About two years ago, Rajesh Kumar, a 43-year-old artist who earns a living by making drawings on commission, received a phone call from a Delhi police station. “The police were investigating the rape case of a minor girl and they wanted my help,” he told me last month, when I met him in his tiny studio in Sarojini Nagar. Rajesh sketched as he spoke, putting the finishing touches on a charcoal drawing of Barack Obama. The officer on the phone, he remembered, had “kept on asking me about my experience in the field of sketching, and also said that I will get a prize if they catch the man.”
A few days after that call, Rajesh went to Delhi’s AIIMS hospital. A woman constable accompanied him to a ward where the victim—a ten-year-old girl—was recovering. Rajesh asked the girl about the alleged rapist’s appearance, trying to gather enough detail to sketch his face. “Till the time the lady constable was there, the child did not say much,” he said. But after the constable left the ward, she began to open up. “Whatever she told me, I drew that,” he said. “After every stroke of the pencil, I would show it to her.” He finished the drawing in half an hour.
A month after Rajesh completed the sketch at AIIMS, the police called him again. “They seemed very pleased,” he said. “I was told that the man had been caught, and they will felicitate me.”
That sketch was one of eight that Rajesh has done for the Delhi police over the past three years. Artists like him have long been instrumental in investigations of heinous crimes—particularly rapes and murders. They speak to witnesses and victims of the crime, piecing together images of what the culprits might look like.
But today, hand-drawn sketches are commissioned much less often than they used to be. Rajendra Singh Kalkal, the inspector of research at the Delhi Police Museum, told me that now, “Rarely is a sketch artist needed,” because since about ten or 15 years ago, “the police have been using computer programmes to make sketches of the wanted people.” This development has disappointed many, Rajesh included, who insist that hand-drawn images are superior to electronically generated ones. Others disagree, saying there are more pressing challenges involved in the production of police sketches.
“All one needs is a seven-day in-house training to use the department’s software,” said Shivaji Chauhan, an inspector at the Kamla Market crime branch, who leads many computer-related operations. The programme, he told me when I visited the branch, presents an array of features—different pairs of lips, eyes, eyebrows and more. The witness picks the features that best fit their memory of the suspect, and the police officer composes an image of a face from those parts.
Rajesh believes this method often leads to shoddy work. “The computer programme can never match the skill of a human hand,” he said, because “the options in an artist’s head are infinite.” This is especially important because most victims are only able to provide “impressions”—not detailed descriptions—of criminals. “If impressions are translated into something physical, it cannot be a computer image. It will always be a sketch by a professional, who sketches every day.” He added: “If this computer thing was so great, why do people come to artists with CCTV footages to make sketches?”
Anil Kumar, the head constable of the Kamla Market crime branch, backed Rajesh’s claim. “Handmade sketches are any day better than the ones made on a computer,” he said. When I asked why, he responded: “I have been in this profession for very long, sir. I am speaking from experience.”
But Sanjay Kumar, another officer at the same branch, didn’t agree. He told me that of the 311 cases in the department that have required sketches since the start of the calendar year, he has prepared 264 of them—all on the computer. “Accuracy mostly depends on the witness,” he said. “It is very rare to prepare a completely reliable portrait. The only time that is possible is when they are someone you already know. Other than that, witnesses struggle with memory and confusion.”
In Kalkal’s experience, many witnesses have only been able to provide vague descriptions, such as “Uska chehra Rajesh Khanna jaisa thha” (His face resembled that of Rajesh Khanna, the Bollywood actor.) Even that, he said, is better than some other comments, such as “Uska chehra normal thha” (His face was normal).
Even trained artists can make errors when sketching suspects. Before Rajesh spoke to the girl at AIIMS, one sketch had already been made for the same rape case. But that artist, Rajesh recalled, “had done too much of shading, as if he had seen a photograph of the person.” Shading, he said, “is problematic. It creates a 3D effect—that is, the illusion of depth made through light and dark strokes of the pencil.” But this can produce false images, because witnesses “don’t give a 3D description of the wanted man.” They simply describe a person’s individual features.
Rakesh Shukla, a lawyer and a psychotherapist who works at the Delhi High Court, told me that it is especially important to not view sketch artists as completely objective. “Prejudice, it creeps in, no matter who you are,” he said. “You may be a judge, a police officer or even an artist.”
One instance often cited as evidence of such prejudice occurred after the 2011 bomb blasts in the Delhi High Court. The sketches produced by the Delhi police were quickly released to the public and led to around 100 people being questioned on the basis of the images. The Jammu and Kashmir police were unhappy with the sketches, and wrote letters to various anti-terror squads to express the worry that the images could result in the “unnecessary harassment of Kashmiri youth.” Shortly after that, the National Investigative Agency interviewed witnesses to create their own sketches, which ended up looking nothing like those prepared by the Delhi police. When I asked Chauhan about the case, he said, “I cannot comment on that. What I can say is that we cannot always be right, and a lot depends on the witness.”
For Rajesh, too, success has been elusive. Of the eight sketches he has done for the Delhi police, only the one he made in AIIMS helped contribute to the suspect being apprehended. He is also still waiting to receive the prize money the police had promised him. But, he said, “I was paid for my work. I don’t need anything more than that, though it is always good to get some encouragement.”