Pre-History of DNA ‘Fingerprinting’ in India

This paper shows how fingerprinting was birthed in colonial India as a response to the requirements of governing the native population whom the British colonialists presumed to be untrustworthy and deceptive. It further shows how fingerprint was developed into a technology of unique human identification by Henry Faulds and Francis Galton in England and the way in which a fingerprint classification system was developed by Edward Henry along with Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose in India. The paper goes on to link the historical development in human fingerprint identification and classification with the contemporary developments in DNA fingerprinting and databasing.