Criminal Tribes Act

Since the 1870s, various pieces of colonial legislation in India during British rule were collectively called the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA). This criminalised entire communities by designating them as habitual criminals.

The first CTA, the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, was applied mostly in North India, before it was extended to the Bengal Presidency and other areas in 1876, and updated to the Criminal Tribes Act 1911, which included the Madras Presidency. The Act went through several amendments in the next decade, and, finally, the 1924 version incorporated all of them.

At the time of Indian independence in 1947, thirteen million people in 127 communities were subject to the legislation. They were subject to compulsory registration and a pass system which limited their movement and where they could reside. The Criminal Tribes Act 1924 was repealed in August 1949 and former "criminal tribes" were denotified in 1952, when the Act was replaced with the Habitual Offenders Act 1952. In 1961 state governments started releasing lists of such tribes.

Today, there are 313 Nomadic Tribes and 198 Denotified Tribes of India who continue to face its legacy through continued alienation and stereotyping with the policing and judicial systems and media portrayal.

Communities as 'criminals'

Terming entire communities as criminals, barbarians, vagabond, or thieves is rooted in Indian caste discrimination. Anthropologist Anastasia Piliavsky argues that the stereotype of 'criminal tribes' has a deep history and predates colonial legislation in India. She adds,

the hypnotism of this bias olonial construct of criminal tribesis extraordinary and leaves scores of learned and talented historians tone-deaf to voices that were there before, during, and after the Europeans reached, and quit the subcontinent.

Ancient and medieval literature from the Indian subcontinent have mentions of outlawed tribes. These include the Vedic ''Aranyaka,'' epics of ''Ramayana'' and ''Mahabharata'', ancient and medieval storytelling of Katha, dramas, and Jataka tales. In these texts, roads, mountain passes, and forest pathways are teemed with robber bands waiting to prey on merchants and travellers. They come from the forests, which are at the periphery of civilisation in Brahmanic cosmology. They are at 'the cosmic fringe, the wasteland, a socially negative space home to various outsiders to ordinary moral, ritual, legal, and social life.' Sage Manu wrote of them as living outside the village, wearing garments of the dead, eating their food from broken dishes, and wandering from place to place. Historian Divya Cherian in her eighteenth-century history of the Kingdom of Marwar reiterates the precolonial roots of 'criminal tribes.' The erstwhile Rathor state attributed an inherent tendency towards animal killing and crimes of Thori and Bavris communities. Archival records show the anxiety of Rathor administrators who viewed these communities as inclined to steal and raid villages. While other communities in the kingdom also engaged in raiding, they were not classified as inherently criminal. Therefore, Cherian argues that it was 'a complex of factors—landlessness, poverty, and the resultant martial weakness—in addition to a hereditary association with theft that led to a caste's perception as criminal.'
Piliavsky also summarises these as socio-political decisions with varied purposes, prior to colonial legislations and subsequent list-making,

Authors of ancient treatises, Mughal rulers, European travellers in precolonial India, and itinerant groups (today and in the past) all called on the idea of hereditary robber tribes to pursue a wide range of distinctive purposes.

Nevertheless, colonial rule advanced these stereotypes of congenital criminality to cement vertical power relations. In addition, contemporary discourse of crime in Britain also influenced perception and response in the larger colonies like India; class and caste seemed to converge in legal discourse and legislations in India.

History of the colonial laws

Origins

Professor Henry Schwarz notes that, as early as 1772, under the governorship of Warren Hastings, legal regulations allowed for punishment of an offender's family and village. It was rooted in the existing jurisprudence that criminality was hereditary in India and criminals were such by profession and belonged to like-minded fraternity. The growth of gang robbery by lowland villagers in the late eighteenth century was significantly due to the Cornwallis administrative reforms rather than changes in the economic production patters. The reforms altered land revenue obligations and tenant-landlord relations as well as the police and judicial systems in colonial India. The Regulation XII of 1793 legislated that 'wandering' communities could be put to work on roads or otherwise forcibly settled down. British officials were encouraged to compile lists of these attributes pertaining to each community and,

classify them on the basis of their usefulness to the state. Observable differences became inherent tendencies. When combined with poorly understood Indian notions of community, such tendencies became essential, unchanging certainties.Schwarz (2010), p. 4

The Thuggee Act of 1836 set the legal precedent for the Criminal Tribes Act 1871. Colonial records characterises thuggee, the magistrate report of James Law to the Commander-in-Chief William Dowdeswell describing the involved thugs as strongly leagued together, organised, ancient, and secretive. In the same year, another report by Judge T. Brooke to Dowdeswell further defined thuggee as 'a crime in which unsuspecting travelers were approached in disguise, strangled with a scarf or catgut string, looted, and hidden.' The same definition was emphasised in Richard Sherwood's report in 1819 as well as that these groups were highly diverse, involving multiple castes, religions, and ethnicities. In 1830, William Henry Sleeman anonymously published an article which sealed the understanding that it was a religious practice. Sleeman, thereafter, wrote three books on the thuggees.

Simultaneously, the late nineteenth century was an important turning point for British legal discourse with far reaching political and ideological consequences.Radhakrishna (2001), pg. 1 Public interest in criminality was growing; crime and criminals increasingly became part of popular fact and fiction. Several reasons were cited for criminality, including alcohol, poverty, urbanisation, overcrowding, and decline in morality.Radhakrishna (2001), pg. 2 Darwin's theories of evolution also provided for new social and political discussions. One school of thought attributed crime to genetic traits transmitted over generations. It provided for a deflection from serious enquiries to the causes of crime.

Sociologist Meena Radhakrishna argues that moral and material progress was demanded to be at a faster pace through a set of new social and political policies in the colonies. She also notes that after the revolt of 1857, many tribal chiefs were labelled traitors and considered rebellious. One of the important persons who participated in the revolt was Banke Chamar.

The colonial government found the demarcation between wandering criminal tribes, vagrants, itinerants, travelling tradesmen, nomads, gypsies, and eunuchs ( hijras) difficult to manage. They were all grouped together, and their subsequent generations were labelled a law and order problem for the state. Though various marginalised caste groups were added to the list, the colonial government used the category of 'tribe' for rhetorical and administrative purposes. This categorisation evoked qualities of 'wildness' and 'savagery' in the way that caste seemed to fail.

Under these acts, ethnic or social communities in India were defined as "addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences" such as thefts, and were registered by the government. Adult males of the groups were forced to report weekly to local police, and had restrictions on their movement imposed.

The colonial government prepared a list of "criminal castes", and all members registered in these castes by caste-census were restricted in terms of regions they could visit, move about in or people they could socialise with. In certain regions, entire caste groups were presumed guilty by birth, arrested, children separated from their parents, and held in penal colonies or quarantined without conviction or due process.

Proposal and justification

Despite previous regulations, until 1871, no community or caste were collectively classified as criminal. In 1871-72, the upper castes convicts featured more in proportion to their population compared to the backward castes. However, after the revolt of 1857, the propensity of the Indigenous tribes to revolt, and with weapons was duly noted by the British colonial officers. T. V. Stephens, the chief architect of the 1871 law, and a member of the Law and Order Commission, while presenting his diabolic law, said,

The special feature of India is the caste system. As it is, traders go by caste. A family of carpenters will be carpenters, a century or five centuries...Viewed from this angle, the meaning of professional is clear. It means tribes whose ancestors were criminal from time immemorial, who are themselves destined by the usage of caste to commit crime and whose descendants will be offenders against law until the whole tribe is exterminated or accounted for in the manner of the 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 to commit crime.

James Fitzjames Stephen testified, "When we speak of professional criminals, we...(mean) a tribe whose ancestors were criminals from time immemorial, who are themselves destined by the usage of caste to commit crime, and whose descendants will be offenders against the law, until the whole tribe is exterminated or accounted for in manner of thugs".Raj and Born Criminals
''Crime, gender, and sexuality in criminal prosecutions'', by Louis A. Knafla. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. . ''Page 124''. While very few officials expressed concern about endowing the police with too much power, most British administrators approved of the draconian measures.

The British Government appointed W. W. Hunter, a senior official, to undertake 'a great stock-taking' after hundred years of British rule in India. He noted that India had become a 'more secure, more prosperous' country and 'thing, dakaiti, and predatory castes eresuppressed' amongst other achievements.

Scope

The Criminal Tribes Act was one of the many laws passed by the British colonial government that applied to Indians based on their religion and caste identification. The Criminal Tribes Act and its provisions used the term ''Tribes'', which included castes within their scope. This terminology was preferred for various reasons, including Muslim sensitivities that considered castes by definition Hindu, and preferred ''Tribes'' as a more generic term that included Muslims.

The Act was initially applied only to the North-Western Provinces, Oudh State, and Punjab.Yang (1985), p. 109

An inquiry was set up in 1883, to investigate the need for extending the Act to the rest of India, and received an affirmative response. 1897 saw another amendment to the Act, wherein local governments were empowered to establish separate "reformatory" settlements, for tribal boys from age four to eighteen years, away from their parents.

In 1911, it was enacted in Madras Presidency as well, bringing entire India into the jurisdiction of this law. The revised version of the act then affected 1,400,000 people belonging to the nomadic communities, especially Yerukalas, Koravars, and Korachas. In the same year, it was applied in Bombay Presidency.

In 1908, special 'settlements' were constructed for the notified tribes where they had to perform hard labour. With subsequent amendments to the Act, punitive penalties were increased, and fingerprinting of all members of the criminal tribe was made compulsory, such tight control according to many scholars was placed to ensure that no future revolts could take place.

It was subsequently extended to the rest of British India, in part or its entirety.

Colonial lawmaking in the 1860s

According to Indian penal code 1860, "Section 401: Punishment for belonging to a gang of thieves.—Whoever, at any time after the passing of this Act, shall belong to any wandering or other gangs of persons associated to committing theft or robbery habitually, and not being a gang of thugs or dacoits, shall be punished with rigorous imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years, and shall also be liable to fine." Looking at the historical context of lawmaking in British India, it seems that creating laws was not only aimed at addressing social issues and served as a means for the imperial government to shape its image. Laws like the CTA were enacted to acknowledge and combat a widespread "social evil," and the act conveyed this message to the general public (Safdar 20).

When the colonial state annexed Punjab, it posed numerous challenges due to its geographical location and proximity to Afghanistan and the restive northern regions of India. The crime statistics of the 1860s were inconsistent, with occasional fluctuations that colonial administrators attributed to different reasons, such as crop failure and the nomadic lifestyle of certain tribes. During the 1860s, colonial lawmaking in Punjab was primarily aimed at addressing the issue of criminal activities by certain tribes, which presented a significant challenge for the provincial administration. These criminal tribes were often perceived as a social evil and a threat to the economic mainstay of the populace, which was agriculture. The colonial officials recognised the importance of maintaining law and order in the province and introduced various legal statutes, such as the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), to achieve this goal. The CTA aimed to target the most accessible and visible suspects. These criminal tribes were already socially ostracised due to their lack of 'animal capital' or 'land capital,' which determined one's social status in pre-colonial Punjab. This social structure was formalised under the capitalist modes of production introduced by the colonial state (Safdar 20).

Labelling and restrictions

The castes and tribes "notified" under the Act were labelled as ''Criminal Tribes'' for their so-called "criminal tendencies". As a result, anyone born in these communities across the country was presumed as a "born criminal", irrespective of their criminal precedents. This gave the police sweeping powers to arrest them, control them, and monitor their movements.

Once a tribe was officially notified, its members had no recourse to repeal such notices under the judicial system. From then on, their movements were monitored through a system of compulsory registration and passes, which specified where the holders could travel and reside, and district magistrates were required to maintain records of all such people.The Criminal Tribe Act (Act XXVII of 1871)
''Muslims and Crime: A Comparative Study'', by Muzammil Quraishi. Published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005. . ''Page 51''.

Public support

The British government was able to summon a large amount of public support, including the nationalist press, for the excesses committed, because the Criminal Tribes Act was posed widely as a social reform measure which reformed criminals through work. However, when they tried to make a living like everybody else, they did not find work outside the settlement because of public prejudice and ostracisation.

Social impact

Nomads vs settlers

Historian David Arnold has suggested that because many of these tribes were small communities of poor, low-caste and nomadic people living on the fringes of the society, living as petty traders, pastoralists, gypsies, hill and forest dwelling tribes, they did not conform to the prevailing European standards of living, which involved settled agriculture and waged labour. Those with nomadic lifestyles were seen as a menace to 19th century society and required control, or at least surveillance.

Historian Jessica Hinchy argues that the laws also repositioned families in space; it geographically redistributed and immobilised population on the basis of family units.

Social engineering

The measure was a part of a wider attempt at social engineering which saw, for example, the categorisation of castes as being "agricultural" or "martial" as a means of facilitating the distribution of property or recognising which groups were loyal to the colonial government and therefore suitable for military recruitment, respectively.

Elsewhere the concept of Reformatory Schools for such people had already been initiated by mid-19th century by social reformers, such as Mary Carpenter (1807–1877), who was the first to coin the term "dangerous classes".Colonialism and Criminal Castes
''With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India'', by Gayatri Reddy. Published by University of Chicago Press, 2005. . pp. 26–27

Because it came to be thought that behavior was hereditary rather than learned, crime became ethnic, and what was merely social determinism till then became biological determinism.

Resettlement of tribes

Many of the tribes were "settled" in villages under the police guard, whose job was to ensure that no registered member of the tribe was absent without notice. Also imposition of punitive police posts on the villages with history of "misconduct" was also common.Punjab – Police and Jails
''The Imperial Gazetteer of India'', v. 20, ''p. 363.''Year of Birth – 1871: Mahasweta Devi on India's Denotified Tribes
by Mahasweta Devi