30 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
The Supreme Court of Bombay derives its several powers from the charter by which it was constituted, in pursuance of the Act of the fourth of the present King [Dec. 8, 1823. See Morley’s Dig . Vol. II. p. 638]. The original necessity of granting those powers to the Courts of Law in our East Indian possessions arose out of the complaints of oppression, and the disputes of persons in authority there, which at different times during the last reign were brought before the Company and Parliament in this country.
One of the resolutions adopted on this important subject at a meeting of the Court of Proprietors, on the 10th of May
1773, was, “that an application should be made for a new charter of justice, to enable the Company to add to each of the Mayors Courts at the three Presidencies, and to the Courts of the Governors and Councils as Courts of Oyer and Terminer, a barrister to act as recorder, to extend the powers of the Mayors Courts.” The additional words of the resolutions are most remarkable on the present occasion : “and particularly to introduce the privilege of the habeas corpus into India.” It is remarkable, too, that in a petition presented to the House of Lords in the same year, the East India Company stated, “that the most effectual provision of all others to prevent oppression which was recommended by the Company viz. that of the habeas corpus, whereby men might know of what crime they were accused, and by whom imprisoned, was omitted.”
The Supreme Court of Judicature at Calcutta was opened on the 22nd of October 1774, from which period, for a long course of years, writs of habeas corpus were regularly issued; most of them apparently to native subjects, and not to those who by way of distinction are called British subjects residing in those territories. On the 16th of January in the year following a motion was made for a habeas corpus to the keeper of a place called the prison of the Dewanee Cutcherree, to bring up a person confined there, and the writ was ordered to issue. It should be observed, that by the 13th Geo. III. c. 63 [The Regulating Act, 1773], the King’s Court had no more jurisdiction in Calcutta over natives or others, except as a Court of Oyer and Terminer and Gaol Delivery, than in any other part of the dominions of the Crown of England within the Presidency, and that the Zemindary Courts of the Company continued to exercise a jurisdiction over natives in Calcutta, just as the