A District Gazetteer, a Police Report, and a Crowd Estimate
You are writing the entry for a 1930 civil-disobedience episode in a Bengal district. Three sources give crowd size and outcome. (1) The official district gazetteer, compiled in 1933, says 'a mob of some two thousand' was 'dispersed without serious injury' and names no casualties. (2) A police station diary entry for the same day records 700–800 persons, two arrests, and one constable injured. (3) A memoir by a participant, published in 1958, describes 'thousands' and 'a lathi charge that left many bleeding'. The gazetteer is the only source with a named compiler. Your editor wants one narrative paragraph and asks which figure you will print.
1. Assess the reliability of each source for the specific questions of crowd size and casualty, and explain why the named compiler does not settle the matter.
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Each source answers a different question.
Police diary (contemporaneous, operational). Closest to the event and written for internal use, so it has little incentive to inflate the crowd - police generally minimise crowd size to minimise the appearance of disorder they failed to prevent, and minimise injuries to avoid scrutiny. Its 700–800 and one injured constable are plausible but self-serving in the opposite direction from the memoir. Its weakness is that it is a bureaucratic record with its own reputational stake.
Gazetteer (retrospective, official). Compiled three years later for public reference. 'Some two thousand' is a round, conventional figure; 'without serious injury' is a formula that may mean 'no official deemed it serious'. Its late compilation and public purpose make it the most likely to smooth conflict.
Memoir (participant, twenty-eight years later). 'Thousands' and 'many bleeding' are reconstructions shaped by later political memory and by the absence of notes. Vivid but unreliable for numbers.
The named compiler is a red herring. Attribution tells you who is accountable for the text, not whether the text is accurate. A named official compiling for a government publication in 1933 has institutional pressures that anonymity would not remove.
2. Draft the editorial decision: what figure goes in the paragraph, and how is the discrepancy handled? Justify the choice.
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Print a range with attribution, not a single figure.
Suggested formulation: 'Contemporaneous police records put the crowd at 700–800; the 1933 gazetteer, compiling later, gave "some two thousand". Two arrests were recorded; the extent of injury is disputed, with the gazetteer reporting none serious and participant accounts describing a lathi charge.'
Justification:
- The lowest contemporaneous figure anchors the floor. It is the estimate least likely to be inflated and closest in time.
- The higher figure is reported as a claim, not adopted. The reader sees the spread and who said what.
- Casualty is flagged as disputed rather than resolved, because no source is positioned to settle it - the police diary would record injuries to police, not to demonstrators.
What would change the decision: a hospital admission register, a jail register for the arrests, or a newspaper report filed within days. Any of these would break the tie. Absent them, printing one number would manufacture certainty the archive does not support - and the discrepancy itself is historically meaningful, since it shows how the event was being managed in official memory.