How the colonial institutions established and what is considered civilized and what it was to be a tribe in colonial times

? ( its implications in terms of economic and legal aspects)

The transition from the altruism of the antislavery movement to the cynicism of empire building involved a transvaluation of values that might be appropriately described in the genealogical language of Michel Foucault. Edward Said's Foucauldian analysis in Orientalism, based on a theory of discourse as strategies of power and subjection, inclusion and exclusion, the voiced and the silenced, suggests the kind of approach I am taking here. For middle- and upper-class Victorians, dominant over a vast working-class majority at home and over increasing millions of "uncivilized" peoples of "inferior" races abroad, power was self-validating. There might be many stages of social evolution and many seemingly bizarre customs and "superstitions" in the world, but there was only one "civilization," one path of "progress," one "true religion." "Anarchy" was many-tongued; "culture" spoke with one voice. Said writes of "the power of culture by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too." At home, culture might often seem threatened by anarchy: through Chartism, trade unionism, and socialism, the alternative voices of the working class could at least be heard by anyone who cared to listen. Abroad, the culture of the "conquering race" seemed unchallenged: in imperialist discourse the voices of the dominated are represented almost entirely by their silence, their absence. If Said is right that "the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced" by the authority of a dominant culture, the place to begin is with a critique of that culture. This, according to Foucault, is the function of "genealogy," which seeks to analyze "the various systems of subjection: not the antic-ipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations." So all the racial discourse and formation of binaries like civilized and barbaric etc was the handy work of a process called colonialism. According to Ania Loomba, the word Colonialism (as given in the Oxford English Dictionary) owes its origin to the Roman colonia which meant farm or settlement, and referred to Romans who settled in other lands but still retained their citizenship. However, this definition completely exhausts the modified connotation which the word came to have and instead became an imperial ideology in the early seventeenth century England. Robert. J. C. Young in Colonial Desire, gives a different genealogy of the word colonialism and emphasizes that the word colonization owes its origin to the binary Culture versus Civilization. According to him, culture comes from the Latin cultura and colere, which had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, attend, protect, honour with worship etc. The inhabit meaning became the Latin colonus i.e farmer, from which we derive the word colony. Young therefore s uggests that colonization rests at the heart of culture or that culture always involves a form of colonization even in its conventional meaning as the tilling of the soil. Colonialism provided an exotic bluff, a sleight of hand and a collective-hypocrisy of pastoral power of saving the East or the Orient from its successive dynasties of despotic rulers, of pre -mordial existence, concupiscence14 and sex-starved brown men. Colonialism portrayed marginal places and people as exotic and savage in contrast to the civilized and enlightened centre of the empire. Matters concerning Oriental sexuality too were being governed by Victorian edicts whereby the East was taken to be horrific in its sexual orientation. Women were depicted as fallen from grace, low and licentious, easily available and servile. A common perception of the 19th century sexologists from Europe was that working men and women, Africans, Asians, and Jews were considered especially voluptuous and more likely to engage in uncivilized,degenerate, sexual practices . Indian women it was propagated by the West wereeasily available, had loose morals and were involved in prostitution due to their polygamous practice. The Oriental man on the other hand was effeminized, portrayed as homosexual ora lusty villain from whom virile but courteous European could rescue the native (or the European) woman. However, paradoxically enough, weak, effeminized and childlike as he was, theOriental man was represented as being dangerous and a threat for the white Western woman. Gayatri Spivak visualizes the above situation very aptly when she remarks white men saving brown women from brown men. affirms this when she says that the original rape narrative in British writing about India in the nineteenth century was that of

colonizing woman threatened with rape by a native man.Employing Bourdieuan terminology, a complete lack of dynamism and a dearth of space for cultural or social growth denoted the doxa of the Eastern society. It was also claimed that the East lacked consciousness and therefore did not have or wasnt able to script its own history. For many colonial ethnographer sadministrators,missionaries, British liberals, political thinkers, novelists and poets, India was a confused heap of crude muddle. In the eyes of the Empire, India was a potpourri of religion, law, custom, and morality. . . all inextricably mixed and jumbled up together . This gets manifested in their opinions about Indian art which according to them never reflected a natural fact. Put precisely, its compositions were formed out of meaningless fragments of colour and lines and the representations of living creatures got distorted and attained a monstrous form15. This discriminatory view filled with racial hubris and sexual overtones was witnessed in their views about Indian men and women, hygiene and cleanliness, Eastern philosophy and even the climate which was racialised by the British. All this helped the West develop certain dichotomies like the sacred east versus secular west debate or as Jack Goody puts it, backward East and inventive West . Speaking on racism, Philippa Levine maintains, to be British was to embody civilization, to be born to rule, and to be not colonized, not enslaved, conditions fundamentally associated with whiteness. Further she adds, Empire and the metropole were not separate sites; empire itself was not a single site . Ballhatchet notes that racism became a hydra-headed spectre when the British realised that their claim to superior knowledge and intellect was no longer tenable enough to run the Empire. However, Ronald Hyam attributes sexual energy as a factor in imperial expansion .Partha Chatterjee notes that race was a key sign through which colonial power operated .Racial feeling among the British became more explicit and brazenly aggressive in the course of the nineteenth century and reached its peak during Lord Curzons viceroyalty between 1899 and 1905 . So,this discourse of colonialism develops especially in the case of India through two stages and but the basic premise behind the two remained the same as in stamping the authority of the west over east. The inherent ideology which influenced this strand was the Four Stage Theory(elaborate on this from ur reading of Ronald Meek).According to this history is divided into four stages: 1st, the Age of Hunters; 2dly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce (LJ(A) i.27).2 This theory, shared with other Scottish and French writers of the mid-to- late eighteenth century, delinates that human society progresses from one ladder of development due to various factors like population increase, change in enviorment (metrological theory of Montesquieu) , level of technology. But when it was applied in the context of colonies they work in tandem with the imperialist ideology and are more inclined towards establishing the superiority of ones society ove r the other.This was also true of the two stages of orietalist discourse which developed divided into early and late differentiated according to the basic underlying parameters for defining the colonial people. In the first phase which is referred to as the Indology to Indomania in this phase the basic argument which comes out according to Trautman is that these people find Indian culture deeply revealing and equated Indians and Europeans as being of common racial stock herein we can see kind of enthusiasm for knowing the other i.e. there is no fear of unfamiliarity with the other. These were of the view that affinity in language affords some presumptions of affinity in race. As Trautman says race essentialism was at the heart of the British Sanskritists in formation of racial theory of Indian civilization. It can be termed as mosaic ethnology of William Jones and some other early orienatalists. We can see the pronouncement from Jones to Hodgson of the emphasis on differences between Aryan and aboriginal races , although they were still not as pronounced as in the later phase when study of people was societies changed from being monogenetic (all of one blood)to polygenesis (with added emphasis on anthropology).This also marked the second phase of the orientalist discourse with the establishment of Anthropological society of London under James Hunt , who was a firm believer in diversity of races. This was a direct attack on earlier kind of inclusive orientalist discourse as now origin of mankind was turned into a discourse of race not only origin but permanently different i.e. the stage of development in

which one society was, according to European theorist they will remain stuck at that point until white man comes to their rescue (white mans burden). Also we need to situate this discourse in context of that time in which industrial revolution was taking place along with formation of nation-states in western part of the Europe, rapid expansion of imperial powers in parts of Africa , Asia etc. So, the differentiation between civilized and the barbaric became more and more pronounced .Social Darwinism was becoming commonsensical notion. It was a theory which seeks to apply biological concepts of Darwinism or evolutionary theory to sociological and politics. There is also one inherent belief that struggle between the two societies leads to social progress of the superior one , evolutionary aspect of the societal progress along with the notions of survival of the fittest seem to be at work herein. This emphasis on permanence of origin of mankind can be interrelated with rise of liberalism which helped Empire building process in the 19th century with its universalist tendencies and ignorance of the differences of the a particular society. This rise of liberalism and its implications can be better understood when we read Uday Singh Mehta who says that British could embrace liberal doctrines of individual freedom and political representational precisely the same time they were extending their autocratic authority over colonized peoples across the globe. Mehta argues that nineteenth-centuryli beralism was able to accept and even endorse imperial rule over Indians and other peoples because its theoretical presuppositions were based on "a singularly impoverish nderstanding of experience". This impoverish-ment derived from what he calls liberalism's "cosmopolitanism of reason" , which was framed around the claim that freedom was conditional on the capacity for reason. Mehta traces this doctrine to John Locke, who argued in his essay on education that children were subject to the benevolent authority of their parents because they lacked the reasoning capacity to exercise freedom. When married to the notion of stages of civilization, this liberal association between freedom and reason gave rise to the claim that colonized peoples were child-like dependents who required the tutelage of the British. In this context, the liberal belief in the primacy of progress trumped its conviction that government should obtain the consent of the governed. Furthermore, liberalism's emphasis on the autonomous individual blinded it to the communal dimensions of political identity, those that Mehta associates with bonds to territory and nation. Hence, liberalism assumed a universalist stance that sought to impose its own standards of reason, progress, and identity on others. So, in conjecture with this there developed what Foucault calls Archaeology of knowledge colonial government and reinvention of the native and destruction of the past of the native and mould it totally into a new kind of light to suit the purpose of colonial governance. The British realized soon enough that in order to rule India, it was necessary to have knowledge of the native language to issue commands, collect taxes, and maintain law and order besides creating other forms of knowledge about the people they were ruling. In this connection Gauri Visvanathan remarks, the state had a vital interest in the production of knowledge about those whom it ruled as well as a role in actively processing and then selectively delivering that knowledge. . . in the guise of objective knowledge For David Arnold, it was the trope of travelling gaze which aided the British in developing an epistemological base of the land and its people. In all this, tropicality of India attained significance as it needed to be located and contrasted with respect to other British colonies. It is worth noting that the colonial concern to know India began with the desire to understand local forms of landholding and agrarian management in the 1770s. This travelling gaze would be elaborated upon by Prathma Banerjee inher book in the context of discourse usedby the british to civilize Santhals. According to Partha Chatterjee, there were four main forms of production and organization of this colonial form of knowledge. Firstly the land revenue histories followed by the survey which began in 1765 with mapping out the conquered territories shaped up the epistemological awareness of the land and its physiography. The first census in India started in 1872 done after every decade and the

museums housing archeological and artistic specimens were the two other modalities of knowledge production about India. Besides, writings by missionaries and travellers, artists and research by administrator-ethnographers alsocontributed immensely to the knowledge pool. Certain disciplines were also turned into handmaidens in the colonial enterprise of racial profiling and othering of the indigene. The various means employed by the colonial rule to gather information about the natives was termed as investigative modalities by Bernard Cohn. According to him, an investigative modality includes the definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification and then how it is transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes and encyclopedias. Some of them were general in nature like historiography and museology. While other were disciplinary and scientific in nature and its practitioners were professionals. This included economics, ethnology, tropical medicine, comparative law, cartography. Moreover, they had to collect revenues, establish law and order through a strong police force and dispen se justice through the Courts of Justice based on the English system.
The imperial authorities employed anthropometry, ethnology and anthropology as an index to categorize, catalogue and identify on the basis of physiognomy to demarcate people belonging to different tribes and castes. According to Dirks, these disciplines sought to classify and control erring groups and later contributed to notions of hereditary criminality and martial races. This disciplining by the discipline became a tool to know about the natives as much as it was to racialise, regiment, control and rule over them. Voluminous details of information were obtained on the customs, beliefs and occupations of the Indian people in the official social science that was later known as the bluebook sociology famous for its blue cloth cover . In an endeavor to quantify their recording and assessment to be used as future epistemic guides, the colonial government relied on their storehouse of information collected in the Gazetteers, Surveys and Reports, Handbooks, Census, and Manual etc.

Taking a cue from these classificatory strategies we can extend upon these by looking these in terms of how colonial rulers used these in the field of defining law for the various sections of the Indian society more specifically in the context of tribal population and how were they identified as the other i.e. outside the realm of civilized world. But before we go on discuss it in greater detail we need to first define as it was described by the colonial ethnographers particularly the foremost among them, HH Risley, according to him tribe is a collection of families bearing a common name which as a rule does not denote any specific occupation; generally claiming common descent from a mythical or historical ancestor, and occasionally from an animal, but in some parts of the country held together rather by the obligations of blood feud than by the tradition of kinship; usually speaking the same language and occupying, professing, or claiming to occupy a definite tract of country. A tribe is not necessarily endogamous; that is to say, it is not an invariable rule that a man of a particular tribe must marry a woman of a different tribe.He sees tribes as precedent of caste and are pure in form and are absorbed by the caste system(elaborate upon this from the text). This point has been stressed upon by Ajay Sakaria , who says that tribe is always masculine in nature in comparision to caste which is seen as effimenate. But according to him and others like Felix Padel and Radhika Singha, this distinction was directly linked to subjugation of the tribes as it was propogated that they needed to be protected from the caste people . They are being projected as child like by the British , so the tribal population is shown as different from the caste violence as the former is shown as transgression from the civilized violence which should be dealt very leniently. This showcases uneasy relation of the colonial power with the tribes as French philosopher Georges Bataille says mans kind of key dilemma is to distance itself from the nature , so when we return back to nature its in more deified form as in the form of transgression. So uneasy relationship with the nature exists. Sakaria goes on to show this point in how the state deals with tribal violence , wherein the whole idea of collective punishment exists.The whole idea of pacification as it exists is to discipline tribe and shape it according to the

policies of colonial government. Padel in his Sacrifice of Human Beings shows how the whole issue of sacrifice basically as a myth state sacrifices what it is to be human which he directly links with the whole question of subjugation of the tribes which was a kind of moral act as a part of civilizing mission and to monopolize the violence. So herein we see the interplay of three kinds of symbolic systems i.e. gonds, non-tribals, colonial missionaries. Padel provides an anthropological view of the psychology of the white man. So, we see both colonial form of knowledge and discourse of power being amalgamated to kind of devise finalist strategy. Also here the idea of sacrifice is being despised in the colonial discourse because there it connotes something in the positive light i.e. in terms of collective sacrifice of the surplus production but when it encounters the other i.e. use of the term sacrifice which involves violence for the production of the surplus , so they tried to put an end to this but one of the major consequences of this was that after this the number of surplus actually go up, this reveals the lack of firsthand knowledge of the Britishers about the ground level situation of the Kond society what it actually meant for them to sacrifice and whether it was actually practiced on such a wide scale ?This image of sacrifice actually built a particularistic image of the kond society , highly charged with emotion and it now became hard to understand it without the official stress on gruesome savagery. So, as Padel sees it this discourse of sacrifice is at the threshold of becoming civilized accompanied with it would be high level of oppression and with it could be connected the implementation of Criminal Tribes Act which was to form the basic premise underlying all colonial judgments about defining rules and regulations about the so- called backward people. The formation of this act also cannot be seen as instant development in the colonial law procedure but it carried with it the experience from English conditions and also the local conditions (how the colonial administrators interpreted them).
India in the nineteenth century in India was punctuated with moments of rupture and marked by great political and administrative upheavals. Ranajit Guha has already mentioned that there were not less than 110 known instances of these protests and sporadic rebellions in a spread of 117 years ranging from Rangpur dhing to the Birasaite ulgulan. These rebellions, protests, jacqueries, revolts, uprisings, insurrections were staged by tribal communities and rural masses. According to Guha, insurgency was particularly important as it referred to the consciousness which informed the activities of the rural masses such as jacqueries, revolt, uprising etc or to use their regional nomenclatures dhing, hool, bidroha, ulgulan, fituri etc. These events later proved to be of seminal importance and were to decide the fate of this nation in the years to come. One of the issues to occupy the colonial administration for most part of the century was crime so much so that a colonial template was developed which carried its different typologies and characteristics like the nekmash and the badmash besides many others. During the early part of nineteenth century, the British found out that certain communities were involved in a cult of extraordinary crimes popularly known as thuggee by the native population. The word thuggee comes from the word Thug meaning cheat, swindler, robber and ref ers to professional highwaymen who for centuries were the scourge of wealthy travelers in India. Thuggee as this trade was called, was not simply a profitable criminal act but a traditional calling. In fact, under most Hindu and Muslim rule, this was regarded as a regular profession and its practitioners paid city taxes too. In the nineteenth century, Thuggee had become a matter of concern for law and order in the empire and a chief obsession with the crown. The phenomenon of thuggee involved not just duping travelers of their belongings but killing them by strangling and stabbing the victim in a merciless manner and mutilating the body parts.Another form of crime which fell under the colonial categorization of crimes extra -ordinaire was dacoityor brigandage which involved armed robbery committed by dacoits or dacoos 29. These developments in theearly nineteenth century instilled fear in the hearts of the administrators and therefore a special wing calledThugee and Dacoity Department was created in 1835 within the Government of India, with civil servantWilliam Sleeman as its Superintendent. The Anti-Thugee Campaign ran for nearly a decade from 18241841,and by 1860, thuggee was said to be almost extinct . But Radhika Singha in her book Despotism by Law contends that the Thuggee Act XXX of 1836 was passed by the colonial administration without explaining what exactly a thug or the crime of thuggee was. Singha in a footnote in the same chapter named Criminal Communities: The Thuggee Act XXX of 1836 says

In Anglo-Indian parlance,thugs were believed to constitute a hereditary criminal fraternity, organized around beliefs and rites which upheld a profession of inveigling and strangling travellers. In contrast to dacoits, thugs were believed to murder by stealth rather than by armed attack. However, the defining line between dacoity, thuggee and highway robbery was never very clear. Anand Yang introduces us to the nature of official power and control in the nineteenth and early twentieth century which according to him can be best described as Limited Raj system. This was so because landlords were the effective rulers and administrators for many of the day-to-day decisions in local society. As connections or links to the local levels o f society, they ensured the authority of British rule, and in return their position as local controllers was sustained and nourished by the powers of the State . These were coupled by the arbitrary and oppressive economic policies of the Imperium. At the same time, the mother country was under great duress due to a plethora of socio-economic problems affecting her restive population (Radhakrishna ). In order to control the mounting threat perception and contain the crisis from escalating further, the Crown embarked on a regime of surveillance. The colonial state was creating and establishing the effect of a despot and subsequently turned the colonial state into a panoptic an. The Revolt of 1857 was a turning point in the career of the British Empire as the baton of rule was handed down to the Queen by the East India Company. It was the beginning of direct rule. the East India Company. It was the beginning of direct rule. C.A Bayly (1996) speaks of a parallel system of information gathering system by the Empire which he calls information order (Bayly 2006) where the entire state acted as a panoptican and everyone kept a watch on everyone else and passed on the information to the concerned higher authorities34 . . Gautam Chakravarty (2005) is of the opinion that this interest in surveillancewas necessitated by the fact that the British empire grew by some 4,700,000 square miles between 1874 and 1902; an expansion that stretched national resources but created in the process new, extra systemic, methods of conflict management . The first half of the 19th century in India was a whirlpool of political and administrative upheavals including a jungle of legislations, rules and regulations that had far reaching ramifications both for the Empire as well as for her most prized colony. Some of them like the Indian Evidence Act, Female Infanticide Act, Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1862 and Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) of 1861, The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 etc. aimed at tinkering with the local customs and practices while also codifying criminal laws and identification techniques. Others like the Akbari Laws of 1890, Cattle Trespass Act of 1871, Forest Laws of 1878, Game and Fish Preservation Act of 1879 connected to the institution of private property were some of the significant legislations that shaped the nature of things to come. Of all the laws and regulations that were injected into the body politic to transform the colonial into a carceral, the Criminal Tribes Act XXVII (henceforth CTA) of 1871 bore great significance. The denomination of certain castes and tribes as criminal emerged from the various administrative depictions of groups that preoccupied military and police agencies of government. According to Radhika Singha, the conception of communities socialized into criminality, with its members plundering or robbing as a profession, did not suddenly emerge in the 1830s (Singha). Further she adds, The theme has a history co-terminus with the very inauguration of the Companys judicial initiatives . However, the genesis of criminality attached to certain people and professions like gypsies, nomads and wandering groups goes back to the mother country its elf (Radhakrishn). It was a popular perception that these mobile people were vagrants, drifters, lazy, not given to any kind of disciplined life and therefore needed to be disciplined. This was also a time when in England a pseudo- science called Eugenics was becoming popular and many Eugene Societies were formed as a result of this forced concoction of genetics and criminality. The only way to wriggle out of this chaos in the colonies as well as in England was to brand certain communities as Criminal Tribes35 in order to control, punish and reform them36. Therefore, in England, the vagabonds, nomads and gypsies who had been despised of due to their itinerant lifestyle, uncivilized behavior and unsettled ways of living were roped under this infamous discriminatory and inhuman law. The CTA redefined the notion of crime, criminals, criminality and tribes and led to a completely newentity formation for certain groups and communities in India. According to the Act, there was a strong belief by the colonial government that certain groups were addicted to the systematic commission of nonbailable offences37 and that these groups existed since ancient times. This Act was first applied to

Northwest Provinces, Oudh and Punjab and later in 1911 a revised version was applied to the whole of India which included the Bombay and Madras Presidencies. The CTA can be seen as a watershed in the popular understanding of criminality, crime and henceforth the so called criminal tribes38 in India. One of the first consequences of this Act was that mobility and ambulatory practices became new criminal acts. These later spun a whole new career for the colonial enterprise at racial and sexual othering. A glimpse of the racist / sexist attitude of the British towards the notion of so called Criminal Tribes gets reflected in the words of J.H Stephens; a Memb er of the Viceroys Executive Council who was said the following before the enactment of the CTA (Act XXVII of 1871): The special feature of India is the caste system. As it is, traders go by caste; a family of

carpenters will be carpenter a century or five century hence, if they last so long. It means a tribe whose ancestors were criminals from time immemorial, who are themselves destined by the usage of caste to commit crimes and whose descendants will be offenders against law, until the whole tribe is exterminated or accounted for in the manner of Thugs. When a man tells you that he is an offender against law he has been so from the beginning and will be so to the end. Reform is impossible, for it is his trade, his caste, I may almost say his religion is to commit crime.
While comparing caste system with the hereditary nature of crime, T.V. Stephens says, . . . people from time immemorial have been pursuing the caste system defined job-positions: weaving, carpentry and such were hereditary jobs. So there must have been hereditary criminals also who pursued their forefathers profession. The inclusion of prostitutes and eunuchs under the rubric of CTA was not surprising as they were supposed to be vectors of venereal diseases that had left almost more than half the total strength of English and European soldiers in India suffering from venereal diseases. It was because of this great indignation and embarrassment that the Empire faced that the Indian Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 was introduced whereby Lock Hospitals and Lal Bazars became emblematic of a sick and ailing Empire. Later in the first half of twentieth century prostitution became a caste and prostitutes were treated as criminals. Moreover, the Mutiny of 1857 had witnessed their participation in helping the freedom fighters especially in Lucknow and which had irked the colonial administration a great deal. It would however be interesting to read into the colonial notion of a eunuch which would have rendered any childless person as a eunuch. According to the CTA, a eunuch was defined as: all persons of the male sex who admit themselves, or on medical inspection clearly appear, to be impotent. It should be borne in mind that the CTA of 1871 along with few other modalities of identification / information like the Census and Fingerprint technology or dactyloscopy as it was known then40 was born to have an effective political surveillance, colonial subjugation and sedentarization. The ostensible purpose of the 1871 Act had been to suppress hereditary criminal sections of the society (Radhakrishna: 2001). It also helped the state to separate supposedly delinquent from honest subjects. In turn, it conferred a spec ific social identity upon such groups, thereby socially stigmatizing them (Bhukya: 2007). The notion of criminal tribes or criminalization of communities according to Radhika Singha had already begun with Warren Hastings in 1772 well before Sleeman had prepared a list of CTs in India in the 1830s (Singha 1993: 83-146). It is therefore important to note that before the CTA came into being, the British rulers dealt with the criminal tribes according to the Regulation XXII of 1793 and Act XXX of 1836 of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department. The Regulation XXII of 1793 invested the Magistrates with summary powers and could put members of certain specified tribes, vagrants, and suspected persons to work on roads, and could imprison them for six months if they absconded. After the enactment of other modalities of surveillance41 like the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1862 and Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) in 1861, the above summary powers of Regulation XXII seized to exist42. In the beginning of 1871, the CTA was debated in the Council initiated by the report from the Superintendent of Operations of the Thuggee and Dacoity. The report was about the activities of the Meenas of the village Shahjahanpur in the district of Gurgaon, Punjab. On the basis of this report, a large number of tribes were put under the CTA. Then it was decided that the Act didnt have any provisions for separating the children from the parents. So the Act was amended in 1897, which provided for the separation of children between the ages of 4 to 18. Again the Indian Police Commission of 1902-03 asserted that special provision may be inserted in the CTA to authorize the simple registration of notified criminal gangs and the taking of

finger impressions of adult male members where necessary. As a result of the recommendation of the Police Commission, a new CTA was passed in 1911, which replaced the Act of 1871. The CTA of 1911 empowered the Local Governments to declare a tribe to be a criminal tribe without regard to its settlement or means of livelihood. Again an amendment was made in 1919. The CTA was again amended in 1923 and finally the Act was known as the CTA VI of 1924. This Act remained in force up to 31st August 1952 when it was repealed and replaced by another piece of legislation called Habitual Offenders Act which was a strain from Canadian Law. Sanjay Nigam has contended that the category of criminal tribes was a colonial stereotype fashioned to justify the punitive disciplining and policing of sections of the population that were unwilling to accept the new moral order that the British sought to impose on rural society. David Arnold has observed that the Criminal Tribes Act was used against wandering groups, nomadic petty traders and pastoralists or khanabadosh43, gypsy44 (Sullivan 1921) types, hill and forest dwelling tribals, in short against a wide variety of marginals who did not conform to the colonial pattern of settled agriculture and wage labour. It wassupposed that criminality had genetic traits and passed down from one generation to another and that particular types of crime were associated with particular skills which were specific to these tribal groups . The reasons for enacting this legislation were compounded by several factors. Firstly, all those groups and communities who did not have a settled way of life and were given to laziness, drifting tendencies, vagrancy and waywardness of various kinds were branded as criminal tribes. Secondly, the state was in general suspicious of the since mobility was seen as a potent threat and therefore wandering mendicants, peripatetic communities and mobile vagrant groups were most likely to be classed as criminals. Besides, the tribes low proximity to the British administration led to their further marginalization and exploitation by the colonial rule. In Punjab alone, some 150,000 Punjabis were roped in under the CTA ). Fourthly, many of its members were acrobats, singers, dancers, tightrope-walkers and fortune tellers. An interesting account exists in the colonial archives about the street entertainers and tricksters who held a sway over the Empire. More and more, like their counterparts all over the world, street entertainment provided by them was seen to be a threat to public order (Radhakrishna. Lastly and very importantly, while some of these nomadic and itinerant communities had accommodated themselves to colonial rule through the provisions of zamindari settlement or the provisional alliances of princely states, there were still others who continued to appear resistant both to British rule and to rural law and order. Those who did resist and oppose British rule were branded as criminals. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 had already signaled a warning bell for a prospective future rebellion in British India. Few of these groups had even participated in the struggle for independence in 1857 like the Goojars which elicited the return of their marauding propensities . These reasons propelled the crown to bring this social legislation in order to stave off the empire from any kind of danger for chiefly economic and administrative reasons. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 can be seen as a watershed in the popular understanding of criminality, crime and henceforth the so called criminal tribes in India. (Radhakrishn). Although the Criminal Tribes Act has been tinkered with many times with slight modifications but till date the basic essence of the act remains intact. The CTA was replaced by a series of Habitual Offenders Acts but the basic thrust of the Act i.e. identifying certain tribal groups as habitual offenders or born criminals continue till today. When India gained her independence in 1947, there were close to 128 tribes49 nearing 3.5 million and 1% of the total population in India who were branded as criminal tribes of the country . In 1952, these Ex-Criminal Tribes were given the status of Denotified Tribes50 or Vimukta Jatis51 by the Government of India52. But though the legal status was changed but the social status that of criminality remained(a) It was W.W Hunter, a senior civil servant whom the British Government had sent to take a stock-taking after a century of British rule in India and who referred these tribal communities as predatory castes. W. Sleeman, W.W. Risley and others have written extensive anthropological accounts of the tribes existing during the colonial period. However, the most interesting point to be noted with respect to the criminal tribes is Radhika Singha, says that a move towards the criminalization of communities was started in 1772 by Warren Hastings, well before W. Sleeman who prepared a detailed list of Criminal Tribes in India in the 1830s. (b) The tribes designated in the official records as Criminal Tribes were enumerated as a separate social group from the1911 census.

There is a mention of the Nat tribe in the Census Report of 1911 which classifies them as the largest number of convictprisoners and beggars in terms of their population. According to the historian Eric Hobsbawm, this was a form of social banditry where those individuals living on the edges of the rural societies made their living by robbing and plundering but who were often seen by ordinary people as heroes or beacons of popular resistance. He asserts that social banditry is a widespread phenomenon known in many societies and some argue that it is still prevalent in remote areas and on high seas like the pirates. Few literatures put the number to 150 who were branded as criminal tribes. According to Meena Radhakrishna about 200 communities were affected as a result of the CTA.Nehru, the then Prime Minister branded the Criminal Tribes Act and later known as Habitual Offenders Act as a blot on the lawbook and scrapped this piece of legislation. He granted a new status to the criminal tribes that is denotified tribes. The regimes of circulation formed by the mobile communities was associated with deterritorialization and an innate sense of rootlessness. This in turn is linked with discovery, circulation of ideas and skills and maneuverability and appropriation of state spaces. Mobile people cannot be taxed and their guerilla tactics of hit and run armed with their war machine is a constant source of fear for the ruling power. This was especially so in the wake of more than a dozen insurrections, rebellions, revolts and insurgencies led by the tribals and forest dwellers. In order to arrest existential threats, the Empire embarked upon a series of legislations and regulations in the nineteenth century some of them which altered basic notions about crime, criminality and tribes. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was one such act that had far reaching effects on the mobile and tribal communities who were forced to live a life of obscurity and stigma. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was a link in the chain of a whole conundrum of repressive measures enacted to control and rule. It reified crime and criminals and was aimed at the sedentarization of peripatetic and itinerant communities. This was achieved through certain investigative modalities like the census, gazetteers and surveys and colonial disciplines like anthropology and anthropometry that divided the country into marital races and criminal castes. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triad formed by the three Cs that is crime, caste and census became the defining features of British India. The CTA under the influence of Eugenics and Social Darwinism supposed that crime was like caste that possessed hereditary traits and passed on from one generation to another54. This labeling of criminality was made to produce docile bodies 55 so that biopower and political surveillance 56 over the natives co uld be effected through the state acting as the grand panoptican.57 The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 inauguratedan era of a new penal regime. The CTA of 1871 was amended in 1897, 1911, 1919 and 1924 until it was finally put out in 1952 and replaced by Habitual Offenders Act. This Act denotified the so called criminal castes and made them Denotified Nomadic Tribes or Vimukti Jatis. However, the Habitual Offenders Act was no different than its predecessor. On the contrary it proved to be far more aggressive and ugly in its applicability whereby the police was given full authority to search and extract fake testimonies for any act of crime committedin the area where members of Denotified Nomadic Tribes lived. The legislation not only stigmatized these tribal and peripatetic communities but the spectre of criminality still haunts them in the modern times and has forced them to live a life of obscurity and anonymity. The status of Denotified Tribes or Vimukta Jatis has neither elevated their status nor brought them closer to the mainstream society. They are still treated as criminals and many communities like Nats and Bedias took to prostitution which has become inter-generational in nature. So, taking cue from the 1871 act , there were whole new range of penal regimes which developed in the subcontinent and had wide implications which we will study through by taking examples of PANAS OF ORISSA AND LOOMBADS OF ANDHRA PRADESH. But before that we will study the other kinds of penal regimes which developed in the colonial world. Radhika Singha explores the ways in which the colonial state tried to settle and stabilize the population in order to conveniently tax and police them. It was mind boggling for the colonial masters to see certain tribes being passed as upper caste despite their otherwise appearances because of the need of mercenaries by various competing despotic states. Also the state suspected all travelling mendicants to be criminals in disguise. Even though caste and religious distinctions were a hallmark of the Indian society yet the colonial state tried to further rigidify these distinctions. Singha claims to study the various problems that

the state encountered while trying to ensure that the distinctions it made stood the test of time withoutbeing blurred or worse still, evaded. The reason for these distinctions was the states increasing need for rapid economic mobilization. Also the dynamics dimmed the aura of the officer who knew the people. The state was further anxious about the fact that the criminal tribes were not only breaking social cohesion but also getting new opportunities due to the revolution in the communication sector. The inherent tension here is that the very people the state classified as the hardest working and best labourers were eventually to be categorized as criminal tribes. One such tribe were the Kabulis who moved around offering their services only in certain seasons and thus entering the widened network of states suspicions. Singha like Philip Constable notes that due to the international needs it became even more imperative for the colonial state to ensure that those of the lower caste and even wily Brahmans registered themselves honestly. Complexities of the state mechanisms needed more complex marks of identification. Soon the terminology and the methods of identification of the indentured labor and the authority bestowed in the hands of the employer including that of penal sanctions left very little distinction between the laborer and the criminal. They were made to live in a way which facilitated police surveillance. She then goes on to describe the various methods of identification used by the state such as godna, viz., tattooing and later photographs alongside description and finally finger printing.The last took on a rather menacing meaning when used for racist purposes throughout for the subjects of the Empire and made it easier for the colonial officers to distinguish between same looking Indians.She concludes by looking at the current use of finger/ thumb printing and also how even the laborersuse it in order to voice their own petitions. A similar though more direct criticism of the colonial sates project of criminalizing certain tribes has been made by Sanjay Nigam who contends that despite using categories of the Indian society the British de-historicized and de-contextualized it. This fulfilled the dual purpose of making them abnormal natives who had to be disciplined, punished and controlled. This made it imperative for the colonial state to spell out the language of their reclamation as well. This disciplining power was used to control and convert them into peasants I.e. the moral subjects of the colonial state. Thus, agricultural resettlement and surveillance were the two ways of bringing these criminal tribes back to normal. As with all tensions and contradictions of the colonial discourse, something discussed in detail later in the piece, it was the repressive mode that eventually took precedence over the peaceful one. The punishments thus far outnumbered those being resettled. Nigam uses examples from tribes cutting across the countrys geography to illustrate this point. They were blamed for being indolent and non-receptive to the reform measures that the benevolent colonial state had so painstakingly devised for them. What was obviously overlooked were the actual problems that these tribes went through when trying to relocate themselves as parts of the normal society. Some such actual problems were landlord power, usurious dealings and crop failings. The obfuscation of these problems from the colonial discourse brought to sharper relief the innate nature of these tribes to stick to criminality. Amongst the many who have pointed out the very many loopholes and the double standards of the English Rule of Law doctrine I will use Elizabeth Kolsky to augment the point. She asserts that even though the law of evidence in India was codified as a part of legal modernization yet this could not be put in practice because of the many peculiarities of the colony. Unlike the codification of criminal procedure these peculiarities expedited rather than thwarted the codification of evidence. These special needs however were used as an excuse to depart from the legal rules and practices of England. The distinctly subjective ethnographic approach produced a medico -legal machinery which the unreliable native knowledge failed to produce. She seeks to redefine and expand our understanding of the violence inherent both to colonial rule and the colonial system of justice. As this work makes clear, especially to those who recently may have neglected some of the violent realities of imperialism, beyond and beneath the brutality of war and conquest, beyond and beneath the hyper-reality of colonial discourse, and beyond and beneath the imaginaries of empire, there lay the quotidian violencethat often characterized the relationship between rulers and subjects, masters and servants, whites and blacks, British and Indians. The work is a study of the social history of the British imperial law. She elaborates upon the lacuna of the imperial law by taking up the case study of the murder of Cockburn, a European planter by a mob. Even though the Calcutta High Court acquitted the accused there was wide spread indignation amongst the European community, which included conjuring the picture of a planter

as a lone figure of civilization amongst hundreds of uncivilized rustic barbarians. This she contrasts with the lack of justice meted out to the many working on the tea farms of Assam. This made law an instrument of oppression. This was buttressed by the penal contract system, which meant that the breach of contract would result in criminal (instead of civil) punishments. Even though several officials including Assam Chief Commissioner C.A. Elliott presented a very rosy picture of the tea plantation .The reality was in fact far from the promises of abstract equality and uniform justice made by the colonial law. This difference in the eyes of law, for Kolsky, reflects the hierarchical and unequal order of the empire and the racial basis of its laws. With no help coming from the Congress at times the planters chose not to retaliate by violence, instead they chose to use the law strategically. The brutal planter in fact offers a clear example of the centrality of violence to empire. At the same the workers had their own way of resisting an disobeying which displayed even more clearly the many contours of the tension between law and labor, the former only at times offering a language and method of resistance. Now lets turn to specific examples of various communities first of all that of LAmbadas of ANDHRA PRADESH , The second half of the 19th century witnessed a major transformation in the life of the Lambada community. It was during this period that the colonial state declared the Lambadas as vagabonds, classified them as criminals and began systematic persecution of the entire community. Besides designating them under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, various other laws were passed to incarcerate them in enclosed spaces where they could be put under state surveillance. The Cattle Trespass Act of 1857 and the Forest Acts of the late 19th century declared grazing cattle in forests and pasturelands as illegal. A custom duty of 5% was levied on the value of every cattle traded in the traditional fairs and bazaars. This basically divorced the link between agriculture and forestry. The remaining cattle were subject to the bancharai or permit pass system forced on cattle keepers to restrict their mobility further. Under the guise of scientific forestry, the State took control of all forest and pasturelands. This action alienated the long-established customary rights of people over these natural resources. Grazing was declared a criminal offence. The Lambada community was forced to abandon its nomadic lifestyle. While denying the customary rights of people, the State embarked on full-scale commercial exploitation of forests for the railways, coalmines, match factories, tea plantations, cotton gins and presses, etc. Denial of fodder weakened the prized cattle of Telangana and their physical health deteriorated, making them vulnerable to diseases. The criminal stigma attached to the community automatically invited surveillance, arrests, and detentions irrespective of the fact that who committed the crime. Also the community was subjected to various harsh punishments like unwarranted arrests , surveillance etc and convinced lamabada was transported to andamnan and nicobar for life.Christaian missionaries along with local village heads contributed to this , lambada were separated from their from their families and were made to learn various trades but on the contrary were made to work as indentured laborers.General mobility of lambada community was restricted even though its members did not have any criminal record.(for further elaboration on this see pg -42 of lambada book review) and also get details of panas from the article itself as there is nothing as such which could be skimmed it has to read as a whole and then make summary)

So, while concluding we can say that ethno-history or caste-history is a product of the colonial ethnography project of the 19th century that presented caste and tribe as the central defining characteristic of Indian society, even though no caste or tribe had ever been so rigid as it became under British colonial rule. But in the strong tradition of history writing that developed in postcolonial India, this type of approach has become pass. Nonetheless, it is being kept alive in the Euro-American colonialist tradition of historiography represented by the Cambridge school of south Asian history.

By Pulkit Aggarwal The drummer GNR r looking for but still no success for them.