devised, ones that would have made the Spanish blush. One Major Renaud took great joy in blackening with tar the face of any brown civilian spotted in his contingent’s line of march, and hanging him by the nearest tree. Facing the justice of a certain Brigadier Neil meant watching your skin being sown to a pig’s while you, and the pig, shrieked in unbearable agony.

Delhi bore the brunt of British savagery. Thousands were hanged; even church gardens weren’t spared. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s 16 sons were hunted down mercilessly; most were stripped to the bone, then hanged in public. “In 24 hours, I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar. I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches,” wrote one Captain William Hodson to his sister. The emperor himself was put in a cage “like a beast” and exhibited.

A red mist enveloped city after city as the British went on a rampage. But such retributions did little to comfort the public back home in England. The mutiny had, in their view, exposed the incompetence of “unpleasant, selfish and quarrelsome” officers of the Company. Seething in anger, the British Parliament decided time had finally come to consider Lord Valentia’s wish, chronicled in his travel notes from Calcutta thus – India must now be ruled “from a palace, not from a counting-house; with the ideas of a prince, not with those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo.”

The Government of India Charter was rolled out. The Company and its Governor General, Charles Canning, were brought under the aegis of Queen Victoria. The college at Haileybury was closed. As a reconciliatory gesture, a few of its alumni, the erstwhile writers and assistants, were nominated to join the Indian Civil Service (ICS) tasked now with implementing reforms for a new India. One among them was handed charge of the Jungipoor subdivision on the upper reaches of the Hooghly. His name was William James Herschel.

Having lived and worked for five years in the interiors of Bengal, one would think Herschel is well equipped to hit the ground running. In reality, getting anything done is proving to be well nigh impossible in post-mutiny Bengal. Embittered and scarred, Indians no longer hold any trust or loyalty for the British. To make matters more difficult for the sahibs, small business owners, suppliers, and peasants, witness to rampant corruption and plundering in the Company era, have picked up the tricks as well as the gumption to indulge in forgery and non-compliance. In this sinister climate, Herschel is facing the worst time of his life, not being able to achieve anything worthwhile in his new, high-profile posting. Born in a family of illustrious astronomers, and named after his grandfather William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, he must have cursed the day he heeded to his father’s counsel – to go for a lonely, isolated life, and work long hours in the sweltering Indian heat to make a career in administration over astronomy. India is proving to be much more arduous to discover than a complete planet for the young Herschel. In one such moment of self-doubt and misery, he pours out his frustration in a letter to one of his Haileybury companions. The 25-year-old confides in his friend, of the treacherous circumstances that have more or less hurtled him towards a failed career, of why he does not expect any good to come out of the orders he is signing every waking day. Rent-rolls from the planters, pothas issued by the zamindars to each ryot, kabooliyats from the ryots – all are mere pieces of paper. Administration of civil justice is a nightmare in a setting rampant with fraud and con jobs. It is a letter as close to being a suicide note without being one, an unmistakable offering of a wrist to be pulled from the ledge he is pacing to and fro on.

The friend’s reply must have acted like a balm to young Herschel’s senses, for very soon he experiences a eureka moment that will bring him world fame.

One fateful July day in 1858, after labouring through tender applications that have arrived from the local ghooting suppliers for the Jungipoor road-metalling project, Herschel selects the proposal of one Rajyadhar Konai of Nista village. Preparing the supplier contract for Konai, Herschel vaguely recalls Thomas Bewick, an author he has admired since childhood. Bewick, a naturalist, would leave his thumb marks as vignettes in his books.

Something clicks.

Herschel talks Konai into sealing the terms of contract with his handprint, smeared earlier with a homemade ink-oil solution. It comforts him to know that Konai could now be identified and held accountable, should any dissatisfaction on account of the quality of his material and work arise. Excited about this newfound means of levying compliance, he gives it a try with his own hand, soon concluding that fingerprints are more than sufficient as a guarantee against forged signatures and plausible denials. The age of unique personal identification had arrived.