Criminal Tribes Act Research Articles

Thinking of Crime: The State, Migrant Population and the Missing Justice

This lecture discusses the ‘idea of crime’ as it was understood by the colonial establishment and also as understood by the present government. In 1871, Lord Mayo introduced the bill leading to the infamous Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) which led to the segregation of a certain set of professions and lifestyles from the rest of society. The segregation was given a concrete form with the creation of penal settlements by the colonial government. The communities brought under the provisions of the CTA are now known as Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, not to be mistaken with adivasis. Mostly nomadic in habit, these tribes have suffered the worst humiliation in the history of modern India. In recent decades, the idea of crime has also been associated with non-state actors in order to deal with terrorism. However, the provisions of laws made towards this objective, such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, are being used speciously to restrain social activists and thinkers. This has raised many questions in recent years. The theme of this lecture outlines the gap between the idea of crime and the idea of justice that needs to be bridged in the interests of deepening democracy in India.

De/Colonizing Hijra

De/Colonizing <i>Hijra</i>

Gender, Family, and the Policing of the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in Nineteenth-Century North India

AbstractIn the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

Conjugality, Colonialism and the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in North India

The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 was a project to geographically redistribute and immobilize criminalized populations on the basis of family units. Family ties were a key site of contestation between criminalized people and the colonial state, as well as cooperation, or at least, situationally coinciding interests. This article’s focus on the family goes against the grain of existing literature, which has primarily debated the historical causes of the CTA and the colonial construction of the ‘criminal tribe’. This article explores a particular type of family tie—marriage—to provide a new vantage point on the minutiae of everyday life under the CTA, while also shedding light on the history of conjugality in modern South Asia. In 1891, the colonial government in north India launched a matchmaking campaign in which district Magistrates became marriage brokers. Colonial governments showed an uneven concern with marriage practices, which varied between criminalized communities and over time. In the case of ‘nomadic’ criminalized groups, colonial governments were more concerned with conjugality, since they attempted more significant transformations in the relationships between individuals, families, social groupings and space. Moreover, criminalized peoples’ strategies and demands propelled colonial involvement into marital matters. Yet the colonial government could not sustain a highly interventionist management of intimate relationships.

Labour and Penal Control in the Criminal Tribes ‘Industrial’ Settlements in Early Twentieth Century Western India

One of the key problems with the official archival sources for India’s so-called ‘Criminal Tribes’ is that there is very little that captures the everyday lives of communities who were subjected to the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), beyond the penal institution. This article explores how we can tease out new material on the work, politics and movements of erstwhile Criminal Tribes by looking at reformatory ‘industrial’ settlements, established between the 1910s and 1930s in Bombay Presidency, as a means of employing communities notified under the CTA in public works and other large-scale industrial projects. Along with identifying the administrative rationale for these settlements, their locational significance and longevity, this article explores the particular forms of surveillance that were developed around industrial work, and the experiences of labour within them. It argues that definitions of ‘criminality’ were, to some extent, negotiated around cultures of work, which drew in ideas about the family unit, traditions of movement and migration, the relationship between cities and their hinterland, and the requirements of capitalist industrial enterprise.

Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

: In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.

Troubling bodies: ‘eunuchs,’ masculinity and impotence in colonial North India

This article considers colonial masculinity from the margins, examining two groups of sexual, gender and caste subalterns classified as ‘eunuchs,’ the hijra and zenana. From the 1850s, several moral panics concerning eunuchs occurred in the official circles of northern India, culminating in the registration of eunuchs under Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871. Masculinity was crucial to the historical marginalization of hijras and zenanas, who challenged binary gender, with hijras often describing themselves as ‘neither men nor women.’ These groups were labelled as ‘men,’ only to be stigmatized as failures of masculinity, in order to erase their embodied difference and socio-cultural identity. I analyse the colonial government's attempts to precisely define and control eunuch deviance, as well as the ambivalences of this project. In particular, this article analyses the definition of the ‘eunuch’ as an ‘impotent man.’ The determination of potency provides a case study for the analysis of medical understandings of masculinity and the contested authority of medical knowledge of sexuality within the broader colonial project. This article concludes by considering the response of hijras and zenanas to the CTA, in particular their articulation of communal and gendered identity.

‘Delinquent subjects’

This article examines how dacoities in colonial India began largely during famines, and how they were perpetuated by the state's cruel practices of detention and surveillance. When dacoity was seen to be a threat to civil society and the state, the authorities deployed a variety of methods to put down, control, punish and reform the dacoits, many of who were considered to belong to ‘criminal tribes/communities’. The creation of a body of anthropological knowledge about the ‘criminal’ communities was important in this respect, as it helped the state to separate supposedly ‘delinquent’ from ‘honest’ subjects. It also conferred a specific social identity upon such groups, thereby socially stigmatising them. The creation of a surveillance society served colonial ends. The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 provided for those designated as criminal tribes to be registered with local police stations, to be confined to specific villages, fined, punished, and put in reformatories. Groups that suffered such a fate thereafter found it so difficult to earn an honest livelihood that they became even more likely to commit dacoities. The itinerant Lambadas of Hyderabad state who were so incarcerated were particularly hard hit.